Free Cowboy Seeks Bride by Carolyn Brown

the wagon up the steep sides.
    “We might as well be brothers, but we ain’t. We was born down around Bowie the same year and started to school at the same time. Buddy stuttered from the time he could say his first word and the kids, well, you know how mean kids can be. I was always the biggest kid in class, so that first day when someone picked on him, I whooped the snot right out of that kid. Every time a new kid came to town they had to get their whoopin’ before they understood that nobody picked on my friend. Buddy might stutter, but he’s real smart, so he helped me with the learnin’ and I helped him with the bullyin’ kids.”
    “What’d y’all do after you graduated?” she asked, since he was evidently in a much more talkative mood than the day before.
    “We signed up for the army and wound up in the Gulf War. Said if we ever got back into Montague County we’d never leave it again. This is our first time to break that vow. Oh, we scoot around the north part of Texas on Saturday nights doin’ some two-steppin’ and pool shootin’ at the bars, but we stay pretty close to home, which is the Double Deuce, where we both work for Ace Riley.”
    “Married?” she asked before he could barely draw another breath.
    Coosie shook his head. “Hadn’t found the right woman yet, but neither one of us is dead yet either, so there’s still a chance. You’d be amazed at how many women think that stutter of Buddy’s is cute. He says why settle down with one heifer when he can have a whole herd.”
    Haley laughed and asked, “So you came home from the army and went to work at the Double Deuce?”
    “Yep, Ace’s granddad hired us and we been there ever since. We were both raised up on ranches, so we knew about cattle and tractors. Looks like Dewar is calling a halt and the sun is straight up, so it must be dinnertime.”
    “What are we havin’ today?” Haley asked.
    “Beans. I set them to soakin’ last night and boiled them an hour this morning while I was makin’ flapjacks. Got some leftover spoon bread to go with ’em and I made too many pancakes on purpose so we could roll them up around some honey and peanut butter for dessert.”
    Dewar kept his distance while they ate dinner, barely even acknowledging that she was part of the crew. Damn his sorry old cowboy hide anyway! His kiss made her want more, lots more, and he acted like it never even happened.
    Haley had had relationships, but never before had a kiss created such a hot spot of lingering liquid desire. And the man who’d delivered the hotter’n hell’s blazes kisses was over there acting like he didn’t even know her.
    Well, if that’s the way he wanted it, he could damn sure have his aloofness. She wasn’t interested in anything past a diversion from the boredom of a month on a cattle drive anyway. So there, Dewar O’Donnell with the sexy strut and the hottest kisses in the whole universe.
    She turned her attention to the cattle lined up at the edge of Cow Creek. Getting them from Ringgold to Dodge City was the issue, not whether Dewar could set her ablaze with his kisses. When that was done, her job was over and Joel could do the actual reality show. And she’d be damn glad to have him out of the office and out of her hair for the weeks that he was out in the woods. And she was not sending a single roll of toilet paper with him, either.
    After dinner they moved on north through the rolling hills again, keeping the herd going through long stretches of pastureland, sometimes through gates, across a section line road, and through another gate. Sometimes they had to cut a fence. Then Buddy and Finn hung back to repair it and catch up later.
    In the middle of the afternoon Dewar steered the cattle to the west. Haley could hear the traffic before she actually saw a vehicle. The first one was a white pickup truck speeding down the road toward the south. The next was a pretty red sports car that made her long for her own car. Dewar rode