Knight in a White Stetson (7 page)

“Whatever. It was no excuse for lying.”

“I wasn’t lying.”

“Henry, please. I don’t care. You’re a good hand. I’m happy to have you.”

“Thanks. I’m happy to be had. But I’m still not lying.”

She peered at him through the dusty gloom. “You’re a doctor?”

“Well, of chemical engineering. I couldn’t have done anything for Lester if you’d hit him any harder tonight.” He smiled at the memory of Helen fussing over her bald, rummy lover. He wondered what Calla looked like fussing over someone. “The best I could have done was come up with a good formula for encasing his head in polypropylene-based membrane until the paramedics arrived.”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m definitely not laughing at you, Calla.”

She dropped down into the stall with Bubba and walked slowly around him, her hand on his wide rump. Henry frowned at her bare feet and considered whether he should rescue her before the old horse crushed her toes. He decided against it.

“What are you really doing here, Henry?” she asked after a long minute.

“I’m really working for you.”

“You have a Ph.D., if I’m not mistaken. And it’s not in riding fences.”

“Changing sprinklers,” Henry corrected.

Calla closed her eyes, gathering patience. “He didn’t mean that. He was just upset. You certainly drove him to it.”

“You always fight his battles, Calla?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I mean, I’m not fighting his battle.”

Henry ignored her. “Because if you do, it’s going to be a long life for you.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“That makes us even.”

“What?” She twisted her head in honest confusion. Sweet Calla. Henry wanted to lie down with her right in that straw-filled stall. It had taken him a while to see past the unbelievable body and the unflinching toughness, but this woman, for all the responsibility she carried on those lovely shoulders, was about the most naive person he’d come across in years. He thought he could fall in love with her for that alone.

“You didn’t answer my question this afternoon in the stack yard. About Dartmouth.”

Calla put her forehead on Bubba’s flank, hiding her flushed face. “As I recall, I didn’t have much of a chance.”

“You’ve got one now.”

She was quiet a moment.

“Yes,” she said finally.

“Yes, what?” Henry stifled in the darkness.

“Yes, I’m going to marry Clark. If he asks me.” She hadn’t taken her head off the horse.

Henry sat for a second longer, then reached down for her across Bubba’s back. The horse shifted a little. Calla looked up, took his warm hand and walked around to face him. He looked down at her for a long moment, studying her face, then reached under her arms and lifted her easily up to sit next to him.

She closed her eyes and waited for Henry to kiss her.

But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he swung his legs over the stall and jumped down to the plank floor.

“Do you want me to go back and get you some shoes?”

“No. Henry?”

“I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll be heading out.”

“Heading out?” Calla blinked at him. The moment of deep tension was gone. She was instantly furious. “You’re leaving? Because I’m marrying Clark? Of all the petty, childish… What am I supposed to do for the rest of the summer? It’s too late to hire a summer rider. I never thought you’d run, you big, selfish…” she groped for an appropriately hideous epithet “…city boy.”

“I’m leaving for camp in the morning, remember?” he said as he walked calmly out the barn door. And just because she was so testy and he was so rigidly, aggravatingly aroused, he shouted over his shoulder, “You better have better accommodations up there than you do down here. I’ve had a mouse in my mattress every night for two weeks.”

He left her fuming. And barefooted.

Calla sat for a long time in the dark of the barn. She had wanted him to kiss her again. She had wanted it more than anything else in the world. He had lifted her as though she were no bigger than a child. Clark had never even let her sit on his lap.

She was going to marry Clark. What was the matter with her? Of course, she was going to marry Clark. She’d been waiting nearly a year. It was all part of the plan.
Of
course.
She should have shouted it at the blockhead.

It was a fait accompli. She knew it, her family knew it, now Henry knew it. It had to happen. Everything was riding on it. A hundred years were riding on it. Her mother and Benny were counting on her. She was the only McFadden left.

So why would she have gladly sold her soul and her best horse a few minutes earlier for the touch of Henry’s lips on hers?

Calla hitched up her nightgown and scooted, bareback, onto Bubba. He grunted a little in surprise, but didn’t so much as shift under her weight. The bare skin of her thighs brushed his warm, coarse hair, doing nothing to ease the aching arousal she’d felt from the minute Henry had climbed the stall rungs to sit next to her.

Oh, Ben, she thought suddenly. I wish you were here to help me. To remind me why I have to forget this man, this beautiful Henry. To help me stick to the plan.

Calla leaned forward and wrapped her arms around the thick neck of the gray. She stretched her legs out behind her until she was lying along the length of the horse.

Even if Benny were here, he never would have helped her, she knew.

Her brother would have chosen Henry for her. And let one hundred years of family history take care of itself.

Chapter 8

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”
C
alla, this is Peggy over at the co-op,” the voice from the machine shrilled in Calla’s ear. “Lester called this morning for a diesel delivery. Calla, I’m real sorry, but we can’t deliver gas until you pay your outstanding bill. Give me a call when you get a chance. Thanks.”

There was a screeching beep. Another voice came on the line. Calla tried to steel herself.

“Uh, yeah. Hello. This is Dusty Johnson. I tried to cash the check you give me for the horseshoeing? And, um, well, there wasn’t no money in your account to cover it.” The voice was young, hesitant, but it bore into Calla like a drill. “Yeah, so anyways, I’m a little short on account of the weekend and all and I was wondering, if you get it straightened out will you give me a call back? I’m at my mom’s house. Okay. Well … okay. See you. By the way, that bay of yours oughta not be rode for a couple days. I quicked her left front hoof just a little.”

Sammy? She was planning to use Sammy this weekend to move the heifers to the Little Sheep pasture. She’d have to start shoeing her own horses again. It was safer. And cheaper. She’d just have to find the time.

Another beep.

“Calla, Clark. I thought we might have dinner tonight. You pick a spot and I’ll meet you. I’d hate to have to come all the way out to the ranch and then have to bring you home. This sports car doesn’t get the mileage it should. I think I’ll talk to the rental company when I take it back. I’m going to tell them I want credit for the extra mileage. Call me at your convenience on the cellular—555-2270. Bye.”

“I know your number, Clark,” Calla said out loud. She unbuckled her chaps and tossed the heavy leather onto the kitchen table. Another beep.

“Calla, this is Dick Dupree. Just calling to remind you about our meeting this afternoon. Four o’clock. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” A long pause. Calla thought the message might be over, but it wasn’t. Unfortunately. “And, Calla, why not invite your dad to come on in with you? I’d like to run something up the flagpole and see how it flies.” Beep.

A bad debt, a bad check, a halfhearted dinner invitation and a threat. She should never have got that machine.

Foreclosure. It wasn’t imminent, she knew from her own set of books, but Dupree, the family banker for as long as Calla could remember, was ready to put the screws to her. He’d been hinting at it for months.

Dupree had been skeptical when Calla took over the cattle operation. And when Judy McFadden Bishop died and left the ranch to her daughter, he was positively beside himself with worry. He’d wanted to put the ranch in trust for her, under her father’s care, until she was twenty-five. But Jackson didn’t want to run the ranch, and he told the banker so. Dupree then suggested the bank hold the ranch in trust and hire a ranch manager for her until such time as she was mature and settled and married enough to handle it. Calla had hit the roof.

But he’d been a good enough banker, overall. When she’d needed the down payment on a new stacker three years ago, he’d only made her beg a little. And he didn’t say much when the registered bred heifer market went down the tubes in ‘97, even though he’d warned her about it—something to the effect of don’t count your chickens, she vaguely recalled. That was the problem with Dupree. He was always talking in cliché. She could hardly remember what he ever had to say.

But she was careful about the loan payments. They were late most months—and the balloon payment at the end of the year kept her up nights—but she always managed to make them. He couldn’t complain.

But he had been complaining, Calla acknowledged. For months, now. She went to the refrigerator and pulled out the pitcher of cold tea Helen kept fresh for her.

What
did
Dupree want? Surely not the ranch. It had been in her family for more than one hundred years, and even Dupree wasn’t foolish enough to foreclose on McFadden property. The outcry from neighboring ranches would be deafening, and Dupree would lose many of Calla’s fellow ranchers to the big Boise banks. He’d been in small-town banking long enough to know that, surely.

Besides, he’d have to do something pretty shady to foreclose on a good note. He’d have to wait until she missed—if she missed—the balloon.

But he wasn’t waiting.

No, something else was going on. Dupree had been edging her toward some kind of cliff for months. If she wasn’t careful, she’d drop right off.

She took her tea and trudged up the stairs. She hadn’t been back to sleep after her conversation with Henry in the barn last night and she was beginning to feel it.

How in the world had she got herself into that one?

That’s right, she remembered. It was Lester.

She looked at the clock on her bedside table. Two-thirty. She stripped down and stretched out on her bed, exhausted. She worked hard during haying, sometimes rising in the middle of the night to catch the hay with dew still on it. Henry had made it easier and faster this year, but she still felt the strain. She dozed lightly, letting her mind drift. And as it had for weeks, it stubbornly, inevitably, drifted toward her hired man.

Henry had gone up to camp with Lester. She always took the riders to camp, to show them around and talk about the fence lines and the schedule for moving the herd from field to field. But she let Lester do it this time, to his grumbled dismay.

If nothing happened, she wouldn’t see Henry again until the weekend, and maybe not even then. She’d send Helen to town to buy supplies—groceries, milk, calf vaccine—and she’d leave them in the bunkhouse for Henry to retrieve. Standard operating procedure. And since Henry was looking after her herd, she’d have time to get some things done around the place. Things she’d put off too long. It was very likely she wouldn’t see him for weeks. If nothing happened.

She’d miss being at camp. She spent a lot of time there in the summer, even when she had a full-time fence rider. It was a second home. There was nothing like riding the hills all day and sleeping in the deep, warm canvas tents that Calla set up every June. It was the part of her job she loved best.

No, Henry would likely pick up his supplies and grab a shower, go to town for a beer or two and a restaurant meal, and head back to camp. If nothing happened.

But something always happened. A cow got caught in the cattle guard or mice got in and ate all the bread or a horse came up lame and needed a vet.

Calla found herself perversely hoping for any of those things. She grudgingly levered herself off her bed, went into her bathroom and turned on the taps to her old tub.

An hour later, dressed in her go-to-the-bank-have-dinner-with-Clark clothes, and somewhat refreshed despite the high-desert heat, she headed to her battered pickup and hoisted herself in. Her father was nowhere to be found, nor, strangely, was Lester or Aunt Helen. Lester should have returned from the camp by now.

If nothing happened.

No. Nothing had happened, and she was vexed by the stab of panic she’d felt. She was hardly in a position to worry about Henry, as anything more than an employee anyway. One kiss did not a husband make.

It was more than a kiss.

His words came back to her, and she was surprised to see the image come back to her, too. If she could just get rid of the mental picture of him kneeling at her feet, his mouth greedy and damp and, really, sinfully skilled…

She felt her body heat rise and a sudden, tight moisture between her legs. Marvelous. Just what I need. Going to see the banker and all I can think about is … that. Fat lot of good that bath did me, she thought as she turned the key and gratefully heard the old truck roar to life.

She’d have to take Dupree on her own today, she thought. No matter. Her father was just window dressing in these situations anyway. His masculine presence made Dupree feel a little better about dealing with a mere girl of twenty-four. The idiot.

Thirty minutes later she pulled to the curb of Paradise Savings and Loan, ignoring the co-op next door and her overdue account there. After Dupree, she rationalized. After I figure out what’s going on.

“Well, Calla, honey. You here to see Dick?” Ruby Watchell’s wide smile practically lit up the tiny space behind her teller’s counter as Calla walked through the door of the bank. Before Calla could answer, Ruby shouted over her shoulder to the open glass door two steps behind her. “Dick, Calla Bishop’s here. She’s got a dress on and she looks awful pretty. You best get on out here.”

Dick Dupree, nondescript as only a banker could be, stomped up behind Ruby. His mustache twitched in irritation.

“Mrs. Watchell, would you please use the intercom when I have visitors? I believe we’ve discussed this before.”

“Now, why in the world should I use that intercom when you’re no more than ten feet away? You can hear me just
fine.”

Dick Dupree sighed heavily and adjusted the lapels on the coat Calla had seen him hastily slip into. A coat. Calla groaned to herself. Bad sign. She followed him into his dank little office and watched him swipe a big plastic bottle of generic antacid into the top drawer of his desk. Another bad sign. She sank into a chair facing him.

“Well, Dupree. Let’s have it.”

“Have what?” He paused, then shook his head. “Calla, I swear sometimes you have the tact of a billy goat. You want coffee?” He moved his hand to the button of the intercom. Calla imagined the lecture they’d have to endure if he pressed it, and she shook her head quickly.

“No thanks, Dick. I’ve got a dinner date in an hour. I don’t have time for the niceties. What’s up? I rarely get a summons from you unless my note payment’s late. And I still have three days until that sad day.”

Dupree cleared his throat, adjusted his tie and pulled a yellow, tooth-marked pencil from a worn felt holder on his desk and tapped it on his knee. Calla watched with mounting alarm. Usually, she couldn’t get Dick Dupree to shut up. He loved a good lecture.

“Dick. Stop it. You’re making me nervous.” She leaned forward and crossed her arms on his dusty desk. “You can’t foreclose. I’ll sue.”

Dupree sat upright and stopped tapping his pencil.

“Don’t threaten me.”

“Don’t you threaten me, Dick. You can’t foreclose.”

“As a matter of fact, I can. I’m not saying I will, but I certainly can. I already have board approval.”

Calla couldn’t breathe. “What?”

“I already have board approval. You have been late one too many times, Calla. You’ve been walking the line. The jig is up. One more late payment and I’m going to shut you down.”

“The jig is up? I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it. And even if you manage to get your notes in on time for the next six months, your balloon is due at the end of the year. You’ll never make that.”

“I will make it. I’ll sell some cows.”

“And then what? You’re digging yourself a hole you can’t get out of, Calla.”

“You’re wrong.”

Dupree raised his hands in supplication, but his beady eyes stayed determined and hard. “Look, Calla, the business has had a huge downturn. It isn’t just you. Every cattleman in southern Idaho is sinking. I’ve heard about foreclosures on operations three times your size. You’ve done a fine job, considering your age and the fact you’re a woman. But it’s time to throw in the towel. The party’s over.”

“Stop talking like that.” Calla rubbed her temples. “You’re giving me a headache.”

Dupree let her stew for a minute.

“There is an alternative to foreclosure.”

“You won’t foreclose on me, Dick.”

“Just listen, Calla.” He took a deep breath and licked his lips. “We’ve had an offer on your place.”

Calla sat back, stunned.

“What?” An offer? Her mind raced. When? Who? She grabbed at a thought as it whizzed through. “Stan?”

Stanley Cutler was her closest neighbor and the man who owned the rights to Sulphur Lake runoff after it passed through her fields. He’d kept a close eye on Calla, waiting for her to give up and sell. But he’d never been insistent, or duplicitous. He’d told her flat-out that when she was ready to sell, he was ready to buy.

“Stan…?” Dupree knitted his brows. “You mean Cutler? God, no. That man’s got financial troubles you wouldn’t … ah, anyhow, no. Not Cutler.”

“Who, then?” Her head was spinning, not a good sign in a banker’s office, where a clear head often meant the difference between a future and a past for a farmer.

“Well,” Dupree began slowly, leaning forward and locking eyes with her. She could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead. His office had an intercom, but not an air conditioner. The fan behind him ruffled the papers on his desk. “It’s a developer, actually. From out of town.”

“A developer,” Calla repeated. “What in the world would a developer want with the Hot Sulphur? It’s not as if we’ve got easy access to the high life out there, you know.”

“Yes, well, the party in question is very shrewd. They see your …
our
property,” he corrected pointedly, “as the perfect spot for a posh, private recreational club.”

“Club? You mean a dude ranch?” Calla sputtered with barely suppressed laughter. “They want to turn it into a dude ranch?”