The Wildcatter

“You’re really not going back to Yale in September?” Tess lay back on her elbows. “Dad will be sooo mad at you!”

“He’ll get over it.” Or he wouldn’t. “Eric and I are marrying in October and that’s that, Tessums. Just as soon as he starts his job—his real job—in Denver, as a public prosecutor.” The job had been promised to him—the Denver attorney general was another friend of Eric’s family—and the coveted position would open up when one of the staff left on pregnancy leave.

Once Eric started drawing a salary, they could marry. After that, Ben would have to make up his mind: he could smile on her decision and help her. Though this time—and from now on—he’d have to let Risa define what was help and what was interference. She hoped to transfer to the University of Colorado at Boulder; that should be a feasible commute from wherever she and Eric set up housekeeping.

But if Ben refused to help her, refused to give them his blessing… Risa’s lips tightened as her fingertip traced a line in the sand. Well, she was marrying Eric anyhow. She’d have to work for a few years, then she’d put herself through college. This was her life and she’d live it her way. Ben had had his chance to shape her future back when it would have really counted for something, and he’d passed it by. So how could he complain now?

“But Eric’s not a cowboy,” Tess pointed out with a child’s irrefutable logic.

Risa smiled to herself. Her youngest sister had been raised all her life at Suntop. She could imagine no world beyond its borders, conceive of no better life than one that circled around cattle and horses. “No, he isn’t. Not every…interesting man rides.” From out of nowhere the image of Miguel Heydt flashed across her mind, his big hand clutching the saddle horn for dear life, his dark eyebrows drawn together in a mock scowl while he swore at the horses. He’d been laughing at himself, as well as teasing her, the other night. Strange, that a man who could make fun of himself seemed not weaker for it, but stronger.

“Interesting.” Tess smirked. “You mean sexy?”

Tess’s fiercely tomboy years seemed to be drawing at long last to a close. Sometime in the ten months Risa had been gone, Tess had discovered boys. “What would you know about sexy?” Risa teased. “You mean like Robbie Kristopherson?”

“Robbie?” Tess made a gagging sound. “Robbie can’t even walk straight! He fell over the wastebasket in Ms. Ever’s class the last day of school! No, I mean sexy. Hot—like that new guy on the haying crew.”

Risa’s heels stopped their rhythmic sliding. “What new guy?” Tess knew every foal that dropped, every barn-swallow that nested at Suntop, but still, surely she was much too young to have noticed…

“The one with buns to die for! And when he takes his shirt off…!” Tess collapsed with a blissful moan and hugged herself.

“How did you see him without a— Ben will shoot you, you goose, if you’ve been hanging around the haying crew. It’s dangerous.” And Risa didn’t mean just the machinery. The haying crew weren’t regular Suntop men but temporary workers, hired only till the fields were cut. Unknown factors, unlike the cowboys, who were all dependable, hand-picked men, who knew their boss too well to flirt with the boss’s daughters.

“I haven’t been hanging around. But this new guy, Risa, you’ve gotta see him. He has a chest and arms like a—like a comic-book hero!”

“You haven’t been peeking through the bunkhouse windows! Tess?” Risa prodded her in the ribs till the girl giggled and shook her head. “Hiding in the hayloft, you little lech?”

“Uh-uh! No, stop, don’t do that! I w-watched him through my binocs yesterday, okay? When I rode out to look for b-bluebirds. He was stacking bales, then they took a break and he took off his s-shirt and dumped water over his head!”

“Oh, well, binoculars, of course,” Risa said dryly. Add one Hunk, genus American Male, to the Life List in the back of her little sister’s Peterson’s Field Guide. And just because Miguel Heydt sprang to her own mind, his muscles shining with sweat and water, didn’t mean that he was the object of Tess’s admiration. Half the men on the haying crew were probably in their twenties.

“Anyway, if you won’t marry a cowboy, why don’t you marry somebody like that?” Tess muttered as she scrambled to her feet.

“Eric’s got a nice chest. A perfectly wonderful chest.”

“Ooooh, and how do you know that?”

CHAPTER FIVE

BY LATE AFTERNOON the crew had cut, raked, then turned as much grass as could be baled on the morrow. Since the weather promised to hold hot and dry, they’d be working straight through the weekend. So the hay boss had given them the rest of this day off.

Half the men were taking siestas in the bunkhouse. The rest had crammed themselves into two pickups and set off, whooping and jostling, for the Lone Star. They wouldn’t come staggering back until closing time.

Miguel put all thoughts of blissful naps and ice-cold bottles of cerveza firmly from mind. Today, at last, he’d make it to the Badwater—no, the Sweetwater—Flats.

Well, he’d thought he would. But when he and Jackhammer came to the bridge over the river, he noticed the trace of a path heading south along the base of the cliffs. Any cut in the earth was a siren song and this one had been singing to him for days, each time he rode the hay wagon past this point. “We’ll go only as far as that first bend,” he assured Jackhammer.

What a lie. Once a man reached a bend, there was always an obligation to peer around it. Who knew that heaven didn’t lie just beyond?

Miguel didn’t find heaven, but he found enough to lure him on. The sedimentary strata through which the ancient river had carved its winding course lay level where the bridge made its crossing. But as he rode south, gradually it began to dip. Good, that was very good; he lived for folds in the earth. He glanced wistfully over his shoulder, since the sediments apparently were rising to the north, but still he continued south. It was just as important to find a marker bed, an identifiable stratum, so he could orient himself. In Texas it would have taken only a glance or two to know where he was, but this was virgin territory.

And he the eager bridegroom. His eyes roved lovingly over the striated cliffs—a layer of dark gray shale lensed out between two layers of limestone—Mancos shale, possibly? He twisted around and dug his rock hammer out of the saddlebag, then sidled his horse in next to the wall of stone. “Be still, you. This will take only a minute.”

The steel spike chopped into the chunk he wanted—a chip ricocheted—Jackhammer’s ears flattened to his head.

“Whoa!” The gelding spun on a dime, took two stiff-legged, jolting hops as his head swung down to his hooves. “So I’m sorry, I didn’t—hey!”

The next thing Miguel knew, he was flying in a magnificent arc, hammer firmly grasped in one hand, mouth rounding to an outraged “Oh.” Off to his left, Jackhammer kicked up his back heels—who knew the brown bastard could move like that?—then shot off toward the—

Miguel hit the water headfirst and forgot about horses. There was a moment of cold confusion, frantic splashing—air, where was the damn air?—then he surfaced, cursing and coughing. “¡Hijo de—!” He burst out laughing.

So a horse wasn’t an unfeeling machine. The sooner he learned that, the better. He glanced around and grimaced. Jack hadn’t waited for an apology. By now he’d be halfway to the barn, blasted brute.

Miguel swiped a forearm across his brow, wiping the hair from his eyes, shrugged and turned back to the cliff. From this low angle he could see details he’d missed looking down from a saddle. And there in the shale, not a foot above ground level—he narrowed his eyes and waded closer—yes, por Dios, there where it had been waiting patiently for millions of years for a man to be thrown from his horse… “You were right, Harry.” Whatever the misfortune, there was always a balancing compensation. Hadn’t he held on to his hammer?

Miguel scrambled out, knelt, commenced delicately to chip stone.

Once he’d pocketed his prize he wandered on, his boots squelching softly. The beds continued to dip southward, layers of shale, limestone and sandstone striping the cliffs in diagonal alternations of gray and cream and gritty pink. He took samples, loading his jeans pockets with rocks, regretting that he couldn’t make notes and sketches of what he found. But Jackhammer had run off with his notebook. Miguel frowned. Wouldn’t want anybody at the barn to look into his saddlebags. He ought to go back.

But there was another bend up ahead. “Just this last one,” he promised himself, and, turning his face to the cliff—the trail had become only a narrow ledge some four feet above the river—he edged sideways along it. As he rounded a bulge of water-smoothed limestone, as luscious to the hands as a woman’s hips, he heard laughter and stopped short. Glanced ahead.

To where two mermaids, astride two sea horses, cavorted and wrestled in the river. Cielo, indeed! Giggling breathlessly, each was trying to shove the other off her swimming steed. Long arms flashing, pale legs twisting, the small, dark one toppled with a hapless screech and a resounding splash. The other mermaid raised her beautiful arms, arching her back as she shook her fists at the sky. “Yes!”

Miguel turned around on his ledge, leaned against the rock and devoured her with his eyes. Tankersly’s daughter. For an instant he hadn’t recognized her. Her hair was so much darker, wet, curling in coppery ribbons over her high, apple-sized breasts. Manzanitas deliciosas. She wore a drenched white T-shirt, which clung to her slender curves like a mermaid’s pearly scales. And below that—he swallowed audibly—only a scrap of turquoise, above legs so long she might have wrapped them twice around his waist with inches to spare.

The little one scrambled up the side of her mount, then froze, propped on her locked arms, her eyes rounding as they met Miguel’s across the pool. “It’s him! Risa, it’s—” She dropped from view behind her pony.

“What?” She—Miguel was beginning to think of her simply as she—spun so fast her hair whirled out around her, chains of copper dripping diamonds.

He laughed softly—how could anything be this perfect?

Her dark eyebrows—surprisingly dark, given her hair—drew together; her golden eyes speared him. She’d taken offense.

He couldn’t blame her. Clearly he’d stumbled into Women’s Magic here. But there was no going back. No way he could unsee what he’d seen. And whatever penalty he must pay in exchange for this vision, he’d pay it gladly. A man was the sum of what he’d witnessed, and he was richer for this sight.

Her far leg arched over the rump of her palomino and she dropped down into the water—spun again to glare at him, chest-deep in the river.

Ah, so that wasn’t a bathing-suit bottom she was wearing. Odd how that realization heated the blood.

“What are you doing here?”

The little one appeared beyond the palomino, swimming toward the far bank, tugging her pony behind her by its bridle. She stopped when she reached waist-deep water, and swung to stare at him, much the way a doe will run, then turn to see if you pursue.

But her elder sister—Risa, was that what the little one had called her?—waded toward Miguel, eyes gold and fierce as a mama wildcat’s. “I said—”

“I’m collecting rocks,” he said easily, before she could scold him. “And better things.” He dropped to his heels with care and fished in his shirt pocket. “Such as this.” He held his find out and waggled it invitingly.

Ah, he had her. Her eyebrows went up. She was dying to see what he had.