by Floyd, Susan
“Sorry, girl,” Clem said, and picked up the tabby. Clem felt her pulse slow considerably as she stroked Frijole. “Don’t you know company’s coming?” She buried her face into the soft fur. Frijole had absorbed many tears these past few years.
With the roast simmering and nothing left to do, Clem sat in her parents’ living room and stared at the floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace. Should she start a fire? She nixed the idea. It wasn’t cool enough yet. A moment later, she found herself hopping up to the door to see if she could detect any activity on the dirt road. At four-thirty, she moved to the porch, where she’d have a much better view of on-coming vehicles. Frijole joined her, plopping her twenty pounds on Clem’s lap. When the sun started to fade, she fingered the cell phone number Randy had given her.
Clem got up and paced the length of the porch. She’d faxed them a detailed map, and they’d assured her they were familiar with the area. The phone rang inside the house, startling her as it echoed off the high ceilings. Cowchip, her parents’ toothless fifteen-year-old Australian shepherd, began to bark. Clem shot through the door and lunged for the phone.
“Hello?” Clem asked breathlessly.
“Gate’s locked.”
Clem felt her heart clog her throat as adrenaline rushed through her veins. The voice sent a dozen light fingers down the fine hairs on her nape. She couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face.
“W-what?” Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was just Randy or Ryan.
“Gate’s locked,” the voice repeated. “Can’t get through.”
She wasn’t mistaken. That voice was branded into her mind along with his kiss.
“Mr. Scott.”
“Ms. Wells.”
“I thought you were retired.”
“Gate’s still locked.” He evaded her comment. He was here. He’d ventured outside the safety of his gates.
“Climb over,” she joked.
The silence on the other side told her he didn’t find that funny.
She added, “I’m coming right out. I thought I left it unlocked. Maybe one of the neighbors saw it and closed it up.” She was rambling, but she couldn’t help it. She was just so excited.
She hurried to her truck, pausing a moment to boost Cowchip into the back.
“Thank you, God,” she whispered as she bounced down the road. She didn’t know what she was thanking him for, the help or Dexter Scott. Nine miles and two gates later, she arrived at the fence just a mile off the main road and laughed with relief when she saw one pink and one dusty-brown truck, both with trailers hitched behind. The men were standing outside, talking and chuckling, their hats tilted low on their heads.
“Hi!” she said as she slid out of the cab of her truck. Cowchip hopped out with her to greet the strangers. She brushed her hair back, unintentionally making eye contact with Dexter. Her face hot, she bent down to find the lock. Clem felt her hands tremble as she fumbled to put the key in it.
Cowchip had managed to wriggle through the fence, and dogs started to bark in the back of one of the trailers. Horses whinnied. Cowchip snuffled Dexter Scott’s jeans and boots, her tongue hanging out in happiness as Dex leaned over to scratch her behind her ears. Clem couldn’t help watching. Even Cowchip fell victim to those hands, competent and calm, able to lull any unsuspecting being into a state of sedated rapture.
“You made it.” She couldn’t stop the breathy quality in her voice, and she tried to cover it up by yanking off the lock and swinging open the gate.
Dexter straightened, uncurling to stand at his full height, his shoulders expanding like the wingspan of a hawk. The smile he had for Cowchip disappeared, replaced with a look much more speculative as his gaze flickered up and down, pausing at the heart locket. Her hand came up to touch it. He continued to stare, as if he were taking in every detail of her, his eyes finally settling on her mouth. He remembered the kiss, Clem realized. If possible, her face felt hotter. Clem turned to the Miller brothers.
“Are you a sight for sore eyes,” Clem said, leaning over to shake their hands heartily.
Randy laughed. “I bet we are. I figured you wouldn’t mind if we brought along extra baggage.” He elbowed Dexter in the back, but he ignored Randy and got back into his truck and then gunned the engine.
Clem took that as her cue. She moved her truck on to the gravel road so they could pull around her. Then she shut and relocked the gate before jumping into the truck to catch up with them. At the next gate, she felt as if she was all fingers, knowing Dexter was watching her every movement. When she finally got the latch undone, she glanced up at him and he tipped his hat in acknowledgement, then drove past her.
By the time they’d gone through the last gate and arrived at the house, Clem was very relieved. They got out of their trucks, looking around.
“Beautiful area.” Ryan whistled.
Clem nodded. “Thanks.” She walked toward the main house. “Come in, please.”
Randy shook his head. “We need to let the horses and the dogs out. They’ve been cooped up for long enough. They need a good stretch. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to let the horses out in the corral for a while, just to get the kinks out of their legs.”
“Of course,” Clem agreed. “Do you need help?”
“No. We’ve got it.” Randy was already starting to unlatch the trailer. Ryan was right behind him, letting the dogs out the side door.
The dogs barked with enthusiasm and raced up and down the courtyard, releasing hours of pent-up energy.
“Any preferences where we put the horses?” Ryan asked, leading out a beautiful mahogany horse, obviously not one of Dexter’s.
Clem shook her head. “Either corral is fine.” She pointed west. “I emptied that stable for all your horses. I hope there’s enough room. If not, you’re welcome to any free space.”
Dexter looked up at the sky. “A few can stay out. They might prefer it. Give them a chance to get used to the air.”
A shrill, terrified screech grabbed their attention. The dogs were chasing Frijole, who moved quite swiftly considering her bulk, scrambling under the trailer ramp, only to startle New Horse, who was being led out by Randy.
“Quince! Bam-Bam! Dell! Come!” Dexter commanded, sharpness in his voice.
Then a sharp epithet shot out of Randy as he clutched his face. New Horse was free.
Clem ran toward New Horse, who was intent on trampling Frijole. The cat squalled in defense, teeth bared, her body hunched, prepared to both attack and retreat at the same time. Clem walked with careful purpose toward the brown horse, crooning to him, reassuring him that the cat wouldn’t hurt him. But even though the horse’s ears pricked up at the sound of her voice, his eyes were wild and his hooves were ready to flatten the cat.
As if in slow motion, Dexter saw New Horse rear again when Clem stepped in to rescue the cat. And he felt raw fear trickle down the back of his neck like sweat.
What the hell was she doing?
She was going to be crushed.
Fear became terror. He was suffocating as he stood there watching her sweep up the cat and duck under New Horse, the horse’s hooves just inches from her head. She stumbled, barely clinging to the cat and her balance. But somehow, she kept her footing.
“It’s not the horse’s fault,” Dexter heard in a fog as Clem reassured the cat. “He’s just a little spooked. I’d suggest, Frijole, if you want to live out the few lives you have left, you keep clear of the dogs and the horses while they’re here.” With a quick kiss to the furry head, Clem let go of the cat, who sensibly took off for the safety of the bunkhouse. Then she walked up to the frenzied horse and caught his reins.
Dexter saw her arms strain against the power of the horse, but she kept crooning to him as she moved as close to him as she could.
Come on, Dex, help me bring in that cow.
Joanna’s clear tones came to him as if she were standing right there.
“Joanna, slow down. You’re going too fast. When we get the time,
we’ll get her. Come on back! We’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow-shamorrow. That’s what you said yesterday and the day before that. If you won’t get the job done, I will. She’s getting away, Dex. Come on, do I have to do everything myself?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have let you sweet-talk me—”
“Oh, Dexter!” Her voice had been filled with fun and exasperation. “Come on!”
“Joanna! Stop!”
Dexter felt the words stick in his throat just as they’d done three years ago. He’d just sat on his horse, frozen as she’d disappeared over the edge of the ravine. Her terrified scream and the shriek of her horse still echoed in his head. He hadn’t wanted to look, because he knew what he would find.
“Where is she?” Randy had reined his horse in next to Calisto, frantic in his search for Joanna.
Dexter just looked in the direction of the ravine, and Randy took off as if he was propelled by a slingshot.
“Is she okay?” Ryan was right behind his brother.
Dexter couldn’t speak.
Randy’s sobs were the only sounds he heard after that.
“Where do you want me to put him?”
“What?” Dexter was jerked out of the painful reverie. Clem was right next to him, her hand light on the reins of the now-calm horse.
“Are you okay? You’re really pale.” She peered up at him, her eyes inquiring.
“Don’t do that again.” Dexter bit out the words as he yanked the reins out of her hands. He strode away, leading the horse to the farthest corral.
CLEM STARED AT DEX. He hadn’t touched her but she felt like she’d been slapped. Her chest hurt, or was that just her feelings? She wasn’t certain what she wasn’t supposed to do again. Try to save her cat? Well, too bad. She wasn’t about to let Frijole meet her demise that way. She just wouldn’t.
“What the hell were you thinking? Or were you even thinking?” Dexter had returned and the anger in his voice managed to push her most volatile button. “Risking your life for a stupid cat.”
Ordinarily, Clem would have winced and felt as if she’d broken a basic rule, but this time she turned on him, her nose to his, well, chest.
“I’m not about to let my cat get trampled,” Clem insisted, not really understanding where the power in her voice came from. She added, “Things are fine. And for the record, she’s not a stupid cat. She’s more reliable than my husband ever was.”
She glanced up and then looked away, trying to control the anger that seemed to have erupted out of nowhere. She never argued. She hated to argue. She avoided arguments whenever and wherever possible. But this fury seemed to bubble up and over.
Dexter’s eyes flickered over her face and Clem didn’t know why but she got the impression he’d just finished an evaluation of his own. She didn’t want to think about what he thought of her.
“Just stay out of that horse’s way,” he said, all his anger dissipated. His eyes searched hers for a long time, then he added, “Please.”
WITH HER POT ROAST in one hand and the coleslaw in the other, Clem took a deep breath and entered the dining room to find that Randy, Ryan and Dexter had taken over her beautiful table. The china plates and silverware were pushed to the side, and the centerpiece was now on an end table, where it was perched right in front the fire. A variety of land maps were spread out over the table and the three men pored over them. She looked over their shoulders as she set down the roast. It didn’t take her long to locate the main house and her father’s property on the land maps.
Randy was stabbing at a mountain peak with a biscuit. Strawberry preserves leaked onto it. He looked none the worse for his encounter with New Horse’s head, except for a nasty bruise that was traveling up his cheek toward his eye.
“Jeez, Rand, put it in your mouth,” Ryan told him, while he used the edge of his lace napkin to clean off the map, smearing red across the bottom. “You don’t know what I had to go through to get these.”
“I still tell you, this time of the year they’ll be as high up as they can get. That’s where the feed is.” Randy chewed and swallowed, then took the coleslaw out of Clem’s hands and made a place for it on the table. Dexter began to pass the plates around. “Especially with such an early rain. I’ve never seen these hills so green, so early.”
Randy was right, Clem realized as she went back for the green beans and an extra place setting. Usually it wasn’t until the spring when the mountain range that separated the San Joaquin Valley from the San Benito Valley turned from the brown-paperbag color burned into it by the scorching heat of the summer to a rich emerald green. She’d been out there getting burned, too, trying to get in the last of the cows. She hadn’t even realized that the moderate temperatures had tricked the rolling hills into thinking that spring was just around the corner. It wouldn’t last. The freeze of December would kill off anything green. But those cows would probably continue to grow, just to spite her.
She placed the green beans on the table and sat on the chair next to Ryan, kitty-corner from Dexter. She tried to make herself as obscure as possible, until Ryan passed her a plate of pot roast that Randy had carved with easy expertise.
Ryan continued to blot strawberry preserves off the map. Then he nodded. “I don’t think they’ll risk getting caught in a gully when the rains come in. They must be feeling the humidity in the air. Did anyone check the forecast?”
“I did,” Clem volunteered, and flushed at Ryan’s look of approval. She scooped up some green beans.
“And what’s it say?” Randy asked.
“Clear until the end of next week. There’s a high-pressure system off the Pacific that’s building steam. Big rains from then on.”
Randy and Ryan exchanged glances. “That doesn’t give us much time.”
“A window of about a week.” Dex finally spoke, then refocused their attention on the mountain peak. “How do you propose we even get there?” He put a generous portion of coleslaw on his plate and took three more biscuits.
“A service road,” Clem said, peering over Ryan’s shoulder. Her voice came out loud and she tried not to feel self-conscious about inserting herself into their conversation as if she had a perfect right to be there. She leaned over, and pointed to an area on the map right in front of Dexter, tracing it with her index finger. She tapped another quadrant. “I’ve spotted a bunch of them right here by Peckham’s Ridge, but by the time we found a way to get to them, they were long gone. I think they moved up this way toward Wright’s Peak.”
“How far does the road go?” Ryan asked, studying the map with interest. Clem could see him thinking, and an overwhelming sense of respect flooded through her.
“Far enough,” Clem said as she sat down again. She popped a carrot in her mouth, chewed, then swallowed before saying. “Once you’re out that far, you’ll need to ride in, anyway. We tried to set up a corral there this summer, but then we couldn’t figure out how to get the cows there. There’s a narrow creek bed that’s dry during the summer, but during the spring we couldn’t even get past it. So the cows were stuck on the other side of the ridge. Then they went up.”
“No other way to get them in?” That was Randy.
“If we used a helicopter, we could transport them across the reservoir, but before you say anything, don’t think that I didn’t calculate the cost.”
“Is the creek running yet?” Dexter asked. He had worked his way through his first helping of pot roast and was sopping up the gravy with his biscuit.
“Just barely. The rain last month was enough to soak the land, but it’s just a trickle.”
“Until next week.”
Randy and Dexter exchanged looks. “We could get them to the valley and then lead them through.”
“One by one?” Ryan shook his head. He cocked his head toward Clem. “How many’d you estimate you have?”
Clem inhaled and wondered if she should lie. She then met Dexter’s clear eyes and swallowed. Once they were in the mountains they’d know
, anyway. “Over six hundred. Probably more, since I think they have offspring now. I put out fifteen hundred last September. And we went in May to get them back.”
“And could only get nine hundred?”
“Eight hundred forty-three. We found twenty-six dead, mostly falls.”
Ryan pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “That’s still a truckload. In a week.”
“We’ve done it before,” Randy reminded him. “Remember Ojai?”
“But that was in late summer. We didn’t have to worry about rain.”
“But it didn’t take us much more than three or four days to get the entire herd in.”
“Yeah, by luck more than anything else,” Ryan said dryly.
“When did you know you were in trouble?” Randy asked Clem. She looked around and all eyes, even Dexter’s, were trained on her, waiting for her to answer.
Clem cleared her throat. “When something that’d taken my father two weeks to do in the past was taking two months. Good thing I started in early March. I thought for sure that I’d have them down by May, even considering my relative inexperience. I also saw that it was coming at a high cost. We exhausted our horses, the few dogs we had. We also lost a couple of dogs to cows that were more aggressive than we expected.”
“Aggressive?”
She shrugged. “They attacked. They turned and charged us, as if they knew that if they worked together, there was nothing we could do but run.”
“Which you did.”
“You bet.” She couldn’t help but smile. “I’m obsessed, but I do want to live.”
She didn’t want to think any more about the past summer. She’d lost most of the dogs to heatstroke. After they got that first group of cows in, she had three of her father’s cowboys quit on her. She pushed her beans around on her plate.
“Sorry, Clem, your daddy’s been good to me, but I’ve got a family.”
Clem couldn’t blame them. She didn’t want to face the cows, either, but even with their advanced size, the ones they’d brought in had just carried the ranch through the summer. She hadn’t had anything left over to invest in new calves. The few times she’d gone into the mountains by herself, she’d realized that this job was way beyond her. She’d spent the latter part of the summer and the beginning of the fall searching for someone who could help her.
