Sandra Steffen - Wes Stryker's Wrangled Wife

“Then you don’t really dislike us?” he asked with a half smile.

Good grief. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. All she’d wanted to do was get out of the house for a little while. Oh, Burke and Louetta. had both assured her that she was welcome to spend the evening with them, but this was their wedding night, and there were just some things that sisters, particularly newly divorced sisters, were better off not witnessing or hearing or imagining.

“Look,” she futally said, “I dislike a few, but no, I don’t dislike all men. I’m just not going to get attached to any more of you, that’s all.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I’m not.” Raising one hand, she began listing on her fingers all the benefits to remaining single. “No more wondering if a man is really attending a business meeting at 1:00 a.m. No more picking up heavy suits from the dry cleaners. No more rushing home from work to spend time with a man who’s made other plans for the evening. No more trying to appease an unappeasable man, or understand an irrational one, or try to plan a meal around a picky man’s tastes. I can eat chicken seven days a week if I want to. I can sleep in the middle of the bed, and there are no whiskers in my sinks. I don’t need a man to define me, and I can open my own jars, thank you very much. And perhaps best of all, the toilet seats are always down.”

Jayne almost felt smug. Festive, that’s what she felt. Buoyant. She’d never put it into words before, and it sounded good. It felt good. She truly didn’t dislike men. At least not most of them. She loved her brother, her half brother and stepbrothers and nephew, and her father, and stepfathers, although she had issues with a few of them. Men had interesting voices and broad shoulders and comical habits. But she didn’t need a man to define her. She didn’t need a man for anything.

“Jayne?”

She turned her head at the sound of her name. While she’d been lost in thought, Wes had inched closer. She could see the tiny lines feathering his eyes, the crease lining one lean cheek, the light brown whisker stubble on his cheeks and jaw. His eyes held her spellbound, his gaze dipping to her mouth and back again as he said, “What about sex?”

The song on the jukebox ended, causing the entire room to become so quiet a person could have heard a pin drop. All Jayne could hear was the pounding in her ears, and the catch in her voice as she asked, “What about it?”

He leaned in, slow and easy. “Are you planning to do without that for the rest of your life, too?”

The deep timbre of his voice reminded her of a guitar string stretched tight and slowly strummed. She had no doubt the man could sweet-talk with the best of them. She should know. She’d been sweet-talked by pros. She’d also been lied to and cheated on and tossed aside, and not only by her ex-husband.

In the background, coins jangled into the jukebox. Within seconds the first strains of “Blue Christmas” started all over again.

She could feel Wes Stryker’s eyes on her. She knew she could have said something blunt and sassy to put him in his place, but for some reason she didn’t. It was his eyes. The rest of him exuded smugness, but those blue eyes of his were tinged with sadness. The man had troubles, and she didn’t see any reason to add to them. She picked up the bottle in front of her and took a hardy swallow.

“Well?” he prodded.

“Sex,” she said, reaching for her coat and sliding off the stool, “is highly overrated.”

She held up her hand, anticipating his protest. “Trust me on this, Wes. Or simply agree that we disagree. Oh, and merry Christmas.” Without another word she walked to the door, gave it a yank and strode out into the cold.

The room remained quiet until the last bell hanging on the hook on the back of the door had stopped jingling. And then it seemed that every spectator had something to say.

“Oooo-eee,” Butch Brunner exclaimed. “That woman’s definitely an eyeful.”

“She is that,” Forest agreed. “But she’ll give you an earful without even trying.”

“Why,” one of the other men said, “she practically singed the hair in the ears of every man in the diner the first time she set foot in the place.”

“I don’t think she’s the kind of woman the Carson brothers had in mind when they decided to advertise for women to come to Jasper Gulch a few years back.”

“No sirree, Bob.”

Wes listened, but he didn’t add to the conversation flowing through the saloon. An eyeful? An earful? He’d bet his last trophy she’d be a handful in bed.

The woman had certainly packed a wallop in the short amount of time she’d spent in the Crazy Horse. He’d known people who talked for hours but said less than Jayne Kincaid had said with two words, a wry twist of her lips and a slight thrust of her chin. She’d been married, divorced and hurt. And she thought she wasn’t looking for a man. Wes happened to believe that everyone was looking for a partner, the other half of a whole, someone to share this messy journey humans called life. And sex wasn’t overrated, no matter what she’d said. It was one of life’s most pleasurable, not to mention its most powerful, driving forces. It was like a tidal wave or a hurricane or the rotation of the earth around the sun. A man could ignore it, but he couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.

And neither could Jayne Kincaid.

Jayne Kincaid. He let her name roll around in his mind, along with the image of her sky blue eyes and that cockamamy way she wore her short, dark hair. Butch was right. She had a helluva body. Yet she did nothing to draw attention to it or detract from it. She wasn’t a flirty little rodeo bunny or a city-wise coquette or an ice queen, for that matter. This was a warm-blooded woman who knew the ropes and wouldn’t hesitate to hang a man on them. Dang. Women like that were few and far between.

Merry Christmas, she’d said. Wes still wasn’t sure about the merry part, but it had turned out to be an interesting Christmas Eve, that was for sure. He rose to his feet slowly. Taking his time buttoning his sheepskin jacket, he wondered how long he should wait before he paid her a little visit.

“Ya leaving, Wes?” Forest called gloomily from the back of the room.

“Yeah. I think I’ll call it a night.” Wes said goodbye to the men who were still huddled inside the Crazy Horse Saloon. Whether any of them noticed or not, he was feeling a sight more amicable leaving the bar than he’d been going in. Even the sting of the wind and the blinding snow didn’t dampen his mood. He simply punched on the lights, turned up the heat and switched on the windshield wipers in his shiny silver truck. He was halfway home when he noticed that he was whistling to a Christmas song about a rusty Chevrolet. It had been a long time since he’d felt like whistling about anything.

His first glimpse of the dilapidated fence posts lining his driveway drew the whistle from his lips. The rundown old house had little appeal in the light of day. At night, it was downright depressing. He should have remembered to turn a light on before he left. Not that he was accustomed to being greeted by lighted windows. It was just that this was the first Christmas Eve he’d spent on the ranch since he’d buried his father a few years back. And it was the first Christmas Eve to come and go since Dusty and Kate had died.

Wes pulled his fancy pickup truck into the barn and got out. The bucking bronco emblem on the doors had been Dusty’s idea. It seemed that Carlin “Dusty” Malone had always had some grand scheme up his sleeve, most of which had gotten the two of them into trouble.

Wes closed the heavy barn door, latched it and headed for the house. He was chilled by the time he shut the back door behind him, but although his knee ached a little, he didn’t experience that knife-in-the-gut feeling thoughts of Dusty usually evoked. Tonight the memory of Dusty’s crooked smile made Wes smile a little himself.