The Cowboy Who Broke the Mold (3 page)

“They can carry tularemia—a nasty, contagious disease
that you nor your schoolchildren would care to contract. First you bloat up and then—”

Not wanting to hear all the gruesome details, Carrie cut him off. “Surely blasting the little creatures is a little harsh?” she questioned, envisioning herself point- ing a shotgun out a window and blowing a chunk out of the hillside.

“Oh, well, if you’re squeamish…” Judson rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I guess I could show you how to trap the little buggers if you’d like. That way you won’t ruin the fur, and if you skin ’em, you can collect a bounty for the pelts.”

The expression on Carrie’s face indicated that option was not exactly palatable, either.

“You really…think it’s…necessary to kill them?” she asked.

“I sure do,” he said, leaning forward and taking one of her hands into his.

A jolt surged through Carrie at his touch. The man’s hands were rugged and callused and big. And when they enveloped hers, a sweet pain unlike any she had ever known before rushed through her. She could liken it only to grabbing hold of a live electrical wire and being unable to let go. Carrie couldn’t help but wonder if a woman would feel the need to struggle beneath such rough hands…

Pushing himself away from the table, Judson picked up the bill and ambled over to the cash register. As she cast a lingering look around the ancient mercantile, Car- rie heard Judson tell the cashier to throw in a length of rope for trapping jackalopes.

His sudden kindness left her feeling beholden, and she felt a rush of gratitude for his concern.

Opening the door into the bright sunshine, Judson Horn warned gruffly, “Remember, I warned you. Har- mony ain’t near so fancy.”

C
arrie’s first impression of her new home was that it was a picture-perfect postcard. Nestled into the fringe of an aspen grove, the school overlooked a meadow speckled with purple lupine and enough wild sunflowers to give the impression that the entire countryside was dotted with butter. Threading its way though the meadow like a silver ribbon was the magnificent Popo Agie River.

A world unto itself, the tiny school district of Har- mony, Wyoming, combined the old and the new. It con- sisted of a little white schoolhouse, complete with a bell in the steeple, which looked like it was taken straight out of a historical novel. A dirt field beside the buildings served as a playground providing two slides, swings, a merry-go-round and a wobbly basketball hoop nailed onto a pole. Beside the playground, a trailer house was set on a concrete foundation, and there, glistening be- neath the sun in front of the two buildings, sat a shiny, new black-and-red Chevy pickup.

Eager to inspect it all for herself, Carrie flung the door open and hopped out of the dilapidated Ford pickup before it even rolled to a stop. She hurried up the weathered steps of the schoolhouse to impatiently jiggle the doorknob. It seemed to her that Judson Horn was taking his own sweet time getting out of the pickup.

Joining her at last on the narrow stoop, he drawled, “You’re sure in a big hurry to be disappointed.”

Carrie’s resentment flared at the gloomy prediction. “I’ll be the judge of how I feel, thank you.”

Tapping her foot upon the smoothly worn wood, she added in a rush, “Now would you please be so kind as to open this door and let me in?”

His long, drawn-out sigh made it clear that he pre- ferred to keep her locked out indefinitely. Carrie watched in shameless fascination while he fished the depths of his jeans’ front pocket for the key. The blood throbbing inside her veins began to simmer, heightening the warm flush on her cheeks. This man was so utterly, so totally, sensual that she had little doubt he was aware of the effect he had upon her, on all women for that matter. The only difference being that Carrie was de- termined to resist him. She had no intention of becom- ing another in what was likely a long, long line of con- quests. Besides, only a couple of months ago she had sworn off all men—especially good-looking ones with attitudes as big as their ten-gallon hats.

“Here you go,” Judson said, handing over a silver ring linking four tarnished keys and a tacky plastic tab faintly marked with the school district’s emblem.

Fervently Carrie hoped that they were keys that would lock out the heartache of the past as well as open the doors to the future. Not unlike a child on Christmas
morning, she slipped the key into the lock and opened the schoolhouse door.

Had Judson Horn, the indomitable curmudgeon, not been there beside her she would have rushed to the front of the room and spun around in her excitement. Instead Carrie stood silently beside him in the doorway and wrapped her arms around herself.

It was like turning a page in a history book. Though the dozen desks were fairly new and there was a com- puter in the back of the room, Carrie felt exactly as if she had walked back into the nineteenth century. All the desks faced front, toward an old oak desk that ap- peared as immovable as history itself. On top of it rested an old battered school bell that had undoubtedly called to generations of children. Directly behind the teacher’s desk was an expanse of antique slate board. Portraits of Washington and Lincoln graced the side walls as patri- otically as they had. throughout the century, and an American flag hung limply in the stillness of time. A potbellied stove dominated the back of the room. The fat potentate seemingly awaiting the time its fiery tem- perament would once again be stoked.

The deep timber of Judson’s voice pulled her back into the twentieth century. “Well?”

Expecting a list of grievances as long as a trail drive, he braced himself against the door frame.

“It’s perfect,” she murmured. “Absolutely perfect!”

A flash of derision quickly replaced the momentary surprise that registered in Judson’s eyes.

“We’ll see how you feel when it’s forty below, the power’s out, and you’ve got to get a fire going in that old stove.”

Damn it all, but she sure was pretty all lit up from the inside out that way. The look of genuine excitement
shining in Carrie’s soft green eyes touched a chord deep inside him. Her response was not at all what he had expected. He’d figured all he would have to do to run off this prissy Easterner would be to show her the prim- itive conditions of her contract, and she’d be history faster than he could say
adios.
It hadn’t taken but the threat of hard times to send Cheryl Sue scurrying back into her daddy’s big house, leaving him with a scarred back and a heart to match—not to mention a matched set of newborn twins.

Given his past history, Judson found the new school- teacher to be most perplexing. Nervous, brash, fright- ened, spunky—an enigma all wrapped up in an appeal- ing feminine package that spelled trouble with a capi- tal
T
!

His icy gaze raked her face. “Come on,” he mut- tered, reminding himself that he’d had enough trouble with women to last him a lifetime. “Let’s put your lug- gage in the trailer.”

Sinking into the soft earth with each step she took, Carrie followed after him, awkwardly maneuvering the short distance in her high-heel shoes. What was fash- ionable in Chicago, she realized with chagrin, was purely impractical in the Wind River Mountains of Wy- oming.

“Welcome to paradise,” he quipped, holding out one arm as if formally admitting her to Buckingham Palace.

Carrie was beginning to truly resent the man whose outlook on life was as clouded as the dirty windows in her new home. On the spot she decided that her very first item of business would be to clean those filmy win- dows. Too bad, she thought, Judson Horn’s negative attitude couldn’t be as easily wiped away.

A musty smell assailed her nostrils the instant she
stepped inside the trailer. Looking around the room, Carrie decided it would have gratified the most austere monk. The furniture consisted of a cheap couch and matching chair. The windows had no curtains, and the carpet was a sickly color of rust in which the major traffic patterns were clearly and indelibly worn. Her thoughts traveled back to her plush apartment in Chi- cago. Complete with tennis courts and swimming pool, it had been chic, modern and
clean.

Her parents would be horrified to find her living in what they would surely consider squalor. Her mother wouldn’t so much as unpack her bags for an overnight stay in a place like this. Feeling Judson’s probing eyes upon her, Carrie defiantly tipped up her chin, refusing him the satisfaction of witnessing a single tear shed in disappointment.

As he took a seat in the living room, Carrie began her inspection. Following the narrow hallway to its end, she opened the door to her bedroom. “Spartan” was the word that came to mind. There was a bed with a white chenille spread that had yellowed to a dingy shade of beige, a small closet and a flimsy bureau. It struck her as peculiar that such an austere decor failed to re- press a fleeting, sinful fantasy of being alone with a blue-eyed Indian stretched out across this bed….

Suddenly the room grew stiflingly hot. What in the world was she doing fantasizing about a man who clearly regarded her as an unwelcome interloper? Lest Judson Horn become impatient, come looking for her and find her engaged in a lustful fantasy that featured him buck-naked on her bed, Carrie hastened back to the living room.

There she was made aware of how very long Judson’s legs were as she was forced to step over them. Sitting
in the chair with his hands behind his head, he looked as comfortable as a cat that called the world his own domain. And as Carrie felt his eyes run the length of her, she had the unnerving feeling that if she wasn’t careful, she might just wind up being this dangerous tom’s next meal.

“There’s no phone,” he informed her as noncha- lantly as she imagined he would relay the going price of beef on the hoof. “Since it’s not worth the phone company’s time and equipment to run a line all the way out here for just one trailer, you have to go back to Atlantic City to place a call. You’ll probably want to invest in a cellular phone for your own personal use, but in case of emergencies, there’s a two-way radio.”

Rising smoothly from the chair, he walked into the kitchen, pulled an ancient-looking apparatus from the narrow pantry and proceeded to explain the operations of two-way communication.

This was far more primitive than Carrie had ever imagined. The term could just as easily be applied to the man standing beside her. Filling her lungs with the heady scent of his musky masculinity, she found it increasingly difficult to keep her mind focused on the task at hand.

“Knowing how to work this radio could mean the difference between life and death,” he said in a tone Carrie suspected was reserved especially for ridiculous city slickers like herself.

Keenly aware of the woman next to him, Judson bat- tled a sudden overwhelming feeling of protectiveness for his children’s teacher. He knew he intimidated her, meant to in fact, so why did the widening of those great big eyes make him feel like such a beast? The feeling threatened to put a chink in his well-polished emotional
armor. She was so utterly vulnerable standing there looking up at him as if he were an encyclopedia of Western living that for a minute he almost wished he could be the white-hatted cowboy she wanted him to be. The irony of that particular image brought an off- kilter smirk to Judson’s lips. As he recalled, in the mov- ies the good guys were usually fair-skinned blonds. Breeds were generally cast in roles several pegs below the black-hatted villain.

Distracted by the erotic curve of Carrie’s lower lip held in consternation between her teeth, Judson was seized by a sudden urge to brush those feathery bangs away from her sweet, open face. How in the name of hell could a spoiled Eastern brat possibly arouse such tender feelings in him?

Was it that perfume she wore, a subtle blend of flow- ers and musk, that tempted him to disregard the mis- takes of the past and recklessly indulge in the possibil- ities of the moment? Angrily, Judson reminded himself that no fragrance was powerful enough to cover the stench of prejudice. He was no longer a schoolboy to be won over by the batting of long eyelashes and the promise of happily-ever-afters that ultimately disinte- grated beneath public scrutiny. That lesson was per- manently etched upon his back.

The problem, Judson told himself, was simply that he was a warm-blooded man who had been a long time without a woman’s touch. Apparently far too long. Maybe it was time to reconsider sexy Estelle Hanway’s unconditional standing invitation into her bed. If that were the case, he wondered why the thought held even less appeal than usual today.

Deliberately he inserted a cool tone of indifference in his voice. “After I show you to your winter transportation,
you’ll need to go into town to buy some supplies. Other than a few conveniences at the gas station, Atlantic City doesn’t have anything in the way of groceries so Lander’s your best choice. And I’d suggest you stock up on canned goods. You won’t get many chances to run to town, and there’s always the possi- bility of an early September snow. I’d hate for you to starve to death during a blizzard.”

Carrie doubted it. For some inexplicable reason the man seemed to despise her. That way he had of looking right through her made her feel as insignificant as a gnat, and she had the feeling that he would, in fact, be elated by the thought of her frozen demise.

Mutely, she followed him outside to a spot behind the trailer.

Pointing at a dusty heap, Judson calmly disclosed, “That’s how you get out in the winter.”

Covered with a tarp and a layer of dust sat a massive snowmobile.

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

Carrie could no more envision herself astride this monstrosity than she could see herself climbing atop a raging bull. She was as stunned by the fact that she was going to have to somehow learn how to drive this for- midable contraption as she was by the tremendous amount of wood stacked against the backside of the schoolhouse. Surely it was excessive. The winters couldn’t possibly be as severe as this infuriating man would lead her to believe.

Judson didn’t have to say a word. That I-told-you-so look of his said it all loud and clear.

Pushing his hat back on his head, he regarded her as a little lamb lost. When he informed her that it was time for him to get going, Carrie merely looked at him
blankly in response. He felt compelled to add in expla- nation as he turned to go, “Look, I’ve got a date, but if you want to, you can follow me into Lander. It’s the nearest town from here.”

Judson deliberately withheld the fact that his “date” was nothing more than picking up his children. He wasn’t exactly sure why he didn’t want Carrie knowing just how unattached he was—that he couldn’t even remember the last time he had been on a real date. But he decided if the way his libido was presently holding his brain hostage was any indication, it was definitely time to remedy that Preferably with a woman who had zero expectations of any commitment. There were only two things in this world that Judson Horn was truly committed to. And right now he was half an hour late picking them up from the baby-sitter’s.

Carrie felt as if she had been sucker-punched. She blamed her reaction less on the fact that this handsome cowboy was involved in a relationship than on the re- alization that he was heading right toward that beautiful red-and-black pickup. The instant she had seen it parked in front of the school, she had assumed that the brand- new vehicle was the transportation provided in her con- tract. That it, in fact, belonged to Judson could only mean that the old bomber in which she had been driven here was to be hers.

Swallowing her disappointment, Carrie stammered, “Th-that’s all right. I want to get settled in. You go on, and don’t worry about me…But before you go…could you possibly…”

It pained her to have to ask Judson for help, but al- though she was initially skeptical about the horned menace,
her introduction to myriad new fauna had Carrie worried that the area was indeed teeming with exotic perils.