Eileen Wilks - Cowboys Do It Best

“Honeydew?” he asked, trying to figure out the reason for the name. “Like the melon?”

“No.” Summer reached out her good hand to the horse, who had her neck stretched out, obviously confident of getting attention. Summer gave the horse a good, brisk rub up the jawbone and along the cheek strap.

Those lovely, capable hands of hers could do a number of things well, Chase felt certain. He could think of one or two in particular he’d like. He could, but he’d better not. Not if he was going to keep his hands off her.

“She started out plain old Honey when I first got her, for her color. I was nine,” she said, and spared him a slight smile, “and not especially original. Pretty soon, though, her name became Honey-Do as in, ‘Honey, do this,’ or ‘Honey, do that.’ Because Honey does just about anything you ask of her—don’t you, sweetheart?” she finished, her voice dropping into a croon.

Everything about her warmed up around animals. He couldn’t help wondering what it would take to get her to heat up for him. “What about the paint with the roan markings?”. he asked, setting down his duffel. “Is he yours?”

The raw-boned gelding he referred to was a big, ugly brute, maybe seventeen hands high. The animal looked up just then from pulling bites of hay off the bale set in the center of the paddock. When he saw that another horse was getting attention, he snorted and trotted over, using his weight to push Honey-Do aside and stretching out his own big, Roman nose.

“For my sins, he is,” Summer said. “He’s a two-year-old, so he’s not much on manners yet.” She turned sideways so the inquisitive horse couldn’t nudge her bad shoulder, then had to push his nose away when he started to lip the sleeve of her shirt. “Some cowboy wannabes out of San Antonio bought him and his mother when he was a colt, then lost interest. They sold the mare easily enough, but the future was looking pretty dim for Horatio here when I heard about him three months ago. I picked him up dirt cheap because they didn’t really want to sell to the knackers. I’d planned on training him fast in the basics and selling him, but I guess that’s not going to happen now.”

“I don’t know why you couldn’t do just that,” Chase said, leaning on the top pole to give the jealous Horatio a good scratch behind the ears. “He’s not exactly a pretty face, and he’s too big for arena work, but his gait looks smooth. I bet he’d make a fine working horse.”

“Timing,” she said succinctly. “In order to make any money on him, I need to get him trained before he eats up my profit. All I can give him is the basics. Like you said, he’s not pretty enough for the arena, and I don’t know how to train him for range roping or cutting, so I couldn’t expect to get any great price for him.”

Chase thought about that. “You’ve had him on the longe line?”

She nodded. “He’s stubborn, but he’s bright and not easily spooked. He walks, trots and lopes on the longe now, and you’re right about his gait. I’d just gotten him used to the bridle and was ready to move on to the saddle when this happened.” With a nod of her chin she indicated her sling. “Now he’ll forget what he knows before I can start working him again.”

“You do much training?”

“Right now it’s just Horatio and Maverick. That’s the Bates’s sorrel gelding—the one that dumped me on my shoulder yesterday. They wanted me to get him over some of his bad habits, so I’m working him as well as boarding him.” She stared out over the paddock, a frown pleating her brow.

“I’ll train them.”

That brought her head around fast—too fast, judging by the way she winced. “I’m not paying you trainer’s wages.”

She was a suspicious one, wasn’t she? He smiled. “You don’t have to. I figure I might find training a couple of ornery horses a nice change of pace after mucking out stalls and shoveling dog poop.”

Her brows lifted skeptically. “You want to train them—just for fun?”

“Sure.” He turned and eased a little closer to her. Close enough to make her just a bit uncomfortable, close enough to see the slight, involuntary flare of her nostrils, as though she were catching his scent. “Of course, I might have some other sort of motives mixed in there, like hoping to make you feel real grateful to me. But you’re too bright to fall for something like that, aren’t you? So I guess I’ll have to settle for what I said. A change of pace. A bit of a challenge.”

Beneath the frown that lingered on her face lay a sort of puzzled awareness. Her eyes were just a hint wider. A hint uncertain. “I guess if you worked Horatio, you could take a percentage. When I sell him. That would be fair, wouldn’t it?”

“Fair?” He did what he’d been wanting to do all morning, and ran his fingers down one long strand of hair, playing with it. “Doesn’t seem like it would be all that fair to you.” He rubbed the hair between his fingers, savoring the smooth, silky feel of it.

“Don’t.” Her voice was steady enough, but her eyes gave her away. He saw anger there. Confusion. Arousal. The confusion excited him as much as the arousal, and he didn’t like that. Only innocents were confused by their physical needs, and Chase wasn’t a man who looked for trophies outside of the arena. He liked his women easy and experienced. Easy meant no one got hurt, no one got burned when it was time to move on down the road.

But he wanted this woman. He wanted to seduce this woman.

His gaze slipped from her face to her throat, where he could see the rapid flutter of her pulse. Lower, to where her hardened nipple was puckered beneath the soft flannel of her shirt...on one side. On the other side was her sling.

He really shouldn’t be doing this.

The sound of a motor filtered through his lust-induced haze. Summer heard it, too. Her eyes widened. She stepped back. He let his hand fall. She frowned, looked over his shoulder and frowned harder. “Well, shi—shoot.”

It amused him that she’d edited out the cussword almost as much as it pained him to be interrupted. He turned.

A tall man was climbing out of a low-slung foreign car next to the smaller gate. Although the man wore boots and a black cowboy hat with his suit, Chase would be willing to bet he’d never sat on a horse. Even from here Chase could see that his face had the smooth, indoor look of a businessman.

“It never rains but it pours,” Summer muttered.

“So who is he?”

“Ray Fletcher.”

The minute the smooth-faced Ray Fletcher stepped through the gate, the belly-deep belling of a bloodhound erupted from the back porch of the house. Hannah heaved to her feet and bayed again, and a cacophony of barks, yips, yaps and woofs broke out at the kennel.

“Ray,” Summer said in a conversational tone that he barely heard over the din, “has never been introduced to Hannah.”

Chase grinned. Apparently Hannah was a little more alert than she looked, and she set the other dogs off. You couldn’t beat a dozen yapping dogs as an alarm system.

Ray Fletcher closed the gate and started across the thirty or forty yards from the front gate to the paddock. Chase noticed that Summer didn’t take one step toward the man. Fletcher had crossed half the distance before she made some kind of signal to Hannah, at which the old dog heaved a sigh and plopped back down. The rest of the canine clamor was dying down by the time Ray Fletcher reached them.

He was an indoor sort of man, all right, a little soft through the middle and under his smooth-shaven chin. Not bad looking. Not especially good-looking, either. There wasn’t much memorable about him, Chase decided, except the expensive clothes he wore...and his eyes.