Knight in a White Stetson (2 page)

Chapter 2

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C
alla
pulled into the ranch just before dark. She scouted the compound for Lester, but when she didn’t see him right off, she decided to let that squabble wait until dinner.

“Thought you were going to camp at Two Creek tonight, honey,” Calla’s aunt Helen said as Calla walked through the kitchen door.

Calla leaned against the door and toed off her boots. “Nope. Decided to come on home. Didn’t want to eat my own cooking.” She padded in her stocking feet to where her aunt was standing over the stove. “What is that? It smells great. I’m starving.”

“You’re always starving,” Helen said, spooning up a bite of the spaghetti sauce and lifting it to Calla’s mouth. Calla sucked it off the spoon.

“Ah, hot,” she said. “Good, though. I really am hungry tonight. Did
Clark
call?”

“Was he supposed to?” Helen reached into the cupboard above her for more parsley. “And why are you so hungry
tonight?”

“That damn Lester,” Calla began, then amended, “sorry, that
darn
Lester. Where is he anyway? I didn’t see him in the yard.”

“He and your dad went into town for a new tine for the hay rake.”

“Another one? That’s about the tenth one that idiot’s broken off the rake this month. I oughta start making him pay for ‘em.”

“Now, Calla.”

“Well, I’m mad at him,” Calla said. “He took the jack out of the pickup and didn’t put it back in. I had a flat up on Bennett, way in hell out by the chalk mine. I nearly had to walk home.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Oh, some guy came by and lent me his jack. I didn’t have a lug wrench, either. That stupid Lester.”

“Who?”

“Lester. Haven’t you been listening to me?”

“I meant, who was driving on that old road this time of year?”

“Oh. Henry … something. I don’t think he told me his last name.”

“From around here?”

“No.
California
.”

“On that road? Was he young or old?”

“Young. Pretty, too. Nice teeth,” Calla said, and started up the plain plank stairs to her room on the second floor. She pulled off her jeans and T-shirt, padded in her underwear to her little bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub and reached for the faucet.

Henry.

An old-fashioned name. She couldn’t think of a single man under the age of fifty named Henry. She turned the faucet to hot and pushed the plug into the drain.

And where did he get that cocky grin? It wasn’t something she normally noticed. She didn’t normally notice much about men at all. She’d lived her whole life with men. They weren’t particularly interesting, on the whole.

But this Henry. He had a very nice smile.

She bathed and washed her hair and, when she was finished stood in front of her tiny closet for five minutes trying to decide what she was going to wear.
Clark
—if he did come over tonight—didn’t like cowboy clothes.

She pulled a plain white blouse from the closet and rummaged through her dresser until she found a pair of khaki shorts amid the blue jeans. College clothes. She’d bought them several summers ago, before she’d left for school. Too bad she never got to wear them anymore. They weren’t suited to the ranch.

But they were suited to
Clark
. That was what mattered now. She dressed quickly and went down to dinner.

“Lester, you snake,” Calla said when she saw the old man, his filthy straw cowboy hat in his hands, sitting at the kitchen table. Lester was a little in love with her aunt Helen, she knew, and never missed an opportunity to sit in the kitchen and chat. It was one of his many bad habits. “I almost had to walk twenty miles today ‘cause of you.”

“Almost isn’t quite,” Lester drawled.

“What the hell—heck—is that supposed to mean? Oh, forget it.” Calla sat down at the wide, worn Formica table and pointed an accusing index finger at Lester. “You know, you left the jack and the lug wrench out of the pickup last time you used ‘em, and I had a flat up on the Bennett today.”

“Hello, darlin’,” Jackson Bishop came into the kitchen from the adjoining laundry room where he’d been washing up. He kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “Yelling at poor Lester again, I see.”

“Same old, same old, eh, Jack,” Lester said, smiling.

“Shut up, Lester. Dad, I—” Calla began, but her father interrupted.

“Poor old Lester,”
Jackson
teased. “Always taking your abuse. It’s a wonder he gets a thing done around here with you yelling at him every five minutes.”

“I wonder about that, too, Jack, to be right honest with you,” Lester agreed solemnly.

“He doesn’t get anything done, that’s my entire point,” Calla said. “All I’m saying, Lester,” she said carefully, stretching out the words, “is put stuff back where it belongs or I’ll take you out to the old chalk road and make you walk home some hot afternoon.”

Lester sniffed at her, wounded, then rose from his chair and put on his hat with painstaking slowness.

“Well,” he drawled, “guess you folks are gonna have supper. I’ll just be headin’ on, then.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Calla rolled her eyes.

“Lester, won’t you stay and have a bite with us tonight?” Helen offered.

“He eats with us
every
night,” Calla muttered. “Why do we have to go through this?”

“Well,” Lester said again, “if you’re sure you have enough.”

“Someone in this kitchen has been cooking for you every night for the past twenty-five years, you old coot,” Calla hissed at him. “You’d think we’d know by now to cook enough for you.”

Living with these three old people was driving her out of her mind. Every night the same conversations. She could guess exactly what the next word spoken would be.

“Well,” Lester began. “How was them salt blocks up there today?”

“Fine,” Calla said.

“You toss out a few of them selenium blocks, did ya?”

“I know my job, Lester.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Calla bolted down the rest of her meal and got up to leave the table.

“Darlin’, I want a word with you later,”
Jackson
said. “Dupree stopped me at the co-op today.”

“Fine, Dad. I’ll be in the barn.”

Calla yanked her boots over her bare feet and tromped out the kitchen door.

The red barn, ancient, cavernous and smelling of the faint scent of animals gone to their reward a hundred years before, was only two hundred yards from the ranch house. For Calla it might as
well have been another planet. While the house belonged to the old people, the barn belonged to Calla. She was home there as she never was anywhere else. Her mother had told her once that
though she’d grown up in that upstairs bedroom—and might die there—her real home was the drafty, high-raftered barn her great-grandfather had built more than one hundred years earlier.

Calla grabbed for the pitchfork she kept neatly hung on one long wooden interior wall, and dropped her chin to her chest in utter defeat when she found it wasn’t there.

“Lester,” she said grimly.

She reluctantly flipped on the light behind her, sorry to disturb the quiet dark of her barn. Bubba, Benny’s old gray, the only horse allowed to sleep in the soft straw of the barn floor, looked mournfully over his stall wall at her.

“Hey, Bubba,” Calla crooned in the direction of the old gelding, scooping a coffee can full of whole oats out of a barrel. “What’s the matter, sweetheart? You don’t like me waking you up?”

She dumped the oats into the grain bin under Bubba’s nose. He grunted his approval, blowing at her quickly with his soft, wrinkled lips before nosing into the oats.

“Poor Bubba,” she said, stepping up onto the bottom wood slat of the stall. She leaned forward and rubbed Bubba’s thick neck with the top of her head, loosening long strands of hair from her careful ponytail to mix with the old horse’s mane. “You lonesome, Bubba? You lonesome for Benny? Well, you and me both, boy.”

“Who’s Benny?” said a voice behind her.

“Geez!” Calla said, as she jumped from her perch and whirled around to face the voice. The boot kicker leaned against the jamb of the enormous old barn door. And smiled at her.

“Sorry, I saw the light on in the barn and thought I might find somebody out here,” he said.

“Well, thanks for scaring the living heck out of me for the second time today,” Calla said. She smoothed the loose hair back against her head. “Henry, right? What are you doing skulking around my barn in the middle of the night, Henry?”

Henry turned his wrist to her. “It’s nine-thirty, and I’m not skulking. I’m looking for the manager of this ranch, and when I saw the light on. I thought he might be out here.”

“She is out here,” Calla said. “I’m the manager. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for a job,” he said.

“A job? A ranch-hand job?”

“Yeah. You got any work around here? Just for the summer probably.”

It was her turn to eye him. He was still leaning against the barn doorjamb, his arms crossed against his chest, one booted foot planted in front of the other. There was that body again, Calla thought. Not ranch hand skinny, but strong and tall. Nice.

“Have you ever done ranch work before?” Calla asked. She looked him up and down. Not entirely for professional purposes, she had to admit to herself after the second or third pass.

She shook her head a little and raised her eyes back to his. She was a little annoyed to see he was smiling at her again, and now his smile held something else. A challenge, maybe? Oh, brother.

“A little,” he said.

“A little what? Oh, ranch work. Well, can you drive a tractor? We’re putting up hay starting tomorrow. Then I’ll need a fence rider through September, when we bring the herd in off the government land. You ever do any fence riding?”

“A little,” he answered again.

Calla looked at him, her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “I thought you said you were from California?”

“I did. We’ve got ranches in California, too, you know. Big ones. You want references from people who will swear I’m not Jack the Ripper?

Calla shook her head. “This isn’t L.A., spud. You don’t know what you’re doing, I’ll know it in a week, maybe less. You do know what you’re doing, I don’t really care if you are Jack the Ripper. I just need someone to help me put up the hay and ride my fences. Got it?”

He grinned at her. “Got it.”

Well, she thought, at least he was unflappable. Half the men she’d ever hired quit after her very first sign of temper.

“Fine,” she said. “You can start tomorrow. You got someplace to stay?”

“I thought I’d stay up in Paradise,” Henry answered.

“And drive thirty minutes out to the ranch every morning? Forget it. I wouldn’t see you ‘til 9:00 a.m. We start at dawn around here. You can bunk with Lester. Of course,” she grumbled, “I don’t usually see Lester ‘til 9:00 a.m., so I guess the bunkhouse isn’t much better than town after all.”

“Who’s Lester?”

“You’ll see.”

“Who’s Benny?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you, Henry?” She smiled at him, cocking her head. “Must be the Californian in you,” she teased.

She looked adorable, Henry thought, in her city shorts and cowboy boots. As he’d made his way across the Idaho desert to this ranch, he’d wondered if she could look as adorable as she had—grunting and puffing—changing that tire. Clearly, he mused, wondering at the sharp and unfamiliar punch of lechery he felt, she could.

“Must be. So, we’ve got a deal? About the job?” He pushed himself off the jamb with his shoulder, crossed the distance between them in three long strides and reached out to her with his right hand.

He grinned at her with those perfect teeth. Daring her.

Calla grinned back. She never backed away from a dare. “Deal,” she said, slipping her hand into his. Henry shook it firmly. His hand was warm and dry and rough. Ranch hands, Calla thought. He’ll work out. She returned his grip with equal firmness. Benny taught her early on that a woman in a man’s business had to do most things like a man.

And some things she had to do better.

They held the handshake just an instant too long. They both knew it. And before he could stop himself, Henry began to rub at the pulse of her wrist with his thumb. He could feel her blood beat in her veins.

“Calla?” came another voice from the gloom outside the shaft of light that spilled from the barn door.

“Clark.” Calla snatched her hand back. She gave Henry a little shove and slipped past him. “Clark. I didn’t know you were here. When did you get back?” Calla reached up on her toes and brushed her lips against the mouth of the slender man who was stepping up onto the wood plank floor of the barn.

“Today. This afternoon. Helen told me you were out here. She didn’t tell me you had company.” Clark reached his hand out to Henry, who had moved diplomatically over to Bubba’s stall when Calla shoved him. “Clarkston Shaw the Third. Dartmouth, Class of ‘89.”