Authors: Candace Schuler
“It makes,” Tom said, “for a real party atmosphere.”
It also had the largest purse in professional rodeo. A cowboy who’d slipped behind in the standings could make it all up—and then some—in Cheyenne.
None of that mattered to Roxanne, though, as she snuggled down into the crisp, cool sheets of a Motel 6 with a blissful sigh. She’d had a long, leisurely bath, and a real dinner in a real restaurant with real linens on the table and fresh salads on the menu and a decent wine list, and now she was faced with the utterly delicious prospect of a full night’s sleep in an unmoving bed—for the second night in a row!—before she had to be up to face the craziness of the Frontier Days celebration.
She could hear Tom rummaging around in the bathroom—showering, shaving, gargling—and then the door opened and he strolled out with one of the too small motel towels wrapped around his lean hips. His body was long and lanky, without an excess ounce of fat anywhere. Wide shoulders. Broad chest. Washboard stomach. Tight little cowboy butt. Strong horseman’s thighs. A perfect masculine specimen, marred only by the scars of his profession. He’d been stepped on, kicked, punched, battered, bitten and broken, and nearly every part of his body showed silent evidence of it.
There was a crescent-shaped scar on his right tricep where an angry horse had taken a bite out of him, and another one just under his bottom lip where his own teeth had snapped together during a particularly bone-jarring ride. He had a steel pin in his right thigh and a knee that talked to him when the weather changed. Both of his shoulders had been dislocated at least twice, his collarbone had been broken once—at the rodeo in Mesquite—and he’d lost count of all the dislocated fingers, crushed toes, and torn ligaments he’d racked up over the years. And, then, of course, there were the fading yellowish-green bruises that still ran down the length of his left arm, courtesy of a feisty little mare called Hot Sauce. Although he claimed it was fine and didn’t bother him at all, he often rubbed it absently, just above his elbow where the bruises had been the worst.
“Tell me again why you do it,” Roxanne said as he dropped the towel and crawled into bed beside her.
“Do what?” He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close, and bent his head to kiss her.
She put a fingertip to his lips, stopping him. “This,” she said, tracing the faint white scar under his lip. “And this.” She touched the bump on his collarbone where the bones had knit imperfectly. “And this.” She ran her hand down the mottled bruises on his arm. “What makes you risk life and limb, over and over again?”
“The sheer glory of being a cowboy,” he said without missing a beat.
“No. I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Where’s the glory in living like a nomad? Of driving three hundred miles or more every day, just so you can spend eight seconds on the back of some half-wild animal? The pay’s lousy, the food’s worse—”
“Food’s been pretty good lately,” he reminded her. “Thanks to you.”
“—and the benefits are nonexistent,” she said, ignoring the interruption.
“So, I guess the magic’s worn off for you, huh?” His tone was teasing, but the look in his eyes was suddenly guarded and wary. “Does that mean you’re going to be packing up and heading back to whatever New England state it is you came from?”
“Connecticut,” she said. “And, no, it doesn’t mean I’m packing up. The magic of the rodeo may have faded—” she cupped his lean cheeks between her hands and smiled up into his face “—but your magic just keeps getting stronger and stronger.”
To her delight, he very nearly blushed.
“I intend to hold you to our agreement, Tom Steele. I’m a one-man woman—and vice versa—until the end of the summer.”
Which was only six short weeks away.
Roxanne felt a stinging in her eyes at the thought, and a painful tightening in her chest. She blinked once, hard, and willed the feeling away.
They still had six weeks, and she intended to make the most of them.
“But I still want to know why you do it,” she said.
“We’ll talk about it later,” he murmured, and bent his head to take her lips. “Much later.”
She sighed and let the magic take her as his lips covered hers. It was a leisurely kiss, soft and sweet and deliciously unhurried. Their lovemaking had always been tempestuous before, frenzied and wild. Now it was indescribably tender.
He took a long time kissing her. Her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids and temples, the soft curving underside of her jaw, the delicate well at the base of her throat, the slope of her shoulder, the bend of her elbow, the pulse beating heavily underneath the pale skin of her wrist, her palms and fingertips. He lavished time and care and infinite attention on all those soft delicate parts of a woman that aren’t generally considered erogenous zones, but indisputably are.
She kissed him back the same way, trailing her lips over his eyelids and cheekbones, over his chiseled jaw and the strong curve of his neck where it melded into the swelling strength of his shoulder. She kissed the hair-dusted curve of his pectorals, his sinewy arms, his hard, callused, clever hands.
The fire took a long time to build and when it caught, finally, it was the slow-burning kind that pulsed with a deep incinerating heat, instead of the raging wildfire they were used to generating between them. Their movements were fluid and unhurried, there on the big cool bed in the anonymous motel room. They kissed and caressed and fondled with languorous deliberation, awash in sensation and sensuality. When he slipped into her, it was without haste, without the frantic urge to possess. He gave to her instead, his powerful thrusts deep and gentle and slow. There was no driving need to race to completion, for either of them, no desperately raging desire to have it happen
now, now, now!
The climax, when it came, was as gentle, as devastatingly tender, as deep and pulsating and lingering as what had gone before.
Her body arched up from the bed in a long sensuous curve as her orgasm rolled through her, rippling outward from her vagina and clitoris until every part of her body was tingling with sensation. She said his name, just once, longingly, lovingly, achingly, an inarticulate plea for even more closeness.
He put his hands beneath her back, supporting her, lifting her against him, pressing her tingling body to his chest, holding her close as his own body contracted in a deep, delicious orgasm of utter completion.
“Roxanne,” he said, and kissed her.
Magic, indeed.
9
T
HERE WAS A FREE PANCAKE
breakfast in downtown Cheyenne the next morning. It was, of course, packed. No cowboy worth his salt was going to turn down free made-from-scratch pancakes and freshly brewed coffee. Long picnic tables covered with cheerful blue-and-white-checked tablecloths had been set up in the plaza between the shops. Smiling cooks in cowboy hats and white aprons manned the large rectangular griddles—easily four feet by two feet—situated at each end of the dining area. The tantalizing smells of coffee, maple syrup and sizzling pork sausage filled the air. A rodeo clown offered free face painting for the dozens of kids running around. The place was packed.
Roxanne settled into a seat at one of the long picnic tables, saving their places while Tom stood in line. From there she saw a whole different side of the cowboys she’d gradually been coming to know over the past few weeks.
Tug Stiles, one of the wildest, rowdiest cowboys on the circuit, ate his breakfast with a pink-cheeked toddler sitting on his lap and an adoring young wife by his side. Clay Madison sat between his beaming parents, who had driven in from Nebraska to watch their son compete. Even Rooster had a lady friend with him, a sweet-faced waitress from Laramie who’d taken the day off from work so she could spend it with him.
“Most cowboys have wives and kids, just like everyone else,” Tom said, answering the question implicit in her lifted eyebrow as he came back to the table with their breakfast. He pried the lid off of one of the cups of coffee he’d brought and handed it to her—the requisite one-half teaspoon of sugar already stirred into it—then inserted himself into the bench seat beside her. “And those that aren’t married have sweethearts.” He took an appreciative sip of his own heavily sugared and creamed coffee. “Or parents,” he said, with a friendly nod at Mr. and Mrs. Madison. “Frontier Days gives them a chance to spend some time together. Lots of rodeo families make this their annual vacation every year for just that reason.”
Sitting there, eating her breakfast of pancakes and little link sausages, watching the cowboys she thought she’d come to know so well interact with their families, she realized she didn’t really know them at all. Never in a million years would she have believed those rough-and-ready, devil-may-care loners could look so pathetically happy to have their families close by. It very nearly brought tears to her eyes to see big Tug Stiles bent so attentively over his tiny daughter, feeding her bites of pancake off the end of his fork. Or the way Clay Madison preened and purred under loving attention of his proud parents. She hadn’t realized until just this moment how desperately lonely the cowboy life was, for both the cowboys and their families—which made it all the more puzzling to her why anyone would choose to live this way.
What was it about the rodeo that made it so attractive to these men?
“Why do you do it?” she asked Tom again as they strolled hand-in-hand through the carnival midway on their way to the arena. “And don’t give me that glory business. I’d like to hear the truth, please.”
“That
is
the truth.”
She gave him a skeptical look, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, the kind of look she gave her fifth graders back in Connecticut when she thought they were being less than completely forthcoming with their answers.
“Honest,” he said, giving her the same earnest look her students did.
“Explain.”
“I don’t know if I can, exactly.”
“You don’t have to be exact,” she said. “I’m just looking for a little insight, is all.”
“Well…” He took a moment or two to gather his thoughts. “I guess what it all boils down to, really, is that for most cowboys the rodeo embodies the myth of the West, the way it used to be. Or—” he slanted a wry glance at her “—the way we
think
it used to be, which amounts to the same thing. Rodeo is John Wayne driving the cattle herd to the railhead in Abilene in
Red River,
or Gary Cooper walking down the middle of the street in
High Noon,
doing the hard thing because it’s the right thing. For those eight seconds in the arena, a cowboy gets to live the legend. He gets to
be
the legend, a living, breathing icon of the American West. And not just in his own mind, either, but in the minds of the crowd, too, because we were all brought up on the myth. We all believe it to some extent. Even sophisticated east-coast city girls like you.” He slanted another glance at her, wondering if he’d revealed too much of the man under the myth to a woman who saw him only as a summer fling. “Maybe, even, especially sophisticated east-coast city girls.”
Roxanne knew exactly what he was getting at. She’d come West looking for a cowboy, looking for the myth, and found her own particular version of it in him. Six feet of lean, well-muscled male in a cowboy hat and tight-fitting jeans. He walked beside her now, the quintessence of every movie cowboy she’d ever seen or dreamed about. His bronc saddle was slung over one broad shoulder, his index finger hooked under the fork where the saddle horn would be if it had one. He’d buckled on his chaps and spurs before they left their motel room instead of carrying them, too. The chaps were made of battered, natural-colored leather, with a modest fringe and a widely spaced row of silver conchas down the outside of each leg. They flapped gently around his long, lean horseman’s legs, framing the bulge beneath his fly and his tight cowboy butt. The little silver jingle-bobs on his spurs sang a sweet cowboy song with every step. Just looking at him made her breath catch and her heart beat faster.
Did that make her shallow? Or just susceptible?
“Who said I was from the east coast?” she asked, avoiding, for the moment, the question of her character. “I could be from Denver. Or Dallas.” She laid the accent on extra thick and fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Or even San Antonio.”
“Not with that accent, you couldn’t,” he said, deadpan. “Besides, you told me yourself you’re from Connecticut.”
Well, yes, there was that. “Did it ever fool you?” she said, getting back to the matter of the accent. She’d thought it had sounded pretty authentic—when she remembered to use it, that is. “Even for a minute?”
“Maybe for a minute.” He slanted a glance down at her. “Did you want to fool me?”
She lifted one shoulder in a quasishrug. “Not really,” she admitted, knowing in her heart of hearts that the only one she’d been trying to fool—was
still
trying to fool—was herself. “I thought it went with the look.”
“The look?”
“You know, the yahoo-ride-’em-cowgirl look.”
He stopped walking to look down at her. “Are you kidding? You think you look like a cowgirl?”
“Don’t I?”
He shook his head. “Madison Avenue’s idea of a cowgirl, maybe. In one of those sexy ads for designer jeans.”
She looked down at herself. “These jeans are
not
designer,” she said indignantly.
“No, they’re Levi’s,” he said, humoring her. “Cowboys—and girls—wear Wrangler. And that hat looks like it just came out of the box. Plus, you’re wearing it set back on your head like some greenhorn hayseed.” He hefted the saddle from his shoulder with a twist of his wrist and bent at the knees, setting it gently on the ground between them, then reached out and grabbed her hat by the brim with both hands. Flexing the bendable wires in the straw brim, he re-shaped it so that the sides flared up a bit and the front and back dipped down, and set it back on her head, making sure it tilted forward. “That’s the way you wear a cowboy hat.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me before?” she said, wishing she had a mirror so she could see how it looked. “Instead of letting me run around looking like a hayseed?”
“I thought that’s the look you were aiming for.”
“Ha. Ha.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “Any other fashion faux pas you neglected to tell me about?”
“Well, now that you mention it…”
“What?”
“Those boots.” He shook his head in mock consternation. “Look around you, Slim. You see anybody else in bright-red cowboy boots?”
“But I got them at Neiman’s in Dallas.”
“I rest my case,” he said, and bent down to retrieve his saddle.
“Tug Stiles’s boots are purple with yellow roses on the sides.”
“You gonna take fashion cues from a guy who has a lightning bolt sewn on the crotch of his jeans?”
He had a point. “So, what color should I get? Brown? Black?” She glanced around, checking out the footwear of the other people on the midway. “Or should I just go step in a couple of cow patties and muddy these up a little?”
“You don’t need new boots. And you don’t need to step in any cow patties.”
“But you said—”
“I was just teasing you, Slim.” He slung his saddle over his shoulder and reached for her hand, enfolding it in his once again. “And you know how much I love to tease you,” he said, giving her a smoldering look and that sexy cowboy grin of his that set her susceptible city girl’s heart to beating erratically.
T
HAT NIGHT
after the rodeo there was a free chili cook-off. A cowboy would no more pass up free chili than he would free pancakes, especially when there was a beer tent set up close by and a country-western band providing background music. Roxanne had washed and fluffed her hair, leaving her remodeled cowboy hat back in the motel room to avoid hat head, and changed into her short denim skirt and a sleeveless scoop-necked camisole in anticipation of the dancing that would come later, after dinner.
“You know what they say about why cowboys like chili so much, don’t you?” Tom said as they sat down at the wooden picnic tables—covered with red-and-white-checked oilcloth this time instead of the blue—with their favorite picks of the various chili offerings.
“No,” she said, playing along. “What do they say?”
“Chili’s like sex. When is good, it’s great. And when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.”
Rooster snickered as if he’d never heard the joke before. He’d been swapping stories and slapping backs at the beer tent and was in a jovial mood. “You know who makes good chili?” he said after he’d gotten over his glee. “That Jo Beth over at the Diamond J. That little gal makes a right good chili. Hot enough to sear through the roof of your mouth if you ain’t careful. You said so yourself, remember?” He smiled happily at Tom, oblivious to the discouraging scowl on his partner’s face. “At the barbecue her folks had last spring when she graduated from A&M? You said she made the best chili you ever tasted. Remember?”
“I remember,” Tom said through his teeth.
Rooster might have been oblivious to Tom’s displeasure, but Roxanne wasn’t. “Who’s Jo Beth?” she said, looking back and forth between the two men.
Tom shoveled a spoonful of chili into his mouth.
“Jo Beth Jensen,” Rooster supplied, happy to be of service. “Her daddy’s spread runs right alongside of the Second Chance. Nice little gal. Sweet as cherry pie and as pretty as a newborn foal. Smart, too. Got herself a degree in— What was it she got her schoolin’ in, Tom?”
“Animal science,” he muttered, wishing Rooster would shut the hell up about Jo Beth. “How’s your chili?”
“Chili’s fine,” Rooster said, and turned back to Roxanne. “She aims to take over the Diamond J someday. Well, she’ll have to, won’t she, seein’ as how she’s her mama and daddy’s only chick. Someday, some lucky man’s goin’ get himself a nice little wife
and
the Diamond J.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively, grinning at Tom through a beery haze. “Ain’t that right, pard?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Tom pushed his bowl away and rose from the table. “Come on, Slim.” He grabbed Roxanne’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “Let’s dance.”
T
HEY CIRCLED
the makeshift dance floor a couple of times in silence, their booted feet scuffing along the bare wooden planks, his right hand curved around her neck under her tousled blond hair, her left thumb hooked in the belt loop on the side of his jeans. Their clasped hands were held low at their sides, in classic country style, as he guided her backward around the crowded floor. It was the perfect setting for romance. The air was soft and warm. The twilight sky was just beginning to fill with stars. The band was doing a credible rendition of George Strait’s heartfelt cowboy lament “Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind?” as they moved together over the floor.
Tom danced with his jaw clenched and his gaze fixed firmly on a point somewhere over her right shoulder, wishing he’d never heard the name Jo Beth Jensen, wishing to hell Slim had never heard it, either. Roxanne stared at the faint white scar on his chin and wondered if she should just keep her mouth shut.
What did it matter who Jo Beth Jensen was? And what difference did it make if she was smart and pretty and could make a “right good” bowl of chili? And so what if her daddy’s “spread” ran alongside Tom’s?
It wasn’t as if she—Roxanne—had any real claim on him, or even wanted one, if it came to that. Their affair had very definite limits. To the end of the summer and that was it. That’s what they’d agreed to. No fuss. No muss. No strings. Once the summer was over she’d pack up and go back to Connecticut where she belonged, putting her Wild West adventure behind her. And he could go back to his “spread” in wherever Texas and marry his neighbor’s horse-faced daughter and raise a whole passel of horse-faced kids, and…
“Are you the lucky man who’s going to marry Jo Beth and get himself a nice little wife
and
the Diamond J?” she said snidely, unable to keep her mouth shut, after all. A month of speaking her mind freely had obviously left its mark.
His gaze flickered to hers. “I’m not engaged to her, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said defensively, and looked away again.
“I wouldn’t care if you were,” she lied. “I was just wondering, is all.”
That got his undivided attention. “You wouldn’t care if I was engaged?” His expression was indignant and disbelieving. “Are you saying you’d knowingly sleep with a man who was engaged to another woman?”
She wanted to lie again, wanted to shrug it off with a laugh and an insouciant toss of her head, but she couldn’t. “Yes, of course, I’d care! I
do
care. And, no, I wouldn’t knowingly sleep with a man who was engaged to another woman. In fact, I’d be inclined to
geld
a man who put me in that position.” She smiled with saccharine sweetness. “And I’d use the dullest knife I could find to do it.”