Handful of Sky (7 page)

Shallie was grateful for Hunt’s intervention, but to remain silent would be to allow Jake McIver the upper hand, something she didn’t intend to let happen.

“Yes, I suppose my mother’s perfume did have something to do with my start in life,” she answered in a light, bantering tone. “I guess I’m lucky she didn’t wear Opium.”

Old McIver eyed her as if sizing her up for a second time. A surprised chuckle accompanied the glance. “You’re right, it could have been a lot worse. Most folks, if they had been named after the romantic potions that put the twinkle in their daddy’s eye, would have ended up being christened Wild Turkey.”

Shallie forced herself to laugh, aware both of its falseness and of Hunt’s eyes upon her. His lips were sealed in a grim, tight line. That was when Shallie noticed that he and his grandfather shared the same sort of full, sensuous mouth. When not laughing, the corners hung down with a slight petulance. They were mouths which had demanded, and known, more than their fair share of pleasure.

“What kind of mangy steers did you bring down for this rodeo school Hunt’s putting on?”

Shallie let her reply fall into the rhythm of McIver’s repartee. “Just the flea-bittenest, motliest bunch I could come up with.” Sometimes she felt almost bilingual in her ability to switch into the speech patterns favored by rodeo folk.

“We’ll have a look at your sorry beeves tomorrow. Come on, Trish, time for me to put this old body to bed.” McIver negated his words by springing spryly to his feet. He was well over six feet tall, every inch as trim as he had been half a century before. Trish trailed behind him as he swept out of the room. Shallie detected the electric glance that passed between Trish and Hunt. It sparked a
flicker of jealousy that she was quick to extinguish. The last thing in the world she needed was to become embroiled in the twisted affairs of the Circle M. At least she had an explanation now for the hostility that flared between Hunt and his grandfather. Hunt too knew the prick of the green-eyed monster.

The gargantuan room seemed to shrink once Jake and Trish had left. Hunt stood suddenly very close. Shallie’s thoughts spun in a futile attempt to come up with something resembling polite conversation.

“It would appear you’ve learned that a sharp wit can be a handy weapon.” Hunt’s words were as quiet as his grandfather’s had been raucous. They also made Shallie suspect that Hunt too might be a bilinguist who reserved one way of speaking for rodeo people and another for the rest of the world. Shallie felt oddly flattered that he didn’t feel he had to use his rodeo camouflage with her.

“Actually I have you to thank for teaching me that lesson. Besides, what other way is there to deal with your grandfather?”

“The only way I know of dealing with him is very carefully.” A frostiness crept into Hunt’s words, which hung in the air long after they had been spoken. Shallie cast about for another topic of conversation. Unfortunately, she blurted out the only one she could come up with before she’d had a moment to consider it.

“Trish. She seems so much—”

“Younger than my grandfather,” Hunt finished for her. “Chronologically she’s twenty-four, but as far as experience goes she’s at least as old as he is.”

Shallie wondered about this cryptic comment, but it was clear from his impenetrable expression that he did not care to explain it. Shallie could only assume that he had firsthand knowledge about the depth of Trish’s experience. She made one more stab at conversation.

“From your accent,” Shallie hazarded, “I’d guess that you haven’t spent your whole life in Texas.”

“And you’d be right. My grandmother packed me off to an Eastern boarding school as soon as I hit my teens. At the time I thought it was the cruelest kind of punishment. But once I got over the shock of using my legs for activities other than gripping the sides of a horse, I was grateful to her for opening up a larger world beyond rodeo to me. Sounds like you’re acquainted with that world too.”

“I guess I have my mother to thank for that. Like your grandmother, she insisted that I study something unrelated to horses while I was at the university.” The mention of horses turned Shallie’s thoughts back to a matter that pressed urgently for quick action: the blue roan. She looked at the man lounging on the sofa and felt her supply of nerve shrink away. In the dim light his hard-carved face fell away in angled planes and deep, hard shadows. His eyes, she’d discovered in the light, were a blue as changeable as a wild sea. One minute they sparkled in his
tanned and weathered face, the tranquil azure of a tropical cove. The next, they shifted to a stormy shade closer to black. At the moment they were a dark Prussian blue.

Under any other circumstances Shallie would have retreated from a man like Hunt, from the dangerous aura of sensuality which he exuded. That is precisely what she had been doing for the past two years. It was simpler that way, she told herself. There was no room in her life for emotional complications. But she couldn’t avoid the danger that Hunt McIver represented, not if she was going to have any chance at the magnificent outlaw roan in Jake McIver’s corral.

“Hunt, I have a favor to ask of you.” Her voice quavered in the dusky room.

He turned his gaze on her without answering.

“I’d like to see one of the auction horses ridden.”

“No favor there, just stay around a day or two and you’ll see them all ridden at the auction.”

“Not all,” Shallie contradicted him. “You’ll have the best ones culled out by then.”

“Of course. Jake didn’t get to be where he is today by selling off his best stock.”

“I know. That’s why I’d like to see one particular horse ridden tonight, before anyone else has a chance to see him.”

“I take it that I’m your candidate to stage this little moonlight buckout.”

“Would you, Hunt?” Shallie couldn’t stop the eager note of pleading that colored her request. “There’s one horse I just have to see. It would mean so much to the Double L. You and your grandfather already have so many champion broncs. All I want is just a chance at this one. He might not turn out to be anything.”

A look of detached amusement stole over Hunt’s features. “And just why should I jeopardize my grandfather’s chance at a prize bronc?”

Shallie had hoped to convince him without playing her trump card. “For the same reason that I’m not going to report you to the PRCA for riding in an unsanctioned rodeo. Because we want to help each other out.” She held her breath, hoping she hadn’t overplayed her hand.

Hunt’s taunting smile faded. “You’d really report me, wouldn’t you? Being the best really means that much to you, doesn’t it?”

Shallie’s voice was level when she answered, “It does.”

For a long moment Hunt seesawed between angry disbelief and amusement. Amusement finally won out. “All right, if there’s one thing in this world I should understand it’s wanting to excel. You’ve got yourself a bronc rider.”

*  *  *

The evening air was cool and soft with the scents and moisture blown by the breezes from the wide Colorado
River, which wound through the McIver property. A high, full moon dusted the swaying grass and dappled the gnarled live oak trees with silver shadows. The lights had been switched off in the arena and the bunkhouse beyond was already dark. The air was thick with the croaking of frogs and the busy whir of crickets. But no human sound other than the crunch of their own footsteps broke the stillness. The corral was at the bottom of the hill from the ranch house. All the horses were motionless, sleeping on their feet, except for one. His restless, snowy head surged above the others.

“That’s him,” Shallie whispered, though there was no one near enough to have heard her voice.

“You’re a good judge of horseflesh,” Hunt allowed. “I had my eye on him myself. Best of the lot.”

Hunt’s compliment stirred a warm rush of pleasure that Shallie hastily put aside.

Hunt stopped at his brown pickup truck and pulled his bareback rigging out of the back. He strode with a loose-limbed grace over to the arena and started to turn on the lights.

“No,” Shallie hissed in the darkness. “No lights.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Hunt demanded. “You want me to ride a wild horse in the dark?”

“Somebody will see if you turn the lights on. Your grandfather can’t know about this.” A note of desperation crept into Shallie’s voice as she envisioned her prize
slipping away from her before she’d ever had a chance at it.

“All right. No lights.” He grabbed a rope and set off for the corral. “Come on and help me catch this hooved treasure you have
your
heart and
my
life set on.”

Shallie followed him. Hunt played out a large, looping lasso as they walked. At the gate he swung his leg over the top timber and straddled it. At their approach, the horses had begun to stir. They began to seethe as Hunt sent a couple of experimental tosses of the rope snaking over their heads. Led by the roan, they churned about the corral. Hunt played out the loop and swung it over his head, a whirring halo. As the roan approached, Hunt let the lasso fly. It cut the night air like a native spear and landed on the roan’s head like a slightly askew fedora covering his ears and one eye. The roan balked and would have thrown off the loop but Hunt, with a practiced flick of his wrist, snaked the lasso up and over the horse’s muzzle, landing it securely around his neck.

Feeling the hemp tighten around his throatlatch, the roan panicked, rearing up on his hind legs. Hunt gave him plenty of rope, then dropped down behind the gate. Feeling no pressure on its neck, the horse calmed down and Hunt started to reel him in like a nine-hundred-pound fish. Hunt played the roan, using instinct and finesse rather than brawn. When the bronc resisted, Hunt let out some slack. When he became more pliant, Hunt urged
him close with a firm but gentle pressure on the rope. Little by little, he drew the animal to him.

“Get a handful of grain,” Hunt ordered Shallie when the bronc was almost close enough to touch.

Shallie scampered off toward the barn and quickly found the grain bin. She dived into it with both hands. Back at the corral she offered the treat to the horse. He whinnied nervously at their closeness. But he wasn’t a wild horse—one totally unused to the sight and scent of man—just a horse that man couldn’t succeed in breaking. The smell of the molasses-laced grain mix was more than he could resist. He buried his muzzle deep in Shallie’s upstretched hands. That was what Hunt had been waiting for. With an unearthly swiftness he tightened his hold on the animal, taking a grip close to its throatlatch where he could control its movement.

With the bronc firmly in tow, Shallie slid back the gate latch and let it swing open. Hunt led the suddenly tractable horse from the herd into the arena. Shallie scrambled up on the chute gate, raising the iron-barred entrance while Hunt led him inside. Once the grating had slammed down behind the bronc, penning him in, Hunt reached for his rigging. A nervous muscle twitched in rebellion on the roan’s back as he positioned the leather device. Shallie held her breath and reached through the planks of the chute to grab the latigo, the long leather strap holding the cinch band to the rigging. She prayed
he wasn’t a chute fighter, a horse that reared up in the box. Bronc riders feared them more than the hardest bucking horse. Their scariest horror stories were about the horses with a propensity for mashing a man between their bodies and the timbers of a bucking chute. Shallie had long ago sworn that she would never keep a horse with even the slightest tendency toward chute fighting in her string.

“Pull it tight.” Shallie hauled in the slack, as Hunt held the rigging so that the front edge rested just above the point where the bronc’s neck joined the backbone. She cinched it down tightly.

Hunt placed a foot on either side of the chute so that he straddled the space above the roan’s back. He bent over and placed a gentle hand on the animal’s sides. “He’s holding his breath.” With a whinnying snort, the horse expelled the air. “Okay,” Hunt ordered. “Pull it in some more.”

Shallie yanked up on the rigging strap. “How’s that?”

“Good.” He straightened up and swung his arms to loosen them. Climbing onto an unknown horse was not a bronc rider’s favorite occupation. He liked to know everything he could about an animal—how he bucked, which way, and how hard. Trying out a maverick at midnight was an experience guaranteed to start a bareback rider’s adrenaline pumping. Shallie, remembering Hunt’s taped ribs and the rumors about his numerous other
injuries, suddenly wished she hadn’t made such a rash request. Out in the darkness, with no one nearby to deflect the flying hooves of a fear-maddened horse, it began to seem not only selfish but dangerous.

“Hunt,” she whispered.

A look of annoyance crossed his face. She had broken his concentration, the psychic link he was forging with the roan. Like a boxer stepping into a spotlit ring, a trial lawyer into a packed courtroom, a surgeon into a hushed operating theater, Hunt was in his element. He was a study in focused intensity.

“What?” His question was testy.

“Don’t go through with it. I’m sorry I asked you to do this. It was a stupid thing to ask.”

His annoyance deepened. He looked from her to the horse beneath him. “No, you’re right, I can sense it. This horse has some lessons in him that no man has ever learned before. I want to learn them.” With that, Hunt’s face settled again into a hard mask of concentration.

Seeing it, Shallie had no doubt about what had made Hunt a champion. The force of his determination hung in the air thick and tangible enough to taste and smell. Shallie could feel it just as she felt the searing heat of the hottest sun or the wind-driven rain of the fiercest storm. It was the heat generated by the force of Hunt’s will that welded him to the animals he rode. It was what transformed the spectacle of rodeo into something more,
something timeless—the most primitive, yet enduring of dramas, the one man has been playing out since he first rose from primordial beings to challenge the other species of the earth for supremacy. What Shallie wanted or didn’t want at that moment no longer had any meaning for Hunt. He had a horse to ride.