Brenda Harlen - Six Weeks To Catch A Cowboy

She breathed a quiet sigh of relief, because now she could pretend he was just a patient, like any other patient. No one special.

But the tingle that danced through her veins as her hands stroked over his skin said something very different.

* * *

As Kenzie gently probed the injured area with her fingers, Spencer acknowledged that this might have been a mistake.

It was true that he’d been so eager to start therapy he hadn’t asked who would be treating him. He hadn’t imagined it would matter, because he hadn’t known that Kenzie worked at the clinic.

In fact, he knew very little about where she’d been or what she’d done over the past seven years, because he’d never asked anyone. Because asking would have suggested that he thought about her, and when he’d left Haven, he’d been determined to put all thoughts of his little sister’s best friend out of his mind.

Still, he’d be lying if he said that he’d never thought about her. But the truth was, whenever he did, he remembered the girl she’d been. A kid with barely a hint of feminine curves and an obvious crush on him.

He hadn’t been the least bit interested in any kind of a romantic relationship with her in high school, but he hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, either. So he’d mostly tried to keep his distance from her, and he’d succeeded—until the night before he was scheduled to leave for UNLV.

He’d made plans to meet his current girlfriend in the barn at Crooked Creek Ranch that night. The meeting was Ashleigh’s idea, so that they could say goodbye in private.

He knew what that meant. And when he climbed up to the hayloft, his body was already stirring in anticipation of what was going to happen. But he was a little wary, too, because Ashleigh had made no secret of the fact that she didn’t want him to go—and that she’d do almost anything to make him stay.

But Spencer wouldn’t let anything distract him from his goal of getting out of this one-horse town—especially not a girl he’d only been dating a few weeks. So despite her assurance that she was on the Pill, he had a condom in his pocket, unwilling to trust his future to anyone else’s hands.

He sure as heck wasn’t going to end up like his buddy, Mason, whose wedding was scheduled for the last week of September and whose baby was due the following April. And while Gina’s pregnancy might not have been planned, at least Mason and Gina were in love.

Spencer wasn’t in love with Ashleigh. But she was pretty and popular and willing to go all the way, and he was eager to use that condom in his pocket.

But when he got up to the hayloft, instead of Ashleigh, he’d found Kenzie waiting for him.

“What are you thinking about?”

Kenzie’s softly spoken question forced him to put the brakes on his trip down memory lane.

“Nothing important,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Her hands—so much stronger than he would have guessed—moved over his shoulder, probing and kneading.

She knew what she was doing, and he’d had enough massage therapy that ordinarily his muscles would respond to the skillful touch. But his brain couldn’t seem to let go of the fact that this was Kenzie’s touch, and it teased him with intimate memories of the last time she’d touched him—and let him touch her.

“I’m sure,” he said.

“Because you’re strung tight as a drum,” she noted, her fingers sliding over his skin, pressing into the knotted muscle.

He was also hard as a rock.

Thankfully, his facedown position on the table allowed that to remain his own little (or not so little, he amended immodestly) secret.

“Some clients like to talk while they’re on the table.”

“I’m not fond of chitchat,” he told her.

“Imagine that,” she said. “And you used to be such a chatterbox.”

The situation was awkward and uncomfortable—probably for both of them—but he felt his lips curve in response to her dry remark.

“And you never used to be a smartass,” he added.

She chuckled softly before acknowledging, “Probably because I could barely put together a coherent sentence around you.”

“I guess it’s true that people do change,” he noted.

And obviously she’d done so. The skinny, geeky teenager he’d remembered had grown into a confident and attractive woman.

A very attractive woman.

She didn’t say anything else after that as she focused her attention on doing her job.

And while she continued to work on him, he couldn’t seem to focus his attention on anything but how good it felt to have her hands on him. At least until he started to imagine how it might feel to have her hands stroking other parts of his body. And, of course, the harder he tried not to think about her touching those other parts, the harder he got.

Unfortunately, his life was already complicated enough without adding any extracurricular activities—or relationships—to the mix.

And that realization was admittedly a little bit disappointing.

* * *

The day before, when Spencer had passed the Welcome to Haven sign on the highway (if the seldom-used rural road could be called a highway), he’d experienced a sense of recognition and familiarity, but not much more than that.

There’d been no sense of homecoming. As far as he was concerned, Haven had ceased to be his home a long time ago. Now it was just the town where he’d grown up and where most of his family still lived. He didn’t mind visiting on occasion, but he had no intention of putting down his own roots in the dry, hardpacked dirt.

His opinion hadn’t changed when he arrived at his parents’ house on Miners’ Pass. Of course, that house had never been his home. Sure he’d stayed there on his infrequent visits, in the room his mother had designated as his and filled with his childhood trophies and buckles, but he’d never lived there.

In Spencer’s opinion, the three-story stone-and-brick mansion was a ridiculous and ostentatious display of wealth and status. Which was undoubtedly why Ben and Margaret Channing had built it. With three of their four adult children living independently, they certainly didn’t need six bedrooms, seven baths, a great room with a twelve-foot ceiling and a soaring river-rock fireplace, or three more fireplaces around the house.

On the other hand, if it made his parents happy, who was he to judge?

But now, as he turned off the highway and onto the access road that led to Crooked Creek Ranch, he felt a tug of something in his chest. Because as eager as he’d been to escape from Haven, he did have some good memories of the town—and almost all of them had happened at the ranch.

A lot of them involved some kind of chore, too, because Gramps didn’t tolerate laziness. But Spencer didn’t mind the work, and mucking out stalls, grooming horses and cleaning tack at least gave him something to do in a town that, at the time, offered little in the way of entertainment beyond the two screens at Mann’s Theater. And when he did his chores well, Gramps would let him saddle up one of the horses and ride out with him to count the cows.

Because even after gold and silver had been discovered in the hills and the family had turned their attention away from ranching and toward mining, Gramps had continued to raise cattle. It was a small herd that he managed—nothing comparable to that of the Circle G—but it was his and he took pride in the routine of breeding, calving, culling, weaning. There were more lean years than profitable ones, but he didn’t care. Of course, now that the family was making its fortune in gold and silver, his interest in the market price of beef was mostly academic.

Whenever Spencer returned to Haven, he tried to visit the ranch and ride out with Gramps. But today’s visit had another purpose—to check on Copper Penny.