The Cowboy Who Broke The Mold
Cathleen Galitz
Women to Watch"Cathleen Galitz has captured the essence of the Western man. Her characters are as unique as the land that spawned them." – Award-winning author Carolyn LampmanHE WAS ROUGH, UNTAMEDAn arrogant, blue-eyed, half Native American cowboy with an attitude who thought prim one-room schoolteacher Carrie Raben couldn't hack it in the wilds of Wyoming. Guess again, cowboy.SHE WAS SOFT, INNOCENTChaste Carrie was running from heartbreak, and she had something to prove to herself…as well as to Judson Horn. And neither the enormity of the open range nor this potent man of the land could intimidate her. Instead, she was about to tame this know-it-all virile cowboy and teach him about the explosive power of opposites attracting.Women to Watch. For classic tales with a sexy twist, dazzling debut author Cathleen Galitz is our Woman to Watch….
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u62245b32-a3f1-5dc5-a235-330d9850d390)
Excerpt (#u30431a63-00ae-5524-a044-b7e33df8f5a5)
Dear Reader (#u0a2bc04a-73aa-56e2-9a0f-d59b56fe57bd)
Title Page (#uf089f45d-1e06-5002-acfa-e15730dcf5c4)
Dedication (#u65834c20-77e5-512e-bd65-2ab58c3febff)
About the Author (#u9d1da5fb-c52a-5f69-9993-0840e0d5caed)
Chapter One (#u74ff0eb9-d346-5761-9a60-49e825685c82)
Chapter Two (#u7016a3d4-e2eb-5065-acb6-e427fc53b96c)
Chapter Three (#u0aac5f77-6d2d-50c9-af5e-27e0b238b4e5)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Her mother had warned her to stay away from such men.
Men whose eyes could undress you and possess you in the self-same glance. Men whose toughness in word and manner covered their feelings. Men whose rough hands conjured up unladylike images of silken bodies entwined. Men who could break your heart just as surely as they could break a wild mustang and abandon you the instant you were tamed….
But despite her mother’s warning, Carrie felt herself unable to resist the enigmatic cowboy.
Dear Reader,
What a special lineup of love stories Silhouette Romance has for you this month. Bestselling author Sandra Steffen continues her BACHELOR GULCH miniseries with Clayton’s Made-Over Mrs. And in The Lawman’s Legacy, favorite author Phyllis Halldorson introduces a special promotion called MEN! Who says good men are hard to find?! Plus, we’ve got Julianna Morris’s Daddy Woke up Married—our BUNDLES OF JOY selection—Love, Marriage and Family 101 by Anne Peters, The Scandalous Return of Jake Walker by Myrna Mackenzie and The Cowboy Who Broke the Mold by Cathleen Galitz, who makes her Silhouette debut as one of our WOMEN TO WATCH.
I hope you enjoy all six of these wonderful novels. In fact, I’d love to get your thoughts on Silhouette Romance. If you’d like to share your comments about the Silhouette Romance line, please send a letter directly to my attention: Melissa Senate, Senior Editor, Silhouette Books, 300 E. 42nd St, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10017. I welcome all of your comments, and here are a few particulars I’d like to have your feedback on:
1) Why do you enjoy Silhouette Romance?
2) What types of stories would you like to see more of? Less of?
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Your thoughts about Romance are very important to me. After all, these books are for you! Again, I hope you enjoy our six novels this month—and that you’ll write me with your thoughts.
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Senior Editor
Silhouette Books
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The Cowboy Who Broke The Mould
Cathleen Galitz
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Brian—the man who,
in a world beleaguered by bottom-liners, puts us first.
CATHLEEN GALITZ,
a Wyoming native, teaches English to students in grades seven to twelve in a rural school that houses kindergartners and seniors in the same building. She lives in a small Wyoming town with her husband and two children. When she’s not busy writing, teaching or working with her Cub Scout den, she can most often be found hiking or snowmobiling in the Wind River Mountains.
Chapter One (#ulink_c374ec28-a388-588a-91ba-023f6f4f9a80)
Judson Horn had no more difficulty in picking out the new schoolteacher as she stepped off the plane at Rock Springs than if she had been holding a gigantic placard. Ms. Carrie Raben was, after all, exactly what he had expected.
The dark-haired cowboy shook his head in disgust. “No more sense than a calf straying into a barbecue,” he muttered to himself.
Wearing a matching dark skirt and blazer, and sporting an expensive leather briefcase, Ms. Raben looked infinitely better suited to running an executive board meeting than to teaching a raggle-taggle group of schoolchildren in the middle of nowhere. Her light brown hair was cut in a chin-length bob that swung neatly with her every movement. It was precisely the no-nonsense sort of hairdo Judson had the woman figured for before he’d ever laid eyes on her.
It took less than a minute for Judson Horn to size Ms. Raben up as just another lost cause from back East. He’d had his bellyful of ‘em—those cosmopolitan types who insisted on accompanying their husbands deep into the backwoods on the hunting expeditions he guided. Without fail they were whining, spoiled creatures who wanted to go home the day after he had set up camp. To them he was merely an anomaly of nature—a blue- eyed half-breed who piqued their cultural curiosity. De- spite their obsequious panderings to the plight of the American Indian, what most of these social matrons re- ally wanted was a savage lover to turn their blue blood to fire.
Stoically detached in the face of their not-so-subtle advances, Judson merely had to run a finger across the scar tissue along his jaw to remember an encounter with a couple of overly protective brothers who took a strong personal dislike to his relationship with their lily-white sister….
“You half-breed bastard!” they had called out as the lash of the whip sailed through the air, cut into the tender flesh across his back and curled around his jaw. “People ‘round here don’t take to Indian trash messing with their women.”
Judson swallowed hard against the rage that rose in his chest at the memory and made himself focus on the task at hand—transporting a hothouse orchid to the harsh clime of Wyoming. He gave the pretty little thing less than a month before she came to the realization that she was totally unsuited for the rigors of living in the wild Wild West.
I’ve signed a contract to teach in hell, Carrie thought to herself, ducking to avoid hitting her head on the exit ramp door. Greeted by a blast of hot wind, she clutched the wobbly railing and took her first step in Wyoming.
Long before the eighteen-passenger airplane touched down in the middle of what appeared to be a gigantic dust bowl, it had managed to hit every air pocket in the state with an astonishing accuracy that left Carrie feel- ing sick to her stomach. From an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, it appeared that the entire state was de- void of human life—a world of vast nothingness where colors all blurred to varying shades of brown. And now viewing her new home at eye level, Carrie had to admit that it was, indeed, as bleak as it had appeared from so high above. Truly this was the epitome of nowhere.
Where were all the mountains her favorite authors had so eloquently eulogized in their novels? she won- dered. Where was the sense of freedom she had antic- ipated feeling with the first rush of fresh air into her citified lungs? And where, for that matter, was Bill Madden with his promised open-armed Western hos- pitality?
Fighting the wind, Carrie made her way to the airport terminal. She looked around the tiny lobby in dismay, her green eyes searching the area, trying to match a face to the slightly desperate voice that had hired her sight unseen over the telephone. In her mind, she pictured an overweight, balding man wearing a suit the color of a pastel mint.
“Mommy!” squealed the precocious six-year-old whose incessant chatter had inundated the tiny aircraft for the past two and a half hours. “Mommy,” he re- peated louder, tugging at her sleeve and pointing. “Look, a real-live cowboy! I thought they were dead…like the dinosaurs—”
“Terry!” whispered his harried-looking mother through clenched teeth. “How many times do I have to tell you it’s not polite to point?”
Following the direction of Terry’s extended index fin- ger, Carrie found herself looking up into the sexiest sky- blue eyes she’d ever encountered. Her stomach lurched to her throat as if she had just hit another air pocket. Standing not two feet away was a broad-shouldered man who looked like he’d just walked off a Western movie set. She indulged herself in a long look, one that started with a black felt Stetson hat, lingered over a silver belt buckle and ended with a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots.
“Mr. M-Madden?” she stammered.
A slow smile spread across the man’s rugged features. “No, ma’am. Bill couldn’t make it so he asked me to pick you up and pack you to Harmony.”
Carrie’s temperature soared. Taking a deep breath of air, she tried to combat the sense of light-headedness that she wanted to believe was simply the aftereffect of a jarring plane ride. Never before had she seen such electric blue eyes on such a dark-complexioned man. The effect was so startling it left her positively breath- less.
Grabbing four heavy bags marked with her tags from the luggage carousel, he balanced two of them under his long arms much the way Carrie imagined one would lug bales of hay to a starving herd of cattle and started toward the doorway without another word. Picking up her lighter bags, she mutely followed the lanky cowboy out of the airport and into the bright August sunshine. The way those tight Wrangler jeans hugged his narrow hips as he swaggered across the parking lot was abso- lutely hypnotic. Her eyes would not release their hold on the rhythmic swaying of his jeans. So absorbed was she in the view that when he stopped abruptly in front of her, Carrie bumped right into him.
“Excuse me,” she mumbled, red-faced.
Though he merely nodded in reply, the man’s crooked grin left Carrie with the disquieting sense that he knew exactly what she was thinking. As she watched her “chauffeur” dump all of her bags into the back of a dilapidated pickup that had seen better days, she won- dered whether her first task at Harmony would be to clean the manure off the expensive luggage her parents had given her as a going away present.
Wiping his hands on his jeans, the man stepped back and opened the passenger side door for her.
Eager to prove capable of fending for herself in the Equality State, Carrie announced with a determined smile, “Thank you, but I can do that for myself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the cowboy said, tilting back his hat. Seemingly looking right through her, that damnable grin affixed on his face, he stepped back and made his way around to the other side of the vehicle. Carrie could swear the air fairly vibrated with the unspoken animosity behind those amazing cerulean eyes.
Climbing into the cab of the pickup, she grappled both with her narrow skirt and the realization that she had somehow inadvertently offended the man’s Western sense of gallantry. Feeling his gaze traverse the length of her legs, Carrie primly smoothed out the skirt that had climbed high upon her thighs. Were all Wyoming men so utterly brazen? she wondered, feeling a blush stain her cheeks. That her look of practiced feminine indignation was received with a twinkle of amusement only served to emphasize the feeling that this man was secretly laughing at her.
As the vehicle lurched to life and they headed down the road, Carrie got her first up-close look at Rock Springs, Wyoming. It was as dreary and no-frills as the olive green pickup in which she rode. Set in the middle of a sagebrush-covered desert, the town could best be described as dusty.
“This is pretty much the cultural metropolis of this part of the state,” her driver matter-of-factly informed her.
Though a variety of small shops lined the streets, Carrie was immediately struck by the fact that the pre- dominant business in town was essentially escapist. An impressive number of bars and saloons called not only to the fantasies of the tourists but to the plight of Rock Springs’s locals, as well. A police car, its lights flashing, was parked outside a tavern named Buster’s. A worn- looking blonde in a leather miniskirt slumped on a street corner bench. A drunk struggled against a red light as Carrie watched him make his way from one bar into an equally dismal one across the street. A huge tumble- weed drifted along the sidewalk in a lonesome gust of wind.
As he pointed to the town’s infamous red-light dis- trict, it occurred to Carrie that her driver had purposely gone out of his way to show her the seedy side of town. Wryly she considered telling him that he was wasting his time if he was trying to shock her. In fact, some of the things she had seen back in Chicago might just set this rough-and-tumble cowboy’s charming smile awry.
What actually did shock her was the modern high school they passed on their way out of town. Complete with a well-groomed football field, track and swimming pool, it was far superior to the facilities where she had previously taught.
“Don’t get your hopes up. Harmony ain’t this nice,” the man warned.
“Isn’t,” she automatically corrected.
Whether it was anger or mirth that activated the dim- ples at both corners of his mouth, Carrie wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, she quickly changed the subject. “Since we’re going to be traveling the next one hundred and twenty miles together, it would be nice to know your name.”
“Judson Horn at your service, ma’am,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “And I can’t say as I’d blame you for wanting to teach here instead of in the middle of nowhere.”
He flashed her a smile and Carrie felt a peculiar sharp stab deep inside her. The man was entirely too sure of himself, she thought with irritation, noting that even the way he draped one arm over the steering wheel was unnervingly sexy. Judson Horn exuded an aura of self- confidence that might just border on the edge of arro- gance. Carrie mentally reviewed her etched-in-stone list of Pitfalls To Avoid In Future. And Arrogant Men was right there at the top.
“I’m sure I’ll manage, thank you very much, Mr. Horn,” she replied stiffly.
“It’s not much of a place for a woman alone, you know. And call me Jud. Unlike the big city, we don’t stand on formality around here.”
Bristling, Carrie wondered whether the only place this Western Neanderthal thought women belonged was the bedroom and the kitchen—in that order.
Judson Horn’s smirk did not diminish in the least at her obvious antipathy. If anything, he seemed to take malevolent pleasure from her disapproval. Sidling closer to the door, Carrie turned her head sharply away and looked out the window, determined to tune out the decidedly handsome stranger with whom she had no choice but to share the next hundred or so miles.
Jud passed off the new schoolteacher’s cold shoulder as typical urbane snobbery. As a rule, outsiders gener- ally considered themselves culturally superior to locals. A man of the land himself, he was certain that only twisted thinking could suppose concrete and skyscrap- ers preferable to a life in wide-open spaces. His ances- tors had been wise in their desire to protect Mother Earth from the white man’s butchery, their children from his poisoned thoughts.
It amused him to think that Little Miss Eastern Know-It-All was sorely mistaken in her assumption that he was some two-bit hired hand whom she could dis- miss however rudely she pleased. Though he briefly considered clarifying his identity, his rather bent sense of humor stopped him from doing so. It would simply be too much fun to see how sophisticated Ms. Raben would react when she discovered that a half-breed In- dian was her new boss!
True, he had fallen into the position by default. And gauging by the volume of public dismay when his ap- pointment to the Board of Trustees had been announced, it would have been wise for him to have simply de- clined the “honor.” Instead, ignoring the raised eye- brows of his neighbors, he’d dug in his heels, deter- mined to prove the patrons of School District No. 4 wrong about him once again.
As if it wasn’t enough just raising twin cyclone kids by himself and trying to keep his ranch profitable in tight times, he could do without the headaches that in- evitably went along with local politics—particularly for someone of his temperament and dubious background.
But Judson Horn wasn’t a man who took the easy way out of anything. Besides, if there was ever a way to protect his own children from the biases that had plagued his own schooling, serving on the school board was the surest way to guarantee the education to which they were entitled. If that meant the twins had to endure some cruel teasing by their classmates, then so be it. He’d endured it. And when all was said and done, he would have to say he was a stronger person because of it.
Even if his biological father had undoubtedly played on the sympathy garnered by his terminal illness to pub- licly acknowledge the son he’d refused to claim at birth, there wasn’t a damned thing Judson could do about his father’s deathbed wish. He only knew it must have taken an Academy-Award-winning performance to con- vince Harmony’s strictly anglo Board of Education to accept a bastard half-breed in their hallowed ranks.
Judson fought the anger that rose like bile in his throat. He would have liked the opportunity to tell that sorry excuse for a man not to bother. Coming at the end of a lifetime of denial and betrayal, such a gran- diose public gesture had been vulgar at best. At worst, the final joke of a hypocrite who hadn’t bothered to claim his illegitimate son when it would have mattered to him. Arthur Christianson had only deluded himself during his last days with the thought that he could somehow buy righteousness and lay claim to his only grandchildren through a last will and testament. It mat- tered little to Judson that his inheritance was substantial. As far as he was concerned, his old man would spend eternity in hell waiting for his forgiveness.
Eternity and then some.
“What was that?” Carrie asked, interrupting the dark thoughts that cast a shadow across Judson’s handsome features.
Her eyes were like those of a child as they followed the movement of a graceful brown and white creature that darted across the road in front of them and slipped beneath the barbed-wire fence lining the highway.
“Haven’t you ever seen an antelope before?” he scoffed.
Aware that Judson Horn seemed to think such lack of knowledge was grounds to revoke her teaching cer- tificate, Carrie reluctantly admitted her ignorance.
“Well, you’d better get used to ’em. There are more of those crazy goats than people in this state.”
“They’re beautiful,” she said simply.
“They’re a damned nuisance.”
Carrie’s eyes darted to the gun rack directly behind her head. Speculating on what fate awaited “nuisances” in the State of Wyoming, she clamped her mouth shut.
Judson lifted the hat from his head to wipe the sweat from his brow. The pickup was without air-con- ditioning, and it was hot, miserably so. Both windows were rolled down, allowing dust to coat everything in- side the cab with a dirty film. He had a lot of things to do today, and picking up this silly little greenhorn did little to improve his mood. Though he was tempted to voice a caustic comment about her obvious unsuitability for the job that lay ahead, there was something so utterly wide-eyed about Carrie’s excitement that he stayed his tongue. She reminded him of a miller furiously beating its wings against the draw of a light bulb, trying its damnedest to immolate itself.
And she somehow made the experience seem enviable.
Most assuredly there would be time enough for Ms. Raben to realize the mistake she had made. Until then, Judson decided that there should be no reason why they couldn’t coexist amicably. Turning off the interstate and onto a less traveled road, he reached into the small cooler on the seat between them.
“Want something to drink?” he asked, pulling out a cold one.
Carrie cringed.
Drinking and driving made her nervous. Though there wasn’t another soul on the road and the likelihood of an accident seemed minimal, her hand tightened on the door handle. It was one thing to be traveling alone with a stranger and quite another to be riding with a drunk.
“No,” she stated coolly.
“You sure?” Judson asked with a peculiar look in his eye. He held the cold can to his forehead for a sec- ond before pulling the tab and taking a long, cool swig.
Carrie’s throat was parched. Inviting beads of mois- ture dripped down the sides of the can. She had to resist the temptation to dab away the rivulets of sweat forming between her breasts.
“Positive.”
A hard glint turned eyes the color of a cloudless sky to gunmetal as he asked, “Even if it’s nonalcoholic?”
Again Carrie cringed, this time not out of fear but embarrassment. Without so much as bothering to check the label, she had simply assumed that drinking and driving was de rigueur for the Western male.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Just because I’m an Indian—” Judson’s voice was cold enough to drop the temperature in the cab several degrees “—doesn’t mean I’m a drunk.” He tilted his head back and took an especially long pull.
His words came as a total surprise. An Indian with blue eyes? Carrie was as taken aback both by Judson’s declaration of his ancestry as by the vehemence with which it was uttered.
“I didn’t think that—”
“I’ve yet to meet a white who hasn’t jumped to the same conclusion as you—that we’re all good-for- nothing drunks living off government handouts. You don’t need to worry, Ms. Raben.” Her name came out as a hiss. “You’ll fit in just fine around here.”
Carrie drew back as if his words were fists. She had never meant to imply such a thing.
Unmindful of the bewildered look on that pretty face, Judson continued. “There’s a long line of alcoholism in my family history, and I can assure you that I’ve learned something by burying the dead, so you can just let go of that door handle and relax. I have no intention of killing you today.”
Tension wrapped the pair in a tight shroud. Gritty and on edge, Carrie attributed her raw nerves to the long, uncomfortable plane ride from Chicago. She refused to give credence to the possibility that her growing sense of uneasiness was linked to an unlikely chauffeur whose earthy scent of woods and sheer masculinity invaded her senses and left her feeling helpless.
“Hell,” he grumbled. “If you’re afraid of me, how are you ever going to cope with the demands of a school smack-dab in the middle of the wilderness?”
“I am not afraid!” Carrie rejoined a little too quickly, a little too loudly. “And—” Her voice rose a notch. “I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings!”
Issued with such fierce indignation, it was an odd apology indeed. Judson’s eyes snapped from the road to lock upon her. Like an insect squirming beneath a microscope, Carrie was minutely scrutinized.
Judson stared directly into the depths of his passenger’s eyes, the color of which, he decided, was the green of aspen leaves, of undiscovered passion and of a raw vulnerability that reached deep down inside him and squeezed his heart—hard. It just didn’t make sense. The woman was a living, breathing oxymoron. How could such a frightened, little thing exude sexuality like a tea- pot giving off steam?
“Don’t worry. I’m past having my feelings hurt,” he muttered in disgust.
It was a bald-faced lie. It bothered him a whole lot more than he liked to admit that his children’s pretty new schoolteacher had been so eager to assume the worst about him. By now he should be numb to such umbrage, but the dull ache throbbing in his chest as- sured him otherwise. Bitterly, Judson congratulated himself for casting the only vote against hiring this woman whose angelic face presented a deceptive facade for the bigotry that had marked his life. He saw it as his duty to protect the children of Harmony from people like Carrie Raben.
Her assumption that he was a drinker couldn’t have been further from the truth. As a child he had watched alcohol rob his mother of her youth and beauty, slowly destroying her. Through the eyes of an adult, he wit- nessed the desiccation of an entire culture. By publicly taking the pledge that bound him to a life of sobriety, he hoped to provide the kind of positive role model that young Native American men and women so desperately needed. Judson vowed his own children would never grow up in a home like the one in which he was raised—one in which a bottle held greater priority than food on the table or paid utilities.
Defiantly, he reminded himself that just because Car- rie Raben’s singular looks seemed to grow on him with each passing mile, that didn’t make her any better than anyone else who passed judgment on him without both- ering to look past the color of his skin.
Carrie was burning up. The open windows let in fresh air but did little to lower the temperature in the cab. Staring at a sky that met the horizon in an unbroken, infinite line, she was struck by the sheer enormity of the open range that was as intimidating as the virile man sitting a mere arm’s length away. It was apparent that she and her driver were as different as night and day, as explosive as gasoline and matches…
As the old green pickup rolled off the main road and rumbled onto a dirt one, Judson unsnapped the top two buttons of his Western shirt and opened his chest to the air rushing in the open window. Carrie was getting hot- ter by the minute, and not because of the desert heat. Surely the man knew he was giving off sexual vibes that could ignite a prairie fire. Her own fingers itched to untie the silk bow wilting around her neck. An un- expected thought flitted across her mind, an X-rated im- age of Judson Horn pulling off to the side of the road and slowly undressing her—Carrie dropped the thought like a burning match. She hardly knew him and here she was letting her mind take indecent liberties with a man who could scarcely contain his dislike of her!
She concentrated on the scenery. The great plains were slowly giving way to more mountainous terrain. Boulders cropped up like great gray pigeons huddled against the earth. Scraggly spruce began yielding to out- bursts of pine and quaking aspen.
“Aren’t those bright red flowers dotting the hillside Indian Paint Brush? Isn’t there a legend behind them?” she asked, venturing into what she assumed was safe territory.
Mindful of his mother’s undying belief in the old legends as well as her penchant for those fragile blos- soms, Judson felt the question touch a sensitive chord deep inside him. He was angered that that which held deep spiritual significance for him was nothing more than frivolous small talk to this outlander.
“It’s symbolic of the red man’s blood shed by the whites when you stole our land,” he snapped. “You can read all about it in one of the books you bought to brush up on Wyoming folklore. Most outsiders are sure they can find all they’ll need to know about the natives in the library.”
Stung by the cold fury of his words, Carrie eyed him critically. How dare he make her feel like some kind of cultural squatter!
“If I’m going to teach here, I’d like to be as knowl- edgeable as possible,” she replied woodenly in defense of herself.
Judson raked his fingers through his dark hair and sighed in exasperation. A man of few words who en- joyed his solitude, he found superficial chitchat a waste of energy. Certain that a litter of kittens would prove less curious than this contrary female, he decided it was time to put a stop to her endless questions.
“Are you going to ask me the name of every plant and animal in the Wind River Mountain Range?”
“Maybe,” she said, gracing him with an acerbic smile.
Grudgingly Judson acknowledged how a smile could transform the uptight schoolteacher beside him into a lovely woman. Carrie Raben was something all but- toned up, he decided, and wondered just what kind of a man it would take to get those buttons undone. Aroused at the thought, he grimly reminded himself of the cost of such yearnings.
Nonetheless the young woman’s interest in the native flora and fauna evoked in him something that at last put the two of them on peaceable terms: his love of this untamed land.
The further away from the city they traveled, the less Judson resembled a cornered mountain lion. As he pointed out coyotes and deer and red-tailed hawks, Car- rie was impressed both by the depth of his knowledge and his uncanny eye. Where she could discern only landscape, he unerringly uncovered camouflaged wild- life. Clearly this man was on a spiritual plane with his fellow creatures. Knowledge tempered by respect and reverence was evident in the way his eyes held this vast wilderness that he called home, and Carrie found herself wondering if any woman would ever be able to compete with such a rival.
In a cloud of dust they passed a weathered, old gold mine claiming “The Carissa” as its name. Rounding the top of the next hill, Carrie was astonished to find herself in the midst of an actual ghost town. Little more than an outcropping of historic buildings, Atlantic City was still functioning—in a desolate, halfhearted sort of way.
“Almost there,” Judson said, pulling up in front of the local mercantile. “Time to stop for lunch.”
Climbing out of the pickup, Carrie thought to herself that there could not be enough liquid refreshment in the old establishment to put out the fire inside her. She fol- lowed Judson through the swinging doors and into the past. A 1912 calendar hung on the wall along with a collection of mining relics. The smell of whiskey min- gled with dust, and Carrie almost expected an old-time saloon girl to step out from behind the antique bar and offer her a shot of whiskey.
Judson ordered a hamburger platter, and Carrie did the same. Looking over the rim of the old preserving jar in which her soft drink was served, she studied him closely. In the vehicle she had been nervous and re- served. In the dimly lit mercantile she felt more at ease in scrutinizing her driver. His face was lined with the telltale signs of a life of hard work beneath the sun, and it seemed to Carrie that the harsh exposure to the ele- ments had given him an aura of determination and dig- nity. The lines around his eyes belied the sun-squinted curiosity of looking so far to see so little in these wide open spaces. Slightly off center, his nose had been bro- ken a time or two, and a ridge of scar tissue ran along his left jawbone. Clearly there was as much hard living as hard work written on Judson Horn’s handsome face. This was definitely a man who knew his own mind.
He was slightly older than she had first thought. Per- haps it was his lean body that had initially duped her into thinking him to be less than ten years older than she. Or maybe those incredibly tight-fitting jeans had deceived her. Was it merely the unusual combination of blue eyes set against such dark skin that made the man so phenomenally attractive? Or the sense that no woman would ever be able to tame him?
When her eyes fell upon that all-knowing smile of his, Carrie quickly diverted her gaze to a whimsicallooking creature hanging upon the wall. It was a rabbit with a set of horns growing from its head.
Judson’s eyes twinkled with devilment, and a wicked thought played with the corners of his mouth. A harm- less little practical joke would illustrate far more elo- quently than he himself could the need to send the new teacher back where she belonged.
“It’s a jackalope,” he offered in explanation.
Ignoring the tug at his conscience, Judson quickly reminded himself that this delicate woman was simply not the right person for this job. It was a damned shame that Ted Cadenas had been forced into early retirement by a heart attack. With school starting in less than a week, the board members had jumped on the only ap- plication they had received like a trout upon the first mayfly of the season. They’d summarily dismissed Judson’s concern that a city-bred girl would be unable to handle the elements and the isolation of the job.
“They’re thick around here—and mean,” he contin- ued, warming to his subject. “If you see any around the schoolyard, just get out your shotgun and blast ’em. They’ve been known to gore children if they happen to come between a mama and her bunnylopes.”
If Judson noticed her skepticism, he didn’t show it. He was too busy cursing himself for falling headlong into eyes the color of a mountain meadow. Hotly he told himself that his desire to see Ms. Raben on an airplane heading in the opposite direction had less to do with the pooling of desire in his loins than the certainty that, with typical Anglo obstinacy, she would force her urban prejudices onto his children.
“They can carry tularemia—a nasty, contagious disease that you nor your schoolchildren would care to contract. First you bloat up and then—”
Not wanting to hear all the gruesome details, Carrie cut him off. “Surely blasting the little creatures is a little harsh?” she questioned, envisioning herself point- ing a shotgun out a window and blowing a chunk out of the hillside.
“Oh, well, if you’re squeamish…” Judson rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I guess I could show you how to trap the little buggers if you’d like. That way you won’t ruin the fur, and if you skin ’em, you can collect a bounty for the pelts.”
The expression on Carrie’s face indicated that option was not exactly palatable, either.
“You really…think it’s…necessary to kill them?” she asked.
“I sure do,” he said, leaning forward and taking one of her hands into his.
A jolt surged through Carrie at his touch. The man’s hands were rugged and callused and big. And when they enveloped hers, a sweet pain unlike any she had ever known before rushed through her. She could liken it only to grabbing hold of a live electrical wire and being unable to let go. Carrie couldn’t help but wonder if a woman would feel the need to struggle beneath such rough hands…
Pushing himself away from the table, Judson picked up the bill and ambled over to the cash register. As she cast a lingering look around the ancient mercantile, Car- rie heard Judson tell the cashier to throw in a length of rope for trapping jackalopes.
His sudden kindness left her feeling beholden, and she felt a rush of gratitude for his concern.
Opening the door into the bright sunshine, Judson Horn warned gruffly, “Remember, I warned you. Har- mony ain’t near so fancy.”
Chapter Two (#ulink_6ce006f7-9de4-504e-bfea-67a14ad47b62)
Carrie’s first impression of her new home was that it was a picture-perfect postcard. Nestled into the fringe of an aspen grove, the school overlooked a meadow speckled with purple lupine and enough wild sunflowers to give the impression that the entire countryside was dotted with butter. Threading its way though the meadow like a silver ribbon was the magnificent Popo Agie River.
A world unto itself, the tiny school district of Har- mony, Wyoming, combined the old and the new. It con- sisted of a little white schoolhouse, complete with a bell in the steeple, which looked like it was taken straight out of a historical novel. A dirt field beside the buildings served as a playground providing two slides, swings, a merry-go-round and a wobbly basketball hoop nailed onto a pole. Beside the playground, a trailer house was set on a concrete foundation, and there, glistening be- neath the sun in front of the two buildings, sat a shiny, new black-and-red Chevy pickup.
Eager to inspect it all for herself, Carrie flung the door open and hopped out of the dilapidated Ford pickup before it even rolled to a stop. She hurried up the weathered steps of the schoolhouse to impatiently jiggle the doorknob. It seemed to her that Judson Horn was taking his own sweet time getting out of the pickup.
Joining her at last on the narrow stoop, he drawled, “You’re sure in a big hurry to be disappointed.”
Carrie’s resentment flared at the gloomy prediction. “I’ll be the judge of how I feel, thank you.”
Tapping her foot upon the smoothly worn wood, she added in a rush, “Now would you please be so kind as to open this door and let me in?”
His long, drawn-out sigh made it clear that he pre- ferred to keep her locked out indefinitely. Carrie watched in shameless fascination while he fished the depths of his jeans’ front pocket for the key. The blood throbbing inside her veins began to simmer, heightening the warm flush on her cheeks. This man was so utterly, so totally, sensual that she had little doubt he was aware of the effect he had upon her, on all women for that matter. The only difference being that Carrie was de- termined to resist him. She had no intention of becom- ing another in what was likely a long, long line of con- quests. Besides, only a couple of months ago she had sworn off all men—especially good-looking ones with attitudes as big as their ten-gallon hats.
“Here you go,” Judson said, handing over a silver ring linking four tarnished keys and a tacky plastic tab faintly marked with the school district’s emblem.
Fervently Carrie hoped that they were keys that would lock out the heartache of the past as well as open the doors to the future. Not unlike a child on Christmas morning, she slipped the key into the lock and opened the schoolhouse door.
Had Judson Horn, the indomitable curmudgeon, not been there beside her she would have rushed to the front of the room and spun around in her excitement. Instead Carrie stood silently beside him in the doorway and wrapped her arms around herself.
It was like turning a page in a history book. Though the dozen desks were fairly new and there was a com- puter in the back of the room, Carrie felt exactly as if she had walked back into the nineteenth century. All the desks faced front, toward an old oak desk that ap- peared as immovable as history itself. On top of it rested an old battered school bell that had undoubtedly called to generations of children. Directly behind the teacher’s desk was an expanse of antique slate board. Portraits of Washington and Lincoln graced the side walls as patri- otically as they had. throughout the century, and an American flag hung limply in the stillness of time. A potbellied stove dominated the back of the room. The fat potentate seemingly awaiting the time its fiery tem- perament would once again be stoked.
The deep timber of Judson’s voice pulled her back into the twentieth century. “Well?”
Expecting a list of grievances as long as a trail drive, he braced himself against the door frame.
“It’s perfect,” she murmured. “Absolutely perfect!”
A flash of derision quickly replaced the momentary surprise that registered in Judson’s eyes.
“We’ll see how you feel when it’s forty below, the power’s out, and you’ve got to get a fire going in that old stove.”
Damn it all, but she sure was pretty all lit up from the inside out that way. The look of genuine excitement shining in Carrie’s soft green eyes touched a chord deep inside him. Her response was not at all what he had expected. He’d figured all he would have to do to run off this prissy Easterner would be to show her the prim- itive conditions of her contract, and she’d be history faster than he could say adios. It hadn’t taken but the threat of hard times to send Cheryl Sue scurrying back into her daddy’s big house, leaving him with a scarred back and a heart to match—not to mention a matched set of newborn twins.
Given his past history, Judson found the new school- teacher to be most perplexing. Nervous, brash, fright- ened, spunky—an enigma all wrapped up in an appeal- ing feminine package that spelled trouble with a capi- tal T!
His icy gaze raked her face. “Come on,” he mut- tered, reminding himself that he’d had enough trouble with women to last him a lifetime. “Let’s put your lug- gage in the trailer.”
Sinking into the soft earth with each step she took, Carrie followed after him, awkwardly maneuvering the short distance in her high-heel shoes. What was fash- ionable in Chicago, she realized with chagrin, was purely impractical in the Wind River Mountains of Wy- oming.
“Welcome to paradise,” he quipped, holding out one arm as if formally admitting her to Buckingham Palace.
Carrie was beginning to truly resent the man whose outlook on life was as clouded as the dirty windows in her new home. On the spot she decided that her very first item of business would be to clean those filmy win- dows. Too bad, she thought, Judson Horn’s negative attitude couldn’t be as easily wiped away.
A musty smell assailed her nostrils the instant she stepped inside the trailer. Looking around the room, Carrie decided it would have gratified the most austere monk. The furniture consisted of a cheap couch and matching chair. The windows had no curtains, and the carpet was a sickly color of rust in which the major traffic patterns were clearly and indelibly worn. Her thoughts traveled back to her plush apartment in Chi- cago. Complete with tennis courts and swimming pool, it had been chic, modern and clean.
Her parents would be horrified to find her living in what they would surely consider squalor. Her mother wouldn’t so much as unpack her bags for an overnight stay in a place like this. Feeling Judson’s probing eyes upon her, Carrie defiantly tipped up her chin, refusing him the satisfaction of witnessing a single tear shed in disappointment.
As he took a seat in the living room, Carrie began her inspection. Following the narrow hallway to its end, she opened the door to her bedroom. “Spartan” was the word that came to mind. There was a bed with a white chenille spread that had yellowed to a dingy shade of beige, a small closet and a flimsy bureau. It struck her as peculiar that such an austere decor failed to re- press a fleeting, sinful fantasy of being alone with a blue-eyed Indian stretched out across this bed….
Suddenly the room grew stiflingly hot. What in the world was she doing fantasizing about a man who clearly regarded her as an unwelcome interloper? Lest Judson Horn become impatient, come looking for her and find her engaged in a lustful fantasy that featured him buck-naked on her bed, Carrie hastened back to the living room.
There she was made aware of how very long Judson’s legs were as she was forced to step over them. Sitting in the chair with his hands behind his head, he looked as comfortable as a cat that called the world his own domain. And as Carrie felt his eyes run the length of her, she had the unnerving feeling that if she wasn’t careful, she might just wind up being this dangerous tom’s next meal.
“There’s no phone,” he informed her as noncha- lantly as she imagined he would relay the going price of beef on the hoof. “Since it’s not worth the phone company’s time and equipment to run a line all the way out here for just one trailer, you have to go back to Atlantic City to place a call. You’ll probably want to invest in a cellular phone for your own personal use, but in case of emergencies, there’s a two-way radio.”
Rising smoothly from the chair, he walked into the kitchen, pulled an ancient-looking apparatus from the narrow pantry and proceeded to explain the operations of two-way communication.
This was far more primitive than Carrie had ever imagined. The term could just as easily be applied to the man standing beside her. Filling her lungs with the heady scent of his musky masculinity, she found it increasingly difficult to keep her mind focused on the task at hand.
“Knowing how to work this radio could mean the difference between life and death,” he said in a tone Carrie suspected was reserved especially for ridiculous city slickers like herself.
Keenly aware of the woman next to him, Judson bat- tled a sudden overwhelming feeling of protectiveness for his children’s teacher. He knew he intimidated her, meant to in fact, so why did the widening of those great big eyes make him feel like such a beast? The feeling threatened to put a chink in his well-polished emotional armor. She was so utterly vulnerable standing there looking up at him as if he were an encyclopedia of Western living that for a minute he almost wished he could be the white-hatted cowboy she wanted him to be. The irony of that particular image brought an off- kilter smirk to Judson’s lips. As he recalled, in the mov- ies the good guys were usually fair-skinned blonds. Breeds were generally cast in roles several pegs below the black-hatted villain.
Distracted by the erotic curve of Carrie’s lower lip held in consternation between her teeth, Judson was seized by a sudden urge to brush those feathery bangs away from her sweet, open face. How in the name of hell could a spoiled Eastern brat possibly arouse such tender feelings in him?
Was it that perfume she wore, a subtle blend of flow- ers and musk, that tempted him to disregard the mis- takes of the past and recklessly indulge in the possibil- ities of the moment? Angrily, Judson reminded himself that no fragrance was powerful enough to cover the stench of prejudice. He was no longer a schoolboy to be won over by the batting of long eyelashes and the promise of happily-ever-afters that ultimately disinte- grated beneath public scrutiny. That lesson was per- manently etched upon his back.
The problem, Judson told himself, was simply that he was a warm-blooded man who had been a long time without a woman’s touch. Apparently far too long. Maybe it was time to reconsider sexy Estelle Hanway’s unconditional standing invitation into her bed. If that were the case, he wondered why the thought held even less appeal than usual today.
Deliberately he inserted a cool tone of indifference in his voice. “After I show you to your winter transportation, you’ll need to go into town to buy some supplies. Other than a few conveniences at the gas station, Atlantic City doesn’t have anything in the way of groceries so Lander’s your best choice. And I’d suggest you stock up on canned goods. You won’t get many chances to run to town, and there’s always the possi- bility of an early September snow. I’d hate for you to starve to death during a blizzard.”
Carrie doubted it. For some inexplicable reason the man seemed to despise her. That way he had of looking right through her made her feel as insignificant as a gnat, and she had the feeling that he would, in fact, be elated by the thought of her frozen demise.
Mutely, she followed him outside to a spot behind the trailer.
Pointing at a dusty heap, Judson calmly disclosed, “That’s how you get out in the winter.”
Covered with a tarp and a layer of dust sat a massive snowmobile.
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
Carrie could no more envision herself astride this monstrosity than she could see herself climbing atop a raging bull. She was as stunned by the fact that she was going to have to somehow learn how to drive this for- midable contraption as she was by the tremendous amount of wood stacked against the backside of the schoolhouse. Surely it was excessive. The winters couldn’t possibly be as severe as this infuriating man would lead her to believe.
Judson didn’t have to say a word. That I-told-you-so look of his said it all loud and clear.
Pushing his hat back on his head, he regarded her as a little lamb lost. When he informed her that it was time for him to get going, Carrie merely looked at him blankly in response. He felt compelled to add in expla- nation as he turned to go, “Look, I’ve got a date, but if you want to, you can follow me into Lander. It’s the nearest town from here.”
Judson deliberately withheld the fact that his “date” was nothing more than picking up his children. He wasn’t exactly sure why he didn’t want Carrie knowing just how unattached he was—that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had been on a real date. But he decided if the way his libido was presently holding his brain hostage was any indication, it was definitely time to remedy that Preferably with a woman who had zero expectations of any commitment. There were only two things in this world that Judson Horn was truly committed to. And right now he was half an hour late picking them up from the baby-sitter’s.
Carrie felt as if she had been sucker-punched. She blamed her reaction less on the fact that this handsome cowboy was involved in a relationship than on the re- alization that he was heading right toward that beautiful red-and-black pickup. The instant she had seen it parked in front of the school, she had assumed that the brand- new vehicle was the transportation provided in her con- tract. That it, in fact, belonged to Judson could only mean that the old bomber in which she had been driven here was to be hers.
Swallowing her disappointment, Carrie stammered, “Th-that’s all right. I want to get settled in. You go on, and don’t worry about me…But before you go…could you possibly…”
It pained her to have to ask Judson for help, but al- though she was initially skeptical about the horned menace, her introduction to myriad new fauna had Carrie worried that the area was indeed teeming with exotic perils.
“There’s, uh, that little matter of those jackalopes…”
At the reminder, Judson’s face broke into a wide grin. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot,” he said, snapping his fin- gers. “Wait here just a minute. I’ll be right back.”
Just what was it about that crooked smile that made her heart thump so frantically? Conscious of the quiver in her stomach, Carrie watched him saunter over to the pickup. Unable to tear her eyes away from his snug jeans, she told herself that it was ridiculous for her to be feeling this way. Aside from the fact that the last thing she needed right now in her life was any romantic attachment, this particular man had made it quite clear that he not only didn’t like her much, he was dating someone else. Judging by those drop-dead good looks, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had an entire harem at his disposal.
Plainly, Judson Horn was off limits, and that was all there was to that. Thank God and good riddance to any future heartache.
Returning momentarily with rope in hand, he began fastidiously fashioning a snare. Fascinated by the sight of rough hemp manipulated by his strong, masculine hands, Carrie felt her mouth grow dry.
Realizing that this would be something she herself would be expected to master, she asked with a shaky sigh, “Would you mind teaching me how to do that?”
“Not at all.”
That lazy, irresistible grin instantly disarmed her, spreading warmth throughout her body and leaving a hot blush upon her cheeks. Surely that trademark smile had won him many a skirmish! As Judson reached around her and began guiding the rope through her fingers, Carrie swallowed a sharp intake of air. Trapped in his arms and surrounded by his woodsy scent, she could feel the shivers tripping up and down her spine. Though her mind urged her to run away, her body seemed pow- erless to obey.
“Think you can manage that?” he asked, pulling the rope into a small noose.
Was he crazy? How could he expect her to pay at- tention when her heart was racing a hundred miles a minute and her thoughts were concentrated on the mus- cles corded along his forearms? Such strong arms, she thought absently, were made to make a woman feel pro- tected and cherished.
Say something, her mind urged. But she was unable to fill her lungs with enough air to expel a single syl- lable. What was it about this man’s touch that instantly turned her brains to pudding?
Staring down at their joined hands, she asked at last, “Would you mind showing me one more time?” Try as she might, Carrie was unable to make her voice reg- ister louder than a whisper.
“Not at all.”
Giving in to the urge, Judson bent so that his mouth was next to her ear. Whether he personally liked her or not, there was no denying that Carrie Raben felt damned good in his arms. Her waist was so incredibly small he wondered if it were possible to span its circumference with his two hands. He had little doubt that if the severe winter and isolation of the outback didn’t get lovely Ms. Raben, some rich, lonely rancher would. Just off the top of his head, he could think of at least a dozen eligible fellows who would give their left arm for the chance of snapping up such a sweet, cultured morsel. Knowing how fast word traveled in Harmony, he figured there would be a line of beaus outside her trailer door before his dust had had a chance to settle.
For some reason that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, Judson found the thought strangely unsettling. He told himself it was just because that could leave his children without a teacher right in the middle of the year when it would be next to impossible to find a replace- ment. Still, when Carrie raised her lowered eyelashes to meet his searching look, Judson knew for certain that it was he, not the children of Harmony, who was in trou- ble.
Suddenly he couldn’t remember what had prompted him to even consider pulling this sweet, young thing’s leg. The naiveté shimmering in those wide green, eyes resurrected in him a streak of chivalry that he thought had died long ago at the end of a whip.
Carrie’s hair felt soft against his cheek, her subtle fragrance bewitched him, and a perfectly graphic sen- sual image flitted across his mind as he trailed the rope across her pale, slim wrists. Repeating his instructions, he couldn’t help but wonder just exactly what kind of a trap it was that he was setting.
Carrie suspected that her heartbeat galloping at break- neck speed was a dead giveaway to the fact that she was a woman without a man in her life. Glad that he was unable to witness the crimson flush of her face, she tried her damnedest to block out the effect that Judson’s closeness was having upon her. When at last she was able to master the process of setting a snare herself, she stepped and surveyed her handiwork.
“Simple task for an ex-Girl Scout!” she quipped, self-consciously making light of her racing pulse.
Leaning against the side of the old schoolhouse, Judson decreed with a definite sparkle in his eye, “Who’da thought a greenhorn could set such a fine jackalope snare?”
Confused by a sudden rush of pleasure at the com- pliment, Carrie was startled by how warmly his words filled the hollow inside her. Perhaps she had been wrong about this man after all. Perhaps her first impression of him had been too hastily formed. Perhaps it was only the rigors of hard living that made him seem so distant and solitary. Perhaps she needed to have her head ex- amined.
Feeling the need to put some distance between them, Carrie said with newfound assurance, “I’ll set a couple out a ways.”
Picking up a length of rope, she stepped off into the high grass surrounding the playground. She had gone less than ten paces when a pair of brawny arms grabbed her around the waist and lifted her off the ground. A red haze of panic descended over her as her mind filled with dreadful possibilities.
“Let me go!” Carrie yelled, resisting him for all she was worth. Her high heels connected with a shinbone, and an oath echoed against mountain walls.
Judson stumbled backward, dropping her upon the hard dirt. Carrie scrambled to her feet, but Judson was already loping toward his vehicle. Helplessly she watched as he pulled something out from under the seat. When he turned to face her, a pistol dangled from his hand.
It seemed incongruous to her that this man would want to hurt her, but having dealt with violence on a daily basis in her previous school, she wasn’t taking any chances. Her mind raced to come up with a way to make this lunatic see reason. She remembered her instructor’s words from a self-defense class she had taken. If you can, engage your attacker in conversation. Make him see you as an individual. Certainly there was no chance of some kindly police officer intervening way out here in the boonies.
“Wait a minute…P-please…” she stammered, back- ing slowly away.
But Judson wasn’t listening. Expressionless, he looked right through her. Raising the gun to shoulder height, he steadied his grip with his free hand and shat- tered the silence with a squeeze of the trigger. Carrie heard the bullet whiz past her and compelled her eyes to follow the direction of the smoking barrel.
There, curled up in the long grass just a step away from her discarded length of rope lay a huge gray and yellow diamond-patterned snake. Though decapitated, its body kept coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. Fearing the still-groping tail could some- how find her and wrap itself around her, Carrie stepped back.
Judson holstered his gun. Then he rubbed his raw shin.
“What in the hell’s the matter with you? Are you deaf and blind both?” he demanded, the look in his eyes illuminating his doubts about the new schoolteacher’s mental stability.
“You scared me!” she snapped in her defense.
The woman was a master of understatement. The ter- ror glistening in her eyes reminded Judson of a fawn cornered by a pack of wolves. What had he done to make her come to such unflattering conclusions about his intentions? Bothered by the question, he told himself that it was enough just knowing that the district had entered into a nine-month contract with a crazy woman. One whose innate prejudices conjured up a bad B-movie fantasy based on the old preconceptions of what savage Indians did to white women. His eyes nar- rowed in cold fury.
Limping over to the dead snake, he picked it up by the tail and held it at arm’s length. Reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out a knife and sliced off its rat- tles—ten to be exact. Stepping toward her, he shook his closed fist next to Carrie’s ear. As innocent as a baby’s rattle, it was indeed the sound of death.
“Whenever you hear this sound, stop and back away slowly. Rattlesnakes, not Indians, are the real threat out here, lady.”
Tossing the snake into the bushes, he added coldly, “One more step and we’d be having this conversation at the hospital.”
Judson’s words clicked inside Carrie’s head like the rattles of that diamond-backed snake lying dead beneath the afternoon sun. She battled the sudden flush that swept over her. It was a sensation that had little to do with the heat of the day and everything to do with the man who stood looking at her as if he should be helping her into a straitjacket. The rustling of aspen leaves seemed quite far away as terror drained from her body and the ground swayed precariously under her feet.
“You’re not going to faint, are you?” he asked, hold- ing out both arms to catch her just in case.
Guilt pressed upon Judson’s heart like a grinding stone. It appeared he’d scared the poor thing to death.
Valiantly trying to insert a hardy tone into her voice, Carrie responded, “I’ve never fainted in my life.” But there’s always a first time for everything…
Struggling to regain her senses was like trying to find her way up from the bottom of a deep mountain lake. No, make that the depths of a pair of blue eyes filled with what appeared to be genuine concern. What was happening to her? A minute ago she was fighting this man with all her might, and now she was leaning against him for support, practically begging him to wrap those strong, sensuous arms around her again.
Putting both hands on his chest, Carrie woozily at- tempted to steady herself against that impenetrable wall and recover a modicum of her dignity.
Judson derived little satisfaction in being right about this rough country being no place for one so fragile. Damn it, shouldn’t being right feel better? Looking into Carrie’s pale, delicate face, he was reminded of his chil- dren. Perfect angels—when sleeping. And like his twins, she evoked in him a fierce possessiveness and the irrational desire to keep her safe forever.
Judson’s body, however, reacted in a manner that was far from fatherly. He was excruciatingly aware of Car- rie’s soft curves against his hard, lean frame. Her nip- ples were taut through soft silk; his arousal just as ob- vious through rough demin. If he didn’t get the hell out of here right now, he might as well hand her the knife to cut out his heart.
Good Lord! Just how many times did a man need to be horsewhipped to learn a lesson? The muscle along his jaw bunched at the memory.
Holding on to her by both elbows, Judson took a step back then let his arms fall loosely at his sides.
Bewildered, Carrie stood in front of him trembling like a butterfly, riveted to this singular spot of the spin- ning globe by the warmth centered deep inside her. This was definitely not the way she had intended to start the school year—in the arms of a blue-eyed Native American who had made it quite clear he didn’t even partic- ularly like her!
What must he think about her now that she had lit- erally thrown herself into his arms? In a community as isolated as Harmony, it couldn’t take much to set tongues wagging.
“Are you gonna be all right?” Judson asked, his voice a sexy, agitated purr that sent her imagination traveling down a road clearly marked Danger—Enter At Your Own Risk!
Swallowing hard, Carrie simply nodded.
Apparently unconvinced, Judson ran a work- roughened fingertip beneath her chin and tilted her face up. Beneath his close inspection, twin roses bloomed upon her cheeks.
Certain the most passionate kiss could not have been more erotic than the tenderness in that one callused fin- ger, Carrie felt her knees grow as weak as a baby’s. She hated herself for blushing again. It was the Raben curse—fair skin that acted as a barometer for every emotion and rendered her absolutely useless in a game of poker.
Seemingly satisfied at last that she wasn’t going to collapse and melt into a puddle of estrogen at his feet, Judson turned abruptly on his heels. Following after him like a scolded pup, Carrie heard the gravel crunch be- neath his feet as he reached his pickup and jerked open the door.
Climbing behind the wheel, he tossed her a gruff di- rective. “By the way, if you don’t have one, you’d bet- ter think about gettin’ yourself a gun.”
“But I don’t believe in guns,” she stated unequivo- cally.
Judging by his reaction, Carrie was certain a kick in the stomach would have had a less negative effect than this particular admission. Judson’s eyes glinted danger- ously, making her feel at once both vulnerable and fool- ish.
“What you don’t seem to understand,” he continued, speaking slowly as if English were not her native tongue, “is that our children need someone not just to teach them but to protect them, as well. There may come a time you’ll need a gun, say, to clear off the front steps of some such unfriendly critter as a rattle- snake or a bear.”
Carrie suppressed a shudder at the thought.
“Look, no one would blame you if you decide that you’re just not cut out for this job.” Pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from beneath the brim of his black Stetson hat, Judson Horn looked unflinchingly into her eyes. “Quite frankly, it would save us all a lot of grief if you’d make that decision right now instead of mid- term when it will be damned near impossible to find a replacement. Out here it’s a matter of survival.”
His words pierced Carrie’s heart like the rows of barbed wire that lined the road to Harmony. He was right, of course. She had come out West naively ex- pecting to leave heartache and urban crime behind only to be greeted by a rattlesnake in her front yard! Still Carrie could not allow herself to be so quickly deterred. What she had left behind had been a different kind of wilderness, and she knew that if she kept running away from her fears she would ultimately destroy herself in the process.
“I’m staying,” she said with sudden resolution.
Whether it was disgust or admiration reflected in Jud- son Horn’s eyes, Carrie wasn’t sure. She knew only that she was done running and that she was determined to make Harmony her home.
“Suit yourself,” Judson said, his expression a studied mask of indifference. Reaching into the glove compartment, he pulled out an envelope with her name typed upon it and handed it to her through the open window.
With that, Judson tipped his hat and threw the pickup into gear.
Something in that simple gesture made Carrie’s heart beat more quickly. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but there was something undefinably sexy about that damned cowboy hat.
As dust rose about the receding vehicle, she noticed that Judson Horn didn’t so much as glance back.
She was on her own.
Chapter Three (#ulink_bec97275-152e-5a6d-b75f-cc4ff411bed7)
School was to start in less than a week, and she didn’t know where to begin. First there was enough house cleaning in both buildings to keep her busy for a month. Then there was the fact that she wasn’t sure how to organize one schoolroom to accommodate eighteen children at six different grade levels. Still, those worries would have to be temporarily put aside. Right now food was her most imminent problem. Aware that the half a hamburger she’d eaten in Atlantic City wouldn’t last her long, she realized that somehow she was going to have to get comfortable driving a beat-up, old stick shift— and fast.
Sinking to the front steps of the schoolhouse, Carrie felt the tears spill down her face. The surprising thing was that they weren’t tears of self-pity but rather of unexpected joy. Beneath the never-ending Wyoming sky, she felt spiritually cleansed. The sun filtered through the quaking aspen, splaying exquisite patterns upon the ground. The air she breathed was sweet and clean. The rippling of the river and the rustling of the Jeaves seemed to her the most soothing sounds on earth.
High above two eagles circled, brushing wing tips on clouds before separating and going their own ways. A sharp pain ripped through Carrie as she was reminded of the engagement she had severed back in Chicago. From the very start she had worried about the possible consequences of mixing business with pleasure. Never get involved with the boss, she had told herself, but Scott Ballson insisted that the fact that he was her prin- cipal had nothing to do with their out-of-school rela- tionship. He assured her that their private lives were their own.
Then again, Carrie reminded herself bitterly, he had also told her he’d back her a hundred percent. In truth, Scott had stood behind her only long enough to stab her in the back.
“Just because I changed a student’s grade?” he had sputtered incredulously, staring at the engagement ring she had pressed into his palm. “I can’t believe you’re acting so childishly.”
“It’s a matter of betrayal.”
“It’s a matter of politics,” he had scoffed, alluding to the fact that Cindy Lawton’s father was on the school board and that the failing mark the senior had earned in Carrie’s class not only rendered her ineligible to play in the state basketball tournament but also jeopardized the pretty senior’s graduation, as well. When Carrie had adamantly refused Scott’s request to raise the grade, he exercised the “administrative privilege” of changing it himself—without her consent or knowledge.
“I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, Carrie, but it’s the way of the world. Everyone does it.”
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