The Bridal Path: Sara Read online

  He could cope with this without giving in to temptation, he swore to himself. He had to. He wasn’t about to risk tomorrow’s deal on a one-night fling with the boss’s daughter, no matter how inviting the idea seemed right at this moment.

  Besides, this was Sara, for God’s sake. He’d watched her grow up. He’d never thought of her as anything more than a pesky kid sister. Okay, an attractive pesky kid sister, who was so far off-limits to a man like him, she might as well have been in Alaska.

  After sucking in a final lungful of the crisp, night air, he strolled inside and tossed his hat in the direction of a rack on the wall. It caught and held. Sara’s delicate eyebrows rose an approving fraction, but her gaze remained steady and unblinking. Jake’s pulse bucked under that thoroughly feminine look. How had he missed the fact that little Sara had grown up? The daring she’d shown as a girl took on far more dangerous implications in the woman she’d become.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his booted heels. He cleared his throat and aimed for sounding casual. “So, what brings you by?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “About?”

  “The deal you’re about to make with my father.”

  Jake grimaced. He’d guessed right. She was going to make trouble. It was written all over that pretty face of hers.

  “I wasn’t sure if you knew about it,” he said cautiously.

  A frown passed over her face. “I sure as heck didn’t,” she admitted heatedly. “Not until I overheard you and daddy talking tonight. Quite a secret, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Since you’re here, I gather you don’t approve.”

  “No,” she said succinctly. “I don’t.”

  “Then shouldn’t you be talking to your father?”

  “We both know that would be a waste of time.”

  Jake steeled himself against the hurt and fury he could read in her eyes. He couldn’t afford to feel any sympathy under the circumstances.

  “So is talking to me,” he said tersely. “This is a business deal, pure and simple.”

  “Not to me, it isn’t,” she said. “We’re talking about my home.”

  “Mine now,” he retorted.

  “Not quite,” she contradicted. She stood up and moved slowly toward him. “Jake, you and I have always been friends, haven’t we?”

  Warning bells echoed in his head at the plaintive question. “Yes,” he agreed warily.

  Her gaze lifted and clashed with his. Why had he never noticed that her eyes were precisely the shade of emeralds shot through with fire? He had to drag his gaze away, force himself to focus on something innocuous like the dishes still sitting in his sink.

  “See,” she said blithely. “We’ve already agreed on something. We’re friends.”

  “Sweetheart, I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but I surely do wish you’d get there.”

  “Okay, the bottom line is, I have a counteroffer I don’t think you’re going to be able to resist.”

  He swallowed hard at the soft, provocative tone. Sweet heaven, she was going to try to seduce the ranch away from him. Temptation curled through him, tangling his thoughts. Or maybe just seduce him, then scream bloody murder afterward so that Trent would chase him off with a shotgun. Either way, she represented danger.

  “No way,” he managed to mutter, backing up a step.

  Her lush lips curved seductively. “You don’t even know what I have in mind.”

  He couldn’t lose sight of his goal, when it was so close. Not for this woman. Not for anyone. “Doesn’t matter,” he said vehemently. “I want Three-Stars.”

  “You want it badly, don’t you?”

  “More than you can imagine.”

  “I doubt that,” she said wryly. “Remember, I want it, too.”

  “Which brings us to an impasse.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She stepped so close he could smell the soft, spicy perfume she wore, something intoxicating and wicked. She slid her fingers up his chest until they were less than a hairsbreadth from the burning skin of his neck. Jake wondered if hell could possibly be any worse than this. To keep from reaching for her, he jammed his hands in his pockets so roughly that his knuckles scraped on denim.

  “I think you and I could come…” she hesitated, then added “…to an arrangement.”

  “An arrangement,” Jake repeated, his voice choked. Trouble was rapidly escalating into calamity.

  She nodded and smiled. It was a look of such innocence that Jake’s thoughts went spinning. What the devil was she up to?

  “I want you to make a bet with me, Jake,” she said sweetly.

  “A bet,” he echoed.

  “An all-or-nothing bet,” she elaborated.

  He swallowed hard and tried to get his mind to focus on what she was saying. Too damned much was riding on this for him to be fuzzy headed and thinking with some part of his anatomy that clearly wasn’t connected to his brain.

  He deliberately backed up a step, then another. He figured he wouldn’t be safely out of harm’s way unless he fled the house completely, but he refused to do that. He just had to keep reminding himself that Sara was like a pesky little sister, not a seductive, alluring woman. Climbing Mount Everest would have been easier, he conceded, as his mouth went dry and his skin flushed.

  “Exactly what is this bet you want me to make?” he asked. If the woman wanted to bet he couldn’t go another minute resisting her, he might as well forget about the ranch. His body was carrying on an argument with his brain the likes of which no man should have to endure. His brain was losing, flat out shutting down while his senses raged.

  She smiled once more and his knees went weak. She moved closer again. Her fingers crept along his neck and tunneled through his hair. This time he didn’t seem to have the will to move away. It took pure grit to keep his hands in his pockets.

  “It’s simple really,” she explained. “And the odds are all in your favor.”

  Jake seriously doubted that.

  “After all, you were a rodeo champion, weren’t you?” she added smoothly.

  Jake’s gaze narrowed. What did his rodeo victories have to do with anything? At some point in the last ten seconds this conversation had taken a twist he hadn’t followed.

  Sara stood on tiptoe, her lips so close he could feel her sweet breath fanning across his face. “You were good, weren’t you?”

  “Very good,” Jake agreed.

  “Then this shouldn’t be any problem for you at all. In fact, I’m probably crazy for even bothering…” Her voice trailed off as if at this very moment she might be reconsidering the idea that had brought her to his house.

  Yeah, he thought, she was crazy all right. Crazy like a fox. Those warning bells in his head were clanging loud enough to wake the dead. Every fiber of his being heeded the call to arms.

  Jake untangled her hands from his hair and retreated another step, out of touching range, if not out of danger.

  “You’re going to have to spell it out, sweetheart. I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

  She smiled. “It’s not so complicated,” she assured him. “I just want to challenge you to a bull-riding contest, winner take all.”

  Chapter Two

  Jake stared openmouthed at the woman standing before him, hands on hips, fiery hair dancing around her face like dangerous flames caught by the wind.

  He was absolutely certain he couldn’t have heard Sara Wilde correctly. If she’d clobbered him over the head with a two-by-four, Jake couldn’t have been any more flabbergasted. Was it truly possible that she was willing to risk her life on the back of a bull to get control of the ranch he’d just agreed to buy from her father? Surely not even Sara, who’d pulled some pretty outrageous stunts in her time, would suggest something so crazy.

  “You want to do what?” he asked slowly.

  “I want to challenge you to a bull-riding contest,” she repeated every bit as calmly as she’d delivered the same incredible
words the first time.

  She had certainly dashed cold water on his libido, he thought wryly. This was a long way from the seduction he’d been convinced she had in mind. An unmistakable and worrisome sense of disappointment flitted through him. Either deliberately or inadvertently, Miss Sara Wilde had started something she clearly had no intention of finishing. He wondered if he’d ever be able to look at her in the same way again.

  That, of course, begged the immediate problem: what to do about this absurd bet of hers. It was taking considerable effort to hold back the laughter threatening to bubble up from somewhere deep inside him. He hadn’t had a good belly laugh in a long time. The glint in her eyes as she waited for an answer told him he didn’t want to have one at her expense.

  “Well?” she prodded, when he remained silent.

  “You’ve obviously lost your mind,” Jake said succinctly. “For starters, women don’t ride bulls.”

  “Sure, they do. I’ve researched it.”

  “You’ve researched it,” he repeated, then shook his head in disgust. “Well, that’s just dandy.”

  To prove her point, she listed a whole string of women riders. Jake wasn’t impressed.

  “Maybe what I should have said was women don’t ride bulls in competition with me.”

  Sara’s willful expression never wavered. “You aren’t chicken, are you?”

  The deliberately taunting question had him gritting his teeth. “I was bull-riding champ on the circuit three years running,” he reminded her. “If anyone ought to be quaking in their boots here, it’s not me. Forget it, sweet Sara. You’re playing out of your league.”

  “You don’t scare me,” she insisted.

  “I may not, but a thousand pounds or so of spitting-mad bull ought to give you pause,” he suggested. She did lose a little color at that, but her eyes flashed with grim determination.

  “Will you or won’t you?” she demanded as if he hadn’t already given her a straight answer.

  Jake was realizing for the first time that Sara Wilde was the kind of irritating woman who heard only what she wanted to hear and kept needling until she got an answer twisted around to her way of thinking.

  “I won’t.” He hoped the flat, unequivocal statement left absolutely no room for negotiation.

  He regarded her curiously. “Where did you come up with such a screwball idea?” he asked, genuinely puzzled by the out-of-the-blue proposition. Women had been making outrageous and indecent offers to him since the day he won his first rodeo title, but not one of them had ever suggested trying to outride him on the back of a mean old bull.

  Of course, Sara Wilde wasn’t like most other women. He’d known that the moment he’d set eyes on her. She’d been barely seventeen back then and she’d had audacity to spare. To Jake’s private amusement, not a single one of Trent Wilde’s attempts to tame her had had any effect. Her sweet, ladylike mother had been totally flummoxed by her out-of-control daughter.

  At one point, Trent had threatened to send Sara off to some fancy finishing school where she’d learn manners and social graces. Sara had responded by stealing a horse and hiding out in the wilderness for an entire weekend on her own. Trent had been so relieved when she’d sauntered back into the house unharmed that he’d dropped the notion of sending her away.

  When she’d reluctantly gone off to a nice sedate college, Trent had breathed a sigh of relief. He’d evidently figured a few years in the world of academia would accomplish what he hadn’t been able to. At the very least he’d been counting on her to make a good match and become some other man’s headache. His bewildered expression when she’d returned home, unchanged and unmarried, had kept Jake entertained for days.

  Jake understood that kind of grit and determination better than most. He had a willful streak of his own that was a mile wide. It had served him well so far. He won most arguments, whether he started them or not.

  But then again, like Trent, he’d never butted heads with anyone quite like Sara before. Even now, she was trying to stare him down, undaunted by his flat refusals.

  “I want Three-Stars,” she said bluntly. “So do you. There’s only one way I can see to settle it. If I stay on that bull longer than you, then the ranch is mine. You back off and tell Daddy you have other plans for the rest of your life. Go steal somebody else’s land out from under them.”

  “Have you mentioned to your daddy how badly you want the ranch?” he asked.

  “Every weekday and twice on Sundays since I hit my teens,” she responded with a shrug of resignation. “Daddy doesn’t listen to anything that doesn’t suit him. You might have noticed that about him.”

  He had. Trent had a mind of his own and very little interfered with his decisions once they were made. Jake had learned to jump into his boss’s thinking process early, when he still had half a chance to sway him. Sara clearly had waited too late, though it seemed likely that Trent had reached this particular decision long before Jake’s arrival. Chances were he’d reached it the minute he’d realized he was never going to have a son to whom he could leave his beloved ranch.

  Outnumbered by the unexpected number of women in his life, Trent had always viewed Jake as a surrogate son who could help to even the odds in his out-of-balance household.

  “Have you told him the lengths to which you’re willing to go to keep Three-Stars?” Jake asked.

  She shrugged, her expression as resigned as her tone. “It wouldn’t make any difference. I figure it’s between you and me now.”

  Jake wasn’t willing to let her break her neck and lose the ranch. There had to be another way to get her to back off, especially since he had no intention of giving up the land he’d been intent on buying since the day he first set foot on it.

  Three-Stars meant more to him than it possibly could to the daughter of Trent Wilde. She’d had a lifetime of privilege. He’d been born to a shiftless father and a drunken mother. Success on the rodeo circuit had given him money and fame, but not the one thing he truly craved…respectability.

  “Let’s talk about this,” he said casually, as if he were giving the idea thoughtful consideration in the face of her determination. “Have you considered the possibility that you could lose?”

  Her chin rose a defiant notch. “Not really.”

  “Well, it is a possibility,” he said, figuring if he ought to acknowledge the million-to-one outside chance that she could win, then she’d better at least consider the dead-on certainty that she would lose, not just the bet, but very likely her life. He decided to start small and work up to the big stuff such as breaking her neck.

  “It would be pretty humiliating,” he pointed out.

  “Maybe you’re the one who should be worrying about humiliation,” she shot right back. “Being beat by a woman would ruin what’s left of your reputation with the rodeo set. They’d probably make you give back all those fancy buckles, maybe even take you out of the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame.”

  “Not likely.” He studied her intently. “So, what’s in it for me, if I win?”

  She didn’t even hesitate. “If you win, and that’s a big if,” she said with cocky confidence, “you get to keep the ranch.”

  “By tomorrow I’ll have a signed contract to buy the ranch,” Jake pointed out. “I don’t have to climb on another bull and risk breaking a few more of my bones to keep it.”

  That seemed to throw her. She blinked up at him. “Isn’t owning the ranch free and clear of any claim from me enough?”

  “Like I said, it’s already mine.”

  “I could tie it up in court for years, claim you exerted undue influence on my father,” she argued.

  “Then you’d have to prove he was incompetent to make the decision to sell. Are you prepared to go into court and declare that?”

  That silenced her, at least temporarily. Trent might be an ornery old cuss, but no court in Wyoming would find him loony.

  Jake doubted Sara was ready to give up, though. As he waited for the other shoe to drop, an
outrageous idea popped into his head, one that ought to send her scrambling to put an end to this entire scheme. If he’d been terrified she intended to try to seduce the ranch away from him, how would she feel if he upped the ante to include her? Scared spitless, no doubt.

  He regarded her thoughtfully, “Of course, if you cared to up the stakes a little…”

  Her gaze narrowed suspiciously. “How?”

  He paused as if to ponder the possibilities, then suggested, “First, I’ll give you a break. We’ll ride broncs, not bulls.”

  “I don’t want any breaks,” she insisted.

  “Believe me, staying on a bucking bronc for eight seconds will be challenging enough for your spirit of adventure,” he said dryly.

  Her gaze was fixed on him as if she already guessed there was a catch. He didn’t disappoint her. He smiled. “And if I win, I get the ranch…and you.”

  She stared at him blankly. “Me?”

  “Marriage,” he explained patiently.

  That ought to scare the bejesus out of her, he thought, even as his own pulse bucked unexpectedly at the prospect. He wasn’t the marrying kind, though it struck him that marriage to a woman like Sara Wilde might not be all bad. She’d certainly be full of surprises, no doubt about that.

  He called a quick halt to that line of thinking and waited for her to gasp with dismay, blister him for even considering such an insulting proposal, maybe turn tail and flee.

  She did none of those things. Instead, after giving the proposal several minutes of thoughtful consideration, she looked him straight in the eye and nodded. “It’s a deal,” she said quietly.

  Then, before he could gather his wits, she turned and walked away, leaving him to wonder just which one of them had gumption and which one was the fool.

  * * *

  Jake was still cursing his impulsiveness when dawn came. Why hadn’t he seen that Sara wanted Three-Stars so badly she would have sold her soul to the devil to keep it? He should have recognized that kind of desperation. He’d felt it often enough himself. The truth was, he had seen it. He just hadn’t wanted to deal with it. He’d hoped Trent would do it for him. He should have known better. Trent had given up trying to make sense of his daughters long ago. According to local lore, he hadn’t had control of any of them since they were toddlers.