“Ready?” he asked.
“I doubt it,” Lara said, “but I’m game.”
Spur winked. “That’s my girl. Now start with your right foot.”
Lara obediently put her right foot forward. Instantly she was swept off her feet, tossed into the air like a child, caught and swung around shoulder-high in a complete circle. She gave out a startled shriek and hung on to Spur as though he were a runaway horse. He laughed, set her on her feet carefully and grinned down at her.
“Over the Moon and Around the Mountain,” he said. “Like it?”
“Er – “
“One more time.”
“Spur –!”
Too late. Lara’s feet left the floor before she could finish her sentence. This time Spur tossed her even higher, caught her even closer and swung her around twice. The men were all stamping and applauding and whooping their approval, and cutting a few fancy steps of their own while Willie made the old fiddle sing. Lara went Over the Moon and Around the Mountain so many times that she lost count. Before long she was laughing, breathless and too dizzy to do more than cling to Spur when he finally relented and set her on her feet to stay.
Suddenly the room fell silent. Lara pushed the hair back from her eyes and looked up. Carson was standing just inside the bunkhouse door. His expression was hard, and his eyes were the cold yellow of a winter sky after sunset. Although he was leaning casually against the door frame with his thumbs hooked into the waistband of his jeans, the angry tension of his body belied his relaxed stance.
“Any of you yahoos know what time it is?” Carson asked, his voice the temperature of a February wind.
‘“Bout eleven,” Spur said. “Why?”
“Going to be a long day tomorrow,” Carson said flatly. He pinned Lara with a glare from his narrowed eyes. “Have you lived in the city so long that you’ve forgotten how early dawn comes? These men have work to do, and they can’t do it if they’re staggering around half blind for lack of sleep.”
“I’m sorry. I lost track of time,” Lara said. Hurriedly she shut the tape recorder off and stuffed it into her backpack. “It won’t happen again.”
“You’re damn right it won’t,” Carson retorted, straightening and walking slowly toward Lara with his hand out. “I’ll carry that pack for you.”
“Now wait a minute,” Spur said, catching Lara’s hand as she jammed the rest of her stuff into the backpack.
“None of us are riding nighthawk so what we do after dinner and before dawn is our own lookout. If we want to help you with your research, we’ll damn well do it!”
If the room had been quiet before, it became absolutely dead still as the older hands held their breath in anticipation of Carson’s explosion. He had a well-deserved reputation for his rough temper. The men who knew him expected him to fire Spur on the spot. Instead, Carson simply looked at the young cowhand. Spur realized he was in trouble, but he wasn’t going to back down from what he had said. He had a full measure of the proud independence that had been the hallmark of cowboys since the first man saddled a horse and tried to keep track of his cattle in the West’s endless open range.
“It’s all right, Spur,” Lara said quickly. “Carson’s right. I shouldn’t have – “
A curt motion of Carson’s arm cut off the flow of Lara’s words. She bit her lip and wished she knew why Carson was so angry. It was late, yes, but not that late, and as far as she knew, only routine ranch work was scheduled for tomorrow. It wasn’t as though she had kept everyone up late carousing on the night before branding or haying.
“This is the damnedest so-called ‘research’ I’ve ever heard of,”
Carson said icily to Lara. “Unless you’re doing a thesis on how to pick up men. Is that it?” he demanded, glaring at her right hand. Suddenly Lara realized that Spur still had his hand on her right wrist to prevent her from packing up and leaving. She eased herself from Spur’s grip.
“Now that would make sense,” continued Carson, warming to his topic with a vengeance. “You go around to all the bunkhouses and get handled by all the young cowboys and they take up a collection to thank you for being so soft and warm and willing. Hell, I’ll bet a girl could make quite a nice living that way, if she didn’t mind being known as an easy kind of female – or worse.”
The anger that Lara had felt earlier that evening returned in a rush as Carson’s sarcasm cut into her.
“An easy kind of female,” repeated Lara tightly, yanking her backpack into place and pulling her hair out from beneath the straps with abrupt motions. “Yeah, I guess you’d be an expert on loose women – or worse – if that blond number who was undressing you earlier tonight is any sample of your taste.” Lara’s disdain vibrated in every word as she walked toward Carson. “Well, Mr. Expert, if you wouldn’t hang around with easy females like that, you wouldn’t think that every woman was dying to go to bed with the first man who would have her!”
Carson’s hand shot out and clamped around Lara’s arm as she swept past. He leaned down and spoke so softly that only she could hear.
“Maybe you’re forgetting who was doing the offering and who was doing the refusing a few years ago,” Carson said in a low, deadly voice.
Lara looked up into his clear, cold eyes and felt herself freezing inside, shame splintering through her in shards of razor ice, cutting right through to her soul. It was as though the years had never intervened. She was vulnerable, naked, trusting, wanting – and he was none of those things. He was armored, ruthless, and all he desired was to see her shame.
A shame that she couldn’t conceal. Naked.
Nothing had changed. She was as helpless now against Carson as she had been years ago. The realization was devastating.
“Damn you,” she breathed, shaking with humiliation. “Damn you!”
Lara slipped past Carson and ran out into the night without stopping. She heard him call her name once and then again, urgently, as though something other than anger moved him. She didn’t even hesitate in her flight.
Carson got to the doorway just in time to see the pale blur of Lara’s blouse retreating along the road between the ranch house and the Chandler homestead. Behind him, in the explosive silence of the bunkhouse, he sensed movement. His hand shot out, and his long, work-hardened fingers clamped around Spur’s arm in an unbreakable grip before the younger man could push past him and out into the night after Lara.
Unceremoniously Carson yanked Spur down the bunk-house steps and around to the back, where no one could overhear.
“I’m going to tell you this once, cowboy, and only once. You listening?” snarled Carson.
Spur opened his mouth to say something, looked at the icy gleam of moonlight in Carson’s narrowed eyes and decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valor.
“You’re new to this valley,” Carson continued, his words clipped.
“You don’t know about the Blackridges and the Chandlers, and I’m not going to waste my time educating you. All you have to know is this – Lara Chandler is mine. Got that?”
Spur hesitated, then nodded.
Carson looked at the younger man for a long moment, then nodded in turn, releasing him. “Good. Remember it.”
“Or you’ll fire me?” Spur asked, both curiosity and aggression in his voice.
Carson smiled thinly. “Hell, no, kid. I’ll trash you. You want to work for me after you heal up, you’re more than welcome. You’re a good hand, Spur. One of die best I’ve got, despite the fact that you’re barely old enough to drink hard liquor. But there are other good hands, and there’s only one Lara Chandler.”
Spur opened his mouth, shut it and smiled crookedly. “Well, you’re living up to your reputation, Blackridge. Hard but fair. Know something? If Lara had given me the slightest come-on, I’d fight you and welcome to it. She’d be worth it. But she wasn’t handing out any invitations to me or to anyone else that I could
see.” Spur shrugged.
“So she’s all yours and good luck to you. You’re gonna need it. That filly is plumb skittish around men. She’s real nice about it, but no is written all over her in letters a blind man could read.”
Although Spur said nothing more, it was plain that he thought Lara’s refusal extended to the tall, hard-looking boss of the Rocking B.
As Carson turned and went back to the ranch house, he was thinking the same thing. It had seemed so easy when Lara had flinched at the thought of him with another woman, and then she had found Susanna with him. Lara had taken one look at his open shirt and suddenly her eyes had blazed with memories. It was exactly the reaction he had hoped for.
What he hadn’t expected was Lara’s fleeing from him as though pursued by the hounds of hell. Before Susanna had dropped in, he had been set up in the library, hoping Lara would come over that night. He had expected to remind Lara of the sensual pleasures they had shared by the implied intimacy of the open shirt, then accept Lara’s offer of a neck rub to ease his headache. She had the most marvelous hands. No one had ever been able to chase pain away as she could, with her sweet concern for his comfort and her knowing, gentle hands. Carson cursed savagely under his breath. He hadn’t meant to hurt Lara four years ago, and he certainly hadn’t meant to hurt her tonight at the bunkhouse. Four years should have been plenty of time to get over being turned down by him. Until he had seen her flash of jealousy at the thought of him with another woman, he had been afraid that four years had been too damn much time to get over him, that she had forgotten entirely the months they had shared. He had assumed that during those years Lara had found more than one man willing to take what she had so sweetly offered Carson, a gift that he had been too caught up in the war between himself and his father to accept. As always, the thought of some other man knowing Lara’s warmth and lovely body made Carson’s jaw tighten until it ached. He had been a pure, double-dyed fool to turn away from her, hurting her and complicating the hell out of his own life in the process; but nothing could be done about that now except to be sure not to repeat the mistake. He had missed his chance to be the first to teach Lara about the pleasures of sex. He would regret that the rest of his life. The thought of someone else sliding into that sweet young body had kept him awake more than once in the past few years. The memory of her bewilderment and pain and finally her overwhelming shame when he rejected her had kept him awake even more often than his enduring hunger for her.
Lara had looked the same tonight, surprised and hurt and then shamed all the way to her soul. The memory of her pale, absolutely bloodless face and haunted eyes turned in Carson like a knife, cutting him, making him grimace with the pain he had never meant to cause her. She was so fragile, so easily bruised, as sweet as a sun-warmed flower; he was a man not known for his gentle words and easy nature. The fact that Lara was still so vulnerable to him gave him both hope and fear – hope for his ultimate success in making her his wife, and fear that she had been too badly hurt ever to trust him again. Damn you. Damn you!
Lara’s words echoed in Carson’s mind every step of the way to the dusty blue pickup. He got in, slammed the door and gunned the vehicle down the dirt road, wishing to hell that he had acted differently tonight. But he hadn’t. He and his damn temper had taken one look at Lara all flushed and mussed from Spur’s arms, and it had been all Carson could do not to take the young cowboy apart right there.
With an abrupt gesture Carson flicked the headlights on to high beam, hoping to pick out the pale color of Lara’s blouse against the black of night. Nothing came back at him but the twin ghostly reflections of a cow’s eyes as it grazed along the fence line. Despite the urgency and impatience that was riding him, Carson kept his speed down well below the range of his headlights as he looked for Lara. He doubted that she had had time to get all the way back to the homestead, but there was no sign of her along the pale, moon-washed curves of the ranch road. Automatically he stopped, opened the homestead gate, drove through, then got out and closed the gate again. As he did, he heard the grating of wood over dirt and made a mental note to fix the gate. If it sagged any more, Lara wouldn’t be able to handle the gate by the time the summer was over. If she was still on the homestead.
The thought made Carson swear again beneath his breath. Lara had to stay. He simply would not accept any other possibility. It had seemed so easy after his mother had died. Even though Lara had refused to speak to him, he had been sure that if he could just lure her out to the Rocking B, time and proximity would take care of her coldness. For he knew that she wasn’t a cold person at all. She was the exact opposite, at least as volatile and passionate as her own mother had been.
Carson frowned. He didn’t like to think about Larry’s mistress. He had grown up thinking of Becky Chandler and her bastard child as his enemies. Like his mother, Carson had blamed the Chandlers for the fact that Larry had never been much of a husband and even less of a father. Years later – far too late to prevent Carson from badly wounding Lara – he had realized that Larry’s failings were his own and were not the responsibility of the passionate, blue-eyed woman Larry had loved when he could not love his own legal family. It hadn’t been an easy thing for Carson to admit to himself, but he had faced the reality of his adoptive father’s lack of love and the reasons for it; then Carson had put it behind him and moved on to other things, things that were within his own ability to change or control.
It had always been that way with Carson. After he had learned whatever lesson was to be learned, he never looked back. For him, the past was a place of pain and mistakes, disillusionment and broken dreams. It held no fascination for him. He had never known his biological parents, and the people who had adopted him had done so for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting a child to love. He had no shared legacy of roots stretching back into time, securely placing him within a family history.
Carson had the future, though, and the future was his. He had earned it, and he was damned if he was going to let the mistakes people had made in the past take it away from him.
Chapter Four
Using the brilliant moonlight as her guide, Lara climbed quickly up the grassy ridge that rose between the ranch house and the homestead. The road snaked around the shoulder of the ridge, but instead of staying with the road, she had cut through the Rocking B’s northeast pasture. It was a shortcut to the homestead, but she had no intention of going home just yet. She knew that would be the first place Carson would go looking for her, and somehow she had no doubt that he would pursue her. After all, she had run despite their agreement and his warning.
As Lara climbed, the memory of Carson’s sarcasm on the subject of easy women flooded through her, goading her to greater speed. She couldn’t blame him for thinking that she was easy. Once she had quite openly offered herself to him. He hadn’t even had to ask. The aftershocks of that night and his refusal still shivered within her, shaking her, shaming her.
The top of the ridge was smooth, gently rounded and grassy. A breeze moved faintly, bringing with it sounds from the valley below. In the distance moonlight glittered along the length of the river that ran through the center of the Rocking B. The Big Green nourished the ranch’s cattle and crops with water that had come down from the sawtooth mountain ranges that rimmed the broad valley. Much closer in, at the foot of the ridge, the ranch’s lights glowed in shades of molten gold. The back door of the ranch house shut loudly, and a flashlight bobbed as someone walked across the yard. The air was so clear that it seemed as though the person were coming straight toward Lara.
She held her breath in the instant before she told herself that whoever was out walking couldn’t be Carson. She had already heard his pickup go by on the ranch road and then turn up the fork that led to the homestead. When the flashlight vanished and the lights of a cottage came on, Lara let out her breath in a sigh, realizing that it had just been Yo-landa going to her quarters for the night. For a few minutes it was so quiet t
hat Lara could hear her own heartbeat. Then two men came out of the bunk-house and went toward the barn. She was too far away to distinguish words or identities, but the sound of easy male voices floated up to her in quiet counterpoint to the whispering of grass caressed by a summer breeze. A shiver coursed over Lara, a feeling that Cheyenne had once described as the sensation of someone walking on my grave.
Lara shrugged off the backpack and put on her wind-breaker, even though the night wasn’t chilly. She drew her knees up to her chin, stared down at the Rocking B and listened to voices drifting up into the beautiful, fathomless silence of the Montana night. Once she had dreamed of being a recognized part of the family at the big house, of having Larry Blackridge acknowledge her as his daughter. She had believed that, if only those things would happen, she would be one of the people living forever amid the golden lights. Lara’s mouth turned down in a sad smile at her own expense. She had been very young then. Certainly too young to protect herself from her own dreams. Far too young to realize that she was Mrs. Blackridge’s natural enemy, a living symbol of her husband’s adultery, not a motherless child mat Sharon might want to call daughter. Even so, the dream of belonging had died slowly, stubbornly, not breathing its last until Lara was a shy, awkward teenager whose greatest pleasure was watching Carson Blackridge from afar.
He had always fascinated her. From the very first time she had met him, he had been different from other men. As soon as she had stood in front of him, she had felt a shock of recognition that had shaken her, as though unseen, unknowable emotions already joined her and the tall, rough-looking adopted son of Larry Blackridge. She had been thirteen years old when she had taken a Christmas present from Carson’s hand. He had been twenty-two. It had been the first time that Carson had come to the Rocking B’s celebration for the hands’ children.
Sweet Wind, Wild Wind Page 5
