Page 1 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

1

ZACK

The Painted Cat was the sort of place where a man could find himself in a whole heap of trouble, if he put his mind to it. I was in a mood to put my mind to it. It was a restless, ticklish feeling under my skin that still felt stretched too tight, a feeling that had been there ever since the day I found out life as I knew it was over. The only things that eased it any were drinking and fighting.

Which was why I jumped fists first into a fight that wasn’t mine to begin with. I wasn’t clear on the particulars of how it all started, and I wasn’t in any hurry to end it, either. I doubted anyone in this bar had a claim to righteousness, me included, so I didn’t land my punches with a whole lot of care or forethought.

The bar blurred into a haze of pain, grunts, and shouts. I gave slightly better than I got, or maybe it was the whiskey that made it seem that way. It was going pretty well until the unmistakable pump of a shotgun brought us all up short.

“Hands up!” Janie Belmont hollered from her usual place behind the bar. She had one hand on the barrel and the other near the trigger—but not touching it, I noted. She was tough, but she wasn’t insane. “Asses in seats. The next man who triesanything uncivil is getting an extra hole somewhere on his body.”

“Or woman,” I said around a mouthful of blood. Someone had got me pretty good. Not knowing what else to do with it, I spit the blood out in the elbow of my flannel sleeve. “For equality and shit.”

Janie cocked her head so her red hair tumbled over her shoulder and narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you sass me, Zack. I’ll call your brother and have him drag your ass out of here.” I didn’t ask which one, since either of my older brothers was more than capable of getting the job done. “I don’t see a single woman in here asking for trouble, do you?”

It was the wrong question to pose, because right then a blonde woman outside the bar peered in through the window. The back of my neck prickled as her sharp gaze landed on me. Her chin jerked up, like I was exactly who she was looking for.

Trouble, in other words.

She came in with the wind as she opened the door. I felt the cold bite of it on my cheeks but that was nothing compared to the bite in her tone when she spoke.

“Mr. Hale, I presume?” She said my name like a reprimand.

I felt some kind of way about that. “Nope,” I said. I grabbed a napkin from the bar and used it to sop up the blood leaking from my bottom lip.

That set her back on her heels a bit. She blinked at me through her round glasses like a suspicious owl. “No?”

“Mr. Hale is my father,” I clarified. “I’m Zack. Which you know damn well, Hannah Bell, so you don’t need to presume shit.”

Until ten months ago, I had spent most of my time on the road, traveling and competing in rodeos, but I had been home to Aspen Springs, Colorado, enough that I had seen the town librarian a handful of times. Not at the library, since it was safeto say I hadn’t set foot there since…well, ever. Mostly I’d seen her around town. Sometimes at Lodestar Ranch, the quarter horse training and breeding property my family owned. She was good friends with my sister-in-law, Essie Price, and my soon-to-be other sister-in-law, James Campos, who was also the head trainer at Lodestar.

Come to think of it, I couldn’t recollect a single time we had actually been introduced, but I knew who she was, and she damn well knew who I was, too. Everyone did. It struck me as odd that she was pretending we didn’t know each other, but then, Hannah Bell was a little odd in general.

I always looked twice at Hannah Bell. First to gauge that she wasn’t for me. And then again to confirm it.

The women I gravitated toward could be summed up with one word: fun. Easy on the eyes, and easy on the brain. Not that any of those women had been dumb. They just knew better than to waste their deeper thoughts and dreams on a rough-and-tumble bronc rider only in town for the weekend rodeo. Honestly, they probably would have been disappointed if I had wanted anything but sex. I was a vacation for them. A fantasy.

Fun was not a word I’d ever use to describe Hannah. Maybe it was the ankle-length skirts she always wore or those oversized blouses and sweaters that left far too much to the imagination. Maybe it was the way she wrapped her blonde hair in a tight bun that suggested she wouldn’t be happy if a man were to give it a little tug. Or maybe it was that she never looked at me the way I looked at her.

Whatever it was, I knew instinctively that Hannah was not for me. Still, every time we found ourselves in the same vicinity, I felt the need to verify the truth of it all over again.

Twice.

“Well, Mr. Zack Hale, I’ve been trying to reach you,” she said crisply. “I’ve left several messages.”

That gave me pause. I had received hundreds of texts in the month following my accident. Some of them from real friends and colleagues. Some of them with descriptive names meant to jog my memory, like Nice Tits Molly, Nice Tits Allison, or Nice Tits Tonya.

That system didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, since apparently I was of the opinion that all tits were nice tits.

But the vast majority of texts were from anonymous nine digits, and considering the content of those messages, I highly doubted Hannah’s was among them.

Frowning, I dug my phone out of my front pocket. “Did James give you my number? I don’t recall seeing a message from you.”

“Not your cell phone,” she said. “I called the ranch phone.”

Since the last person to sit in the Lodestar office and answer the phone was my mother, may her peaceful rest give her strength to raise holy hell, this came as a surprise. “The ranch has a phone?”

“It’s listed on the website.”

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