A Family Kind of Guy (12 page)

Mason, wearing sunglasses and an irritated expression, shook his head, and though Bliss's ears strained to hear the conversation, she caught only snippets.

“…waited all night,” the woman said.

“No one asked you to.”

“…we had an understanding.”

“Did we? Wasn't my idea.”

“Mason, please—” The woman cast a sidelong glance at Bliss, who increased her pace as she walked to the stables. The sun was hovering low in the western sky and the air was breathless and still.

Bored with listening to her tapes and reading old magazines, Bliss had decided to go for a ride. Her father had already pointed out the docile horses he wanted her to saddle, but Bliss had other ideas.

“Lousy son of a bitch!” The woman's voice blasted through the hot air.

Bliss turned toward the car.

The driver gunned the engine. Gravel sprayed. Mason leaped away from the fender as the car took off at breakneck speed down the lane.

Swearing under his breath, Mason swung his fist in the air in frustration. “Damn fool—” He caught his tongue and threw his hat on the ground. Then, turning on a worn heel, he caught Bliss's eye. Rather than be the target of his wrath, she ducked around the corner of the stables and snagged a lead rope coiled around a peg near one of the doors. The last person she wanted to catch in a bad mood was Mason Lafferty. No way. No how. The man was enough trouble when things were going right.

Squinting against a lowering sun, she eyed the horses grazing quietly in the shade of a stand of oak. She wasn't interested in the docile palomino mare or lazy roan gelding her father had pointed out to her and smiled when she spied the animal who had unintentionally captured her heart—a feisty pinto three-year-old. His eyes were an unusual pale blue—the only blue-eyed horse she'd ever seen—and he was a show-off in front of the mares, always hoisting his tail high, tossing his head and snorting as he galloped from one end of the field to the other.

“Okay, Lucifer, I think it's time you and I got to know each other,” she said as he snorted and pawed the dry earth. “Come on,” she cooed, uncoiling the vinyl rope. “That's a boy.”

Lucifer rolled his eyes suspiciously. He was wearing a leather halter. All she had to do was get close enough to snap the tether to the ring under his chin.

“It's all right,” she assured him. She was only three feet away. One more step and—

He bolted. With a high-pitched squeal and a toss of his brown-and-white head, he galloped from one end of the pasture to the other, kicking up a cloud of dust in his wake. His odd eyes sparkled in the sunlight, as if he knew he was taunting her.

“Don't make me chase you,” she warned.

“Why not? He loves a good fight. Especially with a female.”

She stiffened at the sound of Mason's voice. Glancing over her shoulder, she ignored the sudden jump in her pulse and shot him a glance guaranteed to be as cold as ice. “Seems like you should know,” she said.

“Can't argue with that,” he admitted, though his jaw was hard as granite.

When he didn't stroll off, she asked, “Was there something you wanted?”

He was leaning against the gate, his arms crossed, elbows resting on the worn top board, eyes still shaded by aviator glasses. His hat was resting on a post and his hair, sun-streaked and ragged, brushed his eyebrows and the tops of his ears. “Just watching you.”

She lied and told herself that the absolute last person on earth she wanted observing her was this sarcastic cowboy. “Don't you have
something
more important to do? You know, like work? Isn't there a cow to be branded, a horse to be shod or something?”

“Not just now. Besides, I wouldn't want the boss's daughter to get herself into some kind of trouble.”

She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Don't worry about it.”

He didn't bother to respond. Nor did he move. Bliss gritted her back teeth together and inched her chin upward in pride. She'd die before she'd let him witness her humiliation from this headstrong piece of horseflesh.

“Want me to help?”

“No!” Damn the man, he was enjoying this and making her so nervous she was beginning to sweat. “Give me strength,” she muttered under her breath as she approached Lucifer again. In a louder voice she said gently, “Come on, boy. That's a good—”

In another whirlwind of dust the colt again thundered away, bucking and showing off as if he and Mason were privately conspiring against her.

“Son of a—” She bit back a curse and stomped a foot, sending up her own pitiful puff of dirt, and Mason, damn his soul, laughed outright. “I suppose you could do better,” she challenged, then cringed as the words escaped her lips.

“Yep.” In one lithe movement he vaulted the fence and gave a sharp, terse whistle.

Lucifer stopped short.

Another commanding blast from Mason's lips and the colt, ears flicking nervously, reluctantly turned. He hesitated, his nostrils flared, and Mason whistled a third time.

To Bliss's complete mortification, the colt trotted docilely to Mason, pressed his nose against the man's chest and was rewarded with a piece of apple.

“Isn't that cheating?” she asked as Mason grabbed Lucifer's halter and with his free hand slowly motioned for Bliss to approach with the lead rope.

“Everything's fair in love and war and taming horses.” He glanced at her from behind his tinted glasses. He was so close she could smell his aftershave as well as the dust and odors of horse and leather that seemed to cling to him. His jaw was gilded with a day's growth of beard and his sleeves were shoved above his elbows to show off tanned forearms where veins and hard muscles stretched beneath his skin.

Swallowing against a suddenly arid throat, she turned her eyes back to the horse.

“You have heard the expression before, right?”

“It was a little different.” She snapped the lead onto the metal ring on the colt's halter.

Mason lifted one dark eyebrow. “Well, around here we make expressions fit the situation.”

“So I see.”

“Be careful with Lucifer.”

“I can handle him.”

“I hate to give you advice, but if you call what you just did ‘handling him,' you're in for a couple more lessons from this guy.”

“Am I?” She tossed her hair over one shoulder.

Mason patted the pinto on the shoulder. “You want me to saddle and bridle him for you?”

Her smile was cool, though her hands were sweating on the tether and her heart was beginning to pound erratically. “I'll be fine,” she said, clucking to the colt and heading to the stables, where she'd already picked out a saddle, blanket and bridle. She didn't need any more help from the sexiest ranch hand on the place. All she wanted to do was ride to the river that cut through the north end of her father's property where she planned to take a long, leisurely swim. Nothing more…

But, of course, looking back on it now, she'd gotten way more than she'd bargained for. That night was the night she began to fall in love, the night when all the trouble really started.

“Oh, who cares?” she asked herself as she took a long sip from her cup. Life sometimes seemed to move in strange, fateful circles. Who would have thought that she would be here, at her father's ranch, drinking tepid cocoa at three in the morning? Back in Bittersweet. Involved with—no, not involved with—dealing with Mason again. “Fool,” she muttered to herself as she tossed the remains of her drink into the sink and Oscar, panting, tagged along behind her to the bedroom.

She'd made a mistake with Mason in the past, but she wasn't going to repeat it. “Once burned, twice shy, you know,” she told her mutt as Oscar slipped through the open door to her room and hopped eagerly onto her bed. “Okay, okay. Since you were already here earlier, tonight you can sleep with me, but that's it.”

She slid beneath the sheet and sighed. The rainstorm had moved on, but she was still here, in bed with only a dog for comfort and the nagging feeling that all the promises she'd made to herself wouldn't help where Lafferty was concerned. He was just one of those kinds of men who slipped under a woman's skin and wouldn't go away.

“Great,” she thought aloud as she tugged at the covers. Well, she wasn't an ordinary woman. She was strong. Independent. Margaret Cawthorne's daughter. And she'd be damned if she'd let any range-rough cowboy change the course of her life or mess with her head. Mason Lafferty, damn him, could go straight to hell, for all she cared.

* * *

Mason towel-dried his hair roughly while barely glancing at his reflection in the foggy mirror. He hadn't seen Bliss in nearly a week and, like it or not, he was going quietly out of his mind. He threw on slacks, shirt, socks and shoes, then walked though his apartment and thought it seemed emptier than before. His heels rang against the hardwood floor, echoing loudly enough to make the rooms seem hollow.

He snagged his jacket from a peg near the back door and slid his arms through the sleeves. He'd thought of Bliss off and on over the years but had made a point to keep any lingering and provocative memories of her where they belonged—strictly in the past. Then again, he hadn't expected her to show up in Bittersweet, nor had he thought her old man would remarry so quickly on the heels of his first wife's death. Life, it turned out, was oftentimes stranger than fiction, and a hell of a lot more complicated.

Frowning, he thought of his own situation. How, as a small boy, he'd watched his father drive away in a beat-up old Dodge truck, the exhaust a blue haze in the coming darkness as the pickup rumbled away. He'd clung to his mother's hand, swallowing back the tears that burned in his throat, blinking against the rain that poured from the sky. He'd been five at the time, his sister, Patty, barely two. She'd sucked her thumb as she'd sat balanced on their mother's slim hip.

“It'll be all right,” Helen Lafferty had said, her chin held high, her nose and eyes red from endless nights of crying. Mason had heard the fights, listened to his mother beg his dad to stay—to keep the family together, to stay with them. She'd forgive him the drinking. Forget the other women. Ignore his gambling.

But he'd left just the same.

“You go on to bed, Mason,” she'd said, swiping at her tears. “I'll rock Patty to sleep out here on the porch.”

Only years later did Mason realize that Albert Lafferty couldn't handle responsibility, a family or just plain settling down. He'd never seen his father again and hadn't missed him.

“Yeah, right,” he told himself now. His mother had never remarried and when she'd discovered she had breast cancer the year that Mason turned eighteen, she'd taken matters into her own work-roughened hands. Without insurance or a nest egg, she couldn't afford the operation that probably wouldn't have saved her life anyway. So, stoically, with no word to her children, Helen Lafferty had opened a bottle of sleeping pills, swallowed every one and never woken up. She'd left Mason and Patty a simple note asking them to forgive her and begging Mason to look after his younger sister.

Well, he'd made one hell of a mess of that. Patty, he suspected, was in more trouble now than she'd ever been, and trouble, it seemed, was her middle name. As for Mason himself, his life had never been more complicated. He was considering suing Terri for custody of Dee Dee, Patty and old Isaac Wells were missing, he'd bought half the ranch and had old John mad as a hornet at him, and, to top matters off, now Bliss Cawthorne, “the princess,” had strolled right back into the middle of his life.

His back teeth gnashed together as he locked the door of his apartment behind him.

He wouldn't have believed that seeing her again would bring back a rush of memories he'd hoped to have forgotten. It seemed unfair to be haunted by the past, but then, he'd learned a long time ago that life was neither fair nor easy. Growing up in poverty, he'd developed a keen understanding of the fact that in order to even out the stakes in this life, a man had to have money and lots of it. His old man, when he'd been around, had taught him well. A few years later John Cawthorne had only reinforced that theory.

“Jerk,” Mason growled and wondered where was the sense of satisfaction he'd been hoping to feel, why had the warm knowledge that he was finally getting even escaped him. Somehow, he suspected, this all had something to do with Bliss and how he felt about her, how he'd felt about her in the past, and what the future might hold for them.

Snorting in disgust at the turn of his thoughts, he headed down the stairs and to a space near the street where he'd parked his rig. Traffic was sparse on the quiet streets of town.

He should forget Bliss. She'd stumbled into his life at a time when the last thing he'd needed was involvement with the boss's daughter, but she'd been the most incredible woman he'd laid eyes upon in a long time and fighting his attraction to her had failed miserably.

Then he'd nearly killed her. He should never have let her take off on that horse in the middle of a storm. He should have risked her wrath and refused to let her saddle Lucifer. It would have been better to risk the old man's anger and lose his job than to have Bliss's life endangered.

But then, he'd never been smart when it came to John Cawthorne's daughter. He hadn't been then; wouldn't be now.

Ten years after the accident, he was still drumming up excuses to see her, to be alone with her. Even as he climbed into his truck and silently swore that he'd keep his hands off her, he already knew that he was only kidding himself. Before the day was out, he'd find a reason to see her again.

“Hell, Lafferty,” he told the eyes glaring back at him in his rearview mirror. “You've got it and you've got it bad.” He threw his pickup into reverse, backed out, then nosed the truck onto the dusty pothole-strewn avenue. “Real bad.”