High Country Baby. Joanna Sims
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felt tears of frustration and anger well up behind her eyes. She didn’t typically cry when she was sad—she cried when she was mad as hell. She hated Clint for not being corruptible. She pushed the tears down; they were useless to her and she needed every ounce of her energy reserve to spend another day in the saddle.
“I’ll hang back.” Clint put his cigarette out on the tip of the bottom of his boot before he tossed it into the cold fire pit. “That’s the best I can do.”
Taylor stared at the wrangler for a moment longer. She had already burned too much daylight dealing with an issue that simply wasn’t going to resolve in her favor.
“I’m afraid that you’re best isn’t good enough, Mr. McAllister.”
She had been a vice president at a large bank for many years and knew when a negotiation was over. She didn’t have anything left to say to the cowboy, so she headed back up the hill to where she had stayed for the night and broke camp as quickly as she could.
Her uncle had provided her with a small, sure-footed mare named Honey and an experienced pack mule named Easy Does It. It didn’t take her long to break camp, pack up her belongings and get ready for the day’s ride.
Prior to leaving Chicago for Montana, she had moved all of the furniture in her formal living room out of the way so she could set up a practice campsite. She read, and then reread, all of the manuals that came with her new camping gear, and she had even slept inside of the tent for several weeks to get used to sleeping on the ground.
All of her practice and preparation had paid off—she could set up and break camp with relative ease. Her uncle had personally shown her how to pack Easy’s load properly and refreshed her memory on the correct way to tack a horse. All in all, she was pretty proud of her ability.
But there was one giant fly in her ointment: mounting her horse.
She was short, she had stubby legs and she certainly wasn’t as limber as she’d been in her teens. It was a major chore to get her foot into the stirrup, but once that was accomplished she didn’t have enough strength to get her bottom-heavy body into the saddle. The only way she could mount up was to find a log or a stump to stand on and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. She knew that this was a weakness that needed to be overcome, because if she couldn’t find a makeshift mounting block one day, she would be stuck on the ground. Not good.
She led Honey over to a fallen tree she had scoped out the night before, tightened the girth and lengthened the stirrup. Honey was surefooted, that couldn’t be denied, but she was also horrible to mount. The mare was frisky from the briskness of the morning air and she danced sideways away from the log right when Taylor had managed to leverage her foot into the stirrup.
“Whoa!” Her foot was caught in the stirrup and pulled her leg forward while she wobbled precariously on the log. She ended up in a half-split position, grabbing urgently to unhook her foot from the stirrup.
“Honey, whoa!” Taylor unhooked her foot just in time to stop herself from falling forward.
That could have ended in a serious injury, and she was lucky it hadn’t. The muscles on the inside of her right thigh, already tender from a day in the saddle, had been stretched beyond their limit during that failed attempt to mount her steed.
Taylor clutched the inside of her right thigh. “Ah!”
She rubbed the muscle to stop it from contracting. But the minute she let go of that part of her body, she noticed that her left hip joint was aching.
Honey was standing quietly, perfectly still, a few feet away.
“Woman to woman, Honey—give a sister a break, okay?”
Taylor walked Honey in a semicircle and halted her right next to the log. Three more attempts and three more semicircles later, Taylor was tempted to just start walking until she found a better place to mount. It was at that moment that Clint rode into the clearing, dismounted and silently stood on Honey’s right side to stop her from moving away from the log. The cowboy adjusted her reins so the right rein was shorter, showing Taylor, without verbalizing it, how to keep the horse from moving away from her.
Once she was in the saddle he checked the tightness of her girth and the length of her stirrups. When he was done with his inspection, he led the mule over to her and handed her the lead rope.
Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, for the second time that morning, but this time she could see that his eyes were the color of the blue Montana sky. Satisfied that she was squared away, he mounted his horse and disappeared into the trees beyond her campsite.
It pained her to admit it—it really did. Clint had just gone a long way to prove his value on this trek. She hadn’t said thank you, and he hadn’t expected it. He’d done what her uncle had told him to do—watch out for her. And, then, as good as his word, he’d disappeared into the thick wall of brush and trees.
With a cluck of her tongue and a tug on the lead rope that was hooked to the mule’s harness, Taylor started guiding the mare toward the trail. She was still on her uncle’s land—Bent Tree sprawled out across thousands of acres abutting the Continental Divide. She’d make it to one more designated campsite on this trail, a campsite used by the Brand family for generations, and then she’d finally reach the mouth of the Continental Divide trail. Would the moment be exactly as she had dreamed it so many times since she was a teenager? She could hardly wait to find out.
* * *
It was simply a fact that riding on horseback all day had been much easier, and much more romantic, in her imagination than in reality. The last time she had ridden, she had been in her twenties. Years later, and now that she was pushing forty, her body wasn’t as pliable or cooperative as it once been. She was chaffed in private places, her hip joints ached, her leg muscles ached, her back ached and for some reason, her neck was stiff, too.
She had used every psychological trick and pep talk she could think of to push through the pain, stay in the saddle and make it to the next campsite. When she finally reached a landmark, a steep hill on the trail, that let her know she was nearly there, Taylor tightened her grip on the lead rope and grabbed the saddle horn in order to stop herself from flying backward in the saddle when Honey galloped up the steep hill.
At the top was a grassy plateau perfect for camping. Grateful that she had accomplished her goal, she couldn’t stand to be in the saddle for one more minute. She groaned loudly as she swung her shaking leg over her horse’s rump. She unhooked her foot from the stirrup and slid, ungracefully, gratefully to solid ground. She winced as she walked—a new blister had formed over the old blister on the back of her right heel. But, she didn’t care. She had succeeded! She had triumphed!
Taylor limped her way through the quick camping routine she had established for herself, and then once she was satisfied with her situation she backtracked on foot to go find Clint. It was ridiculous to try to pretend she was alone when she wasn’t, in fact, alone. She had tried all day long and it hadn’t worked. She’d never been good at pretending.
“What’s up?” Clint was surprised, and not pleased, to see her come around the corner. He twisted the top back onto the glass bottle he had in his hand before he tucked it back into his saddlebag.
“We may as well make camp together.”
Clint hadn’t unpacked his gear or unsaddled his horse. “That’s what you want?”
It wasn’t. But it was practical. She had always been, until recently at least, a very practical woman.
“It’s practical,” she told him. “It’s hard for you to babysit me from way down here.”
Clint nodded his head after a bit and then fell in beside her on foot instead of remounting. The silence between them was uncomfortable for Taylor—and when she was uncomfortable, she tended to talk. It was a bad habit she’d never truly been able to break no matter how many times her ex-husband complained about it.
“You must have drawn the short straw to get this gig.”