The Trailblazer

by Vicki Lewis Thompson

  “I feel as if I’ve been cradled in the lap of luxury. In fact, I feel so much better, I’d like you to take me on another ride this evening and show me more of the spread.” God, he was doing it again, looking for excuses to be alone with her. He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

  “I wouldn’t advise that,” she said in a superior tone that maddened him. “You’ll just stiffen up again. If Duane fixes Leigh’s truck, we can drive.”

  “I’d rather ride.”

  She shrugged. “If you insist. You’re the boss.”

  “Not yet.”

  “No, but I’m certain you will be.”

  “Until then, you’re still free to tell me to go to hell.”

  “Only a foolish woman would do that, Mr. McGuinnes.” She turned on her heel and left.

  Duane gazed after her. “Seems like she’s still a little upset ’bout that horse-trough dunkin’.”

  Ry didn’t think it was that at all, but he couldn’t very well confide in Duane about the kisses in the pool. “You could be right,” he said.

  But Duane wasn’t right, Ry thought when he climbed into the van fifteen minutes later. Freddy was all smiles for Dexter, who was ensconced in the seat next to her. With Ry, she was coldly polite. It should have been a turnoff, but instead he found her frosty behavior challenging.

  “We’ll drop you off at the Buckle Barn,” she said over her shoulder as she pulled away from the ranch house. “It takes us about thirty minutes to finish our ice cream. Then we’ll come back for you.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s he want?” Dexter asked Freddy in a surprisingly deep voice for someone so frail.

  Ry leaned forward to answer, but Freddy beat him to it.

  “Everything, I guess,” she said. “You know these Easterners.”

  “Yeah,” Dexter agreed with a chuckle. Then he glanced at Freddy and made a kissing sound. “Last night. In the pool.”

  So he’d been the one who’d coughed and ended the interlude, Ry thought.

  Color climbed into Freddy’s cheeks. “That was an unfortunate mistake, Dexter. I was hoping nobody saw that.”

  “I did,” Dexter said.

  Freddy’s cheeks glowed. “It won’t happen again,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Blame me, Dexter,” Ry said. “I tricked her. She hated every minute of it.”

  “Nope, she didn’t,” Dexter said cheerfully.

  Freddy groaned. “Dexter, I’d count it the biggest personal favor in the world if you would keep what you saw last night to yourself. Mr. McGuinnes is in the process of buying the True Love, and behavior like last night’s doesn’t reflect well on either of us.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re in a business relationship, that’s why.”

  “Seems okay to me.” Dexter pointed to Freddy’s left hand. “You don’t have one of those things. What are those things?”

  “A ring?” she suggested.

  “That’s it. A ring.” His face twisted into a scowl. “Remember that guy? Tried to—clap—no—you know.” He smacked his lips again. “To Belinda. She has a ring. Mine.”

  “Eb didn’t mean anything by it, Dexter, really. He kissed her on the cheek because she’d baked him his favorite pie.”

  “Yeah!” Dexter blustered. “Why’d she do that? She shouldn’t do that.”

  Freddy shook her head and grinned at him. “She was being a good neighbor. You are such a jealous husband.”

  “Have to be,” Dexter said. “Belinda’s so easy—no—funny—no. What is it? What is it, Freddy? You know.”

  “Pretty,” Freddy supplied.

  “Yeah, pretty. Belinda’s pretty. I gotta watch. All the time. Watch that guy.”

  Ry was so fascinated with the concept that Dexter was still protecting his interests after fifty-some years of marriage that he didn’t notice they were in La Osa until Freddy swung the truck off the road and into a dirt parking lot. Not that there was much to notice. La Osa was little more than a wide place in the road with three buildings on the right and three on the left.

  He rolled back the side door of the van. “Thanks for the lift.”

  She glanced at him, her sunglasses disguising her expression. “You’re welcome. We’ll be back in a half hour.”

  He consulted his watch. “Fine.” Then he climbed down and closed the van’s side door. As Freddy backed around and pulled onto the road, he took inventory of La Osa.

  A giant soft-ice-cream cone angled out over the parking area of a glass-fronted building at the far end of the street. Obviously the ice-cream parlor. Next to it a large tin-roofed structure was, according to the sign attached to the porch roof, Gonzales’s Feed And Hardware Store. Above the sign, a life-size statue of a white horse stood on the flat porch roof. Not just a horse, Ry noticed, but a stallion. The horse’s gender had been emphasized by some midnight artist who had painted the stallion’s private parts bright blue. The third business on the far side of the street was a two-pump gas station.

  On Ry’s side of the street stood the Buckle Barn, and next to it a low-slung restaurant that promised live country music, well drinks at a dollar each and “The Biggest T-Bone West of the Pecos.” The last business on the strip, looking new and distinctly out of place, was a video store. It was probably the only establishment that would survive once the housing development went in, he thought. The pickup trucks parked nose first in front of each establishment would be replaced by Saabs and BMWs. People who drove those kinds of cars wanted a different type of restaurant, a different kind of ice-cream parlor and no feed store whatsoever.

  He mounted the wooden steps to the Buckle Barn, barely glancing at the mannequins in the display windows. He had no time for window-shopping today. The scent of leather greeted him as he walked in the door and headed for the rows of boots standing on shelves against one wall. He was one of only two customers in the store, and within twenty minutes he’d found a pair of elkskin boots soft as a glove, three pairs of brushed-denim boot-cut jeans that molded perfectly to his thighs, and six Western shirts in various patterns and colors. He slipped into a dressing room, put on one pair of jeans, a shirt and the boots before he went in search of the final item, the most personal item, a hat.

  * * *

  WHEN RY WASN’T standing outside the Buckle Barn waiting for her, Freddy decided to go in after him. “Just sit tight,” she instructed Dexter, who was looking sleepy after his weekly hot-fudge sundae binge. “I’ll go fetch that greenhorn.”

  Dexter smiled lazily. “Awe, you like him.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t say anything like that around him, okay, Dex?” Usually, Freddy treasured Dexter’s refreshing honesty. It was as if his stroke had stripped life to the essentials and he wasn’t capable of lies, not even little white ones. But now he was exposing emotions she wanted to conceal, especially from herself.

  “It’s okay,” Dexter said, pointing to her left hand again. “No ring.”

  “It’s not that simple.” She was losing patience. “He’s leaving for New York tomorrow, so that will be the end of that. With any luck, he’ll be an absentee landlord like Westridge and I’ll never see him again.”

  “Oh, yes, you will.”

  “Give it a rest, Dex.” Freddy sighed and opened her door. “Roll down your window to let in the breeze. I’ll be back in no time.”

  Inside the front door of the Buckle Barn, she breathed in the new-leather scent and looked around for Ry.

  Connie Davis, the owner and Duane’s steady girlfriend for the past two years, rushed up to her and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Is he the one from New York?” She tilted her head toward the back of the store. “The one you were so worried about?”

  A giant cardboard cutout of Brooks and Dunn, a popular singing duo, blocked Freddy’s view. “I guess. Tall guy, light brown hair, midthirties?”

  “Beautiful blue eyes and shoulders that fill out a Western shirt?”

  Freddy’s breath hitched. She’d rather not
think of Ry in those terms. “I suppose.”

  “You don’t have a thing to worry about,” Connie said.

  “You’re probably right. After tomorrow, he’ll be back in New York and he can’t very well dictate what goes on at the True Love from that distance.”

  “Going back?” Connie looked confused. “He told me he needed some clothes because he planned to be here at least another week.”

  Freddy’s heart stilled momentarily. “Maybe you were talking to somebody else. Mr. McGuinnes made reservations at the ranch for three nights only.”

  “We can sure find out. Come on back. This fellow is making a final decision on a hat.”

  Freddy rounded the Brooks and Dunn display with Connie just as Ry pulled the brim of a black hat low over his eyes. He turned and gave her an easy smile. “Ready?”

  She struggled to find a response. Outfitted in borrowed clothes, he’d looked pretty darn good, but nothing compared to the picture he made in jeans that hugged his thighs, supple cotton that moved with each shrug of his broad shoulders and a hat that shadowed his blue eyes, imbuing them with compelling mystery.

  She wanted him out of town. “I thought you were leaving tomorrow,” she said.

  “Freddy!” Connie shot her a glance. “That wasn’t very nice.”

  He regarded her steadily. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “But your reservation—”

  “You have available rooms. You said this was the slow season.”

  And the hot season, she thought, noticing how his chest hair peeked from the open neck of his shirt.

  “Don’t you need to get back? To Wall Street and everything?”

  A corner of his mouth tilted up. “No, not as long as the phone lines work. Of course, I suppose you could go out with your wire cutters tonight and force that issue.”

  She gasped. “I would never do such a thing.”

  “Wouldn’t you? You’ve resorted to just about everything else to get rid of me.” He turned to pick up the rest of his clothes from a chair by the dressing room door. “But it isn’t going to work, so you might as well get used to having me around.”

  9

  AT ABOUT SIX-THIRTY that night, Freddy nudged Maureen into a trot as she and Ry rode along a trail near the southern boundary of the ranch. Freddy knew that Ry’s mount, a dark bay named Destiny, would mimic her horse’s pace, and she hoped the jouncing would knock some sense into Ry’s thick skull. She wondered what he hoped to accomplish by staying on another week. Surely he recognized the volatile situation between them.

  To their right, the sun sat like a bronze paperweight anchoring the horizon. Then, as if melting from its own heat, it gradually flattened and slipped out of sight. Above them the sky was clear except for a towering pile of white clouds that looked like a huge serving of vanilla ice cream. As the sun sank, the vanilla turned to strawberry, then raspberry, and finally orange sherbet.

  It was Freddy’s favorite time of day, when the heat had left the desert air yet there was still enough soft light for a rider to see the trail. A fierce love of this land surged within Freddy as she glanced over at Ry, the interloper. Did he imagine he could really own the True Love? Money wasn’t enough to claim ownership.

  “When does the real estate agent expect an answer on your offer?” she asked.

  “Soon.” Despite the trot, he sat on his horse easily, the reins held loosely in one hand, his denim-clad thighs gripping leather as he moved in rhythm with his mount. He pulled his hat brim lower to shade his eyes from the setting sun. “Duane asked me today about reinstating the rodeo.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I didn’t give him a direct answer because I decided to settle it with you, first. We can’t take risks like that with the guests, Freddy. No more rodeos.”

  So it starts, she thought. The greenhorn dictator. “You’ll probably lose business,” she said. “Lots of people come to the ranch just for the rodeo.”

  “I don’t care. A lawsuit could bankrupt us.”

  Freddy sighed. That was big-city thinking, all right. And to be fair, he had a point. Her father had loved the rodeo and hadn’t worried at all about lawsuits, but her father had been a lousy businessman. Maybe Ry and his partners would be the first to turn a profit from the True Love.

  He paused and reined Destiny to the left. “Let’s check out that herd of cattle over there.”

  Freddy surveyed the group of about twenty white-faced Herefords, their rusty coats burnished by the orange light sunset. “That wouldn’t be a good idea, Ry.”

  “Why not?”

  Ordinarily, she’d have let him find out for himself, but all this talk about lawsuits had made her jittery. He didn’t own the ranch yet, and she and Westridge would be responsible if he decided to sue. “Destiny’s been trained as a cutting horse. Get him around a stray animal and he lays down some funky moves.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Look, Ry, I don’t think you understand. He—”

  “Let me try, Freddy.” He kicked Destiny into a lope. “How bad can it be?”

  “Ry, slow down!” She started after him. “You’ll spook them!” she called, too late to stop the cattle from scattering in several directions. They were used to crazy greenhorns, so they wouldn’t run far, but any minute, she expected Destiny to spring into action.

  He did.

  Freddy groaned aloud, but still she loved watching the hairpin turns and dramatic spins of a good cutting horse working cattle. Ry seemed to love it less. First he lost his hat, then his stirrups. Finally, when Destiny sat back on his haunches and wheeled a hundred and eighty degrees after a bolting calf, Ry lost his seat and landed with a thud on the ground, catching part of a prickly pear on his way down. Destiny continued rounding up cattle with even more efficiency now that he’d dispensed with his bothersome rider.

  Freddy started toward Ry. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned him, she thought. That should stand up in a courtroom. She leaned from the saddle and snatched his new hat from the branch of a creosote bush.

  “Have you noticed that the cactus are in bloom?” she asked. “That beaver-tail prickly pear is especially pretty in yellow, don’t you think?”

  Ry looked up at her, his hair tousled, his face a grimace of pain.

  She dismounted and dropped Maureen’s reins to the ground before she walked toward him. One of the prickly pear pads had stuck to his left hip, but he’d avoided landing in the middle of the plant.

  “Just think, you can tell all your friends you are thrown by one of the finest cutting horses in Arizona.”

  He rested his forearms on his bent knees. “I’m going to learn how to stay on that four-legged amusement ride,” he said grimly.

  “In a week? I don’t imagine so. Leigh’s a good teacher, but she can’t work miracles.” She crouched in front of him. “Here’s your hat, and you seem to have a piece of prickly pear sticking to you.”

  His blue eyes met her gaze as he put on his hat. “I’m aware of that.”

  She didn’t dare look into those eyes for very long. He might be a city slicker, but his calm acceptance of disaster was a very compelling trait, and there was no Dexter around to chaperon them this time. “You’re lucky you didn’t tangle with that cholla over there.” She pointed to a jointed cactus with segments the size of hot dogs. “Now that’s a cactus with an attitude.”

  “I’m developing one myself.”

  “Stay there and I’ll help you get the cactus off.” She pushed to her feet and looked around for a stick.

  “What about my horse?”

  She walked over to a dead palo verde. “Destiny will wander back once the cattle are rounded up. He’s very well trained.” She snapped off a dried branch and returned to where he sat. “Now hold still,” she cautioned, crouching next to him again. “We might get all the needles to come out when I pry the cactus away.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  She studied the best point to slide the stick under the sauc
er-size paddle. “Unless you want to ride home this way, and drive the needles deeper, you’ll have to take off your pants and hope they stay stuck in the denim.”

  “Shucking my pants is getting to be a habit around you.”

  “Trust me, it’s not on purpose.” She grasped his upper arm for balance as she maneuvered the stick gently between the thorns stuck into Ry’s hip. His biceps tensed as the cactus moved, agitating the needles. “You can swear if you want,” she offered.

  “I appreciate that,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “I’ll wedge the stick in just a little more, and then I’ll try to knock off the cactus in one movement.”

  “Sounds peachy.” He sucked in his breath. “You know, in New York, I’m a capable kind of guy. I can hail cabs and—ouch—choose good restaurants and anticipate a bull market better than most men. You’d be impressed.”

  “I’m impressed now.” With a quick jerk, she separated the cactus from his jeans.

  “God bless America, but that smarts!”

  “I know.” She studied the dirt-stained denim. “Hold still. There are a couple of thorns I can probably pull out with my fingers, and that may be it.”

  “Did you mean that?”

  “Mean what?” Using her fingernails like tweezers, she gripped one of the two remaining barbs and pulled.

  “Sh—sugar! About being impressed.”

  Had she said that? She’d been concentrating so hard on getting the cactus out of him, she must have spoken without thinking. Gradually, she became aware of her fingers closed securely over his arm, her face inches from his, their bodies hunched together. She glanced at him and found him studying her intently. Her breathing quickened. “One more thorn.”

  “You know, all along I’ve thought we couldn’t become involved because we would be business associates.”

  “Exactly,” she said, returning her attention to his hip and the last white needle that had pricked through the denim into his skin. She kept her gaze focused on that needle as she gripped it with her fingernails. She must not allow her gaze to wander to his thighs or worse, to the bulge between them. It was like telling herself not to look over the edge of a precipice. She couldn’t resist, and a hollow ache began deep within her.