This Perfect Stranger. Barbara Ankrum
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with your mares.”
“Don’t bother to get out, Laird,” she told him. “I’ll unload them.”
He opened the door anyway and unfolded himself from the truck. “That wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me, would it? After all, I brought the ladies all the way back here…”
“I mean it. Don’t come near me.”
“I came to pay a simple, friendly visit, Maggie.”
“Nothing you do is either simple or friendly.” She moved toward the back of the loaded horse van. She lifted the slide bolt and whacked it open with the heel of her hand. But as she swung the door open, Laird appeared beside her.
“Anybody ever tell you you’ve got a touch of paranoia, Maggie Mae?”
She shot an ugly look at him before climbing up into the trailer. “Don’t call me that.”
He followed her, crowding her in the dark, narrow space as she moved to unhook the first mare’s halter from the stabilizing tether. She fumbled with the metal latch several times before she got it.
Laird moved to unhook a second mare, all the while watching her. “What?” he drawled. “I get no thank-you for goin’ to all this trouble? It’s not like I didn’t have better things to do with my afternoon.”
“You could have sent one of your men. God knows, you have enough to spare.”
“True. But to tell you the truth, I was curious to see how you were holdin’ up on your own out here. Without Ben.”
Maggie ignored him and backed the mare down the ramp, clucking at her as she went. “Atta girl. There you go,” she crooned.
Laird followed with the other mare, but he wasn’t paying much attention to the horse. “He was a fool, your husband. Abandoning you the way he did.”
“Go home, Laird. I mean it,” she said, leading the mare to the paddock where she tied it up to the fence rail. Laird did the same with his horse but cornered her there against the fence before she could move.
Maggie swallowed hard. “Get out of my way.”
“There’s nobody else here, Maggie. Just us.”
He was close enough that she could smell the stink of cattle on him, and whiskey if she wasn’t mistaken. He’d been drinking. And cigars. He reeked of cigar smoke.
Her throat felt like it was closing up with each thudding beat of her pulse. “Don’t.”
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