Every Cowgirl's Dream

by Arlene James

  “Knowing each of my grandchildren and in consideration, I freely admit, of my own heartfelt desires, I have wrestled with a means by which to fairly and rightly ensure the continuation of the Detmeyer family and the great legacy with which our forebearers have gifted us. To wit, in order to preserve the most viable of the properties and the life-style enjoyed by generations of Detmeyers and some remnant of the ranching concern that once made the name of Detmeyer great, I leave this as my last express wish.

  “I charge and challenge my dear granddaughter, Kara, to undertake, with the direct guidance, advice and assistance of Ryeland Wagner, his consent being granted, the commission of a certain exercise with the following results. If, within six weeks from this date, Kara and Ryeland together, with those assistants of their own choosing, can successfully move a minimum of three hundred head of cattle from the Utah property to the environs of the New Mexico property owned by The Business, in the same fashion and the great tradition of those of old, that is, enacting the modern equivalent of the vaunted tradition known as a trail drive, the New Mexico property, cattle, and all equipment, supplies and assets held by The Business, shall be hers and hers alone, with the express wish that she manage it in accordance with her heart’s desire and mine. To this end, I have outlined—”

  “This is absurd! Beyond absurd!” Smith cried, ensuring that Canton did not get his wish, nor could he have truly expected to, considering the shocking contents of that codicil.

  Kara herself could hardly believe her ears. Perhaps she had misunderstood the legal jargon. Perhaps she was dreaming. She couldn’t think beyond the words that kept running through her head.

  New Mexico property. Hers and hers alone. In accordance with her heart’s desire and mince. Her heart’s desire and mine. Hers and hers alone. And all she had to do was drive the cattle to New Mexico in the same manner as her ancestors might have done—with the guidance, advice and assistance of none other than Ryeland Wagner. Who had given his consent.

  He had known. He had known exactly what this final codicil to her grandfather’s will had contained—and he had agreed to go along with it. Deaf to the storm raging around her, Kara turned to the man standing at her side. Ryeland Wagner met her gaze unflinchingly. His solemn gray eyes said that he didn’t understand it, either, nor did he give a fig why Plummer had set things up this way. He had given his word; everything else was academic. As if that look told her all she needed to know, he gave a slight nod, put on his hat and walked out.

  Chapter Two

  Rye shook his head. They could shout till the cows came home, but it wouldn’t change anything. Plummer had planned too well. He still couldn’t quite believe that he’d let himself be talked into doing this thing with Kara Detmeyer, of all people. Cool, blond, blue-eyed, shapely Kara. She didn’t like him any better than good old Payne did, and Payne hated his guts, had since the moment they’d laid eyes on each other, and it had been mutual even then. Somehow, Payne was the reason Plummer had come up with this scheme. Rye still couldn’t fathom it. What had Plummer expected to accomplish? He could’ve left the place outright to anyone he’d chosen, but he’d chosen to make it conditional—on the completion of a trail drive, of all things! With Rye right in the middle of it.

  He stepped down off the porch and started across the dusty yard. Behind him the screen door opened and slammed closed.

  “Just a minute!”

  He sighed and turned reluctantly to face her. She marched right up and stood toe-to-toe with him. She was tall enough to look him right in the eye with only a slight tilt to her chin. Oddly, he liked that, which was more than enough to spark his flight response. He stepped back and to the side as casually as he could manage, aware that his pulse was slamming. “Don’t get in my face,” he told her harshly, despite feeling foolish. It worked. She backed off.

  “Sony. I just want to ask you a question.”

  He rubbed a hand over his mustache, feeling his own frown. He knew what Champ would say about that. Champ would say, “Daddy, your mouth is hiding again.” He wondered what Champ would say about his trembling hands. Rye nodded. “All right. One question, then I’ve gotta go.”

  She gulped. “Why’d he do this?”

  “Haven’t the faintest notion. Now if you’ll excuse me...” He turned away and started walking again.

  “Wait!”

  “One question, Miss Detmeyer,” he said over his shoulder. But suddenly she was in front of him, not behind him, her arms stretched out straight and locked, her hands on his chest. He reversed himself, spinning away. “Do you mind? I have to get back to my boy!”

  “You knew he was going to do this,” she said. “You had to!”

  “Yes,” he admitted, rerouting around her. “We’ll discuss it after dinner. Or don’t you think my son gets hungry like other boys?”

  She let him go, but he could feel her frustration and curiosity like physical entities that rode his back all the way up the hill. He pushed them away as he stepped through the door into the little house that had been more home for him and his son than any other. Champ was stretched out on his belly on the living room rug, thumbing through a catalog. Borden Harris, the horse wrangler and the only hand left on the ranch, sat in the rocker in front of the window, braiding a leather riata. Rye hung his hat on a hook on the wall and turned toward him.

  “How’d it go?” he asked, his curiosity obvious.

  Rye shrugged. “It went. They’re all shouting at each other down there. I figured I’d get supper on. Care to join us?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Bord said.

  “Thanks for keeping an eye on this rug rat,” Rye told him, kicking his son’s boot affectionately on his way to the kitchen.

  “No problem,” Bord said. “I only had to skin his head a time or two.”

  “Did not!” Champ giggled, rolling over onto his back.

  “Well, how d’you explain that bald spot back there then?” Bord teased.

  “Is not!”

  “It didn’t rub off all by itself.”

  “Uh-uh!”

  Rye chuckled as he walked on into the kitchen. Champ was fun to tease because he tended to take everything so seriously, sometimes too seriously. He’d sure taken the old man’s passing hard. But no harder than his father, if the truth be told.

  It still hurt Rye to think of the old man being gone. He would never forget everything the old man had done for him. And that truck. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never get over that damned truck! Plummer must have intended from the beginning to see it go to him. Plummer had known his heart was bad, and the cash flow had been nothing more than a trickle at the time he’d bought the thing—just after Rye’s own truck had burned its motor into a lump of coal. It hadn’t occurred to Rye that Plummer would leave it to him. Rye’s eyes watered; he wouldn’t give in to tears.

  For more reasons than he could count, Rye would have bossed a trail drive all the way to hell and back if the old man had asked him to. Fortunately, he only had to go as far as New Mexico. After that, he had no idea where he was going or what he was going to do, but he would think of that later.

  He got out a cast-iron skillet and a bag of potatoes. Working quickly, he spooned shortening into the skillet and set it over a burner on the propane stove. Then he began peeling the potatoes, rinsing them and slicing them. When the grease was just about hot enough to start smoking, he tossed in the raw potato slices and jumped back to keep from getting splashed. When the hot grease settled down, he went back to work, opening cans and dumping their contents into various pans until all four of the burners were covered. The end result was a meal of potatoes fried into a kind of brown mush, corned beef hash, green beans and creamed corn, that, too, a little on the brownish side. It wasn’t the fancy fare they’d be having down at the big house, but the atmosphere was decidedly more convivial.

  Dinner was a tense affair. Payne was smiling and easy, but Kara sensed an underlying tension in him, too. Smith was just plain belligerent He’d m
ade no secret about his feelings. He didn’t like being left out of the principal portions of the will, and he didn’t like this trail drive nonsense that would effectively cut out his son, too. Kara couldn’t blame him, but she’d make that drive anyway and make it on time with all the stock required, and she’d do it with Rye Wagner’s help, no matter how much it galled her.

  Aunt Faith, for her part, behaved as if it were all Kara’s fault, conveniently forgetting that Kara had had no more idea what Plummer’s will had contained than anyone else—with one obvious exception. But he wasn’t around to receive their slings and arrows; Kara was. And she figured it was a small price to pay for the right to keep her home. Poor Meryl just seemed sad, her grief still too real for anything else to matter. Kara allowed her grandmother her grief, and did her best to ignore her aunt’s and uncle’s animosity. Smith wouldn’t let it lie, however.

  “It’s not fair,” he said for perhaps the hundredth time. “Father knew I’d be hurt. He did it on purpose.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Meryl countered wearily. “Your father did what he thought was best, period.”

  “Staging a cattle drive? How could that be best? Especially with one person winding up with everything at the end of it!”

  “You wouldn’t be complaining if that person was Payne,” Dayna pointed out defensively.

  “As it should have been, if not myself!” Smith retorted.

  “I’m not a rancher,” Payne put in smoothly. “Grandfather obviously wanted someone who would try to make a go of the ranch. That would, naturally, be Kara.”

  “Thanks, cuz,” Kara said softly.

  “No thanks necessary,” he replied. “And there’s no point kicking and screaming. Why he did it doesn’t really matter, only that he did.” He kept his eye on his plate as he cut into his steak. “I’ll admit I’m a little hurt, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish you the best.”

  “I appreciate that,” Kara said. “Frankly, I’m not sure I’d be so good about it if the tables were turned. But I promise you that it won’t be for nothing. Detmeyers have ranched this country almost since there were cattle to herd, and it won’t end with me, I swear.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Payne said lightly, and adroitly changed the subject. “My compliments to Angelina, Grandmother. These steaks are perfection, as always.”

  “I’ll tell her you said so,” Meryl said in acknowledgment, forking up a bite of asparagus.

  Smith said nothing more, but it was obvious that he had no intention of being mollified. Kara sighed inwardly and forked steak into her mouth. The beef was wonderful. She took pride in the fact that it had been raised right here and willed the minutes to pass until she could meet Rye Wagner. They had much to do, much to decide—and not a minute to lose. She’d already jotted down dozens of things that needed to be done.

  Finally everyone began to leave the table. Kara headed down the hall toward the small room that her grandfather had long ago appropriated as his study. The door was closed, but she didn’t bother to knock before opening it and walking inside. Ryeland Wagner was already there and on the telephone. He sat in her grandfather’s chair just as Plummer himself had done, his booted feet propped on the corner of the desk, the telephone trapped between his shoulder and his ear. His hat was parked on top of the desk lamp just as Plummer’s had often been, and he welcomed her into his domain with a nod and a flip of his hand, for all the world as if he were Plummer Detmeyer himself. But he wasn’t.

  Anger and resentment swept through Kara. She marched straight to the desk and knocked Rye Wagner’s feet off her grandfather’s desk with a whack of one hand. The chair bumped upright, and Rye’s frosty eyebrows bumped up several notches with it.

  “I’ll call you back, George,” he said smoothly into the telephone receiver, then reached across the desk and dropped it into its old-fashioned cradle with the rotary dial. “What’s wrong with you?” he said to Kara. “Dinner not up to your lofty standards?”

  “Dinner was excellent!” she snapped, walking around the end of the desk to his side. “What’s wrong with me is you! You’re not my grandfather. This is not your office, your desk, your chair, your anything! I’ll thank you not to treat it as though it were!”

  “Lady, you’ve got some nerve,” he told her, glaring up at her. “I’ve parked my butt in this chair more times than you can count and, yes, propped my feet on the desk—with Plummer’s full blessing. He gave me the run of the place the first day I came here, the office, the house, the whole damned ranch. But then, he was a generous man and a damned fine one, an aberration among the Detmeyers, seems to me.”

  Kara gasped, outraged. “You arrogant ass!” She leaned forward, getting in his face very much on purpose, her hands braced on the arms of the chair. “I’ll have you know my father was as fine a man as .ever—”

  Suddenly his gaze ratcheted up to her face, and she realized belatedly that he hadn’t exactly been paying attention to her words. She started to look down at whatever had distracted him, when he threw up his hands, knocking hers from the arms of the chair and barked, “Button up your blouse!”

  Shocked, Kara snapped upright and dropped her gaze straight down. A couple of buttons had indeed slipped their holes. She clapped a hand over them. Before she could do more, he was on his feet and in her face.

  “Don’t try that stunt again! Flaunting your body won’t work with me!

  Red flared behind Kara’s eyes. Rage strangled her. She couldn’t even close her mouth, let along force words through it. She took the only other option that seemed open to her, her right hand swinging out to connect sharply with his cheek. His head snapped to the side and then back again. Suddenly she was facing the angriest man she’d ever seen. It was like one of those cartoons, the enraged bull snorting visible fire from his nostrils and eyes. Her hand was still hanging in the air between them, and he grabbed it. Instinctively Kara shoved against him, succeeding only in toppling him backward and down into the chair again. As he had a hold on her, she went down on top of him, knocking the chair back, so that their boots hit the hard edge of the desk, feet and legs tangling as they struggled independently to keep the chair from tipping all the way over. Rye clamped an arm around her waist. She flung her own across the back of the chair. Then the chair rocked forward again and they were safe. Nose to nose.

  Kara gasped, and felt her breasts swell against his chest. Anger had fled in the face of fear and embarrassment, and now suddenly something else had taken its place, something that raised her body temperature alarmingly and sent her heart rate into triple time, something that drew her gaze to Rye Wagner’s mustachioed mouth like a magnet to a lodestone. His hand flexed against her back, fingers spreading, pressing. Awareness flashed through her. She felt every square inch of his body against hers with abnormal clarity. And then he let go of her hand and cupped the back of her head beneath her ponytail. Her heart stopped. Her breath seized in her lungs. Something tightened in the pit of her belly. She could almost feel the prickle of his mustache. And then the door opened and her mother walked into the room.

  “Kara, I’ve been think—ing...”

  Kara shoved upward. Rye practically threw her onto her feet and followed her up so quickly that the chair sprang forward like a sling and rolled against the desk. His hand caught in her hair, sending the rubber band that held it shooting across the room. Kara stumbled and sat down hard.

  “Kara!” Dayna gasped.

  Rye reached for her, yanked back, and reached for her again. She slapped his hands away, grabbed for the corner of the desk and crawled her way back onto her feet, pushing hair out of her face. Rye was again staring pointedly at her chest. She looked down at the open buttons and slapped a hand over them hard enough to bruise herself.

  “Kara! Are you all right?”

  “Yes!” Her voice squeaked like a rusty hinge. She cleared her throat and thought inanely of attorney Canton. “Oh! I—um... s-so—clumsy!”

  “Clumsy!” Rye echoed: He stared
at Dayna for a long moment, his face flaring red, and then he blinked and said, “She fell.”

  “I saw that!”

  “Before, I mean. She fell before...she fell.”

  Kara forced a laugh. “Yes, I...I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m so clumsy all of a sudden. I think I’ve had—It was all a shock. Today. Everything. It was—” She made herself swallow whatever other words were about to fall out of her mouth and lifted her chin, her free hand going to her tumbled hair. She forced herself to face Rye. “About those details...”

  “I’ll have...them together...soon.”

  She looked away, saying briskly, “Yes, have them ready for my approval in the morning.”

  “For your—” He strangled the last word and said tightly instead, “In the morning. Fine.”

  She had her nose so high in the air that she could hardly see where she was going, but she went, anyway. “Thank you. Well good night I’m more tired than I thought,” Kara said as quickly as possible. She swept past her mother and down the hall.

  Dayna Detmeyer followed, stopping to lean her shoulder thoughtfully against the wall just outside the door to the study. Significantly, that door slowly creaked closed a moment later. Dayna’s mouth wiggled. A chuckle sputtered out. She lifted a hand and pressed it against her lips. After a bit she let it fall and lifted her eyes upward. “Plummer, you old cupid,” she whispered. “God love you.” And then she took herself off, smiling.

  She knocked this time, not because she thought he deserved any special consideration, but because it was one more way to put off the dreaded meeting. Her face still pulsed red when she thought of the ridiculous tussle that had taken place the night before—and its aftermath. She could not even bear to think of that moment when she’d realized she was in his lap, her blouse unbuttoned, her body behaving absurdly, her gaze pinned hopefully on his mouth. How could she have wanted him to kiss her? How could she have felt such...longing? And how was she going to face him now?