Cowboy With A Secret. Pamela Browning

of the dying sun, Colt’s horse stuck his head over the door to his stall and pricked his ears. He was a beautiful black quarter horse, sleek and well-kept.

      Her own horse, Dancer, nickered and blew in recognition at the sight of her, but her arms were full and Bethany couldn’t get to the carrot she’d stashed in her back pocket. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. Dancer snorted and bumped her nose against the gate to her stall.

      All was quiet overhead in Colt’s apartment. Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the wooden steps as she made her way upstairs. The door hung wide-open, which didn’t surprise her much. Anybody would want to get a cross-draft going in such airless quarters.

      “Colt?” she called.

      No answer. Inside the tiny room, an oscillating fan positioned on a table blew air across the top of a chipped enamel pan heaped with ice cubes. A primitive air conditioner? It made sense, but not when Colt wasn’t there. And where’d he get that much ice? The apartment refrigerator was the small square kind college kids used in their dorms, and it made minuscule ice cubes.

      She stepped into the room, thinking to leave the sheets on the bed. But before she could set them down, she saw a photograph resting on the mattress. It was tattered around the edges, as if someone had repeatedly taken it out of a wallet for a closer look.

      The picture was one of those glamour photos. It was of a young woman with dark hair teased into what Bethany thought of as Mall Bangs and deep soulful eyes made comical by too much eye makeup. Despite the hair, eyes and the studded leather jacket with the collar turned up, there was something arresting about the girl’s expression. She looked as if under all that bravado she was hiding an underlying sorrow. Then again, it might be the photographer’s lighting. Whatever it was, she was very pretty.

      Bethany was so absorbed in the photograph that she didn’t hear Colt until he entered the room. She wheeled around, startled. And then she saw him.

      Her new ranch hand was buck naked and dripping from the shower. His hair was slicked back, darker wet than it was dry, and the water had curled the hair on his chest into tight little burrs. He looked as startled as she felt—thank goodness, certain strategic body parts were modestly hidden by the towel he held in front of him.

      She dropped the sheets. Also the pillow. She was totally unprepared for the wave of lust and helplessness that washed over her at the sight of him. Colt McClure was magnificently built, from the solid muscles of his arms and chest to the hard rippling ridges of his abdomen. And below that—she looked away, refusing to speculate on what was behind the towel.

      Their gazes caught and held. Bethany could not pull her eyes away. Colt, completely unabashed, merely quirked his eyebrows and said, “Hand me the jeans on that hook behind the door, would you?”

      The spell broken, Bethany groped behind her, felt cloth and yanked blue denim. She tossed the jeans to him and bent over to gather up the sheets. When she straightened, he’d wrapped the towel around his waist.

      “I—um—well, I brought the sheets,” she said, swallowing hard.

      Colt cleared his throat. “I think you better excuse me for a few seconds,” he said, and he disappeared into the bathroom.

      She wanted to run, but that would betray her embarrassment. She told herself that the thing to do was act as if nothing unusual had happened. This was a ranch. She was accustomed to stallions mounting mares, to bulls servicing cows, to misguided but amorous female dogs seeking out Jesse James.

      But she wasn’t used to naked men.

      When Colt emerged from the bathroom, she was nonchalantly shaking dust off the previously clean sheets and pillow.

      “These got a little messed up,” she said, wondering if her cheeks were flushed. They certainly felt that way, and the air blowing across the ice cubes in the pan didn’t help much.

      Colt wore only jeans, and his hair was still wet. It was wavy, something she hadn’t noticed when it was dry.

      He reached for the sheet she was folding, and the fragrance of fabric softener and dried lavender wafted up from the soft percale. The scent brought back memories so sweet that they pierced her to the heart and left her aching inside. Justin had always liked the way she folded dried lavender sprigs from her little garden into the sheets, and they had spent many, many nights making love on those sheets in their double bed beneath the eaves of the bedroom they’d shared in the ranch house, the same room where his father had been born.

      She surrendered the sheet. “I’d better be going,” she said as she watched Colt’s big hands smooth wrinkles out of the fabric. Thankfully she heard footsteps on the stairs and backed toward the door. She knew it wasn’t Frisco because the tread was too even to fit his unsteady gait, and for a moment, Bethany thought it might be Dita. But it was only Eddie, toting a bucketful of ice cubes.

      “Mom sent these,” he said, holding out the bucket.

      Colt grinned at him, man-to-man friendly. “Much obliged, Eddie. Set the bucket by the table.”

      “Anytime you want ice or company, Mom says hang your red bandanna out the window.” Eddie brushed fine pale hair out of his eyes and turned to Bethany. “Hi, Bethany. Dancer wants a carrot and I don’t have one.”

      Bethany was flooded with relief. Eddie had provided a rescue of sorts. She pulled the carrot out of her back pocket. “You’re in luck,” she said, dangling it in front of him.

      Eddie grabbed at it, eyes asparkle. “Can I give it to her?” He was like a child, all enthusiasm. It was one of the things Bethany loved about him.

      “Of course you can.”

      She turned to say goodbye to Colt, but he had scooped the photograph up from the bed and was sliding it into his wallet. He looked preoccupied, thoughtful.

      Bethany didn’t speak after all, just high-footed it out of there. Colt called out a goodbye, but not until she and Eddie were most of the way down the stairs.

      AFTER THEY’D FED DANCER half of the carrot and given the other half to Colt’s horse as a kind of welcoming present, Eddie started back toward the Neilsons’ and Bethany headed for the stand of tall cottonwoods beside the creek. There she sank down on the mossy bench Justin had built for her during her first year at the Banner-B.

      Sometimes she’d had to get away from the heat and dust and cattle and the rowdy hands they’d employed in those days, and this was where she’d sought refuge. Here, where the Little Moony Creek meandered slowly around slippery boulders and purled over shiny rocks; here where she could pull off her boots, spraddle her legs in unladylike fashion and dabble bare feet in the cool, refreshing water. In the spring, cottony seeds drifted down from the trees and caught in her hair, and in the summer, shiny triangular leaves cast welcome shadows across her upturned face. At night, myriad stars peeped through the lattice of foliage above, and now they were winking at her against the backdrop of a velvety blue sky. Winking seductively, it seemed to her tonight.

      “Well, now what?” she said out loud. Frisco would have called it dingbat behavior, but sometimes Bethany talked to Justin in this special place. It kept her from getting too broody, too introspective. And it was a way to think over the pros and cons of a thing, like the time early on when she’d gotten it into her head to sell the ranch to Mott. She’d been disabused of that notion when Mott came to call and suggested that he could warm her on cold nights, which was when she had worked herself into such a hot temper that she’d thrown him out.

      She was much too young for all the responsibility the inheritance of this ranch had placed on her, and she was the first one to admit it, though she excelled at putting up a brave front. After Justin died, she hadn’t thought she could go on without him. She’d had to grow tough and hard in order to cope. Sometimes she got tired of being tough and hard, she longed to be soft and sweet the way she used to be. That sweetness was what Justin had loved about her, and she wondered if he’d still love her now that she was a different person. But then, love didn’t die, Justin had always said. He had been positive of that, and because Bethany was