The Rancher Meets His Match

by Patricia McLinn

  Despite herself, hearing that his overtures to her were something extraordinary brought a deeper, richer warmth to Hannah’s blood than coffee had ever managed. How tempting to think she was special to Dax. Even though it was foolish.

  “Cambria, it’s not like that. He’s nice to me and he answers my questions about ranching and asks about my life—” And when his lips touch mine I forget not only what we’re talking about, but where I am and complex things like how to stand and breathe. “And even if it were, uh, like that, I’m not prepared to get involved and I’m not interested in a vacation fling.”

  “Sure, sure, you said that before.” Cambria tilted her head and raised her eyebrows. Hannah had once seen a cat who’d cornered a mouse with that identical expression on its face. “But since it’s not like that, there’s no harm in taking him up on his offer to go riding, is there? It’s a great way to see beautiful country. It’s as simple as that.”

  * * * *

  Hannah perused the big-boned spotted horse in front of her from its black-splotched nose to its scraggly tail. In between came a very broad—and very high—back. She was expected to sit on that? Even when it moved?

  How had she let Cambria talk her into this? True, her boss’s wife’s logic had backed her into a comer and her boss had thrown away the key by declaring that he had absolutely nothing for her to do this afternoon. But that didn’t mean she had to actually drive to the Circle CR and present herself at one o’clock with a declaration that she intended to take Dax up on his offer to show her Kearny Canyon.

  It had seemed brave and devil-may-care at the time, and a way to prove to Cambria that her suspicions were totally unfounded. Now it seemed like one of her less successful decisions.

  “He’s awful big.”

  “Spock’s the mildest horse we’ve got.”

  Dax sounded reassuring, but he hadn’t looked at her directly since she’d arrived. Maybe that was just as well. He’d rather unnerved her when he’d slowly turned at the sound of her car climbing the incline to the barn area. He’d watched the car—or maybe her inside the car, she hadn’t been able to tell—with a steady, complete stare until she’d gotten out and started toward him.

  “Spock?”

  “ ‘Star Trek.’ The ears. Will named him. Then he started naming horses after space missions. Mercury, that’s his gray mare. And that—” Dax tipped his head to an adjoining corral where a young horse of a burnished red watched them with great interest “—is Apollo.”

  “So Will’s interested in space?”

  “Was. You ready?”

  She was nervous, but not nervous enough to miss that switch of subject. But it could wait. She had more immediate concerns. She eyed the distance from the ground to the stirrup and from the stirrup to the horse’s back.

  “Do you have something I can stand on?”

  “Me.” Loosely holding Spock’s reins in his left hand, he moved beside her, bent one knee and squatted slightly, presenting his well-muscled thigh as a nearly level surface. He patted the denim faded nearly to gray better than halfway up his thigh. “Right here.”

  “I don’t think—”

  His right hand wrapped around her upper arm and drew her toward him.

  “Left foot. Now.”

  She succumbed to the command in his voice and put her left foot where he said. Her hand went to his shoulder automatically for balance. Just as automatically, she recognized the solid power that rested below her hand. As she bent her other knee to get more lift, her toes nearly nestled in the crease between his thigh and crotch. Between that and his straightening as she started to jump, she had more than enough lift.

  She dropped in the saddle with a soft “oof.” Spock twitched his tail and sighed patiently. Hannah found that very reassuring. She took the reins from Dax and searched for the stirrups with her toes. He tugged on the straps of the saddle and stirrups, checking the fit, while she carefully did not look at him. He had swung up into his saddle and maneuvered the tan horse with the black tail and mane that he called Strider next to her before she settled.

  “We’ll take it slow, Hannah.”

  For an instant, she thought his words referred to something other than their ride. Then he went on.

  “But if something happens, hang on to the horn and Spock’ll find his way home.”

  Startled, she looked up. “What could happen?”

  He shrugged. “Probably nothing. But you can’t count on probably. If you’re on foot, follow the water.” He gestured toward the line of water parallel to the road that she might not have noticed amid clumps of pasture grass if it hadn’t enjoyed the company of cottonwood trees in spots.

  “The stream?”

  “Irrigation ditch.” Count on Dax Randall not to pretty up the terminology. “‘Round here, long as you follow water, you’ll ’most always come out somewhere. There’s not so much water that we can let any go nowhere.”

  “Now you’re really worrying me.”

  “No need.” He tipped his head back. “Clouds look clear.”

  “You read clouds?”

  “Folks out here do. You should be worried if you went off with someone who didn’t respect the sky and land. And real worried if you went off with someone who didn’t tell you how to get back on your own.”

  The comer of his mouth tucked in and a gleam of amusement glinted from his dark eyes. Oh, yes, Dax Randall was one attractive cowboy when he let himself be.

  Spock’s loose, slightly rolling motion let her relax enough to expand her field of vision farther than between his ears.

  They headed west, toward the rumpled spine of the Big Horn Mountains. Sweeps of green fir trees jostled with patches of silvered tan of dried range grass. At the peaks, she noticed splotches of white. Snow. It was hard to remember on a golden, warm day like this that fall approached. Occasional slashes of rock’s lighter color indicated the canyon clefts left by eons of that melting snow.

  Movement caught her eye and, for an instant, she thought she was seeing things—that one of those green sweeps had shifted places on the mountain. Ah, now she saw that the patch of dark was the shadow of a cloud passing silently across the blue sky. It fascinated her. She watched the shape shift and change as it flowed over the rolling ground, disappearing behind the rise in front of them, then bursting over it and engulfing them.

  The air around her cooled, but only for an instant, then the shadow moved on and sunlight bathed them once more. Twisting in the saddle, she watched the cloud and its shadow continue their busy progress. When she turned back, she realized she was smiling. She would never use a moment like that in an advertising campaign—it was too ephemeral, too vague, too odd. But she felt connected to this land in a way she hadn’t a few minutes ago.

  “How long has your family had this ranch?” She had turned to face Dax to ask the question and found him watching her.

  “Nearly fifty years this time.”

  “This time?”

  “My great-great-grandfather started this ranch. He homesteaded the land from there—” He pointed behind them to the skeleton of a huge cottonwood, still impressive despite broken off limbs. “To the road. The next couple generations added to it some, mostly up.” He tipped his head toward the mountains that rose above and around them. “Valley land cost more.”

  He appeared totally at home on horseback, his rear settled well into the saddle, his back straight but relaxed, his leg slightly bent at the knee, the reins resting in his left hand. He looked around, apparently at ease as Strider walked along beside Spock. Yet she sensed that one sound, one movement, one thought, could spark both horse and rider. She was almost tempted . . . just to see it.

  “What happened?”

  “My great-grandfather built the place up, then my grandfather sold it and moved his family to town when my father was a teenager. He swore the day they moved that he’d get the place back, and he did. But he didn’t forgive his father. Claimed my grandfather sold his birthright because he wanted an easi
er life.”

  “How old were you when the family moved back to the ranch?”

  “Happened before I was born.”

  “Your father must have loved this land.”

  “More than anything living.”

  The way he said it chilled Hannah. Totally uninflected, as matter-of-fact as if he’d said the sky was blue. Not a bitter or harsh note crept in, yet he had as good as said that his father had loved the land more than he’d loved his family.

  “So that’s how you learned about ranching, by working with your father?”

  “Until I was old enough to leave.”

  “But you came back because you thought it was the right thing to do for Will?”

  “Yup.”

  A single, laconic syllable that somehow told the story of a man who dearly loved his son. If he thought something was the right thing to do for Will, he needed no more reason to do it. The missing element in his accounting remained Will’s mother.

  And for that matter, what about Dax’s mother? She lived in town with June, that’s what Irene Weston had said, so why didn’t she figure into Dax’s history? What had happened to her?

  “You must not have hated ranching too much if you came back to bring your son up here.”

  “Never said I hated ranching.”

  No, he’d escaped his father, not this land, during the years in the city he’d told her about the first night. That was clear. And very sad. Hannah thought of her father, of strong hands wrapped gently over hers to teach her how to grip a tennis racket, of a beaming face in the audience of her sophomore play, of a strong arm under her hand as she walked down the aisle to marry Richard.

  The man beside her apparently had no comparable memories.

  “June and your mother live in town together, right? So you must see your mother—’’

  “Gets steeper here, we better go single file. I’ll lead.”

  And that just goes to show that Dax Randall is fully capable of slamming a door in your face even in the middle of the great out-of-doors, Hannah thought.

  The path narrowed to a track worn deep into the earth and barely as wide as Spock. On their right, rock rose in a hillside topped with what resembled the works of a mad stone mason with pretensions of topiary—her imaginative eye spotted open archways, gigantic toadstools and crumbling castle towers.

  The trail curved away from the water, circling a boulder about the size of a house. When they came back to the water, it had widened and grown noisier. It rushed over a rock-strewn bed, protesting the impediments in its path vocally and with froths of irritation. Hannah saw that the irrigation ditch they had followed was a minor offshoot of this stream. The water came down from the mountains to their right, dividing behind the huge rock they’d circled, with the main part curving to the south and the ditch heading east.

  “Thought we’d rest here awhile. If you want,” Dax added as an apparent afterthought.

  “Yes. This is lovely.”

  He dismounted in one fluid motion, then held Spock’s head while she slid down with considerably less grace but no catastrophes.

  “There’s a blanket and some food in here,” he said, handing her a leather pack he unstrapped from behind his horse’s saddle. He also unhooked a canteen, which he set on a well-shaded rock. “I’ll tend the horses.”

  She stood where he’d left her, and watched as he led the horses through the rocks bordering the water. When they’d had their fill, he took them to an open area to one side of where she was, but within sight. He squatted down, first by Strider’s front legs, then by Spock’s, doing something with lengths of leather with a series of buckles. When he straightened, she saw he’d hobbled their legs, limiting their wandering ability.

  Only then did he turn to her.

  He frowned slightly, apparently in puzzlement. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine, why?”

  “Thought you’d have the blanket spread and the food out. But if your legs feel . . .”

  “Well, my legs do feel as if they’re having trouble adjusting to no longer being molded to that saddle. They’re not used to being in that position.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew they were a mistake, sparking images of what might put her legs in a similar position. He nicked a look at her, but said nothing. He didn’t have to. Her face burned and the blender in her stomach kicked up a fuss. “I mean they’re wobbly, but I guess I just didn’t know the chores you expected me to perform. The women’s work, I suppose.”

  Being careful not to make eye contact, she pulled the blanket from the top of the pack and shook it out. Dax caught the opposite side in midair and stretched it so it came to the ground smoothly.

  “Hannah, I didn’t mean—I’m no great talker. Never have been, and now I’m rusty—”

  “No, I’m sorry, Dax. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I got caught up in watching you—what you were doing,” she added hurriedly. Her leg muscles protested as she sat tailor-fashion on the blanket, then relaxed. The guilt of taking out her embarrassment on him would take longer to ease. “Why not tie their reins to a branch?”

  “You can lose a lot of reins that way. If anything startles them enough to run, they’ll snap leather reins.” He handed her a small apple he pulled out of the pack as he spoke. “And anything that moves can startle them.”

  He bit into his own apple, then held it between his teeth as he pulled out a large plastic bag filled with nuts and dried fruit, then a plastic bottle of water. He handed her the water. “June thought you’d prefer this to a canteen.” Before she could answer around the bite she’d taken of her own tart, juicy apple, he went on. “Ninety-nine leaves can blow across their path without any bother, and the hundredth one comes along and you’d think it was a tornado, fire and flood rolled into one.”

  “Can’t they wander away?”

  “Yeah. Some even get pretty good at running with hobbles. But usually slows ’em down enough that you can catch ’em.” The twitch at the comer of his mouth appeared. “Especially Spock.”

  She grinned at him. “Just my speed.”

  They finished their apples without conversation, but not in silence. The water, the breeze and the birds had plenty of comments to fill their ears. She started to tuck the apple core into a plastic bag to throw out when they got back, but Dax stopped her with a hand to her wrist.

  “We’ve got our own recycling system out here. C’mon.” He stood easily and tugged her wrist so she joined him, still holding the sticky core between her ring finger and her thumb. His hand easily encircled her wrist. His touch was warm and firm.

  Spock lifted his head. Strider kept grazing.

  “Hold your hand out,” Dax ordered. She hesitated. She had the oddest urge to hold her wrist immobile, as if moving it might break some invisible force field. He clearly had no such qualms. He molded his big palm across the back of her hand and tipped it so the core faced up. “Put it in your palm.” The core dropped to her palm. “Keep your hand flat. Like this.”

  He curled the tips of his fingers over hers and bent them back gently, so her palm arched up, offering the apple core to Spock. Soft, moist lips with tickling whiskers brushed across her palm and delicately removed the core.

  Without releasing her hand, Dax put the remains of his apple, which he’d held in his other hand, onto her palm. “Now Strider.”

  The horse raised its head at hearing its name, or perhaps at sensing the potential for plunder. Before Hannah could blink, Strider’s black-maned head swooped down and she felt the same sensation of soft, moist lips and tickling whiskers across her sensitive palm, but this time a new sensation followed, like being attached to the business end of a vacuum cleaner.

  Half startled, half amused, she made a sound, and Dax immediately cupped her core-offering hand protectively in his and stepped between her and Strider

  “You okay?” he demanded.

  “I’m fine.” She chuckled as she straightened her hand, still resting inside Dax’s. “He obviously believes
in the motto ‘good to the last drop.’ I don’t think he left an atom of that apple.”

  Dax stroked the pad of his thumb slowly across her palm. Maybe to make sure it was okay, the same way he’d run his hand down the leg of the horse named Merc yesterday evening. But she was positive Merc hadn’t reacted the same way—with a shiver that skittered from her palm, up her arm, across her shoulders, then straight to the tips of her breasts.

  “Greedy.” Dax’s voice came as a low rumble. His eyes met hers a moment, then his gaze dropped. She couldn’t be sure where he focused, but her nipples tightened abruptly, as if they were sure.

  “Wha—what?”

  Dax cleared his throat. “Strider. He’s greedy when it comes to apples.”

  Hannah muttered something she suspected was both unintelligible and unintelligent, withdrew her hand from Dax’s unresisting hold and wiped it down the side of her jeans. That removed the slight remnants of apple stickiness and horse kiss, but it did not stop the tingling.

  Rusty, he’d said? Maybe. But beneath the rust, Dax Randall had plenty of top quality raw material to work with.

  As they returned to their seats on the blanket, she looked around to keep herself from considering that raw material too closely.

  Bushes and trees turning to autumn shades of gold and lemon with flashes of orange hugged the creek’s banks, apparently more grateful for the water than the boulders and rocks that battled it. At a curve in the creek, a lone tree bent over the water as if trying to reach the other side. Rough, sage-speckled slopes rose sharply, stepping back so the sky opened wide above them.

  The sunlight glowed off the bright-colored vegetation like a beacon and glinted clear fireworks off the water.

  She lifted her face to the sky. A speck in the clear blue left a thin trail. A jet heading west.

  “Think of everything those people are missing.”

  “What people?”

  She gestured to the jet. “The ones who consider anything between New York and L.A. fly-by territory. The ones who think it’s all a wasteland of boredom to be suffered through with drinks, phone calls back to the office and free movies they belittle. The ones like my ex-husband.”