Page 32 of A Family Kind of Guy (Forever Family 1)

“No!” Damn the man, he was enjoying this and making her so nervous she was beginning to sweat. “Give me strength,” she muttered under her breath as she approached Lucifer again. In a louder voice she said gently, “Come on, boy. That’s a good—”

In another whirlwind of dust the colt again thundered away, bucking and showing off as if he and Mason were privately conspiring against her.

“Son of a—” She bit back a curse and stomped a foot, sending up her own pitiful puff of dirt, and Mason, damn his soul, laughed outright. “I suppose you could do better,” she challenged, then cringed as the words escaped her lips.

“Yep.” In one lithe movement he vaulted the fence and gave a sharp, terse whistle.

Lucifer stopped short.

Another commanding blast from Mason’s lips and the colt, ears flicking nervously, reluctantly turned. He hesitated, his nostrils flared, and Mason whistled a third time.

To Bliss’s complete mortification, the colt trotted docilely to Mason, pressed his nose against the man’s chest and was rewarded with a piece of apple.

“Isn’t that cheating?” she asked as Mason grabbed Lucifer’s halter and with his free hand slowly motioned for Bliss to approach with the lead rope.

“Everything’s fair in love and war and taming horses.” He glanced at her from behind his tinted glasses. He was so close she could smell his aftershave as well as the dust and odors of horse and leather that seemed to cling to him. His jaw was gilded with a day’s growth of beard and his sleeves were shoved above his elbows to show off tanned forearms where veins and hard muscles stretched beneath his skin.

Swallowing against a suddenly arid throat, she turned her eyes back to the horse.

“You have heard the expression before, right?”

“It was a little different.” She snapped the lead onto the metal ring on the colt’s halter.

Mason lifted one dark eyebrow. “Well, around here we make expressions fit the situation.”

“So I see.”

“Be careful with Lucifer.”

“I can handle him.”

“I hate to give you advice, but if you call what you just did ‘handling him,’ you’re in for a couple more lessons from this guy.”

“Am I?” She tossed her hair over one shoulder.

Mason patted the pinto on the shoulder. “You want me to saddle and bridle him for you?”

Her smile was cool, though her hands were sweating on the tether and her heart was beginning to pound erratically. “I’ll be fine,” she said, clucking to the colt and heading to the stables, where she’d already picked out a saddle, blanket and bridle. She didn’t need any more help from the sexiest ranch hand on the place. All she wanted to do was ride to the river that cut through the north end of her father’s property where she planned to take a long, leisurely swim. Nothing more…

But, of course, looking back on it now, she’d gotten way more than she’d bargained for. That night was the night she began to fall in love, the night when all the trouble really started.

“Oh, who cares?” she asked herself as she took a long sip from her cup. Life sometimes seemed to move in strange, fateful circles. Who would have thought that she would be here, at her father’s ranch, drinking tepid cocoa at three in the morning? Back in Bittersweet. Involved with—no, not involved with—dealing with Mason again. “Fool,” she muttered to herself as she tossed the remains of her drink into the sink and Oscar, panting, tagged along behind her to the bedroom.

She’d made a mistake with Mason in the past, but she wasn’t going to repeat it. “Once burned, twice shy, you know,” she told her mutt as Oscar slipped through the open door to her room and hopped eagerly onto her bed. “Okay, okay. Since you were already here earlier, tonight you can sleep with me, but that’s it.”

She slid beneath the sheet and sighed. The rainstorm had moved on, but she was still here, in bed with only a dog for comfort and the nagging feeling that all the promises she’d made to herself wouldn’t help where Lafferty was concerned. He was just one of those kinds of men who slipped under a woman’s skin and wouldn’t go away.

“Great,” she thought aloud as she tugged at the covers. Well, she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She was strong. Independent. Margaret Cawthorne’s daughter. And she’d be damned if she’d let any range-rough cowboy change the course of her life or mess with her head. Mason Lafferty, damn him, could go straight to hell, for all she cared.

* * *

Mason towel-dried his hair roughly while barely glancing at his reflection in the foggy mirror. He hadn’t seen Bliss in nearly a week and, like it or not, he was going quietly out of his mind. He threw on slacks, shirt, socks and shoes, then walked though his apartment and thought it seemed emptier than before. His heels rang against the hardwood floor, echoing loudly enough to make the rooms seem hollow.

He snagged his jacket from a peg near the back door and slid his arms through the sleeves. He’d thought of Bliss off and on over the years but had made a point to keep any lingering and provocative memories of her where they belonged—strictly in the past. Then again, he hadn’t expected her to show up in Bittersweet, nor had he thought her old man would remarry so quickly on the heels of his first wife’s death. Life, it turned out, was oftentimes stranger than fiction, and a hell of a lot more complicated.

Frowning, he thought of his own situation. How, as a small boy, he’d watched his father drive away in a beat-up old Dodge truck, the exhaust a blue haze in the coming darkness as the pickup rumbled away. He’d clung to his mother’s hand, swallowing back the tears that burned in his throat, blinking against the rain that po

ured from the sky. He’d been five at the time, his sister, Patty, barely two. She’d sucked her thumb as she’d sat balanced on their mother’s slim hip.

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