Read Online Cowboy Tough by Joanne Kennedy - Free Book Online Page B

began bustling around the kitchen as if the king of England had arrived. Cat took the opportunity to mumble a polite excuse about getting organized and hightail it for the relative safety of the bunkhouse.
    She’d chosen the smallest room in the Heifer House for her own, a windowless cubicle at the end of the hall furthest from the bathroom. It was the approximate size and shape of a grave, which left barely room for herself and her luggage. For the moment, the cave-like solitude suited her.
    Tugging a string that dangled from the bare bulb screwed into the ceiling, she knelt by the bed and fussed over her art supplies. She needed to have two of everything. Dora would be arriving tomorrow, and Cat had no doubt she’d conveniently forget her own brushes and paints. The girl had been strangely resistant to painting ever since her mother died.
    Cat hoped she’d be able to figure out why on this trip. Figure out why and fix it. Underneath the hard shell Dora had donned at her mother’s funeral was a sweet, talented girl. And Cat aimed to bring that girl back into the light.
    She put everything back into the canvas bag she’d bought just for the trip. The brushes fit into neat slots, graduated by size. The paints themselves went into a plastic-lined compartment, and there was a removable zipper pouch for sketching pencils, charcoal, and erasers.
    She loved art supplies the way some women loved fashion or food. There were so many possibilities waiting inside the tubes of bright color, and the blank paper was just waiting to take the paint.
    The sketchbook went in last, and reluctantly. She’d noticed a rustic cabin behind the house, set in a copse of trees at the end of a picturesquely winding path. It would be lit by the lowering sun right now, with long, crisp shadows stretching from the sagebrush. She’d love to do a quick watercolor sketch of the place, but she needed to check on Trevor Maines and see if Madeleine Boyd had stolen his free will yet.
    She hoped so.
    Strolling up the steps to the ranch house, she was careful not to even look toward the barn. She had trouble enough without ogling the cowboy again. She mounted the steps and edged the door open.
    â€œAnybody home?” She hoped her voice sounded more playful than she felt.
    â€œIn here.” Madeleine sounded chipper enough.
    Trevor was laughing as she entered, his head flung back so that his blond hair flowed over the back of the chair. The laughter sounded forced and artificial, and when he slanted his gaze her way she caught a hard gleam in his eyes that had nothing to do with humor.
    What was it about this man that made her so uneasy? For some reason he set off alarm bells in her head.
    â€œIt looks like Mrs. Boyd made you comfortable,” she said.
    â€œOh, yes. We’re old friends now.” He shifted his feet, which were resting on a fringed footstool constructed mostly of cattle horns. Like much of Maddie’s furniture, it looked like a relic of the nineteenth-century west of cattle barons and entrepreneurial British nobility. The website said the original Boyd was a duke from Scotland whose father had sent him to America after he’d killed a rival in a duel.
    She tried to picture Mack fighting a Scottish duel, but she only got as far as the kilt before her thoughts wandered off on a rocky and forbidden track.
    Or maybe not so rocky. The kiss had been awkward, but she had to admit the cowboy was growing on her. There’d been a companionable silence during their ride that felt somehow soothing, and he’d let her look at the landscape as long as she wanted. Most nonartists got impatient with her gawking, but Mack had a stillness about him that let her relax and enjoy the view. She enjoyed looking at him too, but she’d been serious about the “no touching” rule. There was no way she could indulge herself in a wild cowboy fling once Dora arrived.
    Still, she wasn’t sorry she’d