“I…”

She made a little moan deep in her throat, but she didn’t pull away. Her lashes shivered; the color swept over her breasts, a dawning of desire.

He fingered one swelling rosebud—leaned to adore it with tongue and mouth, felt her heart thundering against his cradling palm. Ah, marry me, Risa, and we’ll do this every night of our lives! He raised his head to replace his lips with his coaxing fingers. Perhaps it was male instinct that would brook no denial. He would have her surrender. “Say yes!” he demanded, his voice husky with emotion. “Only leap, Risa-Sonrisa, and I will catch you!”

“Truly?” She flattened a hand against his heart. “¿De veras? You really want me?”

More than all the oil in the world. He caught her slender waist and lifted her to kneel astride his lap. “You’re all that I want!”

But that…that was a lie he’d pay for.

Dear Reader,

I still remember the first oil well my geologist father took me out on. It was some place in the Big Thicket country of East Texas.

What a circus of sights and sounds for a six-year-old! The towering rig, the massive machines bellowing and roaring—spinning and rising and falling. The muddy, greasy men performing their dangerous balletic feats up on the drilling platform. The rig lit up at night like a Christmas tree.

The trailer where my dad and others studied the wavering, intricate lines on long scrolls of paper as the drill bit gnawed its way down to black gold—or a dry hole that cost a fortune.

Big, drawling male voices, lots of laughter, the underlying tension and excitement. Back then in my preprinting days I never dreamed that someday I’d want to write about these men. I just knew that, looking up from buckle level, they all seemed like heroes to me.

So here I give you my latest hero, Miguel Heydt, a seeker, a searcher, who comes to Trueheart, Colorado—to Suntop Ranch—looking for treasure.

Thanks for coming along for his ride!

Peggy Nicholson

The Wildcatter
Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

DEDICATION

This book is for the first and last wildcatter

in my life: Erwin Grimes, of Kerrville, Texas—

the man who taught me to dream big; to dare to back my

dreams with action; and to come back smiling…even when

a well comes up dry. Because there’s always the next time,

the next dream, isn’t there? And thanks so much,

Dad, for all your advice and background on this story—

couldn’t have done it without you!

And in memory of Yaffa.

She came; she saw; she conquered. We wept when she left.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

PROLOGUE

The Present

MIGUEL HEYDT TURNED the flattened wedding ring that rested on his palm. Not much thicker than a piece of tinfoil, the golden, metallic shape looked like a starburst. Or maybe a sunflower with the center shot out of it.

Shallow, crescent-shape gouges in the gold showed the imprint of whatever tool had been used to make this final statement. Flip it over, and the pebbled texture suggested that the object had rested on concrete at the time of its smashing.

Looking down at the ruined marriage band he’d carried in his wallet for eleven years, Miguel Heydt had to smile—even as all the other old emotions roiled within him.

Emotions like anger.

Disappointment.

Hot desire and biting humiliation.

Maybe even a touch of wistful sorrow?

But the first emotion this battered ring always evoked in him, on the rare occasions when he allowed himself a look, was reluctant admiration. Aren’t you something, though?

For Risa Tankersly Heydt, without wasting a single word, had sent him her message, loud and clear: “You can kiss my sweet ass goodbye!” Miguel murmured ruefully. That’s what Risa was telling him when she mailed him his ring back from Las Vegas.

At the time she’d dropped it into an envelope and passed it to a postal clerk to postmark, he and Risa had been married for roughly eighteen hours.

Had to be one of the shortest marriages on record.

A marriage eleven years in the past, yet still he could close his eyes and taste her—taste that kiss he’d claimed at the altar, with Risa’s father, her family and all her fine, fancy world to witness. She’d tasted like hot golden coins dipped in honey. Like a poor boy’s dream of triumph.

“Ah, Risa.” She’d annulled their marriage in Las Vegas—then married another man the day after. The happy couple lived far away from Trueheart, or so Miguel had been told.

Risa-Sonrisa. He didn’t think about her often. A man couldn’t look back and stay a man. A man walked forward into his life, with long strides in big boots.

But eleven years later he’d come full circle. His strides were taking him from Alaska back to where their story had begun. To Suntop Ranch, outside the small Colorado town of Trueheart.

Not that he was going back for Risa. Oh, no. That dream was over and done. Ashes. This time he’d keep his eye—and his heart—on the money, as he should have from the very start.

CHAPTER ONE

Eleven Years Earlier

IT WAS A RITUAL, some thirty summers old. Joe Wiggly would meet the boss up at the Big House half an hour past sunrise. He’d bring Tankersly his mount for the day—something half a hand too tall or a tad too rank for a man in his seventies, but then, that was the only sort of horse the boss would ride.

Seated astride his own sensible cow pony, the foreman of Suntop would smoke his first cigarette of the morning while he waited for the old man to walk out his front door.

When at last the door opened, always Ben Tankersly would stop short on his porch, as if stunned by first sight of this high-mountain valley. And to be sure, it was the finest view on Suntop Ranch—the biggest, richest cattle spread in all Southwest Colorado.

King of his own small kingdom, Tankersly would sweep his dark hooded eyes along the rolling meadows that sloped south, toward the distant main valley, invisible beyond the green flank of Suntop Mountain. Then he’d swing on his boot heel to inspect his eastern ramparts—a ten-mile-distant spur of the Trueheart Hills, which were low mountains, really, with big forested shoulders gashed by slabs of gray granite. The rising sun would be backlighting their craggy peaks with raw copper light.

From there Tankersly would draw a deep breath and swing north, toward the best view of all. The wild canyons and plateaus of the summer range, stair-stepping toward peaks high enough to scrape heaven—the San Juans, some fifty miles beyond. Already catching the sun, the lingering snow at their summits would be burning rose and gold in the clear mountain air.

On days when he had one of his pretty ladies in residence, Ben Tankersly would bounce out that front door to confront his view. As he stopped to survey his world, he’d be trying to rein in a dog-in-the-henhouse grin that kept breaking loose.

Days when there was no visitor to keep the family on its company manners, when one of Ben’s three hellion daughters had been kicking the slats out of her stall and busting through fences, Tankersly would bang out the door, to stand with his big chest heaving and his gnarled hands clenched, glaring at his kingdom—but not seeing it. Then he’d stomp down the wide fieldstone steps to Joe and the waiting horses, looking ready to chew barbed wire or curdle the milk.

Today was one of those days. Ben swung up on his too-big gelding, gave a grunt that meant “Let’s go” and shot away downhill toward the barns and pastures of the main valley.

Joe touched spurs to his mare and followed. Once they were loping along the dirt road, he stole a glance at his boss. After thirty years, neither of them would have presumed to call their relationship a friendship, but they understood each other.

“Risa,” growled Tankersly by way of explanation.

His eldest, the one with hair like a sunset aflame and eyes like a fawn tangled in a fence. Sweet as wildflower honey till you rubbed her wrong, which Ben often did, then it was hang on to your hat, cowboy. Joe had always been mighty fond of Risa. He’d missed her this past year, when she’d been away in the East at college.

She hadn’t hurried back home to them, either, come summer. Here it was mid-July and she’d arrived at Suntop only last evening. Joe had yet to see her himself, but word had got around. “I hear tell she has herself a beau,” he observed mildly.

“Huh—fiancé, she calls him. She’s wearing his ring. Diamond the size of a jackrabbit turd.”

Ben had never taken kindly to men courting his daughters. Which was pretty laughable, considering he’d have given his left nut for a grandson. At seventy-two, the old man seemed to have finally outgrown the notion of siring his own son, but he sure wanted himself a boy to raise. A boy to be the next heir to Suntop.

No suitors, no boy. But a wise man didn’t try to reason with Ben Tankersly. He might be as crafty as a lame coyote, but the owner of Suntop led with his heart, not his head. “Somebody she found back East?” Joe hazarded.

“Yep. A smooth-talking, limp-handed, self-satisfied snake of a Yalie lawyer.” Tankersly reined his big buckskin to a sliding halt. Nodding bleak approval at the cloud of dust thus raised, he patted the gelding’s glossy neck, then kneed him into a long walk. “Risa thinks the smilin’ scumsucker hung the moon.”

Joe fell in beside his boss again. “A lawyer.” Cattlemen liked lawyers about as much as rattlesnakes, jimson weed or big government.

“Denver stock, though why any man’d send his son east to college…” Tankersly’s growl died away to a mutter, probably as he remembered he’d sent Risa east.

Because she’d wanted to go west, Joe recalled. She’d wanted in the worst way to study film in Los Angeles, at the University of California. But Ben didn’t approve of actors or acting, and considering the way Risa’s mother had met her end, maybe he had a point. So he’d sent Risa against her will to Yale, and surprise, surprise, she’d paid him back with a Yalie lawyer.

“Well, if he’s a Denver boy, that’s not so bad,” Joe soothed. “Likely they’ll settle somewhere in state.” Denver was only an eight-hour drive to the northeast of Trueheart. Keeping Risa close to home would be good.

“Huh! You know what his old man does for a living? He’s a developer! Chops up useful ranchland into five-acre ranchettes. Has made himself two or three fortunes doin’ it.”

They’d rounded the base of Suntop, and now they paused on the crest of the ranch road to its south, overlooking the lower valley. Lush and green, the pastures spread out below them. The river rippled shallow and silver in the early light, then darkened where it deepened, plunging into a lacy line of cottonwoods that followed its meandering course down the valley. Beyond the foreman’s house, men and horses were stirring, moving between the corrals and the barns and the bunkhouse. A couple of dusty cars were climbing up from the distant county road—the hay crews assembling.

“Used to be a man measured himself by what he built,” Tankersly said softly, nodding at his world below. “Or if he didn’t build it himself—” Ben, after all, was the third of his line to hold Suntop; since the early 1880s this had been Tankersly land “—then he prided himself on holding something precious together. On expanding his holdings, improving his land, his stock. But nowadays seems a man measures himself by what he can tear down—a corporation…a ranch…a way of life.

“Ranchettes!” Tankersly spat into the long grass and rode on. “Risa’s brought us home a wrecker. A limp-wristed, stab-you-in-the-back-and-smile wrecker. I don’t call that breeding stock.”

Joe sighed to himself. Not a cloud in all the clear blue sky, but it was gonna be a stormy summer. Two mule-headed Tankerslys with opposing notions…

“You find a replacement for that boy?” Tankersly demanded, changing the subject abruptly. One of their haying crew had gashed his leg from knee to toe cutting hay yesterday. Joe had driven down into Trueheart last night, seeking a replacement.

“Nope.” Haying was sweat-soaked, backbreaking drudgery. And hardly the safest of jobs, with all that whirling machinery. He’d tried the bars in town, the general store, Mo’s Truckstop—and he’d come up dry. Only real prospect had been that young drifter in the Star, and he’d turned the job down flat. Which was probably just as well. A foreman got so he could smell trouble. Knew better than to invite it home.

“You tried the Lone Star?” growled Tankersly.

A roadhouse out on the highway to the south of Trueheart, the Lone Star was dear to the thirsty hearts of local cowboys, passing truckers and in-town rowdies. Surest place to find a cold brew, a hot woman or a knuckle-busting debate. Or a bum broke enough to consider haying till he’d made the price of his next bottle. “Did. There was one Tex-Mex kid…” Big enough to buck bales and old enough to hold his own with a rough haying crew.

Watching him from across the smoky room, Joe had figured the kid was trolling for a job, the way he struck up casual conversations with this group of cowboys or that. He handled himself well among strangers, casual but confident, neither cocky nor shy. He’d do, Joe had decided after sizing him up for a while. So he’d approached and asked the drifter if he was looking for work.

“Might be,” the kid had agreed pleasantly, with just the trace of a Texas drawl. “Where?”

Not doing what, but where. Now, that seemed sort of odd. “Ranch north of town,” Joe allowed, playing his cards close to his vest. “We’re one short on our haying crew. Just a summer job, but it pays pretty well. Plus bunk and board if you want it.”

“Haying.” The young man’s excellent teeth flashed for a second; he knew about haying. His chin jerked in the start of a “No,” then he paused. “On what ranch?”

“Suntop.” Really no reason not to tell him. Still, something wasn’t ringing true here.

“The biggest outfit in these parts.”

So the stranger had made it his business to learn that much. “And the best.”

“So I hear. But no, thank you.”

Something just a little too polite and formal for a Texan in his manner, and he cut his o’s short and soft. Mexican somewhere in his background? He was a big, rawboned, good-looking kid, maybe mid twenties, maybe older than Joe had first thought. But seen close up, this one had the eyes of a seasoned man and poise to match. He smiled now as Joe stood perplexed; tipping his head in the faintest of farewells, he swung away.

Joe covered his dismissal by ambling off to the men’s. When he came back to the room, the kid was standing a round of drinks for some of the Kristopherson crew. Trolling for a date instead of a job? Somehow Joe didn’t think so. The ledge of rock under the manners suggested far otherwise.

But then, what the Sam Hill’s he after? Whatever, Joe was still one down on the haying crew. Settling his hat to a determined angle, he’d walked out the door, bound for Mo’s.

“Didn’t find a soul,” the foreman repeated now glumly as they rode into the ranch yard and reined in to sit watching. Eyes shifted their way, then skated on by. A few hat brims dipped half an inch in laconic salute, but everyone went on about his business, as good hands should. Down at the horse barn a brawny young cowboy strode out of the tack room, toting a saddle toward a hipshot gray tied to the hitching rack. “So I reckon I’ll tap Jake there for the hay fields ’fore he rides out.” Joe shot a sly sideways glance at Tankersly. “’Less you want to loan me Risa’s new sweetheart? Maybe he’d like to try his hand bucking bales.”

Tankersly snorted. “The way a pig loves to tap-dance, he would!” He looked automatically back toward the Big House, then stiffened. “And speak of the devil, here he—they come. Didn’t figure that one would roll out of bed before noon.”

But Tankersly’s eldest daughter would not have graced the lawyer’s bed, Joe figured privately. Not by chance was Ben’s master bedroom situated between the wing of the Big House that housed his family and the wing that held guests—welcome or otherwise. To tiptoe past the boss’s door on the way to one of his cherished daughters would take balls of clanging brass. So, likely Risa and her man were up early, seeking a safer place for canoodling.

The little red sports convertible—Joe didn’t bother with the names of cars—stopped as it reached the yard. Its top was down, but the foreman didn’t waste a glance on the driver. With a wide grin, he sidestepped his mare over to the passenger side.

Risa threw off her seat belt and stood, hanging on to the top of the windshield. “Joe! Oh, Joe, you look wonderful!” She laid a smacking kiss on his leathery cheek as he swept off his straw hat and leaned in close to collect it. “Lord, I missed you!” Her big golden eyes were starry with tears, though she was smiling to beat the band.

Joe blinked frantically and jammed his hat down over his nose to hide his own swimming eyes. “It’s you that was missed,” he said gruffly. And she’d come back prettier than ever, it seemed, though thinner than he cared to see. “Didn’t even visit us for Christmas!”

“By December I was just getting over being homesick,” she protested, laughing as she patted his wiry forearm. “I didn’t dare risk stirring it up again. Another round would have killed me. That was before I met— Oh!”

She glanced around at her driver, then knelt on the edge of her seat so he could see past her. “Joe, this is Eric Foster, my…” The color rose in her heart-shaped face and she tipped up her chin as if she expected resistance—and likely she’d had a wagonload of that already. “My fiancé. We’re engaged.” She presented her left hand for Joe’s inspection, slender fingers arching in one of those graceful girly gestures that a man couldn’t have made in a thousand years.

The stone was not quite as big as Ben had described, but twice as gaudy. Still, Joe would leave disapproval to her daddy. “Very nice. And pleased t’meet you.” He nodded graciously to Risa’s young man.

“And you,” agreed the blond, movie-star-handsome youngster—without a trace of real warmth. His hands were fixed firmly to the steering wheel; though with a bit of a reach, he could have shaken Joe’s hand. “Risa, could you please sit down,” he added coolly. “Unless you want everyone staring at you.”

“I…” She slid abruptly into her seat, her smile fading for a moment before it rallied. “Sorry.”

She was taking that from this puffed-up young rooster? Their Risa of a year ago would have tweaked his long, haughty nose and bounded out of that fancy car without bothering to open the door. So this was what they taught a girl back East? Polished the grit right out of her? Joe’s gaze met Ben’s over the width of the convertible.

The boss man had ridden up close on the lawyer’s side. “You’ve just arrived and you’re off again already?” he demanded of Risa.

She had spunk enough to spare for her daddy, if not the fiancé. “We’re driving down to Mesaverde. Just for the day.”

“I’m fascinated by Anasazi ruins,” added the boyfriend, putting the shine on for Ben that he hadn’t for the hired man. “And with Risa to give me the tour, how could I resist?”

“I was thinking you might like to help us out ’round Suntop, today,” Ben said, poker-faced, though his eyes were as intent as a coyote’s at a gopher hole. “Seems we’ve lost one of our haying crew. Could sure use a hand. And it’d give you a taste of real ranch work.” That is, if you plan to be part of the family, was the unspoken challenge.

The lawyer’s wide, slick smile didn’t waver. “Gee, I’d really enjoy that, Ben!” He shook his head regretfully. “But I’m a martyr to hay fever. Once I start sneezing… That’s one of the reasons I thought it might be wise to spend the day off-ranch. Give my nose a break.”

“Huh.” Ben straightened in his saddle and fixed his shrewd eyes on his daughter. “Then you two be back by suppertime, princess, you hear me?”

Foster laid a hand on her knee as he cut in smoothly, “We’ll certainly try.”

Speaking for her, as if she had no mind of her own. Joe didn’t like it a bit, as he tipped his brim to Risa and smiled her on her way. She brushed her blowing, sunset hair from her cheeks and waved back at him, then to her father. Then she turned forward to call a greeting to this hand or that as the convertible threaded through the bustling yard.

“Hay fever,” Joe said quietly, looking after them.

“See what I mean?” Ben spat in the dirt again. “Can the girl pick ’em or what? You know what he asked me at dinner last night? How much land I have here!”

“He did?” That was the worst kind of manners. You knew how much land a man owned you knew his worth close to the penny. Might as well ask to see his bank book.

“Let a bad ’un like that into your breeding stock,” Tankersly fumed, “and you’ll be culling out his knock-kneed, greedy get for the next four generations!”

But try to tell a woman what to do. Joe had never had any luck at that, and neither, for all his land and wealth and sheer cussedness, had Ben Tankersly. Risa would follow her wistful heart, even if it led her straight on to heartbreak.

And ain’t it a cryin’ shame? Joe jammed his old straw down over his nose and rode off to spoil somebody else’s day—Jake’s, he decided. And if he heard one peep about hay fever…

CHAPTER TWO

HE’D HAVE TO EAT some crow, Miguel Heydt reflected as he turned his dusty old pickup off the county road. Serious crow. Driving under the arching name board, he glanced up. Suntop Ranch was emblazoned between two rising suns, both the letters and suns shining gold in the morning light—gilded to perfection. It was that kind of outfit.

With pride to match, he didn’t doubt. The biggest, richest spreads always had the best jobs—and didn’t they know it. He’d made a bad mistake rejecting that old man’s offer last night.

Then to show up today, hat in hand and crow feathers all over his mouth? He’d be lucky if they didn’t run him off the place.

But how was I to know? The one map he had, marking the Badwater Flats, was eighty years old. It located the plateau on Kristopherson land.

Last night at the Lone Star he’d learned that the Kristopherson Ranch was still in existence, still lying east-northeast of Trueheart. So he’d been looking for Kristopherson cowboys, not Suntop men. Buying them drinks when he found them, pumping them casually, discreetly. Making up stories, then seeing what stories he got in return.

He’d told his tale about a water hole that poisoned cattle back on a ranch in Texas where he used to work—and heard tales about locoweed poisoning in return.

He’d tried again, spinning that yarn about an old mud pit on the home ranch—greasy thick mud, black as tar, that would suck down deer, stock ay, Dios!, even unwary children.

His listeners came back with stories of quicksand, of bad river crossings on trail drives. He laughed softly. That hilarious story the old-timer had spun about a pig wallow and helping the boss’s pretty daughter feed the sows, and his punch line that even after that fiasco she’d forgiven him, married him—and forty years later they were still happily married…

Miguel rubbed the smile off his face. Wonderful stories, but not the story he wanted to hear. Not one of those cow-hands would admit to bad water on Kristopherson land.

By midnight he’d been ready to give up in frustration. Badwater. The name could have come from most anything—a dog fell down somebody’s well. Or some early traveler had tapped a new keg on his wagon while passing through here and found his drinking water had gone scummy, so he named the flats to mark the occasion. Maybe it was a corruption of an Indian word and had nothing to do with water at all.

Then another geezer had wandered over to the table where Miguel had sat drinking and swapping yarns. Willy, a Suntop man. Smiling insults had been traded—the Kristopherson crew had apparently bested the Suntop cowboys in a local rodeo a few weeks back.

Fighting hard for his outfit’s honor, Willy had dredged up an ancient triumph. Let the Kristophersons sneer, but Ben Tankersly’s father had beaten old Will Kristopherson decisively in the thirties, and they were still laughing about it. Sam Tankersly had won the Badwater Flats in a game of stud poker. He’d bluffed Kristopherson out of ten square miles with a pair of threes and a pair of jacks, and what do you think of that?

Miguel thought he’d better not kiss the old man, but he was tempted. Instead he’d bought him a round, then teased him, apparently defending his Kristopherson pals. Yes, Sam Tankersly had won the Badwater Flats, old man, but so what? Of what earthly use was a patch of range with bad water?

It was worth plenty, Willy had insisted. Since the creek made the cattle sick, Suntop had drilled wells. Put in windmills to pump up tanks of good, clear water. Nowadays that section was a treasure, with some of the best graze anywhere around Trueheart. It had been rechristened Sweetwater Flats, as the Kristopherson hands well knew. And weren’t they sorry their boss’s granddaddy had been such a blind fool at the card table back in ’34?

Miguel was a lot sorrier than any of the Kristopherson crew, who shrugged amiably and ambled off into the star-filled night shortly thereafter. A bunch of hired hands, what did they care? It was Miguel who’d played his cards wrong, turning down the job at Suntop.

Because one look at the map told him the flats—Badwater, Sweetwater, by whatever name—were remote. Not to be inspected on foot from any public road. He’d need to ride in five miles through Suntop land to reach them. And from what he’d heard around the Lone Star, Suntop’s owner didn’t take kindly to trespassers.

He needed a job on the ranch as his cover.

But haying?

Only as a last—his very last—resort.

HE’D BEEN DRIVING as he replayed last night’s happenings. Following what seemed to be the main private road, though smaller dirt roads branched off to left and right. He’d come more than three miles west across the wide, rolling valley. There was no sign of a house or barn yet; only the neat barbed-wire fences marching along either side of the road. A herd of twenty or so horses grazing on a distant hilltop, miles north. Two tiny cowboys riding a fence line, as far south. Hard to get a grasp on a place this big, and the mountains threw everything out of perspective. That big humped one up ahead might have been two miles distant—or twenty. The jagged peaks to the north, maybe fifty?

It wasn’t just the scale of the place that was making him edgy. This land was too rich, too lush. Green as money. He was used to the red dusty plains of West Texas. Hardscrabble land, where a man had to scratch for his luck—scratch hard and deep. Here luck seemed to be served up on a wide, green plate with a golden rim.

A plate set on some other man’s table, not one where a poor boy from Dos Duraznos, Mexico, would be welcome.

But then, Miguel needed no invitation. No scraps from another’s table. He’d been making his own luck for years.

Still, when he reached the river at last, it was a welcome change. The trees along it rose like a shaggy wall, cutting off the eastern valley from what lay beyond. His truck rumbled out onto a low concrete bridge that spanned dark pools, a yellow leaf drifting fast. With no car in sight, Miguel braked in the middle, to sit staring at the steep bank ahead.

He swung to study the one behind him. As he’d hoped, the valley floor was limestone and shale, not granite. Sedimentary rock. The blood tingled in his fingertips, his palms…the same way all his hunches started—as if he’d scooped up a double handful of luck. He nodded to himself and drove on.

On the west side of the river, the land rose abruptly in a series of wide benches, with the road winding to find the shallowest grade between them. His truck heaved over a rise and Miguel saw the ranch house on a hill ahead, with a clutter of barns and corrals intervening. Nearly there.

But again the road switched back on itself, entering a narrow pass cut in a ledge of rock. Miguel turned to glare at the cut as he drove by—granite, at this elevation—not so promising.

A horn blared out and he jumped violently. He whirled back toward his road, and stood on the brakes. Tires rumbled and skidded on the gravel. The pickup lurched to a halt. Its massive front bumper, with its greasy hydraulic winch, loomed only inches above the hood of the low, sleek convertible that faced it. A red Mercedes-Benz two-seater, top down. The dust his wheels had raised drifted over its glossy wax job, over its windshield, obscuring Miguel’s view of the person or persons within. He blew out a soundless whistle. Now, that would have made a fine first impression—squashing this pretty toy.

His shoulders twitched as the Mercedes’ horn blared again—too soon, too long, much too loud. On a particularly insolent note. Out of my way, peón! it yelled.

Miguel’s back teeth came together with a click. Yes, he should have had his eyes on the road, but then the rich boy that he could now make out behind the Mercedes’ wheel had been coming too fast. They both shared in the blame, but so what? No harm had been done.

Yet, he told himself as the horn blared for the third time. He drummed his fingertips on the wheel and schooled his frown to an expressionless mask. This cut was too narrow for the vehicles to pass each other. Somebody would have to back down.

Since Miguel was the one who needed a job—this scowling princeling with the golden hair clearly needed no job; that car had cost fifty thousand easily—it made sense that Miguel should humble himself and give way. This was somebody of importance. Possibly the ranch owner himself, or the rancher’s son. To offend him…

The horn blared yet again. The driver leaned out his window. “Hey! Get that heap out of my way!” His voice matched his horn—an arrogant tenor, bursting with pride.

Una lástima—a pity—to start out like this. But some things a man could not do. Miguel sighed and reached for the pack that sat on the seat beside him. After unzipping the top compartment, he pulled out an apple. He fished his knife from his jeans pocket, unclasped it and commenced to leisurely peel the fragrant red globe. Turning to prop his back against his door, he focused on his task. With care, it could be done in one continuous spiral—much more satisfying that way.

The horn blared again—a series of impotent, outraged squawks. Miguel pursed his lips and whistled “The Wichita Lineman.” Something his old friend Harry used to sing when he was feeling soulful.

He caught a movement in the corner of his eye and turned to look. The convertible’s passenger door was opening. Someone—a girl—with windblown hair the color of raw copper, of forest fires and wild honey, was getting out. She touched one foot to the ground—but the driver lunged her way, gesturing. He caught her arm, shook his head emphatically.

She hesitated, shrugged…closed her door again.

Her companion put his hand down on the horn and held it there in an ear-splitting, nerve-grating protest. Miguel sighed and cut a wedge of apple, ate it thoughtfully. Looked as if he’d have to go over there and offer to flatten Mr. Mercedes’ nose for him. Not something he wanted to do with a lady present.

On the other hand, maybe it was time she learned her man was not only rude but gutless.

None of your business to teach her, he reminded himself. A rich gringa like that could buy all the lessons in life she needed—or buy her way out of them.

He was saved from choosing. The Mercedes jerked into reverse and roared backward at a reckless speed, its driver taking out his temper on his machine—and his startled passenger, who’d braced herself against the dashboard. What some women put up with. Smiling wryly to himself, Miguel put his truck in gear and followed.

After mounting a final rise, he turned into a wide, dusty barnyard. Several men on horse and afoot gazed off to where the red convertible had reversed all the way to a lone horseman, sitting a big buckskin horse at the far side of the yard. The rider leaned down from his saddle, listened as the driver of the Mercedes gestured wildly—then jabbed his finger at Miguel’s truck.

So that was the man in charge. Not a good beginning, Miguel told himself as he parked alongside a corral and stepped out. But play it as it lays.

“NOPE,” Ben Tankersly drawled, gazing across at the man who’d climbed out of the dusty old pickup. “He’s not one of mine. ’Fraid I can’t fire him for you.” He swallowed his smile and glanced at his daughter. You see what you’ve got here, princess? You want a man who can’t settle his own fights?

Risa’s eyes touched his, then skated away. She stared off into the distance, arms tightly crossed, teeth buried in her lower lip, her cheeks the color of roses. Embarrassed, Tankersly hoped. She damn sure ought to be.

“Fine! Okay! Forget it, then!” Foster stomped on the gas and roared off the way he’d come, raising a cloud of dust.

Moving much too fast for the crowded yard. Ben’s eyes narrowed—the damn fool—then widened as he realized. The car was aimed straight for the stranger, who’d paused halfway across the open space. “You idiot!”

No doubt Foster meant to shame his target, forcing him to scramble for cover. Instead the young man stood, apparently paralyzed. Tankersly sucked in a harsh breath, bracing himself for the impact.

But the stranger took one long graceful stride to the side, whirled—and landed a thumping mule-kick on the driver’s door as the Mercedes shot past.

One of the hands let out a blissful whoop. Tankersly’s pent breath burst out in a guffaw. Stove in his slats for him! Dented his door a good one! The vanquished Mercedes roared out of the yard and off down the hill.

Tankersly’s grin faded. That cowardly fool had his daughter aboard and there he was, trying to sprout wings, running away from his own humiliation. The rancher put the heel of his hand to his heart, rubbed it, then shrugged. Not a thing in the world he could do about it. If Foster didn’t kill her in the next mile or so, maybe Risa would finally see. “That’s not breeding stock,” he muttered, then switched his attention to the oncoming stranger.

He blinked—and felt the dice teeter, then tip over, the way they sometimes did. One final roll and your life turned from empty pockets to can’t lose. Foster was not breeding stock, but this one… Maybe…just maybe… Ben sat and let him come on, sizing him up as he would have any yearling colt, deciding whether to keep or sell him.

And this one looked like a keeper. On his mettle after he’d faced down that attack, his color was high, his eyes direct, fastened on Tankersly. He had that top-stallion strut—good spirits, good body and well-proven pride, combining to give a soft bounce to each stride, though you couldn’t hear his feet hit the ground. With guts, good bone and reflexes. The young man halted beside Ben’s stirrup. “They call me Heydt,” he said, holding out a big brown hand. “Miguel Heydt.”

Something south of the border in his deep voice—just a hint. And in his black Spanish eyes, though his hair was the same bronzy shade as the dark buckskin Ben rode. “Tankersly,” Ben declared himself, squinting down as they shook. Maybe five years older than Risa’s nineteen, he estimated, though Heydt’s eyes made him seem twice her age. Eyes that had seen trouble and sorrow and come through it with just a trace of cool amusement at their corners. Eyes that said, Come what may, I can handle it.

Not like Risa’s pretty boy, whose eyes said, Come what may, I can buy my way free—or talk my way out of it.

Heydt endured another minute of Ben’s appraisal, then he spoke again. “I told him—” he tipped his head toward Joe Wiggly, who was riding up on them “—that I wasn’t interested in haying. I’m looking to cowboy.”

Standing there in a pair of old engineer’s lace-up leather boots! Tankersly snorted. “Not what I need.” If this one didn’t answer to the rein, he wouldn’t do in spite of his looks. Ben had enough trouble this summer without signing on an outlaw. “You’ll buck bales or you can be on your way.”

Heydt nodded impassively, but something was moving at the back of his dark eyes. “When I’m not haying, on my own time can I ride?”

To Ben’s mind, any minute of life not spent in the saddle or in bed with a laughing woman was wasted. Still, his gaze sharpened. With those shoes, Heydt was no cowboy. But neither was he one of those wet-behind-the-ears dreamers who’d yet to find himself—though what kind of fool ever lost himself? Heydt was too old, too toughened, too savvy to be seeking a romantic new career the way some city slickers did every summer, to the locals’ amusement.

So what’s he want? Looking down at those steady eyes in the too-controlled face, Ben knew that asking would get him nowhere. He’d have to wait and see. “Why not,” he agreed with a shrug, though he knew one good reason why not. After a day of haying, even the strongest man nodded asleep at the supper table.

He touched spurs to the buckskin and headed off toward the lower pastures. “Reckon he’ll do,” he told his foreman as he passed him. “Sign him up. And Joe,” he called back over his shoulder, “come evening, if he still wants it, Heydt gets a horse.”

CHAPTER THREE

WHENEVER FEAR or sorrow or confusion nibbled at her courage, Risa Tankersly reached for her camera. Through the lens of her ancient Nikon, somehow the harshness of the world was softened, or at least pushed back to a manageable distance. Framed in the viewfinder, half-perceived patterns became clear. Pain or chaos or uncontrollable events could be frozen into a sixteenth-second snapshot—frozen, reduced to a palm-size glossy rectangle, then tucked away out of sight and mind in one of the manila envelopes where she stored her photos until she felt strong enough to deal with them.

The Nikon had been Risa’s escape hatch from the world since the summer she’d turned thirteen. One of her mother’s last boyfriends, a cameraman with a minor studio, had left it behind when he stormed drunkenly out of their lives one night after a raging exchange with Eva about who should pay the pizza deliveryman. The next morning Risa’s red-eyed and stumbling mother had dumped his camera bag in the trash can along with the rest of his possessions.

When her mother wandered back to bed, Risa had stealthily retrieved it, then hidden it under the T-shirts in her bureau drawer for a month—until Eva’s next lover had come along to erase the last one from mind. Only then had Risa dared to bring out the camera and start—at first timidly, then with growing fascination—to explore the Nikon’s possibilities.

The lovely old Japanese camera, with its scratched case, silken action and merciless, all-seeing lens, had been her best friend and confidant ever since. Had served her faithfully in the wrenching year that followed its coming, when her mother died and a tall, acid-tongued cowboy old enough to be her grandfather stalked into her life, claiming to be her daddy. Whisking her out of the helter-skelter gay and sorrowful world she’d always known, back to his enchanted kingdom called Suntop.

A world where fourteen-year-old Risa didn’t know the players, the rules or even how to mount the standard means of transportation. A world where she’d come too late to ever quite belong.

Five years later, the Nikon was still a comfort and a consolation.

An hour before dawn Risa finally gave up the struggle for sleep. She slipped into her jeans and a green, pearl-snap western shirt, brushed her tousled, flyaway hair, grabbed her camera bag and set out to greet the first rays of the new day on Suntop Mountain.

Better, she told herself, pausing on the terrace to breathe deep the chill pine-scented air. Out from under her father’s roof, she felt better already.

She took the stone steps in two long-legged bounds and strode off down the track. She’d have to hurry to make it to the summit by sunrise.

Passing close under the windows of the guest wing, she glanced upward, half fearfully, half wistfully. If Eric had spent as restless a night as she had… If he now happened to be leaning out his window, contemplating the east, where the sky was already fading from Prussian blue toward a heart-catching turquoise…

But his window was closed against the dawn. Eric wasn’t a lark as she was. Likely he’d sleep till she knocked on his door and coaxed him down to breakfast.

A faint frown drew her dark eyebrows together. He hadn’t been very happy with her when he’d rejoined her on the landing last night. Whatever Ben had said to him after he’d summoned Eric into the library must have stung. Ben had a tongue like a rawhide lash and he didn’t hesitate to use it.

But what was I to do? Ben was a tyrant, used to having his way around Suntop. Certain the rest of the world beyond the ranch’s boundaries would also bend to his rock-bound will. No wonder Eric and her father were clashing–two strong men, from such different worlds…

And Risa caught in the middle, loving them both. She’d spent the night worrying how to do this. How to smooth the way between them. How to make Ben see how wonderful her man really was. Yesterday had been quite a setback.

She blinked, surprised to find that her brooding had carried her as far as the west shoulder of Suntop. And now for the hard part. She gulped in a breath and started up the horse trail that climbed the slope in switchbacks. Hurry! It could only be minutes before sunrise. No point to this exercise if she wasn’t there to greet it.

Robbed of her mountain endurance by nine months at sea level, Risa arrived panting and light-headed on the grassy, rounded summit of Suntop.

Slowly she rotated, glorying in the three-hundred-sixty-degree view, greeting each landmark below in turn, saving the east as she always did for last. Oh, she did love Suntop, and she’d missed it terribly, for all the eagerness with which she’d fled the ranch last September. Someday soon she’d have to bring Eric up here to show him all this.

With that thought she swung east, and she’d timed it perfectly. The first rays of the rising sun swept through the notch in the far-off Trueheart Hills, to strike this enchanted summit, this spot and this alone, with the first light of day—a stroke of gold like a private benediction, a sizzling splash of fairy dust, while all around it the world lay sleeping in purple shadows. Suntop.

“Yes!” Laughing delightedly, Risa spread her arms wide to welcome the sunshine and turned in the light. She should take a picture, but for once she needed no layer of glass between her and the world. it was simply enough to be and be here.

Dizzy with her twirling, laughing softly to herself, Risa stopped, opened her eyes—and found herself staring straight into the eyes of a stranger. The fine hairs shot up along her nape and her breath whooshed out in a startled gasp. She’d spent too many recent months in New Haven, where suddenly encountered strangers could be muggers or worse.

But this is Suntop, she reminded herself, where her father called her and her sisters “Princess.” Here of all places she was safe, if not always happy. She unfisted her hands.

“Cielo,” the man said quietly, and nodded—an oddly courtly gesture.

Spanish. “Yes, it is,” she agreed. “It’s heaven, or ’bout as close as you can get.”

In the light now sifting down the mountaintop, his smile was a slash of white against his tawny skin. Even as she watched, the sun touched his straight, shaggy hair to bronze, his face to ruddy gold.

There was enough light to see his dark eyes, and the amusement in their depths. “That is what it means, isn’t it?”

“Yes, heaven—that’s exactly what it means.” Big hands casually hooked in his back pockets of his jeans, he sauntered uphill to join her.

Risa had an impulse—born from who knows where—to turn and run…run bounding and panting down the far side of Suntop toward the safety of her father’s house.

She stood, eyes narrowed, blood thrumming through her veins, and leaned slightly back on her heels, but still held her ground. Pinned in place by her pride. Then it hit her. “You’re—!”

The cause of all her misery yesterday! The outing to Mesaverde had been utterly spoiled. “You’re the man in the truck!”

“Ah. I thought that might have been you. How many women around here could have hair like a tequila sunrise?” With one last stride he stood before her. “And how’s the car?”

That blasted car. It was Eric’s shiny new toy, a gift from his father on his graduation from Yale Law School last month. After he’d seen the damage, Eric had been in a black rage for most of the morning. “It has a dent in its door. Quite a large one.”

She’d tried at first to hint to Eric that it had been his own fault for driving so close to the man—this man. He’d been outraged that she’d think so, called her disloyal. Whose side was she on?

“But I don’t see it as sides,” she’d protested, retreating immediately from his anger. “I just didn’t think it was worth anyone’s being hurt.” She still didn’t. How silly to argue over right-of-way, like two Rocky Mountain bighorn rams butting heads on a one-goat trail.

“Good. Perhaps that will teach your friend to watch his temper.”

Hardly. After she’d realized how furious Eric was, she’d done her best to back away from their disagreement. In the six months they’d been courting, they’d never had a real lovers’ quarrel. This had seemed such a stupid subject for their first fight—a one-time event caused by a stranger who’d blundered into their charmed circle for a few unpleasant minutes, but now was gone for good.

Or so she’d thought.

“Well, Eric said the whole thing was your fault, actually. He says the uphill car always has right-of-way.” She’d never heard that rule before, but then, Eric knew so many things that she did not. It was one of the reasons he’d first attracted her. He seemed so assured, so at home in the wide, daunting world into which she’d been thrust when she’d gone East to college.

“Oh, well, if Errrric says so…” The corners of the stranger’s mouth curled wickedly as he rolled his r’s. He had a very…arresting mouth for a man, with a beautifully carved, full bottom lip and a certain mobility of expression that was unlike the typical cowboy’s poker face. Or an Ivy Leaguer’s stiff upper lip. And once noticed, that mouth could not be ignored. It drew her eyes like a magnet. She frowned to break its spell.

“And when he tried to run me down?” the stranger continued too politely. “I suppose there, also, it was my fault?”

“He didn’t try to run you down.” Eric had insisted on that, loudly and at length, till finally she gave in and admitted that perhaps only her viewing angle had made the encounter appear so horribly close. “He was headed for the gate—we were on a straight-line course for it—and he…naturally he assumed you’d step aside.” As much as Eric had insisted on that, too, she’d had in the end to believe him. If you loved somebody, you had to believe in him. Trust him.

“That’s what he…assumed?”

He 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 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.”

Miguel let go the horn, stole a glance at her, then transferred his reins to the left hand the way she held hers. He rested his right hand on his thigh, fingers clenched in spite of himself. “Aren’t you missing your supper?”

His own stomach growled at the taunt and she laughed. “Yes, but I’m waiting for my fiancé.” Reining in, she gazed out over the twilit valley. “That might just be him there, coming back from Durango.” She nodded toward the county road, some five miles to the east, and a tiny pair of moving headlights.

But they passed the ranch entrance and crawled on to the north. Her fiancé. “You mean Señor Mercedes?” A pity. He would make a poor husband, ill-tempered and overbearing. And a man who was full of himself would be selfish in bed.

“I mean Eric Foster, who does happen to own a Mercedes, and it’s a nice one, too.”

“Except for that dent in the door. Must be a careless driver?”

“Ha!” She touched her spurs to her palomino’s ribs and the horse surged toward the river.

Without signal from his rider, Miguel’s own horse followed. Miguel grabbed the horn—grimaced and let it go—yelped and clutched it again, half standing in his stirrups. Dios, a mile of this and he could forget having sons!

She glanced back at him around the brim of her hat and called mockingly, “Let go of that horn, cowboy!”

“¡Brujita!” he swore under his breath. She was a little witch, with her hair of burning embers blowing back over her face as she laughed and tortured him. Impossibly slim in the saddle. And graceful, her hips barely bouncing against the polished leather, while he slipped and jolted like a clown.

Abruptly she took pity on him and reined in, letting him catch up to her at the next cut down to a lower level. “Why haven’t you sold these worthless brutes for dog food and bought yourselves something useful? All-terrain vehicles or dirt bikes?”

She smiled as she rubbed her horse’s glossy neck. “Oh, they sort of grow on you. No bike’s going to blow down your collar or rest his head on your shoulder.”

“Gracias a Dios.”

“Of course, it’s partly your choice of ride,” she added with a twinkle. “Did they tell you his name?”

“Jack is what Wiggly called him.”

Her smile broadened. “That’s short for Jackhammer.”

“And thank you, Wiggly!” He dared to touch Jackhammer with his heels, and miraculously the beast didn’t resent it but moved on. His tormentor pursued, drawing even with him again. Their knees brushed for a moment and he glanced at her sharply. “I suppose you’ve been riding since you could walk.”

“Oh, no. I started late myself. Fourteen.”

He cocked an eyebrow; how could that be? But she’d swung away from him, was gazing off in the direction her fiancé would come. The pale line of her profile against the gathering dusk was a thing of beauty, like Venus rising in her veils of light, there in the east. Someday, once he’d made his fortune, he’d find himself a woman like this one, all grace and spirit and fire.

But first, but first, he reminded himself. First came the means to win, then keep her. Because a man without money—

“There he is!” she cried on a note of satisfaction. A pair of headlights slowed for the turn into the ranch, then seemed to glare at them across the intervening miles as the car topped a low rise.

She reached over and laid two fingers on Miguel’s wrist. Her touch shot up his arm like a spark leaping to tinder and he sucked in his breath. “Pull back on your reins and hold them,” she commanded.

“Like so? But why?”

“Because I’ve got to run and you don’t want to follow.”

Or do I? But already her horse had spun in its length, snorting and dancing.

She gave him an absent smile, her mind filled with another already. “Have a good ride.” The palomino thundered away uphill.

Jackhammer threw up his head, fighting the reins, eager to race for the barn. “Whoa, you cabro! ¡Cabrón! Who’s the boss here?”

A good question. By the time they’d settled it, she was long gone.

THIS WASN’T THE SUMMER Risa had pictured when she’d invited Eric to Suntop. She’d imagined them riding out daily. She’d show him all her favorite, secret spots—the canyons, the swimming holes, the high country. They’d pack picnics along every day, and somewhere outside, sometime this summer, sometime just…right, they’d make love. She wanted her first time to be outdoors, under the stars. Or in a high-mountain meadow, in the lush grass and flowers, with the sun blazing down, only eagles for witness.

Wanted some way that distinguished the act from the casual rolls in an unmade bed, in a small shabby room with cobwebs in the corners and cigarette smoke hanging heavy in the air. Half-empty beer cans on the bedside table. That was her earliest impression of love, the way her mother had gone about it.

For herself, Risa wanted something different, so different. But how was she to get it when Eric wasn’t welcome at Suntop? Ben had looked her fiancé in the eye at the supper table for three nights running and asked how long he planned to hang around Suntop.

And Eric was sensitive. Eric had his pride. Eric could take a hint. He’d come back last night from Durango to tell her he’d found a job for the rest of the summer. He’d be working pro bono for the biggest law firm in that city. The senior partner was a friend of his father’s. He’d sublet an apartment there, and they’d see each other weekends and evenings. “I’d like to be closer, sweetheart, but what with your father…” He’d shrugged and smiled bravely.

She’d flown to lock her arms around his waist. “Oh, Eric, that’s just his way. He gives all our dates a hard time.”

“He’s going to have to get used to the fact that I’m not just some pimply-faced date. I’m here to stay, Risa. There’s no way he’s stopping me. Stopping us.”

What had she done to deserve such devotion? she’d wondered as he kissed her. It seemed such a miracle. That a man like this could love someone like her. Too tall, too shy, too awkward. Neither brilliant nor beautiful. Never quite belonging anywhere.

A castoff, a stray. Her younger sisters were both legitimate, but she was not.

Ben had never bothered marrying her mother. Never troubled himself once in fourteen years to visit his daughter, not till Eva’s death. Then he’d brought Risa back to the ranch like an afterthought. When he’d adopted her and given her his name, well, that must have been for no more reason than that all Suntop stock wore his brand.

Compared with Ben’s brusque and offhand affection, Eric’s unswerving attention was cool water in the desert. In his arms she’d found her home at last.

But, oh, she was missing him already, and this was only the second day he’d been working. So to pass the hours till sundown, she’d ridden out with her youngest sister.

“Who cares if we didn’t bring our swimsuits? I’m positively, absolutely melting! Come on, Risa. Race you there!” Twelve-year-old Tess Tankersly wheeled her paint pony midbridge and spurred south down the river trail.

“Tess!” Risa had wanted to return to the Big House, in the hope of finding a message from Eric waiting there. But she couldn’t let her youngest sister swim alone. “Darn it. Wait up, you silly goose!”

No answer but a wavering war whoop. Tess ducked her dark head alongside her pony’s neck and vanished under the green-fringed curtain of a willow tree.

Risa growled something wordless and urged her lathered mare into a lope. Exasperating as her little sister was, she was right. It was hot today. They should have ridden into the heights instead of the valley, but Tess had wanted to show her the latest crop of yearlings. She had her eye on a black, half Arab, half quarter horse filly that she was determined to make her own. Her first grown-up mount.

So far, Ben, in his usual fashion, had made Tess no promises. There was so much more power in maybe, than sure.

That’s why he doesn’t like Eric, Risa told herself. Because he can’t control him. And once they married, Ben would lose control over her. She smiled as she crouched along her mare’s shoulder, willow leaves stroking her back.

Two more twists along the narrow trail and she came to the swimming hole. Here the river made a wide bend around the cliffs on the opposite shore. The current slowed, the bottom was sand, the water deep and dark.

Tess had shucked the saddle off her paint and was leading him into the river. She’d left her T-shirt on, thank heavens, but she’d wriggled out of her jeans. Her skinny little butt gleamed bright red with her cotton bikinis, then vanished beneath the olive-gold water. Beside her, her pony snorted and launched himself into the depths, paddling like a dog.

“You twerp!” Risa called. Now they’d have to wait for Oscar to dry off before Tess could saddle up again.

“He was as hot as I was.” Swimming alongside, Tess grasped the pony’s black mane and squirmed up onto his withers, then threw a leg over his surging rump. “Wheee, we’re flying!”

“What do you think—want to swim?” Risa asked Sunrise as she folded her jeans on top of her boots. Sunny dipped her head and actually seemed to nod. Risa laughed and reached for the cinch knot. “Just like old times.”

They swam the horses downstream as far as the next bend in the river, then back against the current, to come ashore on the opposite bank, where a narrow sandbar edged the cliffs. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, legs outstretched, digging their bare heels into the damp, sugary grit, they talked aimlessly, while Sunny and Oscar prowled the bank behind them, seeking mouthfuls of grass growing from the cracks in the rocks.

“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.

“Cretaceous period,” he told her, helpless to stop himself from showing off, any more than a stallion can stop himself from arching his neck and prancing around a ready mare. “Sixty-five million years old, give or take a couple of million.”

“What is it?” shrilled the little one from the shallows.

He closed his fingers, hiding it from view. “An inoceramus.” To fix his gaze on Risa’s face as she waded warily closer took an effort of will. As the creek bottom shelved upward, she was rising like a nymph from the waves. His eyes yearned to melt down over her, praising every swaying curve and hollow.

“And what’s that?” She stopped with the water lapping her slender waist.

“You tell me.” He offered it, cocked his head in challenge. Her bottom lip pushed out a delectable quarter inch in annoyance, but still she reached. He laid it delicately on her palm. Para tú.

“Risa, what is it?” shrilled her younger sister, bouncing with impatience.

“A fossil.” Intent on its ribbed and fluted shape, Risa turned it slowly. “Some sort of clam.”

She hadn’t said “only a clam.” Abruptly it struck him that liking a woman would be more dangerous than lusting after her.

“It’s really that old?” she added.

He nodded. “Waiting here for us all that time.”

“Let me see!” The little one had waded ashore, tied both the horses, and now launched herself across the stream. Heads almost touching, the mermaids studied the inoceramus while Miguel studied them. Such different coloring, sunset and midnight—rubia y oscura. When you looked for it there was not much resemblance, either to Tankersly or each other, but still, they were unmistakably sisters.

La oscura glanced up at him. “You found it underwater?”

“No. Embedded in the cliff. One finds such in shale.”

“But you’re all wet.”

Miguel had to admit he was. “My horse threw me in the creek.”

His wry look earned him a bubbling laugh from the niña, and a twitch of those luscious lips from her elder sister.

“Then you’ll have to ride back with us,” decided the little one. “Risa’s Sunny can carry two.”

“Thank you,” he said quickly as Risa frowned and her lips parted to counter this offer. No way would he pass it up!

He waited on his ledge while the sisters crossed to the far bank. Turning his face gallantly to the cliff, still he could picture Risa shimmying into her jeans.

“What’s your name?” the little one called, her shyness forgotten.

“Miguel. And you?”

“Tess. Tess Tankersly. And this is Risa.”

Señorita Tankersly to him, till she herself made him free of her name. Still… Risa, whatever it might signify in inglés, in español it meant “laughter.” And if you were to laugh with me?

But such a notion was madness. If all went as he hoped, someday soon he’d have to deal with Tankersly. Negotiations would hardly go well if he’d been sniffing about the rancher’s daughter! Business might be one thing, but the old man would have a better match in mind for his crown jewel, his fire opal, than a flirtation with a Mexican half-breed.

While the girls saddled their horses, Miguel let himself down into the river and waded across. On his dignity, he walked instead of swam. At the lowest point, for five yards or so, only his eyes showed above water. He waggled his eyebrows at Tess and earned another outburst of giggles. He smiled underwater. Ay, chiquitas. She was as easy to entertain as his own little sister had been last time he’d seen her, too long ago.

But Risa was not so easily amused and she stiffened when he mounted clumsily behind her. “I’ve never done this before,” he confessed softly in her ear. What delights he’d been missing! Pale as a gibbous moon, her nape with its waving tendrils of reddish-gold was only inches below his lips.

She jammed her hat into place and its rim established a “don’t trespass” perimeter.

“May I hold on?” he asked as they set off at a trot. His hands would almost span her supple waist; his palms itched with anticipation.

“To the cantle—the back of my saddle—please do,” she snapped.

Tess rode before them, chattering over her shoulder. “So you collect fossils, Miguel?”

“Sí. Also stones. I’m a rock hound.” It was close to the truth.

“I found a piece of fool’s gold last year. On roundup. Would you like to see it?”

“Pyrite? With much pleasure.”

“And I have a chunk of something that I used to think was a diamond when I was little. It’s big as an egg! But I reckon maybe it’s just quartz.”

“More likely,” he agreed. And there were compensations to hanging on to the cantle, he was finding. At this pace, over the rougher patches of trail Risa couldn’t help but bounce a little. Her taut, smooth hips brushed his thumbs more than once. Tipping his head to one side to peer under her hat, he grinned. Her nape was now rosier than pale. Were he to brush his lips, rough with his afternoon beard, right…there, he bet she’d go off like a bottle rocket, all sparks and fizz and a firecracker pop! Ah, rubia, you bring out the bad in me!

“What were you doing back there?” she asked coolly in an undertone. “Aren’t you supposed to be haying?”

His smile faded. “Even a peón gets a day off now and then.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

“No?” While he spun his fantasies, he should remember not to forget: she was a ranchera rica and he was a wet-back. He had more hope of collecting fossils on the moon than taking such a one as this in his arms. At least, not while he had hay in his hair.

But someday… He glanced over his shoulder. Tess had chosen the easier grade of the road leading to the ranch yard, instead of the cowboys’ trail. From this height, he could see the tops of the Trueheart Hills jutting east of the valley. He’d lost a precious day, flirting with mermaids.

The growl of an engine mounting the grade behind caused him to swing farther around. Uh-oh! Here came that ancient, caramel-colored Lincoln Town Car that Tankersly flogged around the ranch when he wasn’t riding. He’d driven it down to the hay fields yesterday, gunning it ruthlessly through the muddy irrigation ditches.

“Daddy!” Tess cried, reining in as the car braked alongside them. “Look what Miguel gave me!” She waved the fossil that he’d intended for Risa. Ah, hermanitas.

Little sisters could get a man in all kinds of trouble. Tankersly was bound to resent any and all contact between a summer laborer and his daughters. Miguel met the old man’s stony gaze, his own face expressionless.

“See, Daddy?”

“Huh.” Tankersly hardly glanced at Tess’s prize. His shrewd old eyes were measuring the distance between Miguel’s chest and his beautiful daughter’s shoulder blades to the very last quarter inch.

Or so it seemed to his hired hand, who was braced for the worst. What a fool I’ve been—¡qué tonto! To give this merciless geezer an excuse for firing him before he’d barely started… No woman was worth this!

“You’re wearing your stirrups a notch too short,” he growled at his eldest. “You learn that back East?”

“What if I did?” Risa leaned back in her stirrups till her hat brim brushed Miguel’s mouth.

“Should have sent you west.” The massive old sedan rumbled on past and vanished up the hill.

Not once had Tankersly cracked a smile. So why did Miguel have the strangest feeling that the old man had been pleased?

CHAPTER SIX

MORNING. Joe Wiggly and the Old Man sat their horses in their usual corner of the yard, watching the hands saddle up and ride out. Two cars rolled up the hill, parked by the tool shed and disgorged those men of the hay crew who slept down in Trueheart. The rest of the crew shambled out of the bunkhouse, stretching and yawning, to clamber aboard the two empty hay wagons that waited by the barn.

“Been keeping an eye on him for me?” Tankersly nodded toward Heydt as the young man vaulted onto a wagon’s flatbed. He sat down immediately, then flopped backward on a broken bale, pulling his hat over his face.

Joe smiled wryly at that. He knew just how the fella felt. He meant to catch a few winks himself, soon as he and Tankersly had planned the day’s work. “Yep, I’ve been watchin’ him. Didn’t get really interesting till last night.” He’d hoped Ben would ask. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled a cigarette out of his pack, and stuck it between his lips. Proceeded leisurely to light it.

The tractors fired up and hauled the wagons down the road, off to the fields for a day of baling. Tons of hay to be stacked and moved and stacked again. Heydt’s tail would be dragging by the end of this day for sure.

“He’s been ridin’ most evenings, going a little farther every night, mostly upriver and down. But last night, danged if he didn’t set off like a dog smelling a bitch over the mountain. Straight line. Along the road to the main gate, then north, then through our gate on the other side. On and on east till he comes to the gate to the Sweetwater Flats. I’m hanging way back, you understand, but ’bout then we lost the last of the light.” The foreman drew on his cigarette, squinting through the smoke as he exhaled.

“You know how ragged that section is. Reckon I’d’ve broken my neck a dozen times if there hadn’t been a half-moon.” Maybe, come to think of it, that was what Heydt had been waiting for—enough moon to see by?

“Anyways, I move up a bit closer. I’m starting to wonder if maybe he’s scouting cows to rustle.” He’d begun to regret that he’d not thought to pack his .22 along. Heydt was unfailingly pleasant, but something told a man that he’d be a rough one to cross.

“Ya think?” Tankersly scowled. Rustling was no longer a hanging offense, and that was a pity, because it was a growing problem in the West. A thief could fill a cattle truck with twenty head, drive ’em to hell and gone, earn himself a year’s pay in a single night.

“Not now I don’t. Eventually he comes to where we’ve fenced off the creek bed, and he ties his horse and climbs through the wire. I’m figuring he’s forgotten his canteen and he’s meaning to drink from the stream, and I’m grinnin’ to myself, picturing his face when he tastes that water. So I wait, expecting him to come scrambling back up the bank, spitting and wiping his mouth. But he doesn’t show.”

He leaned over to tap his ash off on his boot heel, then straightened again. “After a bit, I get kinda curious and I ride up t’where I can see over the fence and down into the cut. It’s about twenty feet deep along there…” He dragged in a lungful of nicotine, smiling inside at the look on the boss’s face. Oh, he had him, all right. “’Bout a quarter mile on, I see a light–bright light, one of them halogen lanterns. Kid’s walking real slow, playing his beam over the banks, first one side, then t’other. Stops every so often, looks real close at something, then moves on.”

“Huh.” Tankersly spat thoughtfully into the dirt.

“I follow along the top of the flats, find another place to peek over the side. But he’s just moseying on, flashing his light.”

“He ever find anything t’speak of?”

Joe shrugged. “Not’s so as I could tell. I hung around till two or so, till I was yawnin’ so hard I feared he’d hear m’jaw crack. He was still hard at it when I headed on home.” He’d flopped onto his couch at the foreman’s house not long before sunrise. Had slept for an hour, then saddled Tankersly’s mount for the day and set off to fetch him. “If Heydt made it back to the bunkhouse in time to snatch the last biscuit, I’d be surprised.” And served him right for keeping an old man out all night.

Tankersly rubbed his craggy jaw. “Now, what the devil’s he up to?”

RISA RODE her outrage all the way down to the ranch yard. How dared he? Did Ben imagine she was still a rebellious fourteen, to be sent to her room without supper when she disobeyed? Or fifteen, forbidden to drive with her girlfriends to Durango to see a movie?

But to have intercepted Eric’s messages…this was a new low in high-handedness even for her father!

And worse, he’d almost succeeded in driving a wedge of misunderstanding between her and her fiancé. After three days of echoing silence, she’d begun to fear that Eric had stopped returning her calls. That perhaps he’d found someone at the law firm where he was working. That he’d finally come to his senses and realized he could do much better than Risa Tankersly.

To call him one last time at work had taken all her courage. She’d gotten past the secretary who’d recorded her previous messages and reached Eric himself.

And learned that over the past three days, he’d called Suntop four times! Once her father had answered the phone, and the other times Socorro, their cook and housekeeper, had taken Eric’s calls.

Neither of them had passed his message on.

Furious as she was, Risa couldn’t blame Socorro; the woman had worked for Ben for thirty years and she knew who signed her paychecks. She only would have been following orders. But Ben? “You manipulative heartless bastard!” she swore, swinging down from Sunrise by the barn. Pity her father wasn’t here so she could say that to his face! He was off in his Town Car, at one end of the ranch or another.

She knew because she’d checked the garage, up at the Big House. Had she found his car, she would have taken it and paid the consequences later.

But no such luck.

Which brought her here. She would not sit meekly at home, letting Ben think he’d won again. After tying Sunny’s reins to the hitching rack, she loosened the mare’s cinch, then stalked off toward the bunkhouse.

Her steps shortened as she neared it. The bunkhouse was off limits to her and her sisters. Ben insisted that the men liked their privacy, and no doubt that was true. But over the years, the forbidden had bred fascination. To the Tankersly women, the shabby old one-story barracks had an aura of masculine mystery, much like the sacred ritual house of Hopi men. A kiva for cowboys.

Don’t be silly, she scoffed at herself. It’ll just be a bunch of hands, wandering around without their shirts on. Bad enough. She should have brought Tess along for support. Go on. All you have to do is rap on the screen door and ask for him.

Then endure the knowing smile on the face of whichever man answered her knock! She came to a halt, one foot on the bottom step of the stairs leading up to the sagging porch.

“You look lost, señorita!” called a low mocking voice from across the yard.

She jumped, then glanced over her shoulder. Miguel Heydt sat astride the tow hitch of a horse trailer that had been uncoupled and left parked alongside the tool shed. Leaning back against the trailer’s streamlined front, he held a beer balanced on one blue jeans–clad knee. He tipped his head back in inquiry, but he didn’t rise as she approached.

At least he still has his shirt on, she told herself. Actually, it was a T-shirt, clinging damply to his broad chest. She stopped close enough to smell an aroma of hay and hot male that did funny things to her pulse. “You’re not inside,” she said, suddenly at a loss over how to begin.

“Waiting for my turn in the shower.” He rubbed the hard angle of his jaw and she heard the tiny rasp of bristles. He hadn’t bothered with shaving this morning; the blue shadow gave a rakish air to his weary smile. He looked like a bandido one jump ahead of the posse.

But not worried about the outcome—far from it. “Looking for someone?” he inquired politely.

“You.” There was no way she could think to hide that fact. “I was wondering if you’d—” She ran out of air, had to stop for a breath. “If you might loan me your truck—that is, if you don’t mean to use it yourself. Tonight. I’d be happy to fill it with gas for you. Pay you something, if you like.”

His dark eyes narrowed behind thick black lashes. “Ah.” Absently he raised the bottle of beer to his lips, then seemed to focus on it. “Could I offer you una cerveza? Or maybe you’re not of age. Perhaps a cold drink. We have lemonade.”

He, also, saw her as a child? She felt her temper kick up a notch. “I’m quite old enough to drink, thank you, but no, thank you. But your truck…?” She couldn’t manage an ingratiating smile—bit her bottom lip anxiously, instead; this was even harder than she’d imagined.

“Your own car is not working?”

“I don’t own a car.” She’d asked—begged—Ben for one, for her graduation from high school. She was so cut off from the world, here at Suntop. Most of her friends lived in Trueheart, some twenty miles away. She’d have been happy to take a job in town to earn the price of a car, but there was no way she could reach the job without wheels in the first place.

All that last month before graduation, she’d circled ads in the Durango newspaper for used compact cars at reasonable prices. Left the classifieds on Ben’s desk where he couldn’t fail to see them.

On graduation night, he’d given her a pair of two-carat emerald ear studs, which she’d yet to wear. Because she’d read his gift’s message loud and clear. He’d treat her like a princess—as long as she remained under his thumb.

“You own all this…” Heydt’s eyes swept the horizon beyond her. “But you own no car?”

Her problems were not his business. She shrugged. “I have the use of the ranch car when I need it.” As long as Ben approved of her needs. It was a battered old Range Rover that rattled your teeth out. But there was a constant tug-of-war between her and Lara for its use, and since she’d been gone from home, Risa had lost this round. “My middle sister, Lara, has taken it to Albuquerque. She’s visiting friends, so…” She looked at him pleadingly.

“Then, perdoname for wondering, but why not ask your father for his car?”

She almost stamped her foot with frustration. “He’s out somewhere driving and I’m in a hurry!” Eric had to work overtime on a case tonight. But he’d promised her that if she could come to him, he’d take her out for a late supper, then show her his new apartment. Damn it, it had been nearly five days since last they’d kissed!

“Ah.” Miguel sighed and rose stiffly to his feet. He swayed as he reached his full height, bouncing lightly off the trailer behind him. “In that case, señorita, I will drive you to Durango with pleasure. Let me grab a shower, then we can—” He paused as she shook her head emphatically.

That was the very last thing she needed—Miguel Heydt tagging along. Oh, Eric would love that, all right! “No, please—I mean—thank you very much. But I have to go alone. Look, I really will pay you. Whatever you want for a night’s rental.”

The corners of his mouth took on a whimsical tilt as his gaze seemed to drop a few inches.

She licked her lips nervously and felt a wave of heat rush through her. He was thinking of kissing her? Surely not! “Please?” she repeated, hating to beg. “Say…fifty dollars?” She reached into her pocket.

“No.” He cut the syllable shorter than usual. A Spanish no, not an anglo one. A Latin-male no, she realized as his lips tightened and his eyebrows drew together. She blew out a breath and looked away. He’d offered her a favor; she’d spurned it, trying to buy his help, instead. But she was too frustrated to apologize.

“Tell me,” he said after a moment. He patted the trailer behind him, drawing her eyes back his way. “Who owns this thing?”

“The trailer?” Lara’s mother had owned it originally, Risa remembered. So she supposed it had become her daughter’s when she died. But Lara had written her elder sister in March, in desperate need of money—for what she would not explain. Some scrape that she’d had to conceal from Ben.

Risa had sold a classmate her favorite Zuñi bracelet, a corn blossom sterling-and-turquoise bracelet, and sent three hundred dollars on to her sister. Which meant that Lara owed her. Which meant that now, if Heydt’s inquiry was more than idle curiosity… Her shrug was elaborately casual. “I do.” At least, you could say she had a three-hundred-dollar interest in Lara’s trailer. “I and my sister own it. Why?”

“Because I would like the use of it. I have so little time to ride after work. With this I could go farther.”

“Oh? But I was talking about borrowing your truck once,” Risa pointed out, fighting an urge to clap her hands in excitement. “If you mean to use this trailer often, then I’d want to…” She met his gaze squarely. “Then how about a one-for-one trade? For each time I get to use your truck, you get a night’s worth of my trailer?”

His eyes gleamed like shards of obsidian. “Bueno, a woman who knows how to bargain! But there’s una problemita. I’ll need my truck to tow this thing.”

Risa gave him a wide, close-lipped smile. “Oh, that’s no problema at all.”

IN SPITE OF his exhaustion, Miguel didn’t fall asleep until nearly ten. The poker game in the bunkhouse kitchen was particularly raucous tonight; somebody was drawing good hands. Each time he laid his cards on the table, the shouts of disbelief and groans of indignation carried through the thin walls.

Lying on his top bunk in the darkened room he shared with three other men, hands clasped behind his head, Miguel stared at the ceiling only a few feet above. It was too dark to make out the crack in the plaster, but he knew it already by heart; a line like a ragged river, cutting its patient way through limestone.

He wiggled his toes under the sheet with pure pleasure. The creek bed at the Sweetwater Flats! His hunch had been right. From the instant he’d stumbled across that old map of Trueheart in a flea market in Abilene, he’d known it in his bones. Somewhere along the course of that creek was an oil seep—maybe several seeps. He hadn’t been able to find the upwelling in the dark. Every crack in the bank, every shadow cast by a rock, looked like a gush of black gold by the light of his lantern.

But though he’d yet to find it, he’d tasted the water and that told him enough. Bad water? This was water to make a man’s fortune! Agua bendito!

An image of Risa’s heart-shaped, haughty face flashed through his mind. Would you look down your adorable nose at me, gringa, if I were as rich as your papá? Richer than your Mr. Mercedes?

He could picture her standing in the midst of his miraculous stream. She was wearing only her white T-shirt and that scrap of turquoise silk. He stood before her, cupping the precious water in his hands and pouring it over and over her fiery curls, black gold for his rubia. And when she was drenched, her T-shirt clinging to her delectable body, water hanging in crystal from her long lashes…when she stared up at him, her big eyes full of wonder and admiration, he’d hook an arm around her slender waist and draw her slowly, so slowly… Miguel smiled, sighed luxuriously…and slept.

“HEY, HEYDT, you’re wanted.” A hand jostled his shoulder.

“Uh?” It could not be morning! He felt as if they’d buried him under blankets—under the earth—then parked a hay wagon on his chest. “No,” he grunted, rolling onto his stomach.

The knuckles returned to jab him harder. “I mean it. Get up! Wiggly wants you.”

That pierced his stupor. “Uh.” Wiggly?

Jake, one of the cowboys, nodded grimly, his square, freckled face level with the top bunk. “Yeah. What the heck’d you do?”

Reached for the stars? Miguel didn’t know, but a summons in the middle of the night—because it was still dark outside the window—this could not be good. Would be anything but. “Where…is he?”

“Out on the porch. And if I was you, I wouldn’t keep him waiting.”

Miguel didn’t. Tucking a clean shirt into his jeans, he zipped, buckled his belt, stepped out the screen door.

The foreman looked him up and down, not smiling. “The boss wants t’see you.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

TANKERSLY WANTED to see him? Perhaps Miguel wasn’t even awake; this was a nightmare to punish his dream of the old man’s daughter!

But the packed dirt of the ranch yard felt solid and real under his boot heels as he walked toward the foreman’s house, where Wiggly had sent him. He glanced overhead. And the stars were all in their proper places. It wasn’t as late as it felt; by the moon it must be only eleven or so.

It hit him suddenly, bursting on his befuddled brain. Risa had taken his truck.

Ay, Dios, she’d wrecked it! He stopped short with a groan snagged in his throat. Oh, please, no! Over the years he’d lost friends to car wrecks. The men of the Texas Oil Patch were hard drinkers, hard drivers. When they raced back to the rig after a night of carousing, accidents weren’t uncommon. But to take that golden girl? God could not be so cruel!

Oh, but he could. He could.

What was I thinking, loaning her my truck?

He hadn’t been thinking, at least not with his head. He groaned again and trudged on toward the lit windows of the foreman’s house.

A thump on the back door brought an answering shout from within. Miguel swallowed hard and stepped into the light. “Mr. Tankersly.”

No answer. He drew a deep breath and moved on into the house. Passed through the kitchen doorway and found himself on the threshold of the living room. Ben Tankersly slouched in a leather easy chair, with a drink at his elbow. A bottle of whiskey sat on the table beside him, along with a bag of chips.

The old man lifted his drink and sipped deliberately, his dark, hooded eyes measuring Miguel over the rim of his glass.

No offer of a seat. Miguel unfisted his hands and waited, determined not to speak first.

The rancher set his glass aside. “Got a question for you, Heydt. Do you know where my daughter might be? Risa’s missing.”

Relief surged through Miguel like a river breaching a dam. ¡Gracias a Dios! He let out a long slow silent breath, fighting the smile within.

Which faded immediately. Because if Risa was alive and well, still he was in danger. And thank you, rubia! Lack of sleep must have made him stupid this evening. Any idiot would have realized that she was coming to a stranger for a car because her father did not approve or even know. Somehow he’d thought she came to him because…because… Just because.

Because she knows a sucker when she sees one! He shook his head. “Your daughter? No, sir. I have no idea where she might be.” She could be off most anywhere, breaking men’s hearts. She’d told him Durango, but maybe she’d lied. Clearly, Risa hadn’t troubled herself about a hired hand’s skin.

Or his job. Dios, if Tankersly fired him at this point, what would he do? He hadn’t evidence yet to prove his find. Besides, if Tankersly blamed him for aiding his daughter in her mischief, why should he do business with the man who’d helped her?

“Huh.” Tankersly took a long, considering sip of whiskey. “All right. Second question. What were you looking to find, prowlin’ around my land at night?”

“Sir?” Damn, damn, how did he know?

“If it’s gold or silver you’re after, then you can pack your bags. No man will mine Suntop while I’m alive. Miners are rapists—greedy swine—tearing down God’s mountains for a handful of shiny. Pah! Spoiling the land with their piles of tailings and the creeks with arsenic. Is that what you are, boy?”

Miguel pulled himself erect. “No, sir. I’m a wildcatter.” The elite of the oil business. The men who dared much and risked all. Those who sought oil far from the known fields, in places where it had never been found before.

“An oilman, huh, that’s no better! Rigs lit up like Christmas trees, trucks roaring in and out scaring the cattle, wastewater and oil spills. Well…” Tankersly stared broodingly off into the distance. “Well, that’s a pity. Tell Wiggly to cut you a check, and be gone by morning.”

He’d laid his fingertips on treasure, only to have it wrenched from his grasp!

But not without a fight. “Sir, it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s true that in the past oilmen have been careless, despoiling the land they drilled. But a man who cares can drill carefully, cleanly, taking the riches below without hurting the land above. The rig stays only till the pipe is set, then it goes away. The waste can be trucked out, the pits covered and resodded.” He flipped his hands palms up and shrugged. “The cows will get over their fright.”

“Huh.” Tankersly swirled the ice in his glass till it tinkled. “That so?”

“That is so. And if a well is made, the money can flow like a river.”

The rancher laughed a dusty, soundless laugh. “You think I don’t have a cash flow already?”

“Can a man ever have enough money? With more money you could buy more land, if that is what matters to you. Or better cows.”

Wry amusement froze to black ice. “There’s none better in the West than my herd!”

“Oh. Then more range for your cattle.” Perhaps a car for your daughter. But something was working behind the old man’s eyes and Miguel held his tongue.

Tankersly nodded toward the kitchen. “Go get yourself a glass.”

His palms were itching as if he’d scooped a double handful of luck. Still, he hardly dared to breathe; one wrong word and it could trickle through his fingers. And any minute Risa might drive into the yard in his pickup—its headlights would sweep these windows! Let that happen and her father would probably shoot him. But still, but still, he could feel his palms itch. This was a night to bet and bet big.

Returning, he held out his glass while the old man poured him a generous measure. Tankersly nodded at the sack of chips. “Some pork rinds?”

“Um, no, thank you.” He dared to sit on the couch opposite. Took a wary sip, while Tankersly crunched a pork rind and considered him, much as a butcher might size up a side of beef, planning his first cut.

“So you found the oil seeps,” Tankersly growled finally.

Miguel inhaled a gulp of liquid fire and choked. “Y-you know about—?”

Tankersly sighed. “It’ll save us both a truckload of manure if you don’t figure me for a fool, Heydt. Of course I know what’s spoilin’ my groundwater over on the flats.”

“Yes, sir.” But where was his leverage if the old man already knew? Miguel had hoped to trade news of his discovery for the right to drill. Usually a landowner was surprised and delighted to be told that there might be oil below his property. But in this case…

“So that’s where you’d figure to drill—on the flats?”

No, he shouldn’t panic. He still had a bargaining chip. “Perhaps, perhaps not, sir. You see…” He sipped, gathering his thoughts. “After oil is formed deep underground, it is pushed toward the surface by the pressure, enormous pressure, of the rocks and mountains above. But it can only travel if it finds a highway, a layer of porous rock such as sandstone, along which to move.

“So what I seek is a place where the beds of sediments have folded over millions of years into an arch—an anticline, they call it. The oil travels along its permeable highway to the top of this arch, this dome, buried deep in the earth.

“Then, if by the greatest good luck there is a cap of impermeable, nonporous rock—say, a layer of tight limestone—above the dome, then the oil becomes trapped there, at the top of the arch. It can rise no farther. Geologists call this a trap. At this place there may form a pool of oil, perhaps an enormous pool. If we tap into this…”

“Then we’re all driving gold-plated Cadillacs filled with dancing girls—I got that. But isn’t this dome below the oil seeps?”

“I don’t know yet. There is some sort of fracture in the rock, sí, there where the oil seeps out. But the oil may simply be rising in the sediments past that point, on its way to the trap, which might be three miles to the east or five to the south. What I must do is try to map the beds, see where they rise and fall, till I can discover where I think the top of the dome is located.”

“Huh.” Tankersly munched another pork rind. “Why didn’t you come to me in the first place and tell me you wanted to scout my land for oil?”

Because I’m a nobody again, now that Harry’s dead. Sí, perhaps I could have shown you my map and persuaded you that oil might be present—but then you might have turned around and called in one of the big-name outfits to find it for you. No, Miguel had wanted his discovery firmly in hand before he came to the bargaining table. But now…“I’d heard the way you feel about miners,” he lied tactfully. “If I’d come to you and asked permission to scout, would you have given it?”

“Nope.”

“So I thought it would be best to know there was a good chance of oil before we talked.”

The rancher’s old eyes glinted with amusement. He wasn’t quite buying it, but perhaps the whiskey was mellowing him. “Huh.” For a while he ate pork rinds and Miguel prayed. “Here’s how I see it,” he drawled finally. “You’ve got a problem, Heydt. You’re hungry for a crack at my oil. You don’t even know yet, for sure, if you’ve got something here or not. And even if you find it—well, think you’ve found it—still, I’m not hungry. Maybe I’ll decide I’m leaving that oil in the ground for my grandchildren. It’s like money in the bank.”

It was—if it was truly down there in its vault of stone. In the end, Miguel could only say that to the best of his knowledge the oil should be down there. But the very best of the wildcatters drilled five dry holes for every well they brought home. It was a break-heart career, but still, gambler that he was, he’d choose no other.

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