The Wrangler And The Runaway Mom

“I’ll do that.” She frowned. “I wonder what happened to it. It wasn’t flat earlier this evening.”

He busied himself gathering up the tools. “Maybe you picked up a nail or something. Had a slow leak for a couple days that finally finished the thing off. Or you could have—Damn!”

“What is it?” She aimed the flashlight at him and saw him cradling one hand with the other.

“Blasted jack cut my hand.”

“Let me see.”

He wiggled it as if he could shake off the pain and picked up the crowbar. “It’s okay. Nothing that hasn’t happened to me dozens of times on the ranch.”

She gazed at him, momentarily diverted. “You have a ranch?”

He looked away as if he were too embarrassed to meet her gaze. “Uh, I used to.”

Compassion swept through her. He must have fallen on hard times and lost his ranch, the same fate suffered by countless other ranchers during the recent run of lousy beef prices and high feed costs. Maybe that’s why he was on the circuit. For a good cowboy, a summer spent rodeoing could be a quick route to ready cash to help rebuild a ranch.

She swallowed her words of sympathy, somehow knowing they wouldn’t be welcome. “Still,” she said quietly, “I would feel better if you allowed me to take a look at that hand.”

Before he could argue, she dropped the frying pan into the dirt and grabbed his fingers. As her hand met his skin, hardened and rough from hard work, heat raced between them every bit as powerful as the lightning sizzling across the sky.

Unnerved, Maggie cleared her throat and dropped his hand. “That looks deep. You should put some disinfectant and an antibiotic on it.”

He shoved the injured hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be all right.”

“I insist, especially since it was my tire you were fixing. Come on. I’ve got some iodine in the trailer.”

“I wouldn’t want you to wake up your kid. I’ve probably got something I can use at my place.”

She frowned at him. “You might as well accept my help. I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know you’ve put something on that.”

“Fine, Doc. Whatever you say. Since you’re so set on it, you can come and watch to make sure I stick the Band-Aid on right side up.”

As he led the way to his camper, the skies finally opened and began to spit huge drops that plowed into the dusty ground like bullets. They made it inside just as the storm began in earnest.

“Welcome to the McKendrick hacienda,” he said, flipping on a light above the little stove. Maggie instantly realized she had made a mistake by following him.

A huge mistake.

The camper was no more than eight feet wide and a dozen feet long, small and compact and intimate, especially with the storm playing a symphony on the thin aluminum skin of the roof.

Her nerves were in entirely too much turmoil for her to be comfortable in such close quarters with Colt McKendrick. She couldn’t breathe without brushing against him, but she inched as far away as she could manage. “Um, where’s your disinfectant?”

“It’s in here somewhere. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll see if I can rustle it up?”

He bent to rummage through a drawer, highlighting thin spots where his jeans had worn almost white from all the time he spent in the saddle. She caught herself staring and jerked her gaze away.

What on earth was the matter with her, gawking at the man like she was some kind of buckle bunny on the make for a good-looking cowboy? Embarrassed, she slid onto one of the vinyl bench seats around a little gray-speckled Formica table

To distract herself she studied the interior of the camper, looking for some clue into McKendrick’s personality. It appeared to be about the same general era as the trailer she had bought with the proceeds from selling her Volvo The decor was straight out of the 1970s, all orange, yellow and dark green tones. A well-used rope, coiled neatly, hung on the back of the door. A pair of worn boots, an older twin to the pair he was wearing, waited by the bed.

Earlier in the day she had noticed that the pickup and horse trailer both looked fairly new and in much better condition than the camper. Wasn’t that just like a cowboy? Worry about his horse and his truck but not about where he laid his own head at night.

The only somewhat jarring note that kept the inside of the camper from being completely stereotypical was a stack of books on the window ledge. She studied their authors. Larry McMurtry, Louis L’Amour, a couple of mysteries. Just what she might have expected. But she suddenly did a double take at the slim volume at the bottom of the stack. Descartes? A cowboy who reads philosophy?

Before she could ask him about it, he emerged from the cupboard with a battered first aid kit lifted victoriously in his hand. “Here we go. I knew this was in here somewhere.”

He slid into the seat across from her and thrust out his hand. “Okay, Dr. Rawlings. Do your worst.”

She eyed his hand with trepidation. After what had happened outside when she touched him—that odd, silvery shower of sparks—she was reluctant to make contact again.

This is ridiculous, she thought, and forced herself to take a deep breath. She was a professional. She could handle putting antiseptic on a man’s hand without getting all fluttery over it. Couldn’t she?

Her nerves firmly in check, she picked through the first aid kit until she found a small dark bottle of iodine, then reached for his hand. The sparks threatened to return, but she sternly suppressed them and examined the injury. His hand was a testament to years of hard work, with a varied collection of nicks and scars.

Instead of a new injury, as she had assumed, it looked as if the jack had ripped open an existing wound, a jagged, ugly cut that traced the curve of his lifeline. “What did you do here? Before tonight, I mean.”

He looked at it for a moment and she could swear he was being evasive again. “Uh, a cowboy’s curse. I was putting up fence line and snagged it on some barbwire.”

“Looks like it was painful.”

He grunted in response and she managed not to smile. “Oh, I forgot. You macho cowboys don’t feel pain like the rest of us. Now if you weren’t a cowboy, I’d tell you this is going to sting a little. But since you are, I won’t waste my breath.”

Cowboy or not, he stiffened as she poured the iodine on, and Maggie winced. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have teased you.” She instinctively blew on his palm to cool the burning.

He grinned. “Now there’s a mother for you, thinking you can make it all better by blowing on it. My mother used to do the same thing when I was a kid.”

She couldn’t stop her smile, intrigued by the idea of him as anything other than the completely adult, completely masculine person in front of her. “Sorry. It’s a habit I picked up with Nicky. You’re lucky I didn’t kiss it to make it feel better.”

“Am I?” he murmured.

Was he flirting with her? She’d been out of the manwoman scene so long she simply couldn’t tell. She shot him a glance under her lashes, but his strong, chiseled features remained impassive.

Unsure how to respond, she cleared her throat and opted to change the subject, even though the one she picked didn’t make her any more comfortable. “Speaking of Nicky,” she began, “I wanted to apologize for this morning. About calling you a saddle bum and all. I overreacted. It’s just that I panicked when I woke up and he wasn’t there. I’m afraid you bore the brunt of that lingering fear.”

“No harm done.”

“No, I shouldn’t have lashed out at you like that. It’s just...I tend to be a little overprotective of Nicky.” She forced her gaze away from his to the bandage she was wrapping around his hand. “It’s too bad today was the last day of the rodeo and we’re moving on tomorrow. If we had more time, I would have let you take Nicky up on your horse. If you were serious about your offer, that is.”

“Would I lie to a big, bad outlaw like Nicky the Kid?”

She couldn’t help her laugh, one of the few genuine ones she’d enjoyed in quite a while, then instantly regretted it when he gave her an odd look that sent her pulse skittering.

“Where’s your next assignment?” he finally asked. “Maybe we’ll run into each other down the road.”

“Butte, Montana. The Butte Vigilante Rodeo.”

“Now there’s a coincidence. I just sent in my entry fee for the same show this morning. They have a nice calf-roping purse I’ve got my eye on, so I’ll be heading into Montana ’round about Wednesday. I’d be happy to take your little guy up on Scout one day next week.”