This was ridiculous, he thought, and jerked back as the old-timer came at him again. What was he supposed to do? Stand here and get his tail whipped, or go down in history as the man who’d beaten Methuselah to a pulp?
“Put up your fists and fight,” Jonas snarled. “I’m gonna whip your butt into next Sunday!”
“Stop it!” A slender woman with a cap of pale gold hair came running toward them. “Stop it this instant!”
“You stay out of this, Marta.”
“She’s right,” Caitlin said fiercely. “Dammit, stop!”
Tyler held up his hands, palms out. “Look,” he said reasonably, “this is crazy. I’m at least thirty years younger than you are—”
“More than that, I’d bet,” Jonas said. “But if you think I give a damn about beatin’ you up ’cause you’re a baby, you’d better think again.”
Tyler couldn’t help it. He laughed, and the old man’s pale blue eyes flashed with anger as he came at him.
“Hell,” Tyler said wearily, and in a move so swift it was nothing but a blur, he caught the old guy’s arm, jerked it behind his back and subdued him.
“Tyler.” Caitlin looked around them and bit back a moan of despair. The fight had drawn a crowd. Men were gathered around, gaping the way they would at a bad accident on the highway. Nobody wanted to see the gory details but nobody wanted to miss them, either. She put her hand on Tyler’s arm. “Please. Let him go.”
Tyler flashed her a quick smile. My God, she thought, he’s enjoying this.
“Kincaid.” Her voice steadied. She lifted her chin and fixed him with the kind of look that had been known to make the toughest ranch hand tremble. “I said, let him go!”
“I heard you, McCord, but a man has to be a fool to let go of somebody who’s determined to kill him.”
“He’s right,” Jonas growled. “I will kill him, just as soon as I get loose.”
“You see?” Tyler shot her that primal male smile again. “I let him go, he’s going to come at me and then I’ll be forced to beat the crap out of him.” The smile changed, turned cold and dangerous, and he jerked back on Jonas’s arm just enough to make the old man wince. “Your choice, mister. You want to waltz around like this another couple of hours, or are you going to tell me you’ll behave?”
“Dammit, Kincaid!” Caitlin’s voice was sharp with anger. “You said you came here to see Jonas Baron. Well, that’s him you’ve got in an armlock.”
Terrific, Tyler thought with disgust. If there was a better way to ensure that Baron wouldn’t answer any of his questions, he couldn’t imagine what it might be. He’d humiliated the old man in front of what looked like every hand who worked on Espada.
There had to be a right way to let go of a tiger, once you’d grabbed it by the tail.
“If you hadn’t used some kind of pansy kung fu stuff on me,” Jonas said, “you’d be hightailin’ it into the next county by now.”
Tyler grinned. “It wasn’t kung fu, it was natural talent. Not that you’re bad, for a man with one boot in the cemetery and the other in the hearse.”
Someone in the little crowd laughed. Caitlin spun toward them, eyes flashing.
“Okay,” she said, “that’s it. Any man still here two seconds from now can collect his pay and get himself off Espada, pronto.”
The men dispersed quickly, and she turned back to Tyler and her stepfather.
“You’re behaving like children, the both of you.”
Tyler gave her a look that said this had nothing to do with her.
“Look,” he said to Jonas Baron, “I understand your distress. I’m sure it’s, uh, difficult, coming on a scene like, well, like the scene you came on. Finding your stepdaughter in my arms must have been unsettling.”
“In your arms?” Jonas snorted. “That’s a nice way to put it. Truth is, if’n I hadn’t come along to break things up, you’d have been up in the hayloft next.”
“Dammit, Jonas!” Caitlin shoved her face at her stepfather’s. “What you saw was none of your business.”
“’Course it is. You’re my daughter. No man wants to see his daughter bein’ pawed.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes!” Caitlin stamped her foot in fury. “I am not your daughter, I’m your stepdaughter, as you have gone out of your way to remind me a hundred billion times in the last couple of years. And I wasn’t being pawed. Hell, if anything, I was the one doing the pawing.” She slapped her hands on her hips and glared at both men. “You know what?” she said in disgust. “You two deserve each other.”
Tyler and Jonas both watched as the slender woman with the pale gold hair slipped an arm around Caitlin’s waist. The women marched to the main house without looking back.
A moment passed, and then Jonas cleared his throat.
“All right,” he said gruffly. “The girl spoke the truth. This is jes’ plain dumb. You let go, I’ll step back and we’ll start from there. Deal?”
Tyler hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders. “Deal,” he said, and let go.
Jonas grunted, rubbed the circulation back into his arm and looked at Tyler. A slow smile curled across his mouth.
“I got in a good shot there, across your cheek.”
Tyler wiped a hand across his face, looked at the blood on his palm, then at Jonas.
“Yeah. And you’re going to have black-and-blue marks for a month.”
“Maybe.”
The two men fell silent, then shot each other quick, grudging smiles, but Jonas’s smile turned into a glower.
“You’re Kincaid.”
“Yes.”
“Abel hired you?”
“Your stepdaughter did.”
Jonas’s pale eyes narrowed. “Did she, now.”
Tyler smiled. It was a quick smile, the kind Jonas recognized from his own youth as the smile of a man as good with his head as he was with his hands.
“She hired me to work with the horses. I’m good at gentling the skittish ones.”
The old man nodded. “I’ll just bet you are.” He bent down and picked up his hat. “Caitlin says you have business with me.”
“I do.” Tyler looked Jonas in the eye. “Important business.”
Jonas nodded again. “Well, go get yourself cleaned up, then come on to the house and tell me what it is.” His eyes swept over Tyler, taking in the scuffed boots, the faded jeans, torn shirt, bloodied cheek and cool, unreadable green eyes. “You look like a drifter and you might be good at gentlin’ horses, Kincaid, but I get the feelin’ that isn’t what you do for a livin’, nor is it what brung you to Espada.”
Tyler flashed that hard, quick smile again.
“I’d heard you were a tough man, Baron, and a smart one. I don’t usually put much store in secondhand information but it looks as if what I heard was right, on both counts. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
“Fifteen,” Jonas replied, and headed for the house.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Tyler knocked on the door—the front door—of the Baron house.
He’d showered, changed his jeans and shirt and brushed the dust off his boots. He’d never gone into a meeting as important as this one in anything but a suit and tie, but jeans were all he’d packed. Besides, he had the feeling confronting Jonas Baron in a suit would only make the stubborn old so-and-so think he had the advantage.
He smiled as the door swung open. “Carmen,” he said pleasantly—but the woman in the doorway wasn’t Carmen.
It was Caitlin.
She’d changed what she’d been wearing, too. No jeans, this time. She had on a blouse in a shade of pale pink that made him think of magnolia blossoms and a blue denim skirt. Her legs were long and bare, her toenails neat and unpolished in a pair of tan leather sandals. Her hair was wet, as if she’d just come out of the shower, and curled around her face in soft little tendrils. Her eyes were icy, her mouth unsmiling, but that didn’t keep him from remembering how hot those hazel eyes had been a little while ago, or what it had fe
lt like when he’d parted that pink mouth with the tip of his tongue.
Heat curled in his belly and he felt a flash of anger, at himself and—even though he knew it was unreasonable—at her. This was no time to let his anatomy do his thinking for him.
His smile disappeared.
“I’m here to see the old man.”
Caitlin raised an eyebrow. “Call him that to his face again and you’ll find yourself heading out the door quicker than you came through it.” She stuck out a hand as Tyler started past her and poked a finger into his chest. “I want to be sure we both understand what happened before, Kincaid.”
“What’s to understand?” Tyler said pleasantly. “You were upset and angry. I caught you off guard, or maybe in a weak moment, and that’s the only reason you behaved the way you did.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes. But how did you—”
“How did I know you’d deny what really happened?” He smiled coldly. “Trust me, McCord. It was easy.”
“I’m sure there are women somewhere on this planet who appreciate Neanderthals.” Her voice was as chilly as his. “But I can assure you, Mr. Kincaid, I am not one of them.” She stepped aside, motioned him in with an autocratic jerk of her head. “My stepfather’s waiting in the library. I’ll show you to it.”
Tyler followed her down a long hallway. Her head was high, her spine rigid; she was treating him as if they’d never shared those mind-blowing kisses, as if she’d never moaned as he cupped her breast.
Anger swept aside reason. He caught hold of her shoulder and swung her to face him.
“Do you ever admit to having an honest emotion, lady?”