by Cates, Tory
“All right. No lights.” He grabbed a rope and set off for the corral. “Come on and help me catch this hooved treasure you have your heart and my life set on.”
Shallie followed him. Hunt played out a large, looping lasso as they walked. At the gate he swung his leg over the top timber and straddled it. At their approach, the horses had begun to stir. They began to seethe as Hunt sent a couple of experimental tosses of the rope snaking over their heads. Led by the roan, they churned about the corral. Hunt played out the loop and swung it over his head, a whirring halo. As the roan approached, Hunt let the lasso fly. It cut the night air like a native spear and landed on the roan’s head like a slightly askew fedora covering his ears and one eye. The roan balked and would have thrown off the loop but Hunt, with a practiced flick of his wrist, snaked the lasso up and over the horse’s muzzle, landing it securely around his neck.
Feeling the hemp tighten around his throatlatch, the roan panicked, rearing up on his hind legs. Hunt gave him plenty of rope, then dropped down behind the gate. Feeling no pressure on its neck, the horse calmed down and Hunt started to reel him in like a nine-hundred-pound fish. Hunt played the roan, using instinct and finesse rather than brawn. When the bronc resisted, Hunt let out some slack. When he became more pliant, Hunt urged him close with a firm but gentle pressure on the rope. Little by little, he drew the animal to him.
“Get a handful of grain,” Hunt ordered Shallie when the bronc was almost close enough to touch.
Shallie scampered off toward the barn and quickly found the grain bin. She dived into it with both hands. Back at the corral she offered the treat to the horse. He whinnied nervously at their closeness. But he wasn’t a wild horse—one totally unused to the sight and scent of man—just a horse that man couldn’t succeed in breaking. The smell of the molasses-laced grain mix was more than he could resist. He buried his muzzle deep in Shallie’s upstretched hands. That was what Hunt had been waiting for. With an unearthly swiftness he tightened his hold on the animal, taking a grip close to its throatlatch where he could control its movement.
With the bronc firmly in tow, Shallie slid back the gate latch and let it swing open. Hunt led the suddenly tractable horse from the herd into the arena. Shallie scrambled up on the chute gate, raising the iron-barred entrance while Hunt led him inside. Once the grating had slammed down behind the bronc, penning him in, Hunt reached for his rigging. A nervous muscle twitched in rebellion on the roan’s back as he positioned the leather device. Shallie held her breath and reached through the planks of the chute to grab the latigo, the long leather strap holding the cinch band to the rigging. She prayed he wasn’t a chute fighter, a horse that reared up in the box. Bronc riders feared them more than the hardest bucking horse. Their scariest horror stories were about the horses with a propensity for mashing a man between their bodies and the timbers of a bucking chute. Shallie had long ago sworn that she would never keep a horse with even the slightest tendency toward chute fighting in her string.
“Pull it tight.” Shallie hauled in the slack, as Hunt held the rigging so that the front edge rested just above the point where the bronc’s neck joined the backbone. She cinched it down tightly.
Hunt placed a foot on either side of the chute so that he straddled the space above the roan’s back. He bent over and placed a gentle hand on the animal’s sides. “He’s holding his breath.” With a whinnying snort, the horse expelled the air. “Okay,” Hunt ordered. “Pull it in some more.”
Shallie yanked up on the rigging strap. “How’s that?”
“Good.” He straightened up and swung his arms to loosen them. Climbing onto an unknown horse was not a bronc rider’s favorite occupation. He liked to know everything he could about an animal—how he bucked, which way, and how hard. Trying out a maverick at midnight was an experience guaranteed to start a bareback rider’s adrenaline pumping. Shallie, remembering Hunt’s taped ribs and the rumors about his numerous other injuries, suddenly wished she hadn’t made such a rash request. Out in the darkness, with no one nearby to deflect the flying hooves of a fear-maddened horse, it began to seem not only selfish but dangerous.
“Hunt,” she whispered.
A look of annoyance crossed his face. She had broken his concentration, the psychic link he was forging with the roan. Like a boxer stepping into a spotlit ring, a trial lawyer into a packed courtroom, a surgeon into a hushed operating theater, Hunt was in his element. He was a study in focused intensity.
“What?” His question was testy.
“Don’t go through with it. I’m sorry I asked you to do this. It was a stupid thing to ask.”
His annoyance deepened. He looked from her to the horse beneath him. “No, you’re right, I can sense it. This horse has some lessons in him that no man has ever learned before. I want to learn them.” With that, Hunt’s face settled again into a hard mask of concentration.
Seeing it, Shallie had no doubt about what had made Hunt a champion. The force of his determination hung in the air thick and tangible enough to taste and smell. Shallie could feel it just as she felt the searing heat of the hottest sun or the wind-driven rain of the fiercest storm. It was the heat generated by the force of Hunt’s will that welded him to the animals he rode. It was what transformed the spectacle of rodeo into something more, something timeless—the most primitive, yet enduring of dramas, the one man has been playing out since he first rose from primordial beings to challenge the other species of the earth for supremacy. What Shallie wanted or didn’t want at that moment no longer had any meaning for Hunt. He had a horse to ride.
His rosined glove squeaked as he jerked it down on his hand, catching the narrow leather strap at its top between his front teeth and pulling it tight. The gloved hand reached down to find the exact point where leather and flesh both conspired to give him the best possible grip.
“Get the gate.”
Shallie jumped down and ran around to the front of the chute. She grabbed the rope attached to the gate and looked up at Hunt. The mental energy he had produced had taken on a physical life of its own. It coursed into his broad shoulders, his sinewy right arm. It brought the well-defined muscles of his back to quivering life. The energy flowed down into the firm hills of his buttocks, the columns of muscle that were his legs. It streamed through his body, pumping every bit of tissue with the same iron determination that locked his brain. He eased down on the bronc’s back.
The startled roan twitched. The sting of fear trapped Shallie’s breath. She had no proof yet that the horse wouldn’t rear up, crushing Hunt beneath its muscled bulk. The horse kicked an angry hoof into the creaking planks of the chute, then settled down, allowing Hunt to claim the position that would best allow him to control the animal between his legs. He turned his toes out, locking his ankles, his spurs aimed directly at the bronc’s shoulders. Then, with the practiced precision of a conductor raising his baton, Hunt nodded his head.
“Let’s see this horse.”
Shallie yanked on the rope in her hand and the gate snapped open. In the same instant Hunt threw his free hand high and the bronc broke into the arena. All the animal’s pent-up rage was directed toward one objective: ridding itself of the man on its back. Shallie caught a glimpse of the horse’s eyes and her pulse pounded faster. They flashed with a fiery light far brighter than that reflected from the moon. They recalled to Shallie’s mind the rage-darkened eyes of stallions painted by El Greco. The roan lunged to the center of the arena, making one heart-stopping buck so high that it seemed he thought he could escape along the platinum avenue paved by the moon. For a fraction of a second, horse and rider hung in the air, suspended in a moonbeam’s glow. It was as if Pegasus lived again, called back to earth by a man with a spirit to equal the mythical greatness of his own. Shallie felt the ground shudder when he landed. Hunt took the jolt with a rollicking cry of exultation that pierced the night. Shallie felt as if she were witnessing a savage ritual in which man and beast mingled their natures.
The roan le
aped for the moon again, fishtailing its body with a wicked shimmy. Hunt clung to the blue-dappled back anticipating each move and matching it. The hooves pounded down again, pointed like a diver’s hands outstretched to pierce the water. Shallie half expected the earth to part beneath the animal’s onslaught. It didn’t. Hunt absorbed the impact, letting it ripple fluidly through him. Tales of the greatest bronc riders in rodeo’s hundred-year history flipped through Shallie’s mind. She could find none to equal what she was seeing. Hunt combined raw physical strength and technical mastery with a kind of artistry Shallie had seen all too rarely in the arena.
Then, with no warning, the crafty roan changed tactics and tore out in a dead run heading straight for a section of fence shadowed by the concrete bleachers.
“Jump,” Shallie screamed. Hunt was one move ahead of both Shallie and the horse. He turned the rigging loose and rolled off the runaway horse’s back, landing with a catlike grace on the plowed dirt of the arena.
The instant the hated weight fell from his back, the roan stopped dead. His goal accomplished, he became the picture of docility. Hunt sprang to his feet, ripped his riding glove from his hand, and tossed it into the air with a wild whoop. Shallie ran to him. The moonlight bounced off his face, reflecting an expression of the purest joy she had ever seen.
As they met in the middle of the arena, Hunt swept her off of her feet and whirled her around, his strong hands spanning her waist. Like survivors of a shipwreck or winners of a sweepstakes they were joined by the magnitude of the experience they had just shared. Hunt put her down and sucked in a deep lungful of air.
“That is some horse.” He spoke each word distinctly.
Shallie laughed, infected by the joy radiating from a man who had just put in the performance of a lifetime. “You rode Pegasus,” she marveled.
“Pegasus?”
“I’m calling him Pegasus,” she explained, as if it were a foregone conclusion that the horse would be hers. “I’ve been saving the name for him.”
His hands still around her waist, he gazed into her upturned face while she congratulated him with her eyes, her smile. It seemed like nothing more than the logical extension of their shared joy when he pulled her to him. Her hands slid shyly up along his arms to the smooth bulges of muscle. She felt his power pulse beneath her fingertips. The glow from his accomplishment bathed them both in a golden radiance. He smelled the way his wild, whooping cry of exultation had sounded. Their bodies met at the two points where her erect nipples probed the shield of flesh that was his chest. The feel of his chest against the sensitive points of her breasts both disturbed and disarmed Shallie. Before she herself was even fully aware of it, Hunt saw and responded to the longing that shone from her face.
Lightly, tentatively, his mouth grazed hers. Her breath sounded with a ragged catch in her throat. It was the signal that triggered the release of Hunt’s passion. He gathered her to himself, crushing her lips with his, pressing her body against his. His thatch of springy curls tickled the palms of Shallie’s hands as she raked her fingers through it.
Shallie clung to him. Never had a kiss affected her this way. She felt as if her legs wouldn’t hold her, as if her very bones had melted in the white-hot flame that smoldered in her belly, fanning waves of dizzying heat through her. It had been so long since she’d felt a man’s body burning against her, making her aware of the softness of her own flesh.
Since rodeo had become her life, rodeo cowboys were the only men she met and the only men she absolutely could not allow herself to become involved with. That was the surest way she could imagine to become a standing joke with the men behind the chutes. She’d heard their crude jibes often enough to know that no bedroom conquest was sacred. She had no intention of ever allowing herself to be used as the butt of such locker-room jesting.
As if reinforcing her resolution, Pegasus whinnied in the shadowed corner of the arena. She pressed away from Hunt.
“We’d better get him back in the corral.” Her voice sounded as wobbly as she felt. Hunt’s arms around her were as secure as the bars of a prison. For a long moment he didn’t unlock them.
Then, “You’re right. That outlaw nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. If I don’t soak it I’m going to feel like something that was ridden hard and hung up wet by tomorrow, and I’ll have to let you teach all those young studs coming for the rodeo school how to ride broncs.”
When Shallie’s prize was safely corralled, Hunt asked, “Shall we drink to your find?”
Shallie hesitated, afraid to speak. What was a simple invitation to Hunt represented much more to her. She wasn’t certain exactly what she felt for Hunt McIver, just that he stirred emotions in her which no man had ever touched before and that more time in his company would only intensify those dangerous feelings.
While she was still grappling for an answer, Hunt took her hand in his. Shallie let him lead her up the hill to the dark stone house at its summit.
Chapter 6
A maze of oak-lined paths led Shallie and Hunt past the fifty-year-old house’s main entrance to a separate apartment. Inside, it reflected a character far different from that of the main house. The low-slung sectional furnishings in a rough-woven charcoal fabric were stylishly modern. A thick pewter-gray carpet covered the wide expanse of the living room. A picture window opened into the night, offering a view of the shimmering boulevard that the wide Colorado River cut across the McIver property. Glass-fronted shelves of richly grained rosewood lined one wall, displaying a selection of decanters and crystal ware. Hunt stepped toward it, sliding a door open and pulling out a bottle of Courvoisier brandy and two snifters.
“Not bad for a rodeo cowboy,” Shallie teased as they sank into the plush sofa.
“Rodeo paid for all of this in only the most indirect of ways. I’m sure you’re well aware that a man, even when he’s riding well and winning, can still put out more money in entry fees, airplane tickets, and hotel rooms than he actually wins in a year. No, the only real money in bronc riding comes from endorsements, commercials.”
Shallie studied Hunt’s heavily lashed eyes, his high-planed cheeks, the sensuously brooding mouth, and began to make a hazy connection between those features and the face on countless ads for everything from jeans to light beer. She knew anyone else in rodeo would have recognized him immediately, but it was just a measure of how far removed she was from the sport’s more glamorous side that it had taken her this long to connect Hunt with the cowboy on all those ads. Ordinarily such a realization would have made her feel awkward and inadequate, but the exhilaration from the moment they had just shared in that moonlit arena seemed to wrap them in a charmed circle that warded off Shallie’s insecurities. It also emboldened her enough to state:
“There’s something I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?” Hunt prompted her, leaning back into a corner of the sofa as if taking command of the piece of furniture.
“You said earlier that you’d been having a run of bad luck on the circuit.”
Hunt’s answer was a tautly spoken understatement. “You might say that.”
“How can that be? You just put the best ride on a horse I’ve ever seen and you did it in an unlit arena on a bronc you knew nothing about.” Shallie’s enthusiasm carried her away as she mentally relived the ride.
Hunt chuckled, joining her in the memory. “It was a pretty fair ride.”
“Fair ride?” Shallie echoed his self-deprecating words. “It was even better than your ride on Zeus, which was the best bronc ride I’d ever seen until you topped it tonight.”
“Aren’t you starting to see a pattern?” Hunt’s voice tightened with mild sarcasm. “I can ride when there aren’t a few thousand people breathing down my neck. It’s been this way ever since I acquired this.” He held out his hand, back side up, to reveal the angry knot of scar tissue at the base of his middle finger.
“My memento of the National Finals two years ago. I was there to claim the championship that shou
ld have been mine. I’d led in the standings by a wide margin all year long. But I drew a nasty, chute-fighting horse who smashed my hand. Split it open like an overripe melon.” Hunt squeezed out the last two words. He paused to massage the keratinous mass on the back of his hand, gazing at it as if it were the crystal ball that had foretold the seasons of defeat which followed it. Hunt balled the injured hand into a fist and drove it into the palm of his other hand.
“Like any other cowboy in rodeo I’ve broken about everything the human body has to offer. But this—the hand—that was different. My link to the animal was broken. I suppose I tried to start riding again too soon, before the nerves and tendons had had a chance to heal. It was the big show in Albuquerque. I’d never missed that rodeo, always managed to score well.
“I was still stinging from the humiliation of leaving the National Finals in an ambulance and wanted to come back with a vengeance. I still don’t know what happened, but when I got into the chute again in front of a crowd, my hand just wouldn’t stay locked around the rigging. That failure, the feel of my hand being torn loose, combined with the sound of the crowd roaring in my ears, dug into some deep part of me. The part I ride from. Now, whenever I feel those hungry eyes digging into me, I . . .” The words trailed off as Hunt sat looking at the hand that had betrayed him.
A dozen clichés, expressions of sympathy, of understanding, ran through Shallie’s mind. She discarded them all. They rang too false in the face of Hunt’s genuine anguish.
“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Hunt said before the words of sympathy he couldn’t bear to hear began. That wasn’t why he’d spoken. “I guess it’s because you seem to feel for rodeo what I do. On the surface it’s stupid for me to keep pushing myself, to keep risking my life in the ring. I make all the money I could ever want from commercials and putting on rodeo schools and a few other ventures. But—”
