Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material

by Elizabeth Lowell

  She wanted to say those things, but she didn’t, for Rio was already talking, answering the questions she had asked and a few more that she hadn’t.

  “I heard about you all over the West,” he said simply. “A drifter in Idaho told me there was a woman who needed help in a place called Valley of the Sun, Nevada. In Utah a farmer I helped said his wife’s sister had heard from her brother in Nevada that a woman called Hope needed a well and nobody would dig it for her. A cattle breeder I once found water for said he’d sold one of his best Angus to a woman with beautiful eyes and a mind like a steel trap, and that she was going to lose her ranch unless the rains came or she found water.”

  Hope’s throat closed with tears she fought not to shed. But the thought of strangers knowing her need, and caring enough to help in the only way they could, made it very hard for her to hold back. She wanted to tell Rio to stop talking, that he would make her cry and she didn’t want to, but she couldn’t get any words past the emotion filling her throat.

  “So I drifted south,” Rio said quietly, watching Hope with eyes that saw everything, the vulnerability and the tears, the determination and the strength. “And I listened. Every time the wind blew, it whispered your name and your need and your dreams.”

  Silent tears slid past her dark lashes to leave shining trails on her cheeks.

  “The closer I came to the Valley of the Sun,” he said, “the more people talked about you. People I had helped in the past left messages for me in every country store and café in the West. The messages all said the same thing: This is a good woman, Rio. Can you help her the way you helped us?”

  The midnight blue of Rio’s eyes was so intense that it was like crystal burning in the sun. She watched him with equal intensity, feeling his words sinking into her, sliding through the protective layers she had built up to guard the vulnerable woman beneath.

  “I didn’t know if I could help you, and I wasn’t going to come to you until I did know,” he said.

  Then he looked out over the land again, freeing her from the blue blaze of his eyes.

  “This country isn’t a stranger to me,” he said quietly. “I’ve found water in some damned unlikely places. And I’ve seen a few places where there isn’t any water to be found anywhere by anyone. I didn’t know if the Valley of the Sun was one of those places.”

  She held her breathing, waiting, hoping not to hear the end of her dream.

  I’ve seen a few places where there isn’t any water to be found anywhere by anyone.

  “I went over all the USGS maps, got the latest satellite photos, talked to university experts and to Indians whose ancestors had hunted along the shores of long-ago lakes. I flew over the steep parts of your ranch with a photo recon camera and a pilot who wasn’t afraid of God, the devil, or gravity.” Rio’s mouth turned up wryly. “Hell of a flyer, though. He saved me weeks of rough-country riding and hiking.”

  Hope looked at Rio, but tears prevented her from seeing more than the powerful outline of his body against the sky. “Why?” she asked huskily. “Why did you go to all that trouble for someone you didn’t even know?”

  It was a question that no one had ever asked him. In the past, people had been more than happy to take what he offered. They had never stopped to wonder why he wanted to help.

  But Rio had asked himself that question for as many years as he had drifted through people’s lives and through the bright, colorful shadows cast by their dreams.

  He didn’t have an answer.

  He had helped many people, touched the luminous edges of their dreams, and moved on. Those people remembered him with gratitude and sometimes even affection. They always had a meal and a bed and a handshake for him whenever he went back.

  But they didn’t know him. He was as much a mystery to them as their ability to dream in the face of brutal odds was a mystery to him.

  He found water for those special dreamers. And each time, each place, each well, he wondered if he would also find the ability to put down roots and dream for himself.

  He hadn’t found any dream to equal the whispering seduction of the wind moving over the face of the land. He no longer believed that such a dream existed.

  “I admire people who are strong enough to dream,” Rio said finally. His long fingers caressed Hope’s face, feeling the warmth of her tears sliding beneath his fingertips. “Like you.”

  “You’re strong,” she whispered. Then, even more softly, she asked, “What are your dreams?”

  “I don’t have any. I stopped dreaming the day I really understood what half-breed meant.”

  Her eyes darkened. Slowly she shook her head, denying both the pain of Rio’s long-ago discovery and the ache of her own realization that she was falling in love with a man who had no dreams.

  She closed her eyes and tried not to cry anymore. Tears kept falling in spite of it.

  He bent slowly toward her, brushed his lips over her eyelashes, tasted the warmth and salt of her tears. He wanted to do more, much more. She called to his senses and his soul in a way that nothing ever had, even the wind.

  “It’s all right,” he murmured.

  He kissed her softly, aching to turn the world inside out and make everything right for her, the past and the present and the future rich with water and dreams. But he couldn’t do that, and unless he stopped touching her, he wouldn’t be able to remember why he shouldn’t touch her at all.

  He was the wrong man for her.

  It was that simple and that final.

  Slowly, feeling like he was pulling off his own skin, he straightened in the saddle again until he no longer touched Hope.

  “I’ll help you find your well, your dream,” he said quietly.

  It was the only promise he could give to her. The only promise he could keep.

  She opened her eyes. Her tears were shining on Rio’s lips. The sight pierced her, coming so close to her core that she almost cried out in fear and hope.

  “But what about you?” she asked.

  “I’ll share your dream for a time. Then the wind will call my name and I’ll go.”

  Hope looked away from him. She bit her lip, trying not to rage against the truth of his words, wanting to deny the pain stabbing through her as his need reached down past her barriers to the reservoir of love that she had protected so long and so well. She blinked slowly, releasing tears from beneath her burning eyelids.

  It was Rio she cried for, not herself. It was too late to protect herself. He had touched her too deeply. Whether or not he found water on the Valley of the Sun, she would love the man who had no dreams.

  “I’ll dream for you, Rio,” she promised in a soft, husky voice. “I’ll dream for you until you can dream for yourself.”

  Hope brushed her arm over her eyes, clearing them of tears. Then she calmly began to puzzle out the mysteries of the map that he had given her, matching place names with contour lines until she could orient herself. With increasing confidence, she began to fill in the old family names that Rio had asked for.

  Motionless but for the occasional small stirrings of his horse, Rio watched her work over the map. He would have leaned closer, pointing out contour lines and explaining symbols to her, but he didn’t trust his hand not to tremble with the aftershocks of the emotion that had gone through him when he had heard her husky voice promising to dream for him.

  In the past women had sometimes cried over him, when the wind blew and they knew he would be going soon. But that wasn’t why Hope cried. She was the first woman to look deeply inside him and cry when she saw the void where his dreams had been. She had wept, knowing his emptiness and pain. She had wept for him rather than for herself.

  And she would dream for him.

  “I’ll put in the rest of the names tonight,” she said, refolding the map along its telltale creases. “Dead Man’s Boot is closest to us. It has a clump of big sage that has to be seen to be believed. Nothing else like it on the ranch.”

  Hope didn’t look at Rio when she sp
oke. She didn’t trust herself to. If she saw again the soul-deep hunger in his eyes when he talked of dreams, she wouldn’t be able to control her tears or her need to hold him.

  With a touch of the reins she sent Aces over the lip of the bench and onto the steep trail.

  Holding Storm Walker in check, Rio watched until Hope disappeared into a steep fold in the mountainside. He had never felt so alone as he did at that instant, with her words still echoing through him.

  I’ll dream for you until you can dream for yourself. I’ll dream for you. I’ll dream. For you.

  The echoes were like the wind blowing through emptiness, defining it.

  “Don’t do it, Hope,” he said softly, achingly, her husky words echoing through him, defining him. “You’ll waste your dreams until the mountains are nothing but sand at the bottom of a nameless sea. I’ve forgotten how to dream. Don’t dream for me.”

  Yet Hope’s promise kept echoing in his mind, sending fine tremors of emotion through him. He couldn’t have been more shocked if she had said she loved him.

  And then he realized that she had said just that.

  He bowed his head, staring sightlessly at his fingers wrapped around the reins. Storm Walker tugged at the bit, wanting to follow the other horse. His rider didn’t notice.

  Finally Rio yielded his iron grip on the reins, allowing the stallion to plunge over the edge onto the narrow trail. The shrill cry of a hawk followed him, carried by the wind.

  The hawk’s cry became a word repeated endlessly, falling from the empty sky.

  Hope.

  Fifteen

  “NOW, ARE YOU sure, honey?” Mason asked. His faded yet still clear eyes measured the lines of worry on Hope’s face. “I ain’t all in a lather to drive to Salt Lake just to eat turkey and trimmings. We got real fine turkey right here in Nevada.” Then he remembered. “Hell, tonight’s your birthday. I can’t go.”

  “Of course you can,” she said. “I won’t be alone here, and even if I was, it wouldn’t be any big deal. I’ve had birthdays before.”

  “But—”

  “No buts,” she cut in firmly. “You’re barely going to make Thanksgiving with your sister-in-law as it is. Get going.”

  “I don’t like it. Rio’s out poking around most of the time, looking for a place to drill. You’ll be lonely.”

  The wind gusted suddenly, stirring up dust. The sky was blue and cold, devoid of clouds.

  “Mason, if you don’t go to Utah, I swear I’ll saddle Aces and ride to Piñon Camp and not come back until December first. You haven’t had a vacation for years. You deserve a few weeks with your nieces and nephews.”

  He watched her with anxious eyes. “You sure?”

  “You can set your watch by it,” she said firmly, using a favorite phrase of his.

  Mason sighed, shifted his battered suitcase to his other hand, and followed her out to the tan pickup. “I don’t feel right taking the truck.”

  “Rio said I could use his truck if I needed to go to town,” she said patiently, ready to go over every argument one more time. “In fact, he insisted.”

  Mason hesitated before he opened the truck door and tossed in his suitcase. “All right, no need to put your hand on my back and shove. I know when I ain’t wanted.”

  “Mason!” she said, shocked. Then she saw the mischief in his eyes. “That’s right,” she said quickly, putting her hand on his back and shoving gently, “you’re not wanted. Go away.”

  Then she spoiled it by throwing her arms around him and hugging him from behind. He turned around and hugged her for a long moment, savoring the love she gave so freely to an old man whose only relationship to her was bittersweet, overlapping memories of her parents.

  The wind flexed again, pushing against Mason as though hurrying him on his way. Hope’s hair flew up, tickling his nose. He smoothed her hair with a gnarled hand, holding the soft strands away from the wind.

  “I’ll be home by the end of the month,” he said, resting his gray-stubbled chin on her dark hair. “Sooner if Rio finds a place to start drilling. Keep that rifle handy. The bit of rain we been getting the last week or two ain’t put all the snakes down.”

  She nodded her head, agreeing without arguing. She didn’t want to open the subject of John Turner. Other than a few calls at odd times of the night, Turner hadn’t bothered her. Maybe he had thought over the scene at his well and decided that she wasn’t just being coy. Maybe he had finally gotten the point: she wasn’t interested in him sexually.

  The truck door slammed, the engine revved, and Mason let out the clutch.

  “Take care,” she said.

  “You, too, honey. Don’t be lonely, now.”

  “How could I be?” She smiled. “I’ve got the whole Valley of the Sun for company.”

  He winked, rolled up the window, and headed out of the ranch yard.

  Hope’s smile held a melancholy that she wasn’t aware of. Even with Rio around, she was lonely. That was new.

  She was still trying to get used to it.

  Before Rio came she had been alone but not lonely. He had changed that. Despite her efforts to withdraw from any emotional connection with him, despite his own blunt withdrawal since their ride up to Piñon Camp, despite knowing she would be hurt more the closer she got, Hope longed to spend time with Rio, to talk with him. To touch him.

  Yet she knew she couldn’t. Not really. Not deeply.

  He was like a rain-sweet wind blowing through her life, washing away the dust of years, revealing the living spirit beneath. She was the land, unmoving.

  And the wind was always moving, always leaving the land behind. Leaving her.

  In time, the wind would come again to the Valley of the Sun, bringing Rio once more, if only to claim the colts Storm Walker sired on his mares. Rio would return . . . and then he would leave again, called by the wind.

  She wondered how many women around the West waited in an agony of hope for Rio’s return, aching for him, holding their breath as they watched the road like ranchers scanning the desert sky for the first signs of life-giving rain. She didn’t want to be one of those women.

  Yet she was, and Rio hadn’t even touched her.

  Hope was both sad and grateful that he had left her alone since Piñon Camp. He talked with her on the water runs, but his talk dealt with weather and cattle, feed prices and the cost of fuel. Ranch talk. His voice was no longer rich with visions. His eyes were no longer dark with a hunger that went deeper than the night, as deep as his soul.

  He hadn’t touched her at all in the five days since Piñon Camp. Not even in the most casual way.

  Not once.

  Mason was right. Rio had too much respect for himself and for her to begin something that would end with his leaving and her crying.

  It made Hope want to laugh bitterly, to lash out at the irony of life. As a child she had heard her parents argue about whether to live on the Valley of the Sun with its endless, brutal demands, or to sell the ranch. Silently the child she had been assumed that if her parents just loved each other, everything would work out. Love was all that mattered.

  And then the child had watched her mother and father tear each other apart in the name of love.

  Hope had sworn then that she would never love a man. The cost was too high. The destruction too great. The grief too endless. It was all there in her parents’ lives, in their arguments, in their letters, the words and phrases burned into Hope’s mind, a warning of love’s limitations that was branded on her soul:

  I love you, Debbie. Come home to me. I need you. I need you with me at the end of the day when I’m so tired that nothing seems worth it.

  And the reply, always the same.

  Sell the ranch. I can’t bear watching you kill yourself for that damned land. For nothing. I love you too much. Wayne, I love you!

  In the end, the Valley of the Sun had killed Hope’s father, just as her mother had predicted. It had killed Hope’s mother, too. She had lived less than a year after bu
rying the man she loved.

  Yes, her parents had loved each other. Passionately, bitterly, hopelessly, helplessly.

  It hadn’t been enough.

  Hope had learned the hard way that there were practical limitations on the thing called love. She had watched her mother, her father, and her poor broken sister try to make love carry more burden than it could.

  Love didn’t magically change people.

  Hope had seen that simple fact demonstrated time and again. Her mother had loved her father with every bit of passion in her soul. It had been the same for him. But it hadn’t changed them.

  Her mother still couldn’t live with the land.

  Her father still couldn’t live without it.

  Love hadn’t been able to bridge that fundamental difference between her parents.

  Hope wasn’t fool enough to forget love’s limitations. She accepted the fact that she was falling in love with Rio. She also knew that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. It wouldn’t change him. Or her. Rio was rootless, like the wind. And like the wind, he would leave her behind.

  She had put down roots in the Valley of the Sun. Even if she could tear out those roots and survive, it wouldn’t be enough.

  Rio was what he was—a rain-sweet wind moving over the face of the land. Alone. As inevitably and as finally as the wild wind was alone. It was the life he had chosen. It was the life he had lived. It had made him what he was.

  And she loved what he was, for better or for worse.

  The knowledge expanded through Hope like the shock waves of an earthquake focused deep within her. She swayed, wrapping her arms around herself while old certainties shattered and fell away, leaving her vulnerable and raw and alone in a new world.

  Is this how Mother felt when she realized that she had to leave the man she loved?

  Is this how Father felt when he knew that the woman he loved would leave him?