The ranch woman had been warned about the cowboy before she ever saw him.
The warning came from a gray-haired station clerk who handed her trunk down from the freight wagon and looked toward the mountains as though the man himself might be standing somewhere among them.
“You working at that cattle spread?”
“Yes.”
The clerk frowned.
“You ever met the owner?”
“No.”
He made a sound deep in his throat.
Not quite laughter.
Not quite concern.
“He’s a large man.”
The ranch woman waited.
“That’s the warning?”
The clerk looked almost offended.
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“He doesn’t talk.”
She smiled.
“I’ve survived men who talk too much.”
The clerk did not smile back.
“He’s different.”
The ranch woman picked up her small leather bag.
“Everyone says that about difficult men.”
The clerk shook his head.
“You’ll see.”
She did.
The cowboy arrived twenty minutes later.
He rode a dark bay horse that looked big enough for cavalry work, but beneath him the animal almost seemed ordinary.
The cowboy was enormous.
Not grotesquely so.
Not in the exaggerated way frightened people sometimes described large men.
He was simply built like a man who had spent most of his life lifting things other people needed teams to move.
Broad shoulders.
Long arms.
Thick hands.
A chest that filled his dusty cream work shirt.
Dark suspenders crossed over him.
His hat sat low.
His face was weathered, lean, and harder than his body suggested.
He stopped his horse near the station platform.
His eyes found the ranch woman.
She knew instantly that he had recognized her from the description sent in the employment letter.
Twenty-seven.
Brown hair.
Five feet six.
Traveling alone.
Experienced with accounts, horses, and household work.
No husband.
No children.
No relatives nearby.
He dismounted.
The station clerk suddenly found something important to do inside.
The ranch woman noticed.
So did the cowboy.
Neither mentioned it.
“You’re the new bookkeeper.”
His voice was lower than she expected.
She held out one hand.
“And you’re the man everyone warned me about.”
He looked at her hand.
Then at her face.
Slowly, he took it.
His palm swallowed hers.
That was the first moment she understood what the station clerk had meant by large.
His hand wrapped almost completely around hers without effort.
He released it quickly.
“Who warned you?”
“The station clerk.”
The cowboy glanced toward the window.
The clerk disappeared from view.
The ranch woman laughed.
The cowboy did not.
Then, unexpectedly, one corner of his mouth moved.
Barely.
“He talks too much.”
“I said the same thing.”
He looked at the trunk.
“That everything?”
“Yes.”
He lifted it with one hand.
The ranch woman stared.
“That trunk weighs nearly seventy pounds.”
He placed it in the wagon.
“Then whoever packed it dislikes horses.”
“I packed it.”
He looked at her.
“That explains some things.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“What things?”
He climbed into the wagon.
“I’ll tell you when I know you better.”
The ranch woman smiled.
That was the first crack.
Not affection.
Not attraction.
Certainly not love.
Just the first small opening in a man everyone described as closed.
The ranch lay sixteen miles beyond town.
Most of the ride passed through open country.
Dry grass.
Pines.
Rising foothills.
Snow still clung to the distant peaks although summer had already begun warming the valley.
The ranch woman asked practical questions.
How many cattle?
How many hands?