Cowboys Don't Cry Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  DID YOU PURCHASE THIS BOOK WITHOUT A COVER? If you did, you should be aware it is stolen property as it was reported 'unsold and destroyed' by a retailer Neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this book

  First Published 1995

  Second Australian Paperback Edition 2004

  ISBN 0-733-55395-8

  COWBOYS DON'T CRY © 1995 by Anne McAllister

  Philippine Copyright 1995

  Australian Copyright 1995

  New Zealand Copyright 1995

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  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention

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  One

  Tanner could hear them arguing even as he came along the side of the barn.

  "He can't."

  "Can so."

  "No way."

  "Yessir."

  "No disrespect, Ev," he heard Bates say earnestly in his polite, college-boy voice. "Tanner's the best at breaking broncs in these parts, no two ways about it. But I don't reckon even he could stay on this one."

  As he rounded the corner, Tanner saw old Everett Warren spit m the dust, then aim a glare at the younger cowboy. "Shows what you know."

  "Yeah," a third, much higher voice chipped in, and Billy, Ev's nine-year-old grandson, swung up on the corral fence "Tanner can do anything."

  Tanner grinned a little at the boy's confidence in him. In fact, he hoped Billy was right. If he was, then everything would work out fine when he had to deal with his new boss this afternoon.

  But before he had a chance to start thinking about that again, he saw Bates shake his head. "Not this mare," he said, nodding at the one whose bridle he held.

  She was the sweetest-looking jet black beauty Tanner had ever seen. The upcoming interview faded from his mind at the sight of her. Talk about prime horseflesh.

  Tanner stopped and simply admired the mare as she fidgeted, stamping, tossing her head and shimmying as Bates spoke.

  "'Course he can. Can't you?" Ev added, when he turned and saw Tanner coming their way.

  "You can ride her, can'tcha, Tanner?" Billy demanded.

  Tanner didn't say anything, just stood considering her, tempted.

  Ev grinned. "Sam Gallagher just brought her over. Says ain't no one can stay on her at his place."

  "Plenty of guys have tried," Bates put in quickly. "Gibb got bucked off last week. Didn't last five seconds. Walker and Del Rio tried, too, and both of 'em bit the dust. Not surprising really, those two...but Gibb, he's dynamite."

  "He ain't Tanner," Billy said stoutly.

  "Ain't nobody better'n Tanner." Ev nodded emphatically, chewed and spat again. He looked at Tanner, his pale blue eyes clear and bright. "Show him."

  Tanner cocked his head. "Just like that?"

  "You've rid your share," Ev reminded him.

  But that had been a while back. He was thirty-four now and occasionally aware after a long day in the saddle of his thrice-broken ribs, a shattered ankle, a lumpy collarbone, a shoulder with a permanent tendency toward dislocation and the two pins still residing in his left knee.

  Still, she was a beauty. And there was nothing in the world like pitting your strength against so much sheer energy, nothing that could compare with settling down onto a half a ton of twisting, surging animal. It felt as if you had the world by the tail.

  Even so, Tanner hesitated. He looked with longing at the ebony mare, feeling the weight of his responsibilities pressing down on him as he did so.

  "What good's a dead foreman, I'd like to know?" Abigail had scolded last spring when he'd hit the dust, concussed, after being thrown by a frisky bay. "I don't pay you to break horses or bones!"

  "I'm fine," Tanner had assured her, swallowing the dirt in his mouth and wiping a streak of blood off his lip. "Don't fuss."

  But Abigail Crumm had loved a good fuss. And when a woman got to be eighty-four, a woman did whatever a woman wanted to do. In this case it was to prevail upon Tanner to stop riding broncs.

  "Is that an order?"

  Abigail had given a tiny, dry laugh. "Of course not. I'm simply asking, Tanner." She'd slanted him a coy glance, adding in her best quavering old-lady voice, "I do so worry about you, you know."

  Tanner had snorted. Abigail had smiled.

  He hadn't ridden the bronc. A bad heart had made Abigail vulnerable and Tanner was damned if he was going to be the death of her. She'd had enough to worry about without him.

  But now Abigail was gone.

  The slight cold she'd brushed off in February had turned into pneumonia the first week in March.

  He'd told her to go to the hospital. He'd told her orange juice and afternoon naps weren't enough. But Abigail had ignored him.

  "You know horses, Tanner, I'll give you that," she'd said with as much briskness as she could muster. "You're a good cattleman, too. A wonderful foreman. But until you can show me a medical degree, I'll do my own doctoring."

  "They got medical degrees in Casper. I'll drive you," he offered almost desperately.

  But Abigail had simply smiled up at him from her rocking chair and taken another sip of juice. Outside the wind had rattled sleet against the windowpanes. "No."

  "Damn it, you're not going to get well like this!"

  "I've had a good life, Tanner. I'd rather die with my boots on like my daddy did than molder away in some hospital room."

  "You're not gonna molder, Abigail!"

  "No," she said firmly. "I'm not."

  She hadn't. But she hadn't survived, either.

  Two weeks ago, almost late because he'd had to ride halfway to Hole-in-the-Wall to fix a fence, Tanner had sat slumped in the back pew at her funeral to listen to Reverend Dailey remind everyone what an inspiration Abigail Crumm had always been.

  "She went her own way. She did her own thing. At one time or another, she had the cattlemen, the oil men, the sheep men, and the townspeople all mad at her. But there wasn't a more caring person in the whole of Wyoming than Abigail Crumm."

  Reverend Dailey's eyes scanned the packed churc
h, looking at all the people whose lives Abigail Crumm had touched. Then he smiled. "Or," he added, "a more surprising one."

  At the time Tanner hadn't realized the full import of that statement.

  Now he did.

  And in a little less than an hour he'd be meeting the biggest one.

  He'd been prepared to have Abigail leave the ranch to one of her causes. The good Lord knew she'd had plenty of 'em—all the way from stray cats to homeless children. And Tanner had figured he could handle that. Being foreman with an absentee landlord was the best of all possible worlds. Besides, who else would she leave it to? Ab had no living relatives. As highly as she thought of her old friend Ev, he didn't have the stamina to manage a spread this big, and Tanner knew she wouldn't leave it to him.

  In fact, he'd made damned sure she didn't.

  "The hell you say," he'd sputtered when she'd told him she was thinking of naming him her beneficiary. "What would you go and do a stupid thing like that for?"

  "I trust you, Tanner. You know the ranch better than anyone."

  "I know what a load of work it is. You ever see a happy rancher, Abby? 'Course not. They got too many worries to be happy. No thanks. I'm a cowboy, not a rancher. And cowboys don't stay. We're free. No strings attached. I came with my saddle. I'll go with my saddle. That's the way I like it."

  "You've been here four years," Abigail reminded him.

  "And I can leave tomorrow."

  "Do you want to?"

  He shrugged, feeling uncomfortable under her speculative blue gaze. '"Course not," he said after a moment. "Not now anyhow. You need me."

  She smiled gently. "Yes."

  "So—" he shrugged "—I'll hang around awhile. Because I want to. Not because I have to. Don't you go tyin' me down."

  Abigail just looked at him for a long moment, so long that Tanner wondered whether she was really seeing him or something else entirely. Finally, she'd nodded. "Whatever you say, Tanner."

  When Ev came home and told him over supper what the will said, he found that she'd left him a horse trailer and her two best saddle horses. "Portable assets," she'd called them.

  She left the ranch to Maggie MacLeod.

  "What the hell's a Maggie MacLeod?" Tanner had asked, taking the cup of coffee Ev handed him. He hadn't had time to go to the reading himself. Cows didn't stop calving just for wills to be read. "Never heard of it."

  It sure as hell didn't sound like stray cats. But Tanner didn't really care. One cause was as good as another as far as he was concerned, as long as whoever was in charge stayed out of his way and let him do his job.

  "Not a committee," Ev had said. "A woman."

  A woman. One woman? Tanner frowned. "Just a regular... person, you mean?" Not a cause at all?

  "Uh-huh." Ev nodded, grinning.

  "What sort of woman?"

  "Schoolmarm."

  Tanner couldn't believe it. Visions of starchy, desiccated old prunes fogged his mind. Heaven knew he'd had his share of them. All those years and all those classrooms had seemed like some particularly enduring form of torture to Tanner. He couldn't wait to get out.

  And now Abby had left the ranch to one ?

  "Hell and damnation!" He leapt to his feet and stalked around the room.

  Ev's grin vanished and he glanced at Billy, then gave Tanner a reproving look. Tanner didn't apologize. He was too busy envisioning what a mess a schoolteacher could make out of the Three Bar C.

  "She teaches down in Casper," Billy volunteered. "Third grade. Like Ms. Farragut."

  "That's a hell of a recommendation," Tanner muttered. Old Battle-ax Farragut looked like she could freeze a herd of cattle in July, and Tanner knew from what Billy and Ev said that there was only one way to do things as far as she was concerned: Farragut's way. His jaw tightened.

  "Ab met her at some soup kitchen," Ev added. "La-dlin' out for the homeless."

  "The homeless?" Tanner echoed. He couldn't quite see Farragut doing that. But a do-gooder wasn't much better.

  "Swell," Tanner grumbled. "She'll probably want to knit caps for the cattle."

  Billy giggled.

  "How come Ab never brought her out here?" he muttered, kicking out a chair and dropping into it, scowling.

  "She did once or twice. You were gone. Riding fence or feeding cattle. What you were supposed to be doin'," Ev said. "Ab didn't need you to vet her visitors."

  "You met her then? What's she like? She live in Casper?" If she had a house and was settled in, that wouldn't be so bad. She could be a landlady from there. Not quite as good as a cause, but...

  Ev shook his head. "Nope. And she ain't never been on a ranch before. 'Cept to visit Ab."

  Tanner's mouth opened and shut twice before he could say, "You mean Ab went and saddled us with a city slicker?"

  Ev shrugged. "She seemed nice enough. Real pleasant, I thought. And, of course, Ab liked her."

  "Ab liked more folks than Will Rogers did!"

  "Even sour-faced old skunks like you," Ev said easily. He clapped his hand on Tanner's shoulder. "Where's your faith in human nature, boy? Ab wasn't no fool. If she liked this Maggie well enough to leave her the ranch, well, that's good enough for me. I reckon she knew what she was doin'."

  Tanner didn't reckon anything of the sort, but he wasn't going to win an argument with Ev about it. Ev had always believed the sun rose and set on Abigail Crumm, and there wasn't any arguing with him. Anyway, a more cheerful thought had just occurred to Tanner.

  "She'll probably stay in Casper, then," he said. "City lady like that won't want to be stuck out here. Besides, there aren't many homeless this far out."

  But yesterday's mail had brought a letter from Clyde Bridges, Abigail's lawyer, that squelched that hope.

  "Miss Maggie MacLeod is looking forward to seeing the Three Bar C." Not even Ms., Tanner had noted grimly. Worse and worse. "She'll be coming on Wednesday. Would you please be available to meet with her at four to discuss her move to the ranch?"

  Move to the ranch?

  Tanner had stared at the words, willing them to vanish. They hadn't.

  He'd shut his eyes and tried once more to imagine the sort of fanatic schoolmarm whom Abigail would've appreciated enough to do something as harebrained as this. Then he tried to imagine such a woman living on the Three Bar C. It didn't bear thinking about.

  His only hope was that she'd see it that way, too.

  The Three Bar C was not your House and Garden-variety ranch. It was damned near a nineteenth-century relic, miles from town in foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The two-story house was built of pine logs that Abigail's father had cut himself and dragged with his team to the site. It had four walls, a stone fireplace and character, but not much else. Even running water and indoor plumbing had arrived within recent memory.

  It was no place for a woman.

  Abigail had been born here, of course. But that meant she'd grown up to it, knew it like the back of her hand. She'd never had another home.

  Miss Maggie MacLeod, whoever she was, had. She wouldn't belong.

  And at four o'clock today, in less than an hour, Tanner was going to have to convince her of that.

  "I dare you," Ev said now.

  Tanner blinked, startled back to the present. "What?"

  "To ride her."

  "Maybe he's got too much sense to risk it," Bates suggested.

  Ev shook his head. "Not Tanner."

  Tanner gave him a baleful look. "Thanks a lot."

  "Just meant you ain't afraid of risks." Ev lifted a brow. "Are you?"

  It was crazy. It was insane. He hadn't ridden an unbroken horse like this mare in over a year. His doctor would be furious. Ab would be spinning in her grave.

  He reached for the reins. He needed the challenge. He needed the thrill, the physical release that he knew would come from trying to bring chaos under control. He would do it; and then he would sort out Miss Maggie MacLeod.

  "Awwright!" Billy shouted as Tanner swung up into the saddle.

/>   In an instant the horse had gathered herself together. Beneath him, Tanner felt her bunch and thrust, exploding as she tried to throw this unfamiliar burden from her back.

  Flung high and hanging tight, Tanner laughed. He thrust his arm into the air, exulting in her blowup, savoring the surge of powerful energy, the challenge of controlling it, of controlling and taming this little black beauty of a horse.

  The landscape blurred around him. Ev and Bates and Billy faded, the fence and the barn evaporated, the car coming over the snow-covered rise disappeared into a haze of winter white and dusty blue.

  The world became a swirl of color. All that mattered lay beneath the saddle leather between his legs, in the gleaming sweaty hide of the ebony mare, in the challenge of bringing her under control.

  She jumped and snapped, hopped and twisted. Tanner hung on. She raced and shimmied, arched and bucked. Tanner clung.

  And then he began to get the rhythm of her. He caught her beat and moved with it. His spine twisted, his knee pained, his head snapped back and his hat flew off.

  He stayed on. He anticipated. He compensated. He leaned, arched, dug.

  The mare ducked her head, lunging forward, then all of a sudden, jerked back, whipping him upward, unseating him.

  He flew. Flipped. Hit.

  Hard.

  He was in heaven.

  Had to be.

  Why else, when at last he opened his eyes, would there be an angel with the greenest eyes, the most kissable mouth and the most gorgeous mane of wavy auburn hair he'd ever seen staring down into his face?

  He smiled. So there were eternal rewards after all. And hell, he hadn't even had to be a complete saint to get one! Fuzzy-minded and light-headed, Tanner reached out tentatively to touch her.

  "Don't move!"

  The sound of her voice was so unexpected that he jerked. It hurt—but no more than reaching out had.

  He shut his eyes carefully, trying to get his bearings. Was he in heaven or wasn't he? He didn't think you were supposed to hurt in heaven, but his Sunday-school teachers had never been the best.

  Slowly he opened his eyes again, expecting the vision to have vanished.

  She was still there, bending even closer now. Her skin looked soft as the petals of Ab's summer roses and there was a faint rosy flush on her cheeks. And God, that mouth! How long had it been since he'd kissed a woman? Tanner swallowed and started to struggle up.