It was still dark. And cold! Rachel’s definition of lightweight differed considerably from Jake’s, she discovered when she stepped out of her car. September had put a decided bite in the predawn air. Shivering in her red windbreaker with “NTSB” emblazoned in four-inch black letters across the back, she joined the group gathered around a cluster of pickups and long, ventilated stock trailers.
Jake met her with a steaming thermos. “You look like you need something to kick-start your engines.”
“I do. Mornings aren’t my best times. I only come awake after a direct infusion of caffeine.”
Gratefully, she wrapped both hands around the mug he handed her. The first sip opened her eyes and closed her throat.
“That’ll do it,” she told him, choking down thick, sludgy liquid.
“Sorry. I should have warned you Shad brewed up this batch.”
Bow-legged and stoop-shouldered, the Bar-H’s foreman ambled over. “You maligning my java again?”
“It’s long past maligning.”
“I was roastin’ coffee beans over an open fire long before you got throwed off your first horse, boy.” With that masterful put-down, the foreman turned his back on his employer and gave Rachel a thorough once-over. “So you’re the one I’ve been hearin’ about. Alice’s niece, are you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Shadrach McCoy. Book of Daniel, chapter one, verse three.”
“You must get asked about your name often,” Rachel commented with a smile.
“Often enough.” He rocked back on his heels, his face all leathery wrinkles and fuzzy whiskers under the brim of his battered felt cowboy hat. “Good thing, you comin’ out to look after your aunt, missy.”
“She and Uncle Cal have always been kind to me. I’m just returning the favor.”
“Good thing, anyway.”
With a tip of his hat, he sauntered away. Rachel smiled after him. He was one of the old breed, she guessed. More at home on a horse than in a pickup.
“Has he been at the Bar-H long?”
“Since before I was born. Shad and my father cowboyed together in their younger days. Rode the rodeo circuit together, too, before Big John decided to invest his winnings in a few acres of Arizona scrub. He’d barely gotten the Bar-H going when Shad came to work alongside him one summer. The ornery old coot’s been here ever since.”
Rachel wasn’t fooled for a moment. Jake’s gruff description didn’t disguise his affection for the bandy-legged foreman. Whatever else he’d done in his colorful past, Shad McCoy had certainly earned the Hendersons’ respect.
“All right, boys and girls,” McCoy called out in his tobacco-roughened voice. “Saddle up. Let’s get this here circus on the road.”
Circus pretty well described the bustle of activity that followed. Jake, his brothers and the other hands finished loading the horse trailers. That done, they tossed saddles, blankets and bridles into pickup beds, then checked the hitches on the cattle transports.
Lauren and Sydney strolled down from the house, laden with more thermoses. Molly, Rachel learned, had left her girls in the care of Jake’s housekeeper and planned to accompany Sam in the twin-engine Cessna airplane parked at the end of the grassy airstrip behind the barns. When the cavalcade was ready to roll, Sam and his wife climbed into the cockpit and began the preflight warm-up. Within moments, the whine of an engine revving up split the morning quiet.
“They’ll scout the canyons from the sky,” Jake shouted above the engines. “Radio in the location of strays. Ready?”
Nodding, Rachel climbed into the lead pickup. The driver’s side door slammed a moment later, closing her inside the dark, single-seat cab with Jake. He twisted the ignition key and gunned the powerful engine. With the rest of the pickups and trailers strung out behind them, they rattled across the cattle guard and aimed straight at the slanting rays painting the eastern sky a bright gold-pink.
“We brought the herd down to an accessible meadow last week, but some will have strayed off into the trees or adjoining canyons. We’ll have to ride in after them. You can stay at the base camp if you don’t feel up to two or three hours in the saddle.”
“I can manage a couple of hours…I think.”
The dubious reply earned her a chuckle. “We always pack a good supply of liniment.”
“Will you rub down the parts I can’t reach?”
The moment the flippant response was out, Rachel wished it back. She hadn’t thought beyond a glib retort, certainly hadn’t intended any sexual connotation. Yet the idea of Jake’s hands gliding over her body started an instantaneous chain reaction. Her nerve endings sizzled. Heat jumped along her veins. She squirmed in her seat, annoyed, irritated, and more than a little dismayed by the way her inner thermostat clicked up several degrees every time she was around the man.
Jake felt it, too. The unexpected spark. The sudden surge of warmth. Rachel saw it in the way his grip tightened on the steering wheel. Heard it in the silence that settled over the cab, displacing their easy camaraderie. She was searching for a way to recover when he cleared his throat.
“Look, Rachel… About that kiss the other night. I need to explain.”
She tried to recapture the nonchalance of a moment ago with an airy grin. “It was pretty self-explanatory to me.”
“You don’t understand.” He stared out the wind-shield, negotiating the dirt road with careful precision. “Ellen and I were married for ten years. We went together for almost six years before that. I can’t… I don’t…”
A muscle jumped in the side of his jaw. The shadowy movement started a little ache just under Rachel’s ribs. Reaching across the console, she laid a hand on his sleeve of his flannel-lined denim jacket.
“It was just a kiss.”
When his jaw flexed again, her fingers curled into the soft fabric. “Jake…”
“I want more.”
“What?”
“I want more than a kiss from you, Rachel.” Dragging his eyes from the road ahead, he nailed her to her seat. “It started at the fair, when we danced. Came hammering home last night, when I wiped that bit of pie from your mouth. I wanted to kiss you again.”
Since he made the confession with all the enthusiasm of a man about to have his wisdom teeth yanked without the benefit of anesthetic, Rachel didn’t feel particularly flattered. Turned on, yes. Flattered, no.
“You don’t sound very happy about the situation.”
“I’m not.”
His blunt reply destroyed any inclination she might have had to tell him she’d indulged in some wanting of her own.
“If I bother you so much, why did you invite me to come along today?”
“Because you bother me so much.”
“Oh, that makes a lot of sense!”
“I know.” Frustration laced his voice. He shoved a hand through his hair, started again. “I’m handling this all wrong. It’s been a long time since I had to apologize for acting like a pimply teenager with hyperactive glands.”
“Is that what this is supposed to be? An apology?”
“I’m just trying to tell you that you don’t have to worry about that kiss the other night,” he ground out. “It won’t happen again.”
The flat assertion raised a nasty little itch in Rachel. She had the craziest urge to take the initiative and prove just how wrong he could be. Pride kept her from scratching the itch, however.
Pride and common sense.
Frowning, she flopped back against the seat. The dawn that streaked the sky with such glorious swirls of red and gold and pink suddenly seemed like a giant mirror, reflecting her own swirling confusion. She had to admit her motivation for joining Jake on this morning’s expedition was as convoluted as his apparently was for inviting her.
Taggart had pushed her, sure, but she’d been pushed before. She hadn’t reached her position as a senior analyst at the NTSB without learning how to deal with the pressure that came at her from all sides. When she released her findings in a hi
gh-profile or controversial accident investigation, that pressure tripled in intensity. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d stood toe to toe with angry officials from the Airline Pilots Association, the Railroaders Association, or the International Truckers Union, not to mention her peers within the Department of Commerce itself.
No, Taggart wasn’t the reason she was jouncing along a dirt road in the chilly dawn. Only a foot or two of airspace separated her from the real reason.
She slanted Jake another look, chewing over his words. He wanted her, but he wasn’t going to do anything about it.
Well, hell.
He’d been right to get it out in the open, Jake decided as the pickup jolted down the dirt track. Right to let Rachel know he recognized that he’d been putting out dangerously mixed signals.
He’d thought it through, wrestled hard with the knowledge that she stirred responses in him he didn’t want to feel. Wasn’t ready to feel. He’d acknowledged that sobering fact last night, right after he’d issued the crazy invitation for her to ride out with him this morning.
He hadn’t intended to invite her, any more than he’d intended to kiss her the other night on the porch. Or let his finger graze her mouth when he’d removed that morsel of pie. Just thinking about her red, luscious mouth had sent Jake to bed hard and aching. Again! He’d rolled out of bed this morning determined to set things square between them.
Well, he’d pretty well bungled the matter, but at least he’d said what needed saying. He’d loved Ellen. He would always love Ellen. Whatever itchy feelings Rachel Quinn raised under his skin couldn’t touch the place in his heart his wife would always hold. Rachel needed to know that, right up front, just as Jake had needed to tell her the way things were. His sense of fairness wouldn’t allow him to take this crazy attraction between them any further. Or let her think he was offering more than he could deliver.
Now that he’d said his piece, maybe he could put that blasted kiss out of his head and concentrate on the tasks at hand…the first being to get them to the meadow that would serve as their base camp without busting an axle.
Hands tight on the wheel, Jake steered the pickup along the rutted road that wound up into the Coconino National Forest. Like most of the big ranchers in the area, he leased grazing rights on the federal preserves that covered a good chunk of northern Arizona.
This particular preserve consisted of almost two million acres containing everything from semiarid desert to ponderosa pine forests to alpine tundra. Elevations ranged from two thousand feet above sea level at some of the canyon bottoms to more than twelve thousand feet at the top of the San Francisco Peaks. It was a tough land, an unforgiving land to those whose lives were affected by the searing droughts, the wild gales, the fierce snowstorms that often ravaged the area. To someone born and bred in the shadow of those jagged peaks, though, it was as close to heaven as a man was likely to get while he still drew breath.
With each hairpin turn in the road, stubby live oak and piñon gave way to fir and pine. Increasingly, the air took on a sharp bite of resin flavored with the damp, earthy odor of rotting logs. The verdant richness filled Jake’s lungs when at last he pulled the pickup off the road into a broad, flat meadow and climbed out.
Squinting in the bright morning sunshine, he spotted a dozen or so head of Brangus and black Angus at the far end of the meadow. The rest of the herd had drifted into the tree-lined slopes on either side of the valley.
Jake and his hands had brought this bunch down from the high summer pastures a week ago and sorted out the bull calves and heifers he wanted to keep for breeding stock. Now came the real work. He was pulling on his worn leather gloves when Shad descended from the second pickup.
“All right, boys and girls,” the foreman croaked. “Time to earn your keep.”
Idly, Jake wondered how many times he’d heard Shad McCoy issue that same gruff announcement. A hundred times at least.
Gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, and as stubborn as a bent nail, the old man could have retired years ago. He certainly possessed the financial resources to kick back, prop his heels on a porch rail and never wrestle another bawling calf into a chute again. Both Big John and Jake, when he took over management of the Bar-H, made it a practice to match the contributions their employees made to retirement funds.
Shad was far more than an employee, however. And Jake was damned if he was going to be the one to suggest retirement to the man who’d wheezed with laughter every time one of the Henderson boys had parted company with a horse, then dusted them off and put them right back in the saddle.
Shad ambled over. His rheumy eyes flicked an assessing glance over Rachel as she leaned against the front of the pickup, her hands pushed into her jacket pockets.
“I’ve got an extra pair of gloves in my truck if you’ve a mind to help out.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Good enough. You come with me, missy, and I’ll show you what to do.”
Rachel was soon hard at work helping unload and water the horses while Jake, his brothers and their hands muscled the portable corrals out of the stock trailers and into place. They’d all shed their jackets and rolled up their sleeves by the time the last section clanked into place.
Rachel had worked up a sweat, too, Jake saw. Perspiration shone on her nose and cheeks when she drifted over to join him beside the corral.
“What do we do now?” Shading her eyes, she surveyed the herd at the far end of the meadow. “Ride down and shoo them back this way?”
He hid a smile at her description of the dusty, frustrating chore of pushing a bunch of cows in a direction they didn’t particularly want to go.
“The easiest way to handle cattle is to make them come to you. We’ll try this first.”
Wedging a shoulder inside a pickup’s open window, he leaned on the horn. A series of shrill blasts rolled down the meadow. Echoes bounced back from the slopes on either side.
It only took one cow to get the herd moving. A beefy black Angus lifted her head, swung it to identify the source of the noise and started for the trucks. Her calf trotted along behind her. The rest of the herd soon followed in their wake.
“That’s it?” Rachel demanded incredulously. “You just toot the horn and they come?”
“Those that can hear it. We’ll have to mount up and search out the rest.”
Obviously, the technique he’d described didn’t jibe with Hollywood’s version of a cattle drive. Rachel looked both amused and disappointed.
“You just toot the horn?” she repeated with a shake of her head.
Grinning, Jake confessed the secret of modern-day ranching. “We always carry sorghum molasses feed cakes when we come up to check stock. They’ve learned that the sound of the horn means a treat.”
“You know you’re destroying all my illusions about you rough, tough cowboys, don’t you?”
His grin took a wry tilt. “Yeah. I know.”
Jake restored at least some of her faith in cowboys later that afternoon, when they went in search of the cows Sam had spotted in an aerial sweep of a small, rocky canyon.
In the process, however, he shattered his own illusion that he could keep his hands off Rachel Quinn.
Chapter 6
They found the three cows strung out along a narrow canyon cut by a deep gully. Two stood nursing their offspring. The third peered down into the gully and mooed plaintively to her bawling calf. The knob-kneed black Angus had managed to slide down into the gulch and now couldn’t climb back up. His heartrending cries rode on the wind that whistled along the pine-studded canyon walls.
“Poor baby,” Rachel murmured, moved by his plight.
Jake wasn’t quite as sympathetic. With a few choice words about damn fool cattle that don’t have sense enough to stick to grassy meadows, he swung off his horse and untied the lariat lashed to the saddle.
Rachel dismounted as well, fascinated by his smooth coordination as he snaked out the rope. He looped one end around the
saddle horn, then draped the remaining length over a tall pine that seemed to jut out from solid rock. The scientist in Rachel appreciated his use of the simple laws of physics. The tree trunk would act as a fulcrum, she saw at once, and prevent the sharp rocks at the edge of the gully from sawing into the rope. His horse would provide the force required to pull the calf up the slope.
The big bay gelding stood patiently, tail swishing. Obviously, both man and horse had done this drill before. Nevertheless, Rachel felt compelled to offer her less than expert assistance.
“Do you need me to hold his reins? Back him up when it’s time to haul up the calf or something?”
“Hammer here knows what to do, don’t you boy?”
His affectionate slap raised puffs of dust from his mount’s neck. Hammer nickered and tossed his head.
“Just keep back from the edge,” Jake cautioned, wrapping the rope around his waist a couple of times. “The dirt might crumble under your boots.”
Mindful of his warning, she watched the proceedings from a safe distance. Hammer, she discovered, did indeed know just what to do. Bracing his forelegs, he stood unmoving while Jake worked his way down the slope hand over hand. He reached the bottom a few moments later and unwound the rope.
Now that rescue was at hand, the ungrateful calf didn’t appear to want it. Skittish and bleating more loudly than ever, it backed up the narrow gulch. Jake followed, snaking out a loop in the stiff hemp. A moment later, the lasso sailed through the air and settled around the calf’s neck. A quick tug tightened the noose.
Just like in the movies, Rachel thought in satisfaction. Her faith in cowboys restored, she watched as Jake took up the slack and gave a piercing whistle. Hammer began to back up slowly, dragging the calf with him. Bucking and twisting at the end of his tether, the animal started up the slope. His hooves scrabbled for purchase on the loose rocks. His vociferous protests reverberated through the canyon and made Rachel wince in silent sympathy.
Twice in a Lifetime Page 6
