Walk Away Joe

WALK AWAY JOE

A Classic Cindy Gerard Romance

Cindy Gerard

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

WALK AWAY JOE

Copyright © 2014 by Cindy Gerard

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Photo Credits:

Cowboy Style © olly / Dollar Photo Club

1

………

S
HE’D BEEN WARNED ABOUT MEN
like him. She’d been warned about this man specifically. Keep your distance, Karla had told her. Tucker Lambert was bad.

 
But, oh,
Sara thought, watching him through twenty yards of moonlight and the heat of the sultry Texas night,
was he pretty.

He hadn’t heard her slip outside. Standing with his back to her, he didn’t know she was studying him as he folded his arms across the top board of the paddock fence. And while his loose-hipped cowboy stance appeared posed, he couldn’t possibly be aware of the picture he made.

A full, rising moon cast his body in dramatic relief against a sweeping vista dotted with the dark silhouettes of a dozen placidly grazing horses. Thinking himself alone, he contemplated the night in silence.

The silence, she decided, watching him from the shadows of the covered courtyard entry of the little guest casa, wasn’t the only thing they would share before the night was over.

Tucker Lambert. The quintessential American cowboy. He was a drifter turned rancher with a history of being down on his luck and a habit of breaking hearts. A real Walkaway Joe. exactly the kind of man Sara Stewart needed tonight.

He’d tossed his sweat-stained chambray shirt carelessly over the white rail fence beside him. His workingman’s jeans, covered with dust and frayed at one knee, rode low and loose on his lean hips. A battered brown Resistol sat far back on his head. Beneath it, his thick chamois-colored hair was matted with sweat, spiked in soft, damp curls at the nape of his neck.

Pretty, she thought again, appreciating the deep tan of his bare back, painted even darker by the moonglow, the toned muscle tapering to a narrow waist, defined by shadows and substance. Like a statue cast in bronze, he was lovingly molded, artfully crafted. Perfection. Temptation. As faultless in design as he was flawed in character.

Karla had called him a womanizer, yet smiled fondly when she said it. He was a man who played at love and loved to play, she’d said. A man who had broken more hearts in his thirty-plus years than he had broncs. A man you could count on for only one thing—to leave you as he’d found you. Alone.

Slipping open another button on her scoop-necked gauze blouse, Sara pressed the cool, sweating longneck against her heated skin before tipping the bottle to her mouth and taking another deep swallow.

If Karla was here, she’d tell her gently that she’d had too much to drink. Pragmatist that she was, Sara would concur. She’d even agree that sometimes these days she drank a little too much, a little too often. After all, that was the reason Karla and Lance had shanghaied her seven long days ago and dumped her in this godforsaken sweat hole Lambert called a ranch in the first place.

What they didn’t understand was that when she drank, she did it for a reason. It helped her forget. At least it helped her forget some things. Unfortunately, it helped her remember others. It helped her remember what was real and at the same time let her forget she didn’t deserve any better than what she was getting. And tonight, it had played a major part in convincing her that Tucker Lambert, her reluctant nursemaid and a man who until a week ago had been a stranger, was as good a distraction as any to buffer another kind of pain.

She slumped back against the stone-and-adobe archway as a picture flashed through her mind with the force of an ax blow. The face of a child, nameless, bloodless, except for the deep crimson stain spread across his chest. Another life she couldn’t save.

Forcing the gruesome picture from her mind, she battled back the ache of failure and the hollow hopelessness that came with it. She didn’t need a doctor to diagnose her problem. Battle fatigue. Too many years working as head nurse in ER. Too much blood. Too much violence. Too much death. Too much hope lost for this healer who couldn’t always heal.

She refused to think about any of that now. After all, Karla and Lance had brought her here so that she could get away from the front line. And, she reminded herself staunchly as she focused on Lambert again, tonight’s plan was to concentrate on him. She was determined to do just that. He was going to be her fix. At least for tonight. He was a temporary man. She needed a temporary relief. It was a winning combination if she’d ever seen one.

Shoving away from the archway, she dragged a hand through the tousled brown hair that barely skimmed her shoulders and walked with slow determination toward him. The soft folds of her long print skirt brushed sensually against her bare legs with each step. The dry Texas dust, still warm from the blistering summer sun, sifted like fine powder between her bare toes.

Lambert angled his head around when he heard her approach. With a sleepy blink of his blue eyes, he looked her up and down as she pressed her shoulder blades against the wooden fence rail beside him.

She let him look. Showing him her profile, she stared first at the little guest casa she’d been forced to temporarily call home, then at the matching dwelling Lambert’s brother shared with his wife and child and finally at the dim lights of the sprawling Spanish ranch house nestled between them.

Aware that he was still watching her, she drew the bottle across her throat, then downward in a slow cooling glide. Holding it lingeringly between her breasts, she invited his gaze to follow.

“Hot,” she said, hearing a huskiness in her voice that his bold assessment created.

“Texas,” he said, after a long, slow eyeful. “July,” he added, turning back to his study of the night and hiking a boot heel on the bottom fence rung. “Kind of tells the tale, don’t it?”

She forced a laugh. “You like to play the good ol’ boy, don’t you?” Tipping her head back, she gazed up at the dazzling stars. They lit up the night on the plains as they never could in the smog-drenched Lambert skies she was used to. “You like to come across as the uneducated cowpoke who’s never read anything but a cutting-horse journal or the label on a longneck.”

He sliced her a lazy, sideways glance. “And what do
you
like to play, Miz Stewart? Other than the wounded bird, that is.”

Coated in his soft Texas drawl, his barb lost enough of its sting that she smiled again. So, the cowboy had an opinion. So what? She told herself she didn’t care what he thought of her. She didn’t want to get to know him well enough to have it matter. Her tone said as much. “Is that how you see me?”

He turned to fully face her then. Thumbing back his hat, he leaned an elbow on the fence railing. “I see you as a woman with a problem.” He glanced pointedly at the bottle in her hand before he met her eyes again. “And it seems to me that you’re lookin’ in the wrong place for the answer.”

She drew a deep breath, determined not to let his words get to her. “Well, now, that’s where your Will Rogers philosophy has let you down, cowboy.” Defiant, she took a long, deep swallow. Amber courage. Liquid oblivion. “Because, you see, Mr. Lambert, I’m not looking for any answers.”

His response was swift and painfully on target. “Hidin’ away from ’em, then.”

She closed her eyes, wanting to hate him for being right, hate herself for what she was doing. But as it had so often lately, the bottle had become her security. She laid it again to the side of her face, catching the last beads of cooling sweat against her cheek as a teardrop of perspiration trickled between her breasts.

She breathed deep of a night that was scented with dry sage and Texas heat. “I didn’t come out here to be analyzed.”

“Is that a fact?” His lazy question was soft and slow and judgmental. “Then why exactly
did
you come out here ... ma’am?” he added with deliberate provocation.

She turned toward him. His eyes were narrowed and searching. Even in the moonlight, they were a stunning, sultry blue. Even beneath the shadowed brim of his hat, she could see the dare—sexual, mocking, dangerous.

Karla was right. He was bad. She wanted him tonight in spite of it. She
needed
him tonight because of it.

Boldly holding his gaze, she moved toward him, then against him. Lifting her hand to his face, she caressed his jaw with the cool side of the bottle in a slow, intimate enticement.

He didn’t move. Not away from her. Not into her. He just stood there, waiting in a silence that could have been either anticipation or indifference.

“Why did I come out here?” she murmured, hooking her wrist behind his neck and pulling herself flush against him. “If you can’t figure it out...then you’re not the man I thought you were.’’

He was hot. The burn of his bare chest seared through the thin cotton of her blouse where her breasts pressed and pulsed against him. Beneath her hand, she felt a sheen of sweat coating his back. It made her wonder at the taste of him. And at the extent of his hunger.

She lowered her mouth to touch and tease her lips across the pulse beat at his throat—and tasted salt, and musk, and male.

He sucked in his breath. The sinewy cords of his neck grew taut and ridged before he raised his hands to grip her wrists. Strong hands. Working man’s hands. Yet remarkably gentle as he tugged them slowly from around his neck and held them steady between their bodies.

“Why, Miz Stewart...” His voice, southern-soft and midnight-mellow, had a distinctly rusty edge. “I do believe you plan to have your way with me.”

He was six-two to her five-three. He outweighed her by a good seventy pounds. In a test of strength, she’d lose, hands down. But this wasn’t about strength. It was about sex and salvation and a few stunning hours of oblivion.

She looked directly into his eyes. The shadow of his Resistol hardened the dark expression on his face as she pulled her wrists free of his grip and moved into him again.

“My way... Your way..." The bottle slid through her fingers and dropped with a muffled thump to the ground. “Any way you want, cowboy,” she whispered against his throat as her hands glided along the damp satin of his back, then slipped to his hips. With a boldness born of determination, she cupped the tight, taut muscle of his buttocks in her palms.

She felt him shudder when she pulled him flush against her hips. Felt the deep rise and fall of his chest, the thick heavy thuds of his heartbeat against her breasts.

“You like that.” Her smile pressed to his bare chest as the swift and hard length of his arousal nestled in the softness of her belly. “For a minute there, I thought you were going to disappoint me.”

A low, deep chuckle rumbled against her cheek. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m going to disappoint you, all right.” His warm breath fanned the top of her head. “Bank on it.”
 

“Now, that’s where you’re wrong again.” She arched her neck to look up at him. “Nothing you could do could disappoint me. Unless you told me you didn’t want to take me to bed.”

He drew a deep, ragged breath. Then he gripped her hard by her shoulders and set her away. “And that’s all you want from me?”

The barely controlled anger in his voice surprised her. So did the roughness of his hold. His fingers bit into her shoulders. When she flinched, grimacing at the unexpected pain, he let her go.

“That’s all I want,” she assured him, unsettled by the turmoil in his eyes, but determined to go through with this. “No commitments. No expectations. Just a good time. You can live with that, can’t you?”

His eyes turned dark and brooding. “I can live with it,” he said with grim intensity. “The question is, can you?”
 

This was something she hadn’t expected from him. Hesitation. Anger. Maybe even a conscience. She didn’t want any part of any of it. And she didn’t want to think about the fact that he might be right. That she might not be able to live with herself if she saw this through. She didn’t want to think at all. After months of existing in an enforced, protective numbness, she wanted to feel.

“For a man who’s noted for action,” she murmured, hating the telling tremor in her voice, ‘‘you ask an awful lot of questions.”

“And for a woman who’s already got one problem, you’re taking a foolish risk, asking for another.”

She resented the hell out of the pity she read in his eyes. Resented it and refused to let it affect her. Her problems were hers, no one else’s. Especially not his.

She didn’t understand his reaction. The general consensus was that Lambert was a bad seed with the morals of an alley cat and the scruples of a grifter.