A Gift For Baby. Raye Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ down at her and she glared back. “Will you please help me?” she asked crisply.

      But he was just as stubborn. His jaw could set, too, and his eyes were even colder. “I’m sorry,” he said firmly. “I have other things to do.”

      She gazed at him, not with anger but with speculation. There it was again, that element in him that looked untamed in a way that had nothing to do with sagebrush and desert winds. Something about this cowboy was annoying her, even beyond his refusal to jump down and help her. She realized now she’d seen him before, working around the corral, and even in town that morning. She’d noticed it then, too. There was a measure of contempt in that look he was giving her. Contempt. Now she was even more annoyed. How dare he? People just didn’t look at her that way. Especially men.

      “Look,” she insisted. “I’m not asking you to spend the afternoon with me. I’m merely appealing for help in carrying my easel and supplies up to the top of that hill. I realize this sort of thing is far, far below punching cows, but think of it as charity work, and maybe it will make you feel saintly.”

      His mouth twitched and his gaze made another arrogant sweep over her. “What makes you think I’m interested in feeling saintly?”

      “Oh, I don’t know.” She waved her hand airily. “Something about you suggests you might be able to use a few brownie points in heaven. I’ll bet you don’t rack up too many of them during your normal day, do you?”

      For all his antipathy toward getting involved, he had to admit she was waging a pretty good fight here. “I try to avoid them,” he said dryly, but he didn’t pull away and urge the horse back onto the road as he should have. In fact, he was forgetting about his desire to move on for the moment.

      “Obviously,” she taunted good-naturedly. “But this time, you see, you’re trapped.”

      His head went back and he let out a short laugh. “The hell I am.”

      She shrugged grandly. “Well, that’s right where I’m afraid you’re headed if you don’t get a few good works under your belt. So you see, I’m trying to do you a favor.” She gestured with a toss of her head, all supreme confidence. “Come on down and help.”

      He met her eyes and stared for a long moment. He wasn’t about to change his overall opinion of her, but he had to admit there was more in her than he’d been giving her credit for. And he also knew they had come to a point where it would be churlish of him to continue refusing to help her. How had he let this happen? He was usually the one manipulating things. This time, she was going to win. Smiling ruefully to himself, he swung down off the horse.

      “What do you want carried?” he asked her without rancor.

      She breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t been about to let him know how shaky her confidence had become in the past few minutes. Looking at him now, so tall, so thickly muscular, wearing faded jeans and a plaid shirt augmented by a leather vest, she knew he was all male and decidedly insolent. And here she was, ordering him around.

      And here he was, giving in. My my. She allowed herself a quick feeling of satisfaction.

      “This easel,” she told him, gesturing toward it. “I can actually carry the rest myself.”

      He nodded, glancing at her face. To her credit, she didn’t gloat, but took his acquiescence as a matter of course and went on with things. “That won’t be a problem,” he said.

      She was still weighing possibilities, her hands on her hips, her head to the side. “Maybe you could just prop it up on your horse.” She frowned at the large beast doubtfully.

      Mitch patted his neck. “This big fella is skittish as it is. If I start piling wood on him, he’s liable to take it as a very bad sign.”

      She nodded thoughtfully. “You’re probably right. Well, if you just took one side and I took the other…”

      Without waiting for the rest of her musing, he lifted the easel without effort and hoisted it onto his wide shoulder. “Top of that hill?” he asked, nodding toward the area.

      “Yes,” she said, hastily gathering her other things. “Thank you so much.”

      But he was already striding toward the spot and she had to run to catch up by the time he reached it. He set the easel in place and was going to take her bundle of papers from her, but as she transferred the items, a small stack of drawings fell out and sailed haphazardly to the ground. Picking one of them up, he stopped, startled, staring at the cowboy face she’d drawn. Slowly he turned and stared at her, feeling like a man walking on quicksand.

      “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked her softly, waving the picture at her. “That’s me.”

      She glanced at it, not surprised at all. “Oh. Is it? Yes, I guess it is. I was just sketching some of the cowboys a week or so ago. I didn’t remember that you were one of them.”

      He stared at her with steely eyes for a long moment, then handed the sketch back to her. “Don’t do it again,” he warned, his voice low but ominous.

      She looked up at him, somewhat startled by his tone. “Why not?”

      Yes, why not? He could hardly explain that he was an undercover agent, could he? That he didn’t want his cover blown. “It’s an invasion of privacy,” he said, evading the real issue. That made her laugh.

      “Oh, come on. I was just sketching character studies. As far as I was concerned, you were just an ordinary cowboy, no more, no less. It was nothing personal.”

      He didn’t relent, and actually, he had to admit, seeing the picture of himself had been downright disconcerting. It gave him an eerie feeling, as though something were going on here that he didn’t understand. And he hated not feeling in the know.

      “Still,” he said, looking at her narrowly, “you reached out and took a piece of me and I didn’t even know it. Some Indian tribes used to think you captured someone’s soul when you had a picture of them.”

      She waved that theory away dismissively. “That was photography.”

      He shrugged. “Same difference.” His forefinger jabbed at the picture. “That’s me, and anyone looking at it is going to know it’s me.”

      And that was just the problem. She was damn good, but he wasn’t about to tell her so. Opening the sketchbook he was holding, he riffled through others that were just as welldone.

      “You see,” she said, watching him, “they’re just character studies. I mean, I don’t think of you as you, whoever that may be. I think of you as Joe Cowboy.”

      He nodded, studying her work. “Sort of a generic brand,” he said softly.

      “Exactly.”

      Looking up, he pinned her with a sharp gaze as he snapped the book shut. “Sure, I understand that,” he said calmly. “That’s kind of the way I think of you.”

      That startled her. She turned slowly, keeping her face bland. “Oh, really?”

      “Sure.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re the generic rich girl.”

      Her eyes widened and she laughed. СКАЧАТЬ