As soon as she heard Rio’s soft footsteps on the stairs, she reached up to the open cupboard shelf where she kept fresh eggs in an unglazed pottery bowl. When she brought the bowl down to eye level, she made a sound of surprise. A scattering of golden blossoms were tucked among the smooth, creamy curves of the eggs. The tiny wildflowers had bloomed out of season following a desert shower.
Rio must have picked the flowers on his way off of Turner’s ranch. It was the only place around that had known rain in months.
The scent of the flowers was a delicate caress and a silent promise of life renewing itself despite the harshest drought. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, filling herself with both the fragrance and the promise.
Emotion twisted through Rio as he watched Hope from the doorway. He would have given away everything he owned for the right to hold her, to inhale her promise as deeply as she was breathing in the fragrance of flowers.
But to do that would be to make promises of his own, promises he couldn’t keep. Brother-to-the-wind.
When Hope opened her eyes, she saw Rio watching her with an expression that was close to hunger and even closer to regret. She smiled at him, wishing that he wasn’t a temporary kind of man, wanting him anyway, wanting him even though she knew that he wouldn’t take her.
She didn’t know that her smile was an echo of his own expression, hunger and regret mingling into a yearning too deep for words.
“Thank you,” she said huskily.
He watched her fingertip stroke a soft petal. He wished that it was his skin being touched so gently by her.
“My grandmother called them rain flowers,” he said. His voice was almost rough with the beat of his blood, his hunger, the rushing need he refused to give in to. “She said they were the only gold that mattered in this land.”
“What did your grandfather call them?” Hope asked, remembering Mason saying that one of Rio’s grandfathers had been a Zuni shaman.
Rio’s eyes narrowed as he tried to remember rituals from deep in his past. Slowly knowledge condensed like clouds across an inner sky, bringing a rain of childhood memories. The soft golden blossoms were medicine flowers, revered for their survival in the face of the harshest conditions.
Softly he spoke in phrases that had odd rhythms, ritual intonations, sacred sounds from a time and a place and a culture that had never been truly his, for his only culture and solace was the land.
He didn’t translate the words into English for Hope. There was no translation that anyone would understand. His grandfather’s spiritual center had been a blending of Zuni and Navajo, Apache and missionary Christian rituals. It had worked for his grandfather in ways that Rio understood but couldn’t explain, one man’s balancing of the ageless animism of Indian heritage with the overwhelming reality of modern European man.
“There’s no real translation for the flower’s name,” Rio said. Then, softly, he added, “I’ve always called these flowers hope, for they bloom at times and in places where nothing else can survive.”
Silence stretched between Hope and Rio, a silence that shivered with unspoken words and hungers. As she looked away from the midnight-blue depths of his eyes, she realized that for the first time in her life she wanted a man, truly wanted him.
And then she knew it was deeper than mere wanting. It was need, a raw emptiness that she had never known before. The thought of not having Rio, of never having him, was a pain so intense she had to fight back a cry of protest.
Hope’s hands trembled as she filled a shallow earthenware saucer with a thin layer of water. Carefully she picked the small blossoms out of the bowl of eggs and floated the flowers on the transparent shimmer of liquid. She placed the saucer gently on the table between her place and Rio’s.
The blossoms shivered with each movement of the water, as though they were alive and taking quick, tiny breaths.
“How do you like your eggs?” she asked, her voice husky with all the things she wanted to say, and knew she shouldn’t.
“Over easy.”
Rio reached past Hope to pick up the huge black coffeepot that was warming on the back of the stove. His arm brushed over hers. It was an accident, but the brief sliding contact sent heat surging through him. He remembered the instant weeks ago when her breasts had pressed against him while she wrestled with the stubborn coupling on the canvas hose. The tactile memory was as clear and hot as the flame burning beneath the cast-iron pan.
The intensity of his response to a memory and a casual touch both surprised and unsettled him. Nothing had gotten underneath his skin like this for a long, long time.
He had thought that nothing could.
None of his turmoil showed in his face as he poured himself a cup of strong coffee. Life had taught him to show no more expression than that of an eagle arrowing out of the sky to claim its prey.
As he replaced the coffeepot, Hope reached for an egg. Her hand bumped into his arm. She felt resilience, heat, and strength as his biceps shifted beneath her fingers. The temptation to prolong the contact by running her palm over his arm almost overwhelmed her. She wanted to feel the warm satin of his flesh, the flex of his strength, the heat of his life beneath her palm.
The intensity of her need to touch him shocked her. She snatched back her hand as though she had touched burning metal.
“Excuse me,” she said quickly. “How many eggs do you want?”
“Four.”
His voice was absent. He was watching the very fine trembling of her fingers as she blindly reached for an egg. The evidence of her response to a casual touch set off a soundless explosion of hunger deep inside him that he could neither control nor deny.
Angry, needing, yearning, he watched her over the rim of his steaming coffee mug. A lock of her bittersweet-chocolate hair had crept free of the clip at her nape. The tendril of hair slid forward to curl softly against her neck.
He wanted to capture the dark curl in his fingers, to lift it to his lips, and then to kiss the golden skin of her unclothed neck.
Rio didn’t know how desperately he wanted it until he saw his own hand reaching for the silky curl of hair. Cursing silently, he made his fingers into a fist and he turned his back on Hope’s endless, innocent temptations.
As he pulled out a chair to sit down at the table, he saw his boots beneath and remembered Hope’s delicious laughter floating up the stairway when she discovered the empty boots. He looked back at her silently cooking his breakfast and he . . . hungered. Automatically he kicked his stocking feet into the cowboy boots and adjusted his pant legs.
Then he realized he hadn’t stopped watching the delicate curve of her neck, hadn’t stopped wanting to taste her skin, hadn’t stopped needing her in ways that shocked him even more than the unruly, insistent beat of his arousal. The direct response of a teenage boy combined with the complex needs of an adult male swept over him like wind over the open land.
And like the land, he had no defenses, only emptiness.
Grimly he reined his thoughts. There was only one way he could touch Hope that wouldn’t destroy both of them, and that was by finding water for her, fulfilling her dream. It had always been enough for him in the past. It would have to be enough now. He had no more to give her except emptiness and pain.
“I’ve been looking over the papers your last hydrologist left,” Rio said. He sipped at the hot coffee and added dryly, “Educated man, no doubt about it. But he didn’t know a hell of a lot about this country on a firsthand basis.”
“He was just out of school.” Hope turned eggs with easy motions of her wrist. “City boy through and through. Nice kid. Earnest and real sorry there wasn’t any water on my ranch.”
Hope slid the eggs onto Rio’s warm plate and retrieved the platter with its load of bacon, potatoes, and toast. She put it all in front of him. After adding honey and a jar of cherry preserves to the table, she left him to eat in peace.
Silently she poured herself a cup of coffee and began making sandwiches for lunch o
n the trail. Between sips of coffee she deftly assembled slices of beef and slabs of yeasty homemade bread. Several apples, plus a double handful of oatmeal and raisin cookies, joined the growing heap of food on the counter.
When it was all tightly wrapped and ready to go, she poured herself some more coffee and sat opposite Rio, not at all bothered by his silence. She had grown up around ranch men. Their work was hard and endless. No one had time for conversation until after his belly was full. Then the men would lean back and talk until their food settled or their consciences got the better of them and prodded them back to work once more.
Rio sensed Hope’s relaxation and relaxed completely himself, grateful for her acceptance of silence. It left him free to savor each bite of the crisp fried potatoes, country bacon, homemade bread, and perfectly cooked eggs. He ate every bit of breakfast, mopped his plate neatly with a last crust of toast, and sighed with real pleasure.
“I’ll take my wages in your cooking any day,” he said, meaning every word.
She shrugged and smiled slightly. She had been raised cooking. She had always loved it, the colors and the textures and the smells, the pure sensual reward of creating a good meal. Her mother and older sister had never understood how she felt. To them, the kitchen was a punishment for being born female on a ranch.
“It’s hard to go wrong cooking breakfast when you have fresh eggs in the cupboard and your neighbor’s best pig in the freezer,” Hope said.
Rio made a sound of disgust. “Tell that to the hundred bunkhouse cooks I’ve known.”
Her smile widened. “That’s how I learned. The hands threw the cook in the corral trough and threatened to quit. I was only ten, but I’d been cooking since I was seven.”
“What about your mother?”
“She hated cooking.”
Rio heard more than the words. He heard the sadness and the acceptance and the loss that never went away but simply became part of life. He understood those things, and respected the fact that Hope faced what life gave her with a smile and the quiet strength that came from accepting what would never change.
“Did you spend much time in the drink?” Rio asked, smiling in spite of his thoughts. The image of a young Hope dumped into the horse trough was beguiling. She would have taken it with a splash and a smile, pulled herself out, and dripped all over the nearest cowboy.
“Just once. Thank God it was summer. The dunking felt real good.”
“What did you do to earn the trough?”
“I made chocolate cake, but I mixed up the sugar and the salt. It was so awful even the dog wouldn’t eat it.”
Rio threw back his head and laughed.
The deep sound was as much a reward to Hope as his enjoyment of breakfast had been. She laughed softly with him, shaking her head at the memory of her mistake.
“Even today when I make a chocolate cake, Mason takes a very tiny first bite,” she admitted. She smiled into her coffee cup. “Nothing obvious, mind you. Just a cautious little taste to make sure the sugar and the salt didn’t get swapped around.”
“I’ll remember that.”
He drained his coffee cup with a long swallow, then stood up with a smooth determination that Hope remembered from her childhood. Man of the house, fed and ready to go back to work.
The thought of what it would be like to have Rio as the man of her house leaped into her mind, burning with an intensity that stopped her heart. She forced herself to breathe, to push the idea of Rio aside, to ignore it. Impossible dreams had killed her mother and her sister. Hope had vowed that they wouldn’t kill her.
She didn’t have the strength or the emotion to spare for destructive dreaming. She knew it as surely as she knew that the man called Rio was as rootless as the wind keening across the land, always searching for something, never finding it, always moving on.
She hadn’t needed Mason to tell her. It was there in Rio’s eyes, in his silences, in his memories of a hundred bunkhouse cooks.
Rio’s long fingers tightened around his coffee mug as he saw darkness veil the humor that had made Hope’s eyes brilliant just a moment before. He wondered what memory or fear had come to her, stealing her laughter.
Suddenly, savagely, he wanted to know what haunted her. Then he wanted to smooth the downward curve of regret from her mouth with his own lips. But if he did, in the end they both would have more regrets, more sadness, the unending bitterness of betrayal.
She couldn’t leave the Valley of the Sun.
He couldn’t stay.
Brother-to-the-wind.
For the first time, Rio understood the tears in his grandfather’s eyes when he told his grandson his true name.
Eleven
AFTER BREAKFAST, Hope and Rio walked beneath an empty, cloudless sky to the horse pasture just beyond the barn. The lunch she had just packed was in the saddlebags over his shoulder. So was a canteen of coffee. It would lose its heat soon enough, but people who worked the land learned to take coffee at whatever temperature they could get it.
“Where do you want to start?” Hope asked.
“We’ll ride the boundaries first.”
“High or low?”
He gestured toward the Perdidas rising in stark grandeur above the rumpled land. “Up there at the northern end of the ranch.”
“Then you better take a good horse,” she said. “The Valley of the Sun goes as low as two thousand feet here in the south and as high as seven up along the northern boundaries.”
“You have timberland?” Surprise was clear in Rio’s voice and in the dark line of his eyebrows.
She gave him a wry, sideways glance. “Timberland? Are you kidding? If it’s a tree, it’s on government-lease land. The part of the ranch that’s above seven thousand feet is all on northwest-facing slopes.”
“Northwest facing,” he repeated, shaking his head. “That means nothing grows but big sage, mountain mahogany, piñon, and juniper.”
“You got it. Not a decent board foot in the lot.”
His mouth turned down in a sardonic curl. “It’s the same way all over Nevada. The best land is government, the worst is Indian, and the rest of the Basin and Range country belongs to anyone tough and smart enough to hammer a living out of it.”
“But it’s beautiful land,” Hope said.
“Most people don’t think so. They look at the sagebrush and the bare mountains and they can’t drive through the state fast enough. Maybe you have to be born here to appreciate it.”
“My mother was born here. She hated it.”
“So did mine,” Rio admitted. “Being raised on a reservation was no treat for anyone, especially a part-Indian girl who looked like she got off at the wrong bus stop. She couldn’t get off the res fast enough.”
“Did your father like it?”
Rio made a sound that could have been laughter, but was too hard. “He hated this land more than she did. He was part Athabascan, born to northern forests and lakes. He hated them, too. But most of all he hated being called Indian when his father was a renegade Scotsman and his mother was a quarter Dutch.”
Hope glanced sideways at Rio. She wondered if his father had been like him, strong bones and easy strength, raven-black hair and quick mind, silences as deep as the night.
He hated being called Indian.
She wondered if Rio did.
As though hearing her silent question, Rio moved his wide shoulders in a casual shrug that belied the dark memories in his eyes. “My father never grew up. He never accepted the fact that there’s no such thing as mostly white. People look at you and see only not white.”
There was a cynicism in Rio’s words that made Hope ache. She wanted to say he was wrong. She knew he was right.
But not when it came to her. “When I look at you,” she said calmly, “I see a man. A good one. Period.”
He glanced quickly aside at Hope. Her voice was like her expression, matter-of-fact. He could take it or leave it, but it wouldn’t change the truth of how she saw the world.
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How she saw him.
Without knowing what he was doing, he lifted his hand to touch her cheek. Before he could, a drumroll of approaching hooves drew his attention away from Hope.
Storm Walker was cantering toward the fence, making rhythmic thunder roll from his dark hooves. In the center of the pasture, two of Hope’s four remaining mares watched the Appaloosa stallion rush to meet the humans.
The stud was worth watching. Black except for a white stocking and the black-spotted white “blanket” that covered his powerful rump, Storm Walker moved with a muscular grace that made Rio want to climb on the strong black back and ride forever.
With a horseman’s knowing, appreciative eye, he watched the stallion mince up to the fence and nicker a greeting. Quietly he stroked Storm Walker’s warm, glossy neck.
Neither the man nor the stud was wary of the other. They had made friends the first time Rio leaned against the fence and talked Storm Walker over to him in low, soothing tones. Since then Rio had come to the horse pasture at least once a day, bringing a reassuring touch, a sprinkle of salt, and an admiration that grew every time the stallion moved over the ground with long, liquid strides.
Storm Walker blew on Rio’s hat and shirt collar. Smiling, he pushed away the velvety muzzle.
“You’re an old softie, aren’t you,” he said in a low voice.
Hope snorted. “Only until you get in the saddle. Then he’ll shake the change right out of your pockets.”
“Rough-gaited?” Rio asked, surprised. “He sure doesn’t look it.”
“Oh, once he settles down he’s as smooth as deep water.” She paused, then added dryly, “But settling this bad boy down is a bone-shaking proposition, kind of like riding a landslide. He needs a lot more work than he’s gotten lately. He’s spring-loaded and looking for fun.”
“Hauling water hasn’t left you any time to give him exercise,” Rio said, understanding.
“Even if I had time, I can’t risk getting thrown. If I break an arm or a leg trying to settle Storm Walker down, I’d have to sell my cattle or let them die of thirst.” She shrugged. “My prancing bad boy will just have to wait until the rains come. Then I’ll ride his spotted tail right into the ground.”
Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Page 11
