A Man of His Word

by Merline Lovelace

  “And you are?”

  “Reece Henderson.”

  “Oh.” The straw Stetson that shaped his head as if made for it had led her to assume he was a local. “You’re the dam engineer.”

  From the way his eyes narrowed, she must have put a little too much emphasis on dam. Either that, or their exchange of terse faxes had annoyed him as much as it had her.

  “When you didn’t show for our meeting this morning,” he said curtly, “I called your assistant and woke him up.”

  So much for the massive search-and-rescue effort Sydney had assumed Zack set in motion!

  “The kid told me you’d driven out to the canyon. He seemed to think you might have fallen into an artistic trance and gotten lost.”

  “I don’t fall into artistic trances,” she said with another smile, slightly strained but still trying hard for grateful.

  One black brow lifted in patent disbelief.

  “All right,” she admitted grudgingly, “I did leave a pot of red beans and rice on the stove a couple of months ago while I was working a treatment, but the fire didn’t do any real damage.”

  When he only looked at her through those cool blue eyes, Sydney gave Zack a mental kick in the shins. How much had her assistant told this guy, anyway?

  “Maybe I did start out for San Diego last week and didn’t realize I was going in the wrong direction until I passed Santa Barbara,” she said defensively, “but I was outlining a script in my mind and sort of got caught up in it.”

  With a little snort that sounded suspiciously like disgust, her rescuer strolled back to the Jeep to untie the rope. “Is that what you were doing last night when you drove off a cliff?”

  “I was not in any kind of a trance last night.”

  Well, she amended silently, maybe she had let her imagination go for a while, particularly when the wind whistled eerily through the canyon and raised goose bumps all over her body. Henderson didn’t need to know that, though.

  “As I told you, there was a boulder in the road, a chunk of sandstone. I swerved to avoid it.”

  “If you say so, lady.”

  Gratitude was getting harder and harder to hang on to. Sydney folded her arms across her now-scruffy yellow T-shirt.

  “I do say so.”

  He straightened, the rope half-looped in his hand, his eyes as sharp and slicing as lasers. “Then maybe you’ll also tell me why you were driving around in a restricted area without a permit? A permit that I had intended to issue at our meeting this morning, by the way.”

  That “had intended” caught Sydney’s attention and shoved everything else out of her mind. The terror of sliding over a cliff, the long, frightening hours alone with only a piñon tree for company, the crab-walk up a sheer rock wall fell away. All that remained was her absolute determination to capture the magic of the ruins on videotape…for her dad, for herself, for the joys and tears they’d shared.

  Every inch a professional now, she cut right to the heart of the issue. “I apologize for going around you, Mr. Henderson. I arrived in Chalo Canyon earlier than planned yesterday afternoon. I tried to contact you for permission to drive out to the site, but you were out of town. At a wedding, or so they told me.”

  “So you drove out, anyway.”

  “After I talked to one of your engineers. He said he thought it would be okay. I believe his name was Patrick Something.”

  It would be Patrick, Reece thought in disgust. Young, breezy, overconfident of his brand-new civil engineering degree that hadn’t yet been tested by thousands of tons of wet concrete and millions of yards of rushing water. Reece finished looping the rope.

  “Apology accepted this time, Ms. Scott. Just don’t go around me again. I’m chief engineer on this project. The responsibility for the safety of everyone involved, including you and your crew, rests with me.”

  “It’s Sydney,” she returned, seething inside at the undeserved lecture, but determined to hammer out a working relationship with this bullheaded engineer.

  “Sydney,” he acknowledged with a little nod. “Now we’d better get you back to town so you can have those scrapes and dents checked out. In the meantime, I’ll get hold of the county sheriff and let him know about the accident.”

  “I’d prefer to conduct our planned discussion before I hitch a ride into town. If this sunlight holds and the rest of my crew arrives on time, I want to shoot some exterior footage this afternoon.”

  Reece stared at her across the Jeep’s hood. For God’s sake, was she for real? She’d just spent the night perched in a tree. Her baggy fatigue pants and yellow T-shirt looked like they’d been worn by someone on the losing side of the last war. Her tangled, dark brown mane hung in rats’ tails on either side of her face…a face, he admitted reluctantly, made remarkable by wide green eyes, high cheekbones and a mouth a man could weave some pretty lurid fantasies around.

  Not Reece. Not after all he’d heard about Sydney Scott. He’d make damned sure he didn’t weave fantasies of any kind about this particular package of trouble. That tug he felt low in his belly was grudging admiration for her sheer guts, nothing more.

  “All right. We’ll drive back to the dam and go over schedules.” He reached into the Jeep and tossed her the mobile phone. “Here, you’d better call your assistant and let him know you’re okay while I block the road.”

  With the rope looped over one arm, he rooted around in the back of the Jeep for the toolbox he never traveled without. Inside was a thick roll of electrical tape. It wasn’t red, but it would have to do as a hazard warning until he could get a crew out here to erect permanent barriers.

  “Zack? It’s Sydney.”

  Her voice carried to him at the rear of the Jeep, attractive enough now that most of the croak had disappeared.

  “No, I didn’t get lost. I, er, drove off a cliff.”

  She caught Reece’s sardonic look and turned her back.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Really. Honest. I swear. Just get hold of the insurance company, okay? Make sure our on-location liability coverage extends to rented Blazers that now reside at the bottom of a river gorge. And arrange for another vehicle. I want to do some site shots this afternoon.”

  Reece turned away, shaking his head. This was one single-minded female. He’d remember that in future dealings with her.

  “It’s a long story,” she told her assistant, scooping her tangled hair back with one hand. “I’ll fill you in on the details later. What have you heard from Tish and the others? Noon? Good! Tell them to be ready to roll as soon as I get back. What time is it now?”

  Her little screech of dismay followed Reece to the vertical outcropping a few yards away. Reddish limestone striated with yellow and green pushed upward. Hardened by nature, sculpted by time, it formed a wall of oddly shaped rock. Too often wind and rain toppled smaller segments of these formations and sent them tumbling down, which in turn caused bigger pieces to break off.

  Pale gashes showed where the rock had broken loose last night. Reece fingered the marks, frowning, then surveyed what remained of the road at this point. The stone formations butted out, making it almost impossible to see around the curve. A driver couldn’t have chosen a worse point to go head-to-head with a fallen rock.

  Edging past the narrow neck, he blocked the road off from the other side. He did the same on the Jeep side. His insides still were tight from the narrowness of her escape when he returned.

  Sydney buried a sigh at the scowl on her rescuer’s face as he strode toward her. She had to work with this guy for the next few weeks. They were not, she decided, going to rank up there among the most enjoyable weeks of her life. With any luck, she and Henderson wouldn’t have to see each other again after today.

  That hope sustained her during the short, silent ride to the Chalo River Dam. She’d seen the massive structure many times before, of course. During the years her father had served as fish and game warden for the state park that enclosed the reservoir, he’d taken her by boat and by car when he went
to check water levels and shoot the breeze with the power plant operators.

  And when the reservoir had been emptied ten years ago, leaving the dam naked and glistening in the sun, she’d attempted to capture its utilitarian starkness as well as the Anasazi ruins on film. Of course, she remembered with a wry twist of her lips, that was before her foolish infatuation with Jamie Chavez had blurred both her vision and her purpose.

  She didn’t have that problem now. Now she saw the curved structure through an artist’s eye trained to recognize beauty in its most elemental state. The contrast of whitened concrete against reddish-yellow cliffs made her hands itch for a camera. The symmetry of the arch, with its gated spillways flanking each abutment, pleased her sense of proportion.

  The air-conditioned chill of the administration building pleased her even more. Sydney took a moment for her eyes to adjust from dazzling sunlight to dim interior before accepting the mug Reece handed her.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’d better save your thanks until you taste what’s in it,” he commented dryly. “My guys swear they can use this stuff to patch the dam if we run short of concrete.”

  The sludgelike coffee carried enough caffeine to make it worth the effort of swallowing.

  “Speaking of patching,” Sydney hinted broadly, “when do you plan to start?”

  He shot her another of those sardonic looks, and gestured to a government-issue metal chair beside an equally nondescript desk. She carried her coffee over with her, careful to keep it away from the charts and clipboards precisely aligned on the desktop.

  Tossing his hat aside, Henderson forked his fingers through his pelt of black hair before pulling out one of the clipboards. The tanned skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled with concentration as he skimmed an acetate status sheet filled with grease-pencil markings.

  “The water passed the halfway mark just after 6:00 a.m. this morning.”

  Sydney attempted a quick a mental calculation. The village nestled in an opening in the cliff face fifty feet or so above the riverbed. If the waters had receded halfway down the cliff face already, they’d reach the ruins when? Eight tomorrow morning? Nine?

  Hell! There was a reason she’d routinely cut her science and math classes in college and now carried a really good calculator in her purse at all times. The problem was that at this particular moment both purse and calculator rested amid the wreckage of the Blazer.

  “When can I expect to see the ruins?”

  “If we don’t get any more storms like last night’s, the reservoir should empty down to the river level by noon tomorrow. The cave that contains the ruins is some fifty feet above the riverbed. I calculate the village will start to emerge at approximately 9:24.”

  “Nine twenty-four? Not 9:23, huh? I could probably use that extra minute.”

  He didn’t appear to appreciate her feeble attempt at humor. “I’m an engineer. Precision ranks right up there with timeliness in our book. And safety.” He leveled her a sardonic look. “Try not to drive off any more cliffs, Ms. Scott.”

  “Sydney,” she reminded him, shrugging off the sarcasm as her mind whirled. Thinking of the exterior scenes she wanted to shoot this afternoon and the sequencing for tomorrow’s all-important emergence, she only half absorbed Reece’s deep voice.

  “We’ve detected a stress fracture on the right lower quadrant of the dam’s interior. Depending on my exterior damage assessment, we may have to blast some of the old section and pour new concrete. Check in with me each morning before you come out to the site, and I’ll let you know the status and whether I want you in the restricted area.”

  That got her attention.

  “Each morning?” she yelped. “What happened to your engineering precision here? I need a little more notice than that to plan my daily takes.”

  “Call me the night before, then. That’s the best I can do until we complete the damage assessment.”

  “Okay, okay. Give me your number. My little black book with all my contacts is at the bottom of the gorge right now.”

  Along with all her working files. Thank goodness she always kept complete electronic records of her projects on her laptop, which she’d left back at the motel. She patted her pockets, searching for a pencil before borrowing one from the holder on the desk. Like all the others in the round holder, it was sharpened to a razor tip—another engineering quirk, she guessed.

  “You can reach me at the office, on my mobile, or at the Lone Eagle Motel.”

  Sydney scribbled down the numbers as he reeled them off. “That’s where we’re staying, too.”

  “I know.”

  The dry response brought her head up.

  “Chalo Canyon’s a small town, Ms. Scott…Sydney. That’s the only motel in town.”

  She was well aware of that fact. She was also aware, as well, of the slight chill in his voice. She had a good idea what had caused it.

  “And?” she asked coolly.

  His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “And people in small towns like to talk, even to strangers. I’ve been hearing about your return to the Chalo Canyon for several weeks now.”

  “About my departure from said canyon ten years ago, you mean?”

  He leaned back, his long legs sprawled under the desk. The chair squeaked with his weight as he regarded her through eyes framed by ridiculously thick black lashes.

  “That, too.”

  Sydney had come a long way from the hopelessly romantic nineteen-year-old. She wasn’t running away this time, from Sebastian or Jamie or herself. Nor, she decided grimly, from this chief engineer.

  “Listen, Mr. Henderson…”

  “Reece.”

  “Listen, Reece. What happened ten years ago is, if you’ll excuse the lame pun, water over the dam. Something I’d like very much to forget.”

  “Folks around here seem to want to remember it.”

  “That’s their problem, not mine.” She leaned forward, jabbing the air with the pencil to emphasize her point. “And even though it’s none of your business, I’ll tell you that the only reason I came back to Chalo Canyon is to capture the ruins on videotape. I started the project a decade ago. This time I intend to finish it.”

  He studied her through hooded eyes. “Why is this particular project so important to you that you’d spend ten years planning it?”

  Sydney forced down the lump that tried to climb into her throat. Her father’s death was too recent, the scar still too raw, to talk about it with strangers.

  “I’m a documentarian,” she said with a tight edge to her voice. “Like you, I take great pride in my work. By themselves, the ruins emerging from their long sleep make a good story. Supplemented with historical background material on the Anasazi and the legend of the Weeping Woman of Chalo Canyon, I can craft a good story into a great one.”

  She pushed to her feet.

  “Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to hitch a ride back to town. The rest of my crew is supposed to arrive around noon, and I want to be ready to roll as soon as they get here.”

  It was, Reece decided as he watched her drive off with one of his underlings, an impressive performance.

  He might even have believed her if he hadn’t been sitting front row, center stage when she made her grand entrance at the Lone Eagle Café some eight hours later.

  Chapter 3

  L ike the clientele it catered to, the Lone Eagle Café made no pretensions to elegance. Most of its business came from locals, the rest from pleasure boaters and fishermen who passed through town on their way to or from excursions on the vast man-made lake behind the dam. Occasionally work crews hunkered in and made the motel and café their headquarters during visits to the hydroelectric plant powered by the Chalo River.

  Reece had stayed at the motel during his initial site survey last winter and again during the preplanning phase of the dam’s inspection and repair a few months ago. He’d returned three weeks ago to supervise the project itself. By now he pretty well knew the café’s menu
by heart, and had settled on the rib-eye steak and pinto beans as his standard fare.

  The beef came from Sebastian Chavez’s spread north of town, or so he’d been told by the friendly, broad-hipped Lula Jenkins, who, along with her sister, Martha, co-owned and operated the Lone Eagle Motel and Café. The pinto beans, Lula had advised, were grown on a local farm irrigated by water from the Chalo River Reservoir.

  “And if you want to keep on shoveling in these beans,” she reminded Reece as she plunked his over-flowing plate down in front of him, “you’d better see that you get that reservoir filled in time for the fall planting.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Folks hereabouts depend on that water. Depend on the revenues from boaters and fishermen, too.”

  “I know.”

  Inviting herself to join him, Lula eased her comfortable bulk into the chair opposite Reece’s. Her heavy-lidded brown eyes, evidence of the Native American heritage shared by so many in this region, drilled him from across the green-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth.

  “How long will it take to restock the reservoir with fish after you boys get done messing with the dam?”

  Reece’s nostrils twitched at the tantalizing aroma rising from his steak. He hadn’t eaten since his hurried breakfast of diced-ham-and-egg burritos, wolfed down during the drive out to the dam just after dawn this morning. Despite the rumbling in his stomach, however, he knew his dinner would have to wait a while longer. Lula’s question wasn’t an idle one. It echoed the worries of a small town that depended on the Chalo River Reservoir for its livelihood.

  Reece had prepared detailed environmental-and economic-impact assessments as part of his prep work for the repair project. He’d also conducted a series of meetings with local business and property owners to walk concerned parties through the process, step by step. Slides and briefings didn’t carry quite the same impact for the people involved as seeing their water supply disappear before their eyes, though.

  As the nation’s fifth-largest electric utility and the second-largest wholesale water supplier, the Bureau of Reclamation’s network of dams and reservoirs generated more than forty billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and delivered over ten trillion gallons of water each year. One out of five farmers in the western states depended on this water for irrigation to produce their crops. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of sports fishermen and recreationists plied the man-made lakes behind the dams, contributing their share to the economic fabric of communities like Chalo Canyon.