My stomach fell a little.
“I’ve got her name right here,” the cowboy said, sliding a piece of paper out of his front pocket. I didn’t need to hear him say it. I already knew the name scratched down on that scrap of paper. “Rowen. Her name’s Rowen Sterling.”
My subconscious couldn’t decide what to curse first, so it mixed, matched, and uttered a Shuk and a Fuit.
When my mom had told me I’d get a ride to Willow Springs with a ranch hand whose name I’d forgotten, I pictured a scratching, spitting, old-timer like the town sheriff in one of those old westerns. Not some young, fit man adhering to the tighter-the-better policy in jeans selection.
I had yet to see his face, but from what I’d seen of his back, I already knew what to expect. And if I was a typical eighteen-year-old girl who liked typical teenage girl things, I’m sure I’d be panting for the opportunity to catch a ride with Cowboy Montana in what I guessed was a big diesel truck with four tires on the back. I’d heard what that kind of truck was called, but I couldn’t remember. Where I came from, people didn’t need six tires because four did the job just fine.
Catching myself right before I let out a long sigh, I stood and made my way over. No sense in stalling.
Stopping a few feet behind the vacuum-sealed ass, I cleared my throat. “Looking for Rowen Sterling?”
Cowboy turned my direction. “Yeah. You know her?”
I gave a shrug. “Kind of.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Yeah,” I replied, trying to get a look at his face. Between his huge-ass cowboy hat and the position of the sun, his whole face was shaded. He could have been the thing of female fantasies. He just as easily could have been eyeless and toothless.
After a few more seconds of quiet—I guessed he was waiting for me to add something—he shifted. “Could you tell me where she is then, please?”
I glanced at the photo in his hand. He’d been right. It was almost ten years old to the day. Taken at my ninth birthday party. I was wearing the biggest, pinkest, most god-awful princess dress ever created, and I was blond and beaming.
I was none of those things anymore. His reaction ought to be fun to witness.
“She’s about two feet in front of you,” I said, thankful I couldn’t see his face. Whether it was a ten or a zero or somewhere in between, I didn’t want to witness the shock and the cringe bound to come.
When someone compared the young girl in the picture to the older girl that was me present day, a cringe seemed the standard response.
What I didn’t expect him to do was remove his hat and extend his hand. “Hey, Rowan.” He flashed a smile that almost made me flinch. I hadn’t been smiled at like that when meeting a stranger in a long time. “I’m Jesse. It’s nice to meet you.”
Jesse. That’s right. The cowboy J name that had slipped my mind was the name that I was certain I’d never forget again. Not because his eyes were the same color as the sky, or because his light hair sort of cascaded down his forehead like it knew just where to fall, or because of the dimples drilled deep into his cheeks from the continued smile. Nope, the reason I’d remember Jesse’s name from that day forward was because of the way he looked at me. He didn’t study me like I was something different and scary. He looked at me like I was a human being, no different from himself, and yet unique just the same.
It was . . . staggering. It made me feel all light and floaty. For a girl who liked to keep her feet firmly on the ground and who, as a policy, didn’t do “floaty,” the whole sensation was a tad overwhelming.
After I’d left his hand hanging in the air like the staggered idiot I was, he dropped it back to his side and lifted his other hand, still holding the picture, toward my face. Studying the picture, then my face, his smile stretched higher. “Yep. You’re Rowan Sterling all right,” he said with certainty. As though he could see past my dyed dark hair, eyebrow ring, dark lipstick, and my inky black combat boots to find the little girl I’d once been. “Do you have a suitcase or anything?” His voice, like his smile, was warm and welcoming. In fact, if I had to pick two words to describe Jesse, those would be the ones: warm and welcoming.
And attractive. There was no denying that. Even to a girl like me, who most people probably assumed would prefer Dracula’s company to a warm-blooded, all-American, sexy-as-all-hell boy.
Reminding myself I wasn’t here to admire the male scenery, I hitched my thumb over my shoulder. “That black bag that looks as if I’ve stashed a dead body in it is mine,” I said, cursing myself. A girl like me shouldn’t talk about dead bodies stuffed in a bag. People wouldn’t assume I was joking.
“Well, if you don’t mind, could we get going?” Jesse asked, sliding that bucket-sized hat of his back into place before heading toward my abandoned bag. “I’ve got about two dozen fence poles to dig and set before dinnertime.”
“Sounds like a killer time,” I said. “Is fence pole maintenance a regular sort of thing on a ranch?”
“That depends how you define ‘regular.’ If thirty to forty every few days does, then yeah, I suppose fence pole maintenance is a regular sort of thing on a ranch.”
“I thought you were a ranch hand,” I said as we paused in front of my monster-sized bag. “Sounds more like you’re a ranch bitch.” I couldn’t quite hide my smile, and it was a totally failed effort when Jesse laughed.