The Cowboy's Wife For One Night

“What the hell happened?” she asked, pushing her hat back on her head.

“He got between the calf and the dam,” Chris said.

“You’re kidding me,” she moaned. Such a beginner’s mistake.

“I think my five-year-old knows better,” Jeremiah said with a wicked twinkle in his blue eyes.

“This isn’t funny!” she yelled and all the men straightened. “We’re not even close to a quarter of the way through the herd. And I can’t spare one man, much less two, so you can get chauffeured into town to get looked at.”

“I can stitch him up,” Jeremiah said. He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through sweaty black curls.

“Really?” she asked.

“I did it all the time on the circuit.”

Those rodeo guys were a tough bunch.

“What about the broken fingers?” she asked.

“Tape ‘em,” Tim said, looking contrite and pained. “I’ll be fine.”

“No,” Chris said. “You’ll be one-handed, at best.”

One handed. One-handed, when she was three men short.

“Do what you can,” she said and watched as Tim and Jeremiah walked back toward the barn.

In the distance, the house sat in the shadows of the granite cliff behind it. A house with two men in it.

She tried to take a calming breath, to divert the sudden river of purpose that had welled up in her. But there was no diverting. She was short men, and the house was lousy with them.

Walter, she knew, even with the medicine, would be no good out here. A liability.

But Jack was another matter.

He’d taken off that cast. Wasn’t walking with a cane.

Just thinking his name ignited a brush fire in her brain.

Jack, who’d seen and worked a dozen calving seasons.

Jack, who’d called her a coward last night and then gone to hide in his room like a child. Jack, whose dark eyes and mercurial animosity had kept her awake tossing and turning most of the night, on fire with anger and a very unwanted lust.

She’d never asked for a damn thing, not once in five years of marriage.

And she’d been proud of that.

But now it was going to change.

7

The door pushed open under her fist without a problem and Jack, lying on his bed, sat up. Her eyes raked his bare chest, the lean, strong muscles.

She worried briefly about his injuries, but she could get him to process with Jeremiah. He could still work a pencil and a tagging gun.

“Mia?” he asked, his face nonplussed, his lips curved in a strange little smile, and she realized she was sill staring at his chest.

She flung open the door to his closet but it was empty. So were the drawers in his dresser.

“You looking for something?” he asked.

The duffle bag beside his bed was overflowing with tee-shirts and jeans. She picked up one of each and rifled them at his chest.

“Get dressed,” she said.

“What are you doing, Mia,” he sighed. “I told you I just wanted to be—”

”I’m drowning!” she bit out, her hands in fists at her sides because she wanted to grab him and shake him. She didn’t want to need him like this. She didn’t want to beg him for help, but her back was so far against the wall she was about to become wallpaper.

“I’m three men short. Tim just got hurt and we’re not even halfway through the calving.”

Jack glanced at the bare window. The big blue sky outside. She couldn’t read his still face, couldn’t see her old friend in those familiar features, her old friend who once would have been the first guy out the door to help her.

Mia pulled the words that didn’t want to see the light of day out from the very back of her throat. “I need you, Jack.” she said through her teeth. “Five years of marriage and I never asked you for—”

He held up his hand. “You don’t have to beg,” he said and shoved an arm through his shirt. “Give me a minute.”

Jack stumbled out into the pasture like one of the calves. New and unsure. The sun was bright, the smells powerful. It was an assault on every sense he’d been wrapping in gauze for the last few weeks.

“Jack?” Chris, the lean, tough foreman who’d been working here since Jack was a kid, stepped up to his left and Jack tried not to flinch in surprise. Christ, he was jumpy.

Back inside! the voices cried. Back to bed!

“Hey Chris,” he said, trying to fake a smile.

“I’d shake but—” Chris held up his hands, swathed in gloves, covered in blood.

Jack nodded. “Deferred shake,” he said with a laugh.

“On account of your hand and knee we’re going to put you up on the truck—”

”My hand is fine,” Jack said, not entirely sure why he said it. But now that he was out here, he wasn’t blind to the work. He remembered how tired Mia had looked last night, passed out in the chair, and guilt bit hard. A week he’d been hiding out in that bedroom, more a coward than he’d even thought. “So’s my knee.”