Stella Bagwell - Taming a Dark Horse

she said as she reached for the button on the waistband of his jeans.

He sucked in a hard breath. “I’ll bet.”

Nevada looked up at him with hard brown eyes. “That’s the second time you’ve implied that I’m promiscuous. What gave you that idea?”

“You. You said you had boyfriends. Or did I misunderstand you?”

With a shake of her head, she focused her gaze on the fly of his jeans. “No. You didn’t misunderstand. And aren’t you glad I’ve got experience? Otherwise I might just get you all tangled up in this zipper.”

Linc started to growl a warning to her but the loud sound of the zipper peeling open caused his mouth to snap shut. Now wasn’t the time to press his luck. But if she didn’t step away from him soon, he was going to do something crazy. Like grab her and kiss her until she couldn’t say one more sassy word to him.

Dear Reader,

Well, it’s September, which always sounds like a fresh start to me, no matter how old I get. And evidently we have six women this month who agree. In Home Again by Joan Elliott Pickart, a woman who can’t have children has decided to work with them in a professional capacity—but when she is assigned an orphaned little boy, she fears she’s in over her head. Then she meets his gorgeous guardian—and she’s sure of it!

In the next installment of MOST LIKELY TO…, The Measure of a Man by Marie Ferrarella, a single mother attempting to help her beloved former professor joins forces with a former campus golden boy, now the college…custodian. What could have happened? Allison Leigh’s The Tycoon’s Marriage Bid pits a pregnant secretary against her ex-boss who, unbeknownst to him, has a real connection to her baby’s father. In The Other Side of Paradise by Laurie Paige, next up in her SEVEN DEVILS miniseries, a mysterious woman seeking refuge as a ranch hand learns that she may have more ties to the community than she could have ever suspected. When a beautiful nurse is assigned to care for a devastatingly handsome, if cantankerous, cowboy, the results are…well, you get the picture—but you can have it spelled out for you in Stella Bagwell’s next MEN OF THE WEST book, Taming a Dark Horse. And in Undercover Nanny by Wendy Warren, a domestically challenged female detective decides it’s necessary to penetrate the lair of single father and heir to a grocery fortune by pretending to be…his nanny. Hmm. It could work.…

So enjoy, and snuggle up. Fall weather is just around the corner.…

Happy reading!

Gail Chasan

Senior Editor

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To our own beloved horses:

Thunder, Trouble, Spider John, Diamond,

Rooster, Topper, Shy Girl, Badger, Miss Kitty,

Potion, Major Bob, Festus, Newly, Doll Brown,

Sante Fe Solid, Maggie and the baby on the way.

And also, in loving memory of Gus, my brother’s great trail horse.

sold her first book to Silhouette in November 1985. More than fifty novels later, she still loves her job and says she isn’t completely content unless she’s writing. Recently, she and her husband of more than thirty years moved from the hills of Oklahoma to Seadrift, Texas, a sleepy little fishing town located on the coastal bend. Stella says the water, the tropical climate and the seabirds make it a lovely place to let her imagination soar and to put the stories in her head down on paper.

She and her husband have one son, Jason, who lives and teaches high school math in nearby Port Lavaca.

1 Approach him with caution—he’s an animal of flight.

2 Don’t try to rope him too quickly—let him run until he tires.

3 When he starts to show interest, give him your shoulder—he’ll want what he thinks he can’t have.

4 When he decides to get close, talk to him—sweet whispered words in his ear will calm his fearful heart.

5 Once he allows you to touch him, show him you’ll never hurt him—stroke him gently on his cheek and along his neck.

6 And finally, when he surrenders to you, give him a sugary treat—he’ll love you for a lifetime.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

“A nurse! Hell no! I don’t need a nurse! I just need to get out of here!”

Linc Ketchum’s loud protest rattled around the small hospital room. Normally he considered himself a quiet, unobtrusive guy, but since the terrible fire at the T Bar K horse barn two weeks ago he’d turned into a growling bear.

His tall, graying doctor gave him a stern look. “Sorry, Mr. Ketchum, but your hands and arms were badly burned and unless I’m assured that a nurse will be with you at all times, I cannot release you from this hospital. And that means round the clock. You’re still highly susceptible to infection and I don’t want any sort of pressure placed on your hands before they heal completely. Your bandages will have to be changed routinely and your skin dressed. I want to know that it’s done correctly.”

Linc looked up at Dr. Olstead. “Hell, doc, if you’re going to force me to have a nurse underfoot, I might as well stay in the hospital.”

“I can certainly arrange that. As far as I’m concerned I’d rather have you here. But your family seems to think you’ll heal better at home.”

Grimacing, Linc glanced down at the sheets covering the lower half of his body. Except for short walks down the hall and sitting for brief spells in an armchair, he’d been stuck in this bed for too long. His whole body was beginning to ache. And that was just the physical side of things. Staring at the close, pale-green walls and the small television screen hanging in one corner of the room was enough to send him to the psychiatric ward. If he didn’t get out of here soon he was going to start yelling and never stop.

“All right, doc. Whatever you say. If I have to have a nurse—well, guess there’s not much I can do about it. At least I’ll be getting out of here.” He lifted his heavily bundled hands and arms. The stiff white objects reminded him of a couple of pesky tree stumps in an otherwise clean pasture. If he had to button his jeans without assistance, or walk out of the hospital naked, he’d be forced to choose the latter. “I want to get out of this mess, doc. I want to get back to work.”

“I’m going to cut the bandaging down soon,” the doctor assured him, “but it will be at least two or three more weeks before I’ll even consider allowing you to go back to work.”

Linc opened his mouth to protest, but the doctor jumped in before he could say a word and went on to discuss the do’s and don’ts he wanted Linc to stick to once he was released from the hospital.

When the man finally left the room, Linc was overwhelmed and just a little angry at being put in such a vulnerable state. He was a man who had never needed or asked for anything. He took care of himself and had done so from the time he was a teenager. He didn’t like depending on other people for anything. But it appeared as though in the coming days he was going to have to do a lot of things he didn’t like.

The memories of the fire that had brought him here suddenly welled up in Linc’s head. He saw flames ripping at the walls of the horse barn and licking at the gates to each stable, the terrified horses rearing and pawing as they tried to escape the fire closing in around them. Their frightened squeals and whinnies had mixed with the loud roar of the crackling flames and the horrible sound still continued to wake Linc from his sleep. And though he tried to forget, he couldn’t get anything about that nightmarish night out of his mind.

Time after time, he’d run back into the burning barn, grabbing every mare that he could and opening stall gates that were being eaten up by the creeping fire. The only thing he had to be thankful for was that all his beloved horses had gotten out safely. Only one had been slightly burned and his cousin Ross had assured him that she was well on the mend. As for Linc, the ordeal had pretty much cooked his hands and arms. But when he thought of his mares and colts and stallion, he knew saving them was worth every second of the pain he was going through now.

“Well, we’ve finally gotten some good news,” Ross said now as he and his sister Victoria entered the room. “At least you’re getting out of here tomorrow. That’s something to look forward to.”

Ross Ketchum was Linc’s cousin. The two of them were almost the same age and had grown up together on the Ketchum’s T Bar K ranch. They shared the responsibilities of running the multi-million-dollar operation. In spite of Ross being talkative and outgoing and Linc liking his privacy, the two of them were more like brothers than anything else. They even shared the same physical characteristics: long legs, a lean torso full of muscles, dark-brown hair and green eyes. Only, Linc’s hair was lighter than Ross’s and his eyes a much darker, muddier green.

“Yeah,” Linc mumbled. “But where the hell am I going to go? I’d drive the boys in the bunkhouse crazy and I can’t have a nurse wandering around a bunch of naked cowboys in the mornings. Unless it was a male nurse.”

Victoria Hastings, Ross’s sister and a practicing medical doctor, looked at him and laughed. “I don’t think any nurse would be welcome in the bunkhouse.”

“Only if it was Nurse Goodbody,” Ross jokingly interjected.

Victoria rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Ross, our cousin doesn’t need a Nurse Goodbody. He needs good care and rest.”

“And that’s just what he’s going to get, sis.” Standing at the head of Linc’s bed, Ross grinned down at him. “As soon as he moves into the big house with me and Bella.”

“Oh no! That’s your place. I’m not butting in.”

The main ranch house had been built nearly fifty years earlier by Linc’s father, Randolf, and Ross’s father, Tucker. Back then, the two Ketchum men had been partners, each of them owning half of the T Bar K, a spread that covered several sections in northwestern New Mexico. Initially, both men and their wives had lived together in the monstrous house built of rock and logs. But eventually Randolf had developed heart disease, sold his half to his brother and built a modest house across the ridge from the main estate.

His cousins Seth, Ross and Victoria had always treated Linc as a sibling. All three of them had insisted he always have access to the Ketchum house and the ranch’s funds just as if he were their brother. Linc had always been grateful for their generosity, but he’d never taken advantage of it. He was his own man. And he wanted to be able to say he’d earned what he had by hard work, not by handouts.

“Damn it, Linc. The house is yours, too,” Ross said now. “It belongs to all of us. Bella and I just happen to be living in it. And you don’t have to be told there’s plenty of empty rooms in the place. In fact, there’s so many Bella doesn’t know what to do with them.”

Mutiny tightened Linc’s jaw as he looked up at his cousin. “You can fill those empty rooms with kids. That would be a damn sight better than hosting a helpless cowboy who can’t even button his own jeans.”

Ross chuckled. “We’re trying to fill them with kids, Linc. But that takes time, you know. It will take us a while to fill that many rooms.”