A Real Cowboy Knows How to Kiss (3 page)

White Knight lowered his head even further, and he pushed against Steen's chest. Pain shot through his side, but he ignored it. Instead, he placed his hand on White Knight's nose, surprised by how soft it was. He'd forgotten what it felt like to touch a horse. He'd forgotten what soft was.

He'd forgotten a lot.

He just wished he'd forget the rest.

Despite her valiant efforts to maintain a positive attitude, there was simply no way for Erin Chambers to see the bright side of the situation when the SUV she was driving lurched and slithered to an engine-coughing death on the edge of the Wyoming dirt road.

"Oh, come on. Please don't do this to me." She tried the ignition again, but there was no response from the vehicle that her best friend, Josie Mayers, had named "Faith" because the truck had gotten her out of so many sticky situations.

Well, Faith had bottomed out in a big way, and was so not living up to her name.

Erin grimaced as she flexed her hands around the steering wheel, trying not to freak out and collapse in a wail of self-pity at this latest sabotage to her attempts to make this day work out okay. She glanced at her watch, her heart sinking when she saw what time it was. It was almost six. It had been over an hour since she'd received the frantic call to stitch up a horse that'd had a trailer mishap.

As tempting as it was to surrender to Faith's refusal to move, she needed to get to the ranch, not sit by the side of the road awaiting the first Wyoming sunset she'd seen in over a decade.

Six weeks ago, it had sounded like a fantastic idea to use her upcoming sabbatical to run the Wyoming vet clinic so Josie could go to Chicago and help her mom recover from surgery. Erin had happily envisioned snuggly dogs, soft kittens, and long conversations with devoted pet owners, a situation that seemed so much more appealing than her stressful equine surgery practice in Virginia. She'd been excited to use her training to help animals that weren't under deep anesthesia all the time, and the thought of returning to the area she grew up in had sounded wonderful. She'd been struggling so much in her day-to-day life, and she was excited to reconnect with a life that used to make sense to her, hoping that maybe she'd be able to figure herself out in the process.

Today was her first day on the job. As she'd expected, she'd gotten conscious animals and the opportunity to drive around her old town, but other than that, it hadn't been anything like she'd hoped and expected, not by a long shot.

In the last twelve hours, she'd been knocked down and nearly impaled on the horn of a massive bull. She'd also been flattened into a mud puddle by a six-year-old girl practicing her barrel racing skills on whatever happened to be near her and her pony, which, at that time, had been Erin.

Her last stop had gone long when the sheep had escaped from the holding pen just before she'd arrived, necessitating almost an hour of watching sheepdogs do their stuff, which was incredibly cool, she had to admit, but not very helpful with her timing. She'd spent over two hours cumulatively being lost, since the spotty cell service in the region had rendered her reliance on her phone's GPS a poor decision. None of the landscape looked familiar to her, and she felt like a complete stranger in the land that had once been her home.

Except
this
life hadn't been her home. When she'd been a kid, she'd never been canvassing dirt roads, trying to locate assorted ranches. She'd been cloistered in the library, or at school, or at ballet class, or any of the proper training classes that her parents had thrust upon her. Everything about her return was wrong, nothing was as she'd imagined, and there was nothing she could do about it now.

Josie was gone, there was no one else to run the clinic, the engine was dead, and a horse named Ox's Ass needed stitches. A passing glance at her phone confirmed she had no reception, so there would be no white knight galloping to respond to a call for help. Grimly, she yanked open the glove box and pulled out the tattered spiral notebook that Josie had stashed inside as a makeshift owner's manual. She flipped the first page, quickly scanning Josie's notes. On the second page, she found a note stating: "When the engine dies while driving, there are three possible causes." Erin scanned the rest of the page, and her heart sank.

"Really? She wants me to connect wires in the engine? Seriously?" Josie's instructions seemed incredibly complicated, and Erin felt like tossing the notebook aside, crawling into the backseat, and sleeping until the three weeks were up.

But there was a horse with a torn shoulder, and she was the one who had to fix it. She sighed. Just because her parents were disgusted with her utter lack of mechanical ability didn't mean she couldn't manage to follow a few instructions, right? She pulled out her reading glasses and studied the notebook again. Sadly, and not surprisingly, the fact she could actually see the words clearly didn't make them any easier to understand.

No problem. She was an innovator. She could make this happen. She took a deep breath to fortify herself, and then popped the hood. Once she saw the engine, she was sure she'd be able to decipher Josie's notes. It was all good.

She pulled the door handle to get out…but the door didn't budge. "Oh, come on!" She twisted in her seat and then slammed her boot against the door. It opened with a reluctant creak of protest. See? She totally rocked it.

Trying not to think about the fact that feeling so triumphant over her ability to exit a truck maybe didn't bode well, she climbed out, her hiking boots kicking up dust balls in the roadside dirt. Ignoring the aches in her body, she strode around to the front of the vehicle, propped the hood up, and studied the engine.

Then she looked at Josie's drawings.

Then she looked at the engine again.

Then she looked at Josie's instructions.

Then she tried turning the notebook upside down.

"Seriously?" Was the drawing even of the same vehicle? Tears suddenly burned in her eyes, tears that had nothing to do with an engine, and everything to do with the fact that she'd been pressing on as hard as she could for the last twelve months since everything had fallen to pieces around her, and this stubborn engine was just one thing too much.

She gripped the grill of the truck and closed her eyes, willing herself to pull it together. She was not going to fail at this. Josie needed her, and Ox's Ass needed her.

Erin took a deep breath, and opened her eyes. "You can do this. It's not like Josie's a mechanic, right? If she can figure it out, then you can." She shook out her shoulders, then set the notebook on the engine. She stared at it. She willed it to make sense to her. But not one damned thing on Josie's drawing matched what she could see in the engine.

Dammit. She was not going to let Ox's Ass down, but what was she going to do?

Hike.

That was what she was going to do.

It was only a few miles, right?

She'd be there in two hours.

God, a two-hour hike carrying medical equipment? Really?

Yes, a two-hour hike carrying medical equipment. Really.

She was
not
going to let herself mourn for her sterile operating room and pristine working conditions. She'd left because that life was strangling her, and if it took hiking several miles in the dusk to find herself again, then that was what she was going to do.

Resolutely, she tossed the notebook on the engine and left it there, then marched around toward the back of the SUV. She'd just managed to get the stubborn tailgate open, when she heard the rumble of an engine.

She spun around, shielding her eyes against the sunset as a billow of dust filled the sky. A black truck pulling a horse trailer was heading right toward her. For a split second, she considered all the big city warnings about strangers and isolated roads, and then she decided that if she were kidnapped and held for ransom, it might help her to gain perspective on her own life. And, if she weren't kidnapped but got help instead, then that would be good, too. So, a win either way, no matter what quality of individual was in the truck.

Decision made, she stepped out into the road and began waving her arms to flag the driver down.

Steen was in the middle of a deep conversation with White Knight about the crappiness of prison life and how much it sucked to have personal freedom ripped out of one's life, when he felt Chase slow down and stop the truck. Frowning, Steen glanced toward the window, knowing they hadn't gone far enough to reach the ranch, but there were no stop signs on these roads. When the truck stayed still, Steen raised the flaps on the side of the trailer and peered out, but all he could see were fields. Where were they?

He heard Chase's door slam shut as his brother shouted a greeting to someone. Apprehension flooded Steen, and he closed the flaps. The last thing he wanted to do was socialize. He had nothing to say to the world. He'd had nothing to say when he lived in it, and he had nothing to say now that he'd been removed from it for the last four years. How did a man make small talk when he had a prison record haunting him?

There was no chance he was getting out of the trailer.

He patted the horse's nose and resumed their conversation, keeping his whispers low so no one would know he was in the back. Knight was relaxed now, munching happily on the hay net that was dangling from the wall. His ears kept flicking toward Steen, listening to the conversation with more interest than anyone had shown in a long time.

Steen sat down on a hay bale, leaned back against the wall, and folded his arms over his chest as he stretched out his legs. His black motorcycle boots didn't fit with this environment, but it was what he'd been wearing the day he went to prison. He wondered idly if Chase had kept his old cowboy boots, in addition to his hat. Not that he'd wear them. His horse days were long past. Everything was long past. He had no idea what he was supposed to do now. Everything he'd believed in was history.

He pulled his hat down over his forehead and closed his eyes. He'd spent four years waiting, and he had no problem with waiting some more while Chase socialized. He was in no rush to go anywhere.

As he sat there, however, the sound of a woman's voice drifted through the window. The moment he heard it, something inside Steen went utterly still. He held his breath, straining to hear her better,
needing
to hear her.

Knight snorted, and Steen instinctively put his hand on the horse's nose, willing him to be quiet. Everything inside him was screaming to hear more. Who was she? Something thundered through him, and he knew he'd heard her voice before.

He stood up and edged over to the side of the trailer, leaning his shoulder against the metal wall as he strained to hear the conversation. He couldn't decipher the words, but her voice rolled through him, melodic and beautiful. He felt the tension in his muscles ease, as if he'd found somewhere safe for the first time in years. Who was she?

Memories hammered at the edges of his mind, moments of his life from long ago. A face flashed in his mind, the image of a thin, homely girl with thick glasses, braces, fancy clothes, and a smile that could light up a room on the rare occasions when something made her grin.

Erin Chambers.

Steen grinned, remembering the girl who had been three years behind him in school, so young and innocent that she'd been more like a fragile china cup than an actual girl. She'd been a nerd and a brainiac, from a family with more money than the rest of the town had, collectively. They were the kind of family which had disdained kids like him who were from the wrong kind of family, and the wrong kind of life.

But not Erin.

Erin was different. Erin had never wanted anything from anyone. She wasn't the type of person he'd ever bothered to notice back in those days, and it had been sheer dumb luck that had brought her into his sphere of awareness. He'd never forget the day he'd first noticed her—

The door to the trailer swung open, and Steen jumped back as Chase stuck his head in the trailer. "You still know engines?"

"Engines? Yeah." He'd spent a lot of time in the mechanics' shop in prison, and he'd even fixed the guards' vehicles in exchange for a break from harassment. "Why?" He was still reeling from the thought of skinny Erin Chambers. How was she still in the area? He'd been so sure she'd be some high-ranking corporate exec on the East Coast by now.

"A car needs your help." Chase gestured him out. "I'll stay with Knight."

Steen instantly comprehended the situation. It was
Erin
who needed his help. Erin, who had once looked at him like he was a saint put on the earth to save the world. She was the only truly selfless human being he'd ever met in his life, the only one who'd ever looked at him as if she couldn't see all the worthlessness about him. Yeah, she'd been nothing but a kid, and he'd never exchanged more than a couple sentences with her, but in some ways, she had been one of the most pivotal parts of his high school existence. A part of him wanted to go out and see her, to find out what she'd become, but a deeper, stronger instinct kept him rooted.

There was no chance in hell he wanted Erin Chambers to see what he'd become. She'd known him as a star athlete, the first Stockton to break from the rut of cowboy-life. He'd been big time, on the way to a full ride at the college of his choice, fully prepared to make a career far away from the small, cursed life he'd been labeled with. Then had come his career-ending knee injury during his junior year of college, right in the middle of an ass-kicking season that had everyone short-listing him as a top draft pick destined for a Hall of Fame career. In one split second, every one of his dreams had come crashing to a stunned halt.

And that's when the real descent had begun, a series of events outside his control that had derailed him from everything that mattered and every dream he'd ever had.