Liz Ireland by A Cowboy's Heart Read Free Book Online

she asked him.
    “No, but I’m sure you’d love to tell me.”
    She ignored the barb. “You’ve got an overworked sense of responsibility. When you’re sheriff, you feel responsible for the whole town. I bet when you’re out on the trail, you feel like you personally have to account for the fate of every one of those beeves. But I’m telling you, Will, Mary Ann is not your problem.”
    He shook his head. “You don’t understand. When Gerald was dying I told him I’d look after his daughter.”
    “Things are different now. Gerald couldn’t know that Mary Ann would one day up and marry Oat and you don’t know that the two of you would be any better off together than Oat and her are,” Paulie pointed out.
    “What do you think I should do—leave her with a toothless old man who obviously makes her unhappy?”
    “How do you know they’re unhappy?”
    “Oat himself said they fought all the time,” he insisted, his jaw set stubbornly.
    “So do all married people. I think if you respected Mary Ann at all, you’d trust her to make her own decisions.”
    Will shot her a keen glance. “You’re Mary Ann’s friend. Has she ever spoken to you about me?”
    Paulie hesitated. “No, she hasn’t.”
    “Not even before she ran off with Oat?”
    Paulie couldn’t help feeling a sharp stab of guilt. “She doesn’t tell me everything, Will,” she admitted, though even that was a pale reflection of the truth. Mary Ann could be thinking about Will twenty-four hours a day, and she wouldn’t know about it.
    He let out a ragged sigh, then looked at her, his brown eyes full of kindness. “1 guess it’s good you came along after all. You always did know how to put me in my place, Sprout.”
    She revelled in the pet name almost as much as she resented it. Why couldn’t Will think of her like he did Mary Ann, not just as a kid?
    He shook his head. “I suppose I’m still a little confused over why Mary Ann would marry Oat to begin with.”
    Paulie remained silent. The whole world was confused on that point
    He shot her a patient glance. “I guess it’s a little silly to be discussing all this with you,” he said. “I doubt you’ve ever fallen in or out of love.”
    The words rubbed Paulie’s fur the wrong way. Why was Will blind to the fact that she’d been crazy about him for years?
    Probably because he was so stuck on Mary Ann he couldn’t see anything else!
    Or maybe because he just didn’t have the slightest interest in her. That was an annoying—though highly likely—possibility. Paulie knew she could never even be a substitute for Mary Ann. She didn’t know the first thing about batting her eyelashes at a man, or flirting. Heck, the only time she’d ever worn a real grown-up long dress in front of Will, he’d said she looked like she’d been sick.
    Sick! At the mere thought, she felt her dander rising all over again. Never been in love? How could he just assume such a thing?
    “That just shows how smart you are!” she said tartly. “You don’t know the first thing about me, Will!”
    He turned to her, his eyes wide with surprise. “Well, have you?”
    Now that she’d started, she wasn’t going to back down.“If you must know, I have,” she said, tossing her head back defiantly. “Deeply in love.”
    “Who?” he asked.
    She blinked. “Who what?”
    “Who is the object of all this love you claim to have stored up?”
    This wasn’t something she was prepared to confess. Especially not to Will. Especially not when he asked her using that sarcastic tone. “None of your business.”
    He looked at her skeptically. “Is it somebody I know?”
    Clearly he didn’t believe her—a fact that made Paulie spitting mad. Men had so little imagination! Just because she owned a bar and wore men’s clothes, was it impossible to comprehend that she had feelings just like every other woman in the world?
    “I’d say you know him pretty well, Will Brockett,” she said. “In fact, sometimes I think