Abbie And The Cowboy

Cover Page

Excerpt

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

Copyright

“‘Because It Feels Good’

Isn’t The Best Reason For

Doing Something,”

Abbie murmured.

“No? I happen to think it’s a wonderful reason for doing something. One of the very best” As Dylan spoke, he reached out to sketch a brief line from the corner of her mouth to the underside of her jaw.

His work-roughened finger created havoc within Abigail. But the instant she realized she’d actually closed her eyes with pleasure, she snapped out of her Dylan-induced trance.

Stepping away from temptation, she said, “Trying to practice some Gypsy magic on me, too? If so, you can forget it,” she added crossly. “Understand?”

“Cathie Linz’s fun and lively romances are guaranteed to win readers’ hearts! A shining star of the romance genre!”

—Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Dear Reader,

The holidays are always a busy time of year, and this year is no exception! Our “banquet table” is chock-full of delectable stories by some of your favorite authors.

November is a time to come home again—and come back to the miniseries you love. Dixie Browning continues her TALL, DARK AND HANDSOME series with Stryker’s Wife, which is Dixie’s 60th book! This MAN OF THE MONTH is a reluctant bachelor you won’t be able to resist! Fall in love with a footloose cowboy in Cowboy Pride, book five of Anne McAllister’s CODE OF THE WEST series. Be enthralled by Abbie and the Cowboy—the conclusion to the THREE WEDDINGS AND A GIFT miniseries by Cathie Linz.

And what would the season be without HOLIDAY HONEYMOONS? You won’t want to miss the second book in this cross-line continuity series by reader favorites Merline Lovelace and Carole Buck. This month, it’s a delightful wedding mix-up with Wrong Bride, Right Groom by Merline Lovelace.

And that’s not all! In Roared Flint is a secret baby tale by RITA Award winner Jan Hudson. And Pamela Ingrahm has created an adorable opposites-attract story in The Bride Wore Tie-Dye.

So, grab a book and give yourself a treat in the middle of all the holiday rushing. You’ll be glad you did.

Happy reading!

Senior Editor

and the editors of Silhouette Desire

Please address questions and book requests to:

Silhouette Reader Service

U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

Abbie and the Cowboy

Cathie Linz

CATHIE LINZ

left her career in a university law library to become a USA Today bestselling author of contemporary romances. She is the recipient of the highly coveted Storyteller of the Year Award given by Romantic Times, and was recently nominated for a Love and Laughter Career Achievement Award for the delightful humor in her books.

While Cathie often uses comic mishaps from her own trips as inspiration for her stories, she found the idea for this trilogy in her very own home—from an heir-loom that has been in her family for generations. After traveling, Cathie is always glad to get back home to her family, her two cats, her trusty word processor and her hidden cache of Oreo cookies!

For everyone who still believes in magic!

With special thanks to my buddies,

especially Jean Newlin,

who helped me survive

The Summer of ’95!

One

“Whoa!” Abigail Turner shouted, yanking on Wild Thing’s reins as she tried to stop the bay mare from racing into the woods two hundred yards in front of them.

The horse kept going. And the woods kept getting closer and closer, each tree trunk looking like the dangerous barrier it would become if she were to collide with it. The branches were thick and full, creating an impenetrable fortress. There was no marked trail in that stand of trees; Abigail knew that much.

She also knew there was an extended family of prairie dogs located just before the woods, with the accompanying string of holes they burrowed into the ground—holes that could snap an unsuspecting horse’s leg in two. If Abigail didn’t get her runaway horse to swerve soon, she and Wild Thing might both be goners!

“Whoa!” The wind stung Abigail’s eyes as she crouched low on Wild Thing’s back to urgently repeat her command closer to the horse’s ear. No luck.

Desperate now, Abigail tugged sharply on Wild Thing’s reins, directing the horse to turn right. That didn’t work, either. A good horsewoman, Abigail was bracing herself to stand in the stirrups and put all her body strength into halting the horse when she became aware of a thundering noise above the pounding of her heart and her own horse’s hooves on the ground.

Out of the corner of her watering eyes, she saw a man riding hell-for-leather on a monstrous Appaloosa with spots as dark as the black Stetson the cowboy was wearing. “Let go of the reins!” he yelled at her. “And kick loose of the stirrups.”

There was no time to argue. She did as she was told. A second later, the stranger had looped his arm around her and scooped her from her saddle to his, while both horses galloped side by side. The saddle horn banged against her thigh as he sat her across his lap, keeping her clamped against him with one hand while deftly handling his horse with the other. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she hung on for dear life.

In the transfer from her horse to his, the bandanna holding her hair in place had fallen off, loosening her long curly hair so that it blew into her face…and her unknown rescuer’s face, as well. She couldn’t see anything, and she didn’t have a free hand to get her damn hair out of her eyes.

She felt him shifting, transferring the reins into the hand that had been pressed against her side. Seconds later, his horse, responding to the movement of his heels, veered right toward the open meadow.

It wasn’t until they slowed down that Abigail got a view of Wild Thing, her reins in the man’s capable suntanned hand as he led her. Abigail went limp with relief.

“Don’t pass out on me now!” he growled in her ear.

She immediately stiffened again, on the defensive against the irritation she heard in his voice. Besides, now that the imminent danger was past, she was becoming all too aware of the way her denim-clad bottom was in such close proximity to a certain intimate part of his anatomy. She could feel every flex of the powerful muscles in his thighs as he urged his horse to a stop.

He kept Wild Thing’s reins in his hand as the horse stood at a standstill behind them, her flanks heaving from exertion, her withers flecked with lather, but seemingly unhurt.

Tipping back his black Stetson with his right thumb, Abigail’s unknown rescuer looked down at her. Shoving her hair out of her face, she tried to get her first good look at him. But his hat, although slightly angled, still created enough shadow that she couldn’t tell much, except that he had devil-dark eyes.

“Mind telling me why you were riding like a maniac that way?” he inquired in a soft drawl that spoke of Western outlaws and desperados. It was gruff and dusty, silky and sexy all at once. Men didn’t learn how to speak that way; they were born with the skill. She ought to know, since she was a successful Western-romance writer. Such men were her specialty—in fiction and in real life, she’d always had a weakness for cowboys.

But after three unsuccessful relationships, she’d recently sworn off getting involved with any more cowboys, vowing instead to keep them within the confines of her popular books. Things worked out better that way.

“I was not riding like a maniac,” she belatedly denied. “My horse suddenly took off—”

“Listen, lady, maybe you better stay on a gentle mare until you have more riding experience—”

“I’m a good rider!”

“In an empty barn or horse stable maybe,” he countered, “but not out here. It’s just lucky for you that I came along when I did.”

“Thank you,” she said stiffly, in a starchy voice that her co-workers back at the Great Falls Public Library would have recognized as the one she reserved for troublesome patrons who wanted a book banned from the library. “You can let me go now.”

“Not so fast,” he replied, leaning back in the saddle to get a better look at her. “What are you doing out here all by yourself?”

“I could ask the same thing of you,” she retorted. “This is private property.” Seeing the direction of his wandering gaze, she put her hand to the open neckline of her shirt, wondering if he’d been able to see down the open V.

“Private property, huh?” he noted with a wicked grin that flashed across his face like summer lightning. “Meaning no trespassing?” he inquired, trailing one finger down her cheek to the curve of her jaw.

“Meaning that exactly,” she haughtily returned.

“So what’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” she shot back.

“Dylan Janos, at your service, ma’am,” he replied with another slight tip of his hat.

“Well, Mr. Janos, you can release me now. I want to see how my horse is doing. Something caused her to take off like a bat out of Hades…”

“Maybe she saw a snake or something.”

“Wild Thing is too well trained to be spooked by a snake unless she was right on top of it, and she wasn’t.”

“Wild Thing?” Dylan repeated. “Whatever possessed you to ride a horse named Wild Thing? You’d do better on a nice nag named Muffin.”

“She’s my horse, and I named her Wild Thing,” Abigail stated.

“You still haven’t told me your name,” he reminded her.

“That’s right. And I don’t intend to.”

“Doesn’t sound like you’re being very friendly.”

“Bingo,” she retorted.

“You know, Gypsy legend has it that if you save a person’s life, they owe you big-time. In fact, their very life belongs to you.”

“Is that so? Well, Western legend has it that if you trespass on someone else’s land, they have the right to…”

“Shoot me?” Dylan inquired dryly. “I do believe that’s reserved for horse thieves, not trespassers.”

She ignored his observation. “Western legend also dictates that a cowboy doesn’t take advantage of a woman…”

“I haven’t taken advantage of a thing. Not yet,” he added, his flashing grin downright roguish this time.

“A gentleman would have let me go five minutes ago.”

“I never claimed to be a gentleman.”

“I can tell!” she declared, twisting suddenly to efficiently slide from his grasp and his saddle, landing on the ground on both feet with enough force to jar her back teeth.

Dylan dismounted a moment later. As he did so, she noticed the stiffness of his movement and the way he was rubbing his right thigh. She also noticed the way the denim of his jeans lovingly molded those masculine thighs before dismissing such things from her mind. Or trying to, anyway.

It was difficult, though. The man was six feet of rugged masculinity. At five foot eight, she was no shrimp herself. It wasn’t until he moved closer that she realized he was limping slightly.

“Did you hurt yourself?” she asked in concern.

“You might say that,” he replied darkly, his thoughts on the rodeo injury that had laid him up and forced him to retire from the rodeo circuit. The doctors had told him he’d been lucky to retain as much use of the leg as he had, lucky that he’d still been able to ride at all. But he’d never ride as he had before. The championship belt buckle he wore attested to his skill in the arena. A skill that had shattered along with the bones in his right leg. No, he wasn’t feeling real lucky at the moment.

“Is there anything I can do?” Abigail asked.

“Yeah, you can tell me your name. And tell me what you’re doing way out here. This is Pete Turner’s ranch.”

“That’s right.”

“And since I know Pete doesn’t welcome visitors, I’d say you’re the one trespassing, not me.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Like I said, Pete doesn’t care for visitors. He and I go way back.”

“Really? Have you talked to him lately?”

“A few months ago. March, I think. February, maybe.”

She knew all about cowboys and time. They lost track of it, the same way they lost track of money and women. It was now July.

Still, if Dylan had been a friend of her uncle’s, she wanted to break the news of his death as gently as she could. While she struggled to find the proper words, he impatiently demanded, “Who are you?”

“I’m Pete’s niece.”

“No way! His niece is a starchy librarian in the big city.”

Gritting her teeth, Abigail strove to ignore the starchy part of his description as she silently reflected on the ironic fact that both her chosen professions were rife with misconceptions. “I’m a librarian. Or at least I was until a few weeks ago.”

Dylan eyed her from head to toe as if suspecting her of lying. “You don’t look like any librarian I’ve ever seen,” he replied.

“Really? And when was the last time you were inside a library?” she countered sweetly.

Dylan had visited the hospital library plenty while laid up, although he wasn’t about to tell her that. He preferred to think about her, wondering what kind a librarian rode a horse called Wild Thing. One he wanted to get to know better, Dylan decided. She was all long legs and sleek curves. And her hair reminded him of curly ribbons of silk. It had caressed his face like a slender, seductive rope trying to lasso him and capture his heart—clinging to his rough skin with gentle abandon, rich with the scent of lily of the valley, his favorite flower.

Realizing that he was staring at her mouth without hearing a word she’d said, Dylan murmured, “What?”

“Never mind.” Ignoring him, she ran her hands over Wild Thing’s chest and withers, then her legs and hooves, even inside the horse’s mouth, checking her for anything suspicious. Abigail’s first search turned up nothing; the bay mare wasn’t injured, thank heavens. The horse was still quivering slightly, but her limbs weren’t swollen or cut. A more thorough search, after removing the saddle, provided the answer Abigail had been looking for. “I knew it!” she exclaimed. “I was set up!”

Two

“What are you talking about?” Dylan demanded.

“I knew Wild Thing wouldn’t take off like that for no reason. Look at this!” She showed him the burrs attached to the saddle blanket. Sure enough, there were matching marks on the horse’s flank, although her mahogany color made them difficult to see at first. “You poor baby,” Abigail crooned, making Dylan wish she’d talk that way to him instead of her horse.

“Didn’t you check your rig when you saddled her?” he asked.

“Of course I did. Those burrs weren’t on that blanket then. It may have taken a while for them to work far enough under to really irritate her, but when they did, she bolted. And there’s no way I could have picked up burrs in that location on the saddle blanket unless someone deliberately put it there.”

“Did you leave the horse unattended after she was saddled?”

“Just for a minute. I got a phone call on my cellular phone…”

Dylan rolled his eyes.

“It was my editor from New York,” she continued. “But I only stepped away for a few minutes, no longer than five.”

“Long enough for someone to mess with this blanket,” he said, reaching out to rub the mare’s nose.

“Wild Thing doesn’t like total strangers touching her,” Abigail warned him.

“Like her owner that way, is she?” Dylan countered, soothing the skittish horse with his large hands, calmly reassuring her. The mare, darn her traitorous soul, ate up the extra attention.

Remembering the feel of that hand on her cheek, Abigail shivered. Dylan’s fingertips had been work roughened. She didn’t have to look at the palms of his hands to know they’d be callused and nicked. This was no city cowboy. He was the real thing.

“So why do you think someone would want you thrown from your horse?” Dylan turned to ask her.

“I don’t know. Maybe because I refused to sell out to Hoss Redkins, the local bigwig bully.”

“Sell out?” Dylan repeated with a frown. “You may be his niece, but this is still Pete’s ranch and there’s no way in God’s green earth he’d sell to an overblown buffoon like Redkins.”

Abigail bit her lip, realizing she still hadn’t told him about her uncle’s death. “My uncle passed away two months ago,” she said quietly. “His attorney called me and told me he’d left the ranch to me.”

“I thought he disowned his family when they sold out to Hoss.”

“He did. Over the years, I tried to stay in touch.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you did,” Dylan retorted. “You’d want to stay in the good old guy’s graces, after all.”

“Meaning what?”

“Nothing,” Dylan said wearily, taking off his hat and shoving his hand through his hair before setting the Stetson back on his head again. It shook him to realize that Pete was dead. Dylan had met him at a local rodeo where Pete had supplied some of the horses. The old man might have been about as friendly as a grizzly caught in a bear trap, but Dylan had enjoyed his company over the past ten years—since he’d moved west, in fact. Pete had taught him a lot. It pained him to think that Pete wouldn’t be sharing any more tall tales of the “good old days” with him over a steaming cup of coffee generously laced with whiskey.

“So what are you going to do with the ranch now?” Dylan asked.

“Why, keep it, of course.”

“Keep it? Like some kind of science project? Do you have any idea how much work it takes, not to mention money, to run a ranch, even one as small as this one?”

“I have a good idea, yes. I did a lot of research before I came up here.”

“At the library down in Great Falls, no doubt,” he said mockingly.

“That’s right. And don’t forget that I grew up on the ranch next door.”

“Decades ago.”

Stung, she said, “It wasn’t that long ago!”

“Yeah? How old are you?”

“How old are you?” she retorted.

“Twenty-eight.”

My God, he was just a baby! Well, maybe not, she amended, noting the fit of his jeans. He was definitely all grown-up. But he was a good four years younger than she was.

Thirty-two had never felt so old to her before, but then she’d never been attracted to a younger man before. She was also vastly irritated by him, she reminded herself, lest her hormones incite a temporary memory loss.

“Let me guess, a gentleman never asks a lady her age, right?” Dylan said. “So, Ms. Librarian, are you and your horse going to come along quietlike, or am I gonna have to lasso you?” Seeing her startled look, he continued, “I’ve got a double horse trailer parked a short ways away. It’s attached to my pickup, and I can give you both a lift back to the ranch house.”

“If you think I’m going to hitch a lift with a stranger-”

“I’m not the stranger, you are. You know my name. I still don’t know yours.”

“It’s Abigail,” she replied, staring him right in the eye, the tilt of her chin a challenge and a dare. “Abigail Turner.”

“See, that wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” he teased her, but she was no longer paying attention.

It suddenly occurred to her that maybe she was looking a gift horse, or in this case a gift cowboy, in the eye here. “Now that I think about it, you might be just what I’m looking for,” she murmured.

“Really?” he murmured right back with a lift of one devilish eyebrow. “And how do you figure that?”

“Are you looking for a job?” she asked.

“Why? Are you aimin’ on hiring me for something?”

“Maybe. I know you’re experienced…with horses, I mean,” Abigail added in a rush. She felt like an idiot. “I write better dialogue than this,” she muttered.

“You do?” Dylan replied. “That mean you’re a writer?”

“That’s right.” She lifted her chin, waiting for the inevitable question—What do you write?

Instead, he cautiously said, “What kind of job are we talking about here?”

“I don’t suppose you take dictation, do you?” she couldn’t resist inquiring with the slightest of smiles.

“You’d suppose right.”

“How about typing?”

“Nope.”

“Is that championship belt buckle you’re wearing really yours?”

His dark eyes gleamed in the sunlight. “Want to check out the initials yourself?” he inquired wickedly, propping his two thumbs behind the wide silver buckle in a gesture that was downright inviting and very, very sexy.

For a moment, Abigail wondered what he’d do if she called his bluff. Then she decided she’d better not find out. At least, not right now. “I’m looking for a temporary ranch foreman,” she said briskly. “During the past few years, my uncle wasn’t able to keep up with things, and the property and fences show it. There’s also livestock to be taken care of. I need someone willing to work hard. Hoss has put out the word, so none of the men around here will apply for the job. I should warn you that if Hoss scares you, then this isn’t the job for you.”

“Hoss doesn’t scare me.” You do, Dylan almost added. The blond librarian might be old Pete’s niece, but she looked city bred and very high maintenance. Her jeans weren’t anything fancy, nor was her denim shirt, but she had a way of carrying herself that was downright feminine. Yet she’d been quietly confident when she’d checked her horse, moving with quick capability. The woman was a study in contrasts. And she smelled like lily of the valley. Damn.

Her problems weren’t his, he reminded himself. If he had a lick of sense, he’d remount and head on out. But cowboy chivalry demanded otherwise, just as it had decreed that he rescue her when he’d seen her wildly racing off across the meadow. Dylan wasn’t the kind of man who went looking for trouble, but somehow trouble always seemed to find him anyway, despite the fact that he liked to keep moving.

His roving life-style suited him just fine; he wasn’t looking to settle down. His older brother might have gotten married and his sister might have eloped, but Dylan wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture just yet. Not by a long shot.

Still, Dylan never could resist a challenge, be it from a horse that they said couldn’t be ridden or a woman as bristly as a porcupine. There was something about both that made his Gypsy blood run hot.

Wild Thing snorted and impatiently stamped her foot, as if publicly declaring her irritation with being ignored.

“I think I will take you up on that offer for a lift,” Abigail decided. “Then we can talk some more about the foreman’s job when we get to the ranch house.”

Once the horses were safely ensconced in the double horse trailer and Abigail had climbed aboard the front bench seat of his pickup, she had the distinct feeling that she’d just taken the first step in an entirely new direction for her life. Only problem was that she wasn’t sure this was the right direction.