“That right, m’heart?” He squeezed her leg. His big hand seemed to circumvent her slender calf, enveloping it in warm steel. “Well, Eagle Pass ain’t the Kentucky Derby. You ever try to keep flat heels in the stirrups on a rough ride?”
“I’ve been trained to avoid ‘rough’ rides,” she informed him with icy hauteur.
He gave that one a hoot. “Well you’re about to violate your training then. Good luck holding your stirrups with them buggy slippers.”
“I’ll manage,” she assured him with confidence. “It’s been many years since I’ve been thrown by a horse.”
He sauntered back to his mount, lean-hipped and rangy, confident even in profile. His face was smug with the sly expectation of trouble ahead. At that moment she knew she truly hated the man.
“There’s an old wrangler’s rhyme,” he told her. “‘There ain’t no horse that can’t be rode, there ain’t no man that can’t be throwed.”’
“My God, Mr. Clayburn, you are so quaint. I’m duly impressed at your colorful Westernisms. Now if you’ll just—”
She fell silent, her eyes widening when she spotted the blued metal of the rifle barrel. She watched him slide it from a buckskin sheath and transfer the weapon into a leather scabbard dangling from the fender of his saddle.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
“Why, what else? In case you attack and try to ravish me. I hear you Southern gals have short fuses.”
She didn’t ask if he was alluding to tempers or passions. Nor did she want to know.
“I’ll try so very hard to control myself,” she said dryly. “Seriously, what’s it for?”
“Bears and such,” he replied, with what she was sure was a sly smile.
“Grizzly bears?”
“Not likely. But there’s some good-size black bears. They take to the high country in summer.”
“Are you…allowed to shoot them?”
“Not when they’re mauling newspaper reporters. Look, if seeing a rifle gets you all nerve-frazzled, you’re in for some shocks. Bears are only one danger up there. We’ve got high-water fords to cross, plus talus slopes so slippery even goats fall to their death sometimes. Lower down we’ll have to watch for flash floods. And then—”
She wasn’t sure of it, but she sensed a brief hesitation here—a momentary glitch in the veneer of his cool, confident authority before he went on.
“And then there’s avalanches up higher.”
“Avalanches? But…I mean, will we be riding through snow?”
His hand hooded his gaze. “We shouldn’t have to. It’ll be just above us at our highest point in the pass. But big sheets of old winter pack can slide off the outcroppings and shelves, and can fall on…anybody that’s below,” he finished with a grim face, reining his mount around. Both horses stood prancing, impatient at the delay.
“Now I’m sick of all your damn questions,” he informed her. “We ain’t gonna talk our way through Eagle Pass. Now, either we go or I’ll drive you back to Mystery.”
Biting her tongue, she followed, wondering what had set the man off. Only one thing was clear: she was going to spend five long days with him in the middle of nowhere. She was sure going to have the chance to find all his fuses.
Well, ain’t she the big explorer, A.J. thought scornfully, slewing around in his saddle to watch Jacquelyn.
They were about two hours into their ride. She had halted Roman Nose beside the rotting timbers of an old head frame to dictate into her pocket recorder.
“I’m now passing the old Fitzsimmons-Phelps mine. Hazel told me it didn’t exist yet when Jake McCallum rode past here. The first gold ore they pulled out was so high grade you could see the veins of gold in it. So much ore, in fact, that the wagons hauling it required up to twenty mule teams. Teams so long the drivers had to ride the lead mule. One freighter claimed a man could get rich just by following the ore wagons and picking up the shake.”
Man alive, she has studied up plenty about those old times, he was forced to concede with grudging admiration. Nonetheless, the whole damn trip was nothing to him but one big cat-and-mouse game.
He had long despised the Rousseaux family and their summer-lodging, carpetbagging ilk. They had their permanent roots in Atlanta, yet felt they could lord it over everybody out in Montana. First the old man bought up the Mystery Gazette, and now he was trying to turn Mystery into a tract-house tourist mecca. And this high-toned daughter of his—wasn’t she all silky satin?
A stir in his loins suddenly ticked him off even more. He sure as hell didn’t want to play stallion to that Thoroughbred, no matter how beautiful she was. Hell, beautiful women were as easy to get for a rodeo man as a whore’s token in Deadwood. He’d had his share and then some. Sure he never kept them, but he wasn’t in it for the attachment.
No, beautiful women were around in heap and mounds. Women to love were actually pretty damn rare and something he wanted no part of. You loved; you lost. When he’d lost his parents in the blink of an eye, he never wanted to go through that agonizing gauntlet again. And the beautiful women, always around, made it real easy.
Gazing from the edge of his hat brim, he studied her. She was tiny but curvy. Just the way he liked a woman. The short-cropped hair revealed a fairylike delicacy to her face, but her soft, sensual, pink mouth and those damned sea-green eyes held no innocence. The mouth sometimes tightened in defense; the eyes filled with disapproval; but always a promise lingered in both, one that could pull a man toward her just by the darkness inside him.
She looked at him. The twist of her mouth proved she’d caught him staring this time.
But she ignored him and continued her essay.
Resenting her anew, he told himself she wouldn’t be swaggering around a few days from now. The delicate magnolia would lose a petal or two. He’d guarantee it.
“I’m also looking,” she narrated into her recorder, “at large patches of eroded slopes. Still denuded of timber, they are a legacy of that era. Some of the big mines had miles of tunnels. They had to be timbered against cave-ins. A few men got rich while the rest lived with the damage.”
A.J. removed his hat to whack at flies with it.
“Hey, Ms. Ace Reporter!” he called back to her. “Them ‘denuded’ trees will grow back by the time you finish yak-king to yourself! Let’s make tracks. Now!”
She sent him the same go-straight-to-hell-and-do-not-pass-go glower that he’d seen from almost the beginning of the trip. Unfazed, he chuckled as he kicked his horse into motion again.
She’s uppity now, he gloated. But she’s headed for a fall. And not just because her saddle girth, despite my clear warning, is way too loose.
In spite of her gloomy mind-set, Jacquelyn soon reveled in the glorious beauty of the day.
The trail they followed through the rolling foothills was now so seldom used that it had grown over with grass and ground cover. Yet, never bothering with a compass or map, A.J. used familiar landmarks to orient them.
She’d been a fool to fear this experience, she assured herself. The clear air was cool and bracing against her skin. And the magnificent mountains, looming just ahead of them now, bristled with conifers on their lower slopes.
They reached a small, dry chasm and crossed it on a stone footbridge. Soon they reached a quiet pool fed by a runoff brook.
A.J. reined in ahead of her and swung down from the saddle.
“We best water the horses and fill our canteens,” he told her. “This is the last low-country water hole.”
Jacquelyn, too, dismounted and dropped Roman Nose’s bridle so he could drink. She had to shade her eyes from the brilliant, late-afternoon sun.
Her good mood lulled her into a slightly less defensive frame of mind. Now she felt the strong presence of that other, more complete self trapped within her—the self who she knew was there, desperate to break through the thick layers of protective ice.
Watching him walk closer to the water, she again noticed the slight favoring
of his injured leg. She recalled Hazel’s description of his rodeo mishap, and a twinge of sympathy moved through her. While no rodeo devotee herself, she knew what rodeo was. She knew that saddle-bronc riding could be literally bone crushing. Just last month, up at the rodeo in Calgary, a contestant finished his ride and fell dead from the saddle.
“Hazel told me,” she called over to him, overcoming her natural reticence, “that your last injury was pretty bad. That it may even threaten your rodeo career.”
He turned away from the pool, twisting on the cap of a canteen. She saw a shadow move into his face.
“Hazel’s top-shelf,” he replied brusquely. “But she’s a woman, so sometimes her tongue swings way too loose.”
“Look, I didn’t mean to touch any nerves.”
“I guess where you come from, prying into other people’s personal lives is just conversation. But out here we call it being nosy.”
So much, she rebuked herself, for letting the ice thaw.
In the silence he nodded to her, once again all business. “There ain’t no more bridges up ahead. I’d advise you to reset your saddle and check that girth again.”
“I just checked it last time we stopped,” she told him. “Why don’t you worry about your own horse and let me tend to mine?”
He swung up and over, then reined his mustang around. He leaned forward and rested his muscular forearms on the saddle horn, watching her with that scornful twist to his handsome mouth.
“Yes’m, whatever y’all say,” he told her in an exaggerated parody of her accent. “From now on, I’ll just hush my li’l ol’ redneck mouth.”
Six
As a westering sun inched steadily toward the horizon, the two riders gradually left the foothills behind. Almost imperceptibly, they gained the front slopes of the mountains.
The going remained easy, at first. Mostly lush meadows dotted with wildflowers. And grass so tall that sometimes it literally polished their boots riding through it.
Jacquelyn’s mood remained ebullient despite her guide’s obvious hostility and surliness. The cool, sun-luscious air and grand, unending vistas more than compensated for the presence of the rigid, unyielding back of the cowboy she was forced to follow.
I couldn’t warm up to him, she assured herself, if we were cremated together.
However, one problem had begun niggling at her: night was coming on. She knew where they would camp, of course, because it was marked on the map and the itinerary Hazel sent along—the same spot where Jake McCallum camped last century.
But she was beginning to wonder what their sleeping arrangements would be like. Suddenly feeling vulnerable so far from civilization, she wished she had gotten the plan clear while they’d been still in her own driveway. With the sun falling on the trail, now seemed no time to ask.
In the gear, she had noticed two down-stuffed sleeping bags and a small pup tent among the stuff A.J. had tossed out of the truck. But only one tent. Did he intend that small tent for both of them, she wondered. If so, she’d be sleeping in the open.
“Spell the horses,” he called out, reining in ahead of her.
“Does everything have to be an order?” she asked. “We’re not soldiers on bivouac.”
He ignored her. He swung his leg over the cantle and dismounted, landing light as a cat. He began to unsaddle his horse.
“What…what are you doing?” she asked, angry at herself for stammering and revealing her sudden nervousness. “This isn’t the first campsite. I thought this was just a rest stop.”
“Sun’s still hot,” he replied curtly, tossing his saddle. “And so are the rocks. The saddle blankets are soaked with sweat. We don’t dry them out now, tomorrow we’ll have to put ’em on the horses wet.”
He stared at her with those intruding, intriguing eyes.
“Start thinking more about the horses and less about your damn fingernails,” he told her with blunt contempt.
“My grooming habits are none of your concern,” she retorted.
“But my horses are,” he shot out, “so pull that wet blanket off.”
Biting her tongue, she swung down, untied the girth and tugged the heavy saddle off. The cowboy was right—damn his eyes, she thought. Despite the cool breeze and low humidity, the horses had been steadily climbing. The blanket was soaking wet.
She copied him, spreading it out on some sun-heated boulders beside the trail. While the blankets baked dry, they curried the dried sweat from the ponies.
A.J. remained taciturn, his face buried in the shadow of his hat. She saw him stare at something farther above them on the slope. A group of pronghorn antelopes—perhaps six or seven—were picking their way down from the granite peaks high above, shrouded in clouds.
“Hmm,” he said, as if to himself. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“Pronghorns generally forage by themselves. You’ll rarely see a group moving as one like that.”
“Hunters?” she suggested.
“Nah, not up there—no access road. Might be some weather heading up.”
He didn’t sound worried about it. So she wouldn’t worry, not with the day so clear and glorious. It made bad weather seem as remote as a distant rumor of war.
But the day was waning, she reminded herself. Soon the awkward moment would arrive when they’d have to clarify certain matters—better to cool this noble savage’s blood now than later, when it might be more difficult.
The last thought sent a little flutter of nervousness through her stomach. Sure, Hazel vouched for the guy. But what did Hazel know about his sexual manners? The day wasn’t even over and he’d already eyed her enough to assess her bra cup size and had manhandled her with the thoroughness of a physician. If he thought he was going to bunk with her, too, he was dead wrong.
Jacquelyn cast about for some diplomatic way to broach the subject. But she finally simply blurted out, “What about…sleeping arrangements?”
His eyes flicked to hers, sly and knowing, and she blushed like a schoolgirl.
“No problem,” he assured her. “I figured we’d just sleep in a Tucson bed.”
“I…what’s that?”
“Y’ lie on your stomach and cover herself with your back,” he said from a deadpan.
She stared at him, not quite getting it.
He laughed.
“Seriously,” she said. “What—”
“You worry too much, Miss Rousseaux,” he tossed out.
“I’m a woman. I’ve a right to know sleeping arrangements.”
“Look, it’s damn easy for us men to control our carnal urges when there’s nothing special to urge us. There’s plenty of fillies in my stable, if you take my meaning. Don’t worry about me peeking at your cute little bare butt. I ain’t woman starved.”
“Why you arrogant, self-centered—”
“Blankets are dry enough,” he grunted, cutting her off. “Saddle up and spare me your guff.”
Fuming at her companion, she still did as ordered. But preoccupied by her anger, she failed to check the girth twice.
“Not too far from this big erosion gully,” Jacquelyn narrated into her pocket recorder, “is the spot where Jake’s horse stepped into a gopher hole. When the determined young pioneer broke his left arm in the fall, he set it himself with a canteen strap.”
The sun still showed, but only as a dull orange ball balanced on the western horizon. According to Hazel’s map, they would soon cross Crying Horse Creek. Then they would make their first camp.
The air was beautiful in the dying light, spun-gold gauze, softening all it touched like a flattering airbrush. Again, as she retraced Jake’s actual steps, the enchantment of the story assignment transported her, like listening to mystic chords.
“The love that Jake and Libbie McCallum felt for each other,” she spoke ardently to her recorder, “was matched by their love of this rugged but beautiful new country. One love melded into another, forming a complete, uninterrupted circle. It was, in one very rea
l sense, a love as big and grand and endless as the American West itself.”
She turned off the recorder and slipped it into a saddle bag. While she did so, she noticed A.J. suddenly pivoting around in his saddle. He gave her a long hard look, then resumed the trail.
“So what was that about?” she nudged.
“I guess I’m beginning to see why Hazel let you come on this trip. You really know how to put one word after another.”
He actually seemed to be complimenting her. Cautiously she replied, “I hope I can. That’s my profession.”
“Yeah, like you need a profession when your old man’s worth a mint.”
It was her turn to stare at him. Naturally, she told herself, the beast would have to ruin any good impulse he had.
She pressed her lips into a grim, straight line and did her best to ignore him.
Soon, however, another problem edged his surliness out of her thoughts. For some time now she had heard the increasing churn and roil of swiftly moving water. Abruptly, she rounded the shoulder of a big knoll, and her stomach went cold at the sight ahead.
“That’s Crying Horse Creek?” she lamented, straining to be heard above the noise. “‘Creek?’ My God, it’s a river!”
“Most of the year it’s just a creek,” he assured her. “But twice a year they open the catch-basin gates up at Point Cheyenne Reservoir. That water is snowmelt, so it’s damned cold. Push through it quick.”
“Push through it?” she repeated, dazed.
The clear water flowed so swiftly in the middle it was actually churning foam.
His horse was already heading down the grassy bank, showing little concern.
“Don’t do a thing except to hang on,” he called back over the rapid chuckle of the current. “Just sit your saddle and keep the reins slack. These horses are strong swimmers. They’ll do all the work.”
“I don’t think—oh!”
Seeing his companion wade into the raging creek, Roman Nose surged quickly ahead, catching her by surprise.
She managed to take hold of the saddle horn and regain her balance. But even as Roman Nose plunged into the creek, snorting, the gelding gave a sinewy little twist that sent her sliding to the right—or rather, sent the loose saddle sliding and her with it.
The Cowboy Meets His Match Page 5