Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (11 page)

As he replaced the coffeepot, Hope reached for an egg. Her hand bumped into his arm. She felt resilience, heat, and strength as his biceps shifted beneath her fingers. The temptation to prolong the contact by running her palm over his arm almost overwhelmed her. She wanted to feel the warm satin of his flesh, the flex of his strength, the heat of his life beneath her palm.

The intensity of her need to touch him shocked her. She snatched back her hand as though she had touched burning metal.

“Excuse me,” she said quickly. “How many eggs do you want?”

“Four.”

His voice was absent. He was watching the very fine trembling of her fingers as she blindly reached for an egg. The evidence of her response to a casual touch set off a soundless explosion of hunger deep inside him that he could neither control nor deny.

Angry, needing, yearning, he watched her over the rim of his steaming coffee mug. A lock of her bittersweet-chocolate hair had crept free of the clip at her nape. The tendril of hair slid forward to curl softly against her neck.

He wanted to capture the dark curl in his fingers, to lift it to his lips, and then to kiss the golden skin of her unclothed neck.

Rio didn’t know how desperately he wanted it until he saw his own hand reaching for the silky curl of hair. Cursing silently, he made his fingers into a fist and he turned his back on Hope’s endless, innocent temptations.

As he pulled out a chair to sit down at the table, he saw his boots beneath and remembered Hope’s delicious laughter floating up the stairway when she discovered the empty boots. He looked back at her silently cooking his breakfast and he . . .
hungered
. Automatically he kicked his stocking feet into the cowboy boots and adjusted his pant legs.

Then he realized he hadn’t stopped watching the delicate curve of her neck, hadn’t stopped wanting to taste her skin, hadn’t stopped needing her in ways that shocked him even more than the unruly, insistent beat of his arousal. The direct response of a teenage boy combined with the complex needs of an adult male swept over him like wind over the open land.

And like the land, he had no defenses, only emptiness.

Grimly he reined his thoughts. There was only one way he could touch Hope that wouldn’t destroy both of them, and that was by finding water for her, fulfilling her dream. It had always been enough for him in the past. It would have to be enough now. He had no more to give her except emptiness and pain.

“I’ve been looking over the papers your last hydrologist left,” Rio said. He sipped at the hot coffee and added dryly, “Educated man, no doubt about it. But he didn’t know a hell of a lot about this country on a firsthand basis.”

“He was just out of school.” Hope turned eggs with easy motions of her wrist. “City boy through and through. Nice kid. Earnest and real sorry there wasn’t any water on my ranch.”

Hope slid the eggs onto Rio’s warm plate and retrieved the platter with its load of bacon, potatoes, and toast. She put it all in front of him. After adding honey and a jar of cherry preserves to the table, she left him to eat in peace.

Silently she poured herself a cup of coffee and began making sandwiches for lunch on the trail. Between sips of coffee she deftly assembled slices of beef and slabs of yeasty homemade bread. Several apples, plus a double handful of oatmeal and raisin cookies, joined the growing heap of food on the counter.

When it was all tightly wrapped and ready to go, she poured herself some more coffee and sat opposite Rio, not at all bothered by his silence. She had grown up around ranch men. Their work was hard and endless. No one had time for conversation until after his belly was full. Then the men would lean back and talk until their food settled or their consciences got the better of them and prodded them back to work once more.

Rio sensed Hope’s relaxation and relaxed completely himself, grateful for her acceptance of silence. It left him free to savor each bite of the crisp fried potatoes, country bacon, homemade bread, and perfectly cooked eggs. He ate every bit of breakfast, mopped his plate neatly with a last crust of toast, and sighed with real pleasure.

“I’ll take my wages in your cooking any day,” he said, meaning every word.

She shrugged and smiled slightly. She had been raised cooking. She had always loved it, the colors and the textures and the smells, the pure sensual reward of creating a good meal. Her mother and older sister had never understood how she felt. To them, the kitchen was a punishment for being born female on a ranch.

“It’s hard to go wrong cooking breakfast when you have fresh eggs in the cupboard and your neighbor’s best pig in the freezer,” Hope said.

Rio made a sound of disgust. “Tell that to the hundred bunkhouse cooks I’ve known.”

Her smile widened. “That’s how I learned. The hands threw the cook in the corral trough and threatened to quit. I was only ten, but I’d been cooking since I was seven.”

“What about your mother?”

“She hated cooking.”

Rio heard more than the words. He heard the sadness and the acceptance and the loss that never went away but simply became part of life. He understood those things, and respected the fact that Hope faced what life gave her with a smile and the quiet strength that came from accepting what would never change.

“Did you spend much time in the drink?” Rio asked, smiling in spite of his thoughts. The image of a young Hope dumped into the horse trough was beguiling. She would have taken it with a splash and a smile, pulled herself out, and dripped all over the nearest cowboy.

“Just once. Thank God it was summer. The dunking felt real good.”

“What did you do to earn the trough?”

“I made chocolate cake, but I mixed up the sugar and the salt. It was so awful even the dog wouldn’t eat it.”

Rio threw back his head and laughed.

The deep sound was as much a reward to Hope as his enjoyment of breakfast had been. She laughed softly with him, shaking her head at the memory of her mistake.

“Even today when I make a chocolate cake, Mason takes a very tiny first bite,” she admitted. She smiled into her coffee cup. “Nothing obvious, mind you. Just a cautious little taste to make sure the sugar and the salt didn’t get swapped around.”

“I’ll remember that.”

He drained his coffee cup with a long swallow, then stood up with a smooth determination that Hope remembered from her childhood.
Man of the house, fed and ready to go back to work.

The thought of what it would be like to have Rio as the man of her house leaped into her mind, burning with an intensity that stopped her heart. She forced herself to breathe, to push the idea of Rio aside, to ignore it. Impossible dreams had killed her mother and her sister. Hope had vowed that they wouldn’t kill her.

She didn’t have the strength or the emotion to spare for destructive dreaming. She knew it as surely as she knew that the man called Rio was as rootless as the wind keening across the land, always searching for something, never finding it, always moving on.

She hadn’t needed Mason to tell her. It was there in Rio’s eyes, in his silences, in his memories of a hundred bunkhouse cooks.

Rio’s long fingers tightened around his coffee mug as he saw darkness veil the humor that had made Hope’s eyes brilliant just a moment before. He wondered what memory or fear had come to her, stealing her laughter.

Suddenly, savagely, he wanted to know what haunted her. Then he wanted to smooth the downward curve of regret from her mouth with his own lips. But if he did, in the end they both would have more regrets, more sadness, the unending bitterness of betrayal.

She couldn’t leave the Valley of the Sun.

He couldn’t stay.

Brother-to-the-wind.

For the first time, Rio understood the tears in his grandfather’s eyes when he told his grandson his true name.

Eleven

A
FTER BREAKFAST
, Hope and Rio walked beneath an empty, cloudless sky to the horse pasture just beyond the barn. The lunch she had just packed was in the saddlebags over his shoulder. So was a canteen of coffee. It would lose its heat soon enough, but people who worked the land learned to take coffee at whatever temperature they could get it.

“Where do you want to start?” Hope asked.

“We’ll ride the boundaries first.”

“High or low?”

He gestured toward the Perdidas rising in stark grandeur above the rumpled land. “Up there at the northern end of the ranch.”

“Then you better take a good horse,” she said. “The Valley of the Sun goes as low as two thousand feet here in the south and as high as seven up along the northern boundaries.”

“You have timberland?” Surprise was clear in Rio’s voice and in the dark line of his eyebrows.

She gave him a wry, sideways glance. “Timberland? Are you kidding? If it’s a tree, it’s on government-lease land. The part of the ranch that’s above seven thousand feet is all on northwest-facing slopes.”

“Northwest facing,” he repeated, shaking his head. “That means nothing grows but big sage, mountain mahogany, piñon, and juniper.”

“You got it. Not a decent board foot in the lot.”

His mouth turned down in a sardonic curl. “It’s the same way all over Nevada. The best land is government, the worst is Indian, and the rest of the Basin and Range country belongs to anyone tough and smart enough to hammer a living out of it.”

“But it’s beautiful land,” Hope said.

“Most people don’t think so. They look at the sagebrush and the bare mountains and they can’t drive through the state fast enough. Maybe you have to be born here to appreciate it.”

“My mother was born here. She hated it.”

“So did mine,” Rio admitted. “Being raised on a reservation was no treat for anyone, especially a part-Indian girl who looked like she got off at the wrong bus stop. She couldn’t get off the res fast enough.”

“Did your father like it?”

Rio made a sound that could have been laughter, but was too hard. “He hated this land more than she did. He was part Athabascan, born to northern forests and lakes. He hated them, too. But most of all he hated being called Indian when his father was a renegade Scotsman and his mother was a quarter Dutch.”

Hope glanced sideways at Rio. She wondered if his father had been like him, strong bones and easy strength, raven-black hair and quick mind, silences as deep as the night.

He hated being called Indian.

She wondered if Rio did.

As though hearing her silent question, Rio moved his wide shoulders in a casual shrug that belied the dark memories in his eyes. “My father never grew up. He never accepted the fact that there’s no such thing as mostly white. People look at you and see only
not
white.”

There was a cynicism in Rio’s words that made Hope ache. She wanted to say he was wrong. She knew he was right.

But not when it came to her. “When I look at you,” she said calmly, “I see a man. A good one. Period.”

He glanced quickly aside at Hope. Her voice was like her expression, matter-of-fact. He could take it or leave it, but it wouldn’t change the truth of how she saw the world.

How she saw him.

Without knowing what he was doing, he lifted his hand to touch her cheek. Before he could, a drumroll of approaching hooves drew his attention away from Hope.

Storm Walker was cantering toward the fence, making rhythmic thunder roll from his dark hooves. In the center of the pasture, two of Hope’s four remaining mares watched the Appaloosa stallion rush to meet the humans.

The stud was worth watching. Black except for a white stocking and the black-spotted white “blanket” that covered his powerful rump, Storm Walker moved with a muscular grace that made Rio want to climb on the strong black back and ride forever.

With a horseman’s knowing, appreciative eye, he watched the stallion mince up to the fence and nicker a greeting. Quietly he stroked Storm Walker’s warm, glossy neck.

Neither the man nor the stud was wary of the other. They had made friends the first time Rio leaned against the fence and talked Storm Walker over to him in low, soothing tones. Since then Rio had come to the horse pasture at least once a day, bringing a reassuring touch, a sprinkle of salt, and an admiration that grew every time the stallion moved over the ground with long, liquid strides.

Storm Walker blew on Rio’s hat and shirt collar. Smiling, he pushed away the velvety muzzle.

“You’re an old softie, aren’t you,” he said in a low voice.

Hope snorted. “Only until you get in the saddle. Then he’ll shake the change right out of your pockets.”

“Rough-gaited?” Rio asked, surprised. “He sure doesn’t look it.”

“Oh, once he settles down he’s as smooth as deep water.” She paused, then added dryly, “But settling this bad boy down is a bone-shaking proposition, kind of like riding a landslide. He needs a lot more work than he’s gotten lately. He’s spring-loaded and looking for fun.”

“Hauling water hasn’t left you any time to give him exercise,” Rio said, understanding.

“Even if I had time, I can’t risk getting thrown. If I break an arm or a leg trying to settle Storm Walker down, I’d have to sell my cattle or let them die of thirst.” She shrugged. “My prancing bad boy will just have to wait until the rains come. Then I’ll ride his spotted tail right into the ground.”

Rio’s smile faded at the thought of Hope climbing up on the big stud and being bucked off into a corral fence. Not that he thought she was a bad rider. He knew she wasn’t. When he had put her up on Dusk, Hope had been as graceful and confident in the saddle as she was on the ground.

But Storm Walker was big, hard, and had a stallion’s aggressive temperament.

“Is he a good rough-country horse?” Rio asked.

“He was born in the foothills east of here and ran free for the first three years of his life.”

“Like Dusk. She lived wild until two years ago.”

“Did you catch her?”

He nodded. “She led me on one hell of a chase, too.” His eyes focused on an inner landscape of memory. “Her mama was a ranch horse gone wild, an Arabquarter horse mix that was tougher than an old boot. Her daddy was part Morgan, part Arab, and ninety percent cougar, near as I could tell.”

Hope remembered how her father had hated it when the wild horse herds grew beyond the land’s ability to renew itself and still feed the herds. Then the meat hunters would come, chasing the wild horses with airplanes and driving them lathered and terrified into funnel-shaped corrals concealed by brush.

The hunts had been necessary to cull the herds back from the brink of starvation and to return feral horses to their owners. Necessary, but brutal. The alternative—starvation, disease, and a lingering death—was even more brutal.

Hope sighed. “How did you catch Dusk? Airplane?”

“I used the oldest method, the one the Indians invented centuries ago, when the Spanish horses were so new to America that the Cheyenne called them ‘big dogs.’ ”

She smiled. “What method is that?”

“I walked Dusk down.”

Turning, Hope stared at Rio. Mason had told her of men walking down wild horses more than a century ago. They followed the wild herds from water hole to water hole, never allowing them to rest. At first the horses ran at the sight and smell of man. Then they cantered. Then they trotted. Then they walked. Finally they were too tired to move at all.

It, too, could be a brutal method of capture, but at least it was almost as hard on the men as it was on the horses.

“It wasn’t that bad,” Rio said, understanding the expression on Hope’s face. “I wore out Dusk’s flight response as much as her feet. I just hung around the fringes of the herd, leaving bits of salt and grain, following the mustangs everywhere until I kind of grew on her. By the time I walked up to her with a rope, she simply wasn’t afraid of me anymore. I was a member of the herd.” He grinned suddenly. “A strange, slow, small, awkward kind of horse, but one of the herd just the same.”

“How long did it take you?”

“Eight weeks. Ten. Maybe more. I lost track of time. This country’s good for that.”

“Losing track of time?”

Rio nodded absently. His attention was once again on the glossy Appaloosa stallion. “Mind if I ride him today?”

“Only if you break something,” Hope said wryly.

“I wouldn’t hurt a hair on his spotted hide.”

“It wasn’t Storm Walker’s hide I was worried about,” she retorted. “He’s only been ridden a few times in the last year.”

“He looks it. Just full of himself, isn’t he? Don’t worry, we’ll do fine together.”

Hope smiled. “Forget I said anything, just like I forgot that you make your living as a horse trainer when you aren’t drilling wells for dirt-poor dreamers.”

He looked at her, curious about the complex emotions in her voice when she described herself as a dirt-poor dreamer.

“I’d love for you to ride Storm Walker,” she said. “The longer he goes without work, the harder he’ll be for me to handle. And he never was easy. Not for the first few minutes, anyway.”

Rio didn’t waste any more time talking about it. He flipped the saddlebags he was carrying over the corral rail and went after Storm Walker. He had the stallion caught, curried, bridled, saddled, and inside the corral before Hope could change her mind.

Storm Walker knew what was coming. He was dancing and snorting, bristling with energy and eager for some fun.

“You sure you want to ride him?” she asked Rio. “You don’t have to. I need a well more than I need a well-behaved stud.”

Rio grinned like a boy. “You’re doing me a favor. I’ve wanted to climb on Storm Walker since the first time I saw his glossy hide across the pasture.”

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With one hand wrapped around the bridle just above the bit, she held the stallion still for Rio to mount. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

Rio gathered the reins tightly and sprang into the saddle with catlike ease. His feet settled into the stirrups as Storm Walker’s body bunched into a hard knot of protest.

“Turn him loose,” Rio said softly.

Expecting Storm Walker to explode, Hope let go of the bridle and climbed the corral fence in two seconds flat.

Rio didn’t allow the stallion to buck. He held the horse’s head up and let him fight a useless battle with the bit. The stud’s powerful hindquarters rippled as he alternately lashed out with his heels and spun on his hocks. Sudden spins and jerks were the only way he could try to unload his rider, short of scraping Rio off on the fence or rolling over on him. Storm Walker was basically too good-tempered a horse to resort to those tactics.

Bucking, on the other hand, was just good clean fun.

Smiling slightly, Hope watched the man and the horse test each other, probing for weaknesses. Storm Walker backed up constantly, as though to say if he couldn’t buck, he wasn’t going to go forward, either. Rio’s long, powerful legs closed around the stud’s black barrel, urging him forward with relentless pressure. Rio could have used the small, blunt spurs he always wore on his boots, but he didn’t.

After a few backward circuits of the corral, Storm Walker stood still and chewed the bit resentfully.

“Round one to you,” Hope said.

Rio glanced sideways and said dryly, “Something tells me I can either let this son buck here or I can let him buck out there when my mind is on something else.”

“You’ve got it. Storm Walker just won’t settle down until he’s had his fun.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that. Had a horse like him once.”

“What happened to it?”

“I swapped it for a dog and shot the dog,” Rio drawled. “Course, it was a gelding and ugly as sin.”

She laughed, not believing a word of it.

With a sigh Rio tugged his hat down hard, eased his grip on the reins, and touched Storm Walker lightly with his spurs. The stud’s head shot down, his heels shot up, and for the next few minutes he did his best to turn inside out. Rio rode the whirlwind with a skill that made it look easy.

Hope wasn’t fooled. She had ridden that same whirlwind more than once. She knew there was nothing easy about Storm Walker working off a head of steam.

After the first few moments she let out her breath, confident that neither horse nor man would be hurt. She relaxed on the top railing, hooked her feet around the next railing down, and simply enjoyed the man and the stallion as they tore up the corral, two healthy animals perfectly matched, enjoying the test of power against skill.

Without warning, Storm Walker’s head came up. He snorted deeply, then pricked his ears and looked over his shoulder at the man who hadn’t come unstuck.

“Finished?” Rio drawled.

Storm Walker rubbed his nose on Rio’s boot and then stood as placidly as a cow, waiting for instructions from his rider.

“That’s it,” Hope said, jumping down from the fence. “He won’t buck again this ride.”

“Thank God for small favors.”

Rio stretched his back and shoulders, feeling the stallion’s unleashed power in every muscle of his body. Then he looked at Hope’s slender form and wondered how she had managed to stay on top of Storm Walker. It wasn’t raw strength, that was for sure.