The Wildcatter

“When your Errric was complaining, I wasn’t, señorita. But after that…your father hired me.”

How like Ben to hire the man who’d offended her fiancé! Damaged his car! Her nails dug into her palms as it hit her. So Ben really doesn’t like him.

And I have you to thank for that, she realized, glaring up at her companion. Her father hadn’t formed an opinion about Eric, she didn’t think, before yesterday morning. He’d still been weighing him in the balance. But once Ben made up his mind, it was carved in stone. She’d never be able to change it back to approval. You’ve spoiled everything. Everything! She would have gladly flattened her hands on this stranger’s broad chest and sent him tumbling down the mountain if she could have.

Barring that, she had only words to pay him back for the harm he’d done. “Why would he hire you? You’re no cowboy.” Not with those work boots he wasn’t.

Far from being wounded, he laughed. “So they keep telling me. Why is everyone so sure?”

No way would she give him a clue. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.” A childish, spiteful taunt.

His dark eyebrows twitched as his mouth quirked in that odd, irresistible way again. “Finding out things, I’m very good at that. For instance, how do they call you?”

“Miss Tankersly.” A lie. All the men called her Risa. But not this one, if she had a say in it. This one she’d never forgive. “And you?” Might as well know her enemy.

“Miguel. Miguel Heydt del Rey.” Giving her a formal Spanish name, first his father’s surname, then his mother’s. He didn’t click the heels of his big, work-roughened boots together as he dropped his head half an inch in the faintest of mocking salutes, but still, she felt as if he had. She glanced warily down at his right hand, half expecting him to reach for hers and raise it to his lips. And if he’d done so, it would have been another kind of taunt, not so childish as hers. She shivered suddenly; the sun had yet to warm the mountain air.

“Oh.” All at once she was at a loss for words, though not questions: Who are you? Where do you come from, with a name like that, half German, half Spanish? And why are you here, so sure of yourself, though you were hired only yesterday? And for what? Suntop took on no wannabe cowboys, only employed the best.

Whoever and whatever he was, he was trouble. She could feel that, the way sometimes, up in the high country, she could feel the hairs stir along her arms when a storm was coming. Something in the air… A charge building up. Some vast, awful polarity that would have to be bridged in a bolt of fusing fire.

“So…” Heydt turned away from her to look, for the first time, out over the world below, now turning from hazy lilac to green and tawny gold. He nodded at the eastern horizon. “Those mountains over there—those are the Trueheart Hills?”

“Yes.” Why would he care about that?

“How long would it take to ride a horse from here to there?”

If he had to ask, then he wasn’t a rider. “Depends on how many times you fall off,” she said, straight-faced.

He glanced down at her sharply. “I wasn’t planning to fall.”

She gave him a wide, wicked smile. “No one ever does.” And that was as good an exit line as she was likely to get. She turned on her heel and walked.

“¡Luego, rubia!” he called softly after her.

Later, blondie—though her hair was more strawberry than blond. And there’d be no later, not if she could help it. Risa hunched her shoulders and didn’t glance back.

Not till she’d reached the trail that led down the west side of Suntop to safety.

But already Heydt had forgotten her. He stood staring out over the valley, or perhaps toward the distant hills he’d asked about.

The hairs tingled along her arms. Lifting her Nikon, Risa trapped him in the viewfinder. Reduced to half an inch in height, Heydt wasn’t so threatening.

Kk-chick! Not by choice, but sheerly by reflex, her finger had pressed the shutter button.

CHAPTER FOUR

TODAY HE’D STACKED and shifted some eight tons of hay—seventy-five pounds at a throw. Miguel ached from his back teeth to his big toes and all points in between.

Worse than strained muscles was the exhaustion. All he wanted was to lie down on a soft bed—ay, Dios!, even the ground would do—and sleep for a week.

Instead here he sat, sore legs clamped in a death grip around this surly oat guzzler, miles from his goal. With the sun going down.

Pain he could always handle. And fatigue; his hands and his back would soon harden to the work. But at the end of this second day of haying, Miguel was beginning to realize that time was against him.

Yesterday, except for that dawn scouting trip he’d made to get the lay of the land, he’d not had a minute to spare. Cutting and raking in the fields till sunset, then a short stop for food, then the mower’s blades had needed replacing and that job stole the evening.

Then this morning, again they’d started work just after breakfast—and his crew had stacked the final bale in the hay barn only an hour ago. He’d grabbed a shower at the bunkhouse, skipped supper in spite of his groaning stomach, then spent the past forty minutes wrestling a bridle and saddle onto this diablo, and strapping them in place.

Luckily no one had been around to see the show when he tried to mount! The beast could kick forward with his hind leg—Miguel had thought horses only kicked backward—and he’d done so with vicious glee, every time his would-be rider tried to step into the stirrup.

When Miguel had faced toward the back hooves and tried to mount that way, damn if the beast hadn’t twisted his shaggy head around and bitten him in the butt! He’d lost fifteen precious minutes while they’d spun in a swearing, kicking, snapping circle, till finally he’d shoved the brute against the side of a corral and used the rails to scramble aboard.

Now, bruised, battered and bitten, he was taking the first ride of his life—with the sun going down. No way would he make it to the Badwater Flats tonight. But perhaps as far as the river? A man had to start somewhere. Clenching the reins, he clucked to his mount. “Vaya, cabrón. Move it.”

The beast swiveled back his brown pointed devil’s ears and left them that way, reminding Miguel of a cop’s portable radar gun—two guns—aimed at approaching cars. He was being “watched” and measured. “Go on.”

The horse snorted, shook his head and stepped out at a finicky walk.

Not daring to kick him, Miguel shook the reins. “Faster, you!” From the barnyard to the nearest border of the flats was nine miles, he’d calculated on his map. At this rate, he could not reach it before midnight.

Pulling on one leather, he hauled the horse’s head toward the trail he’d seen riders take this morning, which must lead to the valley floor. “To the river,” he told his conveyance. “You know the way.”

The well-trodden trail sloped gently downward toward the outcrop of sandstone that formed the edge of this bench. Halfway there, Miguel felt his mount’s ribs expanding beneath him—then he burst out with a shrill, shuddering whinny. “Whuh!” Miguel grabbed the saddle horn with one hand, while he jerked on the reins with the other. “¿Qué tienes?”

“He speaks Spanish?” A horse emerged from the narrow cut that led down through the caprock. Mounted astride it was Tankersly’s daughter—she of the mountaintop and the Mercedes, though he’d heard there were two more about the ranch. But with her wicked smile and her golden eyes that seemed to take in his awkwardness all in a glance, this one was quite enough.

“No, and maybe that’s the problem,” Miguel admitted. “I tell him to go a la derecha, and he goes to the left. Izquierda gets me right. Tomorrow I buy the big mutt a dictionary.”

She had a low, musical laugh—a fine thing in a woman. “The problem might be that you’re holding your reins too tight. And then—there—you cluck at him, telling him to move on? He doesn’t know if you want him to stop or go.”

“So we’re both confused.” Miguel let his reins out a grudging inch. “Like so?”

“More. See the curve mine make?” Her horse, a golden palomino, sidled around to face the way it had come.

“Ah.” Though what had caused her mount to turn like that? She’d made no movement he could see. “Weren’t you headed to the barn?” he added as her horse leaned back on its haunches and started down the steep cut. He grabbed the saddle horn as his own horse snorted—and plunged after.

“Was, but this is more entertaining,” she called over her shoulder.

Just what he needed—a witness to his incompetence. “Sí, entertainment must be hard to come by out here. Owning a ranch the size of Louisiana must be very boring.”

“Not quite so big,” she said, refusing to take offense. “And I don’t own it. My father does.”

“Ah, yes, a big difference.” The only difference being that Tankersly worked, after his fashion, and she was a lily of the field, buying her right to existence by beauty alone.

Still, why quarrel with flowers? She wore a cream-colored Stetson this evening, which had slipped off her fiery head. A dark rawhide cord across her slender throat now held it in place on her shoulders. He could imagine hooking a fingertip under that cord, his knuckle brushing petal-soft skin as he drew her closer…

“Very different,” she said under her breath, then added with an edge, “if the guys see you holding your saddle horn, you’ll never live it down, you know.”