The Cowboy Way. Candace Schuler
when she needed them most, or the half dozen city slickers who were due to invade the Diamond J in less than a week, or her best friend’s wedding at which she had agreed to be—God help her—the maid of honor. It wasn’t even the bookkeeping.
It was that damned Clay Madison!
If she’d been getting laid regular, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it had been over six months since that weekend in Dallas with Jim, the cattle broker, and she’d gone without for four months before that. It’d been so long, she’d almost forgotten what it was she was missing. And then Clay Madison had swaggered onto the scene with that lazy, loose-hipped, loose-kneed cowboy saunter of his and had reminded her of exactly what she was doing without. She’d have avoided him if she could have, but he was best man to her maid of honor, so ignoring him wasn’t an option.
Unfortunately, having sex with him wasn’t, either.
Jo Beth had two ironclad rules when it came to sex. She didn’t do it close to home. And she didn’t do cowboys. Ever.
And, hell, it wasn’t as if Clay had ever looked twice at her, anyway. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man like him looked at, or even took any particular notice of. She had a decent body—a bit on the skinny side, true, but decent, nonetheless—and she had a nice enough face. Nothing that would stop traffic, but it didn’t stop clocks, either. She freely admitted she didn’t have enough feminine graces to be what anyone would call beautiful, but she had a certain lean and rangy wholesomeness going for her, an outdoorsy girl-next-door kind of thing that wasn’t completely unappealing.
Except to men like Clay Madison.
Men like Clay Madison didn’t want the wholesome girl-next-door. They wanted flash and sparkle in their women. They wanted curvy bodies, big hair, fluttering eyelashes, and glossy wet-lipped smiles. They wanted adoring, tractable, bosomy, bubble-brained buckle bunnies who gave head at the drop of a trophy belt buckle and didn’t make a fuss when the party was over. And they got them. By the truckload. In every town and every city where the rodeo played, the buckle bunnies lined up, waiting for some cowboy to give them a tumble. And if that cowboy happened to be a handsome-assin, four-time Pro Rodeo bull-riding champion with shoulders a yard wide, a tight little butt, and a wicked gleam in his soulful brown eyes, well, that cowboy inevitably got first pick. And it was for certain he would never pick a woman like her.
Not that she’d pick him, either. Not for anything real or permanent. But she sure as hell wouldn’t mind having him in her bed. Just once. Just one time to see if he was as good as he looked.
“And, damn, I bet he’s fine,” she murmured, her eyes drifting closed to better imagine just how it would be.
She pictured herself running her hands over his broad bare shoulders while he kissed her senseless, pictured herself rubbing her bare breasts against his equally bare chest while his hands roamed over her back, pictured herself digging her nails into his firm cowboy butt as he pumped into her. Her mental picture show tightened her nipples inside her plain white cotton bra and had her squirming in the saddle.
Bella tossed her head and looked around to see what was going on.
“Sorry, sweetheart.” Jo Beth reached out and patted the mare’s neck to reassure her that all was well. Cutting horses and barrel racers took their signals from the movement of the rider in the saddle; a press of the leg just a certain way meant one thing, a shift of weight meant something else. “I didn’t mean to confuse you, baby girl.”
Dealing with her own confusion was more than enough for the moment.
It wasn’t as if she even liked cowboys. Well, okay, she liked them all right, as employees, as colleagues, as friends, but definitely not romantically. She’d learned her lesson there the hard way. And, yet, here she was fantasizing about one. Which just proved it was way past time she scheduled herself a trip to Dallas for an overdue visit with her favorite cattle broker. Or, maybe, since time was so short and her need was so desperate, she ought to just call up that good ol’ boy banker in the next county. He was always real glad to hear from her. Tomorrow, after the wedding, she decided, she’d give Todd a call and see if he’d like to meet her at the Holiday Inn out on Highway 81. A nice sweaty bout of recreational sex was just what she needed to clear her head and settle her nerves so she could concentrate on something besides the physical needs that hadn’t been satisfied in far too long. After all, it wouldn’t do to be all wound up when the city slickers finally arrived. It might create a bad impression if she bit a paying customer’s head off just because that customer was breathing the same air she was.
She shifted in the saddle, arching her back in a long stretch, rolling her head from side to side in an effort to loosen muscles that were tight with tension. In the process, she inadvertently tightened her thighs against the mare’s sides. Bella took a quick little sideways jump in response. The move might have unseated a less experienced rider but Jo Beth only swayed in the saddle, keeping her seat without any trouble. “Sorry, Bella,” she said again, reaching out to settle the mare with a stroke of her hand.
Hell, she decided, maybe she wouldn’t wait until after the wedding to call ol’ Todd. He was always real accommodating, always ready to meet her whenever and wherever she wanted him to, always up, as it were, for an afternoon quickie or an all-night marathon. Maybe she’d better call him this afternoon, as soon as she got back to the ranch, and set something up for tonight. Get the kinks out before the wedding.
Except, damn it, she couldn’t.
Tonight was Cassie’s bachelorette party. As maid of honor, Jo Beth was duty bound to show up for it, despite the fact that she was looking forward to it with only marginally less dread than she was to the wedding itself. The difference in her level of enthusiasm being that the wedding would be a public ordeal with everybody in the county in attendance, ready to snicker should she make a fool of herself traipsing down the aisle in a flowing silk dress with rosebuds in her hair.
The bachelorette party, thank God, would at least be a private affair. Silly as all get-out, of course, but blessedly private because the bride had decided she wanted to have an old-fashioned slumber party instead of the more traditional girls’ night out on the eve of her wedding. The invitations had specified baby-doll nighties as the preferred wearing apparel for the festivities—“Not in this lifetime,” Jo Beth muttered morosely—and they were going to listen to golden oldies, make popcorn balls and ice cream sundaes, and give each other manicures and pedicures so they’d all have matching nail polish for the wedding. As a special surprise for the bride, bridesmaid LaWanda Brewster, who’d recently become an entrepreneur in the at-home sex-toy business, was going to treat them to a demonstration of her most popular products.
Jo Beth shuddered at the mere thought of it, and wondered what it was about weddings that turned otherwise reasonable women into starry-eyed lunatics. Or, hell, maybe it was just her. Maybe she was the lunatic and all the rest of them were behaving perfectly normally under the circumstances. All the other bridesmaids—all five of them—had been tickled pink to be part of the wedding. They’d seemed to genuinely enjoy the shopping trip to Dallas to pick out just the right bridesmaids’ dresses, and the endless discussions about the appropriate flowers and which wedding-cake recipe was best and whether the groom’s cake should be devil’s food or red velvet. They’d been sincerely and utterly delighted with the color-coordinated bridal showers, cooing like doves over the pastel sherbet punch, the platters of tiny crustless sandwiches, and the silly bouquet made out of a paper plate festooned with bows from the shower gifts.
It wasn’t that Jo Beth wasn’t honored to have been asked to be the maid of honor—after all, she and Cassie had been best friends since kindergarten—but, really, if she had to sit around with a bunch of otherwise rational women and gush over one more precious pot holder with the bride’s chosen rooster motif on it, she was going to run screaming from the room.
“Thank God it will all be over tomorrow,” she said to Bella as she reined her in and swung out of the saddle.
Her boot heels sent little puffs of dust into the air as they hit the ground, the jinglebobs on her spurs ringing merrily with the movement. She pushed the brim of her hat back with the tip of