by Cates, Tory
“You wouldn’t have that card for long, would you, if the Association knew you were riding in amateur rodeos?” Shallie already knew the answer, but she was hoping he might provide the response to an even larger question.
“Of course not,” Hunt answered edgily. “They’d jerk it so fast my head would spin. That’s why I didn’t ride under my own name or pick up the prize money. Why? Are you planning to report me?”
“No.” Shallie watched the roan’s head, colored the thin blue of skim milk, rise above the others. No, she wouldn’t give away Hunt McIver’s secret, but she was careful to file it mentally in a convenient spot. It could prove quite useful in the future. “Why did you do it then if you weren’t even planning on collecting the prize money?”
She felt his shoulder, lightly touching the outer side of her thigh, shift uncomfortably. She knew she was treading on touchy ground. She glanced down at him. His burning, intense eyes were fastened on some invisible object in the dark distance.
“I was never intending to make off with some hometown hero’s prize money. I just wanted to ride. I was lucky I drew your top bronc. I needed a good ride. Needed it bad. Just me and an honest horse. Not Hunt McIver, one-time bronc-busting champion with a couple thousand fans waiting to see if he still had it or not. For one afternoon I wanted to be any cowboy putting down his money and taking his chances. I wanted to rodeo, pure and simple. To get down into that chute without feeling like I had a business manager and contracts for commercials and offers from Hollywood and a big, fat, bloated reputation all riding on my back. Just me and a good horse, that’s all I wanted. Can you understand that, Shallie?”
“I think anyone who really loves rodeo can understand.” Shallie’s tone spoke more than her words about the bond of understanding between them. It was a bond forged by a mutual love of the raw heart of rodeo which had much more to do with the sport’s beginnings on a forsaken prairie somewhere when men and mounts faced one another in contests played out for survival, not for the cheers of crowds seated in concrete arenas.
“Good,” Hunt boomed out with a heartiness that sounded forced to Shallie’s ears. “Now that we’ve got that all squared away, I’m taking you to meet my grandfather. He heard you were pretty and—” Hunt stopped. He scooped Shallie off the fence and into his arms. “I want to show him that the rumors were true.” He held Shallie against his chest, his arm crooked around the swell of her buttocks. The combination of being swept off the railing and feeling the hard press of his body against hers left Shallie temporarily short of breath.
He grinned triumphantly up at her, his full lips split by the gleam of solid, white teeth. It was a smile that Shallie reckoned a goodly number of women had succumbed to over the years. She put her hands on the broad muscles of his shoulders to steady and to lever herself away from him. He lowered her slowly until his taunting lips were level with Shallie’s breasts. If he were to turn his head to either side their tips, pressing against the thin cotton of her blouse, would be at his mouth.
A scuffle and the snort of unsuccessfully suppressed laughter burst from the darkness behind them. Shallie distinguished Wade’s dumpy form in the shadows. Once again he’d caught her in a less than authoritative position. She tried to reclaim what shreds of dignity she might have left by demanding icily, “Mr. McIver, if you would be so good as to put me down, I would appreciate it greatly.”
With an agonizing slowness he lowered her, managing to graze every inch of her body with his own during the descent. When she was finally on the ground, Hunt turned his attention to the intruder lurking behind them. In two surprisingly swift steps he had closed the distance between himself and Wade and was confronting him face to face.
“Who the hell are you?” he roared at the eavesdropper. “And what are you doing prowling around like a thief?”
“He works for me,” Shallie interjected.
“Are you in the habit of peeping on your boss, mister?”
“Nuh-nuh-no,” Hoskins stammered meekly. “I was just looking to find out what I should do with the steers we brung.”
“What do you think you should do? Serve them all punch in demitasse cups?” Hunt’s sarcasm bit like a whip. “Get the stock unloaded, man. My livestock superintendent will tell you where the stock tank is and show you where you’re bunking tonight. And, as long as you’re on Circle M property, don’t go sneaking around like some damned sewer rat. Is that understood?”
“Yuh-yuh-yessir.” Hoskins sounded like a frightened bully called up in front of the principal. As he turned to leave, however, he slashed Shallie with a glare burning with smoldering resentment.
“Can’t say I’m too impressed with your hired help,” Hunt announced.
“We can’t afford to pay much,” Shallie admitted. “We take what we can get.”
“Well, you don’t have to take weasels like him. Come on, let’s get up to the house. Jake McIver isn’t used to waiting for anyone.”
Chapter 5
It’s about damn time you two showed up. You shouldn’t keep an old man waiting like this.” Jake McIver’s age-rusted voice bellowed out at the sound of the heavy, carved front door opening. Shallie was astonished by the size of the stone house as well as the magnificence of its furnishings. A chandelier lighted one entryway lined with antique photographs of McIvers long since gone to their eternal reward. It opened onto a sunken living room, where the elder McIver held court before a fireplace that extended from the floor to the vaulted ceiling. The floor was of smoothly polished stone taken from the nearby riverbed. Western paintings by masters like Frederic Remington graced the walls, which were paneled in a light oak. Sculptures sitting about the mammoth room on their own individually lit pedestals caught bucking horses at the peak of their leaps and ropers chasing calves, their lassos frozen above the fleeing beasts.
The only sour note in the baronial room was sounded from the thronelike chair Jake McIver occupied. It was composed entirely of long, curving cattle horns, fitting for McIver’s majestically dominating air, which Shallie had come to associate with contractors who were either trying to live up to the stereotype of the rodeo producer or who had had a hand in producing it. McIver belonged to the latter group. From the crown of the Stetson hat that Shallie was sure he only removed at bedtime and reluctantly even then, to the diamond Circle M stickpin glistening on his hand-tailored Western shirt, to the tips of his ostrich-skin boots, Jake McIver was every inch the stereotypical contractor.
As if completing the image, a young woman of dark and sultry beauty was curled at his feet like a royal attendant. Her slender, manicured hand rested on the old man’s knee. A long, silken curtain of ebony hair framed her elegantly high-cheeked face. Meticulously applied makeup added an extra note of hauteur to her aloof features. Shallie became uncomfortably aware of her wind-tossed locks and grimy jeans. As she looked more closely, she realized that the woman’s sophistication belied her youth—she couldn’t be out of her early twenties. She recalled her uncle telling her that McIver had seen the sunny side of seventy long ago. So, she concluded, the old goat had earned his reputation.
“Granddad, I’d like to introduce you to—”
“Who the hell are you introducing?” Jake McIver cut his grandson off. “You think I don’t know who this little filly is? This is John Larkin’s little girl. And just as pretty as I heard she was.” The old man’s agate-sharp eyes glittered as they surveyed Shallie’s lean curves. To Shallie it felt as if he were drinking in her youth, feeding vampirishly upon it with his eyes. The demeaning appraisal irked her. Not only hadn’t old McIver accepted her as a business associate, he was treating her like a bit of feminine fluff to be admired, then acquired. Any hope of being recognized as an equal would vanish if she didn’t act quickly.
“And you,” Shallie said, her voice low and calm, her gaze pointedly taking in the woman at his side, “appear to be everything that I heard you were.”
For a stunned moment old McIver didn’t speak. A brooding grayness low
ered his thick eyebrows. The heavy mood, though, lifted as suddenly as it had fallen and he burst out in a booming laugh. “You can bet your boots on that, gal. You can just bet that Jake McIver is everything, and more, that folks say he is. Come on over here and sit down. I don’t bite, do I, Trish?”
“Not where it shows, Sugar,” the dark-tressed beauty purred, giving him a feline smile.
Shallie descended the low steps into the living room and seated herself at a chair somewhat removed from the others. Hunt followed, sprawling out on a richly upholstered, ivory-colored sofa. But Shallie detected something of the crouched predator in his determinedly casual pose, putting a wary distance between himself and his grandfather. No one spoke until Jake McIver cut the silence.
“What the hell kind of a name is Shallie?”
Shallie hated the question and the reply she always had to issue to it. “It’s short for Shalimar.”
“Shalimar? You mean like the perfume?” McIver continued to probe, insensitive to her embarrassment.
Shallie nodded.
McIver looked puzzled for a moment, then roared out his by now familiar laughter. “That’s probably how you got started, wasn’t it? Your mama’s perfume. Is that it? Did old John name you after your mama’s perfume?”
Shallie was grateful for the dim lighting, otherwise McIver would have had another object of ridicule—her flaming red cheeks.
“You don’t have to answer that, Shallie.” Hunt’s voice, low and tight, cut through the bray of laughter. “The old man’s only kidding.”
Shallie was grateful for Hunt’s intervention, but to remain silent would be to allow Jake McIver the upper hand, something she didn’t intend to let happen.
“Yes, I suppose my mother’s perfume did have something to do with my start in life,” she answered in a light, bantering tone. “I guess I’m lucky she didn’t wear Opium.”
Old McIver eyed her as if sizing her up for a second time. A surprised chuckle accompanied the glance. “You’re right, it could have been a lot worse. Most folks, if they had been named after the romantic potions that put the twinkle in their daddy’s eye, would have ended up being christened Wild Turkey.”
Shallie forced herself to laugh, aware both of its falseness and of Hunt’s eyes upon her. His lips were sealed in a grim, tight line. That was when Shallie noticed that he and his grandfather shared the same sort of full, sensuous mouth. When not laughing, the corners hung down with a slight petulance. They were mouths which had demanded, and known, more than their fair share of pleasure.
“What kind of mangy steers did you bring down for this rodeo school Hunt’s putting on?”
Shallie let her reply fall into the rhythm of McIver’s repartee. “Just the flea-bittenest, motliest bunch I could come up with.” Sometimes she felt almost bilingual in her ability to switch into the speech patterns favored by rodeo folk.
“We’ll have a look at your sorry beeves tomorrow. Come on, Trish, time for me to put this old body to bed.” McIver negated his words by springing spryly to his feet. He was well over six feet tall, every inch as trim as he had been half a century before. Trish trailed behind him as he swept out of the room. Shallie detected the electric glance that passed between Trish and Hunt. It sparked a flicker of jealousy that she was quick to extinguish. The last thing in the world she needed was to become embroiled in the twisted affairs of the Circle M. At least she had an explanation now for the hostility that flared between Hunt and his grandfather. Hunt too knew the prick of the green-eyed monster.
The gargantuan room seemed to shrink once Jake and Trish had left. Hunt stood suddenly very close. Shallie’s thoughts spun in a futile attempt to come up with something resembling polite conversation.
“It would appear you’ve learned that a sharp wit can be a handy weapon.” Hunt’s words were as quiet as his grandfather’s had been raucous. They also made Shallie suspect that Hunt too might be a bilinguist who reserved one way of speaking for rodeo people and another for the rest of the world. Shallie felt oddly flattered that he didn’t feel he had to use his rodeo camouflage with her.
“Actually I have you to thank for teaching me that lesson. Besides, what other way is there to deal with your grandfather?”
“The only way I know of dealing with him is very carefully.” A frostiness crept into Hunt’s words, which hung in the air long after they had been spoken. Shallie cast about for another topic of conversation. Unfortunately, she blurted out the only one she could come up with before she’d had a moment to consider it.
“Trish. She seems so much—”
“Younger than my grandfather,” Hunt finished for her. “Chronologically she’s twenty-four, but as far as experience goes she’s at least as old as he is.”
Shallie wondered about this cryptic comment, but it was clear from his impenetrable expression that he did not care to explain it. Shallie could only assume that he had firsthand knowledge about the depth of Trish’s experience. She made one more stab at conversation.
“From your accent,” Shallie hazarded, “I’d guess that you haven’t spent your whole life in Texas.”
“And you’d be right. My grandmother packed me off to an Eastern boarding school as soon as I hit my teens. At the time I thought it was the cruelest kind of punishment. But once I got over the shock of using my legs for activities other than gripping the sides of a horse, I was grateful to her for opening up a larger world beyond rodeo to me. Sounds like you’re acquainted with that world too.”
“I guess I have my mother to thank for that. Like your grandmother, she insisted that I study something unrelated to horses while I was at the university.” The mention of horses turned Shallie’s thoughts back to a matter that pressed urgently for quick action: the blue roan. She looked at the man lounging on the sofa and felt her supply of nerve shrink away. In the dim light his hard-carved face fell away in angled planes and deep, hard shadows. His eyes, she’d discovered in the light, were a blue as changeable as a wild sea. One minute they sparkled in his tanned and weathered face, the tranquil azure of a tropical cove. The next, they shifted to a stormy shade closer to black. At the moment they were a dark Prussian blue.
Under any other circumstances Shallie would have retreated from a man like Hunt, from the dangerous aura of sensuality which he exuded. That is precisely what she had been doing for the past two years. It was simpler that way, she told herself. There was no room in her life for emotional complications. But she couldn’t avoid the danger that Hunt McIver represented, not if she was going to have any chance at the magnificent outlaw roan in Jake McIver’s corral.
“Hunt, I have a favor to ask of you.” Her voice quavered in the dusky room.
He turned his gaze on her without answering.
“I’d like to see one of the auction horses ridden.”
“No favor there, just stay around a day or two and you’ll see them all ridden at the auction.”
“Not all,” Shallie contradicted him. “You’ll have the best ones culled out by then.”
“Of course. Jake didn’t get to be where he is today by selling off his best stock.”
“I know. That’s why I’d like to see one particular horse ridden tonight, before anyone else has a chance to see him.”
“I take it that I’m your candidate to stage this little moonlight buckout.”
“Would you, Hunt?” Shallie couldn’t stop the eager note of pleading that colored her request. “There’s one horse I just have to see. It would mean so much to the Double L. You and your grandfather already have so many champion broncs. All I want is just a chance at this one. He might not turn out to be anything.”
A look of detached amusement stole over Hunt’s features. “And just why should I jeopardize my grandfather’s chance at a prize bronc?”
Shallie had hoped to convince him without playing her trump card. “For the same reason that I’m not going to report you to the PRCA for riding in an unsanctioned rodeo. Because we want to help each other out.” She
held her breath, hoping she hadn’t overplayed her hand.
Hunt’s taunting smile faded. “You’d really report me, wouldn’t you? Being the best really means that much to you, doesn’t it?”
Shallie’s voice was level when she answered, “It does.”
For a long moment Hunt seesawed between angry disbelief and amusement. Amusement finally won out. “All right, if there’s one thing in this world I should understand it’s wanting to excel. You’ve got yourself a bronc rider.”
* * *
The evening air was cool and soft with the scents and moisture blown by the breezes from the wide Colorado River, which wound through the McIver property. A high, full moon dusted the swaying grass and dappled the gnarled live oak trees with silver shadows. The lights had been switched off in the arena and the bunkhouse beyond was already dark. The air was thick with the croaking of frogs and the busy whir of crickets. But no human sound other than the crunch of their own footsteps broke the stillness. The corral was at the bottom of the hill from the ranch house. All the horses were motionless, sleeping on their feet, except for one. His restless, snowy head surged above the others.
“That’s him,” Shallie whispered, though there was no one near enough to have heard her voice.
“You’re a good judge of horseflesh,” Hunt allowed. “I had my eye on him myself. Best of the lot.”
Hunt’s compliment stirred a warm rush of pleasure that Shallie hastily put aside.
Hunt stopped at his brown pickup truck and pulled his bareback rigging out of the back. He strode with a loose-limbed grace over to the arena and started to turn on the lights.
“No,” Shallie hissed in the darkness. “No lights.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Hunt demanded. “You want me to ride a wild horse in the dark?”
“Somebody will see if you turn the lights on. Your grandfather can’t know about this.” A note of desperation crept into Shallie’s voice as she envisioned her prize slipping away from her before she’d ever had a chance at it.
