“Riding lessons for a tune-up on the Dodge?”
“One riding lesson.”
“A week’s worth of lessons, and I’ll agree.”
He loved the way she looked at him, half sizing him up and obviously half wishing she hadn’t entered a bartering arena with a cowboy. “Okay, Chance Salazar, you’re on.”
He held out his hand, palm up, waiting to seal the deal, wanting to feel her tough him again, if only in a simple handshake.
She hesitated, then slid her palm against his, flat and warm, just skimming the calluses, then lightly pressing. Before she could take back the gesture of faith, he gripped her hand and held it tight, flesh to flesh, imprinting her with his demand for far more than riding lessons, truck repairs or even midnight dreams.
And he realized as she raised dazed eyes to his that he was in way, way over his head, for he wanted to promise her far more than fetching her cattle, fixing her ranch or riding lessons. He wanted every damned one of those midnight dreams.
He released her hand as if it burned him and almost knocked his chair over in his haste to get out of there.
“You coming, Pablo?” he asked, backing out of the dining room.
“Si, jefe. Hasta mañana, José, señora.”
Chance only hoped Jeannie couldn’t hear his scudding heartbeat.
The sun wasn’t cresting the horizon when Pablo woke him. “Someone’s cut the fences down by the gate,” he said. “I swear I wasn’t a hundred yards away and didn’t hear him. If I didn’t know better, I’d think we got a ghost riding this range.”
“Damn. Next thing we get are some dogs for this place,” Chance grumbled. “Bad-guy-eating dogs.”
“Doreen told me her mama has a litter of chowchow-Lab crosses. Eleven of them. Hijolé. Eleven. I think they’re about ready. Want me to get some?”
Chance thought of the last time he’d visited Doreen and had to clean his boots for nearly an hour after the eleven puppies had used them as teething rings. He almost said no, that he’d just been grousing. Then he thought what little José might do with a puppy in his arms, how his face would light up. And Dulce, too, for that matter. The girl needed something of her own to cuddle. But the picture in his mind was of Jeannie lying back in green grass, a red-yellow Lab puppy making her laugh out loud as it frolicked around her.
“Call her up. Get as many as you can,” he growled. “Doreen will bless the ground you walk on if you take them all. But get at least three, okay?”
“Okay, boss.”
“Quit that, will ya? It’s too damned early in the morning.”
“You’re just mad because you’re lying to Señora Jeannie and you know it’s a sin,” Pablo said, handing Chance a cup of coffee.
“Telling a lie isn’t a sin,” Chance grumbled. “It might be wrong, but it’s not a sin.”
“It’s one of the commandments.”
“Bearing false witness against someone, yes. To someone, no.”
“You shoulda been a lawyer, Chance. You’re pretty good at those shades of gray.”
“The trouble with cousins is that they think they can say any old thing and they’ll be fine because we’re related.”
“That’s true, too. Why don’t you tell her who you really are?”
“And scare her to death? She’s happy now, thinking all the problems are over. Why should I wreck that and let her know her ranch has some idiot out there still setting fires and cutting fences and that her hired hands are too asleep at the switch to stop it? That wasn’t a slam at you, pal, it was at me.”
“I know. But I think you should tell her because she might want to know. You and me, we can’t be here every minute of the day. What happens if something goes wrong when we’re not there to stop it?”
Chance made a rude noise. He’d thought of the same thing half a dozen terrible times, and the notion haunted him every bit as much as Pablo’s fence-cutting ghost plagued the ranch. “Get outta here and let me shower. I’ll meet you outside.”
“Okay…boss.” Pablo managed to duck the pillow thrown at his head.
When they reached the fence near Rancho Milagro’s ornate wrought-iron gate, Chance didn’t need Pablo’s pointing out the cut ends to know the barbed wire had been snipped clean in the center.
“I’ll bet anything it was that Rudy,” Pablo said, and gave a swift spit at the dirt to disabuse any notion Chance might have had that Pablo held any respect for El Patron’s chief henchman and Pablo’s third cousin several marriage times removed.
“But at whose orders—Nando’s or El Patron’s?”
“It’s the same difference,” Pablo said. “It’s all of El Patron’s making. He orders, everyone else runs around doing everything they can to get it done before he can complain about it.”
“Was he always like that?” Chance asked. “I don’t remember hearing too much about him when I was a kid.”
Pablo shrugged. “Your daddy had enough money not to feel El Patron’s influence. But I’ll tell you, that one, he was born pulling the wings off flies.”
Chance grunted, torn between amusement at Pablo’s assessment of El Patron’s birthing and chagrin that Pablo’s immediate family hadn’t been able to avoid El Patron’s coercion. When one of Pablo’s uncles had challenged it, he’d lost everything, including his freedom. And Jorge, young Lucinda’s missing husband, had been gone for three weeks and not a single clue had turned up.
“The way these strands were cut, we’re going to have to use this whole roll of new wire. Good thing we brought it with us. Repairing these fences is going to cost Señora Jeannie a lot of money.”
Chance agreed. In cutting the barbed wire down the center, the thugs who did it had made sure that each section would have to be restrung and a come-along winch used to tighten the whole. “I hate riding fence,” he muttered, setting up the fence stretcher.
“Is she rich, then, your lady?”
“She’s not my lady. She’s the owner of this ranch. That’s all.”
“She seems a lot more than just an owner,” Pablo said, neutralizing whatever Chance was thinking. “She seems like a real doña. A lady. If you don’t want to call her yours, that’s fine. You’re loco, but that’s okay, too.”
“You know what, Pablo? You can—”
Pablo cut him off. “I know. I have to go down the fence and set the come-along. We should be in television, you and me. You’re the Lone Ranger and I’m Tonto. You’re Timmy and I’m Lassie. You’re Sherlock, I’m that Watson dude who has to walk the fence asking stupid questions. Again.”
“I don’t know whether to throw you a dog biscuit or warn you not to go into town,” Chance muttered. “Speaking of which, will you follow me into town this morning so I can drop my truck off at Salvio’s and stop by the office?”
“You really going to get a tune-up on that old truck of yours?”
Chance grinned. “It’s part of a bargain with Jeannie.”
“You’re not really going to let her pay for it, are you?”
“Course not. Salvio will tell her one thing, me another,” he said. “And I want to stop by the phone company and give Pete the go-ahead on the phones out here. I’ll sleep a little better knowing we’re not relying on cell contact only.”
“Okay, boss.”
“Damn it, Pablo—”
Pablo snorted as he walked beside the five feet of fence still dragging the ground. “You don’t need to go by the office. I talked with Ted last night on my cell phone. He says no one has seen El Patron at all for the last week. But someone slashed Ted’s tires again the night before last. He’s as mad as a sand flea in December.”
“Ted’s always mad about something,” Chance said, pulling with all his might on the post portion of the come-along.
“He said to tell you that Jack’s wife Cora’s getting nervous. Somebody put some rotten meat on their doorstep. She thinks it’s a warning and wants Jack to retire early.”
Chance swore softly. “Tell him to go ahead. Make Dell
the marshal for a while.”
“Ted’s better.”
“Ted’s fine, but he’s got a temper and right now, we need a cool head at the helm. Dell’s our man of the week.”
“Ted told me some of El Patron’s boys were caught messing around with the trucks out at the potash plant.”
“Why would they do that?” Chance grunted.
“¿Quien sabe?”
“Right. Who knows? What happened?”
Pablo ducked his head to give a mighty tug on the winch. “They’re all…in jail…now. Potash people were smart enough to call the state cops, not Nando.”
Chance grinned. He waved his hand to let Pablo know the fence was tight enough. “We can rule them out of this fence cutting, then. Anything about Lucinda’s Jorge?”
“Not a thing. What all you want Salvio to do on your pickup, boss?”
“Guess I’ll spare everybody’s ears and have him give me the works—short of a full overhaul. And call me boss one more time, Pablo, and I’ll wrap you in this thing and use you for the support for the fence.”
“Okay, cousin.”
Exhausted from pulling wire and from keeping watch on the ranch through at least the first half of the night, Chance followed Pablo to the main hacienda for breakfast, feet dragging. He hid a wince as he spied Dulce waiting for them on the porch.
As often as not in the last couple of days, she’d been outside the hacienda, whether it was six in the morning or six in the evening. Dressed in her derisive chains, black raggedy denim jacket, black jeans, dolled-up combat boots and made up like Halloween, she would lean against one of the viga poles like a vampire ready to pounce.
“Find any stagecoaches in need of rescuing?” she asked. Her tone was snide, at best.
He thought of at least five responses his aching muscles suggested, then said, “Only one, and it had an old man and woman with a million dollars in their suitcases.” He tipped his hat at her as he walked past her into the blessedly cool interior of the hacienda. It was scarcely past seven, and already the temperature hovered in the nineties.
“So, did you rob them or what?” she asked, following him.
“No,” he said, removing his hat, not turning to look at her. “I saved the day, killed the bad guys and put all their money in the bank in a trust fund for you. The old couple wanted it that way.”
“As if.”
Pablo said in Spanish, “They kept half, that was our deal. You only get a quarter.”
In English, Dulce asked, “So who gets the other quarter?”
Still without looking around, Chance said to Pablo, “She’s pretty good at math. Not to mention Spanish. What do we do now?”
“Split our half with her?”
“As if,” Chance said.
“As if what?” Jeannie asked, coming out of the kitchen, her face rosy with cooking heat, her hair curling from the humidity, strands of it red-gold against the whitewashed walls.
“As if we’re gonna wait all morning for breakfast,” Dulce said. “What’s with Juanita? She gets lazier every morning.”
“She’s not required to cook breakfast. I do that,” Jeannie said. “And—”
Dulce interrupted her. “Yeah, like don’t you know what eggs do to our arteries? At the last place I was shoved into, the kitchen witch told me eggs can kill.”
Jeannie’s lips tightened, but all she said was, “Only if you’re using them as bullets.” She set a large platter of scrambled eggs, a rasher of bacon and some plump sausages on the sideboard. “Dulce, would you get the toast and the jellies, please?”
“I knew it wouldn’t take you long to treat me like a servant,” Dulce snapped, but she went into the kitchen. She came out seconds later and carelessly tossed the plate at the sideboard, making it clatter against the wall. “There. Any more chores you want done? I could sweep out the fireplace.”
To Chance’s delight, Jeannie gave an abrupt gurgle of laughter. “You might check to see how the pumpkin is faring down in the garden. Last time I looked, it wasn’t nearly big enough to be a coach, but given a little more magic, one of these days it might happen.”
Dulce gave her a sullen glare, but her lips were pressed together as if she was holding back a smile.
José took Chance by the hand and led him to a different place at the table. Chance hadn’t realized he’d sat in the same seat every meal since that first evening and felt slightly awkward being directed to a new location. But there was one big positive about the change—he was as far from Jeannie as the table allowed.
“What’s this?” he asked.
The boy didn’t answer, but pulled out the chair and bowed with a comic flourish.
Chance looked at Jeannie across the table. He’d always sat near her before. The distance should have made him breathe easier, but it didn’t somehow. It seemed so family. Mother and Father at opposite ends of a table, kids and Pablo between them.
“Seems José has a new seating arrangement in mind.” Chance decided his mother had less color in the bright red petunias in her window boxes on the old farm’s porch than Jeannie sported in her cheeks at that moment. He wondered what caused the blush and for a moment hoped it was because she regretted he wouldn’t be seated next to her.
As if, as Dulce would have said.
“Go ahead,” Jeannie said, and waved a hand at the table.
He’d felt off balance for days, since the moment he met her. But now, with a blush turning her such a flustered rosy color, he found himself wanting to pursue the moment, to watch the cool ranch woman become the dreamy-eyed woman he’d glimpsed now and again. And thought of too often, he added.
“Shall we sit?” she asked, and seemed to melt into her chair.
Dulce sat alone on one side of the table, dead center, leaving at least three empty seats on either side of her.
“She’s still mad because we get a quarter of her fortune,” Pablo said in Spanish.
Chance had noticed Pablo often intervened after one of Dulce’s swift jabs, not correcting the girl, which, in Chance’s opinion, would have been disastrous, but uttering some outrageous quip in Spanish before looking at him, waiting for a translation.
This time, Chance didn’t offer one. He merely positioned his chair so Dulce’s side of the table was semi-censored. To his amusement, little José canted his chair “aback” to Dulce to do the same on the other side of the table.
After they’d gone through the buffet line—the morning’s breakfast consisted of scrambled eggs, bacon, plump sausages, stacks of wheat toast and an array of jellies and jams to sweeten things—Dulce rudely demanded the salt be passed down the table.
Jeannie handed it along with the comment that she’d added herbs to the eggs, so they probably wouldn’t need much in the way of salt. Dulce looked at her with that patented derisive glare of hers and used the shaker with exaggerated enthusiasm.
“Extra salt’s a good idea in the high heat,” Jeannie said placidly. “You don’t dehydrate as quickly.”
Dulce set the shaker down with a loud snap.
Chance withheld a smile at the girl’s thwarted defiance and said, “I know we were going to ride early this morning, but we ran into a little problem down near the main gate, and I’ll have to finish fixing that first. Then I have to take my truck into town. So why don’t we wait until later this afternoon, after the high heat’s down, and ride then.”
Dulce shot him a dark look, which he returned blandly. When she looked at her plate, he continued, “I think it would be a good idea to have a saddling lesson on the first day around the horses. It’ll teach you how to touch them without scaring them and get you used to the critters.”
“At least we know if they start bucking, you’ll know what to do,” Jeannie said.
He flashed her a grin. “They won’t buck, I promise you that.”
José giggled.
“What happens if they do?” Dulce asked. “Buck, I mean?”
“You fall off,” Chance said before forking a lar
ge bite of sausage and eggs into his mouth. He winked at José, who giggled again.
“That’s just mean,” Dulce said, but she was smiling.
The remainder of their meal passed in a fairly pleasant fashion, if one ignored Dulce’s winces as she downed her plate of oversalted eggs.
Jeannie felt she’d never been so high above the ground as she was atop a horse. Twenty-story elevators on the exterior of a D.C. building seemed less frightening than sitting a seeming five miles above the ground on a mild mare with the unlikely name of Jezebel.
“Pet her and tell her she’s a good girl,” Chance suggested. “And don’t let her know you’re scared.”
“She’ll feel it through my shaking hands,” Jeannie said, but did as he told her. The horse gave a rippling shudder and whickered.
“Is that a good noise or a bad one?” Jeannie asked, continuing to pat the horse’s neck and holding on to the saddle horn for dear life.
Dulce said, “It’s a good one. She made the same sound when I gave her a carrot this morning.”
Jeannie gave the girl a grateful smile. “Thank God. Do you have another carrot for her now?”
As Dulce shook her head and grinned wickedly, Chance made a sound that was roughly the male human version of Jezebel’s whicker. “You’re doing fine. I’m going to let go of the reins now. Take them up like I showed you.”
“No, please, Chance. I’m not ready. I don’t want—”
He cut her off by stepping away from the horse. To her considerable relief, Jezebel didn’t leap forward in a mad dash for the Guadalupe Mountains. She moved sideways and tossed her head.
“Squeeze your legs a little harder, and she’ll move forward,” Chance said.
“She’s fine right where she is.”
Dulce chuckled. And Jeannie realized the girl was having a wonderful time watching her new guardian suffer abject terror. She had to swallow a smile. Chance had been right—the girl did appreciate knowing she wasn’t the only one in the world who couldn’t ride.
However, when Dulce had been perched atop Diablo, she’d looked as if she belonged on a horse. Her eyes had danced with excitement, not fear, and she’d flawlessly performed every command Chance had given her. And she’d dispensed with all her chains and most of her piercings. “I didn’t want to scare the horse,” she explained blithely. Jeannie hadn’t wanted to think about what that said about Dulce’s feelings about humanity at large.
Cowboy Under Cover Page 8
