The Cowboy And The Calendar Girl. Nancy Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ me you’ll get worse than lost. Go up to the house.”

      “What house? I never saw a house.”

      He pointed. “Backtrack a mile. Take a right at the clump of pine trees, go two miles and you’ll see the ranch. Becky’s there. The two of you can wrangle this out.”

      “But you—”

      “Get along, Miss Cortazzo,” he growled, reining the horse around. “It’ll be dark soon.”

      And he left her in a cloud of dust. With a gulp, Carly watched him go, forgetting her troubles. Dazzled by the glare of sunset and the vision of manhood that disappeared as magically as he’d come, she stared after him, entranced. Her heart pounded along with the rapid strides of the galloping horse.

      “Wow,” she breathed.

      

      Thundering into the corral, Hank Fowler let out a whoop.

      Of terror.

      Then his horse jammed his forefeet into the ground, and Hank tumbled head over heels over the animal’s head.

      He landed in the dust at his sister’s feet and lay stunned at the impact.

      “You’re a diaster!” Becky exclaimed, not moving from the spraddle-iegged stance that was as natural to her as breathing. Becky was the real cowhand—the one who’d been born to run a ranch. When the horse reared over Hank’s prone body, Becky grabbed the loose reins to keep the panting beast from trampling Hank into a million pieces.

      “What the hell,” she demanded, furiously glaring down at her brother, “do you think you’re doing, Henry? Don’t you know how valuable Thundercloud is?”

      He spat dust from his mouth. “That stupid horse of yours ran away with me!”

      “I told you. You have to show him who’s boss!”

      “I tried!” Hank cried, painfully sitting up on one elbow. “But you know how I hate horses, and they must be able to feel it! This isn’t going to work, Beck.”

      “It has to work, Henry. I need the money!”

      Gingerly Hank felt along his ribs to make sure none of them were broken. “I can’t believe you talked me into this,” he muttered. “I swore I’d never come back to this damned ranch as long as I live. And the charade you came up with gets more ridiculous by the minute! I’m just not a cowboy!”

      Becky hunkered down on her heels and grinned at him. “But you’re still going to help me, right? Look, we’ll practice with Thundercloud all day tomorrow. I promise he won’t run away with you again. By the time that lady from the calendar company gets here, you’ll look like a real cowhand.”

      Wryly Hank shook his head. “There aren’t enough years left in both our lifetimes to change me, Beck. Besides, she’s on her way.” Hank put his hand up for Becky to help him to his feet.

      Her grip was firm and sure, and she hauled him up easily. “What do you mean?”

      Suppressing a groan as his muscles protested, Hank tried to brush some of the dust off his borrowed chaps. “I met her.”

      “You met her? What are you talking about?”

      “This precious horse of yours practically dumped me in her lap. He tore over the hill and threw me as soon as we were out of your sight. By some miracle I landed on my feet. She was there.”

      “Where?” Becky demanded.

      “Out on the south road. I gave her directions. She’ll be here any minute.”

      “Any minute?” Becky cried. “You’re kidding! Did she fall for it? You didn’t mess things up, did you?”

      “Don’t worry. I kept the script simple.”

      “You talked? First you fell off the horse and then you talked? What did you say?”

      “Nothing intelligent, I assure you. After this four-legged locomotive threw me I was a little rattled, so I improvised, that’s all.”

      Becky groaned. “Oh, no. I thought I’d have at least a week to get you into shape!”

      “A week or a month,” Hank said with a grin. “It wouldn’t help, Becky. I was never cut out for the cowboy life.”

      It was true. Even though he’d spent the first fifteen years of his life growing up on his parents’ ranch deep in South Dakota, Henry Fowler was never meant to live anywhere but a few blocks from the nearest urban transit system. Despite his father’s insistence that he learn to rope, ride and eat beans by a campfire out on the prairie, Henry Fowler had escaped the wide-open spaces for an East Coast prep school as soon as he had been able to get away.

      After prep school had come four blessed years at Columbia University in New York, after which he’d bounced from one journalist job to the next—staying in each city only long enough to get his fill of the culture, the restaurants and the nearest climbing mountains. He’d made friends in every major city in the country and never once looked back on the life he might have had on the family homestead.

      Until his sister, Becky, called with a crazy scheme.

      “I think we’d better call it quits before she figures us out, Becky,” Hank said, reaching for the borrowed Stetson that had rolled under the nearest fence rail. “Nobody’s going to fall for me being a cowpoke.”

      “Don’t say that!” Becky ordered, grabbing his elbow and steering Hank determinedly toward the barn. “We’ve got to make this work! If I don’t get the money, I’ll lose the ranch, Henry!”

      “I thought you were supposed to call me Hank. You said it sounded tougher.”

      “It does,” she agreed hastily. “Besides, if she’s coming from Los Angeles, she might actually have heard of Henry Fowler.”

      “What do you mean ‘might’?” Henry demanded. “My column is syndicated all up and down the West Coast. She’d have to be a hermit like you not to know who I am!”

      Although he was based in Seattle now, Hank had begun to make a reasonably good living by writing his syndicated column—a few short paragraphs of weekly diatribe that resulted from the forays he made into the mountains with so-called celebrities. Mostly Hank invited local politicians on physically challenging outings and wrote about their reactions. His piece on a presidential hopeful had ruined the man’s plan for a national campaign. Good thing, too. A man who threw trash on a mountain trail didn’t deserve to be president of anything.

      Over the past couple of years, Hank had begun to attract a loyal following, who now sent him more material than he could use. Every day he received a bucketload of letters that fulminated on subjects ranging from the logic of pasting brassiere advertisements on the sides of city buses to the latest political faux pas committed by an elected dunderhead. Hank used the material to create funny columns that newspaper readers loved.

      “You’re the perfect guy for this column,” one of his former girlfriends had told him. “You hate everything but your precious mountains. And you’re funny about СКАЧАТЬ