The Wildcatter. Peggy Nicholson
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was giving her the lie, just by the tone of his low mocking voice. She hooked her own thumbs in her jeans pockets and tipped her chin up a haughty half inch. “Yes.”
“I have—had—a friend who used to say, ‘Never assume. It makes an ass out of “u” and me.’”
Arguing with an arrogant stranger was no way to spend a gorgeous dawn. She drew herself up—an action that put her on a level with most men’s eyes. But not this one. “Oh? Well, while we’re assuming, may I assume you have some very good reason for being here on Suntop? My father said you weren’t one of his hands.”
“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