Marriage at the Cowboy's Command. Ann Major

he demanded.

      “Ah, back so soon.” Lisa batted her long eyelashes boldly as she fingered the falls at the end of her quirt.

      “Caitlyn better not be in that trailer with your horse!”

      Her brows snapped together. Sucking in a miffed breath, she quit fiddling with her quirt. “Why not? She knows what she’s doing. Why, she’s almost got Ramblin’ Man loaded. And in record time. He can be a brute, that one.”

      Luke’s fury and impatience vanished. The thought of Caitlyn in that tiny trailer with a huge, unpredictable stallion that had to weigh well over a thousand pounds made his gut clench. Was she suicidal? He wanted to scream at her to get the hell out of there, but of course he couldn’t do that without endangering her even more. So, instead, he moved soundlessly around the pen, taking a circuitous route so as not to spook the stallion. He’d wait behind the trailer until she’d safely loaded the horse.

      When he reached his destination and she still hadn’t come out, his heart began to thud more forcefully. Then he heard her soothing voice, along with the nervous clatter of Ramblin’ Man’s hooves.

      Why couldn’t the beast just load?

      “No bees today,” she was saying in that feather-soft purr. “Nothing for a big boy like you to be scared of. Come on, baby, just one more step and you can go home. Don’t you want to go home?”

      And then Luke’s cell phone rang.

      Before Luke could shut it off, the horse had exploded, his head banging into the roof, which caused him to react even more wildly. Hooves banged. Caitlyn screamed. Ramblin’ Man, his eyes round, burst from the trailer faster than a rocket off a launchpad, dragging Caitlyn behind him by a slender foot. Somehow she’d gotten tangled in the longe line.

      Easy to do in such tight, dimly lit quarters, he thought grimly.

      With a cry of sheer terror, Lisa leaped out of the round pen so she could watch the drama from the other side of the railing without risking her own neck.

      It had been a while since Luke had dealt directly with horses, but he remembered that when a fifteen-hundred-pound horse wanted to take one step, five men against his chest couldn’t stop him. Ramblin’ Man wanted out of the pen, and if somebody didn’t get him under control, he’d trample Caitlyn or drag her to death first.