“You don’t exactly look like one of her classmates,” he retorted without any noticeable warmth.
“I’m not,” she allowed with another of those friendly smiles that could kick a man right in the gut. “I’m a teacher. She was in my creative writing seminar this fall, and we got to be friends. I know she said she wrote you about it. My name’s Amanda Marlow. When I told her I needed to do some research on western folklore and history for my next book, she suggested hiding out at the Diamond K.” For a moment, her attention wavered toward the vista beyond the trees. “She didn’t mention that this was just about the most beautiful place on earth.”
The teacher. Jake remembered now, the nonstop talk around the holiday table about Lee’s latest mentor, the award-winning author who seemed to understand all Lee’s babble about plots and themes and symbolism. The Hollywood-bound wonder woman who could make little Lee’s eyes glow like hot rocks and made Jake feel left out and alone, even with Lee.
“It’s also a place without a phone and with electricity that isn’t very reliable,” Jake warned. “And a bathroom with a half-moon on the door.”
“I know.” She grinned. “I got the chance to walk through the snow in my nightgown and boots last night. Quite an experience.”
Jake desperately searched for another alternative. Anything rather than leave this woman on his property.
“Uh, would you like to come in?” she asked now, lifting her hand in a stiff movement toward the interior of the cabin. Then she smiled. “I feel a little silly inviting you into your own cabin. But I was going to talk to you, anyway, about interviewing the hands.”
Jake stiffened. “I have to get back to the ranch. Write what you want, but it’s foaling season. Don’t interfere with the working of the ranch.”
On the porch, Amanda Marlow took a step closer, her gleaming boots clacking on the old wood. “Oh, I wouldn’t interfere. Lee said she thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“Well, I would. You want to rough it, that’s your business. Any problems, let Betty Engleman know. She’s my secretary at the ranch.”
With that, Jake turned on his heel to where Buck waited in perfect silence.
“Jake, wait.”
But Jake was already swinging back up into the saddle, the bridle jangling and the leather creaking comfortably under his weight. Buck shifted a little and ducked his head. Familiar feelings, comfortable smells, a horse and leather and wool. Miss Marlow was the interloper here, the stranger. And yet Jake was the one who felt uncomfortable. He didn’t say another word before spurring Buck into a hard gallop back across the meadow.
Thatwas Lee Kendall’s fussy, old-maid brother Jake? Amanda watched the horse and rider streak across the snow and shook her head. From the way Lee had described her older brother, Amanda had been expecting a cross between Roy Rogers and Johnny Appleseed. Lee had said her brother was shy and conscientious and honest. She’d often talked about how Jake had pampered and overprotected her, the baby in the family, as they were growing up. Lee wanted to write a book about what it had been like for a seventeen-year-old boy to raise his three younger siblings when his parents had died, and dedicate it to the man that boy had become.
Lee was never going to pass creative writing this way. Her description of Jake Kendall would never serve. But then again, Amanda couldn’t quite come up with one that served, either.
Hard. It was the only word that came to mind. He sat his horse like a tower of granite, implacable and overwhelming. His face, all angles and shadows without so much as a dimple to soften them, was the kind of face women dream of and fear.
Amanda had just spent six weeks in Los Angeles working with the people who were going to transfer her latest book to the screen, and she’d seen a lot of handsome men. A lot of tall, sculpted men with faces made up of angles and shadows. She’d seen men who had spent their lives learning how to portray a character just like Jake Kendall. She’d never realized until meeting Jake that they didn’t have a chance of accomplishing it.
It was the intangibles. The way he stood, square on both legs, as if measuring the earth beneath him. The way he talked, his words straightforward and uncompromising, the timbre of his voice like old, scarred wood. It was the way he carried his authority, like an aura, around him. It was the fact that all of these intangibles were his nature rather than any kind of pretension.
Honest. He had none of the small vanities most humans succumb to. Amanda saw it in his bearing, in his eyes, in the way he rode his horse and wore his clothes.
She thought his hair was light, maybe a chestnut color. With his hat pulled so low across his eyes, she couldn’t quite tell. Those eyes, though, she’d seen. Crystals in the shadow, glittering lights in the gloom. A pale, gray-rimmed blue that stood out against the weathered-oak tan of his skin like high mountain lakes at dusk.
He’d taken her breath away, literally. There was a power about him, a natural sensuality she’d never experienced before—even amid some of the best-known beefcakes in the world. He had a quick, easy grace, a command that compelled. When he’d turned away from her, she’d come much too close to walking right off the porch after him. Even now she couldn’t keep her eyes from where his figure sped along the swollen creek, black horse and dark man, his head bent low over the extended neck of the horse, body one with the fluid motion of the animal. She loved to watch a man ride a horse, and she’d just realized it.
Amanda watched until he was out of sight and then turned back into the cabin. Her suitcases were still on the couch, and the bed beyond was still rumpled. The walls were simple white with bright quilts as decorations. The windows were open to the meadow and the mountains beyond. In one comer, kitchen appliances had replaced the old wood stove, and at the other end a fireplace waited with cold ashes in the grate.
Lee had told her that this one-room building had been erected sometime around 1870 and renovated by that hard man out on horseback so that no one would lose the history of his ranch. Kept for family, if they needed someplace to escape, or friends, for hunting. Smelling faintly of coffee and dust and pipe tobacco. The floor was wood, and the furniture was simple. Amanda smiled at the feeling of home it gave her and walked over to punch the button on her tape recorder as she refilled her coffee cup.
“Note,” she recited. “Don’t forget to include how important clothing is on impressions of these characters. What they wear says more about them than what they say.”
It was the boots. His attire had been regulation—flannel shirt and jeans and sheepskin jacket. Probably nothing much different from what his great-grandfather had worn to work this same land. Worn and faded and practical. But Amanda hadn’t been able to help noticing those boots. Not shiny and squared and showy, like hers, like all those hard men she’d just fended off in Los Angeles. These boots were as battered as Jake’s features. Sturdy, solid boots with a good-sized heel and spurs and more wear and tear than the access road that had brought Amanda to this little cabin nestled at the edge of the meadow.
And that hat. Not typical, not like Amanda saw in the cigarette ads. A little wider, a bit taller, with a flat crown and a low brim beneath which he could gauge his opponent without being caught. Well worn, soft, sweat-stained. Just a little different, but beaten by use into as much of a statement as the boots and the torn kerchief he wore around his throat.
“I’ll head over tomorrow to negotiate some interview time with the ranch hands,” she mused aloud, taking a sip of her coffee, her gaze out to the snow. “But I think I have my character. Problem is, he doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t get my letter?”
Jake pulled his hat off and tossed it at the rack by the door before easing down at the kitchen table. “I mean I didn’t get a letter. Just this strange woman standing on the front porch of Bart Kendall’s cabin. Why didn’t you call me, dammit?”
He heard a heartfelt sigh and imagined Lee’s eloquent young eyes rolling dramatically. “Because I sent the book along, too. I wanted to surprise you. I mean, I knew how much you’d enjoy Amanda’s writing. She has a degree in world folklore, and instead of just compiling it into some dry text, she incorporates it into stories. She brings it to life. Oh, Jake, her writing is like poetry. It’s lyrical. It’s—”
