How to Lasso a Cowboy (29 page)

All activity in the bar ceased. Silence as heavy as the pall of cigar smoke answered her. She stood rigid and proudly upright under the curious regard, refusing to lower her eyes, refusing to give in to cowardice and run from the saloon.

Then a throaty feminine chuckle broke the silence. “Honey girl, don't we all! Join the line.”

Tension broke in a wave of laughter. Tess didn't smile.

“Hey, Tessie,” came a hoarse shout from Joe Daniel, who sat at a poker table near the back of the room. “I'm your man, sweetie! I could use me a nice little ranch down on the river and a sweet little gal to go with it.”

Laughter greeted his offer.

“Gettin' mighty brave, Joe,” a man at the bar said.

Another shouted. “You take some sweet little gal onto Tessie's ranch and Tess'll likely hog-tie her, brand her, and sell her to the Injuns like a side of beef. Ain't it so, Tess?”

Tess felt her face heat. True, she had threatened her brother, Sean, with such a fate once, but that had been in fun. Besides, he had deserved it. Her father had never tired of jawing and guffawing about the incident to anyone who would listen. And of course nobody believed that she, Colin McCabe's “wild” daughter, might be the one Joe meant by “a sweet little gal.”

Glory Gilda, one of the Bird Cage's most popular whores, strolled up to stand by Tess's side. “You jackasses shut your yaps. Ain't a one of you in here such a catch that you can make fun of Tess. Besides, she could whup every one of you in a brawl.”

“That ain't exactly true,” Tess admitted to Glory. “But I could outlast any one of them in the saddle.”

“Course you could.” Glory guided her toward an empty table. “Given half a chance, a woman can outlast a man at just about anything you can think of. Whiskey?”

“You know I don't hold with strong drink.”

“You look like you could use a strong drink, though. The stronger, the better.” The woman plunked herself down at the table with a sigh. “So you're finally up against it, are you?”

“Between a rock and you know what.” Tess heaved a disconsolate sigh and pulled up a chair to straddle.

Everyone in the bar knew her problem. Hell, everyone in Tombstone knew that Colin McCabe had reached up from the grave to twist his daughter's tail. Many a man laughed out loud to think that Tess Ann McCabe, one of Arizona's most ineligible females, had to find a husband or lose her ranch to her runty little brother, as worthless a piece of flesh and bone that ever God allowed to breathe the world's air.

Okay, maybe Sean wasn't totally worthless. He was her brother, after all, and he probably did have good qualities somewhere, if a person looked hard enough.

Gilda commiserated. “That was a bum thing your daddy did to you, Tess, honey. Have you talked to a lawyer?”

“Hell yes. But the only lawyer in town is Harvey Bartlett, the skunk who wrote up Daddy's will. Fat lot of help he is. Maybe I will have a whiskey. What's it taste like?”

“Damned good, most times.”

When Tess took her first sip of the amber liquid Glory set in front of her, she disagreed with a grimace. “Uck!”

“It grows on you,” Glory assured her.

It would have to, Tess mused. The whiskey burned all the way down her gullet into her stomach. Fine comfort that was! But she took another sip, just to be sure that she hadn't missed something.

“So how long has it been since the old man bit the dirt?” Glory asked.

“Five months, two weeks.”

“And he gave you six months to find yourself a husband?”

“Six months,” Tess confirmed. “The rat. All my life I was my daddy's right-hand man. Hell, when I was five years old he had me driving cattle and riding half-broke horses. I'm the best damned cowboy on the Diamond T, probably the best damned cowboy in all of Arizona, but that crazy old man kept expecting me to bring home a husband along with the cows.”

Glory nodded sympathetically.

“A husband is harder to rope than an ornery bull,” Tess said with a morose sigh.

“That's a fact. But, honey, it's not like you ain't got nothing to offer a man. The Diamond T is a nice little ranch, with plenty of water and a good crew.”

Tess took another sip of whiskey, which began to send warm streamers into her veins. “That's the rub, Glory. No husband is going to move in on my territory, boss my crew, or run my ranch. Hell, he might even expect me to cook and mend and all that nonsense.” She brought a fist down on the table with force enough to make her shot glass jump. “What I need is a lazy, worthless sonuvabitch who'll run out on me after a few days' time. Me and Miguel and Rosie have it all figured out.”

Glory laughed her throaty laugh. “Well, honey, the world is crawling with worthless men. It's the good ones that are hard to come by. I might even be able to help you out.”

A twinkle of mischief lit Glory's eye as the amiable whore surveyed the room. “How about old Jack Campbell? He hasn't done a lick of work in the last two years as far as anybody can tell. Feed him a meal or two and he'd most likely do anything you say.”

“Too old. Yellow teeth. Smells bad.”

“You said you wanted someone worthless.”

“Yeah, but if I've gotta actually marry the fella, he'd better be at least a couple of steps above a goat, or no one's going to believe it.”

Glory screwed up her face in concentration, creasing her thick makeup. Then she smiled. “I have it!”

“You have it?”

“I have it!”

Hope rose in Tess's chest. Or was that the liquor?

“Tess, honey, look at the fellow drowning in his glass at that corner table. He's been drinking for two days, that one has, too wed to his whiskey to even take me up on the offer of a tumble. He might clean up right nice if you took a
scrub brush to him and poured strong coffee down his gullet.”

Tess looked at the cowboy in the corner. He looked worthless enough. Hell. She might as well give him a try.

JOSHUA
Ransom looked drunkenness straight in its ugly face, and he welcomed it. The drunker he got, the more chance he could forget his goddamned brother, David, forget the Double R Ranch—once the finest ranch north of the Mexican border—and forget that a rancher with no cattle was a rancher with no future. If Josh got falling-down, blind, drooling swacked, maybe he could forget that two days ago he had sat at this very table, in this same saloon, and listened to his last hope in the world tell him the bank wouldn't loan him the money he needed.

So what the hell could he do now? Where does a man turn when his best and last chance rears up and smacks him in the head? How does a man deal with a brother who squanders a family business, a family home, a family tradition, on a bad poker hand?

Josh didn't want to think about it. He wanted another drink, another shot of liquid fire to numb his brain. If he could only manage to lift his hand to summon one of the bar girls.

Magically, one of them appeared without a summons, a yellow-haired angel in pink lace and fishnet.

“ 'Nother drink,” he slurred.

“Sweetie pie, you don't need no more whiskey. But I brought you something better.”

Josh focused blurrily upon what she offered. It was a girl, he thought. But he wasn't sure. Yeah. A girl. Her jeans and denim shirt could have belonged to a man, but no man ever filled out clothes in quite that way.

Strange way for a whore to dress, but there was no accounting for taste.

“No, thanks,” he mumbled. “No woman. Drink.”

Hell, right now he wouldn't be any use to a woman. Not
in his state—which state he really needed to help along with at least one more shot of whiskey.

The yellow-haired vixen in pink chuckled throatily and turned to her associate. “He's all yours, honey, if you can hook him.”

THE
man smelled of sour whiskey and other things Tess didn't really want to think about. The notion of hitching herself to this slug, even for a short time, made her stomach turn. She looked to Glory for help, but Glory's attention had turned elsewhere, namely, to a poker player who looked as if he might donate all his winnings for a chance to peer down her corset.

Tess sighed and sat down, trying not to scowl at her prospective suitor. The man was old enough to be her father. Silver hair hung in his face, reddened eyes sunk into shadows, and his mouth sagged. He might start drooling at any minute. All in all, the bum looked like something you might find beneath a rock.

Even if she scrubbed him up, would anyone believe that Tess McCabe would hitch herself to this piece of dog shit? Well, maybe they would. She had a certain reputation in these parts. Most folks would shake their heads and say something like “That's what comes of a woman wearing pants.”

The man seemed to have forgotten Tess was there, so she woke him up with a kick beneath the table. “Hey, you.”

He jumped. “Huh?”

“You look like you could use some help.”

His laugh sounded something like a burp. Maybe it was.

“I've got a deal to offer. Maybe it would help you out.”

The man simply looked into his empty shot glass. “You wanna go get me a drink?”

Tess wrinkled her lip. She didn't much approve of boozing, at least not on this scale. Plainly she'd better work fast before the poor slob passed out.

“You don't need another drink, looks like to me, mister.”
Maybe she should try to put on some feminine airs, Tess mused, then decided that ploy didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Less, maybe. She decided to come right to the point of her offer. “You married?”

He snorted. She took that as a no.

“You need money?”

That put a spark into his eyes. A dull spark, but there it was.

“How does three hundred dollars easy money sound to you, mister?” Tess pitched her voice low so it wouldn't carry to the other tables.

The man choked. “Three . . . three . . .”

Glory abandoned her poker player and came to Tess's aid. “Shush now, you. Tess, honey, you don't want the whole saloon listening in on your private business, so why don't we take this up to my room?” She nudged their reluctant Romeo. “What do you say, sweetie pie?”

He crossed his eyes and nearly fell from the chair. They took that as a yes.

Glory's “room” was one of the upstairs gilded “cages” that gave the Bird Cage its name and fame. Getting the poor slob up the stairs posed a challenge, because he was bigger than Tess expected. When she took his arm and braced it across her shoulders, the hard muscle beneath his shirt surprised her. Apparently the fellow had only recently turned to liquor. Jerking him off of his downward path could be a good deed.

Or not. This could be the biggest mistake of her life. Still, a woman had to do what a woman had to do.

“Let's sit him on the bed,” she told Glory. “I don't like him towering over me like that.”

The stair climb had brought the fellow around a bit. His eyes now looked more wary than dull.

“What are you gals up to?”

“Saving your sorry ass from boozing yourself to death,” Glory answered primly. “And setting you on the road to riches.”

“That's right. We're doing you a good deed, is what.”
Tess nearly strained a muscle helping Glory sit the fellow on the bed. He didn't carry much fat on him to lighten things up. Finally, she straightened up and looked him narrowly in the eye. “I'll put it to you honest, cowboy. If you aren't already hitched to a wife, you can earn yourself three hundred easy dollars in one afternoon's work. Just stand up with me before a preacher and say ‘I do.' Then you can be on your way to whatever hell you're headed for.”

The poor man nearly toppled over. Glory and Tess both took an arm and hauled him upright again.

“You see . . . ,” Tess continued, hoping to make her proposal sound reasonable, “my father left me the ranch when he died. It's not much of a ranch,” she added hastily. It wouldn't do to set the fellow's thoughts running along lines of greed. “But it's home, you know? But my no-account brother gets the whole thing unless I get myself hitched by March fifteenth. And today is March first.”

In truth, her father had been buried on a hot day back in September. He had given her six months to find a husband, but she had kept putting things off, hoping a miracle would happen. A miracle hadn't happened, and so now she found herself facing this sorry excuse for a man in Glory's gilded cage.

He made a choking sound that might have been a laugh. “You . . . you want me to marry you?”

Tess bristled. “You don't have to make it sound like I asked you to go to hell and back.”

He laughed again. This time it was definitely a laugh. “You want
me
to marry
you?
”

“A few minutes with a preacher,” Tess continued through gritted teeth, “then, when the deed is in my name, you can collect your money and be on your way. I don't need a husband, and if I did, I sure wouldn't choose a drunken bum like you.”