Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (10 page)

He smiled sardonically. “Turner gave me a choice—work for him at triple my present wages, or work for you full-time.” Rio’s drawl deepened. “I allowed as how I’d rather dig wells in bedrock with a toothpick than work for him.”

“Damn him,”
Hope said savagely, furious. Turner knew she couldn’t afford to pay a hand full-time wages. He had counted on squeezing Rio, who needed a paying job. “I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Like hell you will,” Rio said coolly, no drawl left. “Any problems I have with Turner are mine, not yours.”

“Not this time. Turner doesn’t want you working for me. He threatened to cut off my water unless I fired you.”

Rio said something beneath his breath that Hope was just as glad not to quite hear.

“When?” he demanded.

“A little more than a week ago. It was just a bluff. I called it and that was the end of it.”

“Well, that explains something.”

“What?”

“Why Turner suddenly found twenty hours a day of work for me to do at his ranch. He was making sure I was too dog-tired to sweet-talk you into anything he wouldn’t like.”

“Too tired? He doesn’t know you very well.”

Rio gave her a sidelong glance. “You hinting that I’m a tomcat who’s never too tired for a quick one?”

She laughed almost bitterly. “I’m saying you have better things to do than screw around with me.”

“Turner says you’re engaged to him.”

Anger sent scarlet rising in Hope’s cheeks. “He’s lying.”

Rio measured the truth and fury in her and nodded with a satisfaction he didn’t show. “Is that why you’re carrying a rifle in the water truck these days?”

She gave a casual, on-cue shrug that was worthy of her best modeling days. “Mason said there were a lot of snakes around the wells.”

“Smart man,” Rio said. Then with deadly calm he asked, “Did Turner make a try for you at his well?”

She looked at Rio’s eyes and saw the promise of violence in their cold blue-black depths. She looked away and said nothing, not wanting to lie to him.

“Hope?” he asked softly.

“It wasn’t anything serious,” she said finally. “It just takes a while for the word
no
to sink into Turner’s thick skull.”

Rio hooked a thumb toward the heavy cast-iron pipe wrench that was propped against the truck’s rear tire. “Try using that to drive home your point.”

“I did.”

He glanced sideways, saw that she meant it, and smiled like a wolf. Silently he added one more to the list of things he would do on the Valley of the Sun: if he had to leave the ranch for any reason, he would be certain that Hope wasn’t alone.

Then Rio remembered that he wouldn’t always be around to protect her.

Hope saw his sudden frown. “I have enough money to pay wages,” she said. “Not as much as Turner, but—”

“No,” Rio cut in. “Our deal hasn’t changed. Room and board for me, range and a stud for my mares.”

“ ‘For as long as the water flows.’ ”

He raked his hat from his head, holding on to the Stetson’s dusty black curves with fingers that were weathered and lean. Eyes that were used to focusing on distant, wild places measured the surrounding lands. He didn’t see whatever he was looking for. With a disgusted word he replaced his hat and yanked on the rim.

“I have to find the damn stuff first.”

What Rio didn’t say was that he had been looking.

He had come up as dry as the land itself.

Ten

“A
FEW DAYS
ago some of the slopes got rain down toward Turner’s ranch,” Hope said, watching Rio from the corner of her eye, wondering why he looked so grim. “Maybe it will rain here. Anything would help.”

Reluctantly Rio focused his attention on the sky instead of the water he sensed was somewhere beneath the dry land, waiting to be found, waiting as it had for a thousand thousand years. Squinting against the sun, he measured the day on an inner, instinctive scale he had learned to trust.

A haze had formed above the peaks. Within the haze, thicker streamers of clouds were condensing as he watched. Instead of being painfully clear or brassy with dust, the air had a silver shimmer to it.

Moisture.

Well, that’s something,
Rio thought. Not the end of the drought, but better than a kick in the butt with a dusty boot, which was all they had gotten up to now.

“Rain by tonight.” His voice was deep and certain. “A decent rain. Not enough to bring up the water table a whole lot, but it should revive a few of the seeps.”

Hope let out a sigh that was almost a groan.

He smiled slightly. “Don’t let down yet. We’re not off water-hauling duty. But for a week or so we’ll only have to make one trip a day, twice at most. We’ll have to start hauling feed, though.”

“I’ll do the hauling. I hired you to find a well, not to be a ranch hand.”

“That’s right,” he said agreeably. “You didn’t hire me. I volunteered.”

“I can’t let you—”

He cut off her words with a dark blue glance that told her he was every bit as determined as she was. He was bigger, too, with a masculine power she couldn’t hope to match.

But Rio wasn’t like John Turner. Rio would settle disagreements with words, not raw physical strength.

“If we share the water hauling, you’ll have time to ride the land with me,” he continued.

The words surprised Rio even as he spoke them. He had been doing his best not to be alone with Hope. Yet, as he heard his own words, he admitted to himself that she was a big part of the reason he had offered to find a new well for the Valley of the Sun. The thought of riding the land with Hope had flowed deeply beneath his offer, like artesian water beneath a layer of unyielding slate.

He couldn’t be her lover, but he could share her dream for a time, filling the emptiness that had come to him long ago, when he had stopped believing in his own dreams.

“I’ll bet there are parts of the ranch that you’ve never seen,” he said softly. “It’s your land, Hope. Your future. Your dream. You should know every hard, beautiful inch of it.”

Caught by his words, she looked at him with a longing she didn’t know how to conceal or control. Like the land she loved, Rio could be grim and seductive by turns. His eyes were as deeply blue as twilight condensing into night. And like the night, he was alone.

She sensed very clearly the isolation in him, the darkness that lay beneath his smile, the long times of silence when he saw no one, heard nothing but the wind, and spoke only in the depths of his own mind. She felt a driving need to know the secrets hidden in his depths, the riches and sweetness that lay beneath a hard surface that no one had ever breached.

And because she wasn’t a fool, she also wondered what dangers were waiting beneath his rugged surface, fault lines where reality could shift suddenly, crushing the unwary.

Yet danger, too, was part of why Hope loved the land. The Valley of the Sun accepted few people, and none of them easily. The children of the land knew how to survive. They also knew how to
live,
how to take a single moment and find in it an incandescent joy that few people ever knew.

The land had given her the incredible, silky coolness of water in the midst of drought. She had known the shimmering flash of light as the sun sank behind a stark, blue-black ridge, and she had tasted the piñon-scented breeze that flowed out of canyon mouths when everywhere else the air was still. She had shared the terrible power and beauty of an eagle swooping down on its prey, and savored the lush, secret perfume of a night-blooming cactus.

And always, always, there was the land itself, a silent symphony in every tone of gold and brown, moonrise and night.

These were just a few of the moments of intense pleasure, of soul-deep awareness of being
alive
, that the Valley of the Sun gave to those who understood the land. Hope wanted to share those moments with Rio, and to discover what other moments he had found to share with her.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’d like to ride the land with you.”

Rio’s midnight-blue eyes memorized Hope. He saw both the darkness and the light in her hazel glance. The darkness he understood.

The light fascinated him as much as it made him wary.

“I’ll unload my gear at the house,” he said neutrally. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll take the east bedroom upstairs. That way you and Mason won’t feel like you have to tiptoe through my territory every time you use the back porch.”

“Sounds good.”

Hope ignored the flash of sensual awareness that came at the thought of Rio sleeping in the room next to hers. Even if he was sleeping on the floor in her bedroom, she wouldn’t have to lie awake waiting for him to crawl into bed with her. Not by so much as a gesture had he showed any real sexual interest in her.

He liked her, though. She was sure of it. Even Mason had noticed it. He said that he had never seen Rio smile so much as he did when Hope was around.

“You going to fill the Hope’s tank next?” he asked, referring to her slowly failing well.

“Yes.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“Have you eaten yet?” she asked.

He shrugged.

Hope looked at the level of the tank she was filling. “I’ll be finished here in about twenty minutes. Breakfast in thirty-five.”

“You don’t have to make—”

“Better hustle,” she said, cutting across his objection. “If your boots aren’t under the table when the eggs are finished, I’ll feed every bit of your food to the pigs we don’t have. That would be a terrible waste of fresh eggs.”

His smile flashed, a hard curve of white against his dark face. He touched his hat brim in a brief salute. “Yes,
ma’am,
” he drawled, his tone both soft and suitably awed.

She tried not to smile at his gentle teasing and ended up laughing out loud. Rio’s response was that of a polite, slightly backward boy, yet he radiated a seasoned masculinity that was as unmistakable as it was fascinating. It was impossible not to be amused by the difference between the bashful words and the confident reality of the man.

He saw her struggle not to smile, heard her laughter, and winked at her just before he turned to go back to the house.

He didn’t know who was more surprised by the wink, Hope or himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so lighthearted, as if the day ahead was full of new places and possibilities to explore. There was something revitalizing about being in the presence of Hope, whether it was the woman or the simple fact of hope itself.

The memory of Rio’s teasing kept Hope’s mood light even when the brass coupling on the hose proved unusually stubborn. She whacked it apart with the heavy wrench, put everything back in its proper place, and drove the truck out of the pasture.

After she washed up outside, she let herself into the kitchen through the back porch. A single glance told her that Rio hadn’t taken any chances on missing breakfast. He had set a place for himself—plate, silverware, coffee mug, napkin.

And his boots were tucked neatly under the table.

Hope laughed, feeling like a teenager again. She had expected many things after hearing Mason’s description of Rio, but a dry sense of the ridiculous wasn’t one of them.

Still smiling, she lit the oven, turned it as low as it would go, and put Rio’s plate and a big platter inside. With no wasted motions, she took thick slices of bacon out of the refrigerator and draped them in a heavy cast-iron pan to cook. While the bacon sizzled she cut up potatoes into another black pan to fry.

When the bacon and potatoes were crisp and ready, she moved them onto the platter and tucked it into the oven again. Four slices of bread disappeared into the toaster. They popped up after a minute, transformed into crunchy brown squares. She buttered the toast and stashed it in the oven to stay warm.

As soon as she heard Rio’s soft footsteps on the stairs, she reached up to the open cupboard shelf where she kept fresh eggs in an unglazed pottery bowl. When she brought the bowl down to eye level, she made a sound of surprise. A scattering of golden blossoms were tucked among the smooth, creamy curves of the eggs. The tiny wildflowers had bloomed out of season following a desert shower.

Rio must have picked the flowers on his way off of Turner’s ranch. It was the only place around that had known rain in months.

The scent of the flowers was a delicate caress and a silent promise of life renewing itself despite the harshest drought. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, filling herself with both the fragrance and the promise.

Emotion twisted through Rio as he watched Hope from the doorway. He would have given away everything he owned for the right to hold her, to inhale her promise as deeply as she was breathing in the fragrance of flowers.

But to do that would be to make promises of his own, promises he couldn’t keep.
Brother-to-the-wind.

When Hope opened her eyes, she saw Rio watching her with an expression that was close to hunger and even closer to regret. She smiled at him, wishing that he wasn’t a temporary kind of man, wanting him anyway, wanting him even though she knew that he wouldn’t take her.

She didn’t know that her smile was an echo of his own expression, hunger and regret mingling into a yearning too deep for words.

“Thank you,” she said huskily.

He watched her fingertip stroke a soft petal. He wished that it was his skin being touched so gently by her.

“My grandmother called them rain flowers,” he said. His voice was almost rough with the beat of his blood, his hunger, the rushing need he refused to give in to. “She said they were the only gold that mattered in this land.”

“What did your grandfather call them?” Hope asked, remembering Mason saying that one of Rio’s grandfathers had been a Zuni shaman.

Rio’s eyes narrowed as he tried to remember rituals from deep in his past. Slowly knowledge condensed like clouds across an inner sky, bringing a rain of childhood memories. The soft golden blossoms were medicine flowers, revered for their survival in the face of the harshest conditions.

Softly he spoke in phrases that had odd rhythms, ritual intonations, sacred sounds from a time and a place and a culture that had never been truly his, for his only culture and solace was the land.

He didn’t translate the words into English for Hope. There was no translation that anyone would understand. His grandfather’s spiritual center had been a blending of Zuni and Navajo, Apache and missionary Christian rituals. It had worked for his grandfather in ways that Rio understood but couldn’t explain, one man’s balancing of the ageless animism of Indian heritage with the overwhelming reality of modern European man.

“There’s no real translation for the flower’s name,” Rio said. Then, softly, he added, “I’ve always called these flowers
hope,
for they bloom at times and in places where nothing else can survive.”

Silence stretched between Hope and Rio, a silence that shivered with unspoken words and hungers. As she looked away from the midnight-blue depths of his eyes, she realized that for the first time in her life she wanted a man, truly wanted him.

And then she knew it was deeper than mere wanting. It was
need,
a raw emptiness that she had never known before. The thought of not having Rio, of never having him, was a pain so intense she had to fight back a cry of protest.

Hope’s hands trembled as she filled a shallow earthenware saucer with a thin layer of water. Carefully she picked the small blossoms out of the bowl of eggs and floated the flowers on the transparent shimmer of liquid. She placed the saucer gently on the table between her place and Rio’s.

The blossoms shivered with each movement of the water, as though they were alive and taking quick, tiny breaths.

“How do you like your eggs?” she asked, her voice husky with all the things she wanted to say, and knew she shouldn’t.

“Over easy.”

Rio reached past Hope to pick up the huge black coffeepot that was warming on the back of the stove. His arm brushed over hers. It was an accident, but the brief sliding contact sent heat surging through him. He remembered the instant weeks ago when her breasts had pressed against him while she wrestled with the stubborn coupling on the canvas hose. The tactile memory was as clear and hot as the flame burning beneath the cast-iron pan.

The intensity of his response to a memory and a casual touch both surprised and unsettled him. Nothing had gotten underneath his skin like this for a long, long time.

He had thought that nothing could.

None of his turmoil showed in his face as he poured himself a cup of strong coffee. Life had taught him to show no more expression than that of an eagle arrowing out of the sky to claim its prey.