by BJ James
There was no hesitation in Sandy. “When the time’s right.”
“Is that part of your plan?”
“Maybe.”
Jubal quenched a monumental thirst caused by conversation with another glass of champagne. Sandy waved the waiter away again.
Steve and Hank strolled into distant view, leaving one stable for another. “He knows horses.”
Sandy nodded a laconic agreement.
“I’m going to offer him Lorelei.” Jubal cast a sly glance at the foreman. “That’s why you sent him, isn’t it?”
Sandy didn’t admit or deny the suggestion. Jubal was famous for choosing a special horse and offering it to a preferred buyer, for an astronomical price, or nearly nothing, as the mood struck him.
Jubal sipped and sighed. “What will Savannah say?”
“She’ll be mad for a lot of reasons,” Sandy predicted. “Being bested by him, the main one. She’ll be hurt and disappointed, too. She’s had her heart set on Lorelei since we saw her last year.”
“I don’t want to hurt her.”
“She’ll get past it. She’s learned to get past a lot.”
Laughter rumbled deep in Jubal Redmond’s mammoth chest. “Looks like the children have discovered the identity of our mystery guest.”
Across the lawn, by a pristine stable, a gaggle of children surrounded Steve. As he signed napkins, hats and collars of shirts, he reached out more than once to keep Hank Benedict from wandering from his side.
“He knows his horses,” Jubal observed again.
This time, as the waiter made another pass Sandy took a tulip stern filled to the brink with Jubal’s “cheap” champagne. “Knows’em like an Apache knows the desert.”
“Knows his woman, too.”
“Hasn’t admitted it yet. It’s gonna take some time before either of them will.”
“There’s going to be bad blood.” Jubal’s mild warning didn’t mask his worry.
“Has to be.”
Jubal’s gaze narrowed critically, considering. “You figure it has to get worse before it can get better?”
“You know Jake, what he’s like when he wants something. What would it take to make him change his mind, admit he’s wrong?”
An exasperated grunt burst from Jubal. “Something drastic! In nearly a quarter of a century, I’ve never known him to change his mind.”
“Would losing his canyon and his daughter be drastic enough?”
“Do you think it will come to that?”
“Look.” Sandy gestured with his glass, returning Jubal’s attention to the corral by the stable.
“They’re arguing.”
“Yep. Up close and personal. Real close, real personal.” A pleased grin spread over Sandy’s face.
“He can’t take his eyes off her.” Jubal chortled.
“A strong man for a strong woman.”
“You got it backwards, Sandy. A strong woman for a strong man.”
“Backwards, frontwards,” Sandy dismissed the importance of order. Lounging against the balustrade, he laughed a pleased laugh. “Any direction,” the grin grew, “it looks like it might be love.”
Chapter 6
“What the devil are you doing here?” Hank spoke through clenched teeth even as she smiled a greeting in return to one called across the way. The smile was warm and natural. The smile of a woman completely at ease, enjoying a stroll over Jubal Redmond’s manicured grounds.
Only Steve knew the effort it required. As he walked by her side, his shoulder nearly touching her, his gaze ranging over her, only he could see the taut defensiveness. Only he felt the seething anger in the burning rake of her eyes.
Witch eyes. Eyes that enchanted, mesmerized. Eyes he couldn’t escape, and couldn’t forget.
When he looked down at her that first day on the teeming street of Silverton, he’d felt himself falling, slipping over the edge, tumbling Stetson over boots into the well of their silver depths. He’d dismissed it later, when he could think again. He spent days telling himself it was the strangeness of his mood, part of the fugue that presaged the crippling headaches.
He’d dismissed the silver eyes with hidden shadows in their steady gaze, but they wouldn’t stay dismissed. They were always with him, waiting. In the abstracting repetition of his grueling labor, she was there, filling his thoughts. In his dreams the haunting gaze beguiled, seduced.
Witch eyes.
He’d been burned in the past, enough to stay away, to live the insular life the ranch offered. Passive resistance was the answer to Jake Benedict’s greed; it was an impotent greed that couldn’t touch him. The Broken Spur was legally and morally his. If it failed, the fault would lie at his door. But he’d waited too long and paid too dearly for this to fail, and he wouldn’t. So long as he tended his own business and remained indifferent to the enemy. This he knew and understood in every waking moment and every conscious thought.
Yet Hank was there in unguarded moments, drawing him back. A mystery, a need. One to resolve. One to exorcise.
Why had he come today? He wanted to believe he’d come to investigate the promise of an exceptional horse. Intrigued only by a horse with the name of a siren. But when he’d looked again into that silver gaze, he knew he’d been drawn to Jubal Redmond’s by the woman he couldn’t forget.
“Don’t play the strong silent type.” There was scorn in her voice, and a smile too perfect on her face. “Why are you here?”
“Why, Miss Benedict, ma’am...” Putting total truth aside, he matched his step and his smile to hers. “I’m here for the same reason you are, to see the Redmond horses. Perhaps to buy. For all the trappings, selling horses is the purpose, isn’t it?”
“That’s where you’re wrong. Horses are Jubal’s passion and the focal point of the sale. But what you’ve seen today is much more than that. As an outsider you wouldn’t understand, but the rest of us do. I’ve known Jubal most of my life, and in that time he’s been a friend, and a good one.”
She didn’t slow her pace, or hurry, as she paused in her story of Jubal Redmond. Steve walked beside her, sensing there was more.
A hummingbird chittered irritably. A butterfly danced from flower to flower, fluttering wings a flash of color. A dog barked. A horse whickered. Hank didn’t notice.
Jubal’s joyful bellow burbling across the lawn coaxed her from silence. “Jubal’s laugh, it says more of his zest for living than any words. Yet it hasn’t always been so. Longer ago than I can remember, he came to the desert to die. And die badly.”
Before Steve could comment, she shook her head, warding off the obvious. “I know any death is bad, but for Jubal, what he faced was the worst. There was no hope for more than a matter of months, so to spare those who knew and loved him, he came here. But because he’s Jubal, he didn’t stop fighting. When the projected time of his death arrived, he decided he didn’t feel like dying that day, or that week, or that month. He decided to live instead.
“Six months became a year. One year became two. Two became three. Each a gift, cause for celebration. And he grew stronger. There were more doctors, more tests to determine what changed the course of his illness. The benign but inoperable tumor that threatened to destroy his brain, promising to rob him of every human dignity, was gone. No one knows how, or why, only that it is. Jubal calls it his desert miracle.
“That’s why I’m here,” she finished. “To celebrate Jubal and the life the desert gave him.”
“Yet you went to the stables before you did to him.”
“Yes,” Hank answered almost pleasantly, finding it difficult to nurture an anger that seemed petty compared to Jubal’s trials. “He would have been disappointed had I not.”
“Then you aren’t really interested in Redmond’s horses.”
“I didn’t say that.” The sting crept back into the rebuke. “Any breeder would be interested in what Jubal has to offer.”
“Sorry, Miss Benedict, ma’am. I took what you said about going to the stables f
irst to be something you did to humor Redmond.”
“Think again.” Anger flared before she could control it. Anger turned inward for letting Steve Cody rile her as no man had. “Don’t assume, Cody. Neither for me, nor about me.”
“No, ma’am.” Steve struggled to look properly regretful. Failing miserably, he abandoned the effort, grinning with an innocence never intended to be believed.
Hank seethed, the desire to slap the handsome face becoming a dire need. Curling her fingers into a tight fist, she returned her look stonily to the front, concentrating on their destination, the stable and the horses.
With a sudden shriek and a spate of giggles, a group of small children engulfed them. Joining hands they danced in a circle, teasing, begging for autographs. As they broke away, exhibiting his name on every conceivable surface, Steve took Hank’s arm instinctively as a small boy and a puppy tumbled happily into her path.
“Don’t touch me, and don’t call me ma’am again.” Though she didn’t jerk away, the demand was a hiss under her breath as she waved in response to a childish chorus of goodbyes. “Let me go. I’m not going to fall on my face in the midst of Jubal’s marvelous lawn because a puppy trips me up. And I’m not falling for the chivalrous routine. Bowing and scraping will get you an aching back and a raw ego. Nothing more.”
Steve continued to hold her arm, secure in his assumption that she wouldn’t make any sudden or angry moves to draw undue attention to their difficulties. He kept his hand on her, not out of need, or even courtesy, but because he’d discovered in earlier encounters that he liked to touch her. As much as he liked the color that brightened her face when she was angry and the sparkle in her eyes when something surprised her.
Now that he’d finally met the infamous Jake Benedict, he discovered he admired her strength and respected her cool-headed composure under fire. A lesser woman would have shrunk from Jake’s unwarranted attack, but she’d challenged him, refusing to buckle under his caustic and unfair remarks. She’d done it with little fanfare and the skill of long practice.
“Your dad can be pretty hard on you,” he commented, laughter giving way to somber concern. “Not always justly.”
“Whether he is or he isn’t, just or not, what he does and says to me is my affair. It’s something I can handle. Next time, if there is a next time, stay out of it.”
His hand rested lightly at her elbow, his fingers circled her arm. She let him lead her past a cluster of ranchers who stood apart, smoking and arguing the merits of this horse or that. Her smile felt wooden as their conversation stuttered to a halt and all eyes turned toward them.
Though she hadn’t a doubt the gossips had spread the word of her companion with the speed of smoke signals, she refused to confirm suspicion by avoiding introductions. The momentary pride she might have taken in the accomplishment was dashed when several of the ranchers nodded a particular greeting to Steve, calling him by name.
“I didn’t mean to interfere with your dad,” Steve continued amiably when that gauntlet had been run. “I thought I could help.”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Everyone needs help, now and again. Even a Benedict.”
“I don’t.” She stepped through the entrance of the stables. “Not yours.”
“Your smile is slipping. Someone’s liable to guess we’re knee-deep in a quarrel.” Wondering who but an original of Jubal’s caliber would decorate even such modern and pristine stables as these, he drew her to a halt within the tenuous privacy of a potted palm. From smaller pots clustered among ferns, gardenias and jasmine sent up their fragrances. A remembrance of sunny Southern days and moonlit nights, recalling the soft hit he sometimes heard in her voice.
He moved a step closer. “The gossips might decide we’re having a lovers’ tiff.”
With exaggerated determination, she peeled his fingers from her arm, putting distance between them. “If you’ll notice, we’re alone. But even the most illogical gossips couldn’t get it that wrong.”
The stables were, indeed, deserted. Steve closed the distance she’d just put between them, hemming her in the curving wedge of palm and plants. “It would be illogical not to consider it a possibility.”
“Sure!” Denying an insidious awareness of his lean and rangy body nearly touching hers, she lifted her head to stare into his dark, dancing eyes. “Jake Benedict’s daughter and the squatter from Sunrise Canyon? A likely pair.”
“Stranger things happen.” He wouldn’t argue the contemptuous name. Not when there were other things to think of. Not when his fingers tingled with the need to stroke the curve of her cheek, learning the textures of her skin. Nor when he barely controlled an irresistible longing to drag the pins from her hair, to watch it drift in a bright fall over her shoulders and breasts. “If it happened, a number of problems could be solved.”
A capricious breeze swept through the wide door, tickling palm leaves, casting a mosaic of light and shadow over her. In the shout of hothouse perfumes, a whispered fragrance drifted to him. Her fragrance. Wild flowers and roses, subtle, demure. Maddening.
“Our problems will best be solved when you come to your senses.” She remembered children scattering in every direction, eager to show his prized signature. “You’re a star, not a rancher. Go back to the rodeo. You don’t belong here, you never will.”
“Won’t I?” A finger under her chin tilted her face to his. “Why are you so desperate for me to go? What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything.” She wanted to move away from his touch, away from his probing scrutiny, but her pride wouldn’t allow it. “My father wants Sunrise Canyon, I intend to do all that I can to see that he finally has it. That’s the beginning and end of it.”
“Is it?” With his body shielding her from the chance of probing curiosity, succumbing to desire, he stroked her cheek with a roughened knuckle. “Have you deceived yourself into believing what began between us in Silverton can be ended so easily?”
Her hand jerked, her nails drove into tendon and flesh. “I’m not one of your buckle bunnies. I won’t swoon at your touch or fall into your bed. All that began in Silverton was war.” Flinging his hand from her, her heated gaze turned icy. “When it’s finished, you’ll be gone, and Sunrise Canyon will be part of the Rafter B, as it always should have been.”
“How do you propose to accomplish what Jake Benedict couldn’t in all these years?” He should have felt the heat of her anger, but all he could think was how magnificent she was.
“Fairly,” Hank shot back. “At your own game.”
“Horses?”
“Is there another reason we would be standing in a stable?”
Steve could think of several. “Are you making this a formal challenge?”
“Why not?”
“My horses against yours?”
Hank nodded.
“What criteria? What time limit?”
“The best-trained horse, bringing the best money, the Silverton sale,” she answered succinctly. “A little less than a year from now.” Stepping past him as if the matter had been decided, she amended with an edge of scorn, “Unless you’re gone by the time snow flies over the mountains, as Jake predicted.”
“I’ll be here, Benedict.”
Hank laughed and continued toward the stalls. “We’ll see.”
Taking two long steps and reaching out for her, Steve brought her back. “I’ll be here,” he repeated in a tight voice. “I don’t give up easily, so don’t count on winning by default. Don’t count on winning at all.” The planes of his face were sharp, his eyes were cool and appraising, yet his mouth curled in a grim smile. “What are the stakes?”
“We set our own.” His hands were heavy on her shoulders as she cocked a brow at him, waiting for his agreement.
“For you, Sunrise Canyon deeded to the Rafter B, naturally.”
“For a fair price. I won’t cheat before I win, or after.”
“If I win?” Steve asked.
“You won’t.”
“For the sake of argument, let’s say I might,” he persisted. “What then?”
Hank shrugged out of his grasp with some of her confidence sheared away in the face of his. “Your choice.” She hadn’t considered losing, or what he would gain by winning. “My horse?”
“I don’t think so,” Steve said thoughtfully, giving her challenge the respect it merited, weighing alternatives. “Why would I want the second best horse if I had the best?” Simply to see the proud lift of chin, he ventured, “I will have the best, you know.”
“You won’t.” This stubborn bravado took some effort, she wasn’t so sure of herself, nor of him. She hadn’t stopped to think that Sandy had seen more than a washed-up bronc rider in Steve Cody. He wouldn’t be attending Jubal Redmond’s sale on Sandy’s secondhand invitation if there wasn’t more.
Then there was Jubal. In all his good humor, he suffered fools and insincerity poorly. Yet he was impressed by the interloper. In reckless challenge she hadn’t accounted for the possibility that she wouldn’t win. Now she knew she must, if only half seriously. “If you don’t want the horse, then, perhaps, the money?”
Steve pretended to weigh the choice. “The canyon for the price of a second-best horse? Not quite an equitable gamble.”
“What then?” Hank grew weary of the verbal jousting. “Name your prize. Anything short of the Rafter B.”
“Anything?”
Fury trembled on the brink of erupting. “Isn’t that what I just said?”
Steve let his solemn gaze sweep over her, slowly, lazily, before settling again on her face. “Your word on it?”
“Of course you have my word,” Hank snapped. “I assumed that was understood.”
“You aren’t a very good gambler, are you, Benedict? Gamblers never assume.”
“This is a sure thing, not a gamble.”
“Maybe. But in the way of all good gamblers, and as you suggested earlier that I mustn’t, neither of us should assume anything. Not when the stakes are so high.”
“Name your prize, Cody.” As she watched the hard edges smooth from his face, and a spark of laughter dance fleetingly into his eyes, Hank knew she’d been drawn into a trap. “Name it!”
