Handful of Sky

by Cates, Tory

  Prima donnas, she thought with amusement, knowing that this was just the first of an infinite number of missions she’d be embarking upon over the course of the next week and a half.

  When she returned, the grounds were even more cluttered with semis. All around her were the symbols of the best in rodeo contracting. Painted across the eighteen-wheeled trucks, sewed onto the crews of men unloading livestock, and seared into the flesh of the animals themselves were the brands and logos of the producing companies she had read and dreamed of for years. But now that she was actually one of them, sharing the sport’s pinnacle, she halfway wished she could leave before the rodeo even got underway.

  Hunt would be here, of course. The rampage he’d been on since Albuquerque had continued. In the few months he’d competed, he’d won enough to buy himself the third-place ranking. Emile was second and Jesse Southerland led the bronc riders. Since all of the top fifteen bareback riders would be competing in each of the ten performances, a meeting with Hunt was almost inevitable.

  She scooped the grain mixture into the troughs, reflecting on the route she’d taken to the Finals. She realized that luck, and Hunt’s intervention, had played a large part in her presence among rodeo’s greats. But she also knew that she’d put in as much hard work and caring as any contractor. In that sense, she’d earned her trip to the Finals. And she was going to enjoy it! Her decision strengthened her.

  She could face Hunt.

  “Shallie!” Walter, with Miriam by his side, waved her over. He had spent the few free days after their last rodeo at the Prescott ranch, then he and Miriam had flown in together.

  “Come on, girl,” he chided her. “All us big-time contractors and some of the contestants are gathering at the hospitality suite.”

  She waved them on, promising to join them once she’d changed.

  In her hotel room, she pulled out the emerald-green dress and held it up as if it were a talisman. I’ll need it, she thought, slipping the silken sheath on. She added perfume and makeup as if they too were part of the psychic armor she needed for the ordeal of seeing Hunt again. All she wanted was to survive their meeting with as much grace as possible. But deep down inside, she actually wanted much more. Though she wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on her futile hopes, she also hadn’t been able to extinguish them. As Shallie paused at the door of the hospitality suite, a kind of panic close to stage fright clawed at the pit of her stomach. The clinking of ice cubes in glasses supplied a tinkling counterpoint to the bass rumbling of the predominantly male voices at the gathering. Shallie took several deep breaths and entered.

  “Shalimar Larkin!” Jake McIver hailed her. He was encircled by her uncle and Miriam, Petey, and several of the biggest contractors in the business. Though his voice was hearty, weariness strained his face and his eyes were lackluster. Shallie shot him a look of concern. He intercepted it with a wink, which told Shallie that any strain he might be putting on his health was less important to him than maintaining his “Mr. Rodeo” facade.

  “Gentlemen, I’d like you to meet a producer good enough to put any one of you out of business tomorrow, Shallie Larkin.”

  Shallie shook hands all around, but her attention was elsewhere. She scanned the crowded room filled with handsome, athletic men in Western suits, accompanied by wives and girlfriends attractive enough to be shown off at the National Finals. She tilted her chin upward, craning her neck to search the corners of the room for a dark head of curly hair above a pair of high, slashing cheekbones.

  Petey nudged her gently and directed her eyes to his hands. They formed the words “He’s over there,” then pointed to a corner behind Shallie. She instantly began to sense his presence in the form of a warm spot between her shoulders. The heat built until she couldn’t stand it any longer. She dared a quick glance over her shoulder.

  For the first time in over half a year, they looked at one another. Shallie was stunned by the powerful effect Hunt had upon her. It was as if the past months had distilled everything she had ever felt for him into one heart-stoppingly visceral reaction. The expression he saw, however, was one of shock. In the same instant that Shallie’s features began to unfreeze, Hunt turned from her, from the chilly expression that seemed to glaze her features. The smile that finally reached her lips fell upon his stiff back as he deliberately pivoted away.

  Shallie whirled around. Her emotional roller-coaster ride could have been measured in fractions of seconds. Only Petey had even noticed it. Commiseration deepened the lines around his eyes. Petey’s sympathy was more than Shallie could bear. She fled the suite without pausing to make excuses for her abrupt departure.

  Back in her room, she ripped the gaily colored dress off, but she wouldn’t allow the tears misting her vision to fall. No. She wouldn’t waste another teardrop on Hunt McIver. She’d cried enough for him already. As far as she was concerned, he had died and she had already put in more than her share of mourning.

  Shallie was as good as her resolution. At the opening performance the next night, she was back behind the chutes with the fifteen best, and most nervous, bareback riders in the world. At first glance it looked more like a field hospital, with contestants ripping off miles of adhesive tape and unrolling dozens of elastic bandages to bind every imaginable portion of their anatomy. Knees were wrapped, both inside and out of jeans. Shoulders, wrists, elbows, and fingers were encased in sticky white tape. Shallie knew that a lot of the outside reinforcement provided crucial support for torn ligaments and strained muscles. But most of it served only to shore up the mental image each cowboy was brewing of himself as tough and invulnerable, a match for any horse in the chutes.

  A camera crew scurried about, filming the proceedings. A female interviewer, desperately overdressed in heels and a skirt, stuck a microphone in front of Shallie and asked what it felt like to be the only woman contractor at the National Finals.

  Shallie slid into the “good old girl” persona she used for such occasions. “It feels a whole heck of a lot better than if I wasn’t here.” She grinned. The crew chuckled appreciatively, knowing the retort would make good footage. Her smile, though, blinked off as abruptly as the camera’s light.

  She followed the television spotlight as it fell first on Emile, then on Jesse, capturing the top two finalists and probing the rivals for predictions.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Emile answered in his Canadian drawl. “I suppose I have as good a chance as the next fellow of winning. These broncs don’t play any favorites, you know. I’m going into this in second place, just a couple hundred dollars back from Jesse Southerland. But I’d say the man to watch is Hunt McIver. With the size of the purse here, if he stays as hot as he’s been, he could take home that great big gold buckle.”

  Southerland was far less gracious. “I’m going into this in the number-one berth and that’s exactly how I intend on leaving it. No, I don’t consider McIver a threat. We’ve all seen him choke before and I think he’ll do it again.”

  Southerland was opening his mouth to elaborate further on the trouncing he intended to give Hunt McIver, when the bright light blinked off, leaving him in darkness. The crew hurried after the woman in heels as she made a beeline for the entryway. It didn’t surprise Shallie to see Hunt amble in with his usual loose-jointed grace.

  She forbid herself to react to his appearance. When her traitorous body refused, she sealed off her mind, ignoring the way her hands went cold and her stomach seemed to sink a foot lower. The camera crew intercepted him before Hunt reached the chutes where Shallie stood on the catwalk running above them.

  “Hunt.” The female interviewer addressed him as if they were old friends. Hunt’s eyebrows jumped an almost imperceptible fraction of an inch at the presumption. He looked around as if searching for an escape and saw Shallie, her lips curled upward in a slight, ironic grin that chilled his soul.

  “Hunt, is Trish Stephans going to be in the crowd cheering you on?”

  The name rose above the clamor to sting Shallie
with a barb she wished she could will herself not to feel. But feel it she did. It drove her to the only method she had for soothing that pain—escape.

  “What?” Confusion and irritation cracked Hunt’s voice. He wanted to push past this pest of a woman with her high heels sinking into the arena dirt and her stupid questions and find Shallie. Find her and shake her until she rattled. Why had she smiled at him like that? The interviewer clung to him like a gnat.

  “Trish Stephans?” the woman persisted, finally capturing Hunt’s wandering attention. “Will she be here rooting for you?”

  When he looked up again, Shallie was gone. “Ma’am,” Hunt said, fighting to keep his voice even, “maybe you haven’t noticed, but you’re at a rodeo. These are horses here,” he said, swinging his hand toward the chutes. “And we’re here to ride them. Now, if you’ve got any questions on that subject, I’ll think about answering them. Otherwise, will you please get out of my way?”

  The woman stepped aside, her eyes widening in disbelief at encountering someone who wasn’t mesmerized by the television camera’s cyclopean eye.

  Hunt hurried past, but it was too late. Damn her. He felt fury’s familiar sting as he slammed his rigging bag down. It was too late, he should have realized that yesterday. Still, the anger pumping through him was an old friend, one that had served him well over the past months, fueling him with the unrelenting will to win. He let it wash over him, knowing he would start off the Finals with another good ride. Knowing, and not caring.

  Chapter 19

  On day eight of the Finals, Shallie reflected on how easy it had been to fool everyone around her. They all treated her just as if she were a normal human being. Only she was aware that her heart had stopped pumping when she willed herself to cease feeling and that ice water lay frozen in her veins. But then the only people in Las Vegas who knew her well enough to realize that an android had taken her place were too preoccupied to notice: Walter was like a lovestruck teenager. Petey was absorbed in hero worship as he trailed Hunt from one end of the arena to the other. Hunt might have noticed, but after their near encounter the first day, they had both become very careful to avoid one another. For her part, Shallie completely abdicated the bucking chutes to Hunt, retiring to Jake McIver’s private box, where he kept a continuous party running, stocked with bourbon and buckle bunnies.

  “Shalimar, you sweet thing.” Jake greeted her as she entered the private box on the night of the next-to-last performance. “You’ve been running yourself ragged. What you’ve got to learn about producing is delegating, the fine art of laying back and hiring someone else to run themselves to death.”

  A cute blonde at Jake’s side giggled appreciatively, and Shallie wondered if she was a candidate for next year’s Rodeo Sweetheart. Was Trish Stephans already in Hollywood?

  “In case you’ve forgotten, Jake,” Shallie said, remembering to throw in her “good old girl” laugh, “I’m the ‘someone’ you hired to run herself to death so you can sit up here and sip your bourbon and branch water.”

  Jake cackled, Walter and Miriam joining in at a more subdued level. Then the announcer was welcoming the twenty thousand spectators crowding the bleachers and telling them the first event would be bareback riding. The information was superfluous because the sellout crowd was composed of rodeo’s aficionados, the die-hard fans who had flown and driven in from around the country to watch the roughest and the rankest collide.

  “The bareback riding has generated more than its share of thrills over the past few days,” the announcer went on, “and we’re looking to see some more here tonight as our three leaders, Jesse Southerland, Emile Boulier, and Hunt McIver battle it out for that big golden buckle.”

  The three men rode like crazed artists, trying to push their craft to its outer limits. In his riding style, each one revealed more than he would ever know about himself: Jesse Southerland hung on, hard and clutching. His mount was his enemy. Emile flapped loose and free, a happy ragdoll enjoying the jostling. But Shallie, in her most objective moment, realized that it was Hunt who was pushing back the boundaries, while the other two merely followed. He rode with an abstracted ferocity that lifted him above physical constraints.

  Shallie appreciated the performance in the way a sports fan delights in seeing records broken and art lovers thrill to radical new innovations. But her elation had a hollow core. Panic clutched at Shallie as her thoughts drifted down toward that dangerous void. She jumped up from her seat.

  “I’d better go down and make sure all the dogging steers have been sorted out.” She escaped before Jake could order her to sit down and stop fidgeting. She had to get out.

  Down in the labyrinth of pens, the steers she had culled out that afternoon waited patiently for their moment under the bright lights. A crew of livestock handlers, all as proficient at their jobs as any of the buckle-chasing contestants inside the arena, herded animals along a maze of metal alleyways.

  “Need some help, ma’am?” a brawny cowboy she hadn’t met asked her.

  “No, I . . .” She shook her head. There was nothing for her to do there. She thrust her hands deep into her pockets, tucked her head into the collar of her jacket, and plowed into the wintry night. She was grateful for the blast of icy wind that bit into her, stunning her and clearing her head of all thoughts. Her hand leaped to her head to prevent the wind from blowing her hat away. She followed her feet, not thinking about where they were taking her, and not caring. The cheers of the crowd, the eight-second buzzer, the announcer’s twang, all faded further and further away.

  The sports complex was located at the University of Nevada, and as Shallie roamed the campus the stored tensions of the last several months gradually dissipated and she relaxed into an ambling gait. Just beyond the edge of the campus, Shallie spotted a diner, its neon sign blinking out a warm welcome as the winds bit into her.

  Shallie picked a table by the window. The odors of frying hamburgers and yeasty doughnuts floated around her. A skinny waitress thrust a menu in front of her.

  “Just coffee, please,” Shallie said, declining the chicken-fried offerings. She pulled off her hat, carefully setting it down on its crown on an empty chair.

  The waitress slid a steaming mug in front of Shallie. Shallie checked the time, astonished to find that she’d been walking for more than two hours. So, the rodeo was over. She swirled a trickle of cream into her coffee and cupped the icy twigs of her fingers around the mug. She imagined that the festivities in the hospitality suite and throughout the hotels, taken over by cowboys and their retinues of hangers-on, were probably in full swing by now. She hoisted her cup, a wry toast to the bacchanalia she’d fled. Undoubtedly Hunt would be enjoying it to the fullest without the onerous chore of avoiding her at every turn.

  At the next table, the three occupants had chosen to keep their cowboy hats on. Their voices rose above the clatter of spatulas hitting the grill and coffee cups rattling against saucers.

  “Can you believe that ride McIver put on that bareback?”

  The other two chimed in with expressions of incredulity.

  “What I can’t believe is that he came from so far behind. I mean, he was thousands of dollars behind Southerland and Boulier when he went in and he’s damn near closed the gap now. That big buckle is up for grabs. Either one of those three could take it away tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah,” the first speaker agreed, “that McIver is really something.”

  Shallie closed her eyes as if she could shut out the name. She was so weary of it, of hearing about him, of seeing Hunt’s face on billboards, newspapers, magazines, in her dreams. She opened her eyes and blinked twice, wondering if her suppressed longings hadn’t burst forth in full hallucinatory flower. Hunt McIver was outside, his lanky strides gobbling up the city pavement. In the violet light cast by the crime lights, Shallie saw him veer toward the diner as if summoned by the force of her deepest yearnings. Shallie ducked her head as his gloved hand reached out to push open the door.

&n
bsp; “Hey, isn’t that McIver now?” A blast of cold air and the whispered question marked his entrance. Shallie didn’t need to be told that Hunt McIver was in the same room with her. His presence bore down on her with a pressure that stole the air from her lungs. The arrow points of his boots approached, then stopped. They were aimed straight at her. She followed the impossibly long columns of blue-jeaned legs up past an extravagance of muscled shoulders to a pair of eyes filled with anger.

  “Where the hell did you hide the grain mixture?” he demanded, dispensing with the frills of greeting.

  “I didn’t ‘hide’ it anywhere,” Shallie blazed with a fury to match his. “It’s where it’s always been, in the back of the storage room. Walter knew that.”

  “Unfortunately, Walter followed your lead and was nowhere to be found either. And since you kept the grain formula your own little secret, no one knew what to give the broncs.”

  The clanging and clattering in the small diner stopped as every ear tuned in to the fiery exchange. Shallie was ready to leap to her own defense, but Hunt cut her off.

  “Because everyone else was busy, I was the lucky one who got to slog out in this miserable weather trying to track you down. Fortunately there aren’t many places open at night in this part of town, and since you don’t have transportation, it wasn’t too difficult to track you down. But if you hadn’t tried to turn this into a one-woman show, none of this would have happened. I’m surprised you haven’t learned by now that rodeo is a team effort. A good contractor gets to be the best by being able to work with people, not against them.”

  Shallie thought of the nights spent worrying and the days cooped up in the rolling oven of a semi’s cab, the dust she’d eaten, the pride she’d swallowed for the Circle M. She exploded. “You’re talking to me about working with people? Precisely what do you think I’ve been doing for the past six months? Your damned contracts were filled because it was me out there charming cranky committeemen and disgruntled calf ropers. I was the one who coaxed the cowboys on the labor lists into making the extra effort in 110-degree heat that it took to ensure that your rodeos ran smoothly. Meanwhile, you’ve been the one in the spotlight. You’ve . . .”