Pamela Browning - Cowboy With A Secret

To her utter amazement, a small pink fist flailed in the air. The whimper swelled to a cry, and when Bethany bent over to look, she saw a tiny baby wrapped in a print blanket.

It was crying, its face screwed up and its legs kicking emphatically under the blanket. Bethany dissolved into total bewilderment, half thinking this must be some practical joke, yet knowing in her heart that it couldn’t be.

Bethany reached down and unpinned an envelope from the baby’s blanket. The outside of the envelope was blank, so she opened it and unfolded the note inside.

COLT, it said in printed block letters. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF ALYSSA FOR ME. I’LL BE BACK.

It seemed that her new ranch hand, Colt McClure, had some explaining to do.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Pamela Browning spent a lot of years living and rearing a family in a charming South Carolina town that was nothing like Yewville. No one in this book bears any resemblance whatever to persons living, dead or comatose, except for Muffin the cat, who will never reveal her real name. Never. If she wants her catnip mouse refilled on a regular basis.

Pamela enjoys hearing from her readers and invites you to visit her website at www.pamelabrowning.com.

This book is dedicated to the memory

of my brother-in-law, Bob Grier,

who loved to demonstrate in rip-roaring fashion

the wonders of the Grier Ranch.

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

COLT MCCLURE PEGGED THE gal at the Banner-B Ranch for a babe as soon as he spotted her. But it was the promise of the ice-cold beer he’d insulated and stowed in his saddlebag that made him urge his horse into a hellzapoppin’ gallop down the long curving driveway.

The hot Texas wind flung a handful of grit into the five days’ growth of beard bristling from his face, but Colt didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything now except finding a place to work and a place to live. Oh, yeah—and that beer.

Instantly alert at the hammer of hoofbeats on parched earth, the gal lifted one hand to shade narrowed eyes against the orange sun sinking its way toward the horizon. The other hand rested on a neatly rounded hipbone.

He reined his horse to a stop at the edge of a patch of dry dusty grass in front of the two-story house. As he swung down from his mount, he realized that the woman’s eyes were a cool aquamarine, the shade of the sea where there was no bottom. Or at least what he thought the sea would look like—he’d never seen the ocean. And he never wanted to after having a gander at those eyes. He could drown in them if he’d let himself.

The air shimmered with heat in the space between them. “Bethany Burke?” he said.

Long golden hair fell in loose curls around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. The way she nodded her head in confirmation and the resulting ripple of that incredible hair jolted Colt with the kind of emotion he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Or maybe it wasn’t emotion. Maybe he’d been too long away from women. Well, he planned to work on that, and from the look of things, Gompers, Texas, could be the place to do it.

“I’m the mail-order cowboy,” he said into the silence.

Her skin was nut-brown from spending long hours in the sun. Her eyes startled him again with their beauty. She had a soft-looking mouth, the lips full and berry-red without the aid of makeup. It formed itself into a perfect O.

“You wrote. You said you needed a ranch hand.” His voice was gruff and rusty with disuse. He hadn’t done much talking in prison.

“I did. I do. I didn’t expect you to just—arrive,” she said.

“I rode over from town. Managed to cadge a ride down from Oklahoma for both me and Buckaroo with some folks who had extra room in their horse trailer.”

She was a little thing, although well-worn boots added a couple more inches to her five-two or so, and she was clearly all woman under that plaid shirt. A man’s shirt, too big for her, but it had been washed so many times that the well-worn cotton clung tightly to her fully rounded breasts.

No bra. He reckoned he knew such things. She’d left the top buttons unfastened to reveal a deep cleavage, shadowy and pretty near fascinating.

She toyed nervously with the front of her shirt, then realized he was watching. Her hand fell away. A roughly callused hand, but daintily made.

“Where do I bunk?” he said. He saw no point in wasting words. The ranch was a shambles; fences sagging, bunkhouse falling apart, who knew what else. There was work for him here.

She gestured with a thumb. “You’ll—you’ll find an apartment over the barn. I would have cleaned it out if I’d known you were coming.” She didn’t have the local accent, which had a tendency to twang like out-of-tune banjo strings.

“No matter if it’s clean or not. It’ll do. I’ll start in the morning.” He nodded his head curtly and began to lead his horse away.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

He stopped and turned slowly. His shadow fell across her face. “McClure,” he said. “Clayton McClure. They call me Colt.”

“Well, Mr. McClure, we’ll meet in my kitchen tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp. Breakfast. We’ll talk about your duties then.”

“You got it,” he said.

He knew she watched him all the way to the barn, but he didn’t care. As soon as he popped the top off the beer, he took the stairs two at a time and poked around the tiny apartment. If you could put that name to a room-and-a-half with a tiny bath attached. Everything was furred with a thick layer of dust, but that was Texas. Basic furniture, nothing fancy. It would do.

Colt wasn’t daunted by the lack of suds the soap coaxed out of the trickle of alkaline water that passed for a shower in his quarters. Afterward he unfurled an old musty blanket from his bedroll and spread out naked on the bare mattress provided. The air was stuffy; not much of a window. His skin was slicked with sweat before he was half asleep.

He didn’t dream. He’d trained himself not to. It was better that way, especially when your dreams had a way of slipping out from under you and catapulting you into a shaky shadowy world where nightmares woke you screaming.

BETHANY BURKE STARED wide-eyed as Colt disappeared into the barn. When she’d first seen him trying to outrun the cloud of dust he’d stirred up as he galloped toward her, she’d thought he was one of those mirages conjured up out of the heat on a hot summer’s day. She’d almost forgotten about replying to that peculiar ad.

But, she admitted to herself, if she’d ordered a cowboy to her own specifications, he couldn’t have been better. He was lean and lithe, without an extra ounce of fat. His narrow hips sat a horse like he was born to it. Those wide shoulders meant muscular upper arms, good for roping and branding. And he had hungry eyes.

That last thought took her by surprise. Hungry for what? Or was the expression under those drooping eyelids a raw insolence unconcealed by his thin veneer of politeness? Those eyes weren’t only hungry, they were hard as flint. A shiver ran down her spine in spite of the fact that it was ninety-five degrees in the shade.