by Lass Small
With her intentness, it was some time before she realized the sun was gone. There was no friendly shadow accompanying her. She looked at the sky with some indignation. From where had all those dark clouds come?
And she shivered. Could the weather people be right?
Silk is a marvelous material, but even silk has its limits. Her raincoat was in her car. Her car was.that way. She had to find the damned gourd-pod.
So she searched.
And she found it! It was not with glee or satisfaction that she lifted it from the ground. It was with grim, teeth-clenched determination.
The tricky wind had played with the pod as it had fallen. It was not where it should have been, which was right…where?
Lauren stood and looked around, holding the damned cloth-tailed pod. She looked at her compass. She pointed it North.and she began to walk back the allotted degrees to her right.
She walked at an angle. She would find the car. She would never go on another pod hunt in all the rest of her life. She hoped Mark’s wife had triplets.
It took some time for Lauren to realize she could possibly be lost. She figured if she went south and west, she would find the line of mesquites. From there, she would find her convertible. The car was not only hidden among some mesquites, but she had left it with its top down. and rain or dust or something was approaching.
It was not turning out to be a good day.
She would survive…even this. She would find the convertible before she really, really needed the raincoat in the back seat. She would.
The sky darkened almost to night and the winds were not nice.
Lauren trudged along carrying the gourd-pod, which was gaining weight with every step. She was cold. She shivered violently. Her nipples were terse and pinched, and her skin agreed with the discomfort.
She could handle cold. She would find the car, the coat and put the top up, get in and turn on the heat!
The heat. It would be warm and the stream of the heat would go over her body and soothe her. She had the damned stupid gourd-pod, and she would find her car again.
Lauren lost her hat. It was just-gone! She was freezing. She stopped and wrapped the long pod tail around her. It was only minimally better. She was cold.
And…where was she?
She looked around. It was all so relentlessly the same. Rolling ground. No sun. No stars. No clue as to exactly where she was. The compass said North was that way. She went south.
If only she could just get to some trees…even to mesquites.she would be better off. She was so cold.
Lauren redid the long cloth tail of the pod, wrapping it around her head, her neck, and her chest. Her teeth were chattering.
What was a damned gourd-pod worth? Why had she felt the need to go and find it—all by herself? She would probably die out there. Alone. Her bones would eventually be discovered. By then, it would have been so long, since her death, that the finders would assume she was a relic from long, long ago.
She turned to view the approaching storm and her mind saw a man on a horse. So she was hallucinating. Big deal. She didn’t have anything else to entertain her. Lauren’s mind had decided she needed to be rescued and her imagination managed to conjure that.
So she turned her back on the foolishness and trudged off—south and a little west.
Behind her, she heard horse’s hooves.
Yep. That would go right along with the idea that she was being rescued. Her imagination had always been rather vivid. She’d spent most of her childhood reading and rereading her maternal grandmother’s carefully preserved comic pages of Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant.
That grandmother was remarkable.
Lauren figured she was in the final stages of freezing, and she would go out on Prince Valiant’s horse. Okay. She could handle that.
Prince Valiant’s voice came from behind her. “Hey, where the hell are you going?”
How unprincely. Men never acted as they were supposed to act.
She stopped and turned to confront the phantom. “You’re supposed to step down, take off your hat and sweep a really good bow.” With those directions, she stood shivering with her teeth clicking and waited, her back to the storm.
He swung down from the horse with beautiful ease. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it.
That beat the bow all hollow. The coat was gloriously warm. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d already died and probably was in hell. It was so warm. Well, maybe not hell exactly. She hadn’t been that bad.
The masculine voice told her, “Get on the horse.”
Huh? She was going to hell on a horse? That seemed a nasty thing to do to a horse.
She asked the phantom, “What’s he done?”
The phantom’s face was sour. He groused, “I hate women. They always do the dumbest things.”
Warming inside the coat, she retorted heatedly, “Women? Women do dumb things? Do you know that I’m out here for only one thing?”
His interest changed and riveted. “You streetwalking?”
With great, adult patience, she replied, “I came out here with a group to-”
And she couldn’t blab a secret club’s activities. She was staunch.
“Yeah?” He encouraged her speech with his riveted attention.
Why didn’t his Stetson blow away? She was fascinated.
She saw that his shoulders were hunched. He was cold. Where was his coat? It was on her. She said, “I’ll give your coat back to you in just a minute. It’s so warm.”
And he replied nicely but he leaned close as he yelled over the sound of the winds, “As soon as you’re just about thawed, we’ll get out of here before it thunders.”
“It’s thundering?” Her eyes got big and her head jerked around.
“It’s just wind right now. It’ll get interesting in a while. Are you warm enough to get on the horse?”
“What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“This horse.” She was kind and pointed to the horse so that he’d know what she meant by the word. She didn’t think he was very bright.
But the male creature replied, “Block Head. We just call him plain Block.”
She lifted her chin a little. “He seems more intelligent than that.” She was chiding.
“He don’t know no never mind.”
She indicted the horse’s position and mentioned kindly, “He’s protecting us from the wind.”
“That’s ‘cause he don’t know not to.”
She stiffened. Then she said in her Daughters of the Alamo voice, “I’m ready to ride.”
He smiled and bit his lower lip. She was probably hostile enough now to see to herself. He said, “Give me the coat. I’ll wrap you in this here blanket. I’d take the blanket but it don’t have no sleeves. Understand?”
He was a basic man. No wonder he had so carelessly referred to streetwalking. He probably didn’t know any better. She would be careful of him. She took off the coat with steely discipline.
He took hold of her and tossed her up on the horse. Lauren didn’t shriek or sprawl because her daddy had been doing something like that to his daughters all their lives.
She landed neatly in the saddle. She would ride; he would walk. He was a gentleman under all that crudeness. He knew his mann—
Move your foot out of the stirrup.”
He was boarding the horse. too.
But he sat in back of the saddle and he shifted until he got the blanket right, covering the front of her and her legs, then he opened his coat and covered her entirely.
In a sexually stimulating, roughened voice, he commented in her ear, “It’s jest a good thing you got your own gloves.”
He spoke of those thin-skinned, driving gloves, which protected her hands from sun-browning. Sure. But thin as the leather was, the gloves were better than nothing. She said a dismissive, “Yes.”
Then he startled her as he said quite naturally, “The pod’s tail makes a pretty good cover for your head and neck
.”
How’d he know it wasn’t a cantaloupe? She replied a nothing, “Umm.”
He didn’t realize the subject had been rejected by her. He said, “We’ve found a couple of them there things. What’s in them? Ones we’ve tried ta see, they just crumbled.”
She looked at the pod, which was the size and shape of a cantaloupe. “I thought it was a distress signal from a plane flying oddly.” Jack’s flying was odd.
The man in back of her with his arms around her said, “He had enough room to land. He didn’t need any such distress signal.”
“I guess not.” But she did hear in his words that he had been watching as the plane had buzzed the mesquites and then dropped the pod.
Why had he waited in the beginning of the storm? Why hadn’t he come to her immediately? He’d allowed her to find the pod. He’d known where it was? If he was so curious, why hadn’t he retrieved it first? She would have never known if it had been found or lost forever.
This person in back of her on the horse had mentioned they had found other pods. Who all had they told of finding them? Where were the ones they’d found?
This whole adolescent activity was only a confirmation that they were all bored. They had too much spare time with little to distract them. Well, Mike’s baby might distract him for a while.
Actually, Mike had had very little to do with his wife having a baby. She’d done all the work. Come to think of it, even at a time when his wife could be very uncomfortably pregnant, Mike had run off on a pod hunt. He had.
She said lazily, “Next time, I get to sit in back.”
“The wind’s at my back,” he said next to her ear. Then his voice was different, lower, huskier. He said, “I’m sheltering you.”
She accepted that as only right and asked, “Where are we going?”
“To the nearest house.”
She was courteous. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
It began to rain quite nastily cold and wet. He pulled her head back under his chin, and she was protected. He slid his hand across her ribs below her breasts under the blanket. “You warm enough?”
Her mouth responded in a tiny, female way that was embarrassing. She told him, “My feet are cold.”
“Sit Indian-style. I’ll balance you.”
She was surprised. Here she was countering all her horse training. She was slumped back against a man and now her legs were crossed under the blanket and she was—warm.
He fumbled down her stomach and his hand slid into her trousers. “Oops, sorry. I’m trying to see if your feet’re okay.”
“They are.”
“Good.”
A lecher. She squinted a little, as she went over the karate lessons she’d taken because her daddy had insisted. She’d been good at it. She’d nailed the instructor. He’d been hostile to her after that.
If the instructor had gone along the whole way, instead of trying to escape, she would have thought he was letting her win. But he’d tried hard to win over her.
Winning had been heady.
Of course, she’d antagonized yet another male. Her father had laughed.
Her mother had altered the classic, “Never give a man an even break.” But her mother had added, “You’d lose.”
And she had. By being so confident and physically safe, she’d lost just about every male who’d come down the pike. Even all those who had been blinded by her daddy’s clout. She’d lost them all.
Which ones had she wanted?
And lying back against a crude man, she went over all of the contenders like turning pages of a diary, and there hadn’t been a one she’d really and truly wanted. To be a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had never really been tempted must be some sort of remarkable record.
She was probably freezing to death and looking back on her life in a farewell. Actually she was warm and cozy, cuddled down, cross-legged but secure on some man’s saddle. She was leaning back against him and wonderfully wrapped in his blanket and the shared coat. His right hand was innocently tucked under her left armpit.
His wrist was resting on the top of her breast, which moved with the horse’s stride. At least the man wasn’t groping her.
She didn’t realize his wrist was feeling her. Only hands did that. Not wrists or backs or arms.
Two
The wind was howling and shrill across the empty land. There was nothing to sieve the sound, but it was moaning and serious.
The rescuer had turned the horse away from the storm, so the brunt of the wind was on the man’s back. He was Lauren’s.windshield. That was perfectly logical. Any man protected a woman. It probably started in TEXAS, when there were many, many more men than women, and women were precious.
Of course. Women should always be treated as if they are precious. They are.
The precious woman peeked around from her limited sanctuary. Where were they going? She was so covered that she couldn’t see ahead, but she remembered there was absolutely nothing ahead of them. They were just drifting as animals drift before a mean wind. That’s how cattle piled up against fences or went off bluffs or fell through ice.
She had clear memories of hearing her father raising verbal hell over the stupid cattle who’d done that. He’d been furious! Her mother had listened calmly, seated on the sofa, and watched Lauren’s daddy.
The daughters had been sent from the room. Their mother had said to them, “Hush. Run along.”
Then when he’d calmed down, and the daughters could hear only the sounds, they would hear their mother’s voice.
What had their mother said to their father? What had she done to soothe him? Lauren would have to ask her. Until then, it had been something Lauren had never realized she might need to know.
Her nose was down in the blanket and most of the blanket was surrounded by his opened coat. With all that and the wind, Lauren asked, “What is your name?”
Oddly enough, he understood her. He said in a questioning statement peculiar to TEXANS, “I’m listed in the book as Kyle Phillips? But I answer to just about anything if the caller is serious.”
She replied, “How do you do?” And she bowed her head a trifle, as those words had demanded since she’d first been taught the phrase, long ago.
He replied to her response, “Pretty good, so far. What’s your name, honey?”
Just the fact that he’d called her ‘honey’ was a clue. He was basic TEXAN. So she said, “I’m not sure I should give it out in these circumstances.”
“It’s okay.”
He was saying he was safe for her. If he knew her father’s name, what if he just decided to hold her for ransom? She could give her first name. “I’m called Lauren.”
“Lauren. That’s a real nice name.”
How strange to have such a conversation with the wind howling around them and the horse patiently plodding along. Occasionally they moved to one side or the other. It was probably done to avoid something.
Warm, her stomach growled. Could she ask if he had some tea and cakes?
She could be flipping out. Dreaming. Hallucinating? Was she actually on a horse riding. “Where are we going?”
“The place is yonder a ways. We’ll have a fire.”
“In the—place?”
“Yeah.”
Now how big could his place be? She said a nothing, “Oh.” And she knew full well that everybody in TEXAS called their holdings their “place” because that was where they were. It could be a half acre or it could be miles square. She sighed.
And he heard her defeated sound. “It’ll be okay.”
Sure it would. Men were not any smarter than women. Their perception of things was unusual and completely different. Even plain, ordinary words had other, changed meanings. And then there was sex.
Lauren had found that out when she was quite young. Her cousin Theo had played Doctor with the fascinated Davie sisters. At that age, it was just looking.
Since that introduction by Theo, Lauren had managed to
avoid such bold encounters. She was still a virgin.
Theo had gone on to actually become a doctor. Lauren had never gone to him for medical purposes.
Being human was one big pain in the neck, or lower. There were all the rules. All the customs. No other mammal had to fool around with all that stuff. The difference was to prove humans are superior beings.
Even as limited as she was, she could peek around the supposedly virgin land. She wondered what horrific wastes humans had discarded, buried deep in the low, surrounding hills. Were the hills real hills or just earth-covered piles of waste? Animals didn’t pollute the world but briefly. Humans really loused it all up. In some places, the pollution would be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
How could the people, who lived in that distant future, know? What if the chemical wars wiped out all previous knowledge and future peoples or creatures would have no clue about the dreadful storages of harmful waste?
Being human wasn’t a brag.
Being a woman meant you followed all sorts of rules. You either did—or you didn’t. Hadn’t.
Since Lauren was in the didn’t/hadn’t category, if she was in the middle of dying, right then, and going to freeze into an ice statue, should she take advantage of this opportunity to know what Life Was All About?
She’d take another look at this person whose name was nicely Kyle Phillips, and she’d decide. Had her guardian angel sent him so that she could experience him? It seemed rather unkind to take advantage of an innocent man.
Of course, he had asked if she was a streetwalker. He might not be too difficult to lure.
She lifted her head and therefore straightened her body a bit as she peered around to see if anything was in sight. It was snowing!
As she said, “It’s snowing in TEXAS!” She became vividly aware that her shift had caused his hand to come free of her armpit and cover her breast! She said, “Sorry,” as if that had been her fault.
He put his hand back under her armpit and replied, “My fault.”
How kind of him to take her guilt. She would have to pay attention and move more carefully.
She was again discreet. With her head back under his chin, she could smell the freshness of him. Obviously, he didn’t smoke. He smelled nicely male and pure. And she began to wonder what he looked like.
