Tina Leonard - Ranger's Wild Woman

No waving. No hello shouted through the window. Last month, when he’d been helping Laredo learn how to ride the Lonely Hearts Salon’s champion bull, Bloodthirsty Black, he’d met Hannah Hotchkiss, and she’d just about made him think twice about his narrowly divided world. He’d also met Cissy Kisserton, an employee of a rival beauty shop, who’d also made him think twice about life as he knew it. The two women had just about come to blows over him, and he’d liked it!

But…not enough to sacrifice a bone or a body part.

“There’s bad luck in that town,” he said to no one in particular as he sped down the highway, happy to be heading east and away from the ranch. “I’m too cagey to get caught in that heart trap. All that love business is a mess! Lonely Hearts ladies, Never Lonely Cut-n-Gurls—it’s a soap-opera city. I’m passing through there at top speed!”

RANGER’S PLAN WORKED—until he saw the tall blonde waving at him in front of the Never Lonely Cut-n-Gurls Salon. “Dang it!” he muttered. “I almost made it.”

Cissy Kisserton pulled open the truck door and tossed a silver-foil suitcase inside. “Thought I recognized your vehicle, Ranger. How fortunate for me, because I was about to hitch to the nearest highway.”

Ranger couldn’t imagine Cissy having trouble finding a ride. Yet he still didn’t want to be the one to give it to her. She looked devastatingly gorgeous in skin-tight jeans and a cutoff T-shirt—dressed down for traveling and yet still packing dynamite.

“Shew!” he said under his breath. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he told Cissy.

“Neither do I. We’ll get wherever together.”

“But I may be stopping at the military base east of here!”

“Cool,” she said. “I love a man in uniform.”

He frowned at that. “I was planning on traveling alone, actually.” No point in letting this silvery female use her wiles on him—there might be a busted limb in it! This town wasn’t lucky for men.

“Lonely is bad, Ranger. We’ve learned our lesson about anyplace with the word Lonely in it. And we simply can’t let you travel alone.” Cissy tossed another suitcase into the truckbed, this one leopard-printed.

“We?”

“Hey, Ranger,” Hannah Hotchkiss said, poking her tousled head around Cissy to smile at him, that devastatingly bright, cute-rocker-girl smile that had caught his attention the first time he’d been to Lonely Hearts Station. His heart hit his boots. These two women had nearly reinvented the catfight, bringing it to new form over him! Well, maybe not so much in the physical, girls-mudwrestling fantasy he’d had about the two of them, but that was something he would keep to himself. He didn’t want both of them in the truck with him. There might be two busted parts of his anatomy in his future!

Cissy crawled in the front seat, ignoring his frown. Hannah jerked open the door to the extended cab. “Uh, Ranger, did you say you were traveling alone?” Hannah asked.

“Well, I was.”

“Well, you weren’t,” she said, mimicking his tone. “There’s a man in your back seat.”

He whirled around, his jaw dropping when he saw his twin grinning up at him from his napping place in the back. “Archer! What in the hell are you doing?”

“Heretofore, I’ve been listening to you cuss all the way to Lonely Hearts Station,” Archer said with a grin. “But now that we’ve got seatmates, I’d say this trip is going to be a whole lot sweeter!”

Which just showed how little his twin knew.

THEREIN LAY THE RUB, Mason told himself, which was a pretty stupid expression. What rub? he asked himself sourly. What fool had time to sit around and think up such stupid sayings?

The fact was, he was feeling testy, and he knew it, and his brothers knew it, though they hadn’t complained as yet. Actually, they had complained—to each other when they thought he couldn’t hear them. But they had spared him their grousing, and he knew why. Pity. Plain and simple pity, which was worse than if they’d just come right out and chewed his butt.

Mason sighed, pulled his hat down lower, and stared into his coffee cup. At this moment, he was only fit company for his horse, and so the barn was where he sat. And the word of the day was moping. He was moping—couldn’t call it anything else—something he’d always told his brothers they weren’t allowed to do. So he was hiding out here with Samson, because the horse wouldn’t tattle on him and didn’t care anyway as long as his hay was fresh.

“You like having me around, doncha?” he asked Samson softly, running a hand over the horse’s back. “Not like some people I know.”

Mimi. Mimi, Mimi, Mimi. Why did his mind always come back to her?

“And therein lies the rub,” he said to Samson. “Not the kind of rub you like. The kind that really sticks in my craw, that makes my gut churn. I guess,” he murmured on a deep sigh, “I guess I’ll only say this to you once, and to no one else, but seeing Mimi walk down the aisle with Brian tore my heart right out of me. I thought I could handle it. I thought it wouldn’t matter. But, ol’ pal, it mattered. It just about mattered more than anything in my whole life.”

It mattered so much he could barely show his face anywhere. The whole town knew, of course. Everybody had known that he loved Mimi. He just hadn’t known it. He so much hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself.

“And there are reasons for that, but none I’m going into, even with you,” he said with a last gentle rub over Samson’s back. He swiped his coffee cup and headed to the house. There were some things he wasn’t going to think about—some fears not worth mentioning.

THROUGH THE MAIN HOUSE window, Last watched Mason as he left the barn and walked toward home. “Talk about a sore head,” he muttered to Tex. “That one’s a walking case of soreness.”

Tex peered at Mason moving slowly toward the house, his gait not as firm as it once had been. “Why in the hell didn’t he stop her?”

They both knew the “her” was better left unnamed. “Because he couldn’t,” Last said. “Mason couldn’t stop Dad from leaving. He knew some people do what they have to do sometimes, regardless of what other people need or want. And Mimi couldn’t wait around forever. Lord only knows, Mason was never going to marry her. And we all realized that.”

“It would have taken a miracle,” Tex agreed. “I am never falling in love. Never. It’s much easier just to sleep with a woman who only wants sex.” He leered happily until he caught another glimpse of Mason’s face, set in sad lines. “And that’s another thing I can’t figure out. Why didn’t he just sleep with Mimi?”

Last gasped. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Well, hell,” Tex complained. “He wanted her. Even if he acted like he wanted an arm-shave more.”

“Yeah, but she’s like our little sister!”

“But that was the problem,” Tex insisted. “I think he knew his feelings toward her were stronger than that, but he thought that was sacrilegious or something.”

“But he couldn’t have slept with Mimi,” Last argued, still horrified. “That wouldn’t have been right. I mean, Sheriff Cannady’s daughter!”

“Well, then.” Tex returned to the toaster where he discovered he’d burned the bread to a crisp. Smoke came out, and a disgusting odor. “Hell-on-fire,” he complained. “Helga’s gonna kill me. I’ve messed up her domain.”

Last shrugged, watching Mason kick mud off the porch that one of the brothers had scraped from their boots. “If you ask me, life is going to get a lot messier around here, more than any of us would like.”

And it was all Mason’s fault. Unfortunately, as Last and Tex had just discussed, Last really didn’t have an answer for what his big brother, Mason, should have done. All he knew was that whatever needed to be done hadn’t gotten done, and now they were all forced to live with the consequences—except Ranger, who had escaped. Traitor.

“Where’s Archer?” Mason demanded as he walked into the kitchen.

“I ain’t my brother’s keeper,” Tex replied, his voice instantly tense. “Make that plural, just so you’ll know.”

Last stared at Mason. “What do you mean, where’s Archer?”

“His roll-up tent and sleeping bag are missing from the barn storage.”

Last groaned to himself. One more brother on the lam. Whether Mason wanted to admit it to himself or not, he was driving his family away one by one—just as he had Mimi.

And Mason couldn’t stop them from leaving—any more than he could have stopped their father, Maverick, from leaving when Mason was seventeen.

That’s what love did to a man.

“It’s not going to happen to me,” Tex swore quietly, so that no one heard him except Last, who didn’t need to be told what he meant. “Never.”

Last nodded. Maybe it was better if love didn’t hit any more of them. So far, in their family, love was a disastrous affair with biblically epic consequences.

“We’re doomed,” he murmured to himself, seeing the stone-carved expression on Mason’s face.

“Doomed.”

Hannah Hotchkiss stared at the back of Ranger’s head. She could practically see plumes of fire shooting right out of his Western hat. A man that temperamental ought to be a crime! He should be happy for the chance to sit next to Cissy—seemed like all men dreamed of being near her. But no—just like every other Jefferson male she’d met, Ranger had to be different and alarming and hypnotizingly macho. A sin in boots. She sighed to herself.

“I suppose you’re pretty much bred from the Jefferson stock,” she said to the man sitting next to her, a man who looked just like Ranger, which was startling and unnerving. The basic difference between them was that Ranger wore a brown Western hat, and this man wore a black felt with silver rope braid. The confident Jefferson smile was dashingly displayed, and the dark eyes were roaming her cut-open tennis shoes and funky-punky red-tipped hair with interest—she groaned silently with frustration.

And here she thought she’d been going to Mississippi to get away from memories of Ranger. Oh, no, life was not that simple. She had to discover he had an unnerving double.

The grin on her seatmate’s face widened as he shoved his hat down over his eyes. “I’m going back to sleep,” he said. “Ranger, you old dog.”

In the front seat, Ranger stiffened at his twin’s words. “I don’t know what that means,” he said, his tone annoyed.

Hannah rolled her eyes, but the twin kept his mouth shut. Cissy flipped her silvery hair and peered over the seat at the twin.

“Is he always such a wagon-load of joy?” she asked Ranger.

“It’s a family trait,” Hannah said, matching Ranger’s sourness. “Tall, dark and intimidating.”

“Hey!” Archer shoved the hat back and stared at her. “Don’t lump me in with him. We’re not twins in personality.”

“Don’t insult the driver,” Ranger stated, “or you’ll all find yourselves on the road with your thumbs out. Not much traffic at this hour, I might call to your attention.”

Cissy patted his arm. “We’re not insulting you, are we, Hannah?” she said with a warning glance. “Hannah’s just playing around.”

Hannah shrugged. The difference between her and Cissy was that Cissy came from the get-more-bees-with-honey school and Hannah came from the call-it-as-you-see-it school. The two schools operated so completely differently that it was a wonder she and Cissy had hooked up to get out of Lonely Hearts Station. But necessity made strange bedfellows—or truckmates, anyway—and both of them wanted out, neither of them had a vehicle and each agreed a female traveling alone was a recipe for disaster, never mind which school of thought one had graduated from. So they joined forces, decided to walk or hitch to the bus station—after leaving goodbye notes for Marvella and Delilah, their respective employers—and put themselves on the street with their luggage.