How to Catch a Cowboy Read online

  “Are you, by any chance, trying to seduce me?”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Books by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Copyright

  Notes

  “Are you, by any chance, trying to seduce me?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Emily said.

  Kurt watched her for a moment. “And now?”

  She sighed. “Now I wish I’d just walked in and kissed you. Then we wouldn’t be having this nutty conversation.”

  His laugh was slightly strangled, but tender, and strangely sweet. “If I live to be a thousand, Emily Dawson, I’ll never be able to predict what you’ll do next.”

  She knew then. There were flaws in her feelings, but that’s what made love real. She was in love with the last man on earth she should have wanted. The man who was in love with her sister.

  Her sigh came from the depths of her heart. “Let’s just forget I—”

  But Kurt had crossed to her side of the bed, and was pulling her into his arms. He caught her and pressed her close to his body, kissing her so hard and deep, so meant-to-be, that her knees gave way. Her body flushed with heat, her skin tingling like a bad sunburn. But this wasn’t bad.

  This was very, very good....

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Toller Whittenburg is a native Oklahoman and has lived in Tulsa for most of her life. She fell in love with books the moment she learned to read, and began to pursue a writing career in 1981. Taking a writing class convinced her that completing a book wasn’t as easy as it sounded, but she persevered and sold her first book in 1983. She divides her nonwriting time between family responsibilities and working part-time as an executive secretary.

  Books by Karen Toller Whittenburg

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  197—SUMMER CHARADE

  249—MATCHED SET

  294—PEPPERMINT KISSES

  356—HAPPY MEDIUM

  375—DAY DREAMER

  400—A PERFECT PAIR

  424—FOR THE FUN OF IT

  475—BACHELOR FATHER

  528—WEDDING OF HER DREAMS

  552—THE PAUPER AND THE

  PRINCESS

  572—NANNY ANGEL

  621—MILLION-DOLLAR BRIDE1

  630—THE FIFTY-CENT GROOM1

  648—TWO-PENNY WEDDING1

  698—PLEASE SAY “I DO”

  708—THE SANTA SUIT

  727—A BACHELOR FALLS

  745—IF WISHES WERE...

  WEDDINGS

  HARLEQUIN TEMPTATION

  403—ONLY YESTERDAY

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  How To Catch a Cowboy

  KAREN TOLLER WHITTENBURG

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  Chapter One

  “Hell, McCauley, you’re too good for her.” An emphatic nod of consensus made the rounds at the center table, and beer bottles clinked in agreement. “Too dang good for her, and that’s the truth.”

  Through a haze of good buddies and good beer, Kurt McCauley checked the status of his broken heart and decided he’d felt worse. Two hours and several beers ago, he’d felt a whole lot worse. “She’ll live to regret not marrying me,” he said in another vague toast to the fickle nature of women in general and Carolina Dawson in particular.

  “You betcha she will.” Nellis Cohen slurred the statement into one long, vehement word. “Why, you’re the most eligible bachelor in this here state of Nevada!”

  “Damn straight! Plus, you’re a gol’dern famous rodeo star,” Sam Baxter said with greatly inebriated enthusiasm. “But I’m gonna tell you somethin’—Carolina Dawson ain’t the only cowbird in the clover.”

  “She’s the prettiest cowbird I ever laid eyes on.” Kipp Trowbridge mourned the marriage of the belle of Fortune City. “Prettiest damn heifer this side of the Chisholm Trail. Prettiest filly ever to kick up her heels west of the Rocky Mountains. Prettiest little flower ever to—”

  Nellis knocked the elbow props right out from under Kipp’s melancholy chin. “You ain’t helpin’.”

  Truth was, none of them were much help. Kurt didn’t know why he’d let these hayseeds talk him into this commiserating binge, but he guessed their company, drunk as it was, beat the alternative. Melba, his Jack Russell terrier. had made it perfectly clear that she preferred to be the only female in his life. And as horses go, Hank was a dandy, but when it came to commiserating over a lost love, he just wasn’t all that understanding. If he wanted sympathy—and Kurt was pretty sure he did—then these were the guys, and the whoop-it-up Silver Dollar Cowboy Saloon was the place. “She coulda waited for me, ya know.” He held up his empty beer bottle and stared morosely at the slice of lime stuck in the neck. “She knew I always meant to come back and marry her. One day.”

  “’Course she knew.” Sam whopped Kurt on the back and made a dam good effort to snap his fingers at the waitress. “Bring us another round, will ya, darlin’?”

  The waitress sashayed over to the table, eyeing Kurt with interest. “Hey, I saw you on the news. You’re the guy who trained that horse in that movie.” She frowned with the effort of remembering. “Oh, jeez, what was the name of that movie?”

  “Which one?” Steve Cooper drawled with a know-it-all slur. “Hell, honey, this guy’s on call twenty-four-seven with those movie and television people. He’s even got a dog that’s got her own sitcom on the TV. Why, my friend here is only the best damn animal handler this side of Istanbul!”

  “Wow,” said the waitress. “I never met a movie star before.”

  Kurt shifted uncomfortably under her wide-eyed stare. “I just train the animals,” he said, tipping his empty bottle to his lips as a diversion.

  “Get the man another beer, darlin’,” Sam said. “Cain’t you see he’s nursin’ a broken heart?”

  Reaching for Kurt’s bottle, the waitress let her breasts brush his arm. Sensually. Purposefully. Again. “I have a surefire cure for what ails you, honey,” she said, and smiled, up-close and personal.

  Kurt thought he smiled back. He meant to, but Sam whopped him on the back again and let out a whoop. “What’d I tell ya? Women want you, man!”

  From across the table, Max Thurman belched before adding his two-cents worth. “Carolina Dawson ain’t the only woman in the world, McCauley. There’s plenty of ‘em out there just waitin’ for a lonesome cowboy like you to come along.”

  Nellis thumped his bottle against the wooden tabletop. “You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie, my friend Why, there must be hundreds of women who’d’ve waited until hell froze over to marry Kurt, ain’t that right, boys?”

  “Yes, sirree, bob!”

  “Hun’erds of women!”

  “Thousands!”

  “Heck fire, there mus’ be a million of ’em out there! You’re famous, McCauley. All you gotta do is say the word and every woman in this bar’ll be standin’ in line to marry you afore midnight tonight!”

 
The boys made another round of beer bottle clinks, congratulating themselves on their insights and their camaraderie. Kurt eyed the fresh beer bottle sitting on the table before him, a twist of lime cracked across its rim, its surface slick with condensation, its contents fizzing with the elixir of forgetfulness. He knew he’d had too much already, knew he ought to quit now, cash in the evening as a lost cause and go home. But then it wasn’t every day a man found out the woman he’d intended to marry had up and married someone else. The way Kurt figured it, he owed himself one ripsnorter of a night in homage to all the marital bliss he was never going to have.

  Heck, he owed it to every mother’s son in Fortune City. There wasn’t one of them, young or old, who hadn’t been in love with Carolina Dawson at one time or another. There wasn’t one of them, hitched or not, who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to marry her. But Kurt was the only one of them who’d ever had a prayer. Kurt was the one she wanted.

  Had wanted.

  He picked up the beer bottle and slugged back twelve more ounces.

  NORMALLY, Emily Dawson steered clear of the Silver Dollar Cowboy Saloon and its clientele. She didn’t like the stale, smoky air inside the bar, and she didn’t like the country songs that whined, one after another, out of the jukebox. Her opinion of the men who frequented the Silver Dollar wasn’t high, and even if she had wanted a drink—which she didn’t—this bar would rank, in order of preference, only slightly higher than sharing a jug of rotgut moonshine in a drainage ditch.

  But she was no fool. In a town the size of Fortune City, there was only one place to go if you were looking for trouble. Sure enough, the moment she walked through the murky entrance, Emily saw him and knew the rumors were true. Kurt McCauley, the bane of her otherwise pleasant existence, the fly in the ointment of her success, had come home.

  “Hey, Emily, over here.” Mary Lynn Perkins waved her to join the group of girlfriends sitting two tables away from the door. The other three women at the table glanced up in greeting, then shuffled their chairs to make an extra place.

  “Hi,” Emily said as she pulled up a vacant chair and filled the empty space. “Have I missed anything?”

  “Just the preliminary roundup.” Genna Bates scooted her chair a quarter turn so she could keep an eye on the mavericks who occupied the center of the room and the center of attention. “So far, the herd has been unexpectedly docile.”

  “They’re getting restless, though.” Jeannie Gibson lifted her brimming mug in a gesture of welcome. “The gunfight could start any minute now.”

  Renetta Zaltoski’s big brown eyes widened, it being her first time at the Silver Dollar and all. “They’re going to start shooting?”

  “Shooting off their mouths,” Emily said dryly. “If they hold true to form, they’ll do something incredibly dumb, we’ll have a good laugh, and then everyone will go home.”

  “They appear to be getting pretty drunk,” Renetta observed.

  Mary Lynn met Emily’s eyes across the table. “That’s where the incredibly dumb part comes in. When these guys find an excuse to get together like this, they don’t have a lick of sense to share among them.”

  “Fortunately, they only do this about once a year,” Genna said. “Which is about as often as I care to come out to this smoke hole and watch them make complete jerks of themselves.”

  “Oh, but usually Kurt’s not with them, and you have to admit he’s worth the trip.” Jeannie turned to Renetta. “It’s been a long time since Kurt darkened the swinging doors of this saloon. We haven’t seen much of him the last several years, but the rest of these local yokels occasionally manage to keep us entertained.” She laughed. “The last time they got this drunk, Nellis wound up in Nova Scotia.”

  “And the funny part was they actually thought they’d put him on a plane to Scottsdale.” Genna shook her head, setting her red-gold curls bouncing. “We found out later that the idiot had changed planes twice without ever noticing he wasn’t in Arizona.”

  “If any one of them had a brain, they’d be dangerous.” Emily ordered a ginger ale and settled in to observe the back of Kurt McCauley’s dark head. If he had a brain, he’d have taken her up on her business offer six months ago, and they’d both be in tall cotton now. She was sorry that she’d ever wasted a minute following his not always illustrious career. But when he’d left Fortune City, she couldn’t help scanning the newspapers and rodeo magazines for his name and reading—with an embarrassing degree of fascination—the accounts of the daredevil stunts that had catapulted him from the rodeo circuit to Hollywood. Her idea of using his name to promote the line of Western wear she’d developed was brilliant. Kurt hadn’t agreed, which only proved that fame hadn’t changed him in the slightest. He was still an idiot. As far as Emily was concerned, a broken heart was none too good for him.

  “Which one was engaged to your sister?” Renetta craned her neck to see around the short-skirted cowgirl who stood between their table and a clear view of the men.

  Emily narrowed her eyes on Kurt. “The one who keeps getting slapped on the back. His name is Kurt McCauley, but he and Carolina were never engaged. They’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship practically since grade school. I guess most people expected them to get married, but there was nothing official about it.”

  “Really,” Renetta said curiously. “Then how come he’s taking her marriage so hard?”

  Emily shrugged, but couldn’t pull her gaze away from Kurt’s melancholy smile. She couldn’t stop the squeeze that tightened across her chest, either, although she was determined not to let it happen again. She could count the number of times Kurt had been nice to her on one hand, and the fact that he’d been one of only a handful of people who’d encouraged her to open her Western wear store couldn’t overshadow the many times he’d teased and aggravated her.

  Kurt lurched to his feet suddenly, but was pulled back to his chair on a wave of laughter. A second later, to the ribald encouragement of the Corona poster boys, he was tossing back another beer. His neck was long and lean, his skin tanned and supple as he tipped his head to accommodate the ale he poured down his throat. He was in need of a haircut, and when his head was back, several dark strands crossed his shirt collar in uneven tags. There was a faint wave in his hair where his hat rode, and the hint of a curl just behind his ear. His mustache was too thick by half, and if Emily had had any opinion at all regarding his appearance—which she definitely did not—she’d have wanted to take a buzz saw to his upper lip. He was disgustingly handsome... and the Dawson family was well rid of him.

  “Lord love a bug, he is fine.” Renetta dropped her chin onto her hands while she admired Kurt’s profile. “Your sister must be crazy.”

  “No, she’s not,” Emily said. Self-centered? Self-absorbed? Selfish? Yes. Yes. Yes. But crazy? Oh, no, not by a long shot. Emily suspected, despite years of evidence to the contrary, that Kurt had never really been in love with her sister. And she knew that, on some level, Carolina must have suspected it, too.

  “Well, she certainly overplayed her hand this time around,” Jeannie said. “I’ll bet she’ll kick herself sideways to Sunday when she finds out Kurt came home not two weeks after she got married.”

  Genna nodded agreement. “She shouldn’t have given up on him so soon.”

  Mary Lynn chose a pretzel from the snack bowl, popped it into her mouth and crunched aggressively. “Oh, poor Carolina,” she crooned. “While she’s honeymooning in the Caribbean with her Brooks Brothers husband, every cowpoke in this one-horse town is getting drunk in her honor. It must be just terrible for her to know a man like Kurt McCauley can’t bear the thought that she’s no longer single. Well, I say goodbye and good riddance, Carolina! I’ll be only too happy to soothe Kurt’s broken heart.”

  Emily frowned at her. “Give me a break, Mary Lynn. You don’t want Kurt McCauley.”

  Mary Lynn nodded. “I do. Oh, yes, I do.”

  “Get in line.” Genna sipped her beer and stared longingly at Kurt. “T
hat man was made in heaven for me.”

  Emily turned to reassure Renetta. “They’re joking.”

  “Don’t you believe it for a second,” Mary Lynn countered. “We never joke when it comes to men. Isn’t that right, Jeannie?”

  Jeannie, stalwart and unimpressionable, got a dreamy look in her eyes. “I don’t want the man forever, you understand, but a few nights with him ... well, I think it could change my whole attitude, help me lose a few pounds, exercise more, eat healthier. There’s no telling how much good that man could do for me.” Her cheeky grin returned to Emily. “We know you think he’s a lower life-form, Em, but frankly, my dear, we don’t give a damn.”

  “That’s right,” Genna added. “The fact that you wouldn’t take him if he was a blank check is better for us, anyhow. One less female to shove out of the way.”

  Emily lifted her glass in a pensive salute. “You guys are sick, but hey, it’s a free country. Have at him.”

  “Don’t you like him?” Renetta asked. “I mean, if he was almost your brother-in-law, you must know him pretty well.”

  “He’s trouble,” Emily said, summing up in two words what she’d figured out the first time Kurt McCauley had ever actually acknowledged her existence. She’d been a gawky eleven, he a strapping seventeen. He’d tied her ponytail in a knot. She’d stuck out her tongue and called him a stupid peanut. Their relationship had pretty much gone downhill from there. “If you’re smart, Renetta, you’ll ignore him and the ravings of the lunatics sitting at this table. What any woman sees in him just flat escapes me.”

  “Jeez, Emily, open those baby browns,” Genna suggested with a sort of low groan. “Kurt McCauley is so good-looking it nearly puts your eyes out. He’s built like a Porsche, sleek, full-bodied, exotic trim, all luxurious power from top to bottom and—”