He held out his hand. She looked at it, looked at him, told herself it was ridiculous to feel heat sweep over her skin again.
“Ms. McCord?”
Slowly she put her hand in his. His fingers clasped hers tightly. They were warm and strong, but she already knew how gentle they could be. She’d seen the way he stroked the mare. Would he touch a woman’s skin the same way?
Color flew into her cheeks and she jerked back her hand. “All right,” she said briskly. “I’ll give you a week’s trial. The ranch is a couple of miles beyond that ridge. Talk to Abel. He’s our foreman. Tell him…Hey. Hey, Kincaid! What are you doing?”
The question was pointless because he’d already done it. Tyler Kincaid had swung into the saddle. Now, he was holding his hand out to her, as if the horse and the land were his and she were the trespasser.
“You wouldn’t ask a man to walk in this heat, would you?”
He gave her a slow smile, the sort that made it clear she’d seem incredibly foolish to say yes, she would, if he were the man in question.
With a hiss of breath, Caitlin put her hand in Tyler’s and swung up into the saddle behind him. He’d saved her from injury or worse but she’d made a mistake, she knew that now, even if it was too late to do anything about it.
“Hang on,” he said, which she had no intention of doing. But he leaned low over the horse’s neck, whispered something and the animal took off like the wind. Caitlin had no choice but to wrap her arms tightly around Tyler’s waist as they raced toward Espada.
CHAPTER THREE
THE woman had been easy to convince—but then, it was she who’d come up with the story, not he.
By the third morning of his employment at Espada, Tyler was almost ready to believe the tale himself. Once, a long time ago, a lifetime ago, he’d been an itinerant cowboy, wandering from ranch to ranch, taking a job here, another there, doing whatever needed doing so he could put a meal in his belly.
That was the man he’d been, the man Caitlin McCord thought he was. And he, lacking any better entrée to the Baron kingdom, and to whatever secrets it might hold, had accepted the scenario.
The only person who didn’t buy into it was the foreman.
Tyler knew those keen old eyes had not missed the way he and Caitlin McCord had come riding in together on the horse, and certainly not the way she’d jumped from the saddle, her face pale, her eyes cold.
“This is Tyler Kincaid,” she’d said to the old man, as Tyler strolled after her. “Give him a job, a bed and a meal.”
She turned on her heel and stalked off toward the main house, shoulders set, spine rigid. Tyler watched her go and thought how remarkable it was that a woman could look so stiffly unyielding when she felt so softly feminine in a man’s arms.
“Kincaid.”
The old man’s voice had sounded rough as gravel. Tyler looked at him.
“Ms. Caitlin ain’t an employee. She’s family.”
The warning was clear.
“And she’s offered me a job,” Tyler said, smiling politely.
“So she has.” The old man’s face was expressionless. “Name’s Jones,” he said, and spat into the dirt. “Abel Jones. I’m the foreman here.”
Tyler nodded, started to stick out his hand and thought better of it.
“Where’d you work last?”
“Here and there,” Tyler answered, with a lazy smile.
“You ain’t from these parts.”
“No,” Tyler agreed, “I’m not.”
“Southerner, ain’t you?”
“Yeah. From Georgia. But I was born in Texas.”
It was the first time Tyler had said such a thing, or even thought it. The old man stared at him for a long moment, his eyes narrowed to slits.
“Fancy duffel you got there,” he said, jerking his whiskered chin at Tyler’s bag.
Tyler didn’t blink. “Nylon. Lasts longer than canvas.”
“Uh-huh. What can you do?”
“Rope, ride, fix whatever needs fixing. And I’m good with horses.” God, he’d said those same words more times than he wanted to remember, a thousand years ago.
“Ms. Caitlin wants you hired on, so be it.” The foreman’s eyes turned flinty. “Jes do your job and we’ll get along fine.”
Tyler recognized the warning that was implicit in the simple words. But he said nothing, simply nodded and followed a kid named Manuel to the bunkhouse, where he was assigned a room.
“You want me to show you around?” the kid asked.
“No, that’s okay. I want to put my stuff away first.”
Abel was waiting for him, shovel in hand when he came out, but Tyler ignored it.
“I’m hungry,” he said shortly. “Haven’t eaten in a long time.”
Well, it wasn’t a lie. He’d had breakfast hours ago. Half a grapefruit, a croissant, black coffee. His usual morning meal, sufficient when a man faced a few hours spent riding a desk and then lunch with a client but not very substantive when you were going to ride horses or clean up after them, he thought grimly, looking at the foreman and the shovel.
The old man nodded. “You don’t look much like you’ve missed a meal.”
Tyler forced a smile. “Care to listen to my stomach growl, Pop?”
“Name’s Abel. All right, go on up to the main house, to the back door. Tell Carmen to feed you.”
The house on the rise was big and imposing, but no more so than Tyler’s own home back in Atlanta. He concentrated on the irony in that in hopes it would keep him from thinking about the banging of his own heart as he rapped on the door, then stepped inside to confront the woman who might have borne him.
Carmen was round. Round face, round body—even her shiny black hair was round, braided and twisted high on her head in a coronet.
And she was not his mother. Tyler knew it, the minute she turned from the stove and smiled at him.
“Señor?”
“Abel sent me,” he told her, while his heartbeat returned to normal. “He said it would be okay if you fixed me something to eat.”
She smiled even more broadly, sat him at a massive oak table and fed him huevos rancheros, homemade biscuits and cups of fragrant black coffee until he thought he’d burst.
“The men who work at Espada are lucky to have you to cook for them. Your children, too,” he said casually, because he needed to be certain, even though he already knew.
“Ah, my children,” Carmen said happily, and told him all about Esme, her daughter, who was twenty and in her second year at the university, and about her son, Esteban, who was a doctor in Austin.
“Dr. Esteban O’Connor,” she said, and chuckled. A blush colored her dusky cheeks, making her look younger than her years. “The child of my youth—and of a youthful indiscretion.”
Tyler smiled. “And how old is this child of your youth?” he said, even more casually, and Carmen told him that Esteban was going to celebrate his thirty-fifth birthday next month.
Tyler had nodded, tried to ignore the sudden emptiness inside. It wasn’t a surprise; he’d known, hadn’t he, that this warmhearted woman wasn’t his mother? She’d never have given him life, then abandoned him.
“That was a wonderful meal,” he’d said. “Gracias, Carmen.”
He’d dropped a kiss on her cheek and gone to find Abel, who’d set him to work.
Work was what the old man had given him, all right, Tyler thought now, grunting as he unloaded feed sacks from the back of a pickup truck. Hard work, too, as if hoisting heavy sacks and shoveling manure were tests he had to pass before he could be trusted with anything as important as risking his neck trying to break a horse.
All the time he worked, whatever the job, he kept his eyes open, alert for something, anything, that might give him some clue about his birth, about how his mother—his parents—had fit into the enormous puzzle that was Espada. He knew it was foolish, that he’d left this place when he was only a day or two old. What memories would a newborn infant have? Not a one.
He understood that.
Still, he looked at everything as if the most simple thing could be the key to unlock the mystery of his past.
And then, on the third morning, Caitlin McCord came strolling toward the stable and he knew he’d been kidding himself. Part of him had been searching for clues to John Smith’s birth—but part of him had been watching, and waiting, for her.
He felt as if someone had landed a hard right to his jaw.
She was beautiful. How in the world had he ever mistaken her for a boy, even at a distance?
It was a hot day. China-blue sky, brutal yellow sun, with no breeze or a cloud to ease the sizzling temperature. He was sweating and so were the other men. Even the horses were feeling the heat, but Caitlin looked untouched by it.
He drank in the sight of her. She was wearing a sleeveless blue T-shirt and he could see the musculature of her arms, the strength of them, and he wondered why it was that he’d never before thought how sexy that could be. She was wearing jeans, as he was, but hers were a faded blue, almost white at the knees and hems. They fit her snugly, cupping her bottom, skimming the length of those incredibly long, long legs as lovingly as a caress. Her hair was pulled back from her face but a couple of auburn curls had escaped at her ears and on her forehead.
Tyler drew in his breath.
She looked, he thought, like a cool, clear drink of water—and he was a man dying of thirst.
He tossed the last sack from the truck, then straightened up. She was going to pass within a couple of feet of him and the truck but her gaze never drifted right or left. His belly clenched. She was going to walk right on by and pretend he wasn’t even there.
To hell with that, he thought, and jumped down in front of her.
“Good morning.”