Saddle Up

by Victoria Vane

  “Two more loads,” he replied refusing to look up.

  He turned his attention to unpacking supplies but couldn’t seem to keep his eyes from following every time she turned her back. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t ignore his body’s awareness of her. He hadn’t felt himself inside a woman in a long time. Far too long. He’d had no shortage of opportunities, but he’d steered clear of them. It was all part of the self-inflicted penance he’d undertaken to purify his spirit. It had taken months of prayer, meditation, and time spent in the heat and darkness of the sweat lodge to purge impure thoughts.

  He’d finally managed to banish sex almost completely from his mind…until now. He might not like Miranda, but the male part of him still appreciated the female parts of her. As she squatted and gathered up the dead branches, he couldn’t help noticing the long legs encased in tight jeans that also showcased a small but perfectly shaped behind. He briefly fantasized how those long legs would feel wrapped around his waist while his hands cupped that nicely rounded ass.

  Her hoarse whisper called him back from the erotic abyss.

  “Keith, do you hear that?”

  A soft, ominous rattle echoed her words.

  “Shit.” He grabbed the hunting knife from his belt scabbard. He hadn’t really expected her to encounter any snakes. They were usually hibernating this time of year. He’d mentioned them simply to torture her, but the danger was real enough now. “Where is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see over the wood.” Her arms were loaded and her eyes wide with fear. “What should I do?”

  “Don’t move until I say so.” He crept toward her, knife in hand, locating it quickly by sound—a Mojave rattler, the deadliest snake in North America. It was coiled and extremely agitated. “It’s on the left about two feet away from you,” he said.

  He approached from the opposite side, gaze locked on the snake, knife hand poised.

  “Wh-what are you going to do?” she whispered.

  “Kill it.” One flick of his wrist released the knife and impaled the blade in the snake’s head.

  She gasped, dropping the wood with a clatter, her face as pale as a full moon. “H-how did you learn to throw a knife like that?”

  “My grandfather taught me. He believes knife throwing is one of many lost arts.”

  “Wait, it’s not dead!” she shrieked.

  Although the knife had gone straight through its head, the snake still lurched and writhed.

  “Yes it is,” Keith replied matter-of-factly. “It’ll just take a while for him to figure it out.” Taking up a branch, he broke off the ends to form a short fork. “They’re a lot like chickens that way. They can move around for up to an hour after you kill them, and they can still bite, even when the head is severed.”

  “They can poison you even after they’re dead?” She shuddered. “One more reason to hate them.”

  “You can hate the live ones all you like, but this one is dinner.” Using the forked stick, he immobilized the snake to remove his knife.

  She regarded him with brows furrowed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He ignored her question. “I’m going to skin and clean it now. If you’re squeamish, you might want to look away, or better yet, go and start the cooking fire.”

  “You’re really planning to eat that thing?”

  His lips curved into a smirk. “Waste not, want not, Miz Sutton.”

  Chapter 8

  Miranda ate her MRE in silence as Keith prepared a fire to roast his snake—once it finally stopped moving. She was edgy and acutely aware of him watching her. More than once she caught herself staring back. Her fascination had exponentially magnified with the knife throw, making him seem like some kind of larger-than-life adventure hero—her very own Jack T. Colton. A chuckle rose up in her throat as she recalled the snake scene from Romancing the Stone. Perhaps it was a case of delayed shock, but what began as a benign gurgle soon transformed into almost maniacal laughter.

  “What is so damned hilarious?” he asked with a dark look.

  “You.” She gasped for air. “Cooking that snake. I guess life really does imitate art.” She let out another chortle. “Are you certain it wasn’t a bushmaster?”

  “Bushmaster?” His gaze narrowed. “We don’t have those here. They live in the jungle.”

  “C’mon, don’t you get it?” Here she was almost dying of laughter, and he hadn’t even cracked a smile. “It was a joke. You don’t watch many movies, do you?”

  “’Fraid not,” he said. “I never had much interest in movies. ’Sides that, the nearest cinema was almost two hours from my home.”

  “What about cable TV?”

  “No cable.”

  “Satellite?”

  “Nope.”

  “No Internet either?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you serious?” she asked, incredulous. “How did you ever survive?”

  “Where I come from, there was always something more interesting to do outside.”

  “And where was that?” she asked. “Mars?”

  She was happy to see his lips twitch. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all. He’d given hints of it, but she’d yet to see it surface. She’d seen him before as a charming and seductive showman, and now as a brooding, standoffish wrangler. She wondered which version was the real Keith.

  “Wyoming,” he replied after a moment.

  “But your birth and school records were all in Long Island, New York. At least all I could find.”

  “I left Long Island when I was thirteen.”

  “To go to Wyoming? Why would you do that?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “What kind of reasons?” she asked.

  He shook his head with a derisive laugh. “So now you want the real story?” He then turned his attention to building a fire. He was quiet for several more minutes, long enough for her to think he didn’t intend to answer, but then he surprisingly broke his silence. “I grew up feeling like an outsider in my own family. I never understood why until the day this scary-looking dude with long hair, tattoos, and scars showed up claiming to be my father.” He spoke slowly, watching her warily. “I had no idea who he was and freaked out, but I didn’t tell anyone. A week later he came back, wanting to take me away with him. This time my mom was home. They got into it, and she called the cops and had him taken away. After that I started asking questions. Demanding answers.”

  “Was it true? Was he your real father?” she asked, trying to imagine the shock and fear he must have felt.

  “Yup. It turns out my mom was quite a rebel in her college days. She got involved with this Shoshone guy who was a leader in the American Indian Movement. He was bad news. He eventually went to prison for a murder up in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. That’s where he was when she found out she was pregnant, so she quietly married an accountant from New Jersey. They never told me anything about my real dad until he showed up. After I found out about all this, I couldn’t let it go. I tracked my father down. We exchanged some letters and phone calls. Then, one day, he sent me a ticket to Wyoming. So I went.”

  “Your mother let you go? Just like that?”

  “I didn’t tell her. When I got to my grandparents’ ranch, I called and told her I wasn’t coming back.”

  “She didn’t care?” Miranda asked, her heart wrenching at what he must have suffered to have been so desperate to leave.

  “I didn’t give her any choice,” he replied with a careless shrug. “Once I knew where I wanted to be, she never could have kept me away. I was finally home. I had a new family, my grandparents, lots of cousins, and more freedom than I’d ever known. Maybe I wasn’t born there, but I never felt I belonged anywhere else.”

  “I can’t believe you weren’t bored to tears after living in the city.”

  “It was a working horse ranch,” he said. “There wasn’t any time to be bored. There were always animals to take care of and things to fix. We also hunted a lot. Our
freezer was always full of game. It was a completely different life—almost like stepping back in time.”

  “Sounds like an awful lot of work to me,” she remarked. “What did you do for fun?”

  “When the work was through, we liked to practice stuff—roping, riding, archery, shooting…knife throwing. My cousins and I were always very competitive about everything, always trying to one-up each other, especially when it came to the horses.” For the first time, he chuckled, a low, soft sound. “We did some crazy-ass things with the horses.”

  “Like what?” she prompted, her curiosity growing.

  “Reckless shit,” he replied, adding more wood to the kindling beneath his makeshift grill. “You know, like hanging off the side of a galloping horse like the ‘Injuns’ in the old Westerns. Or jumping from one horse to another. My grandfather always encouraged us in all of the old ways. He also gave me my first horse, a yearling colt named Little Bear. I knew nothing about horses then, but he told me the horse would teach me all I needed to know. All I had to do was learn how to listen. So I did. For two years we were inseparable. Where I would go, the horse would follow. That horse became my brother. When he was finally old enough to ride, I rode him.”

  “Just like that?” she asked. “You just got on and rode?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “Training a horse is not difficult if you exercise patience.”

  “Was he the horse you rode in that exhibition? That routine of yours was pretty amazing. It’s like you and he read each other’s minds.”

  “Body language,” he replied. “Horses are masters of it. By mastering his, I gained his complete trust. He even let me ride him with a blindfold. In fact, that’s how I got started performing. I roped a calf with the horse blindfolded to impress a girl. A rodeo promoter saw it and offered me a job.”

  “That’s how you got started?” Miranda laughed. “By trying to impress a girl?”

  “Teenage hormones.” His face split into a grin, revealing perfect, pearly white teeth. “At first it was just local rodeos, but after a couple of years, I left the rez to tour full-time with a big rodeo producer. I taught Little Bear more tricks and began wearing feathers, buckskin, and war paint. When the whole horse-whispering craze came along, I decided to become a clinician. It was a great gig…” He added bitterly, “While it lasted.”

  She snorted. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? From what I saw, you used all this Native American mystique of yours just to exploit women. It seems to me you got what you deserved.”

  His eyes met hers and hardened again. “You got all that backward, sister. From the very beginning, they came to me. Just like that boss of yours. How is that exploitive? I just gave them what they wanted.”

  “You mean Bibi?” Miranda asked. “Are you saying she propositioned you?” She’d heard rumors, of course, but had never quite believed that men were also victims of the casting couch.

  “After my clinic, she asked if I wanted to get into films and even offered to pay for acting classes. She even tried to entice me with her Malibu beach house. How else was I to take that?”

  “She’s an influential woman. It couldn’t have been easy to turn her down.”

  “It wasn’t nearly as hard as you think.” He gave a shudder. “Even if she’d been twenty years younger, I wouldn’t have reacted any differently. You look surprised. Do you really have such a low opinion of me?”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I’m just trying to figure you out. I guess I didn’t think men had the same kind of scruples about these things as women do.”

  “So you think I’m the kinda man who’d be kept as some rich woman’s pet?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not when you put it that way. I can’t picture any woman controlling you like that.”

  She knew now that he wasn’t the type. He had too much pride and self-respect. He’d seduce women on his terms. She wondered how many had succumbed. Probably more than he could remember. “So I guess the whole Hollywood idea didn’t live up to your expectations?”

  “Hardly,” he said. “How about you?”

  “Not exactly,” she admitted. “Or at least not yet. It all seemed so much more exciting and glamorous when I was on the outside looking in. Now, not so much. Then again, I had pie-in-the-sky expectations.”

  He looked up from tending his meal. “What do you mean?”

  “I was clueless about the real world. I grew up in a small town, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and no one ever leaves, but I always wanted more. After graduation I headed out to the West Coast, but L.A. was almost a culture shock for me. Where I grew up, most people didn’t lock their houses or their cars. Out in L.A., we not only lock, but alarm everything. I never feel completely safe, even at home, but then again,” she added dryly, “I don’t live in the best of neighborhoods.”

  “So why filmmaking?” he asked.

  “I don’t know exactly. I’ve always loved movies and photography, so I guess filmmaking seemed like a good fit for me. But I’ve spent more time fetching Starbucks than making movies. In fact, that short of yours for Bibi was the only thing that even qualifies as a real film. The rest of my work has been mostly commercials and corporate promo crap that I hate. I suppose that’s better than videotaping weddings, but it’s still a far cry from what I want to do. I’d like to take on worthy projects, tell stories that others in this industry ignore. I’d like to be successful, but I’m not doing it to get rich and famous.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted. “Are you saying you’re only interested in satisfying your creative muse?”

  “Well, not at the expense of starving,” she confessed with a laugh. “Speaking of which, are you really going to eat that snake?”

  “Yes.” Keith flashed a full-toothed smile for the first time. The effect almost knocked her on her ass. “My people have consumed them for centuries.”

  “But it’s venomous,” she argued.

  “All of the venom is in the head. We don’t eat that part. Want to try it?” He came toward her, offering his plate.

  “No, thank you.” She waved it away, her lips curled back in revulsion.

  “The meat of this snake has got to be better than that shit on a shingle you’re having with God knows what in it.”

  She shuddered. “At least my meal never slithered on the ground.”

  “You don’t know that. How can you be certain what’s really in it? Or do you actually trust those government labels?”

  “To be honest, I’d rather not know.” She gave a dry laugh. “As they say, ‘Ignorance is bliss.’”

  His reserve had begun to melt, and the scowl had lifted from his brow. His black eyes taunted her as he took another hunk of meat off the stick he’d used as a skewer and popped a piece into his mouth. “Tastes just like chicken. Are you always afraid to try new things?”

  “I am daring about some things,” she insisted. “Just not my food.”

  “Oh yeah?” he challenged. “Ever gone skinny-dipping?” His gaze drifted slowly over her in a way that made her feel naked.

  “Not since the kiddie pool in the backyard, but that was well before puberty.”

  “What about zip-lining? Ever done that?”

  “Nope,” she confessed. “I don’t really like heights.”

  “I would have thought the girl who came out here in the middle of the desert would be much more adventurous.”

  “Are you implying that I’m dull? Am I boring you, Keith?” She didn’t know why his opinion mattered. Maybe she wasn’t the most exciting person in the world, but who would be, compared to this Indiana Jones? Although Indiana would certainly have sided with her about the snake.

  “Don’t put words in my mouth,” he said. “I don’t know you well enough to imply anything. I’m just trying to get to know you better.”

  “Why?” she asked, wondering at his sudden interest, when only a couple of hours ago he wanted nothing to do with her.

  “Might as well, since we’re
stuck here together,” he replied.

  Miranda felt another stab of disappointment. It wasn’t real interest in her that prompted the questions but only a desire to pass the time. If that was the case, he’d get the Reader’s Digest Condensed version.

  “There’s not much to tell beyond what you already know. I grew up in central Ohio, went to community college, and then came to California to learn cinematography. I finished my internship last year, and now I’m trying to get into films. I haven’t had much luck yet, but I’m hoping to make something of this opportunity.”

  “Since you don’t like unusual foods, I guess you haven’t traveled much,” he said.

  “No, I haven’t traveled,” she admitted. “Other than summers with my grandparents in Montana and then moving to L.A., I haven’t seen much of this country or any other for that matter. What about you?” she asked. “How adventurous are you?”

  His mouth curved suggestively. “Depends on what we’re discussing.”

  Was she imagining the innuendo? She couldn’t ignore her response to him but refused to acknowledge it. She was already too physically aware of him to be encouraging those kinds of thoughts. “Other foods, other cultures,” she said.

  “I like to think I’m open-minded.” He popped another piece of roasted rattlesnake into his mouth. “I’ve lived on the road for the past eight years and spent two of those abroad.”

  “Really? Where did you go?” She hated that his life was so much more interesting than hers. In comparison, she really was dull and boring.

  “I’ve been to every state in the Continental U.S. and have also seen a good bit of Europe. I spent a lot of time in different parts of Germany. They have a weird fascination with Native American culture over there that goes back to a German author of Western dime novels named Karl May.”

  “What did you do when you were there?” she asked.

  A hint of humor softened his eyes and relaxed the lines around his mouth. “The same thing I did here: presented clinics on horse behavior and seduced countless women.”