KNIGHT IN A WHITE STETSON Page 17

  As though he'd read her thoughts, he unsnapped the button of her fly and slid his hand down, palm out, until he touched the silky top of her panties. He took the elastic between his index and middle finger and tugged. Her head did drop back then.

  Soft, flattened hair. His fingertips touched it, and when they did he saw Calla's lips part, saw her tongue dart out to lick the fuller, lower one. He leaned forward to suck lightly at her collarbone.

  "Come lie with me, Calla," he whispered against her skin.

  "Oh … I can't." His voice was so soft, and his mouth was cruising up her neck, and she labored valiantly to remember why this couldn't happen. "I can't."

  "Calla, I want you so much. Come with me. Forget about everything else. Just for right now. We'll worry about it all later."

  Well, wonderful, now he was hypnotizing her. She couldn't think of another, better explanation why her knees went weak and her body softened and her will collapsed at his words.

  "Henry … please."

  She couldn't have said what it was she begged him for. Release or capture.

  "Calla. Come with me. Let me touch you." He sucked lightly again, higher this time. Calla felt the thrill zip right down between her legs. "I want you to touch me."

  "Ah … Henry, please…"

  "Say yes, Calla." He was this close to begging her. He knew it. Didn't bother him in the least. "Say yes."

  "No, Henry." She pulled away at the last possible second, like a pilot pulling out of a fatal dive. His mouth left her soft throat, his hand left her soft skin. She pleaded with him, silently, with those lovely hazel eyes, to understand. "I can't."

  He watched her for a long minute, his breath rattling in his chest. Then he turned away, leaving her relieved, and bereft.

  "I'll make dinner," he said thickly.

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  « ^ »

  Henry heard Calla groan. He opened his eyes. It was not yet sunrise. Henry smiled. She was back on schedule. He turned lazily and peeked one eye open at her.

  "Good morning," he said, stretching the familiar, pleasant aches from his body. "It's 5:27."

  "I didn't ask." She was lying on her back, her hands over her face.

  "It's usually your first question. You are certainly not a morning person, are you? What's wrong this morning? I hate to ask."

  "I don't want to talk to you right now."

  Henry leaned on an elbow.

  "Why don't you want to talk to me?"

  She groaned again. "Don't look at me." She suspected that her face under the cover of her hands was bright pink. She felt it flame. She'd just had the most amazing dream, was barely recovered from it, still felt a shocking pulse inside her body. If Henry suspected she'd just had her very first erotic dream—about him, about anyone—she wouldn't get out of this tent with her principles and her plans intact, she was certain of it.

  He reached to pluck her hands from her face.

  She snatched them back, flopped onto her stomach and buried her face in the saddle pad he'd given her for a pillow. Miscalculation. Her breasts tingled sharply where they met the bottom of her sleeping bag—the nipples that, in her vivid imagination, had been so recently in his mouth, were hard as river pebbles.

  Another groan. Henry wondered how she breathed with her face buried like that. He admired her thick, straight hair as it spilled over her shoulders and contrasted with the dark-colored saddle pad. If nothing else, at least he'd got her to stop wearing that damn ponytail every minute of her life. He touched the heavy, silky stuff.

  "Aah! Don't touch me!" she shrieked.

  Henry pulled his hand back as if she'd touched a match to it, guilty as a little boy with his hand caught in the cookie jar. It made him furious. He hadn't even kissed her last night! So, he'd made a suggestion. She was a grown woman; he was allowed! She didn't want him touching her? Fine with him!

  "Fine with me!" he shouted at her prone form, and left the tent.

  Calla shook her head against the saddle pad, mashing her nose in the process. The minute her body stopped quaking, she'd go and apologize.

  * * *

  They loaded salt into the wood-framed packsaddles atop Lucky and Sonny, tied the two horses behind Toke and Buster, and started on the eight-hour round trip to Upper Pyramid Flats—with Henry still fuming and Calla still mortified. She did her best to make amends, without actually telling him it was his fault she was so flustered. Him and his … well, she shouldn't think about his … his … oh, it had been just magnificent in her dream!

  "Want to know why they call it Upper Pyramid Flats?"

  "To distinguish it from Lower Pyramid Flats?"

  "Very funny," she said. "There's a real pyramid there. Made from lava rock."

  "Hmm."

  "You're pouting."

  He shot her a nasty look. "Yeah, right."

  "You are. Pouter."

  He kept silent. She guessed she couldn't josh him out of his sulk. She'd just have to apologize, darn it.

  "I'm sorry about this morning."

  "Look, if you're mad about last night…"

  "No. No. I was just as involved in that as you were."

  "I doubt it," he mumbled crossly.

  "I had … a bad dream." No, a very, very good dream. A really excellent dream. One in a million. "It made me wake up grumpy. I'm sorry."

  "You wake up like that every morning. You must have a lot of bad dreams."

  "Not like this one," she said under her breath.

  They rode in silence for a long while, each lost in their own thoughts. They'd have been surprised to know how often those thoughts ran exactly parallel.

  "Benny told me the pyramid was there before Great-granddad started coming through these mountains with his sheep on the way to the shipping depot in Station City."

  "Your great-grandfather ran sheep?"

  "Four bands. Wool was high then, and he sold lambs in the spring."

  "Why don't you run sheep anymore?"

  "Doesn't make sense. Wool prices are too low and labor costs are too high, especially during lambing season. You need a man for every band during the summer, and ten men for every band during lambing season. And you can make the same amount on four hundred fall calves as you can on fifteen hundred spring lambs, plus you only have to pay one cowboy. I hate sheep, anyway. The lambs are cute, but fragile as hell. You end up slitting the throats of the sick ones and throwing 'em to the eagles and the coyotes all winter. I can't take the gore. Besides, as dumb as cows are, they're Einsteins next to sheep."

  She turned in her saddle to check the balance of the packsaddle on the horse behind her. Satisfied, she gave Henry a brilliant smile. "I'm impressed. The art of packsaddles is almost as archaic as ditch riding. Where did you learn to do all this stuff, Henry?"

  Henry shrugged. "My grandfather had a ranch in central California. It wasn't as big as this, but he had a few cows and one thousand acres in dairy hay. I used to spend my summers there."

  Calla was delighted. "Your grandfather? Who runs the farm now? Your parents?"

  "My father sold the farm when my grandparents died," he said flatly.

  "He sold it? How could he sell it? Was it in financial trouble?"

  "No. It was clear."

  "Well—" Calla struggled to understand "—did he need the money?"

  Henry snorted. "My father? No. My father has plenty of money."

  "Oh. What does he do for a living?"

  "He's a doctor. An M.D. He's chief of staff at a hospital in the San Fernando Valley."

  "Wow. That's a great job."

  Henry looked quizzically at her for a second, then chuckled. "I guess so. I've never heard it put quite that way, but yes, I suppose it's a great job."

  "I didn't mean that to be funny. It's just that no one in my family ever even graduated from college."

  "They got to stay on the ranch."

  Calla gave him a winning flash of white teeth. "I've never heard it put that way before, but yes, I suppos
e that's true. They got to stay on the ranch. No one has ever really wanted to leave."

  "Lester told me you wanted to leave."

  "Lester's mouth is as big as a moon on an outhouse."

  "Why did you want to leave?"

  Calla thought about that for a minute. "It's not that I wanted to leave, exactly," she answered slowly. "I wanted to go to college. Ben and I used to talk about it all the time. He should have gone. He was brilliant, wanted to be an engineer. But we never had the money, and he just sort of forgot about it after a while. After Benny died I forgot about it, too, for a couple years, anyway. Then, about six years ago, without telling my dad or me, my mom took out a loan, using the ranch as collateral, so I could go away to college."

  "Where were you going?"

  "Dartmouth."

  Henry hooted. "Give me a break."

  Calla gave him a sharp look. "Dartmouth is an excellent school. I was lucky to get in, especially considering my background."

  "Yes, well, one can hardly fathom why a revered institution like Dartmouth would take a grizzled Idaho farm woman. So, why didn't you go?"

  "I did. I'd been there almost three years when my mom died. I stayed in a dorm my first year, but then I got a job cleaning for a sorority house. I never pledged, of course; it all seemed kind of silly, but they made me a sort of house mother," she said. "I hadn't even noticed how she had wasted away until I came back to Idaho for the funeral. She looked like a little doll in her big casket. Dad told me she'd been sick with cancer for over a year, but she didn't want treatments. Said they made her too sick to enjoy her last months with him."

  "She didn't tell you she was dying?"

  Calla shook her head. "You know, I wonder if she even believed it herself," she said thoughtfully. "She was a strong woman. Incredibly strong. She did the work of a rancher every day of her life until the last few months. She and Benny and I used to feed before school every morning and you never saw anybody pitch a bale like my mother. I don't think she really thought the cancer could kill her. But even if she did, she didn't want me to know it. Especially when I went away. She didn't think I'd have left the ranch if I'd known."

  "And you wouldn't have."

  "No."

  "You didn't go back to school after she died?"

  "No. My dad left his job in town. He was the librarian for thirty-four years, but he just couldn't handle the ranch and the death of my mom at the same time. Besides, we couldn't afford to hire anyone to help with the farm."

  "So, you were the knight in shining armor."

  "Hardly. It was my fault we were in trouble in the first place. My college loan was the first debt the ranch had since my mother paid off a cattle note twenty-six years ago."

  "And you feel guilty about that."

  "Shouldn't I?"

  Henry shook his head. Between this and the death of her brother, no wonder the girl carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. No wonder she was going to marry that putz. "How much debt?"

  Calla stared at him in disbelief. "I'm not telling you that!"

  "Why not?"

  "It's private!"

  "Maybe I could help."

  "Not on $850 a month. Besides, Clark has promised to look into it after we're married."

  "Calla…"

  "Don't, Henry," she said. "I'm telling you. Don't even go there."

  * * *

  They reached Upper Pyramid at midday. After they unloaded half the salt into a lick box and readjusted the packsaddles, Henry spent twenty minutes examining the Pyramid while Calla unpacked their lunch.

  "It's very intricate." He'd come back to sit next to her, unwrapping his sandwich thoughtfully.

  "The sandwich? Thank you."

  "Not the sandwich, dufus. The pyramid."

  "I know. Yes. The weather doesn't seem to touch it. We even had an earthquake here in 1985. I don't think a single stone moved. That's why no one has ever dismantled it, I guess. It's almost mystical in design."

  "Basque?"

  She nodded. "A marker. The sheepherders leave them everywhere they go."

  "Are there Native American writings around here?"

  "The next butte over. I'll show them to you sometime." Her insides flipped. No, she wouldn't show them to him sometime.

  "Are they defaced?" He had finished his sandwich and had tucked an arm beneath his shoulder and leaned back into the dirt. His hat tipped over his eyes. Calla smiled down at him. She had become accustomed to his postlunch position. On impulse, she scooched onto her back and rested her head in the crook of his outstretched arm. They were friends now; this was perfectly acceptable, between friends. She could hear his heart thudding solidly against his chest.

  "No. Hardly anyone knows where they are, and you can't get to them unless you're on foot or horseback. We haven't yet managed to blacktop everything in like you Californians." She closed her eyes. The sun beat pleasantly down on her eyelids. Not too hot today, she mused. Wonder what August will be like? Hope that spring on Milner Meadow stays open.

  "How's your—"

  "Fine. Stop mothering me."

  "Fine. We'll talk about something else. When did you meet Dartmouth?"

  Calla stiffened. "I told you I don't want to talk about him with you."

  "When you went back East?"

  "Henry, look…"

  "I'm just curious. Humor me."

  Calla gave an exaggerated sigh. "Yes, my last year at school. Does he seem like the type to come to Idaho to meet a girl?"

  "No." Henry waited for her to go on. Calla couldn't tell if he waited because he was naturally patient, or because he assumed she'd spill her guts at will. "I met Clark when he came by the sorority house with his fraternity brothers to welcome the new pledges in the house where I was working."

  "Come on." He tipped his hat back and dipped his chin, staring at the top her head. "You're kidding me. He graduated, what, ten years ago? What was he doing welcoming pledges?"

  "I take it that's odd?"

  "It's odd for seniors. It's absolutely sick for someone who left the university years earlier. He was trolling for freshmen, for crying out loud. Eighteen-year-old girls!"

  Calla was indignant. Sort of.

  Because, in truth, she'd felt the same thing when she'd seen the smooth, worldly group of men, some already in their late twenties, hit the sorority house late that September evening. They'd been dressed in suits and ties, and most of them drove the expensive sports cars that were their New England-middle-management stock-in-trade. Those young girls never knew what hit them.

  Calla had been a little overwhelmed herself. Clark's clean-cut good looks and old-money charm had swept her off her feet. She waited until their third date to tell him she was already twenty years old.

  "That's not true! They were a welcoming committee. His fraternity has been doing it every year for, I don't know, years."

  "Since about 1989, I imagine," Henry grumbled from under his hat. "Why did you pick Clark?"

  "Clark?"

  "I have to distinguish him from the other Dartmouth pedophiles."

  "Hey!"

  "Sorry, sorry. Go on. So, why did you choose him out of all those slathering ex-fraternity studs?"

  "You act like I had a wide range of choices. Clark was the only one who took the slightest notice of me. And that's only because I asked him out. I was the poor Western washerwoman in a room full of Eastern, finishing-school flowers, remember."

  There was a tense response from under the hat.

  "Anyway, we only went out a couple times. Then I came back for my mother's funeral. I gave Clark my number in Idaho, but I never expected to hear from him."

  "Because you were an old washerwoman, right?"

  "Right. But one day, about a year ago, out of the blue, he called me from Boise. He was in town on a real-estate deal for a hotel site in Eagle his father wanted to develop. I was calving out heifers at the time, and I couldn't leave the ranch, so I invited him out."

  "Was he impressed with t
he ranch?"

  It had never crossed her mind to ask. "I don't know," she said simply. "I think that's enough chitchat about my fiancé. We'd better get going."

  Calla reluctantly left the shelter of Henry's warm, strong arm and got to her feet. They still had an hour's ride to the next saltbox, and she wanted to be back in Two Creek Camp before dark.

  Henry leaned on an elbow and watched her stretch lazily in the afternoon sunshine.

  "Did you tell him about the ranch when you met him?"

  She shrugged in midstretch. "I guess so. It's a pretty difficult subject to avoid considering it's the only place I've ever lived or worked, and my entire family has been here for 114 years."

  Henry got to his feet and walked toward the horses. He took another cursory glance at the pyramid. It occurred to Calla, not for the first time, that she would have loved to watch him at his work. His real work, not this game at which he was currently playing. He had such a natural curiosity for everything around him.

  "When did he ask you to marry him?"

  "He didn't. I asked him. Last Thursday." Henry stopped and stared at her.

  "I can't think of a single thing to say about that."

  "Thank God." She gave him another smile, hoping it was brilliant and amused and detached. She didn't feel brilliant or amused or detached. She felt embarrassed, as if asking Clark to marry her had been a terribly unfeminine thing to do. She supposed it was. "You usually have far too much to say, anyway."

  * * *

  "He's caught. He's caught!" Henry came awake instantly.

  "Calla, wake up." He went to her on his knees, placed a hand on her shoulder. She jerked under his touch, deep in a nightmare.

  "Don't. Don't. Let me go. He's caught."

  "Calla!" He shook her roughly. Her eyes snapped open. The panic of her nightmare shone brightly in their hazel depths. Henry felt a sick chill. "Calla, wake up. Come on, sweetheart. Wake up."

  She stared, wild-eyed, at him for a moment, clearly unsure who he was. Then she sank back into her cot and closed her eyes. She was peacefully asleep again in seconds, but Henry watched her for a long time. He reached out to brush a loose strand of her thick hair from where it tangled across her forehead, and found his hand was trembling slightly.