October's Cowboy Beau

Read the first pages

From Chapter 1

Beau is harnessing his Clydesdales when a stranger walks into the barn with an unusual request.

The curvy blonde walked into the barn and said, “Take off your shirt.”

I looked up from the buckle I was adjusting on Hank's harness.

The woman standing ten feet away didn't seem particularly bothered by what she'd just asked of a man she'd never met. She had a tablet under one arm and a paper coffee cup in her hand. The look on her face was one I usually saw on somebody trying to back a trailer through a gate two inches too narrow.

She pointed at me with the coffee. “The flannel first. Then let me see what we're working with.”

I pulled myself up to my full height. Hank shifted next to me, the leather traces creaking as he moved. At almost eighteen hands, he had a habit of making most people look small. His partner, Gus, stood hitched next to him, one back foot cocked and his head lowered like none of this had anything to do with him.

Smart horse. I should've followed his lead. Instead, I looked back at the woman.

She was maybe five-five in her boots, which meant she had to tip her chin up farther than most people when she looked at me. Her dark blonde hair was twisted into something at the back of her head that had probably been neat when she left the house. The Montana wind had already pulled a few strands loose around her face.

She was curvy, too, in a way her jacket wasn't doing much to hide. My mouth went dry before I could stop it, and for a second, I lost track of what I was supposed to be arguing about.

She didn't look embarrassed. If anything, she looked impatient.

“You want me to take off my shirt.”

“Yes.” Her attention dropped to my chest, but not in a way that suggested she was enjoying herself. It was more like she was evaluating fence posts. “The blue is all wrong and doesn't work with your eyes.”

I glanced down at the faded flannel I'd thrown on over a plain gray T-shirt before leaving the ranch. “Wrong for what?”

She arched a brow. “The shoot.”

That cleared up exactly nothing.

Find out what happens next tonight.