Six White Horses Read Free Page B

kisses, not coarse and animalistic like yours!" Her fingers touched her sore and tender mouth, still throbbing from his rough kiss while the skin around it was red and scraped by his shaven beard. "Your kisses hurt!"
    "Love hurts." His narrowed blue gaze glittered down at her. "Or haven't you learned that?"
    "I can't imagine you knowing anything about love," Patty retorted with contemptuous sarcasm.
    "Hell!" Morgan chuckled in amusement, releasing her arms and stepping away. "I'm only thirty-five. I couldn't possibly know as much as you do! Why, you must be all of—what, twenty-two?"
    If looks could kill, they would have been carving the date of his death on the gravestone as Patty glared her hatred of him.
    "Yes, I am twenty-two," she asserted vigorously, "which hardly makes me an immature teenager, ignorant of the facts of life!"
    "You may know about them, but you aren't on speaking terms." The grooves near his mouth deepened with mockery.
    "I don't doubt that your bestial existence has given you intimate knowledge," Patty lashed back.
    "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it, Skinny," Morgan winked.
    In that fleeting second, she realized that he was deliberately provoking her temper for his own amusement, laughing at how quickly she rose to the bait.
    "I have work to do, and I'm wasting my breath arguing with you." She spun away and stalked through the stall door toward the tack room.
    "Need any help?" Morgan asked from the tack doorway.
    Patty shook out Liberty's blanket, black with a white rose on the hip. "Never from you," she answered sarcastically.
    "Suit yourself." There was an indifferent shrug of his broad shoulders as he turned away, then paused. "Are you going to Kelly's tonight?" he asked, referring to a local bar.
    "No, I am not."
    "Good. I've just won a hundred dollars."
    "What are you talking about?" Patty frowned, giving Morgan her undivided attention.
    "I bet gramps a hundred dollars that you wouldn't show up tonight because Lije and his wife were going to be there," he responded in a complacent drawl.
    "Gramps? You mean—my grandpa?"
    "Who else? I tried to tell him you'd be too grief-stricken over meeting Lije again to go, but he kept insisting you were made of sterner stuff—smiling on the outside and crying on the inside type of thing. I don't believe he understands women as well as he thinks he does," Morgan concluded wryly. "Females enjoy being miserable."
    Patty's mouth opened and closed. No words came to mind that were sufficiently sarcastic to give vent to her wrath. She was still searching for them as he walked away, heading toward the pens where the rodeo stock was held.
     

 
    Chapter Two
     
    EVERETT KING WAS SEATED at the small table in the travel trailer, studying a road map when Patty entered. The jacket of his light blue suit was lying on the back of a chair. His string tie was hanging loose and the top buttons of his white shirt opened. Running his gnarled fingers through his pepper gray hair, he glanced up and smiled.
    "Do you have the horses all settled for the night?" he inquired.
    "Grandpa, did you make a bet with Morgan Kincaid tonight?" She stopped beside the table, her hands on her hips, her head tilted to the side.
    "Whatever gave you that idea?" There was a disbelieving look from his brown eyes before they returned to the study of the road map.  
    "Morgan Kincaid was the 'whatever' that gave me the idea," Patty answered grimly.
    "You talked to him, did you?" Her grandfather breathed in deeply at her answering nod and folded up the map. "Are you going to Kelly's?" He didn't glance up as he asked the question.
    "I shouldn't go, just to teach you a lesson," she sighed.
    "But you are going," he stated positively, a decided twinkle in the brown eyes that met her pair of equally dark ones.
    "You did it deliberately, didn't you, grandpa?" Her mouth curved into a smile of affectionate exasperation. "I'll bet you even told Morgan where I was just to make sure that I found out about it.