Cowboy to the Core Read online

  “I’m younger than him.” For God’s sake, the woman was acting like he was elderly.

  “Not by much,” she said, giving him a critical eye.

  “Well, maybe I’m just in better shape.”

  “Well, it’s probably also the difference between bulls and horses,” she mused.

  “I like horses,” he said. “That’s the real reason saddle bronc is my event.”

  He didn’t really like to talk about that, because feelings were his least favorite subject, down very low on the list somewhere after poisonous snakes and getting kicked in the balls.

  “Well, maybe we can find common ground with that.” She dusted her hands off, leaving faint handprints on her jeans. “He’s ready to go,” she said. “If you want to I can get Lola out.”

  “No,” he said. “I think you can call it a day if you want.”

  “Really? It doesn’t feel like I did anything.”

  “It was your first day.” He looked around at the stalls that were still empty, conscious of the fact that by the end of the month they were going to have a full house. “This is kind of the calm before the storm, so to speak. Then we’re going to be busy, rotating horses through as best we can.”

  “Well, all right.”

  “I’ll take those notes, though. If you can bring them tomorrow. Your take on all the horses, and then you can go ahead and keep that up-to-date as we get more.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You know, that’s another reason that I might offer to lift something heavy for you, Jamie. I can hire anybody to blockade. You’re the only one that knows horses like this. And you’re the one that I want for that specifically. So you don’t need to get all testy with me, girl.”

  She looked slightly uncomfortable at that compliment.

  “Okay, I guess I can accept that.”

  He smiled. “I don’t recall giving you a choice.”

  She started to walk toward the barn door, and he moved in front of her, holding it open. She paused and blinked, her expression one of almost comical discomfort.

  Her lips twitched. “Are you doing that for me because I’m a lady, too?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I’m doing it because I’m a gentleman.”

  She didn’t seem to know what on earth to say to that, and her dark brows knit together, her lips pursed for a moment, before she clearly decided that standing at the door making an issue was more trouble than simply walking through it. She breezed past him, kicking up dust as she went, and Gabe took a moment to enjoy watching her retreat.

  That woman was all prickles. And even so, her ass looked mighty fine in a pair of Wranglers. He tended to prefer his cowgirls covered in rhinestones, but there was something more than a little bit compelling about this one covered in dirt.

  And if you hired her on and screwed her, no one would be that surprised. Because no one would expect any different from Hank Dalton’s son.

  Hell, no one would expect different from you. Your reputation stands on its own.

  Yeah, he’d earned it. Even if not everyone knew the half of it. He’d made some dumb-ass mistakes in his life, and when he’d gone into the rodeo, even though it was on a path marked with Hank’s exact footsteps, Gabe had thought his own clear-eyed view of who he was would make it different.

  But years on he’d woken up one morning, his last night out on tour, and realized as he lay in bed, with a stranger and a hangover as companions, that he was an apple flourishing right beneath the shade of a tree he had hoped to roll far away from.

  At this point he had a feeling the roots were too damned deep to do any different. He’d started to wonder if the vision he’d had of becoming Hank was the wrong one, after all. If he’d just been born him.

  Hank’s bringing him back now, asking for his help on the ranch like it might be some atonement or homecoming for both of them, felt too little too late.

  Hank had known exactly what Gabe had wanted when he was a teenager. He’d been so invested in the horses on the ranch. He’d wanted to train horses then. Maybe breed them for the rodeo. He’d wanted to run the ranch and work it with his hands.

  And Hank had put an end to it then.

  He’d wanted Gabe to go to college. To make a better life for himself when Gabe hadn’t been able to imagine a better life than one spent outdoors.

  But the ranch was Hank’s, and what happened on the ranch was Hank’s choice.

  Hank couldn’t stop Gabe from going into the rodeo, though. That was out of his control. A big middle finger from Gabe.

  And after all that his dad wanted him back here on the ranch, where Gabe had wanted to be back in another life, a life he wasn’t sure fit him anymore.

  Even so, he was having a hell of a time keeping his eyes off Jamie Dodge’s ass.

  He really needed to keep his eyes off her ass.

  It wasn’t so much about what was said about him. He already knew full well what he was. But he didn’t want to have that particular fight with Wyatt Dodge. Or any fight.

  He didn’t have a death wish.

  Jamie looked over her shoulder, and even though he didn’t take her for the kind of woman intuitive enough to know when a man was looking at her ass, there was something sharp in her dark eyes.

  And he had to laugh to himself.

  He was thinking about Wyatt killing him if he screwed around with the man’s sister. But the honest truth was, if he messed with Jamie Dodge, she would be first in line to him.

  Truth be told, he respected the hell out of that.

  And he was going to keep his distance.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “HOW WAS WORK, JAMIE?” Wyatt asked the question so casually that Jamie had to conclude that Lindy, his wife, had threatened him within an inch of his life, and commanded that he not be a dick.

  Everyone who’d worked on the ranch that afternoon—which today had been Bennett, Kaylee, their son Dallas, Grant, McKenna, Wyatt and Lindy—was seated in the private family dining area that they built out behind the main house.

  A Very Lindy Touch that had been added to the property recently. A large paved area, covered by a hard-top gazebo with lights woven through the rafters, picnic tables and benches, a barbecue. A place for the family to gather no matter their configuration.

  Jamie had to admit, it was a lot nicer than the dirty firepit area they’d sometimes occupied, or than trying to eat at odd hours out behind the mess hall that was reserved for guests.

  “It was good,” she said, shifting uncomfortably as she thought back to her interactions with Gabe that day. In hindsight, she didn’t really know what she had been thinking, coming at him like she did, yelling at him about the way he was interacting with Gus, but his response hadn’t been what she expected. And she kind of would’ve rather he behaved in a way that was expected.

  She had figured he would be the kind of guy to come right back at her if she went at him. That he would yell and puff out his chest, and be all...

  Well, the way that Wyatt acted with her.

  She got on Wyatt’s nerves, and he went straight for hers. It was what she knew. And she had figured that Gabe and her big brother were cut out of the same cloth.

  They were, after all, oldest brothers and rodeo cowboys, so it seemed fair enough to make that assumption.

  And in her experience there were only a couple of different kinds of men.

  There were the responsible ones—the space under which she filed her brother Grant. Less so her brother Bennett, who had certainly turned into a responsible adult but had made a few mistakes in his youth, one of which resulted in a secret son he had only found out about a couple of years earlier. Still, in his thirties, he fit the bill of Responsible One.

  Then there were the laconic whores. Like their family friend Luke Hollister, who was quick with a smile and had a whole lot of easy charm
that Jamie thought was about as transparent as a glass-bottom boat.

  Gabe was a charmer, and women liked him, but that was the same with her brother Wyatt, and he wasn’t what Jamie would call easy. No, far from it. He was hardheaded, stubborn as a mule and infused with too much pride and testosterone to be able to cope with anything.

  Her sister-in-law had done a pretty good job of taming Wyatt—the gazebo being a fine exhibit of this—but she had a feeling if she said that, he would have to go out and punch a tree or hit a wasp nest with a stick, or something else that would prove his unending masculinity.

  Yeah, she had imagined that Gabe Dalton was more like that.

  But when she’d come at him, he had done something totally unexpected. He had smiled. And he had... He had acted completely undaunted by her. And then he had gone and done all that chivalry bullshit.

  Lifting the saddle, opening the door. Talking about how he was a gentleman. For the first time in living memory, she’d felt at a loss. And she hadn’t had a clue what to do.

  Her face had gotten all hot, and her skin had felt kind of prickly. It had been the strangest thing, and she didn’t like it. And was not looking forward to a repeat performance. Ever.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Just fine?”

  She snapped her fingers. As if she’d just remembered something. “Oh, yeah. Except for the part where he slapped me on the ass every time I walked past him.”

  Making that joke was a lot like firing a black powder revolver and getting her hand in line with the cylinder gap. She might have gotten a shot off, but she’d been left with a burn of her own. She ignored the heat in her cheeks and tried to focus on her steak.

  She didn’t know why she was letting that man get in her head. He hadn’t even done anything. That was the thing. All Wyatt’s warning her away from Gabe, and he had been completely appropriate. She would have been ready for two things. To have to fend off lecherous advances—not that that had ever happened before—or for him to grouse and get all sour at her for yelling at him.

  He had done neither.

  “Don’t even mess around like that,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to go to prison unless I absolutely need to.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It was fine. It was a workday. How are things at the ranch without me? Did everything fall apart?”

  “Wyatt is falling apart,” Grant commented, a smile curving his lips.

  It was a good thing to see her brother smile again, and the source of that smile was sitting right next to him. His fiancée, McKenna, had absolutely transformed him. Had brought him out of the grief that he’d been mired in since the death of his first wife and given him a life that Jamie hadn’t imagined he could ever have.

  “I’m not falling apart,” Wyatt said.

  “You’re a little testy.”

  “Because I care,” Wyatt said, leaning back on the bench he was seated on and taking a bite of steak with him.

  “Because the sins of his past are flashing before his eyes,” Lindy said. “And all he knows is what he would have done if he hired a beautiful woman to come and work for him.”

  Jamie recoiled. “I do not think that’s what’s happening here.”

  First of all, she wasn’t a beautiful woman, though she wasn’t going to get into that. Mostly because she didn’t want her sisters-in-law fluttering and petting her and trying to reassure her that of course she was pretty, because everyone was beautiful in their own way, or whatever. Her saying that had nothing to do with insecurity, and she knew that they wouldn’t understand that.

  She was fine with who she was. She had accomplished everything she wanted to in life, and she was on the path to accomplishing more. She didn’t want or need to be soft and pretty, didn’t make it an aim to be.

  She supposed she could wax various parts of her body, or put makeup on, or change the way that she dressed, but she didn’t want to.

  She was happy the way she was.

  And it suddenly occurred to her why all of this was so off-putting.

  She had never been treated much differently than her brothers. Not at all growing up, and suddenly, Wyatt was treating her like she was different. Suddenly, the fact that she was female seemed to be at the forefront of his mind, and consequently of everyone’s.

  She’d felt agitated by it for the past couple of months, ever since Gabe had approached her about potentially taking this job on. It had been under her skin the whole time, but she’d simply attributed it to the fact that she didn’t like to be told what to do, and Wyatt was trying to set a record for how many times he could tell her exactly what he wanted her to do in a single breath.

  But it wasn’t just that.

  “Let me ask you this,” Jamie said, kicking her legs out in front of her and leaning back in her chair. “Why are you suddenly so fixated on the fact that all he’s going to see is a woman when he looks at me? No one ever has. Everybody knows that I’m Quinn Dodge’s only daughter. That I’m basically another son. That I am good with horses, and good with my hands. I am another Dodge boy, as far as the entire town is concerned.”

  The expression on Wyatt’s face shifted. “What?”

  “Come on,” she said, slapping her knee. “No one in the history of ever has treated me like a delicate flower, and all of a sudden you’re obsessed with the fact that Gabe only sees me as a pair of pants he can get into.”

  “You don’t really think that, do you, Jamie?” It was Bennett who spoke, his expression grave. “That everybody thinks of you as another Dodge brother?”

  “Hell,” she said. “I know they do.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Wyatt said.

  Her brothers exchanged looks that held no small amount of pity, and Jamie felt like she was missing out on something, and she hated that feeling.

  She had felt it occasionally when she was younger, and the men would share a joke that went over her head. She had always done her best to act like she hadn’t even noticed, even though she did.

  “Jamie, I don’t think anyone ever saw you that way in town,” Grant said gently. “People felt sad because you lived with all of us. Because there was no woman around to...”

  Jamie was only vaguely conscious of making the decision to stand, shoving her chair backward with her boot heel. “Don’t you fucking tell me that people felt sorry for me.”

  “They did, honey,” Kaylee said softly. “Not to be mean, but because you lost your mother...”

  “I don’t even remember her.” Jamie cut her off. “They should’ve felt sorrier for them.” She gestured toward her brothers. “I’m just fine. I had everything in life that I ever needed. And I... Now you’re telling me that everyone sees me as a charity case?”

  “Not a charity case,” Wyatt said, his tone maddeningly placating.

  “When did I ever act like I needed someone to feel sorry for me?”

  She hated this conversation; it was awful. It made her feel stupid, and small, and she couldn’t even bear it. How dare anyone feel sorry for her. She had Quinn Dodge, the best father anyone could ever ask for. He was gruff, and he was a little rough around the edges, sure.

  He had taught her how to be tough. He had taught her how to work with horses, how to work with the land. He loved the land and he’d taught her to love it, too.

  And he’d had a couple of girlfriends when Jamie was younger, before he married his current wife, but Jamie had never had any use for them.

  She hadn’t needed them.

  She had her father, and she had her brothers. As annoying as her brothers were, they were everything she needed.

  And what Jamie hated most of all was that hearing people thought...those things about her...forced her to imagine a small, lonely little girl, sitting by herself, aching for the soft, loving arms of a mother. And that wasn’t Jamie. She never wasted a moment crying over what sh
e lost. Crying over what she didn’t deserve to feel the loss of.

  “Well, you all should know me better than that,” she said, her tone fierce. “He hired me because I am the best horsewoman around. I can sure as hell put my boot in his crotch if the occasion calls for it. I don’t need you to act like a posturing ape about it, Wyatt Dodge. I don’t need anyone to sit around talking about me, worrying about me. I know what I’m about. Just because you don’t...that’s not my problem.”

  She turned on her heel and walked away, shaking with barely repressed energy.

  How dare they?

  All of them.

  Her brothers and the whole town.

  She felt angry and tangled up.

  It was dark now, the sky a handful of diamond dust surrounded by black velvet. The moon was yellow and swollen, appropriate, since Jamie felt round with indignation. Absolutely full of it.

  She wasn’t even fully conscious of where she was going or what she was doing, but as soon as she opened up the barn, and the familiar smell of damp shavings, dust and hay hit her nose, she felt home in a way that she hadn’t sitting around that table with her family.

  She loved her family.

  But all of that just underlined the fact that what she was doing was the right thing. That not telling them she was doing it was the right thing, too.

  She needed to get out of Dodge, finally enough.

  Off the ranch, out of this town.

  To figure out who the hell she was untangled from it all, and she could’ve done it years ago. But...

  They’d needed her.

  That was the other thing that stuck out in her mind as she pictured the scene she had just left.

  She wandered over to the stall where her horse Lilac was, reached out and smiled as the horse pressed her soft, pink nose to Jamie’s knuckles.

  They didn’t need her anymore.

  Her father had married Freda, and moved away to New Mexico.

  Wyatt had Lindy. Bennett had Kaylee, and his son Dallas.

  Grant had McKenna.