Too Hot To Handle

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Too Hot To Handle Page 8

by Elizabeth Lowell


  And it had happened just that way.

  “City girls,” he muttered, forking chicken and dumpling into his mouth. “Useless.”

  Tory had to bite her lip to keep from pointing out that being from the city didn’t ensure that a woman was lazy any more than being from the country en­sured that a man was a hard worker.

  “Tell me, city girl,” he continued, pinning her with a metallic glance. “How are you going to prepare the ground for all those seeds?”

  “I saw a shovel in the barn,” she said neutrally.

  “You’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than look at a shovel to get a garden,” he retorted. “Or did you just expect to plug the shovel in and watch it dig all by itself?”

  She swallowed a crack about not being able to find an extension cord that long. “No,” she said quietly. “I expected to get it done one foot at a time.”

  “Left or right foot?” Jed asked innocently.

  She tried not to smile but didn’t succeed. “Whatever works,” she said, giving Jed a sideways glance out of eyes as green as gems.

  Reever caught the look, and his mouth flattened until there was nothing except a thin, hard line. But whatever he was going to say was lost beneath the genial argument over whether it was better to shovel with the left or the right foot.

  She listened to the men with relief, hoping that Reever had been de­flected from another scathing speech about useless city girls. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold her tongue, especially when being polite was a one-way street. She couldn’t bait him or even respond to his baiting, but he was under no such restraints with her. If he wanted a bite out of her, he just took it and dared her to bite back.

  And she was terrified that she would.

  Then she would lose, and lose hard. She could all but taste the scalding humiliation that would come if she crossed Reever.

  Quietly she pushed back her chair and began to clean the kitchen while the men finished dinner. Normally she enjoyed sitting around the table with them, listening and learning as they talked about horses and cows, grass and creeks, storm and sun­shine. But she didn’t want to stay around tonight. Reever was in a savage mood, his features bleak and unforgiving. Unless she got out of his sight, sooner or later she would bear the brunt of his temper.

  When Dutch started to object as Tory took his plate, she bent closer and whispered, “Don’t get up. Please, Dutch. Reever will skin me alive. My hands are okay. Really.”

  Dutch muttered something fully suited to Reever in his worst mood, but the wiry little cowhand didn’t get up and help her with the dishes. Dutch, too, had seen the black signs of Reever’s temper. So had the rest of the hands. Within minutes the kitchen was empty but for Tory and the boss man. To her relief he got up and went into his office to work on the books. She sighed unconsciously and wondered if his temper would be any better the following morning.

  It wasn’t. None of the hands escaped the caustic effects of Reever’s tongue. Tory waited until he had ridden off before she went out to the barn, found an old shovel, and went to work on the garden.

  And work it was. The ground was rich but stub­born. The shovel was heavy and better suited to boots than tennis shoes. Dutch came by with a pair of his old work gloves in his hand. They were big on her, but they made it much easier to handle the splintery old shovel. Even so, she had done only one short furrow by the time she had to go inside and begin lunch.

  The ragged line of earth glistened with fertile promise each time she looked out the win­dow.

  One time when she looked out, the line of turned earth had suddenly, impossibly widened. She blinked, shook her head and stared. From the back porch came the sound of Jed’s and Dutch’s voices. Then came Miller’s. She raced to the other window and saw the three cowhands making short work of the earth. Two of them used spades that sliced easily through the ground. The third broke up the big clods with the shovel.

  “Reever’s gonna tan our hides,” Jed said casu­ally.

  Miller grunted, rubbed a weathered leather glove over his equally weathered jeans, and spat a stream of tobacco juice off to one side.

  Dutch shrugged. “I figure it this way, son,” he said, leaning on the spade. “Reever told us to shovel out the corral. Now, if we want to shovel them sunbaked turds into this patch of ground in­stead of off behind the barn, that’s our business.” There was a pause, then, “Move it, Miller. Here comes Teague with another wheelbarrow of Black­jack’s best.”

  Tory watched until tears blurred the men into shadows. Slowly she turned back to the chili that was simmering on the stove. She wiped her eyes impatiently as she opened the flour bin. She had been practicing piecrusts for two weeks. Now was as good a time as any to see if she had learned to make a crust that tasted better than it looked.

  By lunchtime the smell of apple pie was compet­ing with the spicy fragrance of chili. As she pulled the second pie out to cool, she looked at the crust critically. Not gorgeous, but acceptable. And she knew the pie itself would taste good because she had eaten a spoonful of filling when she cleaned the bowl. Now all she had to do was find out if the hands liked cheese or ice cream with their hot apple pie.

  Tory went to the back door. As she reached for the handle, the sound of Reever’s voice came clearly through the screen.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Shifting turds,” Dutch said.

  Reever’s ice-pale glance went from man to man. Without a word he turned Blackjack and went back to the corral.

  Tory let out a long breath and crept silently back to the kitchen. When the table was set, she went out to the metal triangle that hung from the porch roof. She banged enthusiastically with a steel wand, calling the hands in to lunch.

  No one came running. Frowning, she banged some more. Still no one. She walked out into the yard, looked around, but saw no one. Slowly she climbed the steps onto the back porch and walked into the kitchen, wondering where all the men were.

  Everyone was in place around the table but Reever. All of the men were trying so hard not to smile that their faces must have ached. Bewildered, she looked from one to the other, wondering what was going on. Then she spotted the mound of small, colorful packets heaped to overflowing on her plate. Seeds and more seeds, a cascade of possibilities call­ing to her. There were so many—far more than three dollars could have bought.

  “They’re all yours, Tory,” Jed said, grinning and sliding three dollar bills under her plate. “And if you try to pay us back, we’ll pour cement in your garden.”

  With an excited sound she hurried to the table, feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. She didn’t see Reever silently close the porch door behind him.

  He leaned a hard shoulder against the kitchen doorframe, stuck his thumbs through the loops of his jeans and watched while surprise and pleasure transformed her face. She ran her fingers through the piled packages of seeds as though they were gold and jew­els, reading off the names while her voice got more and more husky until it shivered into silence over her words of thanks.

  “City girl,” he said curtly, “I think you and the boys have forgotten something.”

  She started, scattering bright packages over the table. She looked over her shoulder. “Oh, Reever, please,” she said, her voice husky. “Let me use that little bit of land. I won’t let it get in the way of my cooking.”

  “Hell,” he said roughly, hating to hear the catch in her voice, “you can have the damned garden plot, for all the good it will do you.”

  “What do you mean? Isn’t the ground fertile?”

  “The ground’s fine. You’re the problem, city girl,” he said, looking straight into her pleading green eyes. “You’re not going to be around long enough to see any of those seeds bloom, are you?”

  She looked at the bright faces of the packets scattered across the table and knew that he was right.
She had forgotten that the Sundance wasn’t her home and that Reever had made no secret of the fact that he wanted her out of there at the earliest possible moment.

  “I guess not,” she said sadly. “So I’ll just have to enjoy as much of it as I can, won’t I?”

  There was no answer but that of Reever’s hungry, steel-colored eyes watching her fingertip trace the bursting ripeness of the tomato pictured on a package of seeds.

  5

  Flexing her hands, Tory admired the supple yet sturdy work gloves she wore. They had appeared by her breakfast plate two weeks ago. The cowhands had all denied any knowledge of how the gloves had gotten there. When she had put the price of the gloves in cash on the dinner table the following week, the money had stayed there for three days before she gave up and put it back in her wallet.

  The golden-brown, suede surface of the gloves was already stained by dirt from the garden and scratched here and there by angry hens, baling wire, and barbwire. Tory was spending more and more time in the barn and around the corrals. De­spite her rather hard initiation into riding, she found herself fascinated by the horses. Dutch and Jed swore that she had a knack for handling the big an­imals. The men had taught her how to groom, bridle and saddle horses, as well as how to rake out a stall. She had gradually taken over the care of any horses that turned up lame or cut, as well as the calves that had been injured in one way or another.

  If Reever objected to Tory caring for the animals, he had said nothing to her about it. That was what had given her the courage to wheedle riding lessons out of Jed. She was no longer satisfied with just being around horses. She wanted to be able to ride out over the land and feel the wind in her hair. She wanted to know again the pleasure of a horse’s easy rocking motions, a pleasure that she had tasted a few times during that long ride to the ranch with Reever. She needed to be outside, moving. She was accus­tomed to more strenuous exercise than being cook for the Sundance’s eight men. She was...

  Restless.

  Jed rode into the yard, spotted her in the garden and smiled. “Soon as you’re finished fooling around in the dirt, come to the main corral.”

  “Are you sure you have time?” she asked ea­gerly, almost afraid to hope. Every time they had planned a riding lesson, Reever had piled more work on Jed.

  “I got a head start on my work today,” Jed said, yawning. “I’ve been riding fence since first light.”

  Suddenly she realized why the young cowhand hadn’t been at the breakfast table or in for lunch, either. “Oh, Jed, I didn’t mean for you to—”

  “I’ll forgive you if you bring a sandwich with you,” he interrupted. “And you might bring a car­rot for Twinkle Toes. That fool mare thinks she’s half rabbit.”

  Quickly Tory gathered up her gardening tools. She washed them off at the outside faucet and wiped them on her already fraying jeans. With a grimace she examined the thin denim. Next time she would have to buy rugged jeans rather than the fashionable imitations that fell apart under real use.

  The thought of buying anything made Tory frown. Money, which she had never had trouble hanging on to before, just kept sliding through her fingers on the Sundance. She had quickly discovered that the tender new plants coming up couldn’t be cared for with a shovel or a spade so she had bought gardening tools. While there were plenty of natural fertilizers on the ranch, the gardening book she had bought—another unexpected expense—had men­tioned that certain kinds of fertilizers were needed at certain times in the growing cycle. In the end she had bought some commercial fertilizer to be sure that her eager little plants didn’t go hungry.

  Fertilizer in bags was very expensive. Her anti-inflammation medicine cost even more, but she didn’t dare go without it. The repetitious exercises that she did for an hour each night were bad enough without having to cope with a swollen knee as well.

  She also needed, and hadn’t yet bought, some kind of denim jacket for the cool mornings and nights. The swim club windbreaker she had brought with her just wasn’t heavy enough. Then there were the hands’ birthdays—it seemed they all came in the summertime. Rather than risk Reever’s wrath by taking money out of the kitchen budget, she simply had bought candles and funny cards and cake decorations out of her own money. Plus, when she went into Massacre Creek with the hands on ranch business or for pleasure, she refused to let anyone buy her so much as a soda. If everyone ate lunch at the Sunup Cafe, then so did she, although the food was both relatively expensive and awfully ordi­nary.

  As a result, Tory’s bus ticket fund hovered at the halfway mark. No matter how many private vows she made, the fund seemed to stay there. Lately she had expected Reever to ask if she had enough for her bus ticket yet. After all, he hadn’t agreed to hire her for all the months she was taking off from div­ing. He had simply told her that she could cook until she earned enough to buy a bus ticket home.

  She would just have to pray that he wouldn’t lose patience with her and kick her off the ranch before she managed to plug the million leaks in her budget.

  Besides, she didn’t really think that he would physically throw her off the ranch. To do that he’d have to touch her. And that was something he had not done since the day he had bathed her raw palms so gently and then with equal tenderness had brushed her breasts into aching peaks.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself fiercely. You promised yourself that you wouldn’t think about it.

  But how do I control the dreams that bring me awake and shivering in the darkness, aching for—

  Don’t think about it!

  She put the garden tools away and began making Jed a thick sandwich using cheese and leftover roast. She moved quickly, anxious to finally begin her riding lessons and to have some­thing to think about besides the hot male sensuality that seethed beneath Reever’s cold exterior. She may have attracted him during the forced intimacy of the ride to the ranch, but he had made it very clear since then that he had no use for her as a woman.

  City girl. Clumsy. Useless.

  Too bad that she still wanted him. Too bad that every time she saw him gently handle an injured animal, or smile and tease Dutch’s grandchildren when they visited the Sundance, or drive himself long past the time when another man would have given in to exhaustion, or stand quietly in the eve­ning and look out over the land with love on his face—it was all she could do at those moments not to plead with Reever to look at her again, to see in her the woman of his dreams.

  But it hadn’t happened.

  It wasn’t going to, either.

  Don’t think about it.

  Tory slammed the screen door and ran out to the corral, holding Jed’s sandwich in one hand and a thermos of coffee in the other. A carrot stuck up out of one hip pocket and her gloves out of the other. She squinted at the brilliant sunlight pouring over the land and wished that she could afford a hat to shield her eyes.

  “Here you are, Jed. I brought you some coffee, too.”

  He smiled down at her. “Thanks, Tory. You do spoil us, don’t you?”

  “I enjoy cooking for the hands,” she said hon­estly. “You’re all so appreciative.”

  “If you’d eaten Cookie’s slop, you’d know why. Only thing he could do worth a damn was beans and biscuits. A man can get real tired of beans and bis­cuits three meals a day.” Jed took a big bite out of the sandwich while he waved with his free hand at the corral where a placid old mare with the unlikely name of Twinkle Toes—better known as Twinks—stood dozing three-legged in the sun. “She’s all yours.”

  Tory picked up the bridle that Jed had hung over one of the corral posts, ducked it through the cross poles and bridled the mare. While the horse chewed the carrot, Tory brushed her down, smoothed the saddle blanket into place, and lifted the heavy sad­dle off the fence.

  “Don’t forget the stirrup,” Jed mumbled around his last bite of sandwich. “If that chunk of wood comes slamming down on he
r ribs, even old Twinks here might cut up a bit.”

  Dutifully Tory hooked the right stirrup over the saddle horn before she swung the bulky saddle onto the mare’s fat back. With a grunt and a few muttered words, Tory got the saddle into place. Fastening the cinch came next. Twinks knew it, too. Casually the mare took a breath that swelled her barrel to half again its usual size.

  Tory took a deep breath as well—she didn’t like what she was going to do, but there was no other way. She brought her knee up smartly into the mare’s barrel. With a disgusted whoosh the mare gave up and let out all the extra air. Quickly Tory tightened the cinch. Twinkle Toes stood docilely, unruffled by the whole process.

  “Good job,” Jed said, sipping at the steaming coffee before setting it aside. “Now gather the reins in your left hand.”

  She did.

  “Uh, better try that again,” he said, walking over until he stood just behind Tory. “If you got on now, by the time you sat in the saddle, the left rein would be laid so hard across her neck that she’d be turning in little circles. Do it like this.”

  He reached over Tory’s shoulders with both hands. Holding the reins in his left hand, he raised his hand until it was on the horse’s mane just in front of the saddle horn. With his right hand he adjusted the reins until they were even on both sides.

  “See?”

  She nodded.

  “Now you do it,” he said, dropping the reins.

  They fell on either side of the mare’s neck and dragged on the ground. The bridle wasn’t equipped with the single loop of a rop­ing rein.

  Tory picked up the reins and did exactly as Jed had done.

  “Good. Now,” he said, putting his arms over her shoulders again, “grab either some mane or the saddle horn in your left hand and—don’t drop the reins!—stand by the mare’s left shoulder. Take the stirrup in your right hand, turn it toward you, put your left foot in, step up like on a ladder, and swing your right leg over the saddle at the same time. If you have to, you can haul yourself up with your right hand on the cantle—that’s the back of the saddle that sticks up. Okay?”

 

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