The Counterfeit Cowgirl
“Positive thinking and visualization. They’ll add the right intonation to your voice — instant believability.”
    “I’ll bet.”
    She heard his boots click across the creaking wooden porch and clatter down the steps. Only then did she hobble to the window in time to watch as he covered the overgrown grass with long strides. He moved like an athlete.
    Felicity sighed then caught herself. Aaron was trouble. A wise woman would get away from that window and put herself back to work.
    She waited until he disappeared through his own front door before turning back to the sofa. After all, a woman with sore muscles shouldn’t move too fast.
    She opened all the windows of the small house to take advantage of the fresh morning air, then finished leafing through the first magazine on the stack and tossed it into the trash sack sitting beside her.
    Suddenly, a loud roaring filled her ears. Felicity dropped the next magazine and hurried to the door as fast as her complaining body would allow. The lawn service she had hired wasn’t due until tomorrow.
    She opened the door and shouted, “Aaron Whitaker, you stop that! I don’t want my yard mowed by you.”
    He never heard her. Moving in harmony to his own inner rhythm, Aaron guided his tractor across the tall grass, leaving a flat, green path in his wake.
    Felicity unlatched the screen and stepped out onto the porch, hands on her hips. “Stop.”
    He mowed on, turning in a perfect square to start back across the yard. She made her way down the front steps and planted herself where he couldn’t help but see her.
    Aaron caught sight of her, smiled, waved, and kept on mowing. Felicity yelled again. He waved again and mowed on, deliberately ignoring her angry motions.
    Felicity glared after Aaron’s back as he turned a corner. Unless she wanted to physically confront him and probably get herself mowed, there was nothing she could do to stop him. She went back inside and locked the door.
    Standing behind a curtain, she ignored her own work and watched as her overgrown front yard morphed into a smooth, green carpet. At least, that’s what she pretended she was watching. In reality, she was waiting for the moment when Aaron stripped off his blue work shirt and let the sun beat down on his bare back.
    There was no doubt about it, Felicity thought. The man ought to be outlawed. He ought to be in jail. He ought to be anywhere other than on her small property. He probably knew exactly what he was doing when he stripped off that shirt. He should be arrested.
    Felicity stared, intrigued against her will. She had never realized before how artistic the arrangement of a man’s musculature was, or how breathtaking the movement of those muscles as they operated together could be. In fact, she’d never been interested in watching a man without his shirt before. This meant big trouble.
    She pulled up a chair. A person contemplating trouble needed to get as comfortable as possible.
    She moved her chair from window to window and leafed through magazines while Aaron drove his tractor back and forth across her entire yard, front and back. When he finished and drove the tractor back to his own property, she remained at the window dreaming, only to be jolted from her semi-dozing state a little later by loud pounding.
    Felicity leaped off the chair and groaned when every muscle protested the action. She jerked open the front door and realized the noise she heard hadn’t come from someone knocking her door down. Aaron knelt at the end of the porch, hammer in hand. While she watched, he took a nail from a leather pouch around his waist and drove it into a loose board.
    He now wore a white t-shirt that highlighted his tan and gave her a close-up view of the way the muscles in his shoulders coordinated the motion when he reached for anything. She cleared her throat loudly.
    “If you’re choking, you’ll have to do the Heimlich maneuver on yourself,” Aaron said. “This porch is going to keep me

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