Only 05 - Autumn Lover

every breath.
    Hunter is brusque with me and sweetly teasing with Penny. But if I turn around quickly, it’s not Penny he’s watching .
    It’s me .
    Yet he makes no effort to court me. Quite the opposite. He’s a right bastard whenever I try to draw him into a bit of civilized conversation .
    Maybe he hasn’t gotten over losing his wife, even though it was more than two years ago .
    Silently Elyssa wondered how much time a man would need before he was ready to love again.
    She was afraid it was more time than Hunter had left on the Ladder S. All too soon the army deadline would be upon them. If the Ladder S met the deadline, Hunter would leave.
    Elyssa sensed it as certainly as she had sensed the brutality that lay just beneath Gaylord Culpepper’s slow talk and calculating eyes.
    And if the Ladder S did not manage to meet the army deadline, Elyssa would have nothing left. Not even dreams.
    Don’t think about it , she told herself. Thinking won’t help. Only working will .
    And praying .
    “Now, if you don’t look pretty as a picture,” Mickey said.
    Elyssa started and glanced over her shoulder. A tendril of hair floated down over her nose. Impatiently she blew the hair aside and looked at the young ranch hand who appeared whenever she left the ranch house.
    Mickey was leaning over the stall door. The look in his eyes might have pleased Elyssa if it had been Hunter doing the watching and hungering.
    But it wasn’t.
    With barely veiled impatience, Elyssa turned back to her milking.
    “What is it?” she asked. “Have you lost the whetstone again? Or is it the barrel staves you can’t keep track of this time?”
    “I’m through with those barrels. Done told him.”
    Elyssa didn’t have to ask who “him” was. Mickey didn’t like Hunter, but he was very careful around the older man.
    “Told him he could hire me at gunfighter wages or I’d leave you flat.”
    Without breaking her silence, Elyssa turned and shot a squirt of milk at the cat. Cupid opened her mouth and caught the liquid with little fuss and less mess.
    “What do you say to that?” Mickey challenged.
    “What did Hunter say?”
    “That he’d let me know before the week was out.”
    “Then that’s what I say.”
    “Huh.”
    Ignoring Mickey, Elyssa kept working. When she thought she heard him move on down the aisle, she let out a silent breath of relief and went back to humming. Finally she stripped the last of the milk from Cream’s teats.
    When Elyssa stood up, she put her fists in the small of her back and arched. Slowly she stretched her back, straightening out the kinks of a week’s hard riding over the Ladder S, hunting for cows.
    “Damn, Sassy, but you make a man want to sit up and howl at the moon.”
    Startled, Elyssa spun around.
    Mickey was still there, hanging over the stall door. He was looking at her breasts as though he owned them.
    Angrily Elyssa turned her back on Mickey and adjusted the scarf she had put in the dress’s low neckline. It had been pulled to one side during the milking, revealing the rising curves of her breasts.
    “Aw, now, don’t go and cover them up,” Mickey complained. “If you hadn’t wanted me to see them, you wouldn’t have worn that dress, now would you?”
    “You miserable—”
    Hunter’s voice cut across Elyssa’s.
    “Mickey, if you don’t have anything better to do than lean on stall doors, you can check the irrigation ditches in the kitchen garden.”
    Mickey straightened so quickly he stumbled. Elyssa knew that he was as startled to find Hunter in the barn as she had been to find Mickey still hanging around.
    “I’d hate to lose the garden harvest,” Hunter said, “just because you’re in a lather over a little flirt. Get going.”
    “Well, ain’t you just a dog in the manger,” Mickey complained. “You ain’t getting any, so you don’t want no one else to get none neither!”
    A single look at Hunter’s eyes made Elyssa feel chilled.
    “Take care of the garden,” Hunter said softly. “Now.”
    “What if I got on my horse instead?”
    “Then I’d shoot you as a horse thief. Every head of stock around here is wearing a Ladder S brand.”
    “Not every head,” Mickey said, smiling maliciously. “Lately I seen a lot wearing a Slash River brand. Ab Culpepper’s brand. Covers the Ladder S like a blanket, don’t it?”
    “Are you going to work or get off the Ladder S?” Hunter asked.
    Swearing like a sailor, Mickey walked out of the barn. On his way he