Brady finished the dishes and threw some corn in his pickup and drove out to feed the twenty head of Black Angus cattle he already had while Kelsey showered and got ready to go. When she came downstairs, he was still out on the ranch somewhere. But there was an older man she had never seen before walking around their front yard. He was standing next to a late-model luxury sedan. He had on an elegant suit that was very much at odds with his craggy, rough-hewn appearance. Frowning, Kelsey went out to see who he was and what he wanted. As she got closer, he swept off his dove-gray cowboy hat, revealing a full head of silver hair that was badly in need of a trim.
“Can I help you?”
He nodded at her politely and put his hat back on his head, before striding toward her authoritatively. His dark eyes zeroed in on hers. “I’m looking for Brady Anderson or Kelsey Lockhart,” he said in a raspy voice.
“I’m Kelsey.” Kelsey held out her hand—it was immediately swallowed up in his much larger, very callused palm. “What can I do for you?” she continued, noting the expensive gold rings he had on each hand. The diamond, onyx and ruby stones looked to be genuine and expensive. Not the kind of thing an ordinary cow-poke or someone from Laramie, Texas, would wear. The same went for his shiny alligator boots.
“My name is Hargett,” he said.
“Pleased to meet you,” Kelsey said. Was it her imagination or was their unexpected caller giving her a particularly close—almost suspicious—scrutiny, too?
Before Kelsey could ask Hargett anything more, Brady roared back into the yard. He jumped out of his truck and strode toward them. It was clear by the extremely irked look on Brady’s handsome face that he knew who Hargett was even if she didn’t. “What are you doing here?” Brady demanded, ignoring Kelsey and going straight for Hargett.
“Nothing yet,” Kelsey said, not sure why Brady was being so rude to this man.
Ignoring her, Brady looked at Hargett. “We had a deal,” he stated tightly, abruptly looking like he wanted to punch someone or something. “You weren’t to come near me.”
Hargett shrugged, not the least bit apologetic. “Time’s up,” he said.
Brady clenched his jaw and, still glaring at Hargett resentfully, pushed the words through his teeth, “Not for two more weeks it’s not.”
Brady wheeled around abruptly. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he propelled her toward the ranch house. “Kelsey, wait inside.”
Kelsey’s jaw dropped open at the unprecedented autocratic timbre of Brady’s tone. She dug in her heels obstinately and refused to comply with his rude order. She glared at Brady. If there was something going on here, she wanted to know what it was. “You don’t tell me what to do!” she spouted off.
Brady was not in the least amused by her rebellious attitude, but Hargett chuckled. “I like a gal with spunk,” he said.
Brady shot Hargett a lethal look before turning back to Kelsey. “In this case,” he countered firmly, “I am telling you what to do.” When she still refused to budge, Brady took Kelsey by the arm and led her to the porch steps, well out of earshot of Hargett, who was still sending them both interested looks. “This doesn’t concern you.”
Kelsey arched a warning brow of her own. “Need I remind you that we are partners and as such everything you do on this ranch concerns me?”
“This doesn’t.” Brady enunciated each syllable in a way that had Kelsey’s own temper flaring sky-high. “Now, go inside and wait for me there.” He waited, expecting her to do his bidding. Kelsey still didn’t budge. “Fine,” Brady said, swearing beneath his breath. “Hargett and I will just leave and have our conversation elsewhere.”
Exasperated by Brady’s unexpected secretiveness, Kelsey blew out a gusty breath. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll go inside,” she grumbled ill-temperedly, figuring at least she could spy on them and gather what information she could that way.
“Thank you,” Brady said, clearly hanging on to his patience by a thread.
Kelsey rolled her eyes and stomped off. She didn’t know what was going on, but she did not like the way Brady was behaving. He was going to pay for this.
BRADY WAITED UNTIL KELSEY was safely in the ranch house before he walked back to Hargett. Then, moving so they were on the other side of the pickup truck and facing away from the windows, Brady stated roughly, with what precious little patience he had left, “You shouldn’t have come here.”
Hargett shook his head at Brady sadly. “That sweet little wife of yours doesn’t know anything about the deal you made with me, does she?”
“No.” Brady tensed as he thought about what would happen if he couldn’t follow through on his half of the bargain he had made. “And I don’t want her to know, either.” Brady paused, wondering how best to protect Kelsey from the choices he had made in his desperate attempt to change his life for the better. Now that he thought about it, he should have realized Hargett would show up here as soon as he learned about the marriage. But he hadn’t thought about it, because he hadn’t really wanted to face the fact that this day of reckoning was coming, and soon, whether he liked it or not. Brady blew out a short, restless breath. “How did you know we were married, anyway?” Brady searched Hargett’s face.
Hargett took a cigar out of his pocket and lit the end of it. “My people do a search of the state records every day.” He paused to draw on the end of it, then put the lighter away. “Your name came up on a marriage license yesterday. When they brought it to my attention, I figured I had better check it out.”
Brady sighed and rubbed the tense muscles in the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, I wish you hadn’t.” He shot a look at the window, and saw Kelsey standing there in plain view. Brady’s frown deepened as he realized his wife was taking in everything she could about his little set-to with Hargett. “Now she’s going to be full of questions,” Brady complained.
Hargett took another long drag on his cigar. “Perhaps rightly so, if she’s your wife.”
Brady fell silent. He refused to feel guilty about keeping his past from Kelsey. What was important was not the life he had been born into or the man he had been, but the man he was now.
“She has a right to know about your past, Brady,” Hargett insisted.
“I’ll tell her when the time is right,” Brady retorted stubbornly, “and not before.”
Hargett studied Brady, as always seeing far more about what Brady was thinking and feeling than Brady wanted. “In two weeks—” he began.
“I’ll have met my conditions for my freedom,” Brady interrupted.
“If not, you know you’re going to have to come back to work for me,” Hargett said sternly. Still puffing away on his cigar, he inclined his head toward the ranch house. “A deal is a deal whether you are married to that pretty gal or not.”
BRADY WAITED UNTIL HARGETT had left before he headed for the ranch house. He walked in to find Kelsey sitting in a chair, her arms behind her, a bandanna drawn like a gag across her mouth. He raced to her side and tugged it off. “What happened?” he demanded worriedly.
Lazily, Kelsey brought her hands—which were not tied after all—around to her lap. “Oh, I can talk now?” she queried innocently.
Too late, Brady wished his “gag order” had stayed in effect.
He rubbed at the back of his neck again. “I’m sorry I had to order you inside like that,” he said.
“Are you?” Kelsey repeated in the same mocking tone.
“I didn’t want you talking to him,” Brady continued, doing his best to appease her while at the same time telling her as little as possible.
“That was apparent.” Kelsey studied him. Slowly she rose from her chair to square off with him, a little less hot-temperedly. “Who is Mr. Hargett, anyway?”
Good question. And one I am not about to answer all the way. At least not right before I get my permanent release from his service worked out with him, Brady thought. “I used to work for him,” he said finally, telling her as much as he could, without abruptly ruining the rapport he and Kelsey had built up over the five months they had known each other and the four months they had been partners.
“As a cowhand?” Kelsey asked pointedly, still scrutinizing his face.
Brady shrugged, uncomfortable with lying to Kelsey or anyone else even a little bit, but not willing to divulge the complete truth to her or anyone else, either. The life he’d had in the past was over. He didn’t live that way anymore. Unfortunately, his past wouldn’t remain in the shadows if he started talking about it to anyone who was curious. “More of a jack-of-all-trades,” he allowed eventually, telling her only what he was comfortable with.
“And you quit,” Kelsey guessed.
“Yes.”
Kelsey’s brows knit together, her expression perplexed. “Why?”
Brady sighed, wishing like heck this new wife of his was not so persistent. “Because I didn’t like what I was doing for him,” Brady explained.
“Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t suited for what he wanted me to do.” Brady tried but could not quite keep the exasperation from his low voice.
“Then why did he show up here today?” Kelsey continued, moving even closer to Brady. She didn’t stop until they were toe-to-toe. “Does he want you to work for him again?”
“Yes,” Brady said firmly, as he drank in the clean and sexy orange-blossom smell of her hair and skin, “but I’m not going to do that.”
The soft edges of Kelsey’s lips turned up in a slight smile. “So why couldn’t I hear you tell him that?” she asked casually.
It was all Brady could do not to roll his eyes and/or beg for mercy. “Because Hargett and I don’t get along all that well. He’s a pretty blunt-spoken man and there’s never any telling what he’s going to say. I didn’t want you to be witness to any unpleasantness.”
Kelsey thought about that for a minute. “And that’s all it was.”
“Yes.” He had been protecting his wife from Hargett’s pushiness, plain and simple. She hadn’t been in any physical danger. But she could easily have had her heart broken—had Hargett had more of a chance to disillusion her by telling her everything Brady had not.
Brady had known he was going to have to tell her all he’d done and why, for a while now. But he had wanted to wait until his past debts were cleared and they had money in the bank. That would not happen for another two weeks.
“So I wasn’t in danger,” Kelsey said.
Brady frowned. It was time this conversation took another tack. “Only from me,” he teased her lightly, “if you don’t stop talking.”
Kelsey rolled her eyes. “You are one of the most difficult men I have ever met.”
Doing what he had wanted to do from the first moment he had laid eyes on her that morning, Brady wrapped his arms around her. “The same goes for you in the female category.”
Kelsey narrowed her eyes at him as she splayed her hands across his chest. She tilted her head up, to better search his face. “I know you’re not telling me everything,” she insisted worriedly.
Brady could feel her body melting against him, even while her will remained as feisty and difficult as ever. He grinned as he realized he wanted her to surrender to him heart and soul. Pushing her hair back away from her face, he brushed his thumb across her lips and told her softly, “A little mystery is good for every marriage, haven’t you heard?”
“Brady—”
He kissed her deliberately, rubbing his lips across hers, then with growing intensity, until nothing was held in check. He had counted on her mouth to be soft and sweet. He hadn’t expected her to rise up on tiptoe, thread her hands through his hair, press her slender body against his and kiss him back passionately, wildly, wantonly. He could feel the surrender of her body in the trembling of her knees, and the way her soft, delicate hands caressed his shoulders with slow, seductive strokes. And yet there remained an innocence to her as she met him boldly, kiss for kiss. He wished he could take her upstairs and make up for the calamity that had happened the day before, when she had lured him there unexpectedly. But he knew he couldn’t do that.
Reluctantly, Brady drew back. There would be time for more kisses. Maybe even time for wooing her and making her his woman, as well as his wife. But it wouldn’t be this morning. Not when they still had so much work to be done, a ranch to outfit, and only two weeks to finish making this ranch the roaring success he knew it could be. He let his arms fall to his sides and stepped back. Ignoring the faint but unmistakable look of disappointment on Kelsey’s face, he tugged the brim of his hat low across his brow, so it shadowed his eyes from her searching gaze, and said, “We better go if we’re going to look at those horses and ponies today.”
FORTUNATELY FOR BOTH of them, the schedule of appointments they had made for that morning kept them plenty busy. There was no more time for kisses. Only serious looking and hard bargaining. “No way are we paying that price for those horses,” Brady said, when they finally found what they wanted, midafternoon. He stepped forward to negotiate with the owner, a crafty man who reminded him very much of his former “boss.”
“They’re worth every penny,” the rancher said.
“Individually,” Brady concurred, before Kelsey could give in and just agree to pay the owner the inflated price he wanted. “Since we’re taking them all off your hands at once, saving you all that time, effort and feed, we should get a better deal.”
The rancher shrugged indifferently. “The price stands.”
Beside him, Kelsey tensed. Brady remained unconcerned. He knew a bluff when he saw one. “Then we go to the next ranch on the list,” Brady said, taking Kelsey’s arm.
“Okay, okay, wait,” the rancher said before they could depart. “I’ll lower the price by five percent.”
“Twenty,” Brady insisted.
“Ten,” the rancher countered, frowning.
“Twelve and we’ll call it a deal,” Brady said.
The rancher sighed. “Done.” He shook hands with Brady, then Kelsey. They talked about the transfer of the horses, which would be done in forty-eight hours, and completed the bill of sale. In silence, they walked back to Brady’s pickup truck to go to the auction house and look at the used saddles and bridles that had come in from a ranch west of there.
“I could have handled the negotiations on my own, you know,” Kelsey said as soon as Brady turned back onto the highway.
Brady knew Kelsey was irritated with him, and for good reason from her perspective. She was an equal partner, and hence should have had fifty percent of the say in what was going on. Knowing by the look on her face, however, that she was going to cost them money they didn’t have to spend if he let her in on the bargaining, he had cut her out of the negotiations. Brady was sorry he had hurt her feelings. He wasn’t sorry for the business stance he had taken. “You were ready to just give him the money he wanted, and I knew he’d take less,” Brady said.
Kelsey scowled. “But if he hadn’t…”
“Then we would have ended up paying full price,” Brady reassured her.
Silence fell between them. After a while, Kelsey asked, “How’d you get to be so good at negotiating?”
Brady frowned. They were headed into dangerous territory again. “My dad was a notorious skinflint. He didn’t pay one penny more than he had to for anything. I guess some of his frugality rubbed off.” Brady paused, reflecting how little he still knew about big portions of Kelsey’s life. He slanted her a curious glance. “What was your parents’ attitude toward money?”
Kelsey rubbed the soles of her boots restlessly across the rubber floor mat. “Well, we never had enough of it, I can tell you that.”
Brady had worried about a lot of things, growing up. Having enough money had not been an issue, however. He studied the brooding look on Kelsey’s face. “And that experience has made you…?”
“Not want to count pennies,” Kelsey said firmly, looking resentful again and staring straight ahead. “Not if I can help it.”
They arrived at the auction barn and went inside. The tack from the big spread was in miserable condition over all. Kelsey took one look at it and was ready to forget it, but Brady was instantly intrigued. He fingered a bridle that was dirty and rough with age, seeing the possibilities, not just what was. “This stuff is awful,” Kelsey said.
“Yeah, it is in deplorable condition,” Brady agreed readily enough, going on to inspect a saddle that was in equally bad shape. He was getting excited despite the way Kelsey was turning up her nose. “But it’s good-quality gear—some of the saddles in this group go for close to two thousand dollars each.”
“When they’re new and in good condition,” Kelsey allowed.
Brady grinned and told her with a confidence he hoped would rub off on her, “These could be cleaned and treated with saddle dressing. A little elbow grease and they’ll look like new. Same for the bridles, and the rest of the tack.”
Kelsey still looked skeptical. “Half the buckles on this tack are broken, Brady.”
Brady took her elbow and steered her over to a deserted corner of the auction house. He looked down at her, wondering how she could still manage to look so pretty and fresh when they’d been on the run all day. “A new buckle costs sixty-nine cents, and a solid brass alligator locking snap is six dollars. Compare that to a hundred dollars for each brand-new headstall, or a hundred-fifty for each brand-new breast collar—when between us we’re going to have some forty horses to completely outfit—and you begin to see the wisdom of buying this in bulk at a greatly reduced price and repairing it. We can save literally thousands of dollars this way, Kelsey, and still have some darn fine gear for you and for me.”
“Only one problem with your plan, Brady. I don’t know how to repair tack.” And, Brady could see, the thought of messing up some two thousand dollar saddle terrified her.
“It’s not hard if you have the proper tools,” he said amiably, reassuring her with a glance. “I’ll teach you.” It would be a good excuse to spend time together. A lot of time together. “Meanwhile,” he continued amiably, “we ought to snap up that bin of horse blankets over there, too. A good washing and air-drying and they’ll all be good as new.”
“Okay,” Kelsey sighed. “You’ve sold me.” She looked deep into his eyes. “But you have to promise to help with all the extra work it entails.”
Wishing he had the privacy to kiss her again, as thoroughly and completely as he wanted to kiss her at that moment, Brady put a hand across his chest. “Word of honor.”
By the time they got back home it was nearly suppertime. Together, Brady and Kelsey carried the stacks of horse blankets and several piles of tack from the back of his pickup truck, into the barn. The rest of the saddles and the horses they’d bought would be delivered on Thursday. Then Brady went out to feed and care for the horses they did have. When he got back, he had hoped Kelsey would have washed up and started supper. He wanted to spend the evening together—and the time to do a little kissing, too.
Instead, the ranch house was empty. Her pickup truck was gone. On the coffee table in the living room she had left a note that read simply, “Back tomorrow. K. L.”
Frowning, Brady looked around and found one other thing missing as well.