She blinked furiously, but it didn't help. Her eyes still burned. Looking down past her cut-off jeans, she saw that her tanned legs were marked with smears of red-brown paint. When she tossed her head to fling back the bangs stuck to her forehead, she stumbled on a pebble and tripped.

“Ow!” She might as well howl her discomfort. No one was around to hear.

This had sounded like such a good idea a couple of days ago.

Blind Faith Mustang Sanctuary had hundreds of acres of fenced land that bordered wild horse country. Mrs. Allen, the sanctuary's owner, was a softhearted
but particular woman, and she wanted her miles of board fence painted to match her redwood barn.

Sam had known she'd have to work hard, but Mrs. Allen had tempted her with exciting possibilities. With wild horses inside the fence and wild horses outside the fence and Sam in the middle, who knew what wonderful things could happen?

Besides, she'd be doing a good deed.

She knew darn well she should store up good deeds and make sure Dad, Gram, and her stepmother Brynna noticed, because horses got her into trouble. She didn't plan it that way, it just kept happening.

This chore couldn't possibly get her in trouble. She had a week off from working in the Horse and Rider Protection program and she knew how to paint, so she'd snapped up the chance to help Mrs. Allen.

It wasn't all fussiness, either. By next summer, Mrs. Allen hoped to have the ranch so tidy and organized, people would drive from all over the country to see mustangs living as they were supposed toâwild and free. The only difference between her horses and those of the surrounding range was that these mustangs would have died if Mrs. Allen hadn't saved them.

Trudy Allen had adopted fourteen captive mustangs. One had malformed legs. Another was blind. The rest were old or unbeautiful. All had been declared “unadoptable.”

Mrs. Allen had taken them in before they could
be destroyed and she'd turned Deerpath cattle ranch into a place where horses ran free.

She deserved Sam's help.

Besides, Sam thought, gazing over her shoulder toward the Calico Mountains, she'd seen the Phantom here several times.

If the silver stallion, who'd once been her hand-raised colt, sensed she was here and alone, he might come to her.

Sam had a lot of good reasons to happily tackle her chore. But it was still July in Nevada's high desert. And it was really hot.

Sam lifted the hem of her T-shirt, then stopped.

She'd been about to blot the sweat from her eyes, but forget it. Her red T-shirt sagged with the same steamy dampness of a saddle blanket after a hard ride.

She'd never minded it before. You just lifted off the saddle and when you raised the saddle blanket, it was like the horse had been in a sauna. But she didn't want to put such sogginess on her face.

Sam smiled at the image of her bay gelding Ace in a sauna.

The best thing about working alone was that no one would hear her silly thoughts. Not even Ace.

For the last two mornings, Sam had ridden Ace to Mrs. Allen's house, then said a prayer for her own safety as she climbed into Mrs. Allen's tangerine-colored pickup truck for a ride out to the section of fence she'd be painting.

She didn't really mind sharing the front seat with Imp and Angel, two Boston bull terriers who bounced on her lap as if they hadn't noticed she'd taken their usual place in the truck. It was Mrs. Allen who scared her.

Mrs. Allen might be the worst driver in the world. She pressed her foot to the floor, accelerating over sagebrush, down gullies, and up rocky side hills. Instead of staring through the windshield to see where she was going, she usually turned to Sam and kept up a running conversation.

The first rough drive from the ranch house and saddle horse corral out to the raw wood fence had resulted in paint cans popping open and spewing paint all over the bed of her truck.

Once they'd reached their destination and started to unload, both Sam and Mrs. Allen had been surprised.

“Looks like there's been a massacre,” Mrs. Allen had grumbled.

Since then, she'd insisted the unopened paint cans be left along the fence line.

“That way we don't have to haul them out with you,” Mrs. Allen had said, quite pleased with her solution, but something about the idea made Sam uneasy.

Coo, coo.
Sam looked over each shoulder.

She heard the dove, but saw nothing alive. No birds, no antelope, no wild horses. Only yellow
cheatgrass moved, blowing in the wind.

Sam looked up into a blueberries-and-cream sky. That dove was calling from somewhere.

“I don't know about this,” Sam said to the invisible bird. “Leaving these paint cans out overnight just doesn't seem like a good idea. Not that I think a coyote is going to pry off a lid and lap it up.”

Oh well, Mrs. Allen had lived on this ranch longer than Sam had been alive. She probably knew what she was doing.

Sam stroked a smooth swathe of paint over the next board just as the wind gusted, singing through her little gold hoop earrings. Sam angled her body to keep the wind from spraying dust into the wet paint.

She watched for bumps and black flecks to appear, but they didn't.

Sam nodded with satisfaction, then thought,
Great. My big thrill for the day is watching paint dry.

Sam dipped her brush and swabbed another red-brown stripe on the boards.

If her best friend Jen Kenworthy had been free to help, this wouldn't be so boring. But Jen's mother had drafted her to cook all week.

Haying crews would be coming to work on their ranch soon. Unlike Gram, Jen's mom, Leah, didn't enjoy making meals for dozens of hungry men. Leah's solution was to do everything ahead.

Jen was stuck inside the kitchen of the foreman's house on Gold Dust Ranch, chopping vegetables,
browning beef, and kneading pillows of dough into loaves. All week, she'd help cook up soups, stews, and mountains of bread to fill the freezers at the Gold Dust Ranch.

Linc Slocum, the richest man in northern Nevada and the owner of Gold Dust Ranch, had actually offered to have meals for the haying crew catered.

“Mom was tempted,” Jen had told Sam, “But she ended up reminding him that the closest restaurant is Clara's coffee shop in Alkali and Clara doesn't do takeout, especially out to the alfalfa fields.”

The thought of Clara's made Sam draw a deep breath. Dad was taking the family out to dinner at Clara's. Tonight.

Dinner out on a weekend would be unusual, but a restaurant meal on a Tuesday was downright abnormal.

Something was up, and she'd find out what tonight. The last time Dad had made dinner into a special event had been last fall, when he had announced his engagement to Brynna Olson.

Sam felt impatient, but she guessed she could wait until tonight to learn why Dad, Gram, and Brynna had been acting so weird.

Not
bad
weird, Sam thought, picking a paintbrush bristle from the fresh paint. Giddy and mysterious weird.

A neigh, reduced by distance to a whisper, floated across the sanctuary pastures. Sam recognized it as a
challenge and she'd bet it came from Roman.

Sam shaded her eyes, but she could only count seven of Mrs. Allen's wild horses.

That dark blob was probably Roman. Even from here, he seemed to strut. The liver chestnut gelding with the extreme Roman nose thought he was in charge of the captive herd. Now, he stood guard over the adopted mustang mares with foals.

Sam smiled. Though Roman stayed far out in the pasture, some of the other horses grazed near enough to see clearly. She could see a black mare who'd been deemed unadoptable because she was old and mean. She didn't look cranky now. Ears she'd once pinned back in bad temper tilted forward in motherly curiosity toward her bright bay colt. Mrs. Allen had named the mare Licorice and her foal Windfall.

Grazing beside Licorice was the yellow dun mare Mrs. Allen had adopted last. The mare's name was Fourteen, because Mrs. Allen had decided adopting thirteen horses that had been slated for euthanasia was unlucky, and picked one more. Fourteen had given birth to a dorsal-striped filly that looked like one of the primitive horses Sam had seen daubed on the stone tunnel leading to the Phantom's hidden valley.

Belle and Faith were closest to Sam.

“Faith!” Sam called for about the tenth time. “Here, baby!”

But “baby” wouldn't come. The Medicine Hat filly
was nearly a yearling. Lanky and almost full-grown, Faith had kept her palomino pinto coloring and sassy attitude. Now she twitched her tail and ignored Sam, just as she had all day.

Remembering the snowy night she, Jen, Jake, and half the cowboys in the county had gone searching for the blind foal, Sam wondered if Faith shouldn't show a little gratitude.

But she only wondered for a minute. Really, she was glad for Faith.

Pastured on hundreds of acres that rolled from the La Charla River to the edge of wild horse country, the filly wasn't hampered by her blindness. She was as wild as any member of the Phantom's herd, with no need of humans. More than any of the other captive horses, she dismissed the calls of people as she might the cawing of crows.

Sam was wiping her forearm across her brow, when all the captive mustangs suddenly quit grazing. Some heads came up slowly, grass falling from their lips. Other heads jerked up and the horses backed in surprise.

Sam heard something, too, but what was it?

Not the coo of a dove or the distant rush of traffic on the highway. It was almost like sand, sifting away from some disturbance. Sam turned around slowly.

Ghostly pale, the Phantom stood alone on the brow of a hill.

For an instant, he held his head high and his nostrils flared. The stallion drew in the hundreds of scents on the wind. His neck lengthened, showing the silver dapples along his throat. His hooves danced restlessly in place.

It must be confusing, Sam thought. Wind swirled nearby scents and faraway ones, all together. He'd smell her, the captive mustangs, the unfamiliar scent of paint, the chalk-dry dirt and sagebrush under his hooves, and maybe even a drop of juice on her hand from the apple she'd fed Ace this morning.

Sam took a quick look around. She knew she was alone, but she had to be certain.

“Zanzibar!” She pronounced the stallion's secret name in three slow syllables.

This time, she didn't whisper.

At once, the stallion's gray-edged ears flicked forward, homing in on that name only the two of them knew. The stallion's head lifted higher. A nicker rode the wind to Sam.

Our magic has two halves
, Sam thought. She spoke the first word of the charm and the silver stallion answered.

He stood like polished ivory, content, this time, to let the spell be shared silence. Not a romp or a ride, Sam thought, just stillness she mirrored by barely breathing.

Suddenly, another sound made the stallion's ears flick right, then left.

Sam couldn't hear anything, but the Phantom gave a snort. Then, head lurching forward, legs reaching, tail streaming like a silken banner, the stallion leaped into a gallop.

Take me with you.

It wasn't a wish that made Sam yearn after him, it was an instinct.

She knew better than to want him for her own. But she feltâSam shook her head. She looked down at her dirty hands, imagining she was that girl who'd seen the first wild horse running, thousands of years ago.

Destined to drudgery, to hauling water and firewood, tending younger children and cleaning out the cave, she would have run after such beauty.

Wow, and once she'd captured the wild horse, then tamed and ridden him, there would have been no stopping her.

Half-hypnotized by the stallion's appearance, Sam started to rub the goose bumps from her arms, before remembering she still held her paintbrush. She dropped it.

The brush lay flat on the ground. She could only guess what a gooey, gritty mess the other side would be. Last night, Mrs. Allen had made her rinse the paintbrush until no barn red remained on the black bristles. It took forever and she hated the gasoline-like smell of paint thinner. Now, she'd have to use it twice as long.

At least she had another brush. Sam reached into the back pocket of her cut-offs and took out the spare brush Mrs. Allen had made her bring.

She'd only been using it a few minutes when she heard an engine's roar and a rooster tail of dust spiraled up from the direction of Deerpath Ranch.

Is that what the stallion had heard?

At the center of the sandy plume she saw Mrs. Allen's tangerine-colored truck, going faster than ever.

BOOK: The Wildest Heart

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