Dewar turned around but he didn’t let go of her hand. “He’s a good leader and he probably would have stood his ground, but I’d hate to lose him.”
“You think he would have lost?”
“Coyotes run in packs. Those were just the two out scouting for a midnight snack.”
“I’ll make a note of that for the show,” she said.
“Hey, why do you go by H. B.? And what’s the big deal about letting folks think you are a man? There are women correspondents in war zones. And last I heard women could even vote these days,” he changed the subject abruptly.
“My whole name is Haley Belle McKay Levy. McKay was Momma’s maiden name. Momma is half Irish-Cajun. The Levy name is Jewish.”
“Does you mother have red hair like you?”
“Oh, no! She’s got all the Cajun features. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Just like her momma. Daddy is the same. Dark hair and dark eyes like Grandpa. I was named after my grandmothers. Mahalia on Cajun side. Isabelle on the Irish side. Think about it,” she said.
He frowned.
“Think harder.”
He shrugged.
She squeezed his hand. “In grade school they called me hay bale. That could ruin a serious businesswoman.”
“Kids can be cruel, can’t they?” He grinned.
“How’d you get a name like Dewar? It sounds like something out of a historic romance book. I bet people mispronounce it all the time and call you Dee-War instead of Dew-Are,” she said.
“Folks probably don’t even know how it looks on paper. When I’m introduced they just say Dew-Are and that’s the way they remember it. My folks are both Irish and Dewar is an old family name, but I never got teased until Sawyer came up with that stupid Dewy Darlin’ story.”
“Now that we understand names, what do you do about the big cat or coyote problem? I need to know for the show.”
“Either stand watch at night or buy a donkey.”
“A donkey?”
“They are natural enemies for coyotes and wild cats.”
“Okay, I vote for a donkey, but it’ll be more dramatic if we make the contestants stand watch. How do they do that?”
He started walking back toward the camp. “Four-hour shifts. What time are you calling it a night on the trail?”
She fell in beside him. “Ten at the latest, but I suppose there’ll be some love interests like on all reality shows and the couple who can’t keep their hands off each other will do some sneaking into the night.”
“Then someone watches from ten to two and someone else from two to six. Rotate the guards so no one loses two nights’ sleep in a row. Someone will be grouchy on the days that they have to stand watch. Or you can just send one of them to buy a donkey the next day after a coyote or mountain lion becomes a threat. It’s a lot easier than a bunch of grumpy folks.”
She shook her head. “I’ll put that in my report, but I like the guard idea better. But who knows what the producers will like? How does a donkey fight off coyotes and cats anyway?”
“Donkeys will bite and stomp them to death. They get along fine with cattle and they’ll protect them, but coyotes and big cats are a different story. I hope I can find a rancher willing to sell me one—hopefully tomorrow. I should have thought of that before we even left.”
“Did they use them on the real Chisholm Trail rides?” she whispered as they neared the camp.
“I wouldn’t know, but I’m going to buy one as soon as I can. Starting tomorrow night we’ll stand watch until I can find one.”
“We don’t need to do watch tonight?” She didn’t realize he’d stopped until she took two more steps and collided with him, breast to hard muscled chest. And then his arms were around her to keep them both from tumbling to the ground in a heap.
“Whoa!” she gasped and looked up.
His eyes went soft and dreamy and were half-shut as his lips came closer and closer. Her pulse raced as she rolled up on her toes. His thumb grazed her jawline and traced the outline of her lips. Her eyes fluttered, half-open, half-shut. She moved a hand away from his chest to his neck.
Just before his lips met hers, his eyes popped open for just a second. She’d never seen such raw hunger before. Her eyelids slowly drooped shut and his mouth landed on hers in a kiss that raged through her body like a Texas wildfire coming over the plains with a good strong tailwind. She tangled her fingers in his hair, holding his lips on hers. She couldn’t think of anything but putting out the fire as his tongue flicked through her lips and she tasted heat and desire rolled into a long, lingering kiss.
His hands moved to her back, drawing her closer to his chest, as if he wanted to melt the two of them into one to ease the blistering hot flames that had him instantly ready for sex.
And then he broke the kiss and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? Are you engaged or married?”
“N-n-no!” He sounded like Buddy.
“Then there’s nothing to apologize for. Good night, Dewar.” She walked away without looking back, sat down on her bedroll, kicked off her boots, and crawled into her sleeping bag.
***
Dewar could not sleep. He looked in her direction but her back was to him and all he could see was a mop of still-damp red hair. What would it feel like to have that thick hair splayed out over his chest when he woke up the next morning? Or tickling his nose as she kissed him awake?
The visions did nothing for the semi-arousal, so he turned his back to her and forced himself to think about plowing a hay pasture. He always listened to country music when he was in the tractor, so one song after another played in his head, but each one turned his thoughts back to the woman barely six feet away with the sweet-smelling soap aroma still hanging on the night breezes.
Finally, he slept only to dream one erotic scenario after another, with Haley the center of each one. He awoke to hear the rattling of pots and pans and Coosie whistling “Oh What a Beautiful Morning.” He threw back his sleeping bag, dug his toothbrush from his saddlebags, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. Maybe if he brushed his teeth and got the taste of Haley’s kisses away from his lips, he’d forget all about how they felt.
He forgot all about brushing his teeth when she sat up, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and finger combed her hair. He rolled his bedding slowly so he could watch her deftly twist her hair into braids and secure the ends with rubber bands she pulled from her shirt pocket. Her jeans were tighter and darker than the pair she’d worn the day before; the shirt long sleeved with buttons and two pockets bulging over those big breasts that had poked into his chest the night before.
“Good morning,” she said.
“What’s so good about it?” he grouched.
“It’s not raining and I smell breakfast cooking. Two good things,” she said.
He did a half snort, half humph and tied the rope knots around his bedroll. “We’ve got the Comanche thing today.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Didn’t Carl give you an itinerary?”
She shook her head. “He said that I didn’t need anything that would cloud my ideas. I did do some extensive research back when I came up with the idea. Aren’t Comanches Indians?”
Coosie laughed as he flipped plate-sized pancakes in a big cast-iron skillet. “Comanche is a town probably about eleven or twelve miles north of where we are right now. We’ll be doing a parade through the town in the middle of the afternoon since it’s one of the big things on the historic Chisholm Trail. The newspaper folks will take pictures and maybe even corner one of us for a few quotes. My main concern is getting to the service station with a water hose so I can fill up the barrel. We’re getting low and it’ll be a while before we are in another town.”
“Oh, I remember now. It was called Tucker at first and the town site was north of where it is now. Are we going through town? Won’t that take us off the real trail? Is there a possibility there’s an old saloon or bank or something still standing that was built du
ring the cattle run days?” she asked.
“So you did some homework,” Dewar said.
“Had to in order to make this all happen to begin with,” she said.
Dewar glanced at Haley. Had he dreamed the kiss from the night before? “The town is real big on being part of the Chisholm Trail and they’ve asked for a parade. When we move the cattle out of the fields and start up the highway, you’ll ride point with me. Coosie will bring up the rear in the chuck wagon. Buddy and Sawyer will herd from the east side and Rhett and Finn from the west side. If we all keep in our place it should be fairly easy traveling.”
“Why do I ride point?” she asked.
“Because the people in town are all going to want to see the person responsible for bringing a reality television show through their town. Think of it as being the queen of the rodeo,” Dewar said.
Coosie slapped a pancake on a plate and handed it to Haley. “Syrup, butter, and sausage patties are on the table. Help yourselves.”
“So why all the worry about going through town?” she asked.
Rhett raised his hand. “I’m done with breakfast. I’ll answer that one. We’ve got one rangy old longhorn bull that hates loud noises and ninety-nine more head of cattle that could stampede at the drop of a hat. Think about glass window fronts, the sides of the street packed with people watching the trail run. Now add in a lot of yelling kids, dashing out into the street to see if they can touch the horns on our big bull. It could go smooth. It could be a total disaster.”
“Ah, the stuff reality shows are made of,” Sawyer said. “You going to finish the drive if you get a broke leg in a stampede?”
“I’ll finish it if I have to ride on the horns of that bull,” she smarted off. And by golly, she would, too.
***
Haley snuck looks toward Dewar as he ate that morning. She’d awakened with a smile and touched her lips to see if they were still as warm as they’d been when she went to sleep. He’d awakened grouchy. Did that mean he was sorry he’d kissed her?
She hung back when they started out.
Coosie looked straight ahead and didn’t offer anything at all. It looked like another long morning with nothing to think about but the kiss, and that was dangerous territory.
“Tell me about you and Buddy. Are y’all brothers?” she finally asked.
Coosie flicked the reins to get the horses to move along a little faster. The land had more rolling hills than the day before and they weren’t too keen on pulling the wagon up the steep sides.
“We might as well be brothers, but we ain’t. We was born down around Bowie the same year and started to school at the same time. Buddy stuttered from the time he could say his first word and the kids, well, you know how mean kids can be. I was always the biggest kid in class, so that first day when someone picked on him, I whooped the snot right out of that kid. Every time a new kid came to town they had to get their whoopin’ before they understood that nobody picked on my friend. Buddy might stutter, but he’s real smart, so he helped me with the learnin’ and I helped him with the bullyin’ kids.”
“What’d y’all do after you graduated?” she asked, since he was evidently in a much more talkative mood than the day before.
“We signed up for the army and wound up in the Gulf War. Said if we ever got back into Montague County we’d never leave it again. This is our first time to break that vow. Oh, we scoot around the north part of Texas on Saturday nights doin’ some two-steppin’ and pool shootin’ at the bars, but we stay pretty close to home, which is the Double Deuce, where we both work for Ace Riley.”
“Married?” she asked before he could barely draw another breath.
Coosie shook his head. “Hadn’t found the right woman yet, but neither one of us is dead yet either, so there’s still a chance. You’d be amazed at how many women think that stutter of Buddy’s is cute. He says why settle down with one heifer when he can have a whole herd.”
Haley laughed and asked, “So you came home from the army and went to work at the Double Deuce?”
“Yep, Ace’s granddad hired us and we been there ever since. We were both raised up on ranches, so we knew about cattle and tractors. Looks like Dewar is calling a halt and the sun is straight up, so it must be dinnertime.”
“What are we havin’ today?” Haley asked.
“Beans. I set them to soakin’ last night and boiled them an hour this morning while I was makin’ flapjacks. Got some leftover spoon bread to go with ’em and I made too many pancakes on purpose so we could roll them up around some honey and peanut butter for dessert.”
Dewar kept his distance while they ate dinner, barely even acknowledging that she was part of the crew. Damn his sorry old cowboy hide anyway! His kiss made her want more, lots more, and he acted like it never even happened.
Haley had had relationships, but never before had a kiss created such a hot spot of lingering liquid desire. And the man who’d delivered the hotter’n hell’s blazes kisses was over there acting like he didn’t even know her.
Well, if that’s the way he wanted it, he could damn sure have his aloofness. She wasn’t interested in anything past a diversion from the boredom of a month on a cattle drive anyway. So there, Dewar O’Donnell with the sexy strut and the hottest kisses in the whole universe.
She turned her attention to the cattle lined up at the edge of Cow Creek. Getting them from Ringgold to Dodge City was the issue, not whether Dewar could set her ablaze with his kisses. When that was done, her job was over and Joel could do the actual reality show. And she’d be damn glad to have him out of the office and out of her hair for the weeks that he was out in the woods. And she was not sending a single roll of toilet paper with him, either.
After dinner they moved on north through the rolling hills again, keeping the herd going through long stretches of pastureland, sometimes through gates, across a section line road, and through another gate. Sometimes they had to cut a fence. Then Buddy and Finn hung back to repair it and catch up later.
In the middle of the afternoon Dewar steered the cattle to the west. Haley could hear the traffic before she actually saw a vehicle. The first one was a white pickup truck speeding down the road toward the south. The next was a pretty red sports car that made her long for her own car. Dewar rode toward a wide gate opening out onto the road and opened it. The cowboys flapped their hats and headed the big longhorn bull through the gate with the rest of the cattle following along behind, then yee-hawed them into a ninety-degree turn back to the north with the chuck wagon bringing up the rear.
“Y’all ready?” Dewar yelled.
“Might as well be,” Sawyer hollered back.
He crooked his finger. “Haley?”
She slapped Apache’s neck with the rein and he trotted right up the right edge of the cattle formation to Dewar. “So I’m the rodeo queen, right? Do I have to wave at the crowds?”
“The Comanche Times newspaper has already done this big spread about Carl Levy sending H. B. McKay up here to check things out for a reality show. Since you are H. B., then yes, you are the rodeo queen. They’re having this big sidewalk sale and the ladies are setting up tables with food to sell. It’s a fundraiser that’ll bring in folks from all around.”
She grinned. “Ahh, shucks. I forgot my diamond hat band and my hair spray to get my hair all big and fluffy.”
“You’ll do.” He quickly scanned her from boots to hat. “If the cattle start to get restless, we’ll hurry them up a bit. If they get too wild, you might have to help corral them. Think you can do that?”
“I can do anything I set my mind to do,” she said. “You aren’t much for compliments, are you?”
“What?” His dark brows became one long line across his green eyes.
“Nothing. Let’s get through this,” she said shortly.
Sure enough more than one little boy darted out to slap a cow or a bull on the rump and then ran back to the safety of his parents. Cameras were out by the dozens, maybe even hundreds, t
o record the modern-day cattle drive through the small town. A pay phone attached to the side of a convenience store caught Haley’s eye and she entertained notions of making a call to end the whole thing. But that kiss kept her moving.
If it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, then the second one wouldn’t fry holes in the toes of her socks.
If it wasn’t, she was in big trouble.
She pulled up reins at a mailbox on a corner and dropped an envelope in it with all her notes for the past two days. It might be a week before her father got another letter, so he could just chew on her discoveries up until then. Besides, he didn’t deserve news more than once a week. Until she could mail him another batch of notes, he could be looking for a chuck wagon, preferably a Studebaker, and he could be thinking about buying a donkey right along with a hundred head of cattle.
Something whirred beside her ear, and she jerked her head around to see a blur that looked like a baseball or a rock. It hit Apache square on the flank and he reared back on his hind legs. The first crazy thing that went through her mind was “Hi Ho Silver.” His front feet came back down, hitting the ground with enough force to jar her teeth.
Suddenly, the saddle felt like it had been greased down with Coosie’s bacon grease. She was cussing and screaming at the kid who was running like the devil poking his butt with a pitchfork. Apache threw his head back, and his mouth opened and screamed right along with her. The cows joined in the concert, and the old bull lent his deep voice to the mix.
Cows were on both sides of Haley and it definitely was not like the running of the bulls. Apache got ahead of the whole herd and led the charge, like General Custer himself, right down the sidewalks festooned with merchandise for the annual spring sidewalk sale. The horse sideswiped a table of leftover valentines, and paper goods went flying through the air. The bright red tablecloth landed on Apache’s saddle horn and the old bull must’ve thought Apache was a bona fide bullfighter, because he gave a bellow, lowered his head, and charged.
One of the bull’s horns caught on a straw hat and the other one snagged a lady’s black lace camisole. Apache veered to the left with the bull so close behind him that Haley could feel his snorts. Two cows managed to get flannel nightgowns over their heads in such a way that only one wild eye was visible and they were giving the bull a real run for his money.
Carolyn Brown - [Spikes & Spurs 07] Page 6
