Daddy's Little Cowgirl Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  About the Author

  Books by Charlotte Maclay

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Copyright

  “I figure we can negotiate the conjugal rights part, but I guarantee it wouldn’t be a hardship on you.”

  “How romantic,” Ann countered. “I can’t recall the last time I had such a tender proposal.”

  “So that’s why you haven’t accepted any of them?”

  Reed’s remark was like a slap across her face.

  She’d never had a proposal.

  “That’s none of your damn business.”

  Reed ignored her as he juggled the baby and diaper bag. “Look at her, sugar. Hold her and then tell me you wouldn’t do anything in the world to keep her if you were in my shoes.”

  He thrust the baby into Ann’s arms.

  Her emotions were like quicksilver as the infant snuggled close and rooted against her breast. Her heart ached, and she had difficulty drawing a breath. Stroking Betina’s soft cap of hair, Ann looked at her through a veil of tears.

  Was it possible that this time she could have it all? The hot sultry passion she’d felt so explosively when she was with Reed? And motherhood, too?

  “H—how soon do you need to get married?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Charlotte Maclay can’t resist a happy ending. That’s why she’s had such fun writing more than twenty romance novels. Particularly well—known for her volunteer efforts in her hometown of Torrance, California, Charlotte believes you should make a difference in your community. She and her husband have two married daughters and two grandchildren, whom they are occasionally allowed to baby-sit. She loves to hear from readers and can be reached at: P.O. Box 505, Torrance, CA 90508.

  Books by Charlotte Maclay

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  474—THE VILLAIN’S LADY

  488—A GHOSTLY AFFAIR

  503—ELUSIVE TREASURE

  532—MICHAEL’S MAGIC

  537—THE KIDNAPPED BRIDE

  566—HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE

  585—THE COWBOY AND THE BELLY DANCER

  620—THE BEWITCHING BACHELOR

  643—WANTED: A DAD TO BRAG ABOUT

  657—THE LITTLEST ANGEL

  684—STEALING SAMANTHA

  709—CATCHING A DADDY

  728—A LITTLE BIT PREGNANT

  743—THE HOG—TIED GROOM

  Don’t miss any of our special offers. Write to us at the following address for information on our newest releases.

  Harlequin Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  Daddy’s Little Cowgirl

  Charlotte Maclay

  Special thanks to Anna Munro and Dan Patterson at The Soldier Factory in Cambria, California, for their warm welcome and detailed information.

  Your exquisite miniatures inspired me.

  Chapter One

  Reed Drummond drove the thirty head of beef cattle down the narrow California blacktop highway. He could have used a partner to keep the animals in line. What he had was a mangy mutt.

  He whistled, and the mutt nipped at the heels of the stragglers.

  The winding road divided two main sections of the Rocking D Ranch, a thousand—acre spread located in the rolling hills that rose along the coastline of central California, not far from San Simeon and the Hearst castle. As Reed well knew, wherever you grazed cattle, the grass was always greener just down the road a piece. He’d traveled a lot of roads in his twenty—seven years, worked as a hired hand in a half—dozen different states and more than a dozen cattle ranches. Now he was back home again, had been for a month, and it sure as hell wasn’t a castle.

  Automatically he reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarette fixings and came up with a pacifier instead. He grinned.

  Who would have thought he’d be a father, not to his own kid but to a brown—eyed sweetheart born to a young couple who’d latched on to him like Reed was their big brother or something. Until Betsy and Tommy had come along, he’d been a loner, a rolling stone that gathered no moss. They’d darn near adopted him, sticking like glue as they moved from ranch to ranch with him.

  Maybe they’d stuck to him because they were runaways like Reed had once been—and with the same good reasons.

  Those two kids were so tickled when Betsy got pregnant, too young to know better.

  And then came the accident, Tommy driving their old jalopy, Betsy in the passenger seat, Reed a halfmile behind them in his pickup, all driving toward Fort Worth and a new job. Betsy made it to the hospital—barely. Tommy hadn’t gotten that far.

  Reed’s throat closed on the memory, and he stuffed the pacifier back into his pocket. Betsy’s very last request was that Reed take her baby, adopt little Betina and be the best daddy he could be.

  He hadn’t wanted to be responsible for a kid. A thousand other guys would have been a better choice. But Betsy had chosen him and with practically her last breath told him Tommy would have wanted it that way too. No way could he have told them no.

  So he’d given up cigarettes cold turkey, hired a housekeeper, packed up Betina and brought her home to the Rocking D. He hadn’t thought of his father’s run—down cattle ranch as home in more than a dozen years. But he couldn’t raise Betina on the road, living in bunkhouses wherever they happened to need a hired hand. That was no life for a kid.

  The ranch had been his for more than two years, since his old man’s liver had finally given out on him.

  Betina needed a place to grow up, a place she could call home. Reed would damn well see she got it.

  He’d given his word to her mother. It was that simple—and that complicated. Reed never went back on his word. Never.

  “Keep on movin’,” he urged the lead steer. “We haven’t got all day.”

  The longer the herd was on the road, the greater the chances some tourist would come barreling through this scenic route at two hundred miles an hour and spook the cattle into a stampede. With only Reed and the mutt to control the animals, slowing a pack of runaway beef on the hoof would be a damn hard trick to pull off.

  There was a school between this particular spot on the road and the pasture where Reed was heading. Nobody had ever bothered to put up a fence there, certainly not his old man, who’d spent more time drunk than sober.

  For a moment, he smiled and thought about Betina—Bets, he’d taken to calling her—someday going to that same school. Good God! he laughed. He’d have to join the PTA! Wouldn’t that just make the town mothers roll their eyes.

  Fire drill!

  The shrill buzzer bleated repeatedly, echoing in the classroom and down the hallways, setting Ann Forrester’s teeth on edge. To compound an already difficult week, the school principal had added one more distraction for the youngsters. She wondered how he expected her to get any teaching done at all between short days for parent conferences, student assemblies and now a fire drill.

  “All right, students. Hand your test papers to me as you go out. And remember to stay in line all the way to the goalposts on the football field,” she admonished the class of seventh—grader
s.

  “I didn’t get to finish, Miss Forrester,” Rosetta complained, the ever—conscientious student.

  “It’s all right. We’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  “Aw, gee, Miss Forrester.” Jason handed her a paper so wrinkled it looked as if he’d had it stuffed in his pocket. Which, knowing Jason, he probably had. “I’m not gonna be here tomorrow. I’ve got a dentist appointment.” He grinned.

  “Then I guess you’ll have to come by this afternoon after school to complete your test.”

  His smile crumpled. “Hey, no way, man. You’re not givin’ me detention just ‘cause of some stupid—”

  “Outside, Jason. On the football field,” she ordered, trying to break up the logjam of students leaving the classroom. In a gesture of frustration, she flipped the ends of her long hair back behind her shoulder.

  Preadolescents were at their most creative when making up excuses not to do their work. Ann didn’t let them get away with much, particularly a youngster like Jason. He had a great deal of potential but so far he’d wasted it all. Given that he was in foster care and had a terrible background of abuse and abandonment, it was little wonder he was a troubled child.

  Her biggest weakness as a teacher had always been worrying about the kids who were at risk of being lost in the system. Bad boys invariably touched her heart the most. More times than not, her efforts to “save” them were a flop. Why she kept on trying was beyond her. It seemed a part of her nature she simply couldn’t change.

  With minimum organization, the students milled around the football field. Teachers tried to keep them contained, everyone waiting with equal impatience for Mr. Dunlap to give the all—clear signal.

  Beneath her feet Ann felt a rumbling sensation. The ground quivered like Jell—O. What were the kids doing now? she wondered. Or was it an earthquake? She looked around for an explanation.

  Suddenly her eyes widened in horror.

  A cloud of billowing dust was rolling toward the unprotected students on the football field. The earth shook harder. The incessant roar increased.

  “Stampede!” she screamed. “Run!”

  Acting on instinct, afraid her students would be trampled—the kids she loved and worried over and cried for—Ann yanked off her sweater and waved it wildly in the air to divert the lead animals onto a new path.

  “Get away!” she shouted. “Shoo! You don’t belong here.”

  The smell of dust filled her nostrils; thundering hooves pounded closer as the herd veered away from the students—and directly toward Ann. She could see the lead animals, white blazes on their faces. Eyes wide. Heads bent with determination.

  “No!” she screamed.

  From out of nowhere, a horse and rider appeared. He bore down on her like an avenging angel. Sorrel horse. Stetson clamped low on the rider’s head. Chaps flying. Heels flailing the animal’s belly. Ann had a fleeting thought that if the cattle didn’t kill her, this deranged cowboy would.

  Without the horse missing a single stride, the rider lifted Ann off her feet, swung her up in front of him, and slammed her across his rock—hard thighs like a sack of flour. Every cubic centimeter of breath was driven from her lungs.

  “Hang on, lady,” he ordered.

  As if she had a choice, she mentally muttered, grasping for whatever she could hold on to. The galloping pace threw her against the man’s pelvis again and again. The ridge of the saddle horn dug into her midsection. Knee—high grass raced by in a blur at what seemed like only inches from her face. On her thigh, holding her, the cowboy’s palm burned into her flesh.

  If all the blood hadn’t rushed to her head, she might have given serious thought to the position of her skirt, or wondered whether she’d donned a decent pair of panties that morning.

  Before the worry of that embarrassment could take hold, the horse whirled, racing off in a new direction, paralleling the stampeding cattle, driving them away from the students who were scurrying for safety.

  Finally slowing, the cowboy clamped his hands around her waist, twisting her, and righting her in his lap as if she were no more than a rag doll. Ann scrambled to restore some modesty to her skirt and drew her first full breath.

  The scent of male and musk and leather invaded her senses along with the keen awareness of her rescuer’s broad shoulders and muscular arms.

  Oh, my…

  He reined the horse to a stop, eased her to the ground and dropped down beside her, all in one fluid motion. The horse heaved a deep breath. Weak with relief, so did she.

  “Lady, are you totally nuts or something?” Eyes the color of polished bronze glared at her. An angry glare. A look that mesmerized and made her mouth go dry. For a moment, Ann wasn’t sure if she’d been rescued—or captured.

  “Me?” she sputtered, trying to smooth her hair that was in wild disarray. “You’re the one who was riding hell—bent for leather! You and your cows could have killed those children. I’ve never seen anything more dangerous, more irresponsible—”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s not real smart to wave a red flag in front of a bull?”

  She blinked. “Those weren’t bulls.”

  “Nope, don’t suppose they were.” He rested one arm on the saddle and with his other hand thumbed his hat a little higher on his forehead. His lips curved ever so slightly as he perused her with a lazy, intimate glance. His gaze lingered overly long on her breasts, stripping her bare. “Still strikes me as a damn fool thing to do, though,” he drawled.

  Lord, he was a tall, slow—talking cowboy, his body lean and hard all over, his face tanned, his sideburns saddle—brown. Not pretty. Too rugged for that. Too insolent. And she shivered with suppressed pleasure at his too—familiar inspection of her. Lord knew how much more he’d seen of her while she’d been upended over his lap.

  Glancing back toward the playing field, she saw the splash of red that used to be her sweater now trampled into the grass. “I guess I wasn’t thinking. I mean, the children…”

  “So you thought you’d plant your pretty little body right smack in the middle of their path and scare thirty head of rampaging beef cattle out of the way to protect those sweet little darlings. Now you tell me, sugar, who’s the irresponsible one around here?”

  Her pretty little body? Sugar? Ann didn’t know whether to react to his unexpected comments or to the accusation that she was irresponsible. Why, she was probably the most responsible person she knew. With one devastating exception when she was seventeen years old, she’d always been reliable and dependable. The very nerve of this high—flying cowboy—

  “Now, listen here, buster.” She’d dealt with her share of recalcitrant bad boys. This guy was no different, only older and a lot taller. And sexier. So sexy he was dangerous. “You’re the one whose herd put those children at risk. If you hadn’t let them stampede that way—”

  His eyes narrowed threateningly, cutting her off, and squint lines appeared at the corners of those burnished eyes. “If some fool city slicker hadn’t been driving the road too fast while I was moving my herd slow and peaceful—like, one of my steers wouldn’t have gotten nicked by his car and the rest wouldn’t have taken off at a dead run. And if you hadn’t been waving that damn red flag, I might’ve turned the herd a mite sooner instead of having to pluck you outta harm’s way.” Idly, he stroked the sleek, sweat—dampened neck of his horse, his hand looking both big and gentle on the animal’s rich, brown velvet coat. “For which you haven’t yet thanked me, sugar.”

  “I, yes, of course, I appreciate—”

  “You’re welcome, sweetlin’.” He touched the brim of his Stetson, a working hat stained by weather and sweat, not one a Saturday—night cowboy would wear out on the town. Nor were his jeans anything but practical, worn hard till they were nearly white and as soft as the warm leather gloving his thighs. His full lips twitched with the merest hint of a smile. “You’re tough, teach. I’ll give you that. Not many women would stand up to me…or to my cows like you did.”

 
For one breathless moment, Ann wanted to bask in the glow of this stranger’s compliment. She wanted to savor the feeling of being totally feminine against his raw, hard—edged maleness. But that was ridiculous.

  She was a math teacher. Foolish notions about a tall, ruggedly handsome cowboy rescuing a damsel in distress had no place in her logical mind. Equations and orderly decimal points rested far more comfortably there.

  Yet the scent of him did troubling things to her. His musky heat, the pungent aroma of maleness. Paralyzing things that threatened to consume her power to reason.

  “Miss Forrester!”

  Dragging her thoughts from the cowboy, she turned to the sound of Mr. Dunlap calling her name. The students were still milling around the football field—excited by the stampede—and the principal was jogging toward her across the grassy field beyond the playground. It occurred to Ann this was the first time she’d ever seen her principal move at a faster pace than a slow walk, and that with difficulty due to his ample girth. She hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack.

  “Looks like you’ve been caught playing hooky, teach.”

  “Not exactly, but the children need to get back to class. So do I.” To linger in this cowboy’s company would be beyond foolhardy, not to mention a sure way to destroy her reputation in the small town of Mar del Oro.

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No, that really isn’t nec—” She squealed as he grabbed her around the waist and hefted her up onto the back of the horse behind the saddle. Her full skirt bunched up to her thighs as she straddled the animal.

  Then, in another fluid motion, one so graceful it was almost like a dance, he mounted in front of her.

  Automatically she wrapped her arms around his waist to prevent herself from sliding off. With a shocking awareness, every feminine cell in her body registered the breadth of his back and the contour of hidden sinew and muscles beneath his shirt. “Don’t you know how to take no for an answer?”