Glancing to her right, she watched Bungu grazing contentedly where she’d hobbled him, the white coloring with its black spots shone stark and beautiful on his broad Appaloosa rump against the rest of his black coat. She wasn’t supposed to ride him out alone either—he was only four and still green to field and trail work. But she’d raised him from a foal and knew him better than she knew anyone or anything else on the ranch. She wasn’t about to listen to her worrywart parents. Besides, she’d been riding horses since the age of three.
She looked back down at her sketchbook and assessed the pencil drawing she’d made of Bungu beneath the cloudy sky. Earlier there’d been a rainbow, and she’d captured it with the camera. She could finish her drawing and put in the color at home after she got the film developed. Maybe her dad would be willing to take her into Wolf Paw Pass tonight after work. It was one of the only advantages to being homeschooled—she could do homework anytime. Pretty much everything else about it, she hated.
On the other hand, she’d heard her father talking to Grandpa Leif that morning. The ranch, the only home she’d ever known, was in some kind of trouble. The Crocketts might decide to sell, and the ranch families might be forced to move. Maybe she’d get a chance to go to a regular school.
The thought was clinical and calm. The roiling in her stomach over the thought of leaving Paradise Ranch was not. She made a few swipes with her pencil on the preliminary drawing. Her family had worked with the Crocketts for two generations. How could anything happen to this place she loved?
Bungu’s sudden, shrill whinny catapulted Skylar to her feet and nearly sent her into respiratory failure. Her horse stood alert, ears pricked to statue-perfect points, every muscle coiled, eyes fixed on the trees along the trail. Skylar searched desperately for a place to hide, unable to imagine who but trespassers would be all the way out here on a day like this. She shrank into the closest hillock and tried to edge toward her horse.
She didn’t make it.
The pretty sorrel quarter horse Skylar recognized as Chevy appeared around a copse of scrub pine and replied to Bungu’s ringing call with one of his own. The woman on his back reached forward to stroke his neck, and Skylar recognized her, too.
“Oh!” Harper Crockett pulled up quickly when she spotted Skylar. Her flushed face and rounded eyes proved she hadn’t come looking for anyone. “Hello there. I . . . sorry, didn’t mean to scare your horse.”
“He’s not afraid.” Skylar couldn’t keep the defiance out of her voice. “He’s the bravest horse I’ve ever known.”
Harper looked like she could maybe laugh, and Skylar found resentment rising along with her other emotions. She wondered if “Miss Harper,” as Mama had always required her to say, even remembered her. All the Crockett ladies had been “Miss.” Except Mrs. Crockett. She was Mrs. Crockett. But she and Harper—she thought with purposeful disrespect—hadn’t seen each other since Skylar had been five.
“It’s a good thing to have that trust in your horse up here in the high country. Do you ride here often?”
“All the time.” Skylar stared at her, waiting.
“Do I . . . know you?”
She didn’t remember. For some reason that only depressed Skylar further. She shrugged. “I know you.”
“You actually live here, then? Wait. No, you can’t be. Bjorn’s daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“Skylar?”
“Yes.” Stupid relief and a little happiness flooded through her.
“Oh my gosh, sweetie, how is this possible? You’re all grown up.”
A fragment of defensiveness melted. Nobody called her a grown-up. “Kind of. I guess.”
“Oh, you have. I remember babysitting you. But not very many times, I don’t think, because I left for college. I think maybe Joely took care of you more often.”
Skylar nodded. “I saw her today. She’s still, like, gorgeous. I think my grandpa said she was a model or something.”
“She is definitely still beautiful,” Harper replied. “She modeled for about a year. Then she got married and moved to California.”
“Does she have kids?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Do you?”
Harper laughed. “Nope. I’m a long way from that. How ’bout you?”
Her eyes twinkled in fun. Skylar felt a smile beg to be set free, and although she really, really didn’t want it to, it slipped onto her lips. “I’m a long ways from that, too.”
“Thank heavens. You’re not that grown up yet.”
“Besides. Don’t you need, like, a guy first?”
This time Harper snorted. “Uh . . . yes, ma’am. Do we know each other well enough to be moving in this direction?”
In Skylar’s experience you could say almost anything on the ranch. Guys talked about girls and sex and cow sex and food and politics and pretty much everything else. She heard a lot the adults didn’t think she heard.
She shrugged. “I don’t care. I don’t have a boyfriend; that’s no secret. The only person around here who’s cute enough to be a boyfriend is Cole.” She saw Harper’s features fold immediately into a frown. “Cole Wainwright, I mean. Do you know who he is? He’s hot.”
“Oh, believe me, I know him. We’ve been friends most of our lives. He’s a very nice guy.”
“My grandpa says the ranch runs smoother when Cole comes back every year.”
Harper moved Chevy two steps closer and leaned forward over the saddle horn. “What are you working on? I don’t mean to pry, but it looks like you’re sketching, and I’m kind of an art fanatic.”
Everyone said Harper was some kind of new-age, liberal hippie who lived in communes, protested things, and thought she was an artist. Skylar studied her fully for the first time. She sure didn’t look like any hippie she seen in books. She looked like a normal person in jeans and a cool, worn jean jacket and cowboy boots. In her own way, she was prettier even than Miss Joely. She took a deep, rebellious breath. Than Joely. No “Miss.” This wasn’t her mom’s freakin’ South Carolina.
“I like to draw my horse. Sometimes I start the drawing then take pictures and finish it at home.”
“Could I . . . see your drawing?” She seemed a little embarrassed to be asking. “You don’t have to. I know drawings can be private.”
Skylar shrugged, surprised again. Nobody ever really looked at her drawings. “Yes, very nice,” they always said, and that was about it. “I don’t care. You can.”
Harper straightened in the saddle and swung down, completely unlike a city-girl hippie. She held Chevy’s reins casually as she dug in a worn leather saddle bag, produced a notebook of some kind, and then flung the ends of the reins around a short, thick-branched bush.
“Turnabout is fair play. I’ll show you mine, too,” she said.
To Skylar’s astonishment, the notebook was a sketchpad, similar to her own. She handed hers to Harper first and took the one offered to her without opening it. Instead, she watched Harper flip pages. Suddenly, desperately, she wished she hadn’t agreed to give it to her.
Harper’s face didn’t change, although her frown disappeared. She studied each page for a long time, as if she were looking at every line or . . . or for mistakes. To protect herself from the sudden urge to grab the book away, she opened Harper’s. With one glance at the first drawing, she had to swallow hard to keep from totally throwing up. It was just a flower, in pencil like her own sketches, but it looked like Harper had picked it out of the field and pressed it into the book. An actual photograph couldn’t have looked any more real.
She flipped the page, spiral-bound at the top, and stared at the next drawings—three small studies of a stalk of wheat with grass stems blowing around it. Every little kernel of bran on the wheat head was perfect.
Humiliation burned through her like a grass fire. If Harper didn’t laugh her head off at the drawings in Skylar’s book, it was because she was the nicest person in the world. With a sick fluttering in her stomach, she turned to an
other picture and then another. The horse barn. A bird feeder. A chicken. Skylar sighed. Even the quick line drawings were perfect. She turned the page a final time and gasped. She’d been so dumb. She’d asked if Harper knew Cole Wainwright, and there he was on the page. The sketch was simple, but there was no doubt whatsoever who it was.
“Ahhh, you found Cole.” Harper smiled. “I did that for him to go with one I drew when we were kids. It’s not quite finished.”
“Oh. Sure. That’s cool.”
Skylar’s chest tightened, and she looked at the picture rather than face Harper. She didn’t tell anybody about her fantasy crush for Cole. He wasn’t around much in the summer, but every winter he came back—just as nice as Mr. Crockett had been, but much, much younger. And hot. But it was her deepest secret.
“Wow.” Harper had stopped at one of Skylar’s drawings. “This is amazing.”
She turned the pad around so Skylar could see which page. It was a close-up of Bungu’s ear and eye. “I sketched it from a photo.”
“It’s really good. You have a lovely touch with your pencils.”
“Not as good as yours.” Skylar exchanged sketchpads with her.
“They aren’t supposed to be like mine. They’re yours. They’re wonderful. I hope you keep it up.”
Skylar didn’t know how to respond. Definitely nobody had ever called her drawings wonderful. She managed a blown-away “thank you,” and Harper saved her from having to say anything more intelligent by noticing the camera.
“That’s an old beauty.” She pointed. “A thirty-five-millimeter Minolta? My dad used to have a camera like that. I played with it when I was younger than you are.”
“It is your dad’s,” Skylar said without preamble and without really thinking. She swore Harper’s face went a little bit white.
“What do you mean it’s my dad’s?”
“He, um, gave it to me. He taught me how to use it and where to send the film to get it developed.”
“My father?”
Skylar nodded.
“When did he do this?”
The joyful twinkle and flowing compliments had disappeared. Harper suddenly looked more suspicious than friendly, and Skylar stepped back one involuntary step. “About two years ago. I don’t know.”
“Why would he do that? He loved that camera.”
“I don’t know. He . . . he said it would teach me how to take good pictures. He said I had . . . ” She lowered her head, thoroughly embarrassed.
“Had what?” Harper’s voice gentled again.
“Talent.”
Harper surprised her again with a harsh burst of laughter. “Seriously? My father told someone she had talent? You’re sure?”
Skylar didn’t understand at all and didn’t say a word. Harper’s change of mood made no sense.
“I’m sorry,” Harper said again. “I guess this is a little weird for me. My father is gone, and I’m finding out all kinds of thing I never knew about him.” She straightened. “I’m glad his camera is in good hands. You take care of it.”
“O-okay.”
“So, it was great seeing you, Skylar. I’m sure we’ll meet again. Time for me to head on. You be careful up here in the foothills.”
Just like that, because of the camera, someone Skylar thought might be a little different from the others on Paradise Ranch, turned cool and standoffish. It was almost like she hadn’t believed Mr. Crockett had really given away the camera. Resentment swelled up again. It was pretty typical for people to change their opinions of her, but this was even faster than usual.
“I will,” she said. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
For an instant she thought Harper might say something more, or apologize or something, but she gathered up Chevy’s reins, and mounted smooth as any cowboy on the place.
“Good.” She smiled, but not like she had when they’d first met. “I’ll see you around, okay?”
She was moving before Skylar could reply. After she’d disappeared down the trail, Skylar fought with tears for one brief moment before anger replaced her hurt feelings.
“Whatever,” she said to no one.
CHEVY PICKED HIS way along the rocky trail without help from Harper. With only a steadying hand on the reins, she let the gelding have his head. The farther she got from her encounter with the girl, the stronger her mortification grew. The meeting had turned Harper into a bigger mess than she’d been at the funeral, and she’d been unconscionably rude.
But her father’s camera? He’d nearly had apoplectic attacks if she or her sisters had touched it. Then he’d turned around and given it to a teenager he barely knew? Harper couldn’t deny the pain of betrayal squeezing her heart. So long. So long she’d prayed for his acceptance. Apparently young Skylar Thorson naturally possessed the key to getting that rare commodity.
The first tear traced down her cheek. It wasn’t Skylar’s fault, but envy blazed through Harper as if she were a child again, burning through her rational thinking and heading straight for the tinder that was her grief. None of this was fair. It hadn’t been fair from that night when, at age ten, she’d refused to help feed the horses until she’d finished her painting. Without any warning or second chance, Dad had hidden her pad of heavy canvas paper and starter set of brushes in his study and locked her easel in a closet where she would not have access to it until she’d learned to straighten out her priorities.
The moment still loomed as pivotal. It had started Harper on the path of hiding her work and sneaking away to draw. It had pushed her away from the ranch as soon as she was old enough to go to college, but she had been too young to know how to handle the freedom she’d never had under her father’s thumb. She’d made terrible choices about friends and school and her life for the first years of independence. Choices so stupid that she’d been kicked out of art school. Evicted from apartments. Fired from jobs. It had taken four more years of intermittent counseling and Tristan Carmichael’s constant “believe in yourself” mentoring to turn her into the artist she’d always wanted to be. Nonetheless, she still considered herself more of a failure at life than she ever wanted her good, God-fearing family to know.
She’d made a terrible choice again. A very selfish one. She’d seen Skylar’s face at the end of the camera discussion. Clearly confused and wounded, the girl had drawn up the protective wall of suspicion and attitude that had temporarily fallen away as she’d shared her drawings.
Harper knew how fragile an artist’s ego and confidence were. The girl had to have been hungry for feedback, or she wouldn’t have trusted Harper to look at the sketches. And she was surprisingly good, with an innate understanding of shading and texture. Given some instruction her talent could become something special.
There was no excuse for Harper’s pettiness.
And yet. The thought of pretty, young Skylar with her wide, blue eyes and spikey, strawberry blonde hair having possession of that Minolta created stupid and unreasonable feelings.
“Please, please.” She raised her eyes to the cloudy heavens. “Let this be because my system is out of whack from all this emotion.” She didn’t want to be known as the jealous diva sister. The inner demons she already owned were enough to handle.
“I should go back,” she said aloud. Chevy flicked his ears back, awaiting further instruction.
She picked up her slack reins, but before she could start the turn to head back, Chevy halted with a forceful hoof plant and wheeled all by himself. She kept him from bolting, holding him steady with her legs, and coaxed him back in the direction they’d been traveling. He side-stepped and let out a powerful whinny, but he moved forward.
“What is it, boy?” she asked. “Another rider?” She stroked his neck. He was only five—new to the ranch Rico, one of the ranch hands, had told her at the barn—so given his inexperience it was good behavior for him to trust her. Still, she had to continually persuade him to move down the gently sloping hill on the scree-and-dirt path that skirted the wide base of Wolf Paw
Peak.
Before they reached the back side of the mountain, a rumble of engines grinding over uneven terrain confused her. When Chevy rounded a last bend, Harper stared across the green-and-yellow expanse of valley floor spreading between Paradise and the Teton Range sixty-five miles north, and her mouth popped open in shock. Two hundred yards away, a small fleet of four white vehicles trundled toward her. Chevy snorted and danced sideways.
Mystified, and more than a little uneasy, she tried to imagine how the mini convoy had gotten onto such remote Paradise land. This was one of the prime grazing areas—although she saw no cattle today—usually accessible only by horseback. As they drew closer she recognized a familiar logo on each vehicle door. Curled blue waves under a three-peaked purple mountain, set against a golden yellow sun: the ubiquitous symbol of Mountain Pacific Oil.
The two pickup trucks, a van, and a Jeep stopped before they reached Harper. Two people emerged from each and, clearly unaware of her presence, moved to stand in one group. As a collective they turned slightly away from her, and the man at the front of the clump pointed. She could hear their voices but couldn’t make out the words.
With a squeeze of her calves, Harper moved Chevy forward again, annoyance growing out of her curiosity. A proprietary aura emanated from the group, and along with her natural prejudice against oil people, it blew away all nervousness that had taken shallow root in her gut. They didn’t notice her until she’d ridden to within fifty feet and could see all eight people, including three women, clearly. Coordinated and hyper-neat, they wore navy slacks and company polo shirts in blue and purple, with the logo embroidered on each breast pocket. When they saw her, they smiled in unison like a team of robotic cable TV techs.
“Hello there!” One of the women, brandishing a clipboard and adjusting expensive-looking aviator sunglasses, approached with a widening smile. “I’m Magdalen Pearce, senior technology analyst for Mountain Pacific Oil.” She craned her neck to look around Harper as if expecting someone to be behind her. “Are you here with Sam Crockett?”
The Bride Wore Denim Page 5