Loe raamatut: «Just a Cowboy»

TO KRISTIN T., a quiet hero

Prologue

Kelly Scanlon Devereaux drove home late and alone. It was fast approaching midnight, the downside of having lost her job along with her marriage. She’d had to take a temporary position waiting tables, and it was beginning to look as if she’d never work again as a medical billing clerk. At least not around here.

That was the cost of divorcing a prominent plastic surgeon: No other doctor wanted to hire her under the circumstances, and so far the hospitals had had no openings.

At least she had shed Dean Devereaux. Mostly. There was still the divorce to get through in a few months, but in the meantime she had her own place and didn’t have to live in constant terror that she would to make Dean mad.

Only now that she was free of that threat did she realize just how nervous and tense she had been for most of the last eight years. Now she often wondered why she had put up with it for so long.

She knew her way around Miami like the back of her hand and chose her route to avoid dangerous neighborhoods. It made her trip longer, but she didn’t care. A little extra time in the car was a small price to pay for freedom.

The truth was, however, that she wouldn’t feel truly free until the divorce was final. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel as the anxiety hit her again, and she took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself.

Up until today, Dean had been ugly about the whole thing. He didn’t like losing, and watching him over the last few months since she’d filed for divorce had been an eye-opener. That man actually thought of her as a possession.

He’d fought the court’s decision to give her separate maintenance and had lost. Her attorney had had to hire forensic accountants to find his assets. And she had been mad enough about the way he had treated her, especially over the last year of their marriage when he had started to hit her, that she had wanted to gouge him.

Cripes, he’d even told her she wasn’t going to live long enough to see a settlement. Ugly, ugly.

But today, just today, her lawyer had called to tell her that Dean had agreed to the settlement, that he had signed the papers.

She was still reeling from that. Her attorney assured her that Dean had changed his mind in order to avoid the publicity of a messy trial, in which his own wife would accuse him of physical abuse, and maybe the lawyer was right. It could hardly help the practice of a man who spent his life making beautiful, wealthy women more beautiful to have it known that he was a wife beater.

So maybe the end was in sight. Her lawyer said Dean couldn’t change his mind now, that the papers his attorney had sent were almost as good as the court’s seal on the settlement.

But she realized, now that she had won, that she didn’t care much about the money. She cared most about the painful places the whole mess had left, and worse, the realization that she hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the man all those years. That she had taken it and taken it, and blamed herself for not being good enough.

That she had been drawn in by charm, flattery and all the oiliness of a snake.

Ugh. She’d give all that money back if she could just erase the last eight years from her life.

She pulled into her parking garage at last and into her numbered slot. Like many high-rises in Miami, this one had been built so that the parking garage was beneath the apartments, at ground level, putting the living units well above the reach of a storm surge in hurricane season. She often thought that if they hadn’t had to put the building on stilts, there would have been no garage at all. This address wasn’t exactly A-list.

But it was good enough, she reminded herself. She sat for a few minutes in her car, enjoying the quiet after work, the sense that soon it would all be over and Dean would be firmly in her past. The sense that she was about to reach a point where she could finally shed the emotional bruises and stop living in fear.

God, it was going to be a relief. Increasingly, she dreamed of leaving Miami permanently. The more miles she could put between her and Dean, the better. She didn’t want to hear his name ever again, even by accident. Heck, she wouldn’t turn on her TV because she might run across one of the commercials for his practice.

Nor did she have any ties holding her here. All the friends she thought she had made during her marriage had turned their backs on her. Maybe she made them uncomfortable in some way, because she suspected many of their marriages were like hers. Women who had married wealthy men who had turned out to think of them as possessions.

“You pay for that money,” she whispered, facing up to her mistake yet again. Even when you honestly believed you loved the guy, you wound up paying for the luxury…sometimes with your body, sometimes with your soul. She’d paid with a little of both.

At last she sighed and climbed out of her car, thinking of crawling into bed and just forgetting everything for a few hours. All the stress, all the worry, even some of the self-loathing she still felt.

Oh, she’d been stupid and naive to begin with, but later, as the emotional abuse mounted, her excuses had grown thinner. She didn’t like herself for that.

She was walking toward the elevator when a voice called out, “Mrs. Devereaux?”

At once a shudder of distaste ran down her spine. Thinking it was one of the security guards, she turned. “I prefer Ms. Scanlon now.”

The man stood only a foot away, dressed Miami casual, smiling. “I thought I recognized you. My sister-in-law goes to see your husband. Anyway, you dropped something when you got out of the car.”

She looked at the hand he held out, trying to see what it was, caught a blur from the corner of her eye, then the world exploded in blackness and stars as her head seemed to split open.

I’m going to die.

And then she thought nothing at all.

Chapter 1

Coming home from roundup at a local ranch in Conard County, Hank Jackson expected to unload his gear, step into the cool quiet of his house, and maybe have a shot of bourbon to ease the pain he lived with constantly.

It seemed that no matter how well the docs put smashed bones back together, the bones always remembered the insult. Then they couldn’t make up their minds if they hated activity or inactivity more.

Regardless, more than a week on the range of riding, camping, roping and herding had left his body feeling a little older than its thirty-four years, and he was looking for a hot bath and a shot, not necessarily in that order.

Except as he was tugging his saddle out of the back of his pickup, he noticed the house next door. He owned that place, too, a decision made on the spur of the moment because he preferred being busy to having too much time on his hands to think, and that house would keep an entire crew of repairmen busy for quite a while.

But since he had left nine days ago, things had changed, signaled by curtains in the windows.

Crap. He froze, saddle still resting on the truck bed, and looked again. He should never have let Ben Patterson persuade him to list the place for rent a few weeks ago. There was still a ton of work that needed to be done, as he’d told Ben. Then he’d allowed himself to be talked into listing it because it would propel him to get the work done faster.

Hell.

He’d never expected that anyone would take it in that condition, not even at the ridiculously low rent.

Sighing, he shifted his weight onto the hip that hurt marginally less and tried to decide if he could ignore his new tenant until tomorrow. Or was he honor-bound to get the heck over there right now and tell him all about the things that weren’t working right and a few things that might not be safe?

Ben might not have remembered all the details. And what if there was a family in there?

Cussing under his breath, he left his saddle and headed next door, leaving his own grassy yard behind for the weedy patch of dirt that belonged to the other house. Yet another thing he’d been planning to take care of this week or next.

Climbing the two steps to the small, covered porch elicited another cuss word that only he could hear. The doorbell didn’t work, so he rapped sharply on the front door, a solid oak door in dire need of painting. Oh, hell, why kid himself? It needed a blow-torch first, and looking at it he was quite certain some of the underlying layers of paint were lead-based. He’d better not find any kids living here, because, if he did, Ben would get more than a few choice words.

His first knock went unanswered. He rapped again, more loudly, saw one of the new curtains twitch, and finally the front door opened a crack.

He found himself looking into one blue eye through that crack.

“Yes?” said a quiet, tense voice.

“Hank Jackson,” he said. “I’m your landlord.”

“Oh.” Then, “Oh! The agent mentioned you.”

And the door didn’t open even a hair wider. “Lady, I don’t know if Ben bothered to tell you, but there are some things about this house that aren’t safe.”

“I know that.”

“But do you know them all? Just tell me you don’t have any kids.”

“No. No kids.”

This wasn’t getting them very far. Part of him just wanted to turn around, walk away, find that hot bath and that shot of bourbon. But in good conscience he couldn’t do that without at least making an attempt.

“I need to show you the things that are wrong. I need to tell you the work I’m going to be doing in the next week or so. Ben did tell you I’d be working on the place?”

“It can wait. I’ll only be here a short while.”

“Some of it can’t wait.” Damn, she was bringing out his stubborn streak. “Look, I don’t bite, but I may have to break your rental agreement if we don’t come to some kind of terms about the things I need to do here.”

The door opened a little wider and he was astonished to see the kind of blond, blue-eyed beauty that should be in the movies. And she looked nervous. Why the heck should she look nervous? Nobody in Conard County looked nervous about someone knocking on the door.

He almost sighed. Instead, he fought for some courtesy. “It’s important,” he said. “I didn’t expect the place to get rented in its current condition, and I’m not sure Ben gave you all the warnings.”

At last she nodded, opened the door all the way, and let him step in. He smothered a wince as his hip reminded him that not all was well south of the border, especially after a week in the saddle.

“The place is good enough for me,” she said tentatively. “I’ll only be here a short time.”

“Yeah, but I’d like you to leave on your feet, not on a stretcher.”

At that he was relieved to see the faintest of smiles lift the corners of her perfect mouth. Beauty came in all varieties, but this woman had the kind that usually implied heaps of plastic surgery. Exactly the kind that didn’t appeal a whole lot to him. Usually.

“The place isn’t exactly a death trap,” he said, forcing himself to pay attention to business and not to another area south of the border that was choosing a bad time to sit up and take notice. “But there’s some rotten flooring I need to warn you about, and a couple of iffy electrical circuits. And the stove doesn’t work right, but I have a replacement coming soon.”

“Okay.”

He held out his hand. “Hank Jackson.”

“Kelly Scanlon.” Her handshake was firm. Okay, so she hadn’t come by that perfect figure by unnatural means. She must work out.

“Nice to meet you,” he managed to say as if he meant it, although he was thinking of at least a half-dozen ways he’d like to give Ben a hard time.

“If the house is so bad, why are you renting it?” she asked.

“It wasn’t my intention. Ben’s been after me to list it with him. I thought I made it clear he wasn’t to rent it until I’d finished the most important work.”

Her smile widened a shade. “I guess he doesn’t listen well?”

“Apparently not. Either that, or he’s even more desperate than I thought. Even with the semiconductor plant that moved in a couple of years ago, I think beggars around here make more than real estate agents. Did he even show you the fuse box?”

“No.”

“Hell.” He sighed, then limped past her through the small living room to the kitchen. Like many kitchens of its era, it had more room than convenience. Space enough for a big table, but few cabinets, an old freestanding sink, and just an itty-bitty patch of counter. The stove stood all by itself near one wall, the refrigerator a few feet away.

“Someday,” he remarked, “this is going to be a nice kitchen. But right now…” He shook his head. “Most of it looks like an afterthought.”

“I don’t need much.”

“Maybe not,” he allowed. “One person can get by.” He walked over to the mudroom door and stepped out into the unheated, glassed-in area. “Here’s the fuse box.”

He opened the metal casing. “There are three circuits here that I removed the fuses from. Resist any temptation to put a fuse in them until I get an electrician out here. If you get desperate to use these circuits, I have extension cords I can lend you so you can plug into safe sockets.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

He glanced over and found her standing right at his shoulder. And damn, she smelled good, too. Faintly like roses and honey. Or maybe after a week of smelling horses and cattle, anything else would smell like ambrosia.

He tore his gaze from her—for some reason his eyes kept wanting to stare—and pointed to the floor to the right side of the back door. “Over there the joists are rotting underneath. You can go out the door safely, but I’d advise against stepping over there. I can’t guarantee it will hold you.”

“Okay.” She sounded agreeable enough.

He looked at her again. “Did Ben tell you this?”

She bit her lip, then gave a tiny shake of her head.

He sighed. “Oh, I am going to have some words with him. All right, the windows out here are slated to be replaced. I have the new ones in my garage, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. You’ll notice the windows in the rest of the house are all new, but I still need to do some caulking and leveling, okay? So you’ll have me outside from time to time banging around.”

“Okay.”

That seemed to be her only word. He led the way back through the kitchen to the rear of the house, where there were two bedrooms. One was completely empty, the other held an old bedstead. He just hadn’t gotten around to removing it, or some of the other furniture the last owners had left behind. Not much, but a minimum for someone who had none.

But when he looked at the bedstead and mattress, he winced, and this time it wasn’t from physical pain. “Are you going to sleep on that?” he asked.

“It’s there.”

“Ah, crap, lady, that thing is…”

“A bed,” she said firmly. “I can get a mattress pad to cover the worst of it. At least it’s not the floor.”

This time when he looked at her he saw past the initial impression of too beautiful to something that showed more depth and determination. Eyes that appeared older than her appearance would indicate. There was a story there, he thought. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know it, either. She’d made it clear she was a transient, and he knew the kinds of stories that came with eyes like that.

“The stuff that’s here,” he said by way of explanation, “was left by the previous owners. I just haven’t gotten around to getting rid of it. If you want it out of here…”

She interrupted. “No, really. I can use the stuff that’s here. I don’t need or want to replace it.”

“Your choice,” he said after a moment. “Watch it in the empty bedroom, though. More rotten floors. I got rid of the termites, but I just haven’t had time yet to replace all the wood.”

“Not a problem.”

He scanned the rooms again, and never had the place looked shabbier. It was an old house to begin with, and the last owners hadn’t invested much, if anything, in keeping it up. They’d been getting on in years, and probably hadn’t even noticed most of the deterioration. The walls everywhere were hideous, covered in dying wallpaper, water spots and paint that had probably been sagging on the walls since the Second World War. The floors…well, where they weren’t bare, worn wood, they were covered by old, cheap linoleum that had been tacked down in places where it had ripped.

“I was so sure nobody would rent this place in this condition.”

She surprised him with a quiet laugh. “Amazing things happen.”

He looked at her again and felt himself smiling in response. “That they do.”

“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything, but I just rented the place this morning and I haven’t been out to get supplies, or even any dishes or a coffeemaker. I figured I could do that tomorrow.”

“This morning? Just this morning?” That gave him pause. “You have a car, right?”

She shook her head.

“Well, hell,” he said. “That’s not gonna work. You can’t carry much on foot—the store’s on the other side of town. What do you need?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “That depends on how comfortable I want to be.”

“Short term, right?”

“Two months at most.”

He nodded. “Okay. I’ve got some stuff at my place you can use. Coffeemaker, pots and pans, some spare dishes and things. No reason you should buy that stuff for just a couple of months.”

Her mouth opened a little in surprise. “Are you sure you can spare it?”

“Hell, yeah. That house belonged to my parents. When I moved back here, I came with a lot of stuff from my place in Denver. I wanted my own things, and I just moved a lot of theirs to the side.” Feeling a little awkward, he admitted, “I just wasn’t ready to get rid of it, you know?”

She nodded. “But now? Are you comfortable with somebody else using it?”

“Sure. I’m not lending you the heirloom china, though.”

She laughed again, and this time it was an easier sound. That was good. If he was going to have to deal with a tenant as closely as he’d need to deal with this one, what with all the work this place needed quickly, it was far better to deal with one who wasn’t uptight about everything.

And the rest of it? Well that was just being neighborly.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll get you some minimum stuff to get through the night, and we can discuss what else you need in the morning.”

“But,” she said, “Ben said you were out working at one of the ranches. You must be tired.”

“I am. But if I stop moving, I’ll freeze up. So let’s just get you a coffeepot, some dishes. Like I said, just enough for tonight. We can deal with anything else in the morning.”

Then he turned and limped his way to the front door, aware of her light step following him.

Kelly followed him, noticing the limp, but even more noticing his lean, rangy build, a build that, encased in jeans and a plaid Western shirt, suggested a lot of hard muscle beneath. His face had a chiseled appearance, a few lines that seemed awfully deep for a guy who didn’t look like he was much older than she was, and the sun had bronzed him. His hair was dark and a little wavy, and just a bit too long.

He was the kind of guy a lot of women in her previous life would have noticed, partly because he had a great build, but partly because he was so different from what they were accustomed to. A rednecked cowboy, evidently, and a far cry from the guys she had known who got their muscles in gyms and their tans on the beach or in salons.

She had to admit that she liked it. Life with her soon-to-be-ex husband had revolved around his practice and the hours he spent with a personal trainer. Not to mention the careful artifice of sun-streaked hair from a bottle.

Once that had seemed normal to her, but now she loathed the plasticity of it. Which was really kind of a funny thought, since Dean had been a plastic surgeon. She swallowed a giggle, surprised that she even wanted to laugh.

“So,” said Hank Jackson, the limping cowboy who had just barged into her life, “how the heck did you get curtains up so fast?”

“It was the first thing I did this morning,” she answered truthfully. “I walked into town and bought them. The rods were still good.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t pulled them down, either.” He paused at the steps to his porch and looked at her. “I’ve always heard that the first thing women do in a new place is put up curtains. Never believed it before.”

“Well, you can believe it now.” Nor did she have any intention of telling him why those curtains were so important to her.

“I guess not all stereotypes are stereotypes,” he remarked. He tugged a key out of his pocket and unlocked the front door.

The house smelled a tiny bit stale, having been closed up for a while, but it wasn’t a bad stale. Just faint hints that meals had been cooked here, that someone had lived here and been away.

It had a similar layout to her place, although it was a bit bigger. And the signs of a woman’s presence still dominated. She guessed that he hadn’t been able to part with a lot, including dotted Swiss curtains with ruffles, cheerful rag rugs and picture frames holding bunches of dried flowers.

He led her down the hallway, much longer than the tiny one in her place, to a large kitchen. Unlike hers, this one had been modernized with new cabinets, a dishwasher, a stainless-steel stove and a matching refrigerator.

“Let me get some boxes,” he said, and disappeared through a door.

She waited, looking around, and felt her throat tighten unwillingly. This place practically shouted “home,” unlike the mansion she’d left behind. Sometimes she wondered how she could have been so stupid and blind.

Hank returned a couple of minutes later with a box under each arm. “I think a lot of what you need is already here.”

He set them on the table and she moved closer to look as he opened them.

“Ah, I do have a memory,” he said wryly as he revealed a drip coffeemaker, some dishes and flatware.

“This is terribly kind of you,” she said honestly. “I’d have managed.”

“I’m sure you would have, but when you have a neighbor, it’s not always necessary. And if you’re only going to stay a few weeks, it just makes sense to lend you my extras.”

“Thank you.”

He smiled, an expression that lit up his face. “Let’s get this stuff over there, and come back for some more. You cook a lot?”

“Not really.” Not anymore. Life with Dean had meant dining out nearly every night, and when dining at home there’d been guests and a cook. Funny how that all looked to her in retrospect. But she didn’t want to think about that now.

It felt odd, after weeks on the run, to be trusting someone again, even if the trust only went as far as to let her new landlord lend her some things. Her nerve endings had been crawling for so long that she wasn’t sure they were capable of stopping.

But she was sure she had found the most out-of-the-way place on the planet, short of Antarctica, and something about this little town nestled in the middle of nowhere had suggested that she might be able to safely pause and catch her breath. She could be wrong, and she promised herself that at the first suggestion of danger, she would bolt like a rabbit.

One thing for sure: She needed a little time free from being constantly on the move. Even if it was only a few days or a week.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she repeated as he unloaded the boxes onto her kitchen table and suggested that they go back for more.

“No need,” he insisted reassuringly. “I’m not using these things and you need them for a few weeks. It’s really not a big deal.”

It was to her, but Kelly didn’t say so. Up to now, the only help she had received from anyone had been a few drivers who had given her a lift when she decided she needed to get away from buses for a while.

By the time Hank finished taking care of her, she had sheets, towels, pots, pans and some kitchen utensils.

“If you need anything else,” he said as he unloaded the last ones, “just give me a shout. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, and I have plenty in storage.”

“You’re very kind.”

He shook his head, looking almost wry. “That’s what neighbors do. Although I have to admit, it’s not helping me work on my future as a crusty curmudgeon.”

That surprised a laugh out of her, and she liked the way his gray eyes seemed to dance in response. “Really? You want to be a curmudgeon?”

“Of course. I still have a long way to go. Haven’t been able to bring myself to yell at the kids to stay out of my yard … although I may get there when I lay the sod out front next week.”

“Why are you sodding?”

He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms. “Because if I seed, it’ll rain and wash it all away…and I really don’t fancy the idea of trying to scoop up all the seed in a spoon and sprinkle it around again.” He paused while she laughed quietly again at the image. “Or, if it doesn’t rain, the neighborhood kids I still can’t bring myself to yell at will be all over it, killing the shoots before they have a chance.”

“And that would make you yell?”

He sighed and ran his fingers through shaggy, dark hair. “No, it probably wouldn’t. So I’ll just avoid all the problems and lay sod. It should stand up to just about anything except a baseball game. Now what about food? You must need to get some. Just let me get that saddle out of my truck and we’ll go.”

“I’ve already imposed enough,” she said firmly.

“I need to go to the store anyway. I’ve been out on the range for about nine days. I’m afraid to open my refrigerator. Grab whatever you need while I get my gear stowed, then we’ll go.”

She followed him to the door, and once again noticed the way he limped as he walked back to his place. She wondered what had happened to him.

Then she told herself it didn’t matter. Two months, max, and she’d be out of here. Sooner if necessary.

So it really didn’t matter at all.