“Salt,” he admitted, grinning.
He shoved hard on the persistent cow’s neck. She heaved a barn-sized sigh and ambled back to join the other Angus.
“Must be time to put out more salt licks,” Hope said.
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“I can do it.”
“I’m sure you can.” He had seen her handle the heavy blocks of mineral salt once, and had promised himself he would take over that job.
“But you’re going to do it anyway.”
“How’d you guess?”
Laughing, she shook her head, pushed off her hat, and let it hang from its rawhide thong down her back. She shook out her hair and combed her fingers through it. She loved the feel of the wind lifting the heavy mass of hair away from her face.
Rio wondered if the sudden, hungry speeding of his pulse showed against his neck or temple. Deliberately he looked away from Hope’s unintentional seduction and stared at the cattle instead.
“Good herd,” he said after a moment or two. “One of the best I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank you. I won’t pretend I’m not proud of them. I bought some, culled calves, and raised the rest. They’re my gift to the Valley of the Sun.”
Rio’s black eyebrows rose in surprise. To him, Hope was as unexpected as water in a stone desert. “Your family didn’t raise Angus?”
“No, but Dad always wanted to. The first thing I bought him with my modeling money was Sweetheart. He didn’t live to see her bred.”
“You were a model?” Rio asked, surprised again.
Hope thought of the picture she must make—dirty boots and stained blue work shirt, faded jeans and a beat-up cowboy hat. She smiled crookedly. “Long ago, far away, in another country.”
Not all that long or that far, Rio thought hungrily. He didn’t say it aloud. He was trying not to look at her the way a man looks at a woman he wants. Badly.
Yet he couldn’t always force himself to look away. His uncanny eyes had memorized the purity of Hope’s profile, her shining hair, the womanly lift of her breasts, and the long, achingly lovely line of her legs.
He had known more beautiful women in his wanderings, women who could make men stop and stare in hunger and disbelief. He had never known a woman who called to his mind and senses the way Hope did. He wanted to talk with her, laugh with her, help her, protect her, stand close to the shimmering radiance of her dream.
And he wanted to touch her, to learn the hot, secret textures of her body, to know the sweet demands of her mouth and the heat of her response, to hear her cry out his name when the pleasure he brought her consumed her to her soul.
Grimly Rio called himself a goddamned idiot.
Hope wasn’t for him. His mind knew it, but his body was fighting that knowledge every bit of the way. All Hope had to do was breathe and he wanted her with a force that was different from anything he had ever known with another woman.
Despite the heat coiling in his gut, making him ache, Rio wouldn’t make a move to touch Hope. He had nothing to give her but the well he wanted to find for her, for her dream. When he found it, when the dream was truth, then his brother the wind would call to him. And he would leave.
Hope deserved better than that.
He looked away from the woman he shouldn’t touch and said quietly, “I’ll bet you were good at it.”
“Modeling?”
He nodded.
Hope smiled and dismissed her career with a wave of her hand. “I made a lot of money, but I wasn’t an international cover girl, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did you want to be?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“All I ever wanted was the Valley of the Sun. After Mom and Julie died, I was free to come back home.”
“You don’t model anymore?”
Hope gave Rio a sideways glance out of hazel eyes that were haunted by shadows and lit by flecks of gold. “No. When I’m in L.A. . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not a city girl. I can live there, but I don’t like it.”
“The money is good.”
“That’s why I stayed as long as I did. I had to pay off the inheritance taxes or sell the ranch. After I paid off the taxes, I worked until I thought I had enough money to keep the Valley of the Sun going while I built up the herds and put the ranch on a paying basis.”
“Is there ever enough money on a ranch?” he asked dryly.
She gave him a bittersweet smile. “In some ways, I was as green as grass. I didn’t know that there’s no such animal as ‘enough money’ when you’re talking about a desert ranch.”
“Could you go back to modeling?”
“Could you live in a city?” she asked.
“I have.”
“And now you don’t.”
Rio didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. He was here rather than in a city. So was she.
Hope looked at her beautiful black cattle and the brilliant currents of water welling silently up from the hose at the bottom of the tank.
“I could exist in the city,” she said slowly, trying to make him understand what she barely understood herself. “I can only live here. This is my past, my present, my future. No matter where I live, the Valley of the Sun is the only home I’ll ever have. I’ve always felt that way. I always will. The ranch is part of me.”
He wanted to put his arms around Hope, to fold her gently against his body and hold her, to promise her that he would find the well that would allow her to live forever on the land she loved.
But he couldn’t do it. Not the holding. Not the promising.
As a child he had learned that promises were only words, and that the unspoken promise of a comforting hug could be the biggest lie of all.
Not that his parents had meant to be cruel. It just had turned out that way. They had been more interested in fleeing the Indian part of their heritage than they had been in anything else, even their black-haired son.
Silently Hope and Rio watched the cattle glisten blackly beneath the clear light of morning. The fact that it was Friday morning—and early morning at that—suddenly registered on Hope.
Rio shouldn’t be on the Valley of the Sun. He should be at Turner’s ranch.
“Did you finish with Turner’s horses?” she asked.
“After a fashion.”
She turned and looked at Rio, caught by something buried in his western drawl. “What does that mean?”
He smiled sardonically. “Turner gave me a choice—work for him at triple my present wages, or work for you full-time.” Rio’s drawl deepened. “I allowed as how I’d rather dig wells in bedrock with a toothpick than work for him.”
“Damn him,” Hope said savagely, furious. Turner knew she couldn’t afford to pay a hand full-time wages. He had counted on squeezing Rio, who needed a paying job. “I’ll make it up to you somehow.”
“Like hell you will,” Rio said coolly, no drawl left. “Any problems I have with Turner are mine, not yours.”
“Not this time. Turner doesn’t want you working for me. He threatened to cut off my water unless I fired you.”
Rio said something beneath his breath that Hope was just as glad not to quite hear.
“When?” he demanded.
“A little more than a week ago. It was just a bluff. I called it and that was the end of it.”
“Well, that explains something.”
“What?”
“Why Turner suddenly found twenty hours a day of work for me to do at his ranch. He was making sure I was too dog-tired to sweet-talk you into anything he wouldn’t like.”
“Too tired? He doesn’t know you very well.”
Rio gave her a sidelong glance. “You hinting that I’m a tomcat who’s never too tired for a quick one?”
She laughed almost bitterly. “I’m saying you have better things to do than screw around with me.”
“Turner says you’re engaged to him.”
Anger sent scarlet rising in Hope’s cheeks. “He’s lying
.”
Rio measured the truth and fury in her and nodded with a satisfaction he didn’t show. “Is that why you’re carrying a rifle in the water truck these days?”
She gave a casual, on-cue shrug that was worthy of her best modeling days. “Mason said there were a lot of snakes around the wells.”
“Smart man,” Rio said. Then with deadly calm he asked, “Did Turner make a try for you at his well?”
She looked at Rio’s eyes and saw the promise of violence in their cold blue-black depths. She looked away and said nothing, not wanting to lie to him.
“Hope?” he asked softly.
“It wasn’t anything serious,” she said finally. “It just takes a while for the word no to sink into Turner’s thick skull.”
Rio hooked a thumb toward the heavy cast-iron pipe wrench that was propped against the truck’s rear tire. “Try using that to drive home your point.”
“I did.”
He glanced sideways, saw that she meant it, and smiled like a wolf. Silently he added one more to the list of things he would do on the Valley of the Sun: if he had to leave the ranch for any reason, he would be certain that Hope wasn’t alone.
Then Rio remembered that he wouldn’t always be around to protect her.
Hope saw his sudden frown. “I have enough money to pay wages,” she said. “Not as much as Turner, but—”
“No,” Rio cut in. “Our deal hasn’t changed. Room and board for me, range and a stud for my mares.”
“ ‘For as long as the water flows.’ ”
He raked his hat from his head, holding on to the Stetson’s dusty black curves with fingers that were weathered and lean. Eyes that were used to focusing on distant, wild places measured the surrounding lands. He didn’t see whatever he was looking for. With a disgusted word he replaced his hat and yanked on the rim.
“I have to find the damn stuff first.”
What Rio didn’t say was that he had been looking.
He had come up as dry as the land itself.
Ten
“A FEW DAYS ago some of the slopes got rain down toward Turner’s ranch,” Hope said, watching Rio from the corner of her eye, wondering why he looked so grim. “Maybe it will rain here. Anything would help.”
Reluctantly Rio focused his attention on the sky instead of the water he sensed was somewhere beneath the dry land, waiting to be found, waiting as it had for a thousand thousand years. Squinting against the sun, he measured the day on an inner, instinctive scale he had learned to trust.
A haze had formed above the peaks. Within the haze, thicker streamers of clouds were condensing as he watched. Instead of being painfully clear or brassy with dust, the air had a silver shimmer to it.
Moisture.
Well, that’s something, Rio thought. Not the end of the drought, but better than a kick in the butt with a dusty boot, which was all they had gotten up to now.
“Rain by tonight.” His voice was deep and certain. “A decent rain. Not enough to bring up the water table a whole lot, but it should revive a few of the seeps.”
Hope let out a sigh that was almost a groan.
He smiled slightly. “Don’t let down yet. We’re not off water-hauling duty. But for a week or so we’ll only have to make one trip a day, twice at most. We’ll have to start hauling feed, though.”
“I’ll do the hauling. I hired you to find a well, not to be a ranch hand.”
“That’s right,” he said agreeably. “You didn’t hire me. I volunteered.”
“I can’t let you—”
He cut off her words with a dark blue glance that told her he was every bit as determined as she was. He was bigger, too, with a masculine power she couldn’t hope to match.
But Rio wasn’t like John Turner. Rio would settle disagreements with words, not raw physical strength.
“If we share the water hauling, you’ll have time to ride the land with me,” he continued.
The words surprised Rio even as he spoke them. He had been doing his best not to be alone with Hope. Yet, as he heard his own words, he admitted to himself that she was a big part of the reason he had offered to find a new well for the Valley of the Sun. The thought of riding the land with Hope had flowed deeply beneath his offer, like artesian water beneath a layer of unyielding slate.
He couldn’t be her lover, but he could share her dream for a time, filling the emptiness that had come to him long ago, when he had stopped believing in his own dreams.
“I’ll bet there are parts of the ranch that you’ve never seen,” he said softly. “It’s your land, Hope. Your future. Your dream. You should know every hard, beautiful inch of it.”
Caught by his words, she looked at him with a longing she didn’t know how to conceal or control. Like the land she loved, Rio could be grim and seductive by turns. His eyes were as deeply blue as twilight condensing into night. And like the night, he was alone.
She sensed very clearly the isolation in him, the darkness that lay beneath his smile, the long times of silence when he saw no one, heard nothing but the wind, and spoke only in the depths of his own mind. She felt a driving need to know the secrets hidden in his depths, the riches and sweetness that lay beneath a hard surface that no one had ever breached.
And because she wasn’t a fool, she also wondered what dangers were waiting beneath his rugged surface, fault lines where reality could shift suddenly, crushing the unwary.
Yet danger, too, was part of why Hope loved the land. The Valley of the Sun accepted few people, and none of them easily. The children of the land knew how to survive. They also knew how to live, how to take a single moment and find in it an incandescent joy that few people ever knew.
The land had given her the incredible, silky coolness of water in the midst of drought. She had known the shimmering flash of light as the sun sank behind a stark, blue-black ridge, and she had tasted the piñon-scented breeze that flowed out of canyon mouths when everywhere else the air was still. She had shared the terrible power and beauty of an eagle swooping down on its prey, and savored the lush, secret perfume of a night-blooming cactus.
And always, always, there was the land itself, a silent symphony in every tone of gold and brown, moonrise and night.
These were just a few of the moments of intense pleasure, of soul-deep awareness of being alive, that the Valley of the Sun gave to those who understood the land. Hope wanted to share those moments with Rio, and to discover what other moments he had found to share with her.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’d like to ride the land with you.”
Rio’s midnight-blue eyes memorized Hope. He saw both the darkness and the light in her hazel glance. The darkness he understood.
The light fascinated him as much as it made him wary.
“I’ll unload my gear at the house,” he said neutrally. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll take the east bedroom upstairs. That way you and Mason won’t feel like you have to tiptoe through my territory every time you use the back porch.”
“Sounds good.”
Hope ignored the flash of sensual awareness that came at the thought of Rio sleeping in the room next to hers. Even if he was sleeping on the floor in her bedroom, she wouldn’t have to lie awake waiting for him to crawl into bed with her. Not by so much as a gesture had he showed any real sexual interest in her.
He liked her, though. She was sure of it. Even Mason had noticed it. He said that he had never seen Rio smile so much as he did when Hope was around.
“You going to fill the Hope’s tank next?” he asked, referring to her slowly failing well.
“Yes.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“Have you eaten yet?” she asked.
He shrugged.
Hope looked at the level of the tank she was filling. “I’ll be finished here in about twenty minutes. Breakfast in thirty-five.”
“You don’t have to make—”
“Better hustle,” she said, cutting across his objection. “If your boots a
ren’t under the table when the eggs are finished, I’ll feed every bit of your food to the pigs we don’t have. That would be a terrible waste of fresh eggs.”
His smile flashed, a hard curve of white against his dark face. He touched his hat brim in a brief salute. “Yes, ma’am,” he drawled, his tone both soft and suitably awed.
She tried not to smile at his gentle teasing and ended up laughing out loud. Rio’s response was that of a polite, slightly backward boy, yet he radiated a seasoned masculinity that was as unmistakable as it was fascinating. It was impossible not to be amused by the difference between the bashful words and the confident reality of the man.
He saw her struggle not to smile, heard her laughter, and winked at her just before he turned to go back to the house.
He didn’t know who was more surprised by the wink, Hope or himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so lighthearted, as if the day ahead was full of new places and possibilities to explore. There was something revitalizing about being in the presence of Hope, whether it was the woman or the simple fact of hope itself.
The memory of Rio’s teasing kept Hope’s mood light even when the brass coupling on the hose proved unusually stubborn. She whacked it apart with the heavy wrench, put everything back in its proper place, and drove the truck out of the pasture.
After she washed up outside, she let herself into the kitchen through the back porch. A single glance told her that Rio hadn’t taken any chances on missing breakfast. He had set a place for himself—plate, silverware, coffee mug, napkin.
And his boots were tucked neatly under the table.
Hope laughed, feeling like a teenager again. She had expected many things after hearing Mason’s description of Rio, but a dry sense of the ridiculous wasn’t one of them.
Still smiling, she lit the oven, turned it as low as it would go, and put Rio’s plate and a big platter inside. With no wasted motions, she took thick slices of bacon out of the refrigerator and draped them in a heavy cast-iron pan to cook. While the bacon sizzled she cut up potatoes into another black pan to fry.
When the bacon and potatoes were crisp and ready, she moved them onto the platter and tucked it into the oven again. Four slices of bread disappeared into the toaster. They popped up after a minute, transformed into crunchy brown squares. She buttered the toast and stashed it in the oven to stay warm.
Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Page 10
