Catching Calhoun (6 page)

Which he wasn’t. Romance wasn’t his thing.

Seduction, then.

No. Even Jefferson males on their horniest days didn’t seduce emotionally tender females.

“Crap,” he muttered. “This is all going from bad to worse.”

“I know. I feel like a clothesline that got caught in a storm. Whipped and tangled.”

Calhoun shook his head. “I’ll be home tomorrow night. We’ll kick it around a bit more before we tell Mason.” Sighing, he turned off the phone, putting it back into his pocket. “Oh, Mason’s not going to take that well,” he said aloud. “Jefferson men seem to have endless woman trouble. It should be so easy for us. We clean up good, we’re strong, we’re smart…”

He slumped a little, trying to absorb what Archer had told him. This was simply not going to be good. He was sure matters had taken a flashing-red-light turn for the worse.

Someone lightly tapped him on the shoulder. He turned.

Olivia stood beside him, her eyes wide, her lips trembling, obviously wrestling with her thoughts and trying hard to be brave.

And then she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

Olivia caught him so off guard that Calhoun didn’t have a chance to hesitate, nor wonder why he was getting such a gift. By the time she’d put her lips so sweetly against his, two or three times, he gave over to base instinct and pulled her into his lap. The empty beer bottle went spinning away but he held fast to Olivia, drinking her in as fast as a man could gulp when offered such nectar.

If he was a gentleman, he’d have understood she wouldn’t have searched him out in a bar if something wasn’t troubling her. But he was just a man, though smart enough to give her everything she wanted.

Besides, she felt way too good. He wouldn’t stop to ask questions. They could talk later.

The bar erupted in cheers and hoots and catcalls. Calhoun didn’t want to let her go, but Olivia seemed to regain her former stiffness. Breaking away, she stared at him, her eyes large, her mouth rosy and a little swollen from the heat with which he’d kissed her.

Ah, if she’d only let him kiss her some more, he
could really send her away looking like a well-kissed woman.

With a guilty glance around the bar, Olivia turned and hurried off. He watched her sweetly fitting jeans go with regret. A woman whose backside filled out Wrangler jeans the way hers did ought to be on canvas.

“You Jefferson dawgs have all the luck,” someone called. “Women just throw themselves at you.”

“Shut up,” he called back good-naturedly. Olivia hadn’t thrown herself at him, because if she had, he’d have caught her for certain. She’d merely been testing herself.

If he hurried, maybe he could catch her while she was still in test mode.

Tossing some money on the bar, he ran after Olivia.

“Go, Calhoun, go!” someone cried out to a burst of rowdy cheers.

He ignored the applause and caught up to Olivia. “Hey,” he said, catching her hand to turn her to him. In the faint light from the tents, he could see her eyes, big and serious, as she looked up at him. “What was that for?”

She cocked her head. “Earlier you said I was afraid.”

“Yeah? So?”

He watched her take a deep breath. “I’m not afraid. Not as much as you are.” Removing her hand from his, she strode away.

Tricky little minx. He’d have his way with her on
some level, just to satisfy his curiosity. “No fair, cow-girl,” he said, catching up to her so he could grab her hand more securely this time and turn her toward his chest. “It’s only verbal foreplay when you toss out dares and then run off. You know I have to catch you and participate, or we’ll never move to second base, which is verbal seduction.”

She stared at him. “Verbal seduction?”

“Ah, yes. The thinking part, if you will, of the chase. Listen and learn.” He pulled her underneath a light-strung tree, slowly kissed each of her palms in turn, then put his lips against her ear. “You’re beautiful,” he said, and when she would have moved away, in doubt, he held her delicate chin against him so that his lips touched her ear while he caressed her neck with his fingers.

“You are beautiful in so many ways you can’t even understand, because it takes an outsider to see the whole you. And maybe it takes an artistic eye to see what you can never see. You’re fun. You’re tricky. You hold all your hopes and dreams and worries in your sexy eyes, and men would give the use of their roping arms to lie with you at night. You’re hot, Olivia Spinlove. Where you see Mother when you look in the mirror, men see Catch Me If You Can. And we want to so bad.”

She was standing still. His words had completely stunned her. Now, he would tell her exactly what only the wild part of her sheltered little heart dreamed of knowing.

“You rock a man with your body and your tease, Olivia, and because you don’t do it deliberately, you come off sweet. So sweet that a man can taste you just by looking at you. It makes him dream of having you melt on his tongue.”

“Stop,” she said, backing up slightly.

He let her move away, watching her like a hawk.

She hesitated, her eyes so wide he knew he would live with that memory forever.

Then she turned and fled.

He snorted to himself, watching her go with satisfaction, his nostrils flared, his jeans full of unspent heat. “
Now
who’s scared?” he said to her perfume as it lingered gently on the nighttime wind.

O
LIVIA QUIETLY
let herself into the motor home, careful not to wake her family. She was burning from Calhoun’s words—and the shocking part was that he’d never kissed her after he’d caught her. He’d merely used words to ravish her.

Words the woman in her had thrilled to hear.

She sank onto the bed next to her children, surprised to find herself trembling a little. Passion was not a well-met friend. It was, if anything, a passing acquaintance that had often left her stranded.

But tonight her heart raced and her breath seemed tight, and she wanted to run back to Calhoun and beg him to say everything he’d said again so that she could remember it, and please, would he mean it,
damn it, because she so badly wanted to be the woman he claimed he saw—

“Pathetic,” she whispered to herself.

Kenny murmured in his sleep. Olivia glanced over at him, then gasped as she looked at her two beautiful sleeping children.

She was falling! After warning herself over and over again about falling for a man, especially a charming cowboy who clearly knew his way around lots of women, she had practically begged him to seduce her! She was to blame for going after him and taunting him—and he was right. It was verbal foreplay she’d been offering, a path that could only end in her own disaster. Again. Hadn’t she burdened her father—her family—enough?

The Jeffersons were not settling types, as evidenced by Calhoun’s younger brother Last, who rebelliously escaped his responsibilities. And Calhoun, painter of naked women, what would make him settle for just one? If Olivia ever fell for another man again, it would have to be someone serious, who would love Kenny and Minnie as much as a man could, in the role of father.

Calhoun couldn’t.

And there she was, practically begging him to make love to her.

In fact, her body had told him everything he’d needed to know. She was his for the taking.

It was only the gentleman in him that had kept him from doing more than whispering seduction in her ear.

Olivia turned off the tiny night-light and curled up next to her children.

From now on, she would watch herself closely. Thank God she’d realized the disastrous path she was on.

B
Y MORNING
, C
ALHOUN
had a hangover but it wasn’t from the yellow genie. It was from sitting up all night thinking about the little barrel rider and her family. What was it about her that made him want to possess her so badly? Did he see himself in her and her disorganized gypsy band of a family?

Heaven knew the Jeffersons were gypsylike. Whether it was the attics of their minds, the lay of the land or the hearts of women, the Jefferson men wandered.

By God, Olivia made him want to make a pit stop.

She was dangerous to his way of life. Or perhaps, his lack of a way of life. He had no way. He had the ranch and a load of paintings. He had artistic vision.

He had a half-baked erection he couldn’t shake no matter how much he thought about cold things.

Maybe a long swim in Barmaid’s Creek was what he needed. December’s chill on the water oughta knock the stiffness out of his drill.

And it would clear his head. Keep him away from those treacherous children of Olivia’s. They were a huge part of the problem. They wanted him. They’d said so, and he could feel it, and it made him want them, too.

“How dumb is that, huh?” he muttered, pulling on his plain, worn-down brown riding boots. “What you need, Calhoun, is to bring a few more children into this family for a while, because we don’t have enough men acting like kids. Yes, we need more responsibilities, because we’re managing so well with the ones we’ve got.”

No wonder Mimi was selling her ranch. It wasn’t as if they’d exactly helped out their little neighbor in need. They’d tried, but Mimi needed a full-time man.

And so did Olivia.

“The Jefferson track record does suck,” he told a small cricket in the windowsill. He finished packing and left money on the bed for Delilah—she wouldn’t take it if he tried to give it to her in person. She’d given all the Jeffersons a key to the back door of her salon so they could go up the back stairs and stay whenever they were in town. A phone call was all she required, so she could make them breakfast.

A favor given was a favor returned, Delilah Honeycutt said. Since the big storm had brought Delilah and her crew of Lonely Hearts Station stylists to the ranch, there’d been plenty of favors between them.

“Goodbye little cricket. I’m going to do
you
a favor and put you outside where you can find a girlfriend,” he said. “Because all you’re going to find in this windowsill is smashed. And hey, I figure you, as an ugly critter only suited for swimming on the end of a fishing hook, have even less chance of getting love all figured out before you meet your cricket end than I do.”

He carried his duffel and the cricket to his truck. The duffel he tossed into the truck bed; the cricket he laid carefully in the grass. “Jump on,” he told it. “I’m going to go jump on some eggs and bacon.”

Somewhere far from Olivia’s motor home. After this afternoon’s exhibit of his paintings, he was going to pack up and return to Malfunction Junction.

Where he belonged. His own little patch of grass.

“D
O YOU THINK
Calhoun will come to see our act?” Minnie asked her mother as Olivia finished putting makeup on her dad’s face.

It seemed to Olivia that Barley bristled under her fingertips. “Unsquinch your face, Dad,” she said. “The white will crack if you keep doing that.

“No,” she said to the children who eagerly anticipated her answer. “No, I don’t think Calhoun will come. He has to go back home sometime, and we have to hit the road. Tonight’s the last night.”

Minnie’s face seemed shadowed. Kenny’s eyes dimmed a bit as he glanced at his grandfather. “How are your knees?” Kenny asked. “Are you feeling good?”

“I’m feeling fine, Kenny.” Barley ruffled his grandson’s hair affectionately. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ve got more jump in me than a cricket.”

Kenny blinked. “I love you, Grandpa.”

Barley nodded, and despite the clown makeup drawn around his eyes, Olivia could see the glimmer of unshed emotion.

“Hey,” Barley told him. “I’ve got a surprise for you tonight.”

“You do?” Kenny and Minnie asked hopefully.

“I do,” Barley said. His eyes met Olivia’s in the mirror.

Olivia tried to smile, but she couldn’t. Her heart was too heavy. The well of sadness was too darkly puzzling. Why should she care if she never saw Calhoun again?

The smile slipped from her father’s face. Olivia blinked as she realized Barley had read her emotions.

“Damn it, Olivia,” he said.

She burst into tears and fled to the back of the motor home.

B
UT AN HOUR LATER
, Olivia was in full control of herself. She wore her riding costume, a rhinestone-sparkled pair of jeans, a silky white tie top and white boots with fringes. Her expression felt as painted on as her father’s.

“I’m ready,” she told him, raising her chin.

He looked at her for a minute, then nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“There’s no reason to ever be sorry in a family,” she told him. “You’re right. And I’m fine.”

“Still.” He reached out and softly touched her hair. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way.”

“It’s all right.”

They looked at each other another moment, and then she walked out the door to saddle Gypsy. The
kids silently helped her, while Barley closed up the motor home. Olivia’s stiff movements felt unnatural to her. She caught herself glancing over her shoulder toward the open pathway, and then realized she was looking for Calhoun.

After that, she turned her back and kept her gaze solely on the task at hand.

She had never been so glad to be leaving a place in all her riding career. Lonely Hearts Station, indeed. Her father had his feelings hurt by a woman who lived here, and now she had bad memories of her own to pack up and take with her.

She hoped Calhoun was gone by now. She hadn’t left the trailer all day. She hadn’t wanted to run into him before his exhibit was finished. The kids had played Yahtzee with her, and cards, and they’d baked chocolate chip cookies that they’d cut from a roll. It had been a sweet interlude, just the four of them, resting together as a family until show time.

And now it was show time.

Time to show herself that she wasn’t the same girl who’d fallen for the last cowboy who’d pretended to give her his heart.

Thirty minutes later, she had Gypsy in the breezeway of the arena. It was packed tonight, which was good, because Gypsy loved crowds. She seemed to perform best when she had a big arena.

Barley agreed with Olivia on that. He said Gypsy was a true show horse, born to love the limelight.

“Well, you are an ole lime,” Olivia told the horse
affectionately, rubbing under the horse’s mane. “And look at all that light you get tonight.”

She held back the curtain, telling herself she wasn’t scanning the crowd for Calhoun. Why would he be here, anyway? That cowboy with his flowery and earnest words was long gone.

Verbal foreplay. She petted the horse’s neck. “All I wanted was to know that I wasn’t afraid, you know. That’s not wrong, Gypsy. And you know what? With the right man, I might have been a good wife.”

Gypsy tossed her head.

“Oo-la-la,” Olivia said. “Aren’t we the fiery miss tonight?”

She swung up into the saddle, as Kenny and Minnie waited by the curtain.

“Good luck, Momma,” Minnie called.

“Good luck, Gypsy,” Kenny said.

Olivia rode into the ring, her heart nearly stopping as she realized that, not only was Calhoun still in town, but he was sitting in the audience.

With a life-size portrait of Kenny and Minnie staring down at her from beside him in the fifth row.