Her parents were good people, and they loved her unconditionally. When they pushed her too hard or tried to impose their opinions on her, Anne had to remind herself that everything they did, they did out of love for her. She had come late into their lives—her mother was forty when Anne was born. They had doted on her her whole life, and they only wanted the best for their daughter.
SLIPPING OUT OF THE HOUSE was easy. When her parents were engrossed in TV, Anne tiptoed down the back stairs and out the French doors to the patio, then around to the garage. Their driveway was at the top of a hill, so Anne didn’t even have to start her car. She put her blue Mustang—a graduation present from her father—into Neutral and coasted into the street, breathing a relieved sigh when no one called to her.
The whole escapade felt a little childish, she thought as she started the car’s engine half a block away. But the previous few months had upset her parents greatly, and she refused to do anything to cause them more worry.
She knew where the Hardison Ranch was. Even if she hadn’t visited there since she was a young girl, everyone knew. It was the biggest cattle operation in Cottonwood, and old Pete Hardison had been one of the town’s first residents. Pete had struggled in the early days. Then he’d struck oil and become a millionaire overnight—and adopted the lifestyle to prove it.
The oil bust in the eighties had all but ruined the overextended Hardisons, but Pete’s grandson, Jonathan—Wade’s oldest brother—had caught the ranching bug. He’d taken hold of the ranch and brought it back to prosperity over the past dozen years.
When Anne pulled up to the Hardison Ranch’s white gates, she found them open. She rumbled over the cattle guard and up the red dirt drive, meandering through some mesquite trees before she saw the old barn, looming dark in the night.
She was five minutes late. The barn looked black inside, completely uninhabited, but she sensed Wade was there. She could almost feel him. He didn’t seem the type to play games—that was her specialty. If he’d said he’d be here at eleven, he probably was here.
She parked and climbed out of the car. The night had taken on a slight chill, and the brisk breeze blew up inside her jumper, making her wish she’d put on jeans. She shivered slightly, but more from apprehension than the cold.
The huge double doors of the old-fashioned red barn were slightly ajar, enough that she could squeeze through. “Hello?” she called out as her eyes tried to adjust to the almost total darkness.
She heard the strike of a match, then saw the flare not ten feet in front of her. She could just make out Wade’s strong features as he lit a kerosene lantern that looked like an antique. The lantern glowed to life, and Anne could see the cavernous barn was full to the rafters with hay.
“Why were you standing here in the dark?” she asked. “And is it safe to have a lantern in here? All this hay…”
Wade hung the lantern on a hook. “Lots of questions. I like the dark. And the lantern is safe, so long as we don’t get so wild we knock it over.”
Anne’s heart did a flip-flop. If he was trying to unnerve her with his innuendo, he’d succeeded.
Chapter Two
Wade held on to the illusion of confidence like a two-year-old with a security blanket. He tried to pretend Annie showing up here tonight was no big deal. In truth, he’d been terrified she would blow him off.
But Annie had come. She was standing before him, looking like a mirage in the lantern light, her green eyes keeping a wary watch on him. Which meant that maybe she was still interested.
He leaned against a stack of round hay bales and folded his arms. “So, Annie, what’s your story? Why the big deception?” he asked, his tone intentionally casual. “And why the disappearing act?” She’d really thrown him for a loop when he’d awakened that Monday morning after the rodeo to find her gone.
He wasn’t like a lot of the guys on the circuit who slept with any buckle bunny who came along, making empty promises then awkward goodbyes when it came time to move on to the next rodeo. Not that he was a monk, but he’d thought Annie was special—different.
Worth his time and attention.
Though they’d made no promises, he’d felt so good when he was with her that he’d been silently plotting ways he could keep her hanging around. He’d thought she felt the same.
She said nothing, just stood there with her hands clenched, staring at the floor.
“Cat got your tongue?” he asked, enjoying her discomfort. “Come on, you’re a lawyer. Lawyers have to know how to talk, right? Damn, I never would have guessed.”
“The woman you met at the Mesquite Rodeo,” she finally said, “that wasn’t me. She—”
“I thought we covered that territory earlier.”
“I mean, physically she was in my body, but she wasn’t the real Anne Chatsworth.” She paced, a caged lioness looking for a crack she could squeeze through.
Abruptly she stopped and faced him squarely. Though she still wore the conservative clothes from earlier, some of her hair had worked itself loose from her knot and squiggled around her face. Her eyes were large and luminous, and she’d lost that tight, controlled expression he’d seen at the fair.
“I was studying for finals and having a real hard time,” she continued. “The pressure, the doubts, the stress—you can’t imagine what that’s like unless you go through it.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t know anything about stress. I’m just a simple cowboy. Is that it?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sure you’ve had stress in your life at one time or another. I’m just trying to explain where my mind was.”
“Okay, I’ll agree, you were under pressure. Go on.”
“That Friday I kind of lost it. I’d been studying nonstop for hours, days, and I just…snapped. I needed a break. No, I needed more than that. I needed to get away from everything—forget everything, including myself.”
“Enter Annie the slow-talking rodeo girl.” She looked at him, her face pleading with him to understand.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “So I was nothing to you but Cowboy Valium?”
She sank onto a rickety wooden bench. “I guess you could put it that way, although at the beginning I certainly had no intention of…of…”
“…picking up some guy and sleeping with him,” he finished for her.
“Exactly.”
“But that’s what you did. Any particular reason you picked me?”
“You make it sound so premeditated. I recognized your name when the announcer said it. I remembered you, although I’m sure the reverse isn’t true. Last time we saw each other, I was twelve and you were sixteen, so I probably didn’t register on your radar screen. I used to hang out at the Livestock Exchange arena and watch you practice with Traveler when he was just a colt.”
She was right, he’d been focused on other matters. Getting Traveler up to competition speed so he could get the hell out of Cottonwood had been the only thing he could think about back then.
“Anyway, after you won your event, I went back to the chutes to find you so I could say hi, you know, a friendly voice from back home. But I sort of never got around to mentioning Cottonwood.”
“You never even told me your last name. So you could make a clean getaway after you seduced me?”
“Hey, come on. There was a lot of mutual seducing going on, if you’ll recall.”
Oh, yeah, he recalled. And so did she, judging from the way she was breathing, quick and shallow, and the flare of heat in her eyes.
“You