Cowboy Enchantment - By Pamela Browning Page 0,34

wore a coat of fresh white paint, and empty paint cans sat in one corner.

Hank pushed his hat back and cocked his hands on his hips as he surveyed the paint job, the narrow metal cot in one corner covered with a colorful serape, the handhewn wood of the table beside the door.

“Who uses this house?”

“I used to come here when I wanted to be alone. That’s how I became interested in refurbishing it for Justine.”

“It’s primitive now, but it could be beautiful.”

He smiled in agreement. “It has potential.”

While Hank hauled empty paint cans out to the garbage heap out back, Erica wandered into the kitchen, which contained an old wood-burning stove, a sandstone sink and a massive oak table. While she was studying the cobwebs in the overhead beams, Hank reappeared in the doorway. “Come with me. I want to show you what’s in one of the back rooms.”

She followed Hank down a hall to a series of rooms that had probably been used as bedrooms when the house was inhabited.

“Justine piled old furnishings here when she let some construction workers live here last summer while they built an addition on the Big House,” he told her. “Look, there’s an antique pine bedstead, and there are three or four humpbacked trunks. There’s crockery, too, in that beatup crate.”

The crate had been pried open, the cover tossed nearby. When she looked she saw that the dishes inside were of various patterns—blue willow, one with a border of daisies, some with a heavy green glaze. Erica wondered about the people who had once lived here. These dishes would have been part of their daily lives.

While she tried without success to pry open the lid of one of the old trunks, Hank disappeared into the next room. She heard him opening and closing a window as he whistled to himself. The light and shadow that the late-afternoon light streaming through the window cast on the jumble of furnishings would make an interesting still life, she thought, so she readied her camera and photographed the scene from several different angles.

When Hank returned, he was making notations on a pad of paper. “The windows in this place are in bad shape,” he said.

Erica slid her camera back in its case. “How often do you come here?”

“On weekends usually.” He tucked the notepad into his pocket.

Erica was mindful of the weekend coming up. Somehow the image of a cowboy repairing a run-down building on his time off did not seem appropriate; shouldn’t he be frequenting the local watering holes and chatting up cowgirls?

“It relaxes me to work with my hands,” he said, apparently feeling some need for explanation.

A wind sprang up outside in a whirl of dust and tumbleweed, pushing back the door of the front room to gain admittance, funneling off toward the kitchen in a merry whoosh and becoming no more than a caress on Erica’s skin by the time it reached the back bedroom where she and Hank stood. She felt the caress in the same breath that Hank mentioned working with his hands, and the wind whispered as it spiraled past the little whorls in her ear, You could find him something more personal to do with his hands. She saw those hands as they would be if he reached out and curved them around her breasts, and for a moment it seemed as if she could feel their heat and their strength. Her nipples firmed beneath her new yellow flannel shirt at the thought, and the wind, having accomplished its mission, settled down at her feet with a contented sigh.

“Better close these windows,” Hank said, moving to do so while Erica agitatedly hurried into the living room to do absolutely nothing but shiver in what she thought was anticipation. But anticipation for what? Even though she was sure he had almost kissed her yesterday after her riding lesson, he had shown no sign of being physically attracted to her today. She was imagining things. She was making things up. She was so accustomed to having her brain brim full of things to do, was always rushing from one place to another, that when there was extra time to be filled, she filled it by daydreaming about things that weren’t happening. Could never happen. In a million years.

Now Hank was sauntering out of the bedroom, and he was stark naked.

Omigosh.

And then her eyes refocused, and she saw that he was fully clothed. He wasn’t anywhere near naked. This was another figment