Cowboy's Kiss by Victoria Pade Page A

he’d actually done it.
    Cured her of wanting it?
    Oh, Lord.
    Okay, maybe deep down—really deep down—she’d wanted him to kiss her.
    There just wasn’t any other explanation for why she’d been on the verge of meeting him halfway.
    Or any other explanation for why she’d lain awake in bed thinking about what it would have been like to be held in those powerful arms, against that rock-solid man’s body. No other explanation for why she’d relived again and again what it had actually felt like to have him pick her up and carry her over one of those broad shoulders....
    But still, she couldn’t let herself believe any of those things would be good. That any of them might be so good that they would make her knees weak.
    She had to convince herself that everything to do with Jackson was as horrible as the work he had her doing made her feel.
    Because the man in the kitchen the night before, the man who’d carried her up the stairs, the man who’d nearly kissed her, was the same man who tortured her by day because he didn’t want her around.
    And that was something she needed not to forget.
    * * *
    Jackson had Ally stretching barbed wire while he went behind her and did the finish-up work—tightening the wire around the nails, pounding the nails against the loop, shoveling dirt in around the cement that held the posts in place.
    Like everything he’d set her to do, she was inept at it. Slow, weak and not tremendously coordinated. A greenhorn through and through.
    But he had to give her credit. She worked without complaint under the toughest conditions, doing her best—no matter how inadequate that was—at the most unpleasant jobs he could throw at her.
    He respected that.
    And he felt a little guilty for subjecting her to so much.
    But it was for her own good, he told himself.
    Besides the fact that he didn’t want her here, that she was nothing but trouble and extra work for him, women like Ally didn’t belong in a place like this. They came with romantic fantasies and television-fed images of what life on a ranch was like. They didn’t know what they were getting into and they were a danger to themselves because they weren’t as serious about it as they needed to be. They didn’t take precautions.
    Getting herself lost the day before was a prime example. Just wandering off in the middle of wide-open range she wasn’t familiar with. Without any food or water on a mercilessly hot day. Letting her horse get away from her...
    Where the hell was her common sense?
    But he knew the answer to that. It was back in Denver. That was part of the problem—women like Ally might have city sense, or suburb sense. But they didn’t have country sense.
    They just didn’t belong here.
    â€œKeep it tight,” he told her, barking at her as if slack in the wire were a felony.
    She didn’t say anything. She just put an extra effort into pulling the heavy coil more taut, trying not to show how much her hands were hurting as she did. Just the way she’d tried not to let him know how saddle sore she’d been last night and still was today.
    He admired that, too.
    Damn her.
    Damn her for everything she was stirring up inside of him. Like the worry that had made him nearly frantic when he’d discovered he’d lost her yesterday and thought the worst—that maybe she’d been thrown, that she might have broken her neck.
    That if she had, or even if something else had happened to her out there alone, it would have been his fault....
    Well, damn it all to hell, what was he supposed to do? Just let her move in here as if it were some resort? This was a working ranch and if she wanted to live on it, she’d better know it, she’d better do her share of pulling the load, and she’d better learn how to do that without risking her neck.
    Except that he didn’t want her living here. Underfoot, getting in his way, causing