Colorado High

by Joyce C. Ware

  COLORADO HIGH

  Joyce C. Ware

  Chapter One

  By ten o’clock Friday morning, Tessa Wagner had already received three phone calls telling her Scott Shelby was back in town. The fourth came from Jeannie Disbrow.

  “Shoot, Tessa!” She sounded real pissed. Jeannie never did like being low man on the totem pole.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Jeannie. Of course, the others didn’t actually see him—“

  “See him? Gawd, I could smell him! He passed right by the door of the shop, and I don’t mind telling you that cologne of his is a nice change from aroma de cow flop we get from most of the guys around here. I swear he turned every female head in the whole entire town square.”

  The “whole entire town square” being about a third the size of Cottonwood’s 4H rodeo arena, Tessa figured that didn’t add up to a whole lot of women, especially on a morning when most of them were up in Montrose at the City Market stocking up for the weekend.

  She hesitated before asking the obvious next question. It had, after all, been a lot of years. “Umm-mm, how does he look?”

  “Fabulous. I mean really fabulous. He’s still got that gold brush cut. By now he’s gotta be having it touched up, but that’s to be expected, right? I mean it is his trademark, after all. Super job, though. Bright but not brassy. And that cut . . . whoever did that never got his training in a Marine boot camp.”

  Tessa knew that in this case Jeannie’s remarks stemmed as much from professional interest as common garden curiosity. “Think you could duplicate it?” she asked, amused.

  “Gawd, I dunno, Tessa. I’d sure like the opportunity. But a guy like that... I bet he could tell Bill Clinton a thing or two about the price of haircuts!”

  A guy like that.

  Twenty years ago Scott Shelby had seen Tessa barrel-racing at Cottonwood’s annual Labor Day rodeo. An exhibition, actually, since she’d long since won every prize and title going. Sweaty and disheveled, she was leading her quarter horse towards the van where Barry, her husband, awaited them, when this classy-looking man walked up and told her she was the answer to his prayers.

  His fashion prayers, it turned out. As Tessa tried later to explain to Barry, Scott Shelby was neither a designer nor a glorified dressmaker. He’d never sketched the shape of a sleeve; he didn’t know what a gusset was, much less ever sewn one. What he did have was an unerring sense of style coupled with an ego-driven ability to think large. Articles in magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue would soon describe him as an entrepreneur; in Cosmo, the noun was preceded by sexy.

  Tessa, a high-energy person herself, had been astounded by him. “What the hell are you after?” she had asked.

  She remembered his lips twisting up in that cocky little smile of his. Smirk, Barry called it.

  “Not much. Winning the fashion loyalty of the American woman, for starters.”

  Starters being the huge, growing, largely overlooked market represented by women edging out of the miniskirt and hotpants age but not yet ready to throw in the towel. Successful professional women, and women married to success. Women who preferred tweed and denim to sequins.

  Scott’s entering bid, the one he signed her up for, was a line of cowpoke chic, pricey play-clothes for expensive playgrounds. Aspen, Vail, Sundance, Telluride. He’d already registered the name, Wild Westerns; what he lacked, until he saw Tessa, was the image.

  That first afternoon, after declaring her as dashing and authentic as the leather split skirts and hand-tooled boots he already had in production, he had hooked his arm cozily through hers, cut her glowering spouse dead, and continued crooning his siren’s song into her dazed ear.

  “In this business, it’s package or die,” he said, “and I want you to deliver mine tied up in a big luscious, long-legged, streaked-blond bow.”

  He paused to sweep his hand towards the high grasslands nudging the jag of peaks spread out against the blue September sky. “My range-riding Valkyrie!” he exclaimed. Then, peering down into her face, his fingers tapping apologetically on her forearm, she recalled him murmuring something about her name escaping him.

  “Tessa?” he echoed. “Tessa Wagner? Oh my God.” His ecstatic smile had dazzled her.

  “Do you still have that leather split skirt?” Jeannie was asking.

  “I have it,” Tessa said, “but Garland wears it. My size eight days are long gone, my friend.”

  Jeannie, whose weren’t, clicked her tongue. To Tessa, it conveyed a smugness she tried not to resent.

  “These days, seeing Garland—and Gavin, too, of course— it’s like looking in our high school yearbook,” Jeannie said. “Those twins of yours sure are chips off their daddy’s block. Barry had to be blind not to see it.”

  “Barry saw only what he chose to see.”

  There was a brief awkward silence.

  “Uh, did I tell you I saw Jed meet up with Scott Shelby? They went and sat at that broken-down table under the cottonwoods across from the shop, heads together, yammering away.

  Wouldn’t of thought those two’d have much to

  yammer about.”

  “Jed leases his grazing land, Jeannie.”

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot. That Jed. How’s his daddy these days?”

  “Cranky.”

  “That old man was born cranky, Tessa.”

  “Well, crankier then. Still thinks of himself

  as top bull.”

  “And Jed keeps letting him get away with it.”

  Jeannie sighed. “What a waste.”

  After Tessa hung up, she glanced out the window to see shreds of gray rapidly moving in high overhead. Even as she watched, they lowered and thickened, robbing the sky of its earlier cobalt hue and flattening the crags spiking up beyond the horse pasture into shadowless two-dimensionality.

  She rose from the well-scrubbed kitchen table and stood, undecided, her strong hands tightening on the back of the oak kitchen chair. God knows she’d worked up on Hayden’s Bald in weather a lot worse than this. In fact, this wasn’t “weather” at all, just a passing front . . . unexpected maybe, but nothing out of the ordinary for this time of year. She remained standing, seized by an inexplicable dismay that deepened as she caught sight of herself in the cracked mirror next to the sink. Her hair was still a streaky blond, thanks to Jeannie’s ministrations, but the lines radiating from the corners of her eyes . . .

  She narrowed them, blurring the tell-tale signs of the passing years into temporary oblivion. Damn Jeannie and her nattering on about Scott Shelby and split skirts and high school yearbooks . . .

  Tessa plucked Barry’s torn, stained, down-filled vest from the line of wooden hooks on the back of the door and shrugged into it. She snatched her lined leather gloves from the counter, slammed out into the late spring rawness, strode to the corral, and whistled up Turnip with the help of a measure of oats.

  The big rangy roan didn’t much like being saddled; he liked being mounted and ridden even less. But Tessa hadn’t chosen him for his disposition, and no one would choose him for his looks: with his ears flattened against his oddly lumpy head, his resemblance to his vegetable namesake was striking. What she needed was diversion, and Turnip always provided plenty of that.

  By the time they neared the top of the hill, Turnip had confined his antics to an occasional sideways scuttling, like the crabs Tessa had seen on her sole trip to the East Coast, North Carolina to be exact, where Scott had wanted her photographed in his Western gear on a rented, showy-looking horse galloping through the breaking surf with the Cape Hatteras lighthouse rearing up behind them. It hadn’t made any sense to her, but not much about the fashion industry did.

  As they topped the rise, she saw Jed Bradburn’s tall, rangy figure silhouetted against the cloud-shrouded peaks.
Turnip whinnied; Jed turned from the fence he was mending, waved, and leaned back against a battered pickup bristling with posts and barbed-wire, his lean frame assuming the familiar hipshot slouch her father had wryly characterized as the patience of Jed.

  Tessa frowned. Long-suffering is more like it.

  Jed grinned at her as she pulled Turnip up in front of him. He tilted his Stetson back on his head. Even this early in the season, his face was bronzy save for the white strip just below his hairline. “What made you choose that sorry excuse for a horse? I’d forgotten how ugly he is. Never could figure why Barry gave him grazing room.”

  “Barry used to say he was the ugliest son of a bitch he’d ever clamped onto. Ornery as hell, and not about to change his ways. That’s why Barry liked him . . . well, maybe ‘liked’ is the wrong word ...”

  “Tolerated?”

  “No-o-o, not exactly; Turnip tolerated him, maybe, but Barry . . . well, I think he sort of envied Turnip’s in-your-face meanness.”

  Jed’s eyebrows rose. “You’re saying Barry enjoyed being bitten and kicked at? I never thought of him as being a glutton for punishment.”

  “He stayed married to me, didn’t he?”

  Jed dropped his eyes; his fingers rubbed along the worn edge of the Stetson’s brim. “Lot of water’s flowed under the bridge in two years,” Jed said softly.

  “I swear, if you tell me not to speak ill of the dead—“

  “Jed’s eyes snapped up. “Don’t patronize me, Tessa.”

  They glared at each other.

  “Spilt milk, flowing water, whatever,” Tessa muttered. “We came up here to work; guess we’d best get at it.”

  Hayden’s Bald had been divided long ago into two unequal parts: Tessa had inherited the larger part of it on her parents’ untimely death; Jed’s adoptive parents owned the lesser, but the Hattons and the Bradburns had always shared the upkeep, and despite Barry’s grumbles about the inequities, Tessa had no wish to alter the arrangement, either then or now.

  They worked in silent practiced tandem at a chore shared for so many years it could be accomplished, if not quite in their sleep, with an ease as automatic as the making of the morning pot of coffee.

  “Garland’s coming home next week,” Tessa said. “Thursday, I think. Any chance of your coming to dinner? She asked especially.”

  Jed turned to look up at her. His hat brim hid his eyes, but she saw the corners of his mouth curve up. “Thursday?”

  “I think that’s what her letter said . . . I’ll check it again and call you.”

  “Yeah, do that.” He straightened and stretched; his smile became a grin. “The Queen of England said something about dropping in, but hell, I can always put her off. Need any help bringing the twins’ stuff home?”

  “Gavin’s not coming, and Garland’s roommate passes through here on her way home to Durango. They’re planning on driving all night from Boulder. I don’t like it much, but— “ she shrugged— “you know how it is.”

  Jed, who had spent four years at the university himself, allowed as how he did. “What’s Gavin up to?”

  “He found himself a summer job. An opportunity too good to pass up— his words, not mine. A Denver-based bigwig acted as adviser to a campus political group Gavin’s involved with. There’s an election coming up in the fall; he asked for Gavin’s help.”

  Jed pulled at his long Roman nose. “And he’s being paid for this? I thought that sort of thing was strictly volunteer.”

  “Apparently Gavin’s a lot better at it than most. Besides, it gives him a valid excuse for staying clear of the ranch.”

  “Hey, Tessa, that’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “I know that,” she said, thinking it helped to hear him say it. “Actually, it will be a great opportunity for him ... he has the interest, and what’s more important, the knack.”

  “Ever wonder what it’d be like being the mother of the president of these United States?”

  Turnip started at the sound of Tessa’s burst of laughter. “Never thought you had such a lively imagination, Jed.”

  “Stranger things have happened, Tessa.”

  His expression, suddenly sober, unsettled her. “You mean like you meeting up with Scott Shelby in the town square?”

  “God almighty, that Cottonwood grapevine sure beats a fax machine when it comes to speed! Nothing all that strange about me talking with Shelby, except it’s usually over the phone.”

  “That’s what I told Jeannie,” Tessa said, “but one of Scott’s wives, a regular customer of hers, lives on his Cottonwood ranch, so she assumed he’d lose interest in the property when he bought himself a showplace up in Telluride.”

  “Huh. If you ask me, Shelby would never turn entirely loose anything he might make a penny on. He used to practically invite my herd in to graze his land; now I’m paying top dollar.”

  “Worth it, isn’t it?” Tessa asked. “Best in the county, Dad used to say. You should have heard Barry on the subject. Envious?” Her waving arm encompassed the hilltop. “I swear he was greener’n this new spring grass.”

  “Oh, I heard all right. From Barry, both his brothers, and on one memorable occasion, old man Wagner, too. But you know how it is: who wants to pay top dollar for something you used to get at discount?”

  They grinned companionably at each other. Ranchers came in two basic styles: feckless or penny-pinching. Jed and Tessa always tried to strike a happy medium, but when push came to shove, neither of them hesitated to make their pennies cry uncle.

  “Jeannie said he’s looking pretty good.”

  “Shelby? I wouldn’t know about that. He must be, what, pushing sixty? Looks a whole lot younger though.” Jed frowned. “Unnatural, if you ask me.”

  “Sensible living, maybe,” Tessa suggested.

  “You believe that, next you’ll be telling everyone you saw Elvis flipping burgers at Nellie’s Delly.”

  “No-o-o, because I’d be too busy reviving Nell.” With the back of her gloved hand, she pushed away a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead, and peered up at the sky. “What do you say we call it a day, Jed? Those clouds come down any lower, I’ll think I’m at the seashore and start listening for foghorns.”

  “Quitter!” Jed jeered, but he wasted no time loading up the truck. “Call me about dinner with Garland, hear?”

  “Will do. Say hello to your dad for me.”

  “Come by and do it yourself, why don’t you?” “One of these days. I’m waiting on a delivery of feeder calves . . . Garland and I’ll be taking them on up to the summer camp end of June. If I expect to get top dollar for ‘em, they’ll need all the fattening time they can get.”

  “That’s only a couple of weeks away, Tessa. Snow’s still clogging the forest service road a lot short of your cabin.”

  “Hot spell’s predicted.” She held up crossed fingers. “Maybe we’ll get a nice even melt for a change.”

  Jed reached into the bed of his truck and pulled out a shovel. “If not,” he said, brandishing it, “we’ll, be spending the rest of the spring digging out the ditches, as usual.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bradburn,” Tessa said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.” She peeled off her gloves and thrust out her work-roughened hands. “You know those hand cream commercials on TV? I’ve been thinking of hiring mine out for the ‘before’ sequence.”

  “C’mon, Tessa. You look great, always have. Why do you suppose Scott Shelby plastered your photos all over creation?”

  “That was then, Jed. I doubt he’d pay me so much as a plugged nickel now.”

  “You made the man a damn fortune! I just hope you got to keep some of it.” She avoided his eyes, her lips tightening. She reached for Turnip’s reins, yanked the startled horse towards her, and swung into the saddle. “What I got paid and what I do with it is none of your business.”

  “No, I guess not.” He threw the shovel back in the truck. “Don’t know how I could have thought different.”

&nb
sp; Jed climbed into the cab, gave Tessa a perfunctory wave, and drove off down the hill.

  Turnip plodded in the truck’s wake between the silvery ribbons of tire-flattened grasses, his briefly aroused spirits dampened by the thickening drizzle. Knowing the horse could make his way home unaided, Tessa allowed the reins to hang slack along Turnip’s drooping, extended neck. She pulled the poncho from the bag hanging from the saddle horn and fumbled into it, swearing as her hair caught in the grippers. One end of the cord securing the hood had disappeared into its tunnel, forcing her to hold the flapping ends in one hand. She squinched her eyes against the rain the drizzle had become; the angle of her neck paralleled her mount’s.

  The year seems to have lost its way, she thought. Despite the sudden greening and the white cups of the marsh marigold starring the high meadow wetlands, despite the June-captioned page of the wall calendar in her kitchen, it felt more like March.

  As if to confirm her doleful ruminations, a pellet of sleet stung the back of her hand. A moment later, assaulted by a blast of the tiny icy globules, Turnip snorted, tossed his head, and prodded by Tessa’s impatient heels, bolted for home.

  * * * *

  After turning Turnip into the corral—where he kicked back at her before galloping off to harass the other horses—Tessa started a fire in the kitchen’s potbellied stove, switched the electric range on under the tea kettle, checked the notes penciled in on the calendar, and called Jed.

  “Thursday still okay with you?” she asked.

  “What time?”

  “Well, if you want a beer first, make it five; if not, five-thirty or six. Garland always wants that pot roast of mine her first night home, so suppertime’s flexible.”

  “You got anything to go with that beer?”

  “You mean like munchies?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Pretzels, chips, nuts maybe. Nothing fancy.”

  “I’m not a fancy man, Tessa.”

  His tone was reproachful. She felt a flash of irritation. “You have to tell me that?”

  “Hey, I just- “

  “I’ve known you all my life, Jed Bradburn. ‘I’m not a fancy man, Tessa.’ “ Her voice was a gruff caricature. “For God’s sake.”