The Counterfeit Cowgirl (12 page)

“A what?”

“See there? You’d better turn me over to Megan. I’ll bet she knows what kind of truck to show a fall.”

Megan, who had spotted another shopper, glanced over her shoulder and grinned. “Show her that turquoise stepside with the mud tires, Aaron. It’s a color made for falls.”

Aaron took the opportunity to study Felicity’s face. “You don’t look like fall to me. You look like summer, the way a true cowgirl should.”

“True.” Megan lingered a moment, gazing longingly upon Felicity’s western whites. “I’ve never seen clothes like those around here before.”

“You can get them online.” All saleswoman again, Felicity reached into her purse and produced a card. “My shop, The Cosmic Cowgirl, does a lot of online business. And if you’re ever in Nashville, be sure and stop in for a look.”

Megan took the card, looked Felicity’s clothes over with an avaricious gleam in her eyes, and walked dreamily away. Satisfied that she’d landed another customer, Felicity pretended to study a bronze stepside truck. Anything to keep from noticing Aaron, who was smiling appreciatively.

“I hope your shop stocks lots of those outfits,” he said. “You’re the best advertisement a western store could have.”

Felicity ran her fingers over the bronze finish. Aaron stood entirely too close. She fancied she could feel the heat of his body and sense the way his pulse beat rhythmically beneath his tanned wrists. No doubt that was why her own pulse raced along at ninety miles an hour.

“We keep a large inventory,” she said.

She was in trouble. Aaron’s deep, rough voice alone shook her resolve. She reminded herself again his voice was the major reason she needed to exercise caution. She must have been crazy to stop here.

“You aren’t going to make anything easy, are you?” Aaron stepped closer to her.

“Make what easy?” She edged away and casually adjusted the truck’s side-view mirror to avoid catching his eye. “I keep on telling you. I’m very satisfied with my truck, but it’s possible I may be interested in a Chevrolet in the future.”

“I would never have gone off the deep end the way I did if I hadn’t been attracted to you the instant I first saw you,” he said.

Felicity felt jolted, from the heels of her boots to the leather hair clasp on top of her head. Even though she had expected him to come on to her, she had expected a more devious approach. Anything other than this straightforward declaration. She turned to look at him then wished she hadn’t. The moment her gaze made contact with his, everything inside her melted.

Fortunately, the sales training seminars she had attended over the years enabled her to present a smiling facade in the face of the utmost mental confusion. But she couldn’t think of a single thing to say that didn’t sound fatuous and silly.

Taking her hand, he said, “But I would still like to paddle you for making me think you knew how to ride a horse.”

Felicity’s eyes widened with indignation and she removed her hand from his clasp. “It was all your fault, and you know it.”

He laughed as if pleased. “You’re right, it was. I had a powerful hankering to see you on Rhyolite in one of those fancy outfits of yours. But if I’d known you weren’t a rider, I’d have been satisfied just looking at you standing beside Rhyolite.”

Felicity tossed her head back. The strands of silver and turquoise at her ears danced in the sun and threw flashes of light on his blue shirt. “Now that you mention it, an ad campaign featuring you and your horse, with a model out front in one of our best outfits would probably sell more clothes than all the cards I can pass out. Maybe we can work out some sort of trade.”

“Actually, you’re the best advertisement going for that shop of yours. You and Rhyolite would make a perfect team.”

“I’m not a model.” Felicity looked him over. “Whoever heard of a western model with metal stuff on her teeth? But I have a good model on the books, and I’ll bet the two of you would make an even better team. When it comes to selling clothes, of course,” she added quickly, when Aaron eyed her askance.

“Your braces look like jewelry for teeth,” he said. “Maybe you should hire out as a model for the American Dental Association.”

Jewelry for teeth? Felicity regarded him thoughtfully. The man was a master of seduction when it came to words. Thank goodness she knew what he really wanted.

Although the hot, humid air seemed to quiver with emotion, Aaron made no move to get too close, and his voice calmed her further. Then she looked into his eyes and felt as if she had made contact with some powerful force that shook her all the way down to her white cowgirl boots.

“How did you come to injure your mouth?” he asked. “From what your mother said, I gathered you were thrown from a horse into something. I’ve heard of broken bones, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of a mouth injury.”

“Oh, I didn’t just get thrown,” she said with studied nonchalance. “My horse jumped a fence, and I flew over his head and right into a fence post, lips leading.”

The last thing she wanted to talk about right now was Gary Carlisle. Felicity sighed and walked down the row of trucks, absently stopping to stroke her fingers across a shining green hood. What would Aaron say if she just told him the truth?

Aaron followed. “What made you try to jump a fence in the first place if you weren’t an experienced rider?”

“Actually, that was the first time I’d ever been on a horse.” She shrugged and pretended to study huge mud tires on another new truck. “I guess I can say that I’ve now spent a grand total of ten minutes on a horse’s back. Five minutes then, and five minutes yesterday.”

“Then what on earth made you try to jump a fence?” he demanded.

Felicity heard the exasperation in his tone and faced him with flashing eyes. “I didn’t try to jump the fence. The horse tried to jump the fence.”

Aaron frowned. “Did you give him mixed messages, the way you did with Rhyolite yesterday?”

She glared then looked away. “I never had a chance to give him any messages at all. Suffice it to say, the incident had been planned, but I wasn’t supposed to be hurt. I was supposed to be rescued.”

Aaron looked absolutely stunned. The expression soothed a little of her irritation.

“What are you talking about?” he asked at last, shaking his head. “I’m not following this at all.”

“That’s because it’s totally unbelievable. It was a stupid incident, and I’d rather forget it. What a beautiful truck.” Felicity focused gratefully on a turquoise pickup, which sat high above the ground on over-large tires. “I’ve never seen one that color before.”

“It’s a truck made for you,” Aaron said. “This is the one Megan says was made for falls, whatever they are. Now I want to know what happened and how you hurt your mouth.”

It was that voice of his that made her behave like a jellyfish, she decided wryly. She just couldn’t bring herself to tell a man with a voice like that to bug off, even if the voice constituted the chief reason for her wariness. She might as well tell him the whole unbelievable tale. Perhaps then he’d realize he had no chance of fooling her into thinking he cared about her.

“I dated a nice-looking man in Nashville about a year ago,” she said. “He claimed he was a computer expert, but I found out later he was waiting tables in a restaurant and playing lead guitar in a country band while he was waiting to be discovered.”

Aaron’s navy gaze narrowed on her. “Gary Carlisle, I presume. You must have cared a lot for him.”

“Not really.” She shrugged and minutely examined the truck’s hood. “It was too early for that, but maybe I could have cared if he hadn’t tried to speed things up.” She walked around to peer in at the dashboard. “To make a long story short, it wasn’t me he cared about. His only real concern was his career as a country-western musician.”

“So what happened?” Aaron asked, regarding her steadily.

“He wanted to take me to bed. Failing that, he wanted me under obligation to him even if he had to pretend he wanted to marry me.” Felicity shrugged and looked down the line of new vehicles. The late afternoon sunlight gleaming off their finishes almost blinded her. “We had a few dates, and when none of the above came to pass as fast as he wanted, he decided to jump-start matters.”

Aaron’s wry half-smile melted her insides.

“I can’t say I blame him,” he said. “A man can get impatient when the woman he wants drags her heels.”

“If I thought he really wanted me, maybe he would have gotten somewhere,” Felicity said. “Unfortunately, I was left with the opposite impression.”

“What did he do to cause that?”

She shot him a swift glance from beneath her lashes. “It was a collection of little things that are hard to explain, but added together, they left me with the impression that he really didn’t find me attractive at all.”

For instance, Gary Carlisle hadn’t kissed her more than three or four times during their grand total of four dates, and his kisses had impressed her more as “duty” kisses rather than kisses of genuine affection or attraction.

That realization caused her to pause. Aaron had already kissed her more than Gary had during their entire month of dating. What was more, Aaron’s kisses lit all her fires and rang all her bells. Surely this attraction could not be one-sided.

She forced her mind back to her story. “He invited me to spend a day horseback riding and picnicking with friends on a dude ranch outside of Nashville.” Felicity strolled around the truck and studied its lines scrupulously. “It sounded like a lot of fun.”

“Did he know you’d never ridden a horse before?”

“As a matter of fact he did, because I told him. My horse was supposed to be a gentle mare that never moved faster than a walk. Instead, it turned out to be a mare that had been trained for the circus.” She almost laughed at his disbelieving expression. “When someone gave the signal, the horse would jump a barrier from almost a standstill position.”

“What?”

“I had a little difficulty with the idea myself.” Felicity gave him a commiserating grin. “Anyway, I hadn’t been in the saddle more than a few minutes when the friends we were supposed to join further up the trail arrived unexpectedly. One of them was my mother’s sister.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” Clearly, Aaron missed the message she thought she was sending.

“Well, yes,” she admitted, biting back laughter at his baffled look. “Gary got confused and decided the show would have to start sooner than he’d planned, so he gave the horse the signal. The horse got confused because the fence wasn’t where it was supposed to be for her act. She took off and jumped the wrong fence.”

“There was a right fence?” Aaron looked at her as if she had grown two heads.

“Yes, and that’s what caused all Gary’s trouble. His whole plan went haywire when the horse jumped the wrong fence, because Gary wasn’t in the right spot to save me the way he’d planned. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground with paramedics working on me.”

Aaron still had trouble following the tale, which sent her into a spasm of inward laughter. Amazed, she wondered when it had suddenly become so hilarious. She had spent almost a year cringing at the very thought of the incident.

He frowned. “Are you saying this guy planned to have you fall off the horse?”

“Yes, he did, but to give him credit, he had planned to catch either me or the horse in a noble and just-in-time rescue.” She shot him another glance and struggled to maintain a straight face. “It should have been a piece of cake. There should have been a lot of fuss made over the hero, and maybe I’d even go to bed with him in an attempt to show my gratitude.”

Aaron stared at her in fulminating, disbelieving silence.

“Best of all, Mama was sure to hear about every detail of the heroic rescue from her sister and overflow with gratitude.”

Aaron had such a stunned expression on his rugged face, Felicity started to ask if he felt all right.

“That is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at last, mildly. “Are you sure of his motive?”

Felicity folded her lips together as well as she could over her braces and nodded vigorously. “Unfortunately for him, Mama got to the bottom of his plan within five minutes of talking to the stable owner about that horse.”

“Let me get this straight.” Aaron frowned heavily. “This guy wanted you to sleep with him so badly, he arranged an accident so he could rescue you and you’d go to bed with him out of gratitude?”

Felicity met his scowl just before bursting into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Aaron demanded. “You could have been killed by that little stunt.”

“No kidding.” She leaned against the gleaming turquoise truck fender, still laughing. “What I really love is the idea that he was so overcome with desire, he went through extraordinary plotting and expense to set up the situation.”

He regarded her gravely. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me that if you hadn’t been injured, you might have fallen for that idiot.”

“No telling what I might have done,” she said, between gusts of laughter. “And his idea was probably spot-on if it had gone as planned. If he had performed a daring rescue, Mama might have reacted just as he hoped.”

Aaron shook his head in obvious bewilderment. “I still don’t understand what your mother had to do with this. Are you saying he was really interested in her rather than in you?”

Felicity regarded him with pitying amusement. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, but not in the way you mean. He was interested in what Mama could do for his career.”

“
What
?” He was stunned. “Are you trying to tell me this lunatic set you up so your mother would fast-forward his singing career out of gratitude?”

“That’s what he hoped,” Felicity agreed. “Or so Mama said. She was so mad it took me almost a week to get any sense out of her. It wasn’t until he called me one night and begged me to call her off that I finally figured out what was going on.”

“I can’t believe this.” Aaron said. “He had the nerve to ask you to rescue him?”

“Yes, he did. Mama had sicced her lawyer and a private detective on him, not to mention the police. He was in hiding.”

“I should think he was.” Aaron scowled. “I’d like to get my hands on that jerk.”