Handful of Sky (5 page)

A look of slightly irritated puzzlement crossed her uncle’s face. “With you gone I’ll need Pecos to keep the ranch running. You know that Wade isn’t worth a damn if someone doesn’t keep after him every second. At least Hoskins won’t be tempted to sleep on the job if he’s behind the wheel of a semi.”

“But why do I need to go?” Shallie asked, trying to camouflage her misery.

“Look, Shallie”—her uncle leaned forward over the scarred wooden table—“I’ve thought long and hard about this. With me fading more and more out of the picture—” Shallie opened her mouth to protest, but her uncle silenced her and went on—“it’s important for you to get to know the movers and shakers in rodeo. A contact like Jake McIver could be invaluable.”

Shallie knew he was absolutely right.

“You’re not worried about old Jake’s reputation, are you?” he asked with a grin. Jake McIver was a man who had come to favor ever younger girls as he grew older until, at seventy-seven, he was usually to be seen in the
company of a cute young thing who could be, not his daughter, but his granddaughter.

Shallie laughed. “I’d like to see an old goat like that just
try
to chase me around the barn.”

Her uncle joined her laughter. “Doubt that the old coot could remember what he’d been chasing you for, even if he was to catch you.”

Suddenly Shallie felt foolish for having let a worm like Wade Hoskins get her in such a dither. She’d been taking him much too seriously. Perhaps that arrogant cowboy
had
had a point when he told her yesterday that she ought to laugh at herself. And so it was decided: She was going to the Circle M, Jake McIver’s ranch. Shallie got dressed, pulled on her fleece-lined rawhide jacket, and stepped out into the cool, clear early morning air.

The Double L. She’d loved it even before she ever set eyes on it. She loved her father’s dreams for it, which he had shared with his horse-crazy daughter while his wife made noises of disapproval in the background. She looked over the collection of tumbledown stalls and the practice arena where half the wooden slats had been kicked out by crazy broncs and wild bulls. So much work needed to be done and there was never the time or the money to do it. She thought of her father and how he had dreamed that the Double L would one day be a contracting outfit to match any in the country, even Jake McIver’s.

“Someday,” he’d promised her, “there’ll be Double L stock at the National Finals Rodeo.”

Just as every rodeo cowboy dreamed of earning enough points to compete in the National Finals, rodeo’s World Series, every contractor dreamed that his bronc or his bull or his steers would be chosen to challenge the finest the sport had to offer. Shallie shook her head at the memory and kicked a rust-red clump of caliche out of her path. The Double L hadn’t even managed to break out of the amateur circuit yet, much less work its way to the top of the pros. They had so far to go and didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

As Shallie approached the loading pens, she saw Wade surrounded by his sidekicks, Pecos and two other hands. His back was toward her but he was clearly doing a wildly exaggerated imitation of the “riding lesson” she had unsuspectingly given yesterday. His audience collapsed in laughter as he drove his stumpy body through a series of jerky flailings. Shallie felt embarrassment and anger churn her stomach. Her uncle’s words about “fading out of the picture” rang in her ears and Shallie made herself march forward in spite of those emotions. If her father’s dream was ever to be realized, she would have to act, and act decisively, conquering her natural inclination to retreat and forcing herself to act like the contractor she claimed to be. A memory from yesterday’s rodeo gave her a notion of how to do just that.

“Hey, Wade,” she called out, acting as if she were sharing their amusement, “you’re almost as good a riding teacher as I am, except that I only give lessons to champions.” She stared straight at the runty man, dazzling him with her brightest smile. Something in Hoskins’s face quirked uneasily as the other hands, including Pecos, began laughing
with
Shallie and not at her.

“Have you got those steers loaded yet that we’re hauling down to the Circle M?” Shallie’s question came perilously close to a direct order, something she’d never dared before in front of an audience of Hoskins’s cronies. But she’d decided, if she truly was going to be a contractor, now was as good a time as any to start. Hoskins sensed the balance of power between them shifting.

“No, I ain’t.” His answer was a surly challenge that stopped the laughter cold.

“Pecos, give him a hand.” She completely ignored his challenge. “We need to be on the road within the hour.” Pecos looked from Shallie to Wade, then moved off toward the pens. The other hands drifted off to their chores.

As she stepped away, Shallie marveled at just how right the bronc rider had been, at how easy it had been to defuse Hoskins’s undermining of her authority simply by being the one to lead the laughter at herself. Too bad she would never see him again. She would have liked to meet him once more to thank him for that bit of advice. Just that, nothing more. Just to say thanks.

S
he was there at last
—the National Finals in Las Vegas. The stands were packed and he, the nameless bronc rider, was up. A jolt of pleasure shot through Shallie as she realized he was riding Double L’s Zeus. The odd thing, though, was that while all the other cowboys were in their fanciest spangled outfits, he was dressed in nothing more than jeans and adhesive tape from his waist to beneath his armpits. No one seemed to notice.

At the height of the arc of a wild buck, the rider was thrown free. He floated in slow motion, coming to a gentle landing at Shallie’s feet.

“Miss Larkin,” he said, sweeping the hat from his dark head, “I just wanted to tell you that you have the rankest, meanest string of broncs I’ve ever had the privilege of attempting to ride.”

Shallie opened her mouth to speak but his sunglasses
were like a barricade repelling her thoughts. She watched the distorted reflection of her head in the lenses as it bobbed from side to side trying to see around the glasses. Then he understood! He had to take the glasses off before she could speak. He raised his hand and Shallie felt an unearthly exultation. She would see his eyes!

“Hey.” An elbow bit into her ribs. “Hey!”

Shallie’s head jerked up and a keen disappointment bit into her. Even awake she carried the thought from her dream that she was about to learn something of great importance. But instead of staring into the face of the bronc rider who so disturbed her thoughts, the light from the dashboard of the truck shone dully on the grizzled features of Wade Hoskins as he tapped futilely on the GPS screen.

“Piece of crap ain’t workin’. Check the map.” He didn’t bother to soften his harsh order with a “please.” “Find the turnoff for McIver’s ranch.”

Shallie shook off the webs of sleep and shuffled through the stack of maps to find the one Uncle Walter had marked. It wasn’t there. She glanced around the cab and saw the map propped up on the dash directly in front of Hoskins.

“It’s right in front of you.”

“Oh yeah. So it is.” Hoskins pulled the map off the dash and shoved it at Shallie. “Where’s the turnoff?”

Uncle Walter had clearly indicated the road leading
to the Circle M, but Shallie knew that navigation was not the issue. As always, the real issue was her authority. “Take the next right. It should put us onto the spur road to the McIver ranch.”

The big truck lumbered off the highway and onto a narrow, potholed country road. Shallie’s head ached dully. She’d taken the second shift, driving for an hour and a half after they’d left the Double L. Wade had promptly fallen asleep beside her, his mouth gaping open in his slack face. She’d let him sleep another two hours beyond the time when he should have taken over. Then, when she’d tried to waken him, he’d moaned in his sleep and mumbled incoherently.

Shallie suspected that he was playing possum, but she didn’t care to pursue it. Even if it meant driving straight through herself, a sleeping Wade, even if he was faking it, was vastly preferable to a wakeful, leering Wade. So, she’d let him slumber on until he roused himself an hour outside of Austin and took the wheel.

“Take the next gate.” Shallie made her command as unpleasant as she could, hoping to show Hoskins that two could play at surliness. They passed under a high arching gate of black wrought iron. A large M was welded inside a circle at the top. The McIver brand. To Shallie it stood for the biggest and the best in her business. The private road through the McIver property was considerably smoother than the one maintained by the
county that they’d just turned off. The cab was filled with the soft scents of cedar and fresh-cut grass. Shallie took a deep breath. Her nose, attuned to the various nuances of grass, told her it was coastal Bermuda, a species that made excellent hay. They drove on for several miles before spotting a light at the top of a rise.

The light shone on a full-scale rodeo arena complete with bucking chutes and concrete stands. It appeared that a full-scale rodeo was taking place as well. Hoskins parked the truck and they got out. On the far side of the arena, milling about in the darkness, Shallie saw a solid acre of corralled horses.

“Looks like they’re having a buckout.” Hoskins’s voice in the darkness startled Shallie nearly as much as the sight of so many horses penned in one spot.

“Looks that way.”

In the arena, the horses were being run through the chutes and ridden as fast as they could be rigged up. A short cowboy with a face as broad, open, and friendly as Howdy Doody’s made notes on each horse’s performance.

Shallie circled around the bright pool of light flooding the arena, left Hoskins to watch the buckout, and went to the corral full of horses. The animals’ heads churned about catching flashes of moonlight like waves on a midnight sea. She hung on the gate and scrutinized them. For the most part they were a scruffy lot of dinks, sluggish
animals that lacked animation. Perhaps that was why the dappled white roan, tinged a ghostly blue, captured her attention so quickly.

A proud, indomitable spirit flashed from the roan’s eyes. He held his head aloft, nostrils quivering, as if being jammed against such a common herd offended his sensitivities.

Over the years, Shallie had learned that a contractor had to be part cowboy, part lawyer, part veterinarian, and part politician to survive, but that he would never succeed if he was not, above all, a good horse trader. And that, Shallie knew, was her long suit. As good as her uncle was at juggling all the other roles, he bowed to her expertise when they stepped into the auction barn. Judging horseflesh came more as an intuitive gift to Shallie than as a skill she’d had to consciously cultivate. She seemed to have an instinctive knack for knowing which horses, with the right treatment and feed, could be turned from lackluster dinks into high-bucking champions. From the first time she ever accompanied her uncle on a buying trip, she’d been able to pick out those animals with hidden fire.

That first trip out, though, she hadn’t been able to convince her uncle to trust her instincts and bid on a scruffy-looking chestnut gelding. The horse had gone to a producer in Montana. After the chestnut gained sudden notoriety as the rankest horse on the amateur circuit, Uncle Walter had begun paying serious attention to her
perceptions. On her advice, they had acquired Zeus and Odin, the two best broncs in their string.

Shallie never questioned her intuition about horses, which was why, from her first glimpse of the blue roan, she was unshakably certain that this was the horse that could carry the Double L brand to the National Finals. She calmed herself, remembering that she hadn’t even seen the animal buck yet. Still, she thought of the load of steers she’d hauled up and her mind immediately fell to horse trading. If this horse were only half as rank as he looked, he’d be worth a feedlot full of steers. Somehow, she had to see this horse buck and she had to do it before Jake McIver did.

“Miss Larkin?”

Flustered with guilt that someone from the Circle M had caught her in the middle of her scheming, she whirled toward the voice in the darkness. “Yes?” All she could make out was a tall shadow topped by a cowboy hat.

“Welcome to the Circle M. My grandfather and I have been waiting for you.”

Shallie extended her hand. It was an automatic response she had adopted when meeting anyone connected with rodeo. Anyone male. She had found that a firm, no-nonsense handshake was a good method for convincing would-be Romeos that she had no intentions of ever mixing business and pleasure. She was surprised by the feel
of his hand. An uneasy prickling that she couldn’t stop to analyze caused her to shiver. The hand that grasped her own was rough, obviously well-acquainted with hard work, and large enough to make her own seem frail and smooth in comparison. Shallie recorded all these impressions in less than the blink of an eye. As her thumb slipped over the back of his hand, she was jolted by one more discovery: a lump of scar tissue at the base of the middle finger. She ripped her hand from his, thoroughly disconcerted to be standing in front of the man she had been dreaming of such a short time before.

“So, you remember your old riding student?”

How could she have failed to recognize that voice? Shallie wondered, then realized that the uneasiness she’d experienced upon first hearing it had been a warning signal. One she shouldn’t have ignored.

“I told you we’d meet again.” It was clear from his tone that he was not someone accustomed to having his wishes denied. “I’m sorry you had to spend fourteen hours in a semi, but that was the only way I could arrange it.”

“You
arranged it?”

“Sure. Don’t you think we have dogging steers down here in Texas? I had to convince my grandfather that Double L’s were really something special to get him to call your uncle.”

Shallie was flabbergasted. First, to have this phantom
figure materialize as if out of her dreams, then to learn not only that he was Jake McIver’s grandson, but that he had actually maneuvered their reunion.