“You have beautiful legs,” he said when she rode close.
She looked at him, startled. Then she smiled, slid off Aces, and picked up a curry comb.
“My legs are how I got the money to keep the ranch alive,” Hope said as she worked. “Shoes, hosiery, and slit-to-midthigh bedroom stuff was my specialty. The green caftan came from one of my last modeling assignments. I love the way it makes me feel.”
Rio half-closed his eyes. The memory of her silky, beautiful body glowing against the deep green velvet was a pleasure so acute it was almost pain.
“So you take it out and wear it when nobody is around,” he said huskily.
“Except for last night.” Hope shuddered. “Turner knew I’d be here alone. He saw you in town.”
“I know. One of the clerks in the hardware store told me that John Turner took one look at me through the window, reversed direction, and set off out of town like the hounds of hell were after him.” Rio’s eyes changed, becoming as hard as blue-black stone.
“I’m glad you came back,” she said simply.
“Not half as glad as I am.” Emotions vibrated in his voice, a volatile mixture of rage at Turner, anger at himself, and a hunger for Hope so intense that it still could shake him.
With a muttered word, Rio went to the barn. He emerged in a few minutes, leading Dusk. The mare headed toward the horse trailer that had been unhitched from Rio’s pickup and parked beside the barn. Dusk’s movements were the automatic reaction of a horse accustomed to being trailered all over the West as her owner went from town to town, ranch to ranch, horizon to horizon.
“Not yet, girl,” Rio said, draping the roping rein over the corral railing. “First we’ve got a well to find.”
Hope had watched the horse turn toward the trailer, heard Rio’s casual words, and now a cold wind was keening through her soul.
Not yet.
But it would happen. There was no question, no doubt, nothing in Rio’s voice but a calm certainty that he would leave.
Leaning against Aces, Hope struggled to control the storm of grief shaking her. You knew he was going to leave, she told herself fiercely. Last night didn’t change that. Tonight won’t change it.
Nothing will change it.
You’ve fallen in love with the wind, and you knew it even while you were falling.
She had no complaints coming, and accepted it. The choice had been hers every step of the way. Rio hadn’t wanted to be her lover.
Hope. Tell me to stop. I didn’t want to hurt you! I don’t have any past, any future, any present. Hope, I don’t—
Then she had kissed him, wanted him, and he had given her all he could. It was more than any other man had given her: tenderness and fierce passion, serenity and wild ecstasy. She wouldn’t throw Rio’s gift in his face and say that it wasn’t enough. He would blame himself. She knew it as certainly as she knew she loved him.
Are you cruel enough to make him hate himself? Hope asked herself harshly. Is that your idea of loving him?
After a few moments Hope straightened her shoulders and went back to grooming Aces with smooth motions of her arm. It wasn’t long before she saddled the mare, led her out of the corral, and mounted swiftly, before Rio could help her, touch her.
Side by side the two horses loped along the dirt road. The wind blew fitfully, tearing puffs of dust from the land.
Rio kept glancing over at Hope, quick looks that were hidden within the shadow of his hat brim. Back at the corral he had seen intense unhappiness on her face. He had wanted to go to her, to hold her, to assure her that everything would be all right, that he would protect her from whatever she feared.
And then he had seen her gather herself, shaking off whatever had clawed at her.
He didn’t know what had happened, or why. He only knew that for a moment Hope had been sliced open all the way to her soul.
He understood what that kind of pain was like, how unexpected it could be, how devastating. So he watched her, reassuring himself that she was truly all right.
Hope caught the indigo flash of Rio’s glance and turned, smiling at him for a moment before she looked back over the velvet-shadowed hills glowing in the early sunlight. The peace of the morning and the rhythmic beat of hooves were like a benediction to her grieving soul.
Rio’s eyes followed her glance. He was accustomed to such sunrises, such silence—but this time Hope was with him, sharing the quiet and the compelling land. Like the dawn itself, she had a quiet that pleasured him. Other women he had known were hurt or frightened by his silence. They had demanded that he take their emotional temperature with constant conversation. He had hated that, hated being with someone so shallow that she changed temperature with each of his silences.
Leaning over, Rio ran his fingertip down the line of Hope’s jaw. She looked at him and smiled, her eyes almost golden in the rich morning light.
Hunger and something more powerful moved through him, something indescribable, as though a spring was pushing up from his soul and lapping gently outward, sweet water bringing life to everything that thirsted. Gently he touched Hope again, as though to reassure himself that she was real and he was real and the moment itself was real.
The two horses walked into the thick shadows slanting from Wind Canyon’s broad mouth. In this place there was a long exhalation of air, an almost intangible stirring of the atmosphere that was always more apparent here than at any other canyon mouth on the ranch. It was as though something immense slept, and in sleeping, sighed deeply.
Hope glanced up the canyon where the old wagon road began to snake up into the heights. She grimaced and looked away, grateful that Rio hadn’t wanted to go all the way to the abandoned mine.
“What are we looking for?” she asked.
“Nothing we can see.”
She gave him a sideways glance. “That’s going to make it difficult, isn’t it?”
Rio tugged his hat more firmly around his head and almost smiled. “Look at Eagle Peak.”
Dutifully Hope looked at the ragged mountain that had dominated the skyline of all her childhood mornings.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Rock. Lots of it.”
“Close your eyes. You’ll see more that way.”
She looked at him for an instant. Then she closed her eyes.
“Remember that sandwich we talked about?” he asked.
“The torn-up one with waterproof bread?”
“That’s the one. Now, imagine the sandwich is whole. Imagine that it’s slanted up toward the sky at a fairly shallow angle.”
“Umm.”
Rio looked at Hope. Her eyes were closed, her lashes almost black against her golden skin. He remembered the intriguing softness of her eyelashes against his lips, the scent of her when he rested his cheek between her breasts, and the heady taste of her passion.
Impatiently he yanked his wandering thoughts back to aquifers and Eagle Peak.
“Now, that peak is like a party sandwich with all kinds of fancy layers,” he said. “Rocks like granite, quartzite, and slate are the waterproof strata. The meat of the sandwich is limestone laid down in ancient seas. The limestone doesn’t vary much in thickness here, but the surrounding layers do. Granite intrusions can be only a few inches thick in some places, and hundreds or thousands of feet deep in others.”
Hope frowned, eyes still closed as she visualized a rather lumpy, disorganized sandwich. “Then how do you know where to sink the well? If you start where granite is thousands of feet thick, you’ll never get anything but worn-out drill bits and dry holes.”
“That’s why you go to the Colorado School of Mines and get a master’s degree in hydrology,” he said dryly. “It gives you a fighting chance of guessing right.”
Her eyes flew open as she understood what he was saying. At some time in his past he had earned a master’s degree from one of the foremost centers for the study of applied geology in the United States.
Hope watched Rio intent
ly, hoping he would tell her more about himself, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was looking at Eagle Peak with trained eyes that saw through the mixed layers of rock to the chance of water beneath.
“Not much limestone shows through on this side of the mountains,” he said. “That’s probably why your geologist gave up.”
Silently Rio added, That and the fact that his grandfather wasn’t a Zuni shaman who taught a wild kid to be so still that he could feel clouds condensing around distant peaks and water flowing in the earth far beneath his feet.
“He was real sure there wasn’t any water,” Hope said.
“He might be right. But there’s limestone in those mountains. It shows high up in the most deeply eroded peaks over on the dry side of the Perdidas. Because limestone weathers away faster than other strata, it undermines the layers of rock that cover it. They crumble and collapse until the exposed limestone is all but buried by slides of harder stone.”
Though Rio was looking up at the rugged mountains, she sensed that his focus was inward, deep down where knowledge, experience, and instinct arranged and rearranged the possibilities of the layers of rock.
“The limestone I saw could be just fragments of a stratum that has long since dissolved away,” he said. “Or it could be the tip of an aquifer that’s thousands of feet thick and has been soaking up water for millions of years.”
Her breath came in quickly and stayed, filling her until she ached. The thought of so much water waiting beneath her feet was almost unbearable.
“Is it?” she asked, her voice hungry, yearning. “Is there a layer of limestone filled with water for the Valley of the Sun, just waiting to be discovered?”
Twenty
RIO DISMOUNTED AND looked up at Hope. “That’s why we rode to Wind Canyon,” he said simply. “To decide if it’s worth the gamble of drilling here.”
“How will you do that?”
He hesitated, not wanting to explain what he didn’t understand himself; he simply accepted. He had already done everything he could using conventional knowledge of geology and hydrology. He had narrowed the search to three possible sites. Of the three, Wind Canyon was by far the most likely.
Now he would walk the land, letting its silent messages seep into him. He would wait deep within himself, hoping to feel the rippling echo of water flowing beneath his feet. It was like tiny currents of electricity whispering through him, telling him that something different lay beneath his feet. Often the feeling was so subtle that it was easy to miss. Silence was required, silence and an inner stillness that had to come from his whole mind.
White men called what he was doing water witching or dowsing, and claimed not to believe in it. Despite that, many western wells had been found by men or women carrying peeled forked sticks that quivered and dipped in the presence of hidden water. His grandfather had called Rio’s gift the breath of the Great Spirit.
Rio didn’t call it anything at all. He accepted it, just as he accepted the color of his hair and the number of his fingers.
“Experience,” he said finally, handing Dusk’s rein to Hope. He loosened the saddle cinch with a few expert tugs. “That’s how I decide. If the land feels right, I drill.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“I move on until I find water or there’s nowhere left to look.”
He unbuckled the deep saddlebags he always brought with him and reached inside. After a moment he pulled out a pair of scarred hiking boots. Sitting on a convenient rock, he kicked off his cowboy boots and pulled on the others.
“I learned when I was young to trust my instincts,” Rio said, quickly lacing up and tying the boots. “My grandfather was a good teacher.”
She wanted to ask more questions, but Rio was already walking slowly away. He moved over the rocky canyon floor like a man looking for a faded trail. She sensed that it wasn’t the dry surface of the ground he was concentrating on, but something else, something indescribable.
I learned when I was young to trust my instincts.
Silently Hope dismounted and loosened the cinch on her saddle. After a short search she found a flat, sun-washed rock to sit on. She didn’t know how long he would be walking the land, but she sensed he didn’t want any distractions.
In the cool hours of early morning, the sun felt good. Knees tucked under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, Hope watched the man she loved move over the land like an intelligent wind.
With slow strides Rio quartered the mouth of the canyon. Several miles wide, jumbled at the center with debris from thousands of flash floods, the canyon mouth was more like the lip of an outwash plain than a true canyon. The soil was so coarse and stony that little grew there. Water coming down from the heights simply sank into the millions of spaces between the rocks and disappeared before the thirsty roots of plants could soak it up.
Hope watched Rio and remembered that her father had tried drilling a well in a canyon mouth similar to this one. He had drilled down hundreds of feet deeper than his deepest existing well before he gave up and admitted that there was no end to the dry, loose, rocky soil.
That was when he had decided to drill where her namesake well was now. He had struck groundwater and had prayed that his water worries were over.
It hadn’t turned out that way.
With a weary gesture Hope readjusted her hat to shade her eyes against the changing angle of the sun. Thinking about her father scraped at her emotions, yet every time she thought of water she couldn’t help thinking of him.
She loved the land.
She had loved her father.
And the land she loved had killed him. He had worked himself to death trying to get around the stony reality of a retreating water table. It was as though he believed if he just worked hard enough, long enough, faithfully enough, water would return to the land.
With each summer’s visit to the ranch, Hope had seen her father grow older, more tired, more unbending in his determination to make the ranch become what it once had been—alive.
Within a year of her eighteenth birthday he had a stroke, followed by pneumonia. Hope, her mother, and her sister had visited him in the small hospital, sitting beside his bed, listening to him fight for breath. At least Hope and her mother had sat and listened; Julie had been terrified of the broken, white-haired old man who had taken the place of the strong father of her memories.
His death had increased Julie’s terror and her mother’s hatred of the land. Only the fact that her father had willed his half of the ranch to Hope kept her mother from selling it.
Instead, her mother had abandoned the Valley of the Sun, leaving Mason to live alone amid the wreckage of so many dreams.
Hope had come back as often as she could, but the demands of providing for her mother, her sister, herself, and the ranch had meant long hours of modeling. Rarely could she afford to leave Los Angeles to come home to the land she missed with an intensity that would have shocked the people she worked with, people who thought she was cold because she didn’t share their zest for weekend romances and frequent lovers.
Before Hope was twenty her mother had died. According to the accident report, she lost control of her car and crashed into a cement freeway overpass.
Hope knew the explanation wasn’t that neat, that easy. Her mother hadn’t wanted to live. Even Julie’s iridescent smile and feverish pursuit of the perfect lover hadn’t been able to sink through her mother’s grief for her dead husband.
In the end only Hope’s silent, enduring love of the land had touched her mother. She left the ranch to Hope, asking only that Julie receive half of the profits.
There hadn’t been any profits. Not during the two years that it took for Julie to kill herself with drugs and despair, not in the four years since then. The only money that came to the Valley of the Sun came by way of Los Angeles and the Sharon Morningstar Modeling Agency.
Hope had lived in L.A. until she couldn’t stand it any longer. Then she had packed up and returned to the land she loved m
ore than anything else. She had told herself that she had saved enough money to do everything—meet daily ranch expenses, pay off back taxes, and even drill a new well if it came to that.
She hadn’t thought it would. There had been dry years before. They had always passed before all the wells failed. It would be the same this time.
It hadn’t been the same.
In January of this year she had been forced to take out a second mortgage at high interest rates. She had told herself that it would be all right, that once she found a good well, the second mortgage could be renegotiated on the basis of the ranch’s greatly increased production.
But she hadn’t found a well. She had spent thousands of dollars on surveys and geologists. They had told her there wasn’t any water to be found on the Valley of the Sun.
She hadn’t believed them.
She couldn’t. It would be the end of her dream.
Stiffly Hope shifted on the unyielding surface of her rock and wondered how long she had sat there, thinking of a past she couldn’t change and a future she couldn’t control. She was all but numb.
Gingerly she slid off the rock and stretched. Dusk flicked an ear in her direction, snorted softly, and returned to her three-legged doze. Aces had her head up, ears pricked forward, watching something. Hope turned to see what had caught the mare’s interest.
After a moment she saw Rio walking along the southern edge of the canyon, where rock crumbled and rattled down the slopes onto the dry, furrowed land below. As she watched, he began yet another zigzag across the mile-wide canyon floor. Soon a small fold in the land hid him as he worked his way up the broad canyon.
Hope tightened the cinch on Aces, mounted, and grabbed Dusk’s rein. She rode farther into the canyon, passing Rio far enough away not to disturb him, and chose a piece of higher ground to wait on. Up here nothing would get in the way of watching him while he zigzagged slowly toward her, searching for water hidden deep beneath the dry surface of the land.
Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Page 20
