“It’s harder than you think!”
He moved across the kitchen to her, painfully aware suddenly of what a plain room it was. The linoleum was old and worn. The table was a relic from an old bunkhouse. There were only two chairs, one with a plastic seat that had been patched with hockey tape and another with three different colors of paint showing through the worn spots. Well, he hadn’t been expecting highfalutin’ company. At least the place was clean. He’d learned to keep up with housework long ago the hard way. Rinsing a dish right after he ate was a lot easier than trying to blowtorch month-old remains off of them.
He looked over her shoulder. He couldn’t help but notice the top of her head came up to about the bottom of his chin. And that she smelled good. Of soap and shampoo and something sweet and tantalizing that was pure woman.
She was trying to beat the aspirin to death with a soup ladle.
He took two spoons out of his kitchen drawer, placed a tablet between them and squeezed. Instant powder.
“This is how you squish acetaminophen.” He mixed the powder in a teaspoon of apple juice, went back across his kitchen and spooned it into the kid.
The kid spit it out on him.
“Little man, you sure do know how to make a first impression. Squish me another one of those, would you?”
He got up and found some tea towels, ran them under lukewarm water in the sink. “Running water,” he said. “Had it for near six months now.” He drawled it out nice and slow like a real hick. He kept his face completely deadpan.
She cast him a sideways look from under lashes that he noticed were as thick and tangled as a sooty chimney brush. It didn’t look like she had mascara on though, or any other war paint, either. No bright red lips or stripes of green over her eyes. No little pencil-thin eyebrows or slashes of fake pink on her cheeks.
He didn’t revise his first opinion. She was no beauty. But there was something just plain natural about her that was easy on a man’s eyes. He decided he’d had nothing to look at but horses for a sight too long.
She was grunting trying to squish the tablets. Not enough muscle in those arms to wring out a dishrag. If he was shopping for a woman, which of course he wasn’t, he needed one who could heft a bale or two.
She wasn’t Celia, he realized suddenly, and it wasn’t fair to her to treat her like she was, or to assume that all women from the cities would be the same. Maybe she wasn’t even from a city.
“Which part of Oregon are you from?” he asked.
“Portland.”
Best to keep his guard up. Celia, a born-and-bred Baltimore girl, had thought the country would be romantic as all get-out, and she’d had a notion or two about cowboys, too. All of them wrong.
She had thought Turner was rugged and real because she’d seen him ride to glory for eight seconds on the back of a raging bull.
As long as he was handing his Stetson to maître d’s or the hatcheck girl at the ballet her illusions were pretty safe.
Then he’d made the mistake of asking her out here.
Her disappointment and disillusionment had set almost at once. Her first impression of this very room had put a look on her face that would have soured milk.
Then his best reining horse had foaled badly, and the foal had ended up behind the heater in the house, with him trying to coax an eyedropper of milk into it about every ten seconds or so.
It had pretty much sealed his fate when he didn’t even have a candle to light for the special dinner she’d made him. He’d offered to drive over to his sister’s—an hour-and-five-minute round trip—but the moment was definitely lost. She’d said it didn’t matter. When he’d seen those escargot things in full light he’d wished he’d insisted on making the trip.
Turner knew it was for the best, her leaving. They’d been living in some sort of fantasy world, and the reality check had been inevitable. The truth was out. Rugged and real meant he was hardworking, stubborn, a loner, and about as romantic as a skunk in a trap.
He’d wondered so much about whether or not those candles really had mattered that on his next grocery run to town he’d picked up a pair of nice red ones, and bought three videos. For next time.
So far there hadn’t been a next time. The candles were still wrapped and so were the videos.
Maybe his unexpected guest would be impressed. Since the videos were now three years old he doubted it.
He hadn’t been to a rodeo in nearly that long, either. He was getting old, he supposed. At thirty, a ton of Brahma bull, tap dancing on his chest, was not as appealing as it had been a decade ago.
He liked working with horses. He’d finalized an arrangement with his sister and his brother-in-law just last year where they would run the cattle part of the ranch that had been in his family since shortly after Noah, and he could devote himself to doing what he did best. He’d bought this little parcel over here because he liked the barn.
He was a good trainer and he knew it. He had more business than he could handle. Between his training fees, selling colts he’d finished, and his share of the profits from the ranch, he made a pretty fine living. He would actually have lots of money, if he could ever learn to curb his impulse to buy just one more horse.
Turner had paid seven thousand dollars for the lunatic Appaloosa out there. His sister had sighed, looked at his house and had the good sense to say nothing.
Horses made him happy. Show him a house that could do that.
Life was good. Settled. All right, he missed his brother. And from time to time he yearned for the soft company of a pretty woman.
A man got lonely. There was nothing that brought out his vulnerability like this time of year, the promise of winter already in the air at night, the thought of short days and long cold nights filling him with an ache he didn’t want to feel.
He’d wanted very badly for it to work with Celia. But it hadn’t, and it had killed something in him trying to make it. Having a woman digging her spikes into the region near your heart was no less painful than the bull tap dancing. He was too old for them both.
There wasn’t an available woman within a thousand square miles. He knew all the girls, long since turned into women, who had grown up around here, and they were either long gone or long taken. And he was too proud and stubborn and busy to go searching worlds unfamiliar to him like some lonely-hearts-club reject.
But this one had come to him.
Turner slid a glance to her ring finger. Blank. He was aware, suddenly, of a sense of something missing from his life since he’d given up rodeo.
Adventure. Spontaneity. Not knowing precisely what was going to happen next.
Geez, MacLeod, he told himself. Don’t go bein’ no fool. He noticed a little scattering of light freckles over her nose.
She finally managed to break up the acetaminophen.
“You try and give it to him this time,” he said gruffly. “Then we’ll get his clothes off and sponge him down real good.”
She took the juice from him and sat down across from the little boy who looked at her with mulish stubbornness that reminded him of his own brother.
“Oh, little love, open wide,” she sang in such a clear true voice it made Turner start, “let this magic come inside, chase away all the germs that hide—”
The little scoundrel opened his mouth like a baby bird, and swallowed the medicine with a satisfied slurp.
“Did you just make that up, just now?” Turner asked incredulously.
“Oh,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. “It’s silly, but it works.”
Her