Handful of Sky (8 page)

His rosined glove squeaked as he jerked it down on his hand, catching the narrow leather strap at its top between his front teeth and pulling it tight. The gloved hand reached down to find the exact point where leather and flesh both conspired to give him the best possible grip.

“Get the gate.”

Shallie jumped down and ran around to the front of the chute. She grabbed the rope attached to the gate and looked up at Hunt. The mental energy he had produced had taken on a physical life of its own. It coursed into his broad shoulders, his sinewy right arm. It brought the well-defined muscles of his back to quivering life. The energy flowed down into the firm hills of his buttocks, the columns of muscle that were his legs. It streamed through his body, pumping every bit of tissue with the same iron determination that locked his brain. He eased down on the bronc’s back.

The startled roan twitched. The sting of fear trapped Shallie’s breath. She had no proof yet that the horse wouldn’t rear up, crushing Hunt beneath its muscled bulk. The horse kicked an angry hoof into the creaking
planks of the chute, then settled down, allowing Hunt to claim the position that would best allow him to control the animal between his legs. He turned his toes out, locking his ankles, his spurs aimed directly at the bronc’s shoulders. Then, with the practiced precision of a conductor raising his baton, Hunt nodded his head.

“Let’s see this horse.”

Shallie yanked on the rope in her hand and the gate snapped open. In the same instant Hunt threw his free hand high and the bronc broke into the arena. All the animal’s pent-up rage was directed toward one objective: ridding itself of the man on its back. Shallie caught a glimpse of the horse’s eyes and her pulse pounded faster. They flashed with a fiery light far brighter than that reflected from the moon. They recalled to Shallie’s mind the rage-darkened eyes of stallions painted by El Greco. The roan lunged to the center of the arena, making one heart-stopping buck so high that it seemed he thought he could escape along the platinum avenue paved by the moon. For a fraction of a second, horse and rider hung in the air, suspended in a moonbeam’s glow. It was as if Pegasus lived again, called back to earth by a man with a spirit to equal the mythical greatness of his own. Shallie felt the ground shudder when he landed. Hunt took the jolt with a rollicking cry of exultation that pierced the night. Shallie felt as if she were witnessing a savage ritual in which man and beast mingled their natures.

The roan leaped for the moon again, fishtailing its body with a wicked shimmy. Hunt clung to the blue-dappled back anticipating each move and matching it. The hooves pounded down again, pointed like a diver’s hands outstretched to pierce the water. Shallie half expected the earth to part beneath the animal’s onslaught. It didn’t. Hunt absorbed the impact, letting it ripple fluidly through him. Tales of the greatest bronc riders in rodeo’s hundred-year history flipped through Shallie’s mind. She could find none to equal what she was seeing. Hunt combined raw physical strength and technical mastery with a kind of artistry Shallie had seen all too rarely in the arena.

Then, with no warning, the crafty roan changed tactics and tore out in a dead run heading straight for a section of fence shadowed by the concrete bleachers.

“Jump,” Shallie screamed. Hunt was one move ahead of both Shallie and the horse. He turned the rigging loose and rolled off the runaway horse’s back, landing with a catlike grace on the plowed dirt of the arena.

The instant the hated weight fell from his back, the roan stopped dead. His goal accomplished, he became the picture of docility. Hunt sprang to his feet, ripped his riding glove from his hand, and tossed it into the air with a wild whoop. Shallie ran to him. The moonlight bounced off his face, reflecting an expression of the purest joy she had ever seen.

As they met in the middle of the arena, Hunt swept her off of her feet and whirled her around, his strong hands spanning her waist. Like survivors of a shipwreck or winners of a sweepstakes they were joined by the magnitude of the experience they had just shared. Hunt put her down and sucked in a deep lungful of air.

“That is
some
horse.” He spoke each word distinctly.

Shallie laughed, infected by the joy radiating from a man who had just put in the performance of a lifetime. “You rode Pegasus,” she marveled.

“Pegasus?”

“I’m calling him Pegasus,” she explained, as if it were a foregone conclusion that the horse would be hers. “I’ve been saving the name for him.”

His hands still around her waist, he gazed into her upturned face while she congratulated him with her eyes, her smile. It seemed like nothing more than the logical extension of their shared joy when he pulled her to him. Her hands slid shyly up along his arms to the smooth bulges of muscle. She felt his power pulse beneath her fingertips. The glow from his accomplishment bathed them both in a golden radiance. He smelled the way his wild, whooping cry of exultation had sounded. Their bodies met at the two points where her erect nipples probed the shield of flesh that was his chest. The feel of his chest against the sensitive points of her breasts both disturbed and disarmed
Shallie. Before she herself was even fully aware of it, Hunt saw and responded to the longing that shone from her face.

Lightly, tentatively, his mouth grazed hers. Her breath sounded with a ragged catch in her throat. It was the signal that triggered the release of Hunt’s passion. He gathered her to himself, crushing her lips with his, pressing her body against his. His thatch of springy curls tickled the palms of Shallie’s hands as she raked her fingers through it.

Shallie clung to him. Never had a kiss affected her this way. She felt as if her legs wouldn’t hold her, as if her very bones had melted in the white-hot flame that smoldered in her belly, fanning waves of dizzying heat through her. It had been so long since she’d felt a man’s body burning against her, making her aware of the softness of her own flesh.

Since rodeo had become her life, rodeo cowboys were the only men she met and the only men she absolutely could not allow herself to become involved with. That was the surest way she could imagine to become a standing joke with the men behind the chutes. She’d heard their crude jibes often enough to know that no bedroom conquest was sacred. She had no intention of ever allowing herself to be used as the butt of such locker-room jesting.

As if reinforcing her resolution, Pegasus whinnied
in the shadowed corner of the arena. She pressed away from Hunt.

“We’d better get him back in the corral.” Her voice sounded as wobbly as she felt. Hunt’s arms around her were as secure as the bars of a prison. For a long moment he didn’t unlock them.

Then, “You’re right. That outlaw nearly jerked my arm out of its socket. If I don’t soak it I’m going to feel like something that was ridden hard and hung up wet by tomorrow, and I’ll have to let you teach all those young studs coming for the rodeo school how to ride broncs.”

When Shallie’s prize was safely corralled, Hunt asked, “Shall we drink to your find?”

Shallie hesitated, afraid to speak. What was a simple invitation to Hunt represented much more to her. She wasn’t certain exactly what she felt for Hunt McIver, just that he stirred emotions in her which no man had ever touched before and that more time in his company would only intensify those dangerous feelings.

While she was still grappling for an answer, Hunt took her hand in his. Shallie let him lead her up the hill to the dark stone house at its summit.

A
maze of oak-lined paths
led Shallie and Hunt past the fifty-year-old house’s main entrance to a separate apartment. Inside, it reflected a character far different from that of the main house. The low-slung sectional furnishings in a rough-woven charcoal fabric were stylishly modern. A thick pewter-gray carpet covered the wide expanse of the living room. A picture window opened into the night, offering a view of the shimmering boulevard that the wide Colorado River cut across the McIver property. Glass-fronted shelves of richly grained rosewood lined one wall, displaying a selection of decanters and crystal ware. Hunt stepped toward it, sliding a door open and pulling out a bottle of Courvoisier brandy and two snifters.

“Not bad for a rodeo cowboy,” Shallie teased as they sank into the plush sofa.

“Rodeo paid for all of this in only the most indirect
of ways. I’m sure you’re well aware that a man, even when he’s riding well and winning, can still put out more money in entry fees, airplane tickets, and hotel rooms than he actually wins in a year. No, the only real money in bronc riding comes from endorsements, commercials.”

Shallie studied Hunt’s heavily lashed eyes, his high-planed cheeks, the sensuously brooding mouth, and began to make a hazy connection between those features and the face on countless ads for everything from jeans to light beer. She knew anyone else in rodeo would have recognized him immediately, but it was just a measure of how far removed she was from the sport’s more glamorous side that it had taken her this long to connect Hunt with the cowboy on all those ads. Ordinarily such a realization would have made her feel awkward and inadequate, but the exhilaration from the moment they had just shared in that moonlit arena seemed to wrap them in a charmed circle that warded off Shallie’s insecurities. It also emboldened her enough to state:

“There’s something I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” Hunt prompted her, leaning back into a corner of the sofa as if taking command of the piece of furniture.

“You said earlier that you’d been having a run of bad luck on the circuit.”

Hunt’s answer was a tautly spoken understatement. “You might say that.”

“How can that be? You just put the best ride on a horse I’ve ever seen and you did it in an unlit arena on a bronc you knew nothing about.” Shallie’s enthusiasm carried her away as she mentally relived the ride.

Hunt chuckled, joining her in the memory. “It was a pretty fair ride.”

“Fair ride?” Shallie echoed his self-deprecating words. “It was even better than your ride on Zeus, which was the best bronc ride I’d ever seen until you topped it tonight.”

“Aren’t you starting to see a pattern?” Hunt’s voice tightened with mild sarcasm. “I can ride when there aren’t a few thousand people breathing down my neck. It’s been this way ever since I acquired this.” He held out his hand, back side up, to reveal the angry knot of scar tissue at the base of his middle finger.

“My memento of the National Finals two years ago. I was there to claim the championship that should have been mine. I’d led in the standings by a wide margin all year long. But I drew a nasty, chute-fighting horse who smashed my hand. Split it open like an overripe melon.” Hunt squeezed out the last two words. He paused to massage the keratinous mass on the back of his hand, gazing at it as if it were the crystal ball that had foretold the seasons of defeat which followed it. Hunt balled the injured hand into a fist and drove it into the palm of his other hand.

“Like any other cowboy in rodeo I’ve broken about
everything the human body has to offer. But this—the hand—that was different. My link to the animal was broken. I suppose I tried to start riding again too soon, before the nerves and tendons had had a chance to heal. It was the big show in Albuquerque. I’d never missed that rodeo, always managed to score well.

“I was still stinging from the humiliation of leaving the National Finals in an ambulance and wanted to come back with a vengeance. I still don’t know what happened, but when I got into the chute again in front of a crowd, my hand just wouldn’t stay locked around the rigging. That failure, the feel of my hand being torn loose, combined with the sound of the crowd roaring in my ears, dug into some deep part of me. The part I ride from. Now, whenever I feel those hungry eyes digging into me, I . . .” The words trailed off as Hunt sat looking at the hand that had betrayed him.

A dozen clichés, expressions of sympathy, of understanding, ran through Shallie’s mind. She discarded them all. They rang too false in the face of Hunt’s genuine anguish.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Hunt said before the words of sympathy he couldn’t bear to hear began. That wasn’t why he’d spoken. “I guess it’s because you seem to feel for rodeo what I do. On the surface it’s stupid for me to keep pushing myself, to keep risking my life in the ring. I make all the money I could ever want
from commercials and putting on rodeo schools and a few other ventures. But—”

He paused and Shallie was sure he wouldn’t go on, but his words, too long dammed up, burst forth. “I know I can still ride. I don’t care about winning another championship buckle. That wouldn’t prove a thing to me. But I know that I’ve still got some rides in me that are better than anything I’ve done. That knowledge just keeps gnawing at me.”

“I know you’ve got them in you too.” Shallie’s words were a flat statement of fact scrubbed clean of sympathy or pity. Things she knew Hunt didn’t want.

“Enough of this maudlin horseshit,” he declared abruptly, as if suddenly realizing how much of himself he’d revealed, and embarrassed to find himself so exposed. He drained away his brandy in one gulp and stood up. “If I don’t get in that whirlpool right now, I’m going to seize up like an overheated engine.” He headed down the hallway, stopping only to pull a flimsy garment from the closet. “Here, try this on and come and soak with me.”

He disappeared down the hall, leaving Shallie holding a skimpy tank suit. From the end of the hall came the sound of rushing water.

Like a flock of pigeons, all of Shallie’s insecurities and uncertainties came home to roost. Who wore this suit last? she wondered staring at the flimsy bit of Lycra. An overwhelming desire to cut and run swamped her. An
equally strong desire, however, held her rooted to the spot. She thought of Pegasus and remembered that they really hadn’t sealed their deal. She needed Hunt’s assurance that the horse would truly be hers.

So, telling herself that it was for the blue roan, she stepped into the dressing room, choosing to ignore the troubling evidence which indicated that a force stronger even than her desire to carve out a career in rodeo compelled her to stay. After she’d slipped on the suit, she grabbed a thick towel hanging from a rack on the aromatic cedar wall and wrapped herself in it.