This Red Rock (3 page)

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

15

As I saw it, I had two options. I was, after all, Frank"s

nephew, his guest. Frank had not personally given me any

orders at all, and I presumed he was unaware that anybody

else had. I could still go back into the house, pretending

never to have been awake, and wander in to find Frank for

breakfast. But the potential pitfalls of this plan were

manifold. Frank, a rancher all his life, would have been

awake for hours by now. His general tendency, though, now

that he was getting a little older, was to get up in good time

to give his men their orders and then go back to the house to

order supplies and check accounts before breakfast.

Chances were, he had spotted me already from his window. I

had no desire to be caught out in my deception after what I

said last night. Additionally, I did not fail to recognize the

fact that, as one of Frank"s trained ranchmen, it was quite

likely that Oro"s idea of an easy task for a beginner had been

gleaned from Frank in the first place, and that Frank, even if

I succeeded in convincing him that I had just woken up,

would simply set me the same task again himself. And if that

happened I would be here again, still facing the same

Himalayas of horse dung, but without several of the

advantages of the current situation. Frank wouldn"t know

that I had dragged myself valiantly out of bed without ever

being asked; that I had set about finding myself something

to do in order to prove myself as eager for and capable of

work as any of his hired hands. Furthermore—and I can"t

pretend this wasn"t the overriding factor—Oro would know

everything. He would know that my attempted projection of

myself as an honest working man was nothing but a

delusion; most likely, he would think me a pampered little

faggot, and, what"s worse, dishonest. The thought of Oro

coming in here after the agreed hour and a half had elapsed

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

16

and finding that I had completely disregarded his

suggestions—never orders, but genuine attempts to help—

was too cringe-inducing to tolerate. Oro of the open smile

and honey-bronze beauty, I could not disappoint.

Fortified by this decision, I resettled my shovel in my

hands, squared my jaw in what I hoped was a manly

fashion, and turned back toward the stalls. I would show

them, Frank and Oro both. When Oro returned to check, this

place would be spotless.

In any event, “spotless” proved to be something of an

overambitious goal. A better description of the row of stalls,

after I"d had my vigorous way with them, might have been

“ravaged,” or perhaps “incompetently scalped.” (Hey, when in

the ol" Wild West, right?) I"d managed to dispose of the

contents of four of the stalls, shoveling the majority of the

straw and dung out into the wheelbarrow, and subsequently

tossing it on the small mountain behind the building.

Unsurprisingly, that hadn"t been too hard to find. The guys

used it for fertilizer, so it was depleted pretty much on a

daily basis, but even when it was mostly gone, the smell

could have guided any beginner toward the correct spot. By

the time I was done, man
was it plentiful. I had no idea that

horses could shit so much, or that it could be so freakin"

heavy.
Still, I was running on a potent mixture of adrenaline

and anxiety, so the “heavy” factor slipped my concern fairly

early in the game. The only problem was that there always

seemed to be just a few more stalls
,
right when I thought I

must be nearing the end. By the end of the fourth stall, I no

longer had any concept of the passing of time. There was just

me, aching and filthy with sweat and muck and dust, and

the insurmountable, endless task before me. Oh, I was doing

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

17

it well enough, I was pretty sure, but it looked to me like it

could conceivably go on
forever.
And I didn"t want to spend

forever smelling like horse shit.

I had paused for a breather, forearm resting on the

handle of my shovel as I surveyed my temporary domain,

when he came back. Oro: a series of soft-fallen steps through

the straw, and a smile I could feel. I knew he was there

almost before I even heard him, and the hairs on my nape, I

swear to God, stood up. Oh, man.

I"ve never really liked having people stand behind me. It

makes me uncomfortable, like I can feel every inch of space

between my skin and theirs, and it makes my flesh creep.

The muscles of my back were all ready to clench up in self-

defense as Oro approached, but he didn"t stop behind me,

although he brushed past close enough that his forearm

touched my shirt. He settled himself, instead, slightly to the

left of me, on the side where the shovel wasn"t. And then, for

a long, long moment, he just looked.

I have to admit, I was looking, too. Not at the stalls,

which so occupied Oro"s attention, but at him, my forehead

practically touching my sweat-damp arm on the shovel"s

handle, face turned sideways, ostensibly at rest, but really

just to take him in. He had his hands in his pockets, casual,

collected; his elbows turned out loosely, the muscles in his

arms swelling gently under the skin. He still had his hat

neatly, jauntily in place, but there was sweat, now, licking

the hollow of his throat, touching his clavicle within the

opened collar of his shirt. The lines of his profile were as

clean-cut and sharp as the rest of him, his face dark and

fine like a toreador"s, his black eyes watchful. He smelled:

warm
, working-man warm, musky and human, fresh sweat

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

18

and honest toil. The scent of him pricked my nostrils,

resonated between my legs. Abruptly, I turned my face away

and waited.

“Done pretty good here,” he said, when the long moment

finally drew to an end. His smile, when he turned it toward

me, was unclouded and clean. He was
so
clean; I don"t know

why I thought of him so vividly as such, but I did. I couldn"t

help feeling it. I smiled back. I doubt I could have stopped

myself.

“I only managed four stalls,” I pointed out. “And I never

got around to the disinfecting part.”

Oro laughed, rich and heady in the heat. “Four"s plenty

in an hour and a half, man. Hell, I only expected two. Maybe

three, if you were stronger than you look.” He winked at me.

“I guess you must be a
lot
stronger.”

“Oh, yeah?” I could feel my body"s desperation to

respond, to drape itself unconcernedly over the shovel, to

angle itself toward him all wanting, inviting. I struggled

against the urge with every fiber of my being. “How do I
look
,

then?”

He surveyed me for a minute, head quirked slightly to

one side. I could feel myself heating, blood boiling to the

surface of my skin under his gaze. I shuffled my feet, and

tried to look defiantly back at him, chin uplifted, eyebrows

raised in bold inquiry. He laughed a little, as if he"d noticed,

and then stopped laughing, so that what he said was very

serious.

“You look,” he said, “too pretty for Magdalena.

Everybody"s rough as the roads out here.”

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

19

And he turned on his heel, his swagger languid,

unchallenged. “Do the rest,” he called brightly over his

shoulder as he departed. “I"ll be back later.”

I stared after him, voice lost somewhere in my throat. It

hadn"t sounded like an insult, in his gorgeous mouth. But if

not an insult, I couldn"t imagine what it meant. Or rather, I

could imagine all too well, and I thought I"d probably better

stop myself. Oro was a
ranch hand
, I told myself; a cowboy

and a Catholic. When he said I was
pretty
, what he meant

was that he thought I was fey, fragile, too goddamn San

Diego to get anything done around here. Except I"d proven

him wrong in that already, hadn"t I? I"d proven him wrong,

and hell, I"d do it again. I"d do it again
now
, so when he came

back this whole place would be done single-handed.

I hefted my shovel, and stalked into the next stall. The

muscles pulled across my shoulders as I bent to my task,

and it helped a little, the pain, against the imaginings:

against the thought of Oro and his fine-cut, masculine

beauty. There was nothing
rough
about him, whatever he

said.

I shook my head, and repositioned the wheelbarrow by

the door.

I didn"t see Uncle Frank at all, that first day. Oro came

back a couple of hours later with a packet of sandwiches and

a bottle of water; my stomach was protesting so vehemently

by this point that my food-hunger actually outweighed any

attention I might ordinarily have paid to his person. After

rasping my thanks through the thickness of exertion in my

throat, knocking back some water and wolfing down the first

sandwich with barely a pause to chew, I felt a little more

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

20

myself—enough, at least, to notice that he looked pleased.

Impressed, even. I let myself indulge, for a moment, the

glowing sensation in my chest.

“Hungry?” he asked, eyebrow quirking along with the

corner of his mouth (oh, God, his
mouth
).

“Hungry work,” I told him shortly, picking up a second

sandwich and tearing it soundly across the middle. “What

d"you think?”

The combination of physical exertion and hunger—the

sheer
physicality
, maybe, of the morning; the raw sense of

masculine endeavor—had made me confident, unusually

unconcerned. He seemed to like that, too.

“You did good,” he told me, mouth curved around a grin.

“Like you were in any doubt about that, huh?”

“Still nice to hear,” I tossed back at him, stuffing the

half-sandwich into my mouth. Under my breath—and

through a mouthful of sandwich—I scoffed, “
Pretty
.”

I don"t know, even now, whether I expected, or even

wanted him to catch that. But Oro was a sharp one, sharp-

eyed and keen, and his laugh only ripened. “I didn"t mean it

as an insult,
compa.
I can see you have muscles on you.”

At this point, I still had most of a bread roll in my

mouth, which sort of inhibited my capacity for speech. Even

still, I could feel my throat tensing up in surprise, or

anticipation. Oro tossed me a wink, and another packet of

sandwiches. “Here. Keep you going while you disinfect them

all, right?”

And with that, he strode out, the curve of his backside

drawing my eyes under his dirt-smeared denim jeans. I

This Red Rock |
Louise Blaydon

21

started to feel like a pattern was setting in.

I was starting
to feel that, maybe, this might not be a

bad thing.

WHETHER Oro specifically requested charge of me, or if it

was Uncle Frank"s independent idea, I never found out. Or

when, even—had he volunteered himself before he met me?

Was that why he"d known who I was? Or had that been the

sort of thing the whole staff had become aware of by some

kind of vague osmosis, and Oro really had stumbled upon

me all on his own? Maybe he"d asked Frank about me while I

was mucking out the horses. Maybe he"d asked after he"d

brought me the sandwiches, once he knew I was maybe good

for something. Or
maybe
, he"d bumped into Frank at some

point during the day and told him what he had me doing,

and maybe Frank had said, “Oh, yeah? Well, thanks, son;

that saves me a job. Hey, you wanna maybe keep an eye on

him for me the rest of the time? Show him the ropes a little?”

And
maybe
Oro said yes, because he wanted to keep in

Frank"s good books. Or
maybe
he"d said yes because he liked

me, and there were too many
maybes
there to count.

Anyway. Let"s just leave it at me not knowing how things