Emily Carmichael - How To Lasso A Cowboy

Tess grimaced at him. “Don’t look like you’re going to hogtie the poor sot and carve a brand into his hide, Miguel. You’ll scare him away. After all, this was your idea.”

“It was Rosie’s idea. Only a woman could think up a plan like this one.”

“Well, you agreed.”

“Two against one. I didn’t have much choice.”

“Yeah, damn.” Tess sighed. “Neither do I.”

Tess’s soontobe husband looked a bit dazed when Glory hauled him by the arm up the church steps. “Here he is,” the saloon girl declared proudly.

He shrugged off her arm and nearly toppled with the effort. The bum must have really tied one on to still be soused after sleeping for a couple of hours.

“Well, now,” she said with false heartiness. “Here we all are. Time to get this thing done.”

Rosie eyed the groom with growing doubt. “If there were another way-”

“There’s not.” Tess wished there were.

“Well, then.” Rosie pasted a smile on her face. “Let’s do this up right. Come inside. We’ll just clean you up a bit.”

“Aw, Rosie!”

“You will not be married looking like you’ve just ridden in from the range.”

“He looks worse than I do!”

“Him I don’t care about. You, I do. Come.”

Miguel chuckled. “You better not argue with Rosie, chica. You know how she gets.”

Rosie gave the foreman an arch look.

“I know how she gets,” Tess grumbled.

But she followed Rosie into the preacher’s office, where Rosie had enough privacy to fill a basin with water, make Tess scrub her face-in Rosie’s mind the watering trough of the OK Corral didn’t make for proper washing-and then sat Tess down to brush and braid her hair once again.

Rosie never gave up trying to make Tess look like a proper woman. Such persistence had to be admired, even if it was annoying as hell.

“The man you found is big,” Rosie noted. “And he looks like he knows how to work. No fat. All muscle.”

“He’s a drunk. He’ll be off to drink his way through my three hundred dollars without a thought to how he earned it.”

Rosie shook her head dubiously. “I don’t know. You be careful, Tessie. I wish I’d thought to bring a dress.”

“Forget that! This isn’t a real wedding.”

Rosie humphed. “It would have been nice if you could have found a real husband. Every woman needs a man, and men are lost without a woman to keep them in line.”

Tess snickered. “Miguel, for instance?”

Rosie yanked at the braid. “That one? Ha! It would take an angel from heaven to put up with that mule of a man.”

They met Glory, Miguel, and-what was his name?-in the back of the church, and Tess noticed that Glory had spruced up the groom a bit as well. But even with his hair slicked back and his face washed, he still looked like a bum.

“I guess I’d better know your name for when the preacher gets here. Preacher Malone can get picky about marrying folks who don’t really know each other. He’s funny that way.”

The man gave her a fuzzy look. “Ransom.”

“Ransom what?”

“Joshua Ransom.”

“Josh Ransom,” Tess repeated. A good strong name to be wasted on the likes of this fellow. “I’m Tess McCabe. Diamond T Ranch.”

He had the nerve to look uninterested.

“But don’t get any ideas about the ranch, just because you’re standing up with me.”

So why had she even mentioned the Diamond T? Tess wondered. Maybe because Tess McCabe wasn’t anybody without it. She always attached it to herself. Tess McCabe of the Diamond T. That was who she was. One without the other just wasn’t worth much of anything.

Before she could pursue that unhappy thought, Preacher Malone walked in. Tess warned her groom with a subtle elbow to the ribs. “Just say the right words to earn your money.”

The wedding ceremony was mercifully short. Preacher Malone delivered long, windy sermons in Sunday service, but this being a Tuesday, the preacher seemed to have his mind more on getting back to his carpentry business than running off at the mouth about the sanctity and responsibilities of marriage. Good thing, Tess reflected, because the longer she stood in that church with what’shisname, the more the man swayed beside her. The groom had taken on a tinge of green, and the church had begun to smell like a still. If the preacher hadn’t been in such a hurry, he might have noticed such things.

But more important, if the ceremony had dragged on much more than five minutes, Tess herself might have showed a yellow streak and run. Her stomach began to turn somersaults, and the palms of her hands broke out in sweat. Should she back out before the words were spoken? Could she back out?

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” Preacher Malone declared.

Too late. The deed was done, for better or worse.

Slow, insolent clapping from the rear of the church made Tess’s heart jump. In unison with Rosie, Glory, and Miguel, she turned.

“Congratulations, Tessie girl.”

Looking like a greenhorn in a fancy suit and slickedback hair, her brother leaned against the frame of the open church doorway, applauding sarcastically.

“You finally caught yourself a husband, did you? How lucky for you.”

His grin told Tess her luck had just stepped in a cow pie.

JOSH RANSOM COULDN’T remember a time when he’d felt quite so lousy. Of course, right at the moment, his memory didn’t work all that well. Neither did his stomach, his legs, or his tongue; and his eyes still slipped in and out of focus. A pounding headache hammered his brain, and every muscle in his body screamed for mercy.

Liquor and he didn’t get along. Never had. Never would. Why hadn’t he remembered that when he’d tried to drown his sorrows in a bottle? Liquor could numb the brain for a while, but when those nerves woke up again, there was hell to pay. Except that hell couldn’t be anywhere near as bad as this. He lay back in the tub of hot water and contemplated drowning himself-until a cheerful voice walked in on the legs of a short, plump woman with clear blue eyes and a sympathetic smile.

“Soaked some of the whiskey out, have you?”

A blush heated his face hotter than the bathwater as he sank lower beneath concealing suds. At least he hoped the suds concealed.

The woman laughed. “Don’t worry, muchacho. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen so often I’m plumb bored.” But her eyes twinkled. “Though I’ve got to say, you’re less boring than most.”

“You aren’t…you aren’t-”

“I’m Rosie.” She laughed. “You thought maybe I was the one standing beside you in front of Preacher Malone? Ha! You really were in a fog, weren’t you?” She took a scrub brush from a nail above the sink and advanced toward the tub. Josh, not a man accustomed to feeling helpless, felt mighty helpless right then.

“Wait. What’re you-”

“You need a good scrub, my friend. Tess-that’s your wife, by the way-she don’t allow liquor in the house, and you’re just about as potent as a bottle of pure whiskey. Some of that stink has to come off.”

“Wait a minute, lady!” As Rosie applied the stiff brush to his back, Josh flailed, sending water sloshing onto the kitchen floor. Rosie didn’t seem to mind the soaking. “Hey! Ouch! Give me that!” He managed to grab the bristled weapon from her hand. “I can scrub myself, missus. Could I have some privacy here?”

“A touchy one, ain’t ya?” But she chuckled goodnaturedly. “Just see that you scrub good. I’ll just put a few more sticks of wood in the stove before I leave and then you can have your precious privacy.”

Josh did make good use of the scrub brush once the woman had left. He wished he could scrub away the last few days-hell, the last few weeks!-along with the dirt and clinging smell of whiskey. Maybe if he’d had those weeks to live over again, he could have kept David away from that poker game, or managed to lay hands on the entire six hundred dollars to settle David’s marker, or at least not gotten tanked in the Bird Cage. His memory at this moment struggled with a whiskeyinduced fog, but to Josh’s best recollection he’d up and married some woman-not the lady with the scrub brush, he gathered-for a sum that would put him over the top for David’s debt. That sort of lamebrain stunt just about put him on a level with his idiot brother, or maybe even below. He had already had one foot in a mule pile, and now had the other foot in as well. Smart of him. Josh thought upon David’s foolishness with a bit more sympathy. Blockheadedness apparently ran in the Ransom blood.

He looked around him, his brain clearing a bit as some of the fogginess dissolved into the warm water. A wood stove pumped out heat against the March chill. Pots hung from a rack-nothing fancy, strictly utilitarian. A chipped metal worktable doubled as a dining table, with benches pushed beneath on either side. A colorful rag rug-the only touch of decoration he could see-covered part of the smooth clay floor.

The curtain between the kitchen and the rest of the house brushed aside to admit another visitor, this one walking on four legs. A roughcoated gray dog about the size of a goodsized coyote regarded him with confident, measuring eyes. One ear stood up, the other flopped down, but the dog didn’t lose any dignity to his lopsided looks.

“You’re not the one I married, are you?” Josh asked miserably.

The dog’s look changed to sympathy, and it padded over to give Josh’s wet arm a lick.

“Friendly, aren’t you? Want to answer a few questions? Like what the hell am I doing here?” Josh wrinkled his brow in a frown, then grimaced with the pain such an effort caused. Thinking hurt. Frowning hurt. Everything hurt. He dimly remembered the ride from town in a poorly sprung wagon. At the time, climbing into the wagon and heading for somewhere seemed a reasonable thing to do, but wasn’t he supposed to hightail it out of town, money in hand, after the ceremony? So why was he sitting in an unfamiliar kitchen in a tin washtub scrubbing himself raw and talking to a dog?