Walk Away Joe (7 page)

It came to her then that she wasn’t the only one hurting. He was hurting, too, covering his own pain even as he tried to harden himself against hers. A memory from last night—the moment before he’d first kissed her—came back with crystal clarity.

She’d sensed a vulnerability in him then. She sensed it again now. In his voice and in the soulful loneliness of his tortured blue gaze.

“What I don’t have,” she began, as a sure, creeping conviction began to take root, “is a take on what this grand gesture of warning is all about.”

He looked momentarily taken aback before he tried to hide it behind a smile as dark as it was wicked.

“Trust me, darlin’. This is no grand gesture. It’s a warning. Simple and true. But I can see it’s going to take some convincing to make you see the light. I didn’t take advantage last night, Miz Sara Sunshine, because I like my women fully revved when we cross that finish line. You weren’t racing on a full tank.” His smile twisted nastily.

“But that’s not the case tonight, is it? You know exactly what’s going to happen if you don’t get the hell away from me. And so help me, it won’t be me putting on the skids tonight. Tonight, you’re the only one who can do the saving.”

As if to prove his point, he tightened his hands on her hips, blatantly kneading as his gaze dropped from her face to boldly stare at her breasts and the dark shadows of her nipples, pressing against the thin cotton of her low cut nightgown.

She should have felt insulted. He’d intended her to. She should have been offended. He’d planned on that, too. Instead, she felt a tingling longing and a melting heat when he raised a dark, callused hand and caressed her through the lightweight fabric.

On its heels came a warming tenderness and rush of emotion made sweeter by a sense of rightness as strong as any she’d ever known. And when he lowered his head to her breast and nuzzled her through the soft, sheer cotton, she sucked in her breath, welcoming the hot, intimate contact.

“Run, darlin’,” he murmured—half warning, half plea—as he brushed his lips across her erect nipple.

She lowered her mouth to his golden hair. “You weren’t with another woman tonight,” she whispered.

He went very still. When he raised his face to hers, the look in his eyes confirmed her suspicion and her next statement as fact. “

You aren’t even drunk,” she continued, daring him to deny what her heart told her was true. “You’re stone-cold sober.”

She lowered her hands to his chest, needing to feel his heat and experience his reaction. His heart beat like thunder beneath her hands, an affirmation of his lie, giving her the courage to press him.

“Why did you lie to me, Tucker?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The look on his face told her why. He’d lied to protect her. To protect her from him.

“What kind of big, bad user warns his target away?” she asked gently, then saw, too clearly, his difficulty in dealing with the implications of her accusation.

For some reason, this man who had taken care of his orphaned brother and was committed to the needs of his family, had painted himself as the loser who wasn’t entitled to any commitments of his own.

It finally came to her as she searched blue eyes aching with loneliness, why he was warning her off. He was afraid. That was it in a gold-plated nutshell. Tucker Lambert, a self-professed heartbreak kid, was afraid of heartbreak himself.

“Why, Tucker?” she whispered, as the bleakness in his eyes supported her conclusion and made her own heart ache for him. “Why did you lie?”

Long after he’d grunted something to the effect that she didn’t know what she was talking about, long after he’d set her forcefully off his lap and stalked out the kitchen door, she stared after him.

Long after he’d disappeared into the shadows of the night, she wondered if she’d done the right thing when she let him go.

“What made you afraid, Tucker?” Her question bounced off the walls of the empty room. “What’s got you running away?”

She knew all about running. She knew how lonely it was. Yet as she stood in the dark, thinking of him, she felt less alone than she had in a long, long time. The knowledge that he, too, had dragons to slay down scaled the scope of her own problems to a more manageable level. The need that he tried so hard to conceal tugged at strings in her heart that had been out of tune for a very long time.

The world was full of wounded people. Who’d have thought that one of them would come wrapped in a package so flashy and flirty that it hid all the wreckage inside? Who would have thought, she wondered, crawling into her empty bed, that Tucker Lambert had a soul as scarred as her own?

∙ ∙ ∙

The first play a cutting horse made on a calf was a thrill Tucker had never quite managed to put into words. It was one of the things that had attracted him to cutting in the first place, that and a love for horses that had hooked him as a kid and hung tight. A friend had once described the sensation of riding a cutter as just like jumping out of a two-story building with a suitcase between your legs.

Tucker supposed that was as close to a description as any. It was all speed and propulsion rocketing you and the horse into one wild jerk-and-glide ride that, in a competition, was over in two and a half minutes. In business, however, it was a daily workout if you wanted to stay on the cutting edge.

Mounting up, settling in, hanging on. It was his life. He was in it for the money, sure, but he was addicted to the sport, too. It had never failed to suck him in, then grab all his physical and mental attention into one focused, consuming sphere of concentration.

Until she’d come along.

Damn the woman. He could still see her eyes searching his last night. Still hear her voice, and the question that was less accusation than it was concern.
“Why did you lie to me, Tucker?”

How did you know?
he’d wanted to shout as he stomped out of her kitchen.
Why do you care? Why don’t you just accept that it’s the way I am?

And why, for God’s sake, when he was trying his damnedest to warn her away, didn’t she have sense enough to run like hell in the opposite direction? Instead, he was the one who’d run, right out her door and to his empty bed.

He settled deeper into the saddle, trying to concentrate on Poco’s moves, willing himself to focus on the calf.

All he saw was Sara Stewart, in her soft, sheer nightie, and her big brown eyes.

The woman looked too deep to suit him. She expected too much. She thought there was more to him than was actually there. Most women knew better. They got a fix on him the first time they sized him up. Good looks, good time, good-bye. That was all there was to Tucker Lambert. They accepted that and didn’t ask for more.

She was asking, though. She had expectations he’d fought all his life not to fulfill. She was asking him to prove to her that he was less instead of more. The worst of it was, she made him want to give up the fight.

He swore under his breath. The weekend couldn’t come soon enough to suit him. When Karla and Lance came to check on her, he’d send her, none too politely, on her way. Close the chapter. End the book.

In the meantime, he wasn’t worth spit.

He climbed reluctantly out of the saddle. “Sorry, ol’ buddy. My head’s not in the game today.

“Yeah,” he said, commiserating, when Poco snorted and pawed the ground with restless, unleashed energy. He knew how the young stallion felt. His blood was running hot and fast, and he was ready for action. Tucker had just let him down. But he’d brought this little stud too far to lose, in one morning, all the ground he’d gained the past few months. As muzzy- headed as he was today, that was exactly what would happen. The futurity was six months away, and he didn’t want to take any chances with the three-year-old.

“Problem, bro?”

Tucker avoided his brother’s measuring gaze as he led the stud past him toward the barn. “Gettin’ old,” he grumbled evasively.

Tag’s snort told Tucker he wasn’t buying it.

Tucker’s answering scowl told Tag not to push it. He let out a breath of relief, when, after a long, puzzled look, Tag rode Mason’s mare into the holding pen to warm her up.

“Let me get him stalled, then I’ll hold the cuts for you,” Tucker said, knowing that the prospect of putting the mare through her paces would divert Tag’s attention.

Tag had been itching to get a shot at the flashy black ever since they’d unloaded her from Jud Mason’s trailer this spring. It was usually Tag’s job to hold the calf within working range after Tucker had cut it from the herd.

“You’re the boss,” Tag said, unable to conceal his excitement as he leaned down to unlatch the gate and ride the mare into the pen with the herd of calves. “But it’s not going to be easy short-handed.”

“I think we can handle it.”

Tag was right, though; it wasn’t easy. Lana had often filled in as a second hand when they were between wranglers. She was a good rider, and levelheaded—and she enjoyed the action. But since she’d become pregnant, Tag wouldn’t let her within petting distance of a horse, let alone in a saddle. Unfortunately, their last hired hand hadn’t worked out—spent his pay in the local roadhouse and his mornings hung over. They’d had to let him go last week, and they were still waiting for their help-wanted ad to be answered.

Tag’s first cut into the herd led to frustration for both horse and rider when Tucker, without another hand, couldn’t hold the calf in a range close enough for the mare to work effectively.

Tucker was about to give it up when he noticed Sara, her elbows propped on the top fence rail, her expression watchful. She was dressed in faded denim again, along with her worn boots and the straw Stetson that was both work-worthy and sexy.

“I can help,” she offered when Tucker looked her way.

He snorted, not about to let the work he’d thrown into avoiding her since last night go down the tubes. “I don’t think so.”

“No. Really. I can. I used to hold for my daddy when I was a kid.”

“Your daddy?”

“Paul Stewart. He’s been big in—”

“I know who he is,” Tucker said, cutting her off, his voice going as cold as a winter wind.

His heart suddenly felt as heavy as stone in his chest. Anyone who knew anything about the National Cutting Horse Association knew that Paul Stewart wasn’t just big in cutting, he was the biggest. Tucker knew Paul Stewart on a more personal note, though, a note that had soured over time and never quite played itself out.

He should have known. He should have put it together that Sara was from
that
Stewart family.

“Daddy won the open futurity in ’08 and '09. And back in 2000, he let me hold for him in the semifinals. Thought I was just about the biggest cat on the fence that day,” she said with a smile. “I was fourteen. And I was in hog heaven.”

And I was eighteen, Tucker remembered, thinking back to that summer when he’d worked on her daddy’s ranch. He’d known Stewart had a daughter. Might even have caught a glimpse of her now and again from afar. Might even have made a play for her, if she’d been older—and if he hadn’t already been making time.

A wave of disgust swamped him, a sickening sense of self-assessment that even all these years later he had difficulty forgiving as youthful indiscretion, raging hormones and the practiced manipulations of a woman well versed in the art of seduction.

“So how ’bout it?” Tag’s question dragged him back to a moment that was as ironic as fate was twisted. If he’d ever thought, even for a moment, that he could look for something more than a temporary involvement with Sara, that thought had just been trampled into the dry Texas dust.

Paul Stewart’s daughter. Just hearing the name was enough to toughen his resolve to keep away from her. No amount of temptation—whether thinking of her or facing her head-on—could bend his will to stay away from her now.

He scowled at her beneath the brim of his hat. “How long since you rode?”

If she noticed the change from moody reluctance to firm resolve, she didn’t show it. She grinned at him. “Too long. And the longer I watch you two, the more I realize how much I miss it.”

“Third stall, south side of the alley,” he said, after a long moment. “Jezebel. She’s a sweet little mare with a soft mouth and a nice disposition, so go easy on her. You know where the tack room is.”

She gave him a slow, excited smile, backed a step away from the paddock fence then turned and headed for the barn at a trot.

“I’ll go help her saddle up,” Tag offered, riding toward the gate.

Tucker stopped him with a shake of his head. “She’ll do it. If she can’t handle it, I don’t want her out here with these horses. We’re getting paid a lot of money to give some high-priced horseflesh professional training. We can’t afford to have anyone in here who doesn’t know what they’re doing.”

Just like he couldn’t afford to wallow in regrets about what might have been. Of what never should have been in the first place.

Now that he knew she was Paul Stewart’s daughter, Sara was so far off-limits that she could have been in another country, for all he cared.

When she joined them riding Jezebel, however, he couldn’t help but admit that Miz Stewart knew what she was about. She was a natural rider. Had a good seat and soft hands. And she hadn’t been blowing smoke. She knew how to hold a calf.

She was tougher than she looked, too. Holding was a tiresome, sometimes boring job. A lot of sitting and watching, and then quick reaction was called for. She did it well. It didn’t take long to see why her daddy had trusted her in an event as prestigious as the futurity.

Unfortunately, it took even less time for him to realize that he didn’t have as much resolve as he thought. Not where she was concerned.

He’d been determined not to feel anything toward her. Not longing, not regret. Just indifference. But by the time the day was over and she’d ridden through the rest of the workouts, he’d gained a grudging admiration, not only for her riding ability, but for her grit, too. She’d hung tight in the saddle. Hadn’t complained about a thing. Not the heat, not the pace, not even the dust that covered her clothes and mixed with perspiration to track down her face.