Cowboy Enchantment - By Pamela Browning Page 0,10

he quickly reminded himself that if it wasn’t for people like her, he wouldn’t have a job here.

Well, he had another job. That is, if he wanted to return to it. But he and Justine had decided that losing her mother had been upheaval enough in Kaylie’s life and that having to part so soon from her familiar surroundings would only cause problems. It would be better, they’d reasoned, for Paloma, her caregiver, to remain a constant in his small daughter’s routine until Hank had time to bond with Kaylie, the daughter he’d met only after the tragedy that took his ex-wife’s life.

Never mind that Hank’s girlfriend kept asking when he planned to return to her and to his real job. Never mind that he and Justine often argued in the perverse way of siblings about things that probably weren’t, in the long run, all that important.

Besides, he was enjoying his new life as a cowboy. He liked living in the tradition of his childhood heroes—John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers—all of whom he’d seen over and over again in reruns on TV. It made him laugh to think about how stuffy and insufferable he must have been when he wore a suit to work every day. And to tell the truth, he could hardly recall what Lizette, his girlfriend, looked like. You’d think he would. You’d think that after seven or eight months with her, everything about Lizette would be engraved on his mind. Hair color, eye color—the works.

Were her eyes blue? He couldn’t remember. If he worked up the nerve, maybe he’d ask her the next time he phoned her. Which should be soon, but lately he found that his heart wasn’t in those awkward phone calls during which he had to make himself listen to Lizette’s prattling on about rebirthing sessions and her job as a life coach and lunches with her friends. He longed to tell her how cute Kaylie was when she laughed and about the way the sunset turned the distant hills to molten gold, and once he had tried to describe how difficult it was to find the right kind of disposable diapers at the local grocery store. Lizette had evinced only scant interest of his frustration over the situation and then had continued talking about whatever it was that she’d been talking about before he’d changed the subject.

“I guess I’m losing my touch with women, huh, old man?” he said to Whip, who eyed him hopefully as if another sugar cube might be forthcoming.

“Well, there’s one female who’s always glad to have me around,” he said, and then he closed the stall door and went to relieve Paloma of her duties. Kaylie, it seemed, was his only love right now, and now that he thought about it, that was okay, too.

AS SHE WALKED slowly toward the Big House, Erica reflected that Charmaine hadn’t thought much of her longing to look like a cowboy’s sweetheart.

“Forget the cowboy,” Charmaine had said, chucking shorts and halter tops into her suitcase as she packed for her trip to Aruba. “You need someone as intelligent as you are.”

Erica, who had been chugging cold medicine and was feeling woozy as a result, had been sprawled across her sister’s bed reading the Rancho Encantado brochure. “How am I going to find an intelligent man when there aren’t any?” she asked, looking up from pictures of tanned blondes reclining around a swimming pool. “All the ones my age are chasing nineteen-year-old table dancers, and how intelligent is that?”

“I told you that you should stop being so opinionated. It’s okay to run the show at McNee, Levy and Ashe, but in your personal relationships, you need to let the men call the shots once in a while.”

“Aargh! Like I’d want to. Give me a break, Charmaine.”

“You haven’t met the right guy yet, obviously. When you do, you’ll want to nurture. You’ll want to defer.”

Erica ignored this unlikely pronouncement. “You know, I think I’ll take my new digital camera. I used to be a pretty good photographer, and maybe there’ll be some good photo ops in the desert. Animals and such. And maybe they don’t have table dancers in country-and-western roadhouses. What do you think?”

What Charmaine thought was indicated by the meaningful arch of her eyebrows, which had ended the discussion.

Regarding the question of finding a man, any man, intelligent or otherwise, Erica had long ago given up. When she was younger, of course, she’d always expected that something and someone wonderful