LOVE OF A RODEO MAN (MODERN DAY COWBOYS) (10 page)

In her alarm, she must have brought her boots hard into Steamboat’s sides, and that unnerved the poor gelding enough to spur him into even greater effort. With absolutely no grace or d
ignity, Sara clutched whatever parts of the horse she could and screamed bloody murder, passing an astounded Mitch at what amounted to a full gallop.

Her hat blew off, and she felt herself begin the inevitable slide that was going to take her down to the ground, now rushing past Steamboat’s hooves at an alarming rate.

Sara was aware that poor Steamboat was actually making a desperate effort to keep her in the saddle; each time she lurched to the side, Steamboat would correct to the other side, obviously trying his embarrassed best to stop Sara from falling off.

After the first moment of utter astonishment, Mitch and his horse moved like a well
-oiled unit, with all the technique of countless rodeo rescues at their command.

Mitch
drew abreast of Steamboat’s neck until the horses were nearly touching. With one long arm, he then scooped Sara off of Steamboat’s back and onto his lap, holding her firmly against him.

And Sara could feel him laughing even before she looped her arms gratefully around him and hung on as Misty slowed and then stopped.

Steamboat stopped nearby as well, gave them a disgusted look and then calmly dipped his head and took a mouthful of grass.

“What the...” Mitch could hardly talk for laughing. “What the hell did you do to him? I’ve never seen that horse anything but comatose, and all of a sudden, he’s going past me like the favorite at the Kentucky Derby.”

Sara didn’t think it was quite that funny.

“You said to kick him, so I did,” she explained in an aggrieved tone. “But not very hard.”

She was becoming more aware every minute of being held extremely close to Mitch’s warm body, of his arms cradling her against him. He didn’t make the slightest effort to release her, even though Misty was standing stock-still by now.

Sara was sprawled off balance across Mitch and the horse, but his arms made her feel totally secure.

“I, umm, I lost your mother’s hat back there,” she managed to say in a shaky voice.

“We’ll find it, don’t worry.” The laughter was fading from his voice, replaced with a husky intensity that made Sara’s heart pound. Her head was cradled snugly in the curve of his arm and chest. Her legs dangled down Misty’s side, one hip pressed against Mitch. Her arm was snaked around his torso, her fingers touching the hard muscles on his back, and his long, blue-jeaned leg was under both of hers. Tension grew between them, and she struggled to sit up straighter.

“Don’t move,” he begged softly. “Stay close to me for a minute, Doc.”

He tipped his head, and his e
yes traced the line of her lips for a long, breathless moment.

The intense green seemed to grow smoky and opa
que. He moved his hand up, cupping her head with his fingers, lowering his mouth slowly until his lips closed over hers. His hat got in the way, and he nudged it off, letting it fall in the soft grass where Misty was grazing.

He kissed her as if they had all the time in the world. He explored her mouth leisurely with lips and tongue, inviting her to follow the path he set.

The movements of the horse beneath them made him clasp her even tighter in his embrace, and when Sara answered his kiss with passion of her own, she felt his breathing quicken, his body grow tense against her.

Sara was aware of the strong, hot sunlight creating a scarlet blur inside her closed eyelids, of the slight breeze that ruffled Mitch’s hair so that
it tickled softly on her forehead. She felt encompassed by the rock-hard strength and security of his arms and his clean smelling body, but most of all, she was aware of his lips on hers, of the way her body ached to be even closer to him.

Misty made an impatient, sudden movement, and they drew reluctantly apart, their breathing equally labored.

“The back of a horse isn’t the ideal spot for this, is it?” he said raggedly as she squirmed, aware all of a sudden of the way the saddle was digging into her buttock. She sat up straighter, raised an eyebrow and smiled at him.

“Oh, I don’t know. It feels pretty romantic to me, this getting rescued from the back of a bronco by a handsome cowboy.”

The joking banter bridged the intensity of the moment, allowing them both time to still the emotions raging within them.

After a moment, Mitch helped her slide down from Misty’s back. He retrieved first his hat and then her horse.

Soon, with a few valuable pointers, Sara was once again on Steamboat, Stetson firmly pulled down toward her nose in a parody of the way Mitch wore his.

This time, she nudged Steamboat into a gentle trot, and by the time they reached the rambling upper meadow with its grove of willows clustered around a rushing stream, Sara felt that although she wasn’t quite Olympic riding material yet, at least she felt more at home on Steamboat than she would have thought possible a few hours earlier.

Steamboat ambled over near the water, turned his head back and gave Sara a pained look that obviously indicated it might be nice if she got off and let a poor horse have a drink in peace.

She slid to the ground, feeling as if her legs had turned to jelly.

“Feel like a sandwich?” Mitch had dismounted as well, pulling from his saddlebag the carefully packaged bags of lunch Ruth had prepared and handing them to Sara.

They ate sitting on the grass beside the creek, sharing the thermos of iced tea. Swallowing the last of a cheese-and-tomato sandwich prepared with Ruth’s homemade bread, Sara sighed deeply.

“This is the first time since I started working for Doc Stone that I’ve managed to lose the feeling that the phone is about to ring any minute and I’ll have to leave,” she said. “This was such a good idea, Mitch.”

He was a few feet away, sitting with his back against a stump, unwrapping the third package of sandwiches. He glanced over at her, humor sparkling in his eyes.

“For a while there, I had my doubts about it,” he teased. “I figure Steamboat did, too, but with some practice, that horse’ll make a cowpoke out of you yet.”

She wrinkled her nose at his teasing, and he studied her, sitting with her long legs folded under her and her shining hair wild and ruffled by the breeze. In spite of the hat, her nose was sunburned and a few freckles had sprouted. Tenderness welled inside of him.

“I feel such a fool, not knowing how to ride,” she said.

“Truth is, Sara,” he admitted gruffly, “you’re so good at your job, you sort of scare a guy. It w
as a relief to find out there’s some things you can’t do.”

She had a way of looking at him, straight on, with none of the coyness some women affected, no false denials or phony modesty.

“I imagine you’re just as good at your job as I am at mine.” She settled herself more comfortably. “Tell me what it’s like, being a rancher, Mitch. I see the problems ranchers have with their stock, but I don’t actually have much idea how you spend your days.”

He gave her a long, unfathomable glance and then looked away from her, squinting out across the meadow to where, in the far distance, a small herd of cattle grazed.

Rancher, she’d labeled him, and as always, it stuck in his throat. Well, wasn’t that what he was?

Some deep rebellion inside of him still wanted to deny it. He still never thought of himself as a rancher. If he were asked what he
was, he’d automatically say rodeo rider, wouldn’t he?

How did a man make the transition, how did a man learn to live with the fact that he was sentenced to one sort of life when his body and soul still wanted to do something else? And increasingly often, he felt trapped. It made him angry, deep in his gut, that sense of unrest, and the anger made him ashamed.

After all, he wasn’t a kid anymore, longing for excitement and travel. He’d had that, and he ought to be content now with this new life that fate had arranged for him. Trouble was, he wasn’t. Content.

His glance went back to S
ara, sitting motionless, watching him with those thoughtful gray eyes and waiting patiently for him to get around to answering her.

Knowing her was making it a little easier, and also a little harder, maybe. The feelings she stirred in him weren’t the temporary ones he was used to feeling for women he’d met on the circuit.

Sara was permanence, a house and kids and deep roots in one place. All the things he wasn’t sure yet that he wanted.

Except that he knew he wanted Sara. He reached in the breast pocket of his shirt and drew out the package of cigarettes
he kept there, noting how crumpled they were and remembering how she’d felt, helpless in his arms, crushed tight against his chest. His body surged at the memory, and he quickly shifted to a different position, expertly shaking one cigarette from the pack and extracting it smoothly with his lips. He found a match and lit it with a thumbnail, automatically cupping a hand around the blaze, drawing the smoke into his lungs and savoring it before he expelled it in a cloud the breeze drew up over their heads and away.

“Describe the life of a rancher. Well, let’s see.” His gaze went back t
o the cattle, and he began awkwardly trying to tell her what ranching was like, drawing scanty word pictures for her, unaccustomed to describing things instead of simply doing them.

“Ranchers used to be cattlemen, plain and simple,” he began slowly. “That’s changed now, because the market for beef has dropped, so ranchers like my father have to get into other stock, like those damned pigs, or maybe sheep.”

Sara reached over to fill his cup with more iced tea, and he thought how soft her skin had felt to his lips back there on the trail. “Ranching’s one big gamble, I guess,” he went on. “A rancher’s entirely his own boss, and whether he makes it or not depends a lot on how well he knows his job. It’s not a thing a man learns in any school, it’s something you pick up by living the life, something a man teaches his sons over years and years. Pop used to put Bob and me on the saddle in front of him and take us out on cattle drives when we could barely walk.”

Funny, he’d forgotten Wilson doing that until right now. It was hard to remember the old man being anything but cantankerous, the way he was mostly... but there ha
d been a time when Mitch was a little boy that he figured his father was the next thing to God.

“But you didn’t really want to be a ranch
er, did you?” Sara asked. “I remember you saying that your brother liked it, not you.”

Mitch took another long drag on his cigarette and shrugged. “Guess a man can’t always spend his whole life doing just what he wants to do. Like Pop keeps saying, rodeo isn’t a lifelong profession, anyway. So sooner or later, I’d have had to come back here. A man has to work at something, and I’m not trained for brain surgery.”

Her quick smile came and went. “Would you have come back, Mitch? Or would you have bought a small place of your own and started a stud farm, maybe?”

She’d been listening when he spouted off to Bill Forgie, he remembered. And obviously, she’d
filed away everything he’d said.

It comforted and annoyed him both, that she understood how he felt and what his dreams were. He wasn’t used to sharing his thoughts with anyone.

He shrugged noncommittally. “Might still do that someday. Not right now, of course. It takes all my time to keep up with the work around here. Today, for example. This is fun, having you with me, but I’d have had to ride up here whether you came along or not, whether or not it’s Sunday. Branding season’s coming up, and it’s important to know how many yearlings we’ve got, where they are, and what shape they’re in before we start rounding them up.”

“So you have to know all the places they might be on your land,”
she surmised, and Mitch smiled. “Not just where they are, but how much water there is, where it is, how long the vegetation in an area will sustain a cow, what other animals are around, maybe endangering your cattle. For instance—” he gestured with the hand holding his cigarette “—there’s a pack of coyotes hanging around here, you can see their signs all over the place. They won’t bother anything but a newborn or an animal that’s really sick, but a timber wolf would. A good rancher keeps a close eye on wildlife sign.”

Sara questioned, and he patiently answered, describing the particular work each season brought for the rancher, the routine of fencing, haying, seeding, planting and harvest, along with the constant work the stock created.

“It doesn’t sound as if you get much more time off than I manage to,” she sighed at last, and Mitch shook his head.

“Nope, probably not. You got old Doc Stone to answer to, and I’
ve got Pop. Ask me, one of ’em’s about as bad as the other.”

“You don’t get along too well with your father?” Sara ventured.

Mitch frowned. “The old man’s set in his ways, and I don’t always think his methods of doing things are any better than mine. We end up having a few words now and then.”

That was the understatement of the year. Down and out shouting fits described the situation better, Mitch admitted to himself. The old man just had a way of worming under his skin, no matter what good intentions Mitch had each morning.

“Maybe anger’s just his way of dealing with your brother’s death,” Sara suggested hesitantly. “I’ve heard my mom say that after my dad was killed in the mines, she was angry inside for a long time.”

Mitch hadn’t thought about it that way. Maybe Sara was right, but it didn’t make Wilson any easier to be around, whatever the reason for his bad temper. And Mitch had no intention, either, of spending this precious afternoon with Sara analyzing his father.