The Cowboy Way. Candace Schuler
She’d ridden out into the middle of nowhere—or as close to it as she could get and still be on Diamond J land. In this remote corner of the ranch there was nothing but the hot Texas wind and the land, a few gnarled oak trees that’d managed to stand up to both, and the old wooden windmill, its blades creaking rhythmically above the water tank beneath it.
The tank was made of smooth, weathered concrete and was a foot and a half deep and nearly ten feet across. The water in it was cool and clean. Later in the summer, when the cattle were moved in to graze the pasture, the area around the tank would be thick with mud and the water would be churned up and murky, but right now—at least until the new pool behind the main house was filled—the water tank was the closest thing to a swimming hole on the Diamond J.
And Jo Beth was determined to take full advantage of it.
She looped Bella’s reins around one of the crosshatch wooden braces at the base of the windmill, and reached for the metal button on the waistband of her jeans.
WITHOUT LOOKING AWAY from the scene unfolding below him, Clay Madison looped his reins around the saddle horn in front of him, reached into the saddlebag suspended from the rigging behind him, and extracted a pair of high-powered binoculars. Someone was nosing around the water tank in the gully below. It was probably perfectly innocent, just someone intent on getting a drink for themselves or their horse, but it never hurt to make sure. Water was a precious commodity out on the Texas prairie, and a smart rancher took care to safeguard it. Not that Clay was a rancher, but he was the guest of a man who was, and that made it his duty to see what the lone rider messing around down there by the water tank was up to.
Nudging up the brim of his black Resistol cowboy hat with the flick of a finger, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and placed the smooth plastic eyepiece directly against his brow bone. It took a second or two to manipulate the focus wheel, and then, suddenly, with no warning at all, a naked female bottom filled his entire field of vision.
He stared at it for a second or two, then lowered the binoculars, blinked carefully and deliberately, as if to clear an obstruction in his eyes, and repositioned the binoculars. Yep, even at fifty yards there was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was definitely a woman’s ass. Creamy white and softly rounded, two perfectly formed globes of luscious female flesh peeked out at him from beneath the hem of a faded blue shirt. As he set there, stock-still atop his borrowed pinto, his gaze fastened unwaveringly on the enticing curves exposed beneath the blue shirt, he was suddenly struck with the overwhelming need to have one burning question answered.
Who’s luscious ass was it?
It was nobody he knew or had met in the last interminable week, that was for sure. He’d never forget an ass like that. Even if he’d only seen it fully clothed before—and, regrettably, the only asses he’d seen for a couple of months had been fully clothed—he’d have recognized it. It wasn’t the kind a man forgot. There was a nice, sweet double handful there, slim enough to entice the eye, round enough to give a man something to grab on to when the action got hot and heavy.
But who the hell was it?
He readjusted the focus of the binoculars to take in more of the scene below, telling himself—promising himself—he’d watch just long enough to satisfy his curiosity about who it was, then he’d turn the pinto around and go back the way he’d come. It was the proper thing, the gentlemanly thing to do. And no matter what certain matrimonially disappointed females might say to the contrary, his dearly departed mama had raised him to be a gentleman. As soon as he knew who it was, he’d go.
Stubbornly, though, almost as if she knew he was there, she kept her back to him as she finished undressing. She shrugged out of the blue shirt, letting it slide down her back, covering up her ass for a moment before she caught the shirt by the collar with one hand and reached up to loop it over the saddle horn on top of the pair of jeans already hanging there. Given her size in relation to the horse she was using as a clothes rack, she was an inch or two above average height, but she was slightly, almost delicately, built. The waist above that luscious ass was as narrow as a boy’s, her arms and legs were sapling slender, and he could clearly see the bumps of her spine, running down the valley of her back like a strand of pearls barely showing beneath her pale creamy skin. The look of fragility was directly countered, however, by the strength inherent in the smooth flex and coil of the well-toned muscles that covered her narrow frame. She was, he decided judiciously, what was commonly called lean and wiry. She looked the way he had always imagined a ballerina would look if you saw her naked. Not his type at all—he preferred exotic dancers to ballerinas—except for that fantastic little caboose.
It gave him hope that what she had in the breast department might be equally fantastic, and had him unconsciously sucking in his breath when she reached up behind her and released the hooks on her plain white bra.
She leaned forward a bit as it loosened, crossing her arms over her torso, lifting her hands to brush the shoulder straps down. As she straightened, reaching out with one hand to stuff the scrap of white fabric into one of the saddlebags strapped to her horse’s saddle, she flicked a long brown braid over her shoulder. It was nearly as thick as a man’s wrist and came halfway down her back. The sight tickled a memory in Clay’s mind. He’d seen a woman with hair like that. Recently, he thought. He was almost sure of it.
But who?
And where?
And then she turned toward him and it seemed as if his gaze met hers through the precision-ground lenses of the binoculars.
“Jesus,” he said, and dropped the binoculars as if they’d suddenly gotten too hot to hold.
It wasn’t so much that he thought he’d been discovered. Situated as he was, in a stand of tall cottonwoods and scrub oak just below the crest of a hill, with the hot Texas sun at his back and shining full in her face, it would be almost impossible for her to have seen him. Still, he sucked in his breath and froze for a moment, just in case she had, and wondered what in hell the prissy, dried-up stick of a rancher from the Diamond J was doing shucking her clothes to go skinny-dipping in a watering tank in the middle of the day.
He wouldn’t have guessed she had it in her. From what he knew of Miz Jo Beth Jensen—which was, admittedly, not much—she was a serious-minded, no-non-sense, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of woman who seemed to have a perpetual mad-on against men in general and cowboys in particular. What with them both being key members of Cassie and Rooster’s wedding party and having similar duties to perform, they’d been thrown together pretty regularly over the last week and he’d read the No Trespassing signs clearly, right from the start.
At their very first meeting, when Rooster had introduced his best man to his bride’s maid of honor, Clay had politely dipped his head, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers in the accepted cowboy greeting, and flashed his never-fail “howdy there, darlin’” smile in an effort to start things off on a friendly footing. She’d dipped her head in return and answered his smile with one that could freeze the balls off a prize bull at fifty paces. Don’t even think about it might as well have been written across her nearly nonexistent chest in bright red letters. He’d done her the courtesy of acceding to her unspoken wishes and hadn’t given her another thought that didn’t have to do with the wedding preparations.
But that was before he’d seen her standing buck naked in the bright Texas sunlight and realized the dried-up stick of a rancher had one hell of a sweet little body hidden under her dusty jeans and snap-front western shirts. Completely forgetting his vow to leave as soon as he knew who it was, he swung out of the saddle, retrieved the binoculars, and raised them to his eyes.
BRACING A HAND ON THE EDGE of the tank, Jo Beth stepped over the rim and eased into the water. Even warmed as it was by the relentless Texas sun, it still felt deliciously cool against her sun-flushed skin, slick and silky against her thighs and belly, wonderfully refreshing as it lapped against her breasts. She sank down a bit, letting the water slide up over her shoulders and neck to the base of her chin, and tilted her head back so that everything but her face was immersed. And then she sat up and leaned back against the rim of the tank, her eyes closed, her face turned up to the sky, and ordered herself to relax.