Cowboy Crazy (2 page)

Sarah Landon stepped into the Carrigan tower and flashed a smile at the receptionist that felt about as deep as her silk camisole and steady as her high-heeled pumps. When she was a little girl, she’d dressed up as Wonder Woman for Halloween. Now she dressed up in a costume every day, smoothing her flyaway red hair, basting foundation over her freckles, and pasting on that confident, take-charge smile. While she might not leap tall buildings in a single bound, she managed to scale the tallest one in Wyoming every morning en route to her boss’s tenth-floor office.

But that wasn’t her greatest feat of strength. She’d climbed the hallowed towers of two Ivy League colleges too, earning a master’s degree in political science with a focus on energy policy and leaving her small-town roots behind forever.

Or so she hoped. Her hometown of Two Shot was only an hour’s drive from Casper, but it held so many memories she did her best to stay away. Even when she visited her sister Kelsey she avoided the place, keeping herself cloistered in the tidy single-wide at the edge of town.

Of course, Kelsey was always urging her to eat at Suze’s Diner, shop at the candy store on the corner, do all the things they’d done as kids. But Sarah knew better. When she left Two Shot, she’d left behind a lot of disapproving glances, gossip, and snide whispers about who she’d been and who she planned to be. She wasn’t about to let all that into her life again. The past was gone, and she was keeping it that way.

She pressed a button and stepped into the steel-sided elevator. The construction of the sleek, modern tower that housed Carrigan Corporation had been trumpeted as the start of a new age of prosperity for Casper, but most of the dollars drilled out of the ground bypassed the city, winging their way to various executives and speculators back East. Casper’s only skyscraper still stood alone, looming over crumbling brick storefronts and proving what everyone already knew: the Carrigans owned this town.

The building was cutting-edge architecture, spacious and contemporary, but entering Eric Carrigan’s office was like stepping into the past. The room was carpeted in plush hunter green and decorated with dark wood, leather, and brass in the style of a Victorian gentleman’s club. It was jarring to look through the window behind his hulking mahogany desk and see cars and trucks passing on the street below. It would have been more fitting to view a host of hackney cabs dodging Dickensian urchins.

A copy of the
Casper
Star
flew through the air as she entered. It would have hit her if she hadn’t caught it. She bobbled it in the air a couple times before clutching it to her chest.

“I saw the story,” she said.

She wasn’t the only one. Everybody in town had seen it.
Oil
Heirs
Battle
Over
Rights
to
Ranch
, bellowed the oversized headline. It topped an account of Lane’s interview with the reporter from Channel 10 and a detailed history of the brothers’ lifelong rivalry.

“Looks like a job for the public affairs manager,” Eric said.

It looked to Sarah as if Eric needed a private affairs manager to deal with his brother, but she waved one hand with a suave confidence she didn’t feel and stepped up to the task. “I wouldn’t worry. A fight with your brother gives you a public forum to explain the process.”

Eric shot his cuffs and adjusted his tie. In some men the gesture would have looked vain and silly, but Eric moved with such assurance that it only emphasized the square strength of his hands and the chiseled masculinity of his jaw. With his dark good looks and designer duds, he looked like the boardroom hero of a Harlequin romance. Female interns and administrative assistants fluttered around him like moths to a lightbulb, but Sarah wasn’t interested. For one thing, he was her boss. For another thing, she’d sworn off men, and Eric didn’t make her heart flutter anyway.

“The way I see it, your brother’s handed you publicity on a silver platter,” she said.

“Lane would never touch a silver platter. If he gave us anything, he shoved it at us with a manure fork.” Eric tapped a remote and his brother’s image appeared on a big-screen television mounted in a discreet wooden frame above a carved credenza.

“
I’m not letting that happen to Two Shot
,” the image said.

Sarah shifted uneasily. The reference to her old hometown had kept her awake half the night. Why was Lane Carrigan talking about a Podunk little town twenty miles from the ranch? What did he care about Two Shot?

“Really, your brother’s doing my job for me.” Sarah felt like she had a manure fork herself, only she was using it to shovel actual bullshit. “You wanted publicity, and there it is.”

The two of them watched the screen in silence as the camera shifted to follow Lane and his cowboy cohorts across the packed-dirt parking lot in back of the arena. The lens zeroed in on the fringe framing the West’s best-known Wrangler butt and she shifted in her chair. “Proving the process doesn’t affect Lane’s cattle operation will be a major public relations victory. They can’t complain when we’re willing to risk your family ranch, right? And everyone will be talking about it now. It’s just what we wanted.”

Actually, she suspected everyone was talking about the way Lane Carrigan’s butt looked in those chaps. Everyone female, anyway.

She slapped the thought away and turned back to her boss, who was tapping a pencil on the desk top and scowling.

“We’ll make it work,” she said, shoveling on more fake confidence. “We’ll talk to him.”

“How? I left message after message. No response.” Eric lurched out of his chair and started to pace, raking his fingers through his dark hair. “Now that he’s been attacked by that reporter, he’ll probably claim we sandbagged him. He’s impossible, Sarah. It’s going to be a tough fight.”

His shoulders slumped, and for a moment Sarah saw past the professional facade. Eric was only human, and being vilified as a land-raping oil executive while your brother reaped glory as a rodeo star couldn’t be easy—especially when that brother slammed you on national TV.

No
such
thing
as
bad
publicity
, she told herself.
No
such
thing.
Somehow, she’d turn it their way. She had to. This job was a perfect match for her skills. It would carry her far beyond her past and into a world where she could finally stop worrying—about herself, about her family, and about her place in the world. In the business world, hard work paid solid dividends nobody could ever take away.

Nobody. Not Lane Carrigan, or anybody else.

***

Late afternoon sun slanted over Sarah’s desk, casting the long shadow of her mile-high in-box over the paperwork she was trying to finish. Eric appeared at her door just as she was about to dot an i and cross a final t.

“He’s coming in.”

The drama in his tone made it sound like he was talking about a fugitive from justice.

“Lane,” he clarified. “He’ll be here in ten minutes. I’d like you to be there.”

She started to protest, but he held a hand up to stop her. “He’s turned this into a public relations issue, and that means you’re going to be involved.”

She followed him to his office and perched on the chair in front of his desk, back straight, legs crossed. Her pose radiated poise and self-control, but she caught herself covertly biting her cheek the way she always did when she was tense. Sometimes she worried she’d chew her way right through it, but until then nobody would know how uptight she was. The nervous habit kept her hands steady and her gaze level.

“It’s good he’s willing to talk,” she said.

“Not really. He says he’s not going to allow the drilling.”

“He doesn’t really have a choice.” Sarah felt a stab of remorse. Sometimes she felt like she was on the wrong side of these arguments. She’d driven past the Carrigan Ranch a hundred times, maybe a thousand, admiring the smooth, concentric curves of plowed land that traced the contours of the earth. Now those graceful lines would be replaced by long, random scars and right-angled roads that cut through the land with no regard for dips or valleys, rocks or trees.

But she couldn’t think about that now. She needed to keep her mind on her job. “The company owns the mineral rights. What’s he going to do—chain himself to a tree?”

“He says that reporter wants to talk to him again.”

“I’ll bet she does.” Sarah blushed, hoping her boss hadn’t caught the sex-starved subtext in her words.

“Well, look out.” Eric patted his hair into place and crossed his legs. “He tends to bowl people over. Especially women.”

“I know the type,” Sarah said. She’d met enough professional cowboys to understand that the macho, rough-and-tumble rodeo life had probably puffed up Lane’s ego to the size of a mushroom cloud from an atomic bomb. And no doubt he’d try to blast her to kingdom come along with his brother.

Eric grimaced and adjusted his tie again, then shifted a trio of pens around his blotter. He lined them up parallel to each other, then shifted them to an angled arrangement. Picking up a stack of papers, he riffled through them and placed them to the left side of his blotter. After a second or two, he picked them up, tapped them on the desk to square the edges, and moved them to the right side. She’d never seen him like this. One of the reasons she liked working for Eric was his self-assured, take-charge confidence. The only time it seemed to waver was when the subject of his brother came up.

The door swung open and his helmet-haired assistant Dot tipped her head in.

Eric straightened. “Yes, Dorothy?”

“Mr. Carrigan, your brother…”

Lane Carrigan filled the doorway, standing with his legs slightly apart and his arms folded over his chest. He was taller than Eric by a couple of inches, but what made her jaw drop were the muscles straining his worn denim shirt and the uncanny vibrancy of his blue eyes. Eric had those same eyes, but in his aristocratic face they were merely interesting. Contrasted with Lane’s deep tan, they were striking. Eric was handsome, lean, graceful. Lane was a force of nature.

She wondered how old he was. Eric was the little brother, so that made Lane what? Twenty-nine? But he looked older. While Eric’s face was unlined, Lane had faint crow’s-feet when he smiled and long furrows that bracketed his mouth when he didn’t. Eric’s face was genteel and perfectly proportioned; Lane’s was craggier, with a nose that was just a little too big and brows that jutted over his eyes, making the blue of them seem all the more piercing. It was like you’d taken the same man and let one live a refined, easy life while you put the other one through the wringer. She wondered if it was just outdoor life that made Lane look so much older, or if the lines on his face had been written there by some kind of stress or even sadness.

She folded her hands in her lap, doing her best to look prim and professional and praying she’d managed to wipe the lust from her face. Her tummy wasn’t just doing a happy dance; it was cutting a rug in an all-out, hell-for-leather tango.

Lane nodded politely at the secretary. “Thanks, Dot.”

The assistant made a high-pitched giggling sound that was totally at odds with her usual stolid personality and fluttered away. Lane headed for a chair, his stride a little uneven. Somehow the slight limp only made him seem more masculine—maybe because Sarah knew it was the result of an encounter with an angry bull.

But he was clearly at ease in the corporate surroundings, maybe because he overwhelmed them. His presence dominated the room in spite of Eric’s imposing desk, and his animal intensity made the fluorescent light seem suddenly pale and artificial. He glanced at Sarah and her belly twisted again, hard this time, with an urgency that was almost painful. The man’s eyes seemed to see right through her skin and into her soul—or maybe just into her underwear. Certainly the spasm of heat that bolted through her made her feel naked.

But she didn’t like rodeo cowboys, she reminded herself. Not anymore. They’d been her heroes once upon a time, but since then she’d seen firsthand what their devil-may-care attitude and risqué charm could do to a woman’s life. She’d sworn off men in general and cowboys in particular—at least until she got her career rolling.

Lane lowered himself into the chair beside her, shoving it backward so he could stretch out his legs. Now she couldn’t see his face, and she felt immediately uneasy, as if he’d somehow earned an advantage.

“Lane.” Eric reached for the pens and aligned them in a new, precise arrangement on the left side of the blotter. “This is Sarah Landon, our new public relations consultant. We’re glad you could make it.”

“Are you?”

Lane stared at Sarah with an unwavering and decidedly hostile gaze. She wished she had some pens to fool with, but all she could do was tighten her interlaced fingers in her lap and hope the heat in her face didn’t show. The man was so loaded with pheromones that his gaze burned like a branding iron. She told herself the tugging low in her belly was just a reaction to the famous Carrigan charm, but her inner hussy was sashaying around in her belly like the boogie-woogie love child of Richard Simmons and Maksim Chmerkovskiy.

It took all her self-control to give Lane a cold, formal nod. Normally she would have offered her hand, but his gaze made it clear they were already in a fight of wills and she wasn’t about to give him the chance to snub her and score a point.

“Nice to meet you.” He pushed his chair further back and crossed his scuffed cowboy boots at the ankles. They weren’t the tooled, polished fashion statements the wannabes wore to happy hour. They were plain brown leather, rough, scuffed, and unadorned. Workingman’s boots.

But he didn’t work, she reminded herself. He played, riding real-life rocking horses like a three-year-old on steroids.

She worked her way up the faded denim of his jeans, flicking her attention to his face when she found herself eying his belt buckle. His answering gaze slid down the lapels of her jacket and dove into the modest neckline of her camisole. From there, it drifted from side to side, making her renegade nipples perk up and stand at painful attention.