Buch lesen: «The Cowboy Who Broke The Mold»

Chapter One

Judson Horn had no more difficulty in picking out the new schoolteacher as she stepped off the plane at Rock Springs than if she had been holding a gigantic placard. Ms. Carrie Raben was, after all, exactly what he had expected.

The dark-haired cowboy shook his head in disgust. “No more sense than a calf straying into a barbecue,” he muttered to himself.

Wearing a matching dark skirt and blazer, and sporting an expensive leather briefcase, Ms. Raben looked infinitely better suited to running an executive board meeting than to teaching a raggle-taggle group of schoolchildren in the middle of nowhere. Her light brown hair was cut in a chin-length bob that swung neatly with her every movement. It was precisely the no-nonsense sort of hairdo Judson had the woman figured for before he’d ever laid eyes on her.

It took less than a minute for Judson Horn to size Ms. Raben up as just another lost cause from back East. He’d had his bellyful of ‘em—those cosmopolitan types who insisted on accompanying their husbands deep into the backwoods on the hunting expeditions he guided. Without fail they were whining, spoiled creatures who wanted to go home the day after he had set up camp. To them he was merely an anomaly of nature—a blue- eyed half-breed who piqued their cultural curiosity. De- spite their obsequious panderings to the plight of the American Indian, what most of these social matrons re- ally wanted was a savage lover to turn their blue blood to fire.

Stoically detached in the face of their not-so-subtle advances, Judson merely had to run a finger across the scar tissue along his jaw to remember an encounter with a couple of overly protective brothers who took a strong personal dislike to his relationship with their lily-white sister….

“You half-breed bastard!” they had called out as the lash of the whip sailed through the air, cut into the tender flesh across his back and curled around his jaw. “People ‘round here don’t take to Indian trash messing with their women.”

Judson swallowed hard against the rage that rose in his chest at the memory and made himself focus on the task at hand—transporting a hothouse orchid to the harsh clime of Wyoming. He gave the pretty little thing less than a month before she came to the realization that she was totally unsuited for the rigors of living in the wild Wild West.

I’ve signed a contract to teach in hell, Carrie thought to herself, ducking to avoid hitting her head on the exit ramp door. Greeted by a blast of hot wind, she clutched the wobbly railing and took her first step in Wyoming.

Long before the eighteen-passenger airplane touched down in the middle of what appeared to be a gigantic dust bowl, it had managed to hit every air pocket in the state with an astonishing accuracy that left Carrie feel- ing sick to her stomach. From an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, it appeared that the entire state was de- void of human life—a world of vast nothingness where colors all blurred to varying shades of brown. And now viewing her new home at eye level, Carrie had to admit that it was, indeed, as bleak as it had appeared from so high above. Truly this was the epitome of nowhere.

Where were all the mountains her favorite authors had so eloquently eulogized in their novels? she won- dered. Where was the sense of freedom she had antic- ipated feeling with the first rush of fresh air into her citified lungs? And where, for that matter, was Bill Madden with his promised open-armed Western hos- pitality?

Fighting the wind, Carrie made her way to the airport terminal. She looked around the tiny lobby in dismay, her green eyes searching the area, trying to match a face to the slightly desperate voice that had hired her sight unseen over the telephone. In her mind, she pictured an overweight, balding man wearing a suit the color of a pastel mint.

“Mommy!” squealed the precocious six-year-old whose incessant chatter had inundated the tiny aircraft for the past two and a half hours. “Mommy,” he re- peated louder, tugging at her sleeve and pointing. “Look, a real-live cowboy! I thought they were dead…like the dinosaurs—”

“Terry!” whispered his harried-looking mother through clenched teeth. “How many times do I have to tell you it’s not polite to point?”

Following the direction of Terry’s extended index fin- ger, Carrie found herself looking up into the sexiest sky- blue eyes she’d ever encountered. Her stomach lurched to her throat as if she had just hit another air pocket. Standing not two feet away was a broad-shouldered man who looked like he’d just walked off a Western movie set. She indulged herself in a long look, one that started with a black felt Stetson hat, lingered over a silver belt buckle and ended with a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots.

“Mr. M-Madden?” she stammered.

A slow smile spread across the man’s rugged features. “No, ma’am. Bill couldn’t make it so he asked me to pick you up and pack you to Harmony.”

Carrie’s temperature soared. Taking a deep breath of air, she tried to combat the sense of light-headedness that she wanted to believe was simply the aftereffect of a jarring plane ride. Never before had she seen such electric blue eyes on such a dark-complexioned man. The effect was so startling it left her positively breath- less.

Grabbing four heavy bags marked with her tags from the luggage carousel, he balanced two of them under his long arms much the way Carrie imagined one would lug bales of hay to a starving herd of cattle and started toward the doorway without another word. Picking up her lighter bags, she mutely followed the lanky cowboy out of the airport and into the bright August sunshine. The way those tight Wrangler jeans hugged his narrow hips as he swaggered across the parking lot was abso- lutely hypnotic. Her eyes would not release their hold on the rhythmic swaying of his jeans. So absorbed was she in the view that when he stopped abruptly in front of her, Carrie bumped right into him.

“Excuse me,” she mumbled, red-faced.

Though he merely nodded in reply, the man’s crooked grin left Carrie with the disquieting sense that he knew exactly what she was thinking. As she watched her “chauffeur” dump all of her bags into the back of a dilapidated pickup that had seen better days, she won- dered whether her first task at Harmony would be to clean the manure off the expensive luggage her parents had given her as a going away present.

Wiping his hands on his jeans, the man stepped back and opened the passenger side door for her.

Eager to prove capable of fending for herself in the Equality State, Carrie announced with a determined smile, “Thank you, but I can do that for myself.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cowboy said, tilting back his hat. Seemingly looking right through her, that damnable grin affixed on his face, he stepped back and made his way around to the other side of the vehicle. Carrie could swear the air fairly vibrated with the unspoken animosity behind those amazing cerulean eyes.

Climbing into the cab of the pickup, she grappled both with her narrow skirt and the realization that she had somehow inadvertently offended the man’s Western sense of gallantry. Feeling his gaze traverse the length of her legs, Carrie primly smoothed out the skirt that had climbed high upon her thighs. Were all Wyoming men so utterly brazen? she wondered, feeling a blush stain her cheeks. That her look of practiced feminine indignation was received with a twinkle of amusement only served to emphasize the feeling that this man was secretly laughing at her.

As the vehicle lurched to life and they headed down the road, Carrie got her first up-close look at Rock Springs, Wyoming. It was as dreary and no-frills as the olive green pickup in which she rode. Set in the middle of a sagebrush-covered desert, the town could best be described as dusty.

“This is pretty much the cultural metropolis of this part of the state,” her driver matter-of-factly informed her.

Though a variety of small shops lined the streets, Carrie was immediately struck by the fact that the pre- dominant business in town was essentially escapist. An impressive number of bars and saloons called not only to the fantasies of the tourists but to the plight of Rock Springs’s locals, as well. A police car, its lights flashing, was parked outside a tavern named Buster’s. A worn- looking blonde in a leather miniskirt slumped on a street corner bench. A drunk struggled against a red light as Carrie watched him make his way from one bar into an equally dismal one across the street. A huge tumble- weed drifted along the sidewalk in a lonesome gust of wind.

As he pointed to the town’s infamous red-light dis- trict, it occurred to Carrie that her driver had purposely gone out of his way to show her the seedy side of town. Wryly she considered telling him that he was wasting his time if he was trying to shock her. In fact, some of the things she had seen back in Chicago might just set this rough-and-tumble cowboy’s charming smile awry.

What actually did shock her was the modern high school they passed on their way out of town. Complete with a well-groomed football field, track and swimming pool, it was far superior to the facilities where she had previously taught.

“Don’t get your hopes up. Harmony ain’t this nice,” the man warned.

“Isn’t,” she automatically corrected.

Whether it was anger or mirth that activated the dim- ples at both corners of his mouth, Carrie wasn’t sure. Nonetheless, she quickly changed the subject. “Since we’re going to be traveling the next one hundred and twenty miles together, it would be nice to know your name.”

“Judson Horn at your service, ma’am,” he replied, pushing his hat back on his head. “And I can’t say as I’d blame you for wanting to teach here instead of in the middle of nowhere.”

He flashed her a smile and Carrie felt a peculiar sharp stab deep inside her. The man was entirely too sure of himself, she thought with irritation, noting that even the way he draped one arm over the steering wheel was unnervingly sexy. Judson Horn exuded an aura of self- confidence that might just border on the edge of arro- gance. Carrie mentally reviewed her etched-in-stone list of Pitfalls To Avoid In Future. And Arrogant Men was right there at the top.

“I’m sure I’ll manage, thank you very much, Mr. Horn,” she replied stiffly.

“It’s not much of a place for a woman alone, you know. And call me Jud. Unlike the big city, we don’t stand on formality around here.”

Bristling, Carrie wondered whether the only place this Western Neanderthal thought women belonged was the bedroom and the kitchen—in that order.

Judson Horn’s smirk did not diminish in the least at her obvious antipathy. If anything, he seemed to take malevolent pleasure from her disapproval. Sidling closer to the door, Carrie turned her head sharply away and looked out the window, determined to tune out the decidedly handsome stranger with whom she had no choice but to share the next hundred or so miles.

Jud passed off the new schoolteacher’s cold shoulder as typical urbane snobbery. As a rule, outsiders gener- ally considered themselves culturally superior to locals. A man of the land himself, he was certain that only twisted thinking could suppose concrete and skyscrap- ers preferable to a life in wide-open spaces. His ances- tors had been wise in their desire to protect Mother Earth from the white man’s butchery, their children from his poisoned thoughts.

It amused him to think that Little Miss Eastern Know-It-All was sorely mistaken in her assumption that he was some two-bit hired hand whom she could dis- miss however rudely she pleased. Though he briefly considered clarifying his identity, his rather bent sense of humor stopped him from doing so. It would simply be too much fun to see how sophisticated Ms. Raben would react when she discovered that a half-breed In- dian was her new boss!

True, he had fallen into the position by default. And gauging by the volume of public dismay when his ap- pointment to the Board of Trustees had been announced, it would have been wise for him to have simply de- clined the “honor.” Instead, ignoring the raised eye- brows of his neighbors, he’d dug in his heels, deter- mined to prove the patrons of School District No. 4 wrong about him once again.

As if it wasn’t enough just raising twin cyclone kids by himself and trying to keep his ranch profitable in tight times, he could do without the headaches that in- evitably went along with local politics—particularly for someone of his temperament and dubious background.

But Judson Horn wasn’t a man who took the easy way out of anything. Besides, if there was ever a way to protect his own children from the biases that had plagued his own schooling, serving on the school board was the surest way to guarantee the education to which they were entitled. If that meant the twins had to endure some cruel teasing by their classmates, then so be it. He’d endured it. And when all was said and done, he would have to say he was a stronger person because of it.

Even if his biological father had undoubtedly played on the sympathy garnered by his terminal illness to pub- licly acknowledge the son he’d refused to claim at birth, there wasn’t a damned thing Judson could do about his father’s deathbed wish. He only knew it must have taken an Academy-Award-winning performance to con- vince Harmony’s strictly anglo Board of Education to accept a bastard half-breed in their hallowed ranks.

Judson fought the anger that rose like bile in his throat. He would have liked the opportunity to tell that sorry excuse for a man not to bother. Coming at the end of a lifetime of denial and betrayal, such a gran- diose public gesture had been vulgar at best. At worst, the final joke of a hypocrite who hadn’t bothered to claim his illegitimate son when it would have mattered to him. Arthur Christianson had only deluded himself during his last days with the thought that he could somehow buy righteousness and lay claim to his only grandchildren through a last will and testament. It mat- tered little to Judson that his inheritance was substantial. As far as he was concerned, his old man would spend eternity in hell waiting for his forgiveness.

Eternity and then some.

“What was that?” Carrie asked, interrupting the dark thoughts that cast a shadow across Judson’s handsome features.

Her eyes were like those of a child as they followed the movement of a graceful brown and white creature that darted across the road in front of them and slipped beneath the barbed-wire fence lining the highway.

“Haven’t you ever seen an antelope before?” he scoffed.

Aware that Judson Horn seemed to think such lack of knowledge was grounds to revoke her teaching cer- tificate, Carrie reluctantly admitted her ignorance.

“Well, you’d better get used to ’em. There are more of those crazy goats than people in this state.”

“They’re beautiful,” she said simply.

“They’re a damned nuisance.”

Carrie’s eyes darted to the gun rack directly behind her head. Speculating on what fate awaited “nuisances” in the State of Wyoming, she clamped her mouth shut.

Judson lifted the hat from his head to wipe the sweat from his brow. The pickup was without air-con- ditioning, and it was hot, miserably so. Both windows were rolled down, allowing dust to coat everything in- side the cab with a dirty film. He had a lot of things to do today, and picking up this silly little greenhorn did little to improve his mood. Though he was tempted to voice a caustic comment about her obvious unsuitability for the job that lay ahead, there was something so utterly wide-eyed about Carrie’s excitement that he stayed his tongue. She reminded him of a miller furiously beating its wings against the draw of a light bulb, trying its damnedest to immolate itself.

And she somehow made the experience seem enviable.

Most assuredly there would be time enough for Ms. Raben to realize the mistake she had made. Until then, Judson decided that there should be no reason why they couldn’t coexist amicably. Turning off the interstate and onto a less traveled road, he reached into the small cooler on the seat between them.

“Want something to drink?” he asked, pulling out a cold one.

Carrie cringed.

Drinking and driving made her nervous. Though there wasn’t another soul on the road and the likelihood of an accident seemed minimal, her hand tightened on the door handle. It was one thing to be traveling alone with a stranger and quite another to be riding with a drunk.

“No,” she stated coolly.

“You sure?” Judson asked with a peculiar look in his eye. He held the cold can to his forehead for a sec- ond before pulling the tab and taking a long, cool swig.

Carrie’s throat was parched. Inviting beads of mois- ture dripped down the sides of the can. She had to resist the temptation to dab away the rivulets of sweat forming between her breasts.

“Positive.”

A hard glint turned eyes the color of a cloudless sky to gunmetal as he asked, “Even if it’s nonalcoholic?”

Again Carrie cringed, this time not out of fear but embarrassment. Without so much as bothering to check the label, she had simply assumed that drinking and driving was de rigueur for the Western male.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“Just because I’m an Indian—” Judson’s voice was cold enough to drop the temperature in the cab several degrees “—doesn’t mean I’m a drunk.” He tilted his head back and took an especially long pull.

His words came as a total surprise. An Indian with blue eyes? Carrie was as taken aback both by Judson’s declaration of his ancestry as by the vehemence with which it was uttered.

“I didn’t think that—”

“I’ve yet to meet a white who hasn’t jumped to the same conclusion as you—that we’re all good-for- nothing drunks living off government handouts. You don’t need to worry, Ms. Raben.” Her name came out as a hiss. “You’ll fit in just fine around here.”

Carrie drew back as if his words were fists. She had never meant to imply such a thing.

Unmindful of the bewildered look on that pretty face, Judson continued. “There’s a long line of alcoholism in my family history, and I can assure you that I’ve learned something by burying the dead, so you can just let go of that door handle and relax. I have no intention of killing you today.”

Tension wrapped the pair in a tight shroud. Gritty and on edge, Carrie attributed her raw nerves to the long, uncomfortable plane ride from Chicago. She refused to give credence to the possibility that her growing sense of uneasiness was linked to an unlikely chauffeur whose earthy scent of woods and sheer masculinity invaded her senses and left her feeling helpless.

“Hell,” he grumbled. “If you’re afraid of me, how are you ever going to cope with the demands of a school smack-dab in the middle of the wilderness?”

“I am not afraid!” Carrie rejoined a little too quickly, a little too loudly. “And—” Her voice rose a notch. “I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings!”

Issued with such fierce indignation, it was an odd apology indeed. Judson’s eyes snapped from the road to lock upon her. Like an insect squirming beneath a microscope, Carrie was minutely scrutinized.

Judson stared directly into the depths of his passenger’s eyes, the color of which, he decided, was the green of aspen leaves, of undiscovered passion and of a raw vulnerability that reached deep down inside him and squeezed his heart—hard. It just didn’t make sense. The woman was a living, breathing oxymoron. How could such a frightened, little thing exude sexuality like a tea- pot giving off steam?

“Don’t worry. I’m past having my feelings hurt,” he muttered in disgust.

It was a bald-faced lie. It bothered him a whole lot more than he liked to admit that his children’s pretty new schoolteacher had been so eager to assume the worst about him. By now he should be numb to such umbrage, but the dull ache throbbing in his chest as- sured him otherwise. Bitterly, Judson congratulated himself for casting the only vote against hiring this woman whose angelic face presented a deceptive facade for the bigotry that had marked his life. He saw it as his duty to protect the children of Harmony from people like Carrie Raben.

Her assumption that he was a drinker couldn’t have been further from the truth. As a child he had watched alcohol rob his mother of her youth and beauty, slowly destroying her. Through the eyes of an adult, he wit- nessed the desiccation of an entire culture. By publicly taking the pledge that bound him to a life of sobriety, he hoped to provide the kind of positive role model that young Native American men and women so desperately needed. Judson vowed his own children would never grow up in a home like the one in which he was raised—one in which a bottle held greater priority than food on the table or paid utilities.

Defiantly, he reminded himself that just because Car- rie Raben’s singular looks seemed to grow on him with each passing mile, that didn’t make her any better than anyone else who passed judgment on him without both- ering to look past the color of his skin.

Carrie was burning up. The open windows let in fresh air but did little to lower the temperature in the cab. Staring at a sky that met the horizon in an unbroken, infinite line, she was struck by the sheer enormity of the open range that was as intimidating as the virile man sitting a mere arm’s length away. It was apparent that she and her driver were as different as night and day, as explosive as gasoline and matches…

As the old green pickup rolled off the main road and rumbled onto a dirt one, Judson unsnapped the top two buttons of his Western shirt and opened his chest to the air rushing in the open window. Carrie was getting hot- ter by the minute, and not because of the desert heat. Surely the man knew he was giving off sexual vibes that could ignite a prairie fire. Her own fingers itched to untie the silk bow wilting around her neck. An un- expected thought flitted across her mind, an X-rated im- age of Judson Horn pulling off to the side of the road and slowly undressing her—Carrie dropped the thought like a burning match. She hardly knew him and here she was letting her mind take indecent liberties with a man who could scarcely contain his dislike of her!

She concentrated on the scenery. The great plains were slowly giving way to more mountainous terrain. Boulders cropped up like great gray pigeons huddled against the earth. Scraggly spruce began yielding to out- bursts of pine and quaking aspen.

“Aren’t those bright red flowers dotting the hillside Indian Paint Brush? Isn’t there a legend behind them?” she asked, venturing into what she assumed was safe territory.

Mindful of his mother’s undying belief in the old legends as well as her penchant for those fragile blos- soms, Judson felt the question touch a sensitive chord deep inside him. He was angered that that which held deep spiritual significance for him was nothing more than frivolous small talk to this outlander.

“It’s symbolic of the red man’s blood shed by the whites when you stole our land,” he snapped. “You can read all about it in one of the books you bought to brush up on Wyoming folklore. Most outsiders are sure they can find all they’ll need to know about the natives in the library.”

Stung by the cold fury of his words, Carrie eyed him critically. How dare he make her feel like some kind of cultural squatter!

“If I’m going to teach here, I’d like to be as knowl- edgeable as possible,” she replied woodenly in defense of herself.

Judson raked his fingers through his dark hair and sighed in exasperation. A man of few words who en- joyed his solitude, he found superficial chitchat a waste of energy. Certain that a litter of kittens would prove less curious than this contrary female, he decided it was time to put a stop to her endless questions.

“Are you going to ask me the name of every plant and animal in the Wind River Mountain Range?”

“Maybe,” she said, gracing him with an acerbic smile.

Grudgingly Judson acknowledged how a smile could transform the uptight schoolteacher beside him into a lovely woman. Carrie Raben was something all but- toned up, he decided, and wondered just what kind of a man it would take to get those buttons undone. Aroused at the thought, he grimly reminded himself of the cost of such yearnings.

Nonetheless the young woman’s interest in the native flora and fauna evoked in him something that at last put the two of them on peaceable terms: his love of this untamed land.

The further away from the city they traveled, the less Judson resembled a cornered mountain lion. As he pointed out coyotes and deer and red-tailed hawks, Car- rie was impressed both by the depth of his knowledge and his uncanny eye. Where she could discern only landscape, he unerringly uncovered camouflaged wild- life. Clearly this man was on a spiritual plane with his fellow creatures. Knowledge tempered by respect and reverence was evident in the way his eyes held this vast wilderness that he called home, and Carrie found herself wondering if any woman would ever be able to compete with such a rival.

In a cloud of dust they passed a weathered, old gold mine claiming “The Carissa” as its name. Rounding the top of the next hill, Carrie was astonished to find herself in the midst of an actual ghost town. Little more than an outcropping of historic buildings, Atlantic City was still functioning—in a desolate, halfhearted sort of way.

“Almost there,” Judson said, pulling up in front of the local mercantile. “Time to stop for lunch.”

Climbing out of the pickup, Carrie thought to herself that there could not be enough liquid refreshment in the old establishment to put out the fire inside her. She fol- lowed Judson through the swinging doors and into the past. A 1912 calendar hung on the wall along with a collection of mining relics. The smell of whiskey min- gled with dust, and Carrie almost expected an old-time saloon girl to step out from behind the antique bar and offer her a shot of whiskey.

Judson ordered a hamburger platter, and Carrie did the same. Looking over the rim of the old preserving jar in which her soft drink was served, she studied him closely. In the vehicle she had been nervous and re- served. In the dimly lit mercantile she felt more at ease in scrutinizing her driver. His face was lined with the telltale signs of a life of hard work beneath the sun, and it seemed to Carrie that the harsh exposure to the ele- ments had given him an aura of determination and dig- nity. The lines around his eyes belied the sun-squinted curiosity of looking so far to see so little in these wide open spaces. Slightly off center, his nose had been bro- ken a time or two, and a ridge of scar tissue ran along his left jawbone. Clearly there was as much hard living as hard work written on Judson Horn’s handsome face. This was definitely a man who knew his own mind.