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Overview
The Last True Cowboy
A cowboy is as good as his word, but what if the words are "I love you"?
The first moment Julia Weslin sees K. C. Houston, she senses her world is about to be turned upside-down. The long, lean cowboy is the last of an untamed breed of men who live by their word and love by their own set of rules. And for Julia, who has returned to Wyoming and the cash-strapped High Horse Ranch, K. C. is a dream come true. He can tame a spirited horse with just a single touch, he offers to help save the ranch, and he awakens in her a need she thought she'd lost. But Julia knows that this sexy drifter would never break a promise, and while he's filled her days with loving and her nights with passion . . . he's never told her that he'd stay forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780380784929 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.19(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.96(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
From the beginning it was the woman.
The rest of the High Horse setup wasn't anything K.C. Houston hadn't seen along the monochromatic trail of ranches he'd worked for from Montana to Texas. "Prettiest ranch in Wyoming," the owner had told him. Maybe it was, but meadows were meadows and mountains were mountains. It was the woman standing next to the rail fence that drew his fancy directly. Women often did, but this one hit him hard, right from the beginning.
He turned the radio off and rolled the window down as he slowed his pickup. A chilly spring breeze slid into his shirt. He'd been headed for the house, but the woman was closer and far more compelling. He thought about calling out to her, asking for directions he didn't need just to get her to turn his way, but he didn't. He just watched. She stood motionless, while the wind made a fluttering flag of her burnished brown hair and a loosely pegged tent of her white shirt. Her intensity captured him completely.
His pickup purred as he let it crawl over the gravel road. He felt like a crude tourist walking in on a pilgrim saying her prayers. Let me distract you, he thought. Turn this way and let me pull you down to earth. But she simply stared, as if something on one of the snowcapped mountain peaks were calling to her, claiming every receptor in her body. Whatever it was, she was lonesome for it. She was yearning for it, leaning toward it like a flower in a window. Whatever it was, there was some rash and equally lonesome part of him that envied it.
He dismissed the thought of speaking to her. Had she turned, had she even moved, he would have taken it as acue, and he would have stepped up to the plate. But she didn't. She remained inaccessible, like a painting he'd seen once and filed in the unfailing scrapbook of his memory. A mystifying feature in an otherwise familiar landscape, she was out of this world, beyond his reach. That fact alone made his palms itch.
Her image lingered in his mind as he drove on, once again heading for the house. He knew she wasn't his prospective boss's wife. He remembered something about a sister, but he'd funneled the family talk in one ear and out the other. What K.C. knew for sure about the man he had come to Wyoming to work for was that he, too, loved horses. Women, no, at least not the way K.C. loved women. Horses, definitely. It was K.C.'s business to recognize the symptoms. He earned his living off other people's horse fever, and Ross Weslin had the fever about as bad as it could get. But a wife was doubtful. If he had one, she was an unhappy woman.
In fact, if the woman at the fence was Mrs. Weslin, K.C. knew right then and there that he was bound to get himself fired before the summer was over. He could overlook a lot of things, but not an unhappy woman. Not for a whole damn summer. Women and horses were K.C.'s favorite kind of folks. He had superb instincts about both. Give him five minutes with a sullen woman or a skittish filly and he'd know exactly what she needed. He also had good instincts about fulfilling those needs, and he had turned his instincts into an art form. It wasn't the kind of art a person could hang on the wall, but K.C. liked to think that making a gentle-hearted creature happy, even temporarily, required an artist's touch.
But he had come to Wyoming for Weslin's horses, not his women. He got paid only for working his fine magic with horses, and his pockets, like his gas tank, were flirting with E. He was beginning to wonder where the Weslins kept their horses. Empty acres of spring-green pasture flanked the road, which followed the course of Quicksilver Creek. K.C. spotted a coal-black Angus bull using the trunk of a scrawny poplar tree as a scratching post, but he wasn't seeing much activity around the outbuildings and split-rail corrals. And he'd yet to see a horse, except on the sign above the gatepost. He was still looking as he drove across the narrow bridge that spanned the swollen creek and headed toward a copse of crabapples and old cottonwoods.
It was a man's house, a massive structure that stood amid the trees like a bird with its wings outstretched, too heavy to fly. Two single-story annexes, faced with a layer of gray river rock topped with one of tan fieldstone, flanked its main portion, where a second story of pine logs rose above the stone. Red bluffs faced the creek on the east, and the mountains rose to the west. K.C. liked the way the house fit right into its surroundings like craggy leavings from some prehistoric geological upheaval. Someday he'd have himself a house. Maybe not as big, but it would have that natural look.
A rock path, already tufted with spring grass, led him to the steps of the huge stone-pillared front porch. The front door creaked, and a slim, blond, sleepy-eyed woman poked her head out. Her scowl melted when K.C. pushed his hat back with a forefinger and smiled.
"Afternoon, ma'am. I'm looking for Ross Weslin,"
"Ross is..." She gave him a quick, skeptical onceover. "Why?"
"He asked me to come to work for him. The name's K.C. Houston."
None of this appeared to be ringing any bells with her, but her interest in his message was clearly secondary. She liked his looks. Most women did.
"I train horses."
The bemused look in her eyes didn't change. She stepped onto the slate porch, her shapely legs and small feet bared under the trim black-and-white Sunday dress she'd obviously been napping in. He figured she must have been curled up somewhere when he'd come knocking on the door, and he pictured her smooth, pale legs folded up to her breast, her dress just covering her bottom...
The Last True Cowboy. Copyright © by Kathleen Eagle. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.