Wed To The Montana Cowboy. Carol Arens

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СКАЧАТЬ then again, she was alone in the wilderness with a lunatic.

      In a move too swift for her to avoid, he reached down and snatched her arm. He tossed her over his shoulder and began to walk away...somewhere.

      Her horse was not saddled. His team was grazing. Did he mean to walk back to Coulson carrying her like a bag of potatoes?

      Given his mental state, perhaps he did.

      But given her determination not to go anywhere with him... Well, they would see who went where.

      She kicked her legs but all she managed to do was cover his face in a blizzard of furious petticoats.

      She screamed, having forgotten in the moment that her bird loved nothing more than to join in a ruckus.

      Screech screeched. Other birds copied him and soon the branches were alive with alarmed twitters.

      “I’m warning you to put me down!”

      “This is for your own good,” her captor grumbled.

      Apparently, he had forgotten that she still gripped the needle in her hand.

      * * *

      Something stung him in the rump. It was early in the day for hornets.

      He swatted his backside then got stung on the hand.

      He spun about, gripping the woman by the knees, while he sought to slap the bug.

      Sunshine glinted off something in the soiled dove’s hand. All of a sudden he remembered the needle.

      That’s what he got for trying to do a good deed. The same sort of thing had happened to him once when he tried to set the leg of an injured raccoon. He’d been bitten. Infection had been the pay for his effort.

      “What the hell, ma’am!” He didn’t believe in cursing before women, but she sliced the needle at him again as he was setting her to her feet. “Damnation!”

      “Escaped from bedlam or not, you have no right to accost ladies in the forest!” She backed away from him jabbing the slender weapon at the air.

      He did not follow. He rubbed his wounds. Bedlam?

      “I warned you what I would do. You should have known that a seamstress would know how to wield a needle.”

      All of a sudden he felt heat suffuse his face.

      “You’re not a whore?” What a colossal blunder he had made.

      The woman paled.

      “I beg your pardon?” she gasped and clutched one hand to her throat.

      “No, I beg yours.”

      “What could possibly have led you to believe that I was...of that profession?”

      Her cheeks were now flushing with anger, he reckoned, and rightly so.

      He was an ass...a moron. No wonder she thought he belonged in bedlam.

      “You were a woman alone in Coulson, for one.” He had to at least try and explain his mistake.

      “I didn’t know that was an offense.”

      “I offered you money and you took it.”

      “And why not. I don’t mend shirts for free...and by the saints, I’d like my dollar back since your addled state of mind is not my fault after all.”

      “So when you wanted to take off my shirt, it was to mend it?”

      It’s a damn good thing he hadn’t acted on the urgings of his body and stripped off his shirt and everything else.

      “Why else would I have asked—? Oh, my glory... You thought— I can’t even say it out loud. I only meant to mend your rip.”

      Her face was as red as his felt.

      “So—” once more, she pinned the needle to her collar “—you are not a lunatic?”

      “And you are not—?” Clearly, she was not. He was an idiot to have assumed so in the first place. “In danger of catching some fatal disease?”

      “Not in that way, by the saints.”

      With nothing left to say that did not make him sound a bigger fool than he was, he stood looking down, but not too far down, at her, silent as a stone.

      He had to look like a big lump of stupid. No whore that he had ever treated, regardless of her age, had ever looked luminous. He should have seen the truth from the beginning.

      All at once the seamstress’s lips twitched at the corners. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand, then let it drop while she let out a full, joyous-sounding laugh.

      He braced his hands on his knees, bent at the waist and laughed along with her. It felt good to laugh so freely. He couldn’t recall the last time he had done that.

      “So,” he said when he caught his breath, “I well and truly apologize for assuming the worst of you. Please forgive me.”

      “It only makes us even when you think about it.” She dabbed a tear from the corner of one eye. “I assumed that you were a ruffian out to do me and Mike harm. I truly apologize to you, as well.”

      He extended his hand and she took it. The shake of truce was slower and more intimate than it might have been, because her hand met his, dainty, sweet...and not swallowed whole.

      That was something... So different from how Eloise’s hand had ever felt. Eloise had been delicate, like a pretty porcelain cup that he had to be careful not to chip. Even if his fiancée hadn’t walked out, she would never have fit in the life he lived now.

      For all that this woman was tall and, he thought, fit of frame, a woman was a woman and this land was hard.

      Unbidden, thoughts of courting her flitted across his mind. He dashed them out quick.

      Hell, he might fantasize until Kingdom Come and it wouldn’t matter. A wife was someone who would need protecting and that was one big responsibility that he didn’t want.

      But there it came again, a vision of her and him, as irritating as a fly buzzing about the head. Mentally, he swatted at it, but it stuck to him. What might he do if things were different? He couldn’t help but imagine.

      He would spend some time getting to know this lady, work up to giving her a kiss.

      He shook his head. Things were what they were.

      “I can’t help but wonder, knowing what I do now, what you were doing out here with Mike.”

      “Oh, that.” Her expression sobered. “I hired him to take me to my grandfather’s ranch. I’m in a bit of a morass now, I suppose.”

      “Who is your grandfather?” Maybe he knew the man and could be of help.

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