My stomach fell a little.
“I’ve got her name right here,” the cowboy said, sliding a piece of paper out of his front pocket. I didn’t need to hear him say it. I already knew the name scratched down on that scrap of paper. “Rowen. Her name’s Rowen Sterling.”
My subconscious couldn’t decide what to curse first, so it mixed, matched, and uttered a Shuk and a Fuit.
When my mom had told me I’d get a ride to Willow Springs with a ranch hand whose name I’d forgotten, I pictured a scratching, spitting, old-timer like the town sheriff in one of those old westerns. Not some young, fit man adhering to the tighter-the-better policy in jeans selection.
I had yet to see his face, but from what I’d seen of his back, I already knew what to expect. And if I was a typical eighteen-year-old girl who liked typical teenage girl things, I’m sure I’d be panting for the opportunity to catch a ride with Cowboy Montana in what I guessed was a big diesel truck with four tires on the back. I’d heard what that kind of truck was called, but I couldn’t remember. Where I came from, people didn’t need six tires because four did the job just fine.
Catching myself right before I let out a long sigh, I stood and made my way over. No sense in stalling.
Stopping a few feet behind the vacuum-sealed ass, I cleared my throat. “Looking for Rowen Sterling?”
Cowboy turned my direction. “Yeah. You know her?”
I gave a shrug. “Kind of.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Yeah,” I replied, trying to get a look at his face. Between his huge-ass cowboy hat and the position of the sun, his whole face was shaded. He could have been the thing of female fantasies. He just as easily could have been eyeless and toothless.
After a few more seconds of quiet—I guessed he was waiting for me to add something—he shifted. “Could you tell me where she is then, please?”
I glanced at the photo in his hand. He’d been right. It was almost ten years old to the day. Taken at my ninth birthday party. I was wearing the biggest, pinkest, most god-awful princess dress ever created, and I was blond and beaming.
I was none of those things anymore. His reaction ought to be fun to witness.
“She’s about two feet in front of you,” I said, thankful I couldn’t see his face. Whether it was a ten or a zero or somewhere in between, I didn’t want to witness the shock and the cringe bound to come.
When someone compared the young girl in the picture to the older girl that was me present day, a cringe seemed the standard response.
What I didn’t expect him to do was remove his hat and extend his hand. “Hey, Rowan.” He flashed a smile that almost made me flinch. I hadn’t been smiled at like that when meeting a stranger in a long time. “I’m Jesse. It’s nice to meet you.”
Jesse. That’s right. The cowboy J name that had slipped my mind was the name that I was certain I’d never forget again. Not because his eyes were the same color as the sky, or because his light hair sort of cascaded down his forehead like it knew just where to fall, or because of the dimples drilled deep into his cheeks from the continued smile. Nope, the reason I’d remember Jesse’s name from that day forward was because of the way he looked at me. He didn’t study me like I was something different and scary. He looked at me like I was a human being, no different from himself, and yet unique just the same.
It was . . . staggering. It made me feel all light and floaty. For a girl who liked to keep her feet firmly on the ground and who, as a policy, didn’t do “floaty,” the whole sensation was a tad overwhelming.
After I’d left his hand hanging in the air like the staggered idiot I was, he dropped it back to his side and lifted his other hand, still holding the picture, toward my face. Studying the picture, then my face, his smile stretched higher. “Yep. You’re Rowan Sterling all right,” he said with certainty. As though he could see past my dyed dark hair, eyebrow ring, dark lipstick, and my inky black combat boots to find the little girl I’d once been. “Do you have a suitcase or anything?” His voice, like his smile, was warm and welcoming. In fact, if I had to pick two words to describe Jesse, those would be the ones: warm and welcoming.
And attractive. There was no denying that. Even to a girl like me, who most people probably assumed would prefer Dracula’s company to a warm-blooded, all-American, sexy-as-all-hell boy.
Reminding myself I wasn’t here to admire the male scenery, I hitched my thumb over my shoulder. “That black bag that looks as if I’ve stashed a dead body in it is mine,” I said, cursing myself. A girl like me shouldn’t talk about dead bodies stuffed in a bag. People wouldn’t assume I was joking.
“Well, if you don’t mind, could we get going?” Jesse asked, sliding that bucket-sized hat of his back into place before heading toward my abandoned bag. “I’ve got about two dozen fence poles to dig and set before dinnertime.”
“Sounds like a killer time,” I said. “Is fence pole maintenance a regular sort of thing on a ranch?”
“That depends how you define ‘regular.’ If thirty to forty every few days does, then yeah, I suppose fence pole maintenance is a regular sort of thing on a ranch.”
“I thought you were a ranch hand,” I said as we paused in front of my monster-sized bag. “Sounds more like you’re a ranch bitch.” I couldn’t quite hide my smile, and it was a totally failed effort when Jesse laughed.
Damn, that laugh. Just hearing a few notes of it seemed to change my whole outlook. Not a total one-eighty, of course, but maybe a half of a percent. If someone like Jesse could laugh like that, the world couldn’t completely blow.
“Yeah, I suppose ranch bitch is a more fitting title, come to think of it,” Jesse said as he grabbed my bag and heaved it over his shoulder. From the way he’d just man-handled that thing, you’d have thought it was filled with feathers. When Alexander, my mom’s boyfriend-of-the-month—a Grade A Douche by my standards—wrangled the bag into the trunk, I was fairly certain he’d have to meet with a chiropractor twice a week for the next year.
“Man, Rowen,” he said, lifting the bag like he was trying to guess the weight. “From the weight of this sucker, I believe you could have a dead body zipped inside.”
“Consider yourself warned,” I said as we made our way into the parking lot. “Don’t piss me off, or you’ll wind up in a black travel bag.”
Another couple notes of laughter rolled out of him. Two genuine laughs in less than a minute. Surely that had to break some sort of record.
“Thanks for the heads up.” Jesse made his way around a truck that had been seeing better days for the entire twenty-first century before tossing my bag into the bed.
“What is this thing?”
“It’s a truck,” Jesse said slowly, giving me an odd look.
“It was a truck thirty years ago,” I said, examining it again. The thing couldn’t be street legal. “This is a corpse on wheels.”
“What? No way,” he replied, sounding a little offended. “This is Old Bessie.” He tapped the truck as he made his way to the passenger’s side. Opening the door, he stepped aside, obviously waiting for me to climb in.
I wasn’t sure what to be more disturbed by: that he’d named his truck Old Bessie or that he’d opened a car door for me. I didn’t think guys actually did that outside of movies and books. The door opening, that is. I’d known plenty of guys who’d named their cars, but none had named them Old Bessie.
When I stood in a frozen stupor, Jesse cleared his throat. “Not what you were expecting?” He admired his truck as if he could see no wrong. I suppose if you were cool with your vehicle having more dents and dings than there were stars in the Milky Way galaxy, or if you didn’t mind the car being new when your parents first got their licenses, there was nothing “wrong” with it.
“Jesse, I didn’t have any expectations when I came here,” I said. “Least of all expectations about the truck of the guy picking me up from the bus station.”
“Then climb on in,” he said, motioning me inside, “and let Old Bessie redefine some non-expectations for you.”
I bit my cheek and tried not to smile. It didn’t matter what I threw at the guy; I couldn’t shake that darn sunny attitude of his. Worst of all, I was afraid it might be contagious. “Just so I’m prepared . . . Are all cowboys like you?” I asked, stepping up into Old Bessie.
Jesse stepped between the door and me before I could close it. His body took up almost the entire door frame. “There’s no other cowboy like me,” he said with a half smile.
I had to swallow before I could respond. “I suppose ‘Old Bessie’ should have alerted me to that.”
He had no other reply than that half smile of his becoming a whole one before moving out of my way. My door was closing at the same time his opened.
“Miss me?” he teased, shifting in his seat until he got comfortable.
“Like a tumor,” I shot back.
Jesse chuckled, shaking his head. “Rowen Sterling: Putting the wise back in wiseass. I think I’ve found a kindred spirit.”
Before I knew what was happening, I was laughing. Laughing. I’d been under the impression I’d forgotten how, but whether I’d remembered or Jesse had taught me a new kind, I was unmistakably laughing.
“So, other than hauling dead bodies around and being a wiseass, who is Rowen Sterling?” he asked before the truck fired to life. It was a good thing he’d completed his question first because Old Bessie’s engine firing up was damn near a sonic boom.
“I think you’re breaking noise ordinances in the next state over,” I shouted above the noise, but he didn’t hear me. By the time we were out of the parking lot, the engine had quieted a few decibels so my brain wasn’t vibrating into my skull any longer.
“So?” he said over the engine. “Rowen Sterling life story? Bible-sized biography?”
He wouldn’t let that go. Too bad I didn’t sigh anymore because I could have used one about then. “How about I give you the one-word story that sums it all up?”
“Wiseass?” he said, his eyes gleaming at me.
I smirked at him. “Complicated,” I stated, rummaging through my purse. “Very complicated.”Locating my cell, I slid it out to check the reception. At least I still had some out in Middle-Of-Nowhere-Ville. “There. That was two words. What more could you possibly want to know?”
“We’re all very complicated, Rowen. Sorry, you don’t corner the market on very complicated” he said, shifting in his seat. Probably because his jeans were five sizes too small and cutting off the circulation to his junk. “So there’s a whole bunch more I’d like to know about you.”
Dammit. Cowboy Jesse was a closet philosopher. I hadn’t seen that one coming.
“You’d like to know,” I said, rolling down my window. Not only because it was hot but because Jesse’s all-man scent was getting to me. What he did or didn’t smell like shouldn’t get to me.