Again, because she’d figured a ride might be what Jake had in mind, she’d hedged her bets. She fished into her hip pocket and pulled out a sugar lump. She’d heard that horses like sugar.
She’d heard right. Cletus went for the sugar like a bear after honey. It was icky feeding it to him. He snuffled all over her palm before finally lipping the sweet treat into his mouth. When he was finished, he lowered his head and nudged her hip pocket where she’d tucked the rest of the sugar, evidently smelling it there.
“Okay, okay,” she said, laughing in spite of herself, and gave him another hit. “Now we’re friends, right?”
In answer, the horse nipped at her pocket.
“Hey,” she sputtered, stepping back. “Easy on the jeans.”
“They as new as your boots?” Jake asked, startling her as he walked down the aisle of the barn, a big buckskin in tow.
She manufactured a smile. “You’re right about the biting thing.”
His blue eyes pinned hers in the dimly lit barn. “Any guy is liable to bite if a woman has something in her pants that he wants.”
Oh. My. This must be where the walk on the wild side came in. He was letting her know. You came out here to learn, and I’m just the man to teach you.
“Busted,” she said, conceding that he’d caught her with the sugar but not going anywhere near the sexual innuendo. “Who knew he’d be such a glutton?”
“Offer me sugar. See what kind of a glutton I become.”
He gave her another one of those long, smoldering looks that held undertones of all kinds of gluttony, along with shades of warning. She actually thought about turning tail and running as fast and as far as her new red boots would take her.
The old Christine would have run. The new one followed him as he led the two horses out of the barn and into the moonlight.
“Come on. I’ll help you up into the saddle,” Jake offered. “Cletus is long on leg, and you’re just a little short on one end. Um, you always mount from the left, Chrissie.”
Face flaming red, Christine walked back around to the horse’s left side. “I knew that. I was just checking out the, um, stirrup.”
“Sure you were,” he said. “Now grab the saddle horn. It’s that tall thing right behind the mane and in front of the seat,” he added with another shake of his head.
“Well, if I could reach it, it would help,” she sputtered, angry with herself for not being better informed and angry with him for knowing it. “Oh, whoa.” The next thing she knew, she was airborne.
Jake’s strong hands had gripped her around the waist, lifted her up and deposited her on the saddle like a sack of potatoes.
“Here are your reins,” he said when she’d managed to push herself to a sitting position. Problem was, she was gripping the saddle horn for dear life and didn’t have any intention of letting go, even if it was to take the reins.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, near panic when the big body between her legs seemed to pitch and roll like a ship in a rough sea.
“Shifting his weight from one back leg to the other,” Jake said, grinning openly now. “You ready to give up the pretense?”
“Yes,” she all but whined. “Am I going to get hurt?”
He chuckled. “Not on Cletus. He’s a pussycat. And you nailed his soft spot with the sugar, so he’s not going to take a chance of dumping you because you have his sugar stash. Just sit easy, rock with the motion and trust him to take you where we want to go.”
Trust. There was that word again. And that was what this was all about.
“Well, then, yee haw,” she said and smiled when it made him chuckle.
Jake mounted up and they were on the move. The night was warm. The wind that usually kicked up during the day in this part of Texas had mellowed to a breeze. It played gently with her hair, cooling her skin yet somehow warming the night.
Or maybe it was the fear of falling off the horse that made her so warm. More likely it was the prospect of what the evil twin had in mind. Cletus proved to be a real gentleman as he plodded along beneath the stars. So far Jake had been a gentleman, too. Despite the temperature of the night, despite the blanket of stars shining down, she shivered in anticipation of what he had in mind for lesson number two. In all likelihood, being a gentleman was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Greenhorns,” Jake sputtered good-naturedly an hour later when he helped Christine down out of the saddle. “How can you live in Texas and be such a greenhorn?”
“Not all of Texas is yippee-yi-yo-ki-yay land, you know,” she grumbled. “I grew up in Houston. We had cars.”
Cute. She was too cute. And a little sore, if Jake didn’t miss his guess. But she was game, he’d give her that. Once she’d found her seat, she’d taken to the midnight ride like a trooper.
Of course, he never would have paired her with a horse that would have placed her in any danger. Old Cle-tus was pushing twenty-five, and if a random thought of bucking ever did cross the old boy’s mind, Jake was confident it would get lost somewhere between Cle-tus’s head and the execution. So, no, Christine had never been in any danger.
At least, not from the horse.
Not for the first time he told himself that what he had planned was not a good idea. But it would work, if it didn’t backfire on him.
“So, is this like a rest stop?” she asked, tugging down on the thighs of her jeans as if they’d crept up and into places they didn’t belong.
Places he’d noticed. Places he’d been thinking about way too much as he’d ridden in relative silence beside her, a silence broken only by his limited advice on the finer points of riding and his reassurances that no, Cle-tus had no intentions of bucking.
He’d noticed other things, as well. Like the way the starlight shined on her silver-gold hair. Like how cute she looked in those ridiculous boots and how tiny her waist was with her white tank top tucked into her jeans.
Who knew that Miss Chrissie was the complete package? Who could have possibly known? If he hadn’t seen her dressed to kill Saturday night, if he hadn’t felt all those sexy curves against him when they’d kissed—twice now—he never would have guessed it. She’d seemed to make it a mission to disguise that she was even remotely feminine—even though he’d seen glimpses of the china doll lurking beneath all that starch.
Hell, it had crossed his mind a time or two that, as prickly as she was toward him, maybe she played for the other team. He’d never seen her with a guy, never heard of her dating. In fact, when he did see her, she was either alone or with a friend. So, yeah, it had crossed his mind that maybe it wasn’t just him that turned her off but that women turned her on. Not that there was anything wrong with that. But, man, what a waste, he thought, watching her now as she stretched her arms above her head and worked out some of the kinks.
Now he knew for sure that she definitely liked the opposite sex. No woman could kiss him the way she had and not be totally into it. It shouldn’t have made him so happy because tonight, after all, wasn’t about seducing her. Tonight was about scaring her back to where she didn’t want to come within ten feet of him except to hurl insults.
Yeah. Tonight was about reestablishing distance, because distance was the best thing he could give her.
“Come on,” he said, leading his gelding by the reins. “Let’s walk over this rise.”
“Oh,” she said when she saw what was on the other side of the small hill. “It’s beautiful.”
The