Buch lesen: «Taming The Lone Wolf»

Taming the Lone Wolf

Joan Johnston

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Copyright

Chapter One

STONY CARLTON took a bite of his hamburger and tried not to listen to the scene unfolding behind the counter of the Buttermilk Café between the waitress and a guy who seemed to be her boss. For a man used to solving other people’s problems with his wits—and now and then a gun—it was impossible not to eavesdrop, given the agitation in the woman’s voice.

He looked around the empty café. No one else was there to come to her rescue except him—and he wasn’t exactly the knight-in-shining-armor type.

“Come on, Bud, I’ve told you I’m not interested,” the woman said.

“Aw, Tess, just one little kiss.”

“I said no.”

“You oughta have a little more gratitude, seein’ as how I let you leave so early in the day.”

“You let me leave early because I come in two hours before everyone else,” the woman replied with what Stony considered amazing composure.

“Yeah, well, you owe me for givin’ you a job when you had no experience.”

“I’ve got experience now, Bud, a whole year of it. I’ve got work to do, so if you’ll just let me by—”

Stony heard muffled sounds suggesting a struggle. He set down his burger, wiped his hands on a paper napkin and threw it down as he left his booth headed for the counter. The man, Bud, had the woman, Tess, backed up against the wall beside the coffeemaker. She was fending off his attempts to kiss her, turning her head away and shoving vainly at his burly shoulders.

“Hey, Bud,” Stony said.

Bud turned and glared, clearly irritated at being interrupted. “What?”

“Let the lady go.”

“Butt out, mister.”

“Afraid I can’t do that,” Stony said.

“Yeah? So what are you gonna do about it?” Bud snarled.

Stony was over the counter in an instant, as though it wasn’t there. He grabbed Bud by the scruff of his food-stained T-shirt and slammed him against the wall, holding him there with his arm rigid, his palm pressed against the center of Bud’s chest.

The waitress shot out of the way and stood at the kitchen door, hands clutched together, green eyes wide with fright.

Stony ignored Bud as though he were a bug on the wall and turned his attention to the woman. “You all right, ma’am?”

She nodded her head jerkily.

Stony had been in the Buttermilk Café probably once a month in the past year, yet he hadn’t paid any attention to the waitress. Since he had sworn off women a couple of years ago, he had made it a point not to spend his time looking at the pretty ones, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go back on his promise to himself.

Tess was definitely pretty.

In fact, she was the kind of woman it was hard to dismiss. Her auburn hair was pinned up off her neck, but it had that mussed-up look, with lazy curls at her temples and ears and throat, as though she had just gotten out of a man’s bed. The green eyes that stared warily back at him from a heart-shaped face were curved at the outer edges, like a cat’s. Her nose was small and straight, her chin dainty. She had an alabaster complexion, which suggested she didn’t get outside much, because the Wyoming sun burned the hide off you summer and winter.

He had avoided looking at her figure because he found it so alluring. She had a bosom—about big enough to fit his hands—that drew a man’s eye, a tiny waist and feminine hips. And she was small enough to incite a man’s protective instincts. He was tall, over six feet, and he suspected her head would barely reach his shoulder.

“I’m all right,” the woman said. “You can let Bud go.”

Stony had completely forgotten about the man against the wall. He turned to Bud and said, “What is it going to take to convince you to leave the lady alone?”

“What I do in my own place of business is none of your concern,” Bud retorted.

Stony glanced at the woman. “Do you welcome this gentleman’s attentions, ma’am?”

He watched the dark flush start at the V neck of her peach-colored waitress uniform and skate up her throat to sit like two roses on those alabaster cheeks. Her green-eyed gaze flitted from him to Bud and back to him.

“I...uh...no,” she said. “But—”

He cut her off by turning his attention to Bud. “The lady wants you to leave her alone.”

“There’s nothing you can do to stop me,” Bud said smugly.

“I can testify in court when the lady files a harassment suit against you.”

“Why, you—She won’t have to file no suit, because she’s fired!” Bud said heatedly.

“Bud, no!” Tess exclaimed.

Stony glanced at Tess and was surprised to see she was angry—with him!

“Now look what you’ve done!” Her fisted hands found a perch at her tiny waist. “I was handling things just fine on my own before you showed up.”

His eyes narrowed. “The man was pawing you.”

Her chin lifted mulishly. “I’ve been putting Bud off for a year, and—”

“This has been going on for a whole year?” Stony said incredulously. He turned back to Bud, who was still pinned against the wall. “You’ve been mauling this lady for a year?” He gathered up a bigger handful of Bud’s T-shirt.

“Wasn’t doin’ nothin’ she didn’t want,” Bud said. “Widow-woman needs a man more’n most.”

“A widow?” Stony’s glance darted to Tess.

“My husband was killed a year ago,” Tess said in response to his cocked brow.

He saw from the flash of pain in her eyes that it was still a raw wound. Her boss hadn’t done anything to help it heal. Far from it. Stony resisted the urge to slam Bud against the wall again. He forced himself to let go of Bud’s T-shirt and take a step back, afraid he would hurt the man if he held on to him much longer.

Stony wasn’t sure he had solved anything. Maybe he had made matters worse. He refused to ask Bud to keep the woman on, when it was clear if he did that Bud would continue to press unwanted attentions on his waitress. But Tess apparently wanted—maybe needed?—the job.

“What will you do now?” he asked Tess.

“Get my job back, if I can,” she answered with asperity. She walked over and straightened Bud’s rumpled T-shirt. “Come on, Bud. What do you say?”

She managed a crooked smile, but Stony saw her chin was trembling.

Bud shot a malicious look at Stony, then said to Tess, “You’re fired, honey. You can pick up your check at the end of the week.”

“But, Bud—”

Bud jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out.” Bud turned to Stony and said, “Now get out from behind my counter.”

Stony went back over the counter the way he had come. He glanced at the woman from the corner of his eye as he made his way back to his booth and sat down. He picked up his hamburger and took a bite, but it was cold, and he had trouble swallowing it.

He watched Tess argue in whispers with Bud and saw Bud vehemently shake his head. He watched her take off her apron and drape it over the counter before she headed for the kitchen. He waited for her to reappear. He wanted a chance to talk to her, to make sure she was going to be all right, to see if there was anything he could do to help. Although, with the kind of help he had offered so far, he wouldn’t be surprised if she turned him down.

He waited maybe two minutes. When Tess didn’t return, he threw some money on the table to cover his check, grabbed his shearling coat and Stetson off the antler coatrack and hurried outside to the snow-covered sidewalk to see if he could find her.

Stony wasn’t thinking about his vow to stay away from pretty women. He wasn’t thinking about anything except his need to make sure Tess would be able to make ends meet until she got another job. That should have been his first warning. Not that he would have paid attention to it. Stony was the kind of man who would stand bare-assed in a nest of rattlers just for the fun of it.

He stopped dead once he was outside and looked both ways. The snow was still coming down in large, windblown flakes that made it difficult to see very far. She was nearly to the end of Main Street, which was only one block long in the tiny town of Pinedale, walking with her head bent against the wind and her winter parka pulled tight around her.

“Hey!” he called. “Wait for me!”

She took one look at him and started to run.

* * *

TESS WAS TRYING HARD not to cry. For the past year she had been deflecting Bud’s attentions with flip humor. Only, last night her three-year-old daughter, Rose, had been sick, and Tess hadn’t slept much. When Bud had approached her, nothing witty had come to her tired mind. Then that awful man had interfered and made everything worse!

She had been fired.

The desperate nature of her situation was just now sinking in. She had no savings. She had no job. In a town this small in the middle of the off-season there wasn’t much likelihood of finding another. Especially if Bud kept his promise to make sure none of his friends in the restaurant business hired her. She didn’t even have the money for a bus ticket to somewhere else.

Damn you, Charlie Lowell! How could you lie to me? How could you be a thief when you knew what would happen to us if you got caught? How could you go and get yourself killed like that? And for rustling cattle! I hate you, Charlie! I hate you for dying and leaving me alone.

She should have taken one of the marriage offers she had gotten over the past year from the cowboys who came into the Buttermilk Café. Or the Pinedale police chief, Harry DuBois, who had proposed to her for the second time only last week. At least then she and Rose would have been sure of having a roof over their heads.

She liked Harry, and he was good-looking in a rugged Harrison Ford sort of way, but she hadn’t been able to feel anything—let alone love—for any man since Charlie had died. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married again, not after what had happened with Charlie. She had been deliriously in love when she had married at sixteen. She was barely twenty, but she felt much older and wiser. She no longer gave her trust so freely or completely.

But if she wasn’t going to let a husband support her, she had to do a better job of it herself. She had barely been able to cope with her disillusionment and grief over Charlie’s death during the past year. She hadn’t done much planning for the future.

It seemed the moment was upon her. She was going to have to make some plans, and fast, or she and Rose were going to find themselves out on the street in the middle of a Wyoming winter.

“Hey! Wait for me!”

Tess glanced over her shoulder and saw it was that man from the café. He was coming after her! She wasn’t sure what his intentions were, but she didn’t plan to stick around and find out. She took off at a run, headed for Harry’s office. He would protect her from the madman following behind.

Maybe she would have made it if the sidewalk hadn’t been covered with a fresh dusting of snow that concealed the treacherous ice below. Or if she had been wearing a decent pair of snow boots instead of the cheap, leather-soled shoes she wore for work. Tess hadn’t taken three steps when her feet skidded out from under her. She flailed her arms in a vain attempt to catch her balance and reached out with a hand to break her fall on the cement walk. It turned out to be a fatal error.

Tess heard the bone in her wrist crack as soon as her weight came down on her arm. She cried out in agony as her body settled on the cold, hard ground.

The interfering stranger was beside her a moment later, down on one knee, his dark brown eyes filled with concern.

“Now look what you did!” she accused.

“What I did?”

“If you hadn’t been chasing me—”

“I wasn’t chasing you. I was coming after you to—”

“This is all your fault!” she cried, hysterical with the realization that with a broken wrist she wouldn’t be able to work for weeks. Not to mention the fact that she had no health insurance and no idea how she was going to pay a doctor to fix her up.

The tears she had so ably kept under control through her most recent disaster could no longer be contained. She fought the sob that threatened, but it broke free with a horrible wrenching sound. Then she was crying in earnest.

She felt the stranger pick her up, being very careful of her wrist, which he settled in her lap, and stand, cuddling her against his chest.

“It’s all right, Tess. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to take care of you.”

She should have resisted. She should have told him in no uncertain terms that she could take very good care of herself. Instead she turned her face to his chest and surrendered to his strength, thinking how good it felt to give her burdens over to someone else, even if it was only for a few moments.

“I’m taking you to my Jeep,” he explained as he began walking. “I’ll drive you to the hospital, where someone will take care of your arm.”

“I don’t have money to pay the doctor,” she mumbled against his coat.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

They were such wonderful words. She had been in charge of so much lately, and the burdens had been so heavy. She was more than willing to hand everything over to someone else for a while.

“What’s going on here?”

It was Harry. Harry must have seen what happened from the picture window in his office.

“She fell and broke her wrist,” the man said. “I’m taking her to the hospital.”

“Tess?” Harry said. “Do you want Stony to take you to the hospital?”

Stony. So that was his name. And Harry knew him, so maybe he wasn’t a madman, after all.

It took too much energy to answer, or even to turn around and look at Harry. She nodded.

“All right, Stony,” Harry said. “I’ll follow you there.”

“I can take care of it,” Stony said, his voice rumbly against her ear.

“I said I’d follow you,” Harry insisted. “My patrol car is parked down the street.”

Stony didn’t argue; he merely turned and headed for his Jeep.

Tess was feeling drowsy, which wasn’t surprising, considering the amount of sleep she had gotten last night. She had also hit the back of her head against the pavement when she fell, but it was only beginning to hurt because all her attention had been focused on her throbbing wrist.

“Stony?” she murmured.

“What, Tess?”

“My head hurts.”

“You must have hit it when you fell. I’ll have the doctor check it out.”

“Tess?” Harry said.

Answering took too much effort.

“Looks like she fainted,” Harry said, hop-skipping on the dangerous surface to keep up with Stony’s long stride.

“Knocked out by the fall, I think,” Stony replied.

“I only closed my eyes,” she mumbled. “I’m still awake.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Harry said, sprinting—insofar as that was possible considering the icy walks—for the police car parked nearby.

Stony set her in his Jeep and buckled her in. She heard the engine rumble, and things got a little hazy. Behind her closed eyelids she was seeing a picture of the tall, lean, broad-shouldered man who had come to her rescue in the café, his dark brows lowered, his eyes feral and dangerous. And the man who had looked down at her as she lay hurt on the ground, concern etched in his granite features.

His face was weatherworn, with deep brackets around his mouth and a mesh of crow’s feet around his eyes that evidenced a life lived out-of-doors. His straight black hair needed a cut. It hung at least an inch onto his collar, and a hank of it was forever falling onto his forehead.

When he looked at her, his dark brown eyes held her in thrall. They were lonely eyes. Or, at least, the eyes of a man used to being alone. They offered sympathy. They asked for nothing in return.

She had seen him in the café before, but not regularly, so he lived around here somewhere, but maybe not right in town. There were lots of cabins along the river in this isolated place where a lone wolf could find solace from the world of men.

She wondered what he did for a living. Judging by his Western shirt, jeans and boots, he could have been another cowboy. But a mere cowboy wouldn’t have taken on Bud, who was big enough, and meaty-fisted enough, to be downright intimidating. Stony hadn’t blinked an eye at confronting him. So he was probably a man used to being in charge, rather than one who took orders, a man who knew his own strength and used it when necessary.

But he wasn’t a cruel man, or he really might have hurt Bud. She had seen how angry he was, but he had kept his rage on a tight leash. He was agile and strong and—

Stony jostled her broken wrist when he picked her up to take her inside the hospital, and the brief agony jolted her awake. But she couldn’t seem to get her eyes open. Tears of pain seeped from her closed eyelids.

“Sorry, Tess,” Stony said. “Hang on, and the doctor can give you something for the pain.”

Tess drifted in and out of consciousness, aware of the murmur of voices, the sting of an injection, the buzz of the X-ray machine, the warm wetness of the cast being applied around her thumb, from the middle of her right hand halfway up her arm.

She heard the word “concussion” and realized that was probably why she felt so woozy. So it wasn’t only the lack of sleep that made her feel so impossibly tired. She heard the doctor say she would have to stay overnight so she could be watched. But she couldn’t stay, because she had to go pick up Rose from Mrs. Feeny.

“No,” she muttered. “Can’t stay. Have to go home.”

“Be reasonable, Tess,” Harry said. “You’re in no condition to leave the hospital.”

“Have to get Rose.”

“Who’s Rose?” she heard Stony ask.

“That’s her daughter,” Harry said.

“She has a daughter?”

The shock in Stony’s voice made her smile. She wasn’t sure if the expression got to her face.

“An elderly lady keeps the little girl for Tess while she works. Mrs. Feeny, I think,” Harry explained.

Mrs. Feeny was very strict about Tess picking up Rose on time. Otherwise the old woman charged her triple. With all the extra she was going to have to dole out for the doctor, she needed every penny she had.

“Have to pick up Rose.” She tried to get up, but a palm flattened her.

“I’ll do it,” Stony said.

“The kid doesn’t know who you are,” Harry said. “I’ll do it.”

“I said I’ll do it,” Stony countered. “After all, this is my fault.”

Tess wanted to smile again. Stony sure had changed his tune. Maybe he was feeling guilty. He ought to. This was all his fault!

She welcomed Stony’s offer to pick up Rose. For some reason, Rose had taken an instant aversion to Harry. Her daughter had a way of making her feelings known. Tess licked her dry lips and said, “Okay, Stony. Pick up Rose.”

“Tess, you don’t know a thing about the man,” Harry said. “He—”

“Don’t interfere, Harry,” Tess murmured.

“You heard the lady, Sheriff. She can make her own decisions without any help from you.”

Tess realized she hadn’t told Stony what to do with her daughter. “Take Rose home,” she added.

“I’ll do that,” Stony said. “Don’t worry, Tess. She’ll be safe with me. I have lots of room at my place.”

His place?

She had meant take Rose to her own home. Of course, he didn’t have the key, and Mrs. Feeny, who was also Tess’s landlady, was hardly likely to let a stranger into an upstairs apartment in her own home. So maybe it was better this way. Only, she had no idea where Stony lived. How would she find him when she wanted to reclaim her daughter?

She managed to force her eyes open a crack and sought out Stony’s face. “Take me, too,” she said. “Rose needs me.”

“For heaven’s sake, Tess,” Harry said irritably. “You’re in no condition to do anything but lie flat on your back in bed. Stay here in the hospital where you belong.”

The situation was desperate. She reached out and grasped Stony’s hand. It was big and warm and callused. His strength made her feel safe. “Rose needs me,” she repeated. “Take me, too.”