Cowboy Comes Home. Carrie Alexander

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СКАЧАТЬ thrown up his head. His flanks quivered as Rio approached. But he didn’t move.

      Rio held out the bucket. Sloop lunged for it. The halter went on so fast the feat seemed almost a sleight of hand.

      “That was no fair,” Meg called. “I wore him down for you.”

      Rio’s sandpaper chuckle drifted across the pasture. “You ought to know, Meggie Jo. All’s fair in love and war.”

      She flinched. She hadn’t been called Meggie Jo in a very long time. Only her mom and Rio had been allowed to use the nickname, though her father had often said Margaret Jolene Lennox in his most forbidding tone, when he’d been calling her to his study for another dressing down.

      Rio rubbed a hand along the horse’s neck, giving Sloop a moment with the grain before he took the bucket. Meg got her emotions in check and went to push the corral gate open wider, then the Dutch door to the box stall, even though both were already ajar.

      Rio, living on her ranch. That couldn’t possibly work.

      But why not? First she could make it clear that she wasn’t looking for any sort of romantic reunion, and then she could make amends. If that even mattered anymore, so many years after she’d made a wreck of both their lives.

      Rio led Sloop into the stall. The horse was docile now that he’d been caught, nickering hello to his stablemates, then nudging his nose at Meg to prod her into fetching his feed.

      She ran her hand along the gelding’s flank, moving slowly only because Rio stood on the horse’s other side and suddenly the stall seemed smaller than before.

      He looked at her over the chestnut’s withers. “Flashy horse. Registered?”

      “AQHA.” American Quarter Horse Association. “Bonny Bar’s Windrunner, which somehow got translated into the stable name Sloop. He belongs to a woman from town. She’s a beginner, but she hopes to show him next summer. I’m going to work with them till then.”

      “Look at me, Meg.”

      Her throat ached. “I can’t.”

      “I’m only me.”

      “It’s been ten years and then some.”

      “We’ve both changed. But I still know you. You know me, too.”

      She met his eyes. A searing heat sliced through her, the arc of a flaming arrow. She pictured Rio, bare chested, bronzed and beautiful as he pulled back the bowstring.

      She forced out the words. “That’s why it won’t work.”

      “Or why it will.”

      She was afraid of that, too.

      “Why do you want this job? It’s nothing. Not challenging or rewarding. Hardly any pay. And isolated.”

      “Exactly what I’m looking for. See, it’s the room and board that’s valuable to me. I can do the work easily and still have time for…other things.”

      “Like what?”

      The horse shifted between them, curving his neck around to nuzzle at Meg.

      “That’s personal,” Rio said.

      She eyed him.

      “Nothing sinister,” he said. “Just a project I’m working on.”

      “All right, if that’s the way you want it.” She ducked beneath Sloop’s neck and took the bucket from Rio. His fingers brushed against hers, but she jerked away, trying to make it look as though she’d only been moving toward the stall door. She went to the feed bins and dipped out a couple of scoops, then returned to tip the bucket into Sloop’s feed pan.

      Rio was already filling the hay net. “Give me a week,” he said. “A trial.”

      Her head snapped back. Trial. He’d used the word twice now. On purpose? To remind her what she owed him, after almost putting him on trial for a crime he hadn’t committed?

      She secured the bottom half of the Dutch door. No, Rio wouldn’t taunt her with the past. Her guilty conscience was talking again, a voice she’d managed to drown out for the past ten years with a loud life that had ultimately said nothing at all.

      At Wild River, the silence spoke. Too loudly. She’d be grateful to have another person around. They might even be able to reestablish their old friendship.

      But never their status as lovers. Never.

      “I’ll show you the bunkhouse,” she said abruptly. “You might change your mind.”

      RIO REMEMBERED the bunkhouse. Even back then the one-room cabin had been run down, as dark as a cave. The Lennoxes had had a hired man, an old cowboy named Rooney. He’d chewed tobacco, tied flies that never caught fish, kept a string of sleazy paperbacks in his back pocket that he’d read in the barn in between chores. Meg had been the bane of his existence, with her mischief making and harum-scarum horseback riding.

      Rio lifted the limp curtain that hung at the cabin’s only window. The view was of the river that cut through the property, deep, black and turbulent. Rooney had fished there, futilely. Rio and Meg had shot the rapids on their backsides.

      “Do you remember the time you put cayenne pepper into Rooney’s tobacco tin?”

      Meg almost smiled. “He’s dead now.” She bent over a small square table, wiping a thick layer of dust with her sleeve. “He’s dead, too,” she added to herself.

      “He must have been seventy when I knew him.” Rio tried the lamp. “There’s electricity.” He crossed to the bathroom, outfitted with a rust-spotted claw-foot tub and cast-iron sink. The pipes clattered before blatting a brown stream into the bowl. “And water.”

      Meg had pried a book from beneath the table leg. The table wobbled when she dropped the curled paperback on top of it. “The place needs work. I’ll clean it out and get a new mattress. Set some mousetraps.”

      Rio moved over to examine the faded cover of the book. A buxom blonde with a gun winked up at him. Jezebel’s Revenge. Cover price forty-five cents.

      “Are you saying I have the job?”

      “If you want it.”

      “I want it.”

      She let out a breath, clearly exasperated with him. “Have you turned crazy in your old age, Rio Carefoot?”

      He’d been crazy for her. Crazy for a green-eyed girl with rebellion streaming through her veins. The Meg of his youth hadn’t given a flying fig that he was a rootless outsider, halfway Crow, who’d never had a home of his own.

      No real father either. But there’d always been his mother, who’d wanted him only to be good and get along. Virginia Carefoot hadn’t approved of her son’s fatal-attraction friendship with Meg, but after sending him away to one failed summer at the Montana rez with his grandparents, she’d run out of ways to keep them apart.

      “What СКАЧАТЬ