Wild, Wild Cowboy (Lodestar Ranch #3)

1. Zack

1

ZACK

T he Painted Cat was the sort of place where a man could find himself in a whole heap of trouble, if he put his mind to it. I was in a mood to put my mind to it. It was a restless, ticklish feeling under my skin that still felt stretched too tight, a feeling that had been there ever since the day I found out life as I knew it was over. The only things that eased it any were drinking and fighting.

Which was why I jumped fists first into a fight that wasn’t mine to begin with. I wasn’t clear on the particulars of how it all started, and I wasn’t in any hurry to end it, either. I doubted anyone in this bar had a claim to righteousness, me included, so I didn’t land my punches with a whole lot of care or forethought.

The bar blurred into a haze of pain, grunts, and shouts. I gave slightly better than I got, or maybe it was the whiskey that made it seem that way. It was going pretty well until the unmistakable pump of a shotgun brought us all up short.

“Hands up!” Janie Belmont hollered from her usual place behind the bar. She had one hand on the barrel and the other near the trigger—but not touching it, I noted. She was tough, but she wasn’t insane. “Asses in seats. The next man who tries anything uncivil is getting an extra hole somewhere on his body.”

“Or woman,” I said around a mouthful of blood. Someone had got me pretty good. Not knowing what else to do with it, I spit the blood out in the elbow of my flannel sleeve. “For equality and shit.”

Janie cocked her head so her red hair tumbled over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you sass me, Zack. I’ll call your brother and have him drag your ass out of here.” I didn’t ask which one, since either of my older brothers was more than capable of getting the job done. “I don’t see a single woman in here asking for trouble, do you?”

It was the wrong question to pose, because right then a blonde woman outside the bar peered in through the window. The back of my neck prickled as her sharp gaze landed on me. Her chin jerked up, like I was exactly who she was looking for.

Trouble, in other words.

She came in with the wind as she opened the door. I felt the cold bite of it on my cheeks but that was nothing compared to the bite in her tone when she spoke.

“Mr. Hale, I presume?” She said my name like a reprimand.

I felt some kind of way about that. “Nope,” I said. I grabbed a napkin from the bar and used it to sop up the blood leaking from my bottom lip.

That set her back on her heels a bit. She blinked at me through her round glasses like a suspicious owl. “No?”

“Mr. Hale is my father,” I clarified. “I’m Zack. Which you know damn well, Hannah Bell, so you don’t need to presume shit.”

Until ten months ago, I had spent most of my time on the road, traveling and competing in rodeos, but I had been home to Aspen Springs, Colorado, enough that I had seen the town librarian a handful of times. Not at the library, since it was safe to say I hadn’t set foot there since…well, ever. Mostly I’d seen her around town. Sometimes at Lodestar Ranch, the quarter horse training and breeding property my family owned. She was good friends with my sister-in-law, Essie Price, and my soon-to-be other sister-in-law, James Campos, who was also the head trainer at Lodestar.

Come to think of it, I couldn’t recollect a single time we had actually been introduced, but I knew who she was, and she damn well knew who I was, too. Everyone did. It struck me as odd that she was pretending we didn’t know each other, but then, Hannah Bell was a little odd in general.

I always looked twice at Hannah Bell. First to gauge that she wasn’t for me. And then again to confirm it.

The women I gravitated toward could be summed up with one word: fun. Easy on the eyes, and easy on the brain. Not that any of those women had been dumb. They just knew better than to waste their deeper thoughts and dreams on a rough-and-tumble bronc rider only in town for the weekend rodeo. Honestly, they probably would have been disappointed if I had wanted anything but sex. I was a vacation for them. A fantasy.

Fun was not a word I’d ever use to describe Hannah. Maybe it was the ankle-length skirts she always wore or those oversized blouses and sweaters that left far too much to the imagination. Maybe it was the way she wrapped her blonde hair in a tight bun that suggested she wouldn’t be happy if a man were to give it a little tug. Or maybe it was that she never looked at me the way I looked at her.

Whatever it was, I knew instinctively that Hannah was not for me. Still, every time we found ourselves in the same vicinity, I felt the need to verify the truth of it all over again.

Twice.

“Well, Mr. Zack Hale, I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said crisply. “I’ve left several messages.”

That gave me pause. I had received hundreds of texts in the month following my accident. Some of them from real friends and colleagues. Some of them with descriptive names meant to jog my memory, like Nice Tits Molly, Nice Tits Allison, or Nice Tits Tonya.

That system didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, since apparently I was of the opinion that all tits were nice tits.

But the vast majority of texts were from anonymous nine digits, and considering the content of those messages, I highly doubted Hannah’s was among them.

Frowning, I dug my phone out of my front pocket. “Did James give you my number? I don’t recall seeing a message from you.”

“Not your cell phone,” she said. “I called the ranch phone.”

Since the last person to sit in the Lodestar office and answer the phone was my mother, may her peaceful rest give her strength to raise holy hell, this came as a surprise. “The ranch has a phone?”

“It’s listed on the website.”

“The ranch has a website?” Now I was just fucking with her, for no particular reason other than I wanted to. As it had been a good ten months since I had wanted to do anything with a woman, much less fuck with them, I leaned into it.

She pursed her lips. “I left you several messages,” she repeated.

“And I didn’t receive a single one of them, but I’ll let you tell me all about it over a beer. How’s that?” I posed.

Her gaze fell to my mouth, where I still held the napkin to stem the bleeding. She looked at me like she was thinking unflattering things. “Is that wise?”

“Fuck no, it ain’t wise,” I said. “The Painted Cat is not a place people go to seek wisdom, Hannah Bell. However, I do have an open wound on my face, and it was put there by a man whose hygiene I have reason to doubt. So maybe it’s not wise to add alcohol to injury, but at least it might kill some germs.”

Every time I called her by her full name, her cheeks pinked up a bit. It made me feel inclined to keep doing it.

She scrunched her nose like a judgmental bunny. I figured that meant she was about to say no, thank you, she would rather not further partake of my company this evening. I didn’t care. There were plenty of better ways to spend the night than conversing with a prim librarian about…well, what did she want to talk to me about, anyway? It couldn’t be books. She wouldn’t have hunted me down in an April snowstorm for a ten-second conversation.

“All right.” She plopped down on a barstool. “What are you having?”

Her brown boots peeked out from under her skirt. She rocked her weight from one hipbone to the other and tugged at her skirt, loosening the fabric that had stretched tight over her thighs. I caught a glimpse of pale, slim ankles and my dick twitched to life.

I sent a baffled look to my crotch. The stacked brunette who offered to suck you off in the bathroom did nothing for you, but a fucking ankle wakes you up? God damn . My dick was every bit as broken as my leg.

With a shake of my head, I eased onto the barstool next to her. “Any beer on tap will do. I’m not picky.”

Hannah waved to Janie, who was sweeping up a glass that had shattered during the fight. Janie dumped the shards into the wastebasket, rinsed off her hands, and faced us behind the bar, leaning forward on her elbows with a genuine smile. “Hey, babe. What can I get you?”

Hannah smiled. “Water for me, a beer for Zack.”

Janie looked at me like she was suddenly realizing we were sitting next to each other on purpose. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously before she turned her attention back to Hannah. “Sorry, can’t do it. He’s already had three, and Brax made me promise I wouldn’t let him get to four without a designated driver present. So unless that’s you, I’m cutting him off.”

Hannah blinked. “Oh. Um?—”

“I’m not drunk,” I protested. Maybe I wasn’t entirely sober, either, but I knew the twisty mountain roads leading from town to the ranch like the back of my hand. Not that my older brother would care about either of those points, seeing as he was a stickler for rules and bossy as hell. “Anyway, just because Brax knows laws and shit doesn’t mean you have to do what he says.”

Janie smirked. “That’s not why. Anyway, it’s snowing, the road is hazardous, and you might be a pain in my ass, but I’d rather keep you alive a while longer.” She patted my hand. “You’re a good tipper.”

Hannah sighed. “It would take me nearly two hours to get him to Lodestar and then drive all the way back to town.” She chewed her lip. “I guess you could stay on my couch? Would that be okay?”

My leg ached just thinking about spending the night on a cramped couch. Not going to happen. “No, it would not be okay, Hannah Bell. Haven’t you ever heard of stranger danger?”

“We aren’t strangers, remember?” Cheeks pink, she pushed her glasses up her nose and stared at me. “Anyway, your reputation precedes you. Dozens of women have spent the night with you, and they all came out alive.”

The way she said it all blunt like that, without the slightest hint of disapproval or embarrassment, caught me off guard. I was used to people having strong opinions about my sex life, thanks to that damn profile Sport Magazine did on me three years ago. People tended to be either appalled or… interested . Hannah was neither.

“I wasn’t insinuating that you were the one in danger, darlin’.” I leaned in, enjoying the momentary confusion in her blonde-fringed blue eyes as she worked through exactly what I was implying. When she blinked those pale eyelashes at me, my stomach did some sort of nonsense fluttering. “As for the other women, I want it on record that they came out alive and they came happily .”

I said it to get a rise out of her. A reaction of some kind. Maybe a blush. But instead she regarded me with all the resigned patience of a kindergarten teacher.

“Good for you,” she said.

Encouragingly .

Like she didn’t quite believe me, but didn’t want to wound my feelings.

That put me back on my heels a bit. I was of a sudden mind to slip my hand under that ridiculous skirt of hers and lay those doubts to rest. Maybe an orgasm would wipe that condescending look right off her face.

I wasn’t going to do that. I wasn’t going to even try. Women had never been something I had to try for, and I wasn’t about to start now. Anyway, my skin was starting to itch again and I wanted another drink. And I was still curious what had brought her here to begin with.

“There’s an empty cabin at Lodestar,” I said. “You can stay there tonight and drive me back here in the morning to get my truck.”

She wrinkled her nose again. “Or you could not drink,” she suggested.

I smiled kindly. “Now, darlin’, we both know that’s not going to happen.”

Her lips flattened as she considered. “Fine. I’ll stay the night at Lodestar and bring you back to your truck tomorrow morning.” She turned to Janie. “And when I show up to sewing club tomorrow unshowered and still wearing today’s clothes, I don’t want to hear a single word from you.”

Janie, who had been leaning on the bar, eyes darting back and forth between us like she was fully engrossed in a tennis match, straightened. “No one will know. And even if they did, no one would care. It’s Zack.” She grabbed a glass and held it under the tap, filling it with amber liquid.

I didn’t bother to take offense to that. “Sewing club?” I asked Hannah.

She nodded. “Ten a.m. at the library.”

I ran the logistics in my head. Aspen Springs was a forty-minute drive from Lodestar Ranch, and even longer if cows were in the road. She’d probably want an hour to shower and change. “All right. I’ll be ready at eight.”

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Really? You could do that?”

“Of course I could do that. I grew up on a ranch. Not only that, but I’ll have you know that in all my years in rodeo, I’ve never once missed my call time, Hannah Bell,” I said, and watched her cheeks flush in response. Sexual innuendos couldn’t make her blush but calling her by her full name was proving reliable. Odd, that. Even odder that I couldn’t seem to stop testing it.

I took a long swallow of beer with a nod of thanks to Janie. “Now. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Right. The rodeo.” She managed to pull another half inch of height from her already ramrod-straight spine. “You might be aware that the Aspen Springs library has had its budget cut—again—and quite frankly, the amount we’ve been given won’t even keep the lights on. If we can’t make up the difference, we’ll have to cut hours of operation. So I thought we could hold a charity event to raise money—a rodeo. But I don’t know the first thing about rodeos. I’ve never even been to one.”

I nodded. “So you figured, why not ask the person in Aspen Springs with the most rodeo experience? And here we are.”

“Sort of.” She pushed at her glasses. “Lodestar Ranch would be the perfect location, so I went to your dad first. He agreed to host the rodeo at the ranch, and said he’d be happy to do whatever grunt work I needed, but he wouldn’t be much help with the planning.”

I nodded again. Dad was great with horses, but he had always left the business paperwork to Mom while she was alive, and then to Adam after she passed. “So he told you to come to me.”

“No, he sent me to your brother, actually,” she said.

“Which one?”

“Both.”

Well, damn. I rubbed my thigh, which had a tendency to ache if I sat still too long. Or if I stood for too long. Or if I slept for too long. Basically, it always ached.

“But both Adam and Brax were too busy with the breeding program,” she went on. “James?—”

“James?” I interrupted, an edge to my voice. Because god damn . Just how far down this list was I?

“Right. Adam suggested her because she ran a horse show every year at her dad’s stables. But she’s swamped with getting clients ready for rodeo season. She sent me to Essie. Essie offered to help with the work, but she’s pretty busy with clients now, too. She sent me to you.”

I tallied it up. “So I’m your sixth choice. Gotta say, darlin’, that hurts my feelings a bit.” I said it with a long cowboy drawl, heavy on the charm, and a flash of my dimples to show how little I actually cared.

But she had the audacity to take me at my word, regarding me with serious blue eyes. “I thought of you. I wasn’t sure you were an option, after your injury. But Essie said you were healed well enough and had some time on your hands.”

Well enough . For fucking what? Not bronc riding, I knew that.

“I suppose that’s right,” I muttered into my beer.

“So you’ll do it?” she asked hopefully.

“I’ll think on it.” But I already knew I was going to say yes. I always said yes. I drained my beer and signaled for Janie to bring me another. “You want anything?” I asked Hannah. “This round is on me.”

“If we’re going to be here a while, I’ll take a pinot grigio. Thank you.” She reached into the enormous slouchy bag she carried and pulled out a tablet. “Don’t worry about entertaining me. I’ll be fine. Let me know when you’re ready to go.”

Apparently our conversation was over. I paid for our drinks and took my beer to the pool tables, pool being something I could still do just as well after the accident as before. The next time I looked in Hannah’s direction, she was happily engrossed in her book, sipping her wine, looking somehow both completely out of place and entirely comfortable with that.

Nope. Definitely not for me.

But I looked at her again, just to be sure.

Twice.