Cattleman's Choice Read Free

Two
    W hen dawn burst over the valley in deep, fiery lights, Mandelyn was still awake. The night before might have been only a dream except for the swollen discomfort of her lower lip, where Carson’s teeth had cut it.
    She sat idly on the front porch, still dressed, staring vacantly at the mountains. It was spring, and the wildflowers were blooming among the sparse vegetation, but she wasn’t even aware of the sparkling early morning beauty.
    Her mind had gone back to the first day she’d ever seen Carson, when she was eighteen and had just moved to Sweetwater with her Uncle Dan. She’d gone into the local fast-food restaurant for a soda and Carson had been sitting on a nearby stool.
    She remembered her first glimpse of him, how her heart had quickened, because he was the only cowboy she’d seen so far. He was lean and rangy looking, his hair as unruly then as it was now, his face unshaven, his pale eyes insolent and intimate as he lounged back against the counter and stared at her with a blatant lack of good manners.
    She’d managed to ignore him at first, but when he’d called to her and asked how she’d like to go out on the town with him, her Scotch-Irish temper had burst through the restraints of her proper upbringing.
    Even now, she could remember his astonished look when she’d turned on the stool, coldly ladylike in her neat white suit. She had glared at him from cold gray eyes.
    â€œMy name,” she’d informed him icily, “is Miss Bush, not, ‘hey, honey.’ I am not looking for some fun, and if I were, it would not be with a barbarian like you.”
    His eyebrows had shot up and he’d actually laughed. “Well, well, if it isn’t a Southern belle. Where are you from, honey?’
    â€œI’m from Charleston,” she said coldly. “That’s a city. In South Carolina.”
    â€œI made good grades in geography,” he replied.
    She’d given a mock gasp. “You can read?”
    That had set him off. The language that had followed had made her flush wildly, but it hadn’t backed her down.
    She’d stood up, ignoring the stares of the astonished bystanders, walked straight over to him, and coolly slapped him with all the strength of her slender body behind her small hand. And then she’d walked out the door, leaving him staring at her.
    It was days later that she learned they were neighbors. He’d come to talk to Uncle Dan about a horse, and that was when she’d found out who Carson Wayne was. He’d smiled at her, and confessed to her uncle what had happened in town, as if it amused him. It had taken her weeks to get used to Carson’s rowdy humor and his unpolished behavior. He would slurp his coffee and ignore his napkin, and use language that embarrassed her. But since he was always around, she had to get used to him. So she did.
    Later that first year, she’d gone to the rodeo, and Carson had been beating the stuffing out of another cowboy as she was coming out of the stands. Obviously intoxicated, he was throwing off the men who tried to stop him. Without a thought of defeat, she’d walked over to Carson and touched him lightly on the arm. He’d stopped hitting the other man immediately, looking down at her with dark, quiet eyes. She’d taken his hand, and he’d let her lead him around the corral, to where Jake was waiting nervously. After that, Jake went looking for her whenever his boss went on a spree. And she always went to the rescue. But after last night, she’d never go again.
    With a long sigh, she walked back into the house and put on a pot of coffee. She fixed a piece of toast and ate it with her coffee, checking the time. She had a meeting at nine with Patty Hopper, a local woman who’d just come back home fresh out of veterinary school and needed an office. Then, after lunch, she had to talk to the developer who was interested in Carson’s forty-acre tract.