Six White Horses (3 page)

Her back was against the stall partition. "What do you mean, a bantam hen?" she demanded, fighting the sudden leap of fear her heart made.

His fingers spread themselves against the wall near her head as he leaned slightly forward, mockery in the vivid blue color of his eyes.

"Puny and proud." Tilting his head to the side, he studied her wary and angry expression. "It fits, though. Puny, proud Patricia,"

Staring at the massive chest and the strength etched in every rugged plane of his face, Patty felt puny and at a decided disadvantage. But the second part of his observation was just as accurate as her hand raised to slap that mocking expression from his mouth. Her wrist was halted by a steel vice midway to the target.

"I find you contemptible, do you know that?" When her hand failed, she lashed out with her tongue. "You are disgusting and loathsome!"

Long sooty lashes couldn't veil the sudden blazing look in his eyes. "You're too big to take over my knee," he declared grimly.

The forbidding line of his jaw moved closer. With a swiftness unexpected in a man of his size, Morgan Kincaid used his body weight to pin her against the stable wall. Seizing her chin between two fingers, he forced it up while his mouth closed hers in a hard, punishing kiss.

Patty struggled for as long as she could, fighting for the air he seemed determined to crush from her lungs. All her senses were drugged by his overpowering masculinity. In surrender, she lay passive in his arms, letting him do with her as he willed.

The lack of resistance eased the bruising pressure of his mouth as it became mobile and warmly persuasive against hers. There was a vague stirring deep inside Patty to respond with instinctive reaction of a female to a male. She had no need to fight back the traitorous weakness of her flesh as Morgan raised his mouth from hers.

"I can better understand a couple of things now," he drawled lazily, his face not more than an inch from hers, the warm moistness of his breath fanning her lashes. "I know why Jack thought you needed more practice and why Lije sought his satisfaction elsewhere rather than take what you blatantly used to offer him. If I'd been in Lije's place, I would have taught you how to make love and taken your gift."

There was an underlying hint of
portent that sent a shudder of inescapability tingling down Patty's spine. "If you had been in Lije's place, I never would have offered anything," she taunted huskily.

The cruel line of his mouth curved into a smile. "What are you going to do now that you've saved all your kisses for a man who belongs to someone else? Give them out as good-luck kisses?"

"Lije belongs to no one but himself." She deliberately ignored the last jeering question.

"Does that mean you're considering trying to break up his happy home?"

Lije didn't love her. He never had. To try to come between him and his beautiful wife would only succeed in making her look like an even bigger fool.

"I meant nothing of the kind," Patty denied in bitter defeat. She hunched her shoulders together, trying to twist free of his firm hold. "Will you let me go?"

"If I do, will you hit me or run into a corner to hide and try to remember Lije's kisses?"

"He was infinitely better at kissing than you!" She trembled violently with her dislike as he laughed at her statement. The throaty sound was more infuriating than any mocking words. "What's the matter? Don't you think I know?" she demanded angrily. "He kissed me lots of times. They were always warm, gentle kisses, not coarse and animalistic like yours!" Her fingers touched her sore and tender mouth, still throbbing from his rough kiss while the skin around it was red and scraped by his shaven beard. "Your kisses hurt!"

"Love hurts." His narrowed blue gaze glittered down at her. "Or haven't you learned that?"

"I can't imagine you knowing anything about love," Patty retorted with contemptuous sarcasm.

"Hell!" Morgan chuckled in amusement, releasing her arms and stepping away. "I'm only thirty-five. I couldn't possibly know as much as you do! Why, you must be all of—what, twenty-two?"

If looks could kill, they would have been carving the date of his death on the gravestone as Patty glared her hatred of him.

"Yes, I am twenty-two," she asserted vigorously, "which hardly makes me an immature teenager, ignorant of the facts of life!"

"You may know about them, but you aren't on speaking terms." The grooves near his mouth deepened with mockery.

"I don't doubt that your bestial existence has given you intimate knowledge," Patty lashed back.

"Don't knock it if you haven't tried it, Skinny," Morgan winked.

In that fleeting second, she realized that he was deliberately provoking her temper for his own amusement, laughing at how quickly she rose to the bait.

"I have work to do, and I'm wasting my breath arguing with you." She spun away and stalked through the stall door toward the tack room.

"Need any help?" Morgan asked from the tack doorway.

Patty shook out Liberty's blanket, black with a white rose on the hip. "Never from you," she answered sarcastically.

"Suit yourself." There was an indifferent shrug of his broad shoulders as he turned away, then paused. "Are you going to Kelly's tonight?" he asked, referring to a local bar.

"No, I am not."

"Good. I've just won a hundred dollars."

"What are you talking about?" Patty frowned, giving Morgan her undivided attention.

"I bet gramps a hundred dollars that you wouldn't show up tonight because Lije and his wife were going to be there," he responded in a complacent drawl.

"Gramps? You mean—my grandpa?"

"Who else? I tried to tell him you'd be too grief-stricken over meeting Lije again to go, but he kept insisting you were made of sterner stuff—smiling on the outside and crying on the inside type of thing. I don't believe he understands women as well as he thinks he does," Morgan concluded wryly. "Females enjoy being miserable."

Patty's mouth opened and closed. No words came to mind that were sufficiently sarcastic to give vent to her wrath. She was still searching for them as he walked away, heading toward the pens where the rodeo stock was held.

Chapter Two

EVERETT KING WAS SEATED at the small table in the travel trailer, studying a road map when Patty entered. The jacket of his light blue suit was lying on the back of a chair. His string tie was hanging loose and the top buttons of his white shirt opened. Running his gnarled fingers through his pepper gray hair, he glanced up and smiled.

"Do you have the horses all settled for the night?" he inquired.

"Grandpa, did you make a bet with Morgan Kincaid tonight?" She stopped beside the table, her hands on her hips, her head tilted to the side.

"Whatever gave you that idea?" There was a disbelieving look from his brown eyes before they returned to the study of the road map.
 

"Morgan Kincaid was the 'whatever' that gave me the idea," Patty answered grimly.

"You talked to him, did you?" Her grandfather breathed in deeply at her answering nod and folded up the map. "Are you going to Kelly's?" He didn't glance up as he asked the question.

"I shouldn't go, just to teach you a lesson," she sighed.

"But you are going," he stated positively, a decided twinkle in the brown eyes that met her pair of equally dark ones.

"You did it deliberately, didn't you, grandpa?" Her mouth curved into a smile of affectionate exasperation. "I'll bet you even told Morgan where I was just to make sure that I found out about it. You knew he wouldn't be able to resist the temptation of telling me."

"That sounds as if I tricked you into going," he said with mock reproval.

"You did and you know it!" Patty shook her head and stepped into the small kitchen area. "We can't afford to lose a hundred dollars on a silly bet like that and I couldn't stand a week of Morgan's gloating. I suppose he is the stock contractor at our next rodeo?"

"Well, yes, actually he is," her grandfather admitted reluctantly.

"Your little maneuver was successful," she sighed. "I am going to Kelly's, but you're going with me. I'll need some moral support—so don't you go off in some corner with Lefty."

"There's a towel and washcloth in the shower," he told her. There was a pause as he darted her a twinkling glance and added, "And I laid your yellow outfit on the bed just in case you decided to go."

"Just in case, huh? Sometimes
,
gramps, you're positively exasperating!" Patty declared as she walked into the miniature bath area on the side of the trailer.

"I take after my granddaughter," he called after her.

Twenty minutes later she was tucking the opaque flowered blouse into the waistband of the matching lemon yellow slacks. Her dark brown hair was brushed free of its braid to hang loose and tickle her shoulder blades. The casual style alleviated the tomboy image, but the lightly applied lipstick, mascara and eyeshadow couldn't dim the youthfully open look to her features.

With a resigned shrug, Patty turned away from the mirror. She couldn't compete with the sophisticated perfection of the blond model who was Lije's wife. Although she did have a grandfather who maneuvered her into impossible situations, she didn't have a fairy godmother who could suddenly transform her into a raving beauty with the wave of a wand.
 

Besides, hadn't she learned already that Lije didn't see her as anything more than the little girl next door? She wished she could despise him for the way she had wasted all those years waiting for him. It might make it easier to get over him. But she couldn't and didn't. She just kept right on loving him as though nothing had changed.

"All right, grandpa," she said, as she walked through the tiny kitchen to the equally tiny living room of the trailer. "I'm ready. We'd better go before I change my mind."

His shirt was buttoned and his jacket back on. The Western string tie was secured in its longhorn clasp. He set his ivory tan Stetson at a jaunty angle on his peppery dark hair.

"There aren't any quitters in the King family," he smiled, and opened the trailer door.

"I wish I were as sure about that as you are," Patty murmured as she followed him into the starlit

The churning of her stomach was worse than anything she had experienced prior to a performance as they approached the entrance of the small tavern a few blocks from the arena grounds. Because of its closeness, it was frequented by a majority of the rodeo cowboys, those who weren't flying elsewhere to compete in another rodeo. That majority seemed to be there in force tonight, Patty decided when she and her grandfather stepped through the doors.

The room was hazy with smoke, a gauze cloud that hung near the ceiling. The billiard tables in one corner were the scene of some good-natured baiting, the loud voices mixing with the laughter and chatter coming from the tables in the rest of the tavern. Overriding all of the din was a country dance band playing a popular song.

"Do you see him here?" Patty whispered nervously.

"He's sitting over by the dance floor. There's an empty table beside him. Come on," Everett King ordered.

Her searching eyes found Lije easily. He was facing the door with his arm resting on the back of his wife's chair. Blake Williams, one of the leading professional steer wrestlers, was seated at the table with him, for the present commanding Lije's attention.

But Patty wasn't interested in Blake Williams. All of her attention was centered on Lije, catching the loving glance he gave his wife. The look brought a stab of jealousy that cruelly twisted its blade in her heart. What a striking couple they make, she thought dejectedly. The thought didn't stop her from wishing that she had been the recipient of that glance.

Her grandfather's hand guided her along the edge of the dance floor. The chin that had begun drooping was jerked up as Patty looked into a pair of thoughtfully mocking blue eyes. She had been so intent on Lije that she hadn't noticed Morgan Kincaid among the dancers on the floor. But he was there, partnering Jill Van Wen, a tawny-haired barrel racer who followed the rodeo circuit just as the professional cowboys did. The pair had paused directly in their path.
 

"I see you've changed your mind," Morgan observed dryly.

"Yes, I did," Patty agreed with cold arrogance. "It looks as if you lose."

His metallic gaze flickered to her grandfather. "I guess so."

"Lije has just come in, Patty," Jill Van Wert inserted with a faintly catty edge to her tongue. "He's seated right over there—with his wife. Have you seen him yet?"

Patty's
mouth tightened. She had never liked Jill very much. The girl was an excellent barrel racer, but Patty had always had the impression that it wasn't the competition that had prompted Jill to follow the rodeo, but the cowboys—in the plural sense.

"Yes, I did notice him," she answered stiffly. "Gramps and I were just on our way over to say hello."

"We mustn't keep you, then." Morgan smiled crookedly, his eyes openly laughing at the stiff, defensive expression on her face. "See you later."