Lady Be Bad (25 page)

His muttered curses were drowned under a sea
of terry cloth as he pulled the tennis shirt over his head. “So the
Victorian Aunt never existed. Mathilda was, as H. L. Mencken
coined, an ecdysiast, and you’ve been secretly laughing at me all
this time.” Bram tossed the shirt at her. His eyes echoed his hair
– black with a burnishment of cobalt blue. “What else have you been
laughing at, fair Roxanne?”

“I wasn’t exactly laughing at you,” she
protested, her tone decidedly censorial. “I wanted to prove to you
that even after twelve dates and four weeks of time you’ve yet to
really know the woman you claim to love.” Roxanne found her
smugness and complacent attitude dissipating under an onslaught of
pure feminine awareness and appreciation of Abraham Tyler’s naked
torso.

She could easily list a dozen women who’d
swoon over viewing a chest like his – including Aunt Mathilda!
Especially Aunt Mathilda,
her mind teased her.
She was a
lady who reveled in viewing an undraped body, artistic adoration
notwithstanding. Bram’s upper body would inspire an artist to brush
in hand to capture on canvas his magnificent male form. Roxanne’s
half-hooded gaze flowed along the sinewy landscape of his broad
shoulders before transversing a voyeur’s path through the curly
black hair that forested his firm flesh.

She silently cursed the sport of tennis for
contributing to Bram’s athletic physique. Why couldn’t his chest
have been concave and in dire need of weight training? Why hadn’t
she asked for his pants?

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“I found ‘em! I found ‘em!” The youthful
rider reined his pony so sharply that the brown and white pinto
reared and made the other horses skitter sideways, snorting
uneasily. “Wait’ll you see – you won’t believe – but it’s true –
it’s real” The boy’s words became tangled by his excitement. “Crazy
but real. They’re there. I saw them.” He held up his palm.
“Honest.”

“Take it easy, son,” commanded a husky,
authoritative voice. “Here, cool down with this.” A canteen was
passed by twelve pairs of hands until it reached its mark. “Billy,
you shouldn’t have gone off on your own. We were just about to turn
ourselves into a search party.”

Blue eyes watched in silent amusement while
the thirteen-year-old’s face went through animated changes as he
guzzled the canteen water with hearty abandon, finishing with a
loud burp.

Billy Campbell wiped the back of his hand
across his mouth, mixing a dribble of water with dust that smeared
a dirty path over freckled cheeks. “I – I’m sorry, Mr. Devlin, but”
he gulped, “wait till you hear what I found.”

“Just what did you find?”

“Tracks.” Billy yelped. “Big tracks. Biggest
things I’ve ever seen.”

“I knew it, Thor,” Nate Garvin interjected.
“Those damn rustlers are usin’ trucks to steal the cattle.” He
yanked down the brim on the sweat-stained raffia straw hat to
further shade his eyes from the bright July sun. “Probably an
eighteen-wheeler. Describe what you saw, boy.”

“Not tire tracks,” Billy told the foreman.
“Animal, Nate. Funny ones. Like this.” His arms formed a circle.
“Cat tracks too. Big. Real big.”

“Stop exaggeratin’ boy,” Nate demanded over
the excited whispers of the two other teenagers who were riding
with the wranglers. Saddle leather creaked under his lean weight as
he turned to his boss. “What the hell was in your canteen,
Thor?”

“Spring water.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me!” Billy’s
plaintive falsetto sliced through the chatter. Taking a deep
breath, the teenager sat taller in the saddle. “Well, I saw more
than just tracks,” he added stubbornly. “I heard –“

“And just what did you hear, boy?” Nate spat
a stream of tobacco juice at an untrampled anthill.

Billy’s gaze didn’t waver. “Snarling. Lots of
snarling and … trumpeting.”

“Snarlin’ and trumpetin’?” The foreman gave a
loud hoot that was echoed by the ranch hands. He closed one brown
eye, and stared with cold contemplation at the surly youth. “Say,
didn’t you boys stay up late last night watchin’ horror movies on
Thor’s vid-e-o gadget? I say your ‘magination’s workin’ overtime.
Maybe you had a … day mare.”

“This wasn’t my imagination or a day mare
either.” Billy shifted his gaze to Thor. “I – I saw one of ‘em, Mr.
Devlin.” His dark eyes seemed to double in size, dominating his
small face. “It was big. Big as a mountain. Covered with fur and
tusks. Tusks long as a fence rail. It – it was
…pre—prehysterical!”

Thor studied the youth for a moment, then
cleared his throat. “All right, Billy Campbell, lead on to this
prehistorical
find.”

“Yes, sir!” Wheeling the pony left, Billy let
out a war cry that he hoped would echo the twenty-two miles over
the Continental Divide to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

Forty-eight hooves thundered a path through
the prairie grasses, trampling the pasqueflowers and slashing the
blossoms on the yellow bells. The riders did not temper their
heat-lathered horses until the towering aspen grew too thick in the
groves to allow any speed.

“The clearing’s comin’ up,” a breathless
Billy yelled. “That’s where I first spotted all the tracks. I saw
the – the beast at the base of the escarpment.”

Thor’s hand signal halted the riders at the
edge of the coppice. “Maybe we better take a long-distance look-see
at your beast.” He reached into his saddlebag for binoculars.

Nate shook his head. “Beast, huh? I’ll be
damned if I don’t think your ‘magination is runnin’ like the
boy’s.”

“It goes with the territory,” came his boss’s
grinning pronouncement. “Time seems to stand still here. Glacier
Country has peaks so steep and remote they’ve never been climbed
and contains virtually every predator and prey species since the
Ice Age.”

The foreman emitted a disgusted snort. “Yeah,
but you don’t actually believe that Billy saw a –a…”

“Stranger things, Nate.” His voice was oddly
noncommittal. Thor focused on the vast eminence of jagged limestone
mountains. The formidable landscape never failed to hold him in awe
of Nature’s freezing hand that eons ago carved cirques, shaved
peaks, and moved mountains. “I haven’t been in this area since I
was a kid.”

He stared at the tortuous escarpment. The
dark, steep cliffs, gnarled precipices, and craggy summit haunted
an otherwise sunny azure sky. The prevailing atmosphere on this
pocket of ranch land was different. Disquieting. Eerie. Primeval.
Prehistoric.

A childhood memory stirred within Luthor
Devlin’s brain. A long forgotten door slowly creaked open and
released a ghost. He tried to shake off the mood but failed. It had
been here, in this savage-looking place, where at the age of
thirteen, he had met a
beast.

A beast that had attacked without
provocation. Eight feet, eight hundred pounds of rogue black
grizzly. Thor had lost his horse and nearly his life to the animal
and for a long time, both day and night, fear became his constant
companion. His thumb and forefinger massaged away beads of sweat
that dampened his thick black mustache.

“Godforsaken place,” Nate muttered, his body
feeling chilled despite the heat. “Hell, there ain’t nothin’ here.”
He added, “I’ve been foreman for forty-five years and ain’t never
crossed this way. No need to. Cattle don’t stray here. Nor horses.”
His head hunched between raised, protective shoulders. “Nothin’ but
rocks and sky. Maybe a few mountain goats. But I’ll bet a week’s
pay that there ain’t no beast. Probably just an oversized
goat!”

“I’ll take that bet,” Billy snapped. “Because
I know what I saw and –“

A groaning bellow erupted, an indescribable,
continuous confusion of sound that shook the towering pines and
sent rocks and sand drizzling from the crags.

Suddenly silent riders tried to stabilize
their excited horses.

“There! I told you!” came the teenager’s
gleeful chorus. The Billy sobered. “You don’t suppose that’s a cry
of hunger?”

“Don’t worry. We’re not here to be anything’s
lunch.” Thor looped the binoculars around the saddle horn and
reached to check the bullets in the breech of the .357 Magnum
holstered at his waist. “Boys, I want you at least six feet behind
the last man.” His voice was a cool assumption of command that
eliminated any further comments. “Let’s go. Quietly. Carefully.”
His boot heels cued the stallion into a cautious walk.

Aspen, pine, and fir became less and less.
Thor took silent note of the unusual rutted tracks in the clearing.
Then the landscape again yielded to the limestone rocks and
twisted-trunked evergreens that seemingly grew out of a thick foggy
blanket.

Thor stared at the tumbled and warped
architecture of deathbed colors that surrounded him. “This isn’t
right,” came his thoughtful murmur. “The land couldn’t have changed
this much. And this thick mist. No, this definitely is not right.
Nate, I –“ Thor stuttered into silence when visibility abruptly
increased. There, in the distance, his eyes locked onto Billy’s
beast.

The first whispered words that tumbled from
Nate’s lips were more prayer than blasphemy. “What in hell is
that?”

“Mammoth. A woolly mammoth.” Thor’s low tone
echoed the expression of disbelief that had settled on his
face.

“Look at the size of that thing,” muttered
five wranglers in unison. “What d’ya guess, boss?”

“Fourteen feet. Four tons. Plus the tusks.
Those curved pieces of ivory look to be a good twelve feet.”

Twenty-four eyes widened in further amazement
watching as the huge, dark gray, fur-covered mammoth proceeded to
use his head as a battering ram to topple a twenty-foot aspen. The
bull’s stomach rumbled noisily all the while his six-foot trunk
calmly began to strip the branches and place them in his mouth.

“Where in hell did it come from?” Nate
hissed.

“Billy’s beast is set to celebrate his ten
thousandth birthday,” Thor countered, laying a calming hand against
this horse’s neck. “Steady there, boy. I –.”

“Boss! Look up there!” Buck Taylor’s
undertone crackled with excitement as he pointed two hundred yards
up at the limestone precipice. “That cat! Those -- those
teeth!”

Scrambling for the binoculars, Thor raised
them for a closer look. “I’ll be damned.” He turned to Nate.
“That’s a saber-toothed tiger.”

“Saber-toothed?” The foreman grabbed for the
glasses. “If you’re funnin’ me, Thor, I’ll …” Nate’s Adam’s apple
bobbed in amazement. “Holy shit! I ain't never seen a cat that
size. Must be,” he licked his lips and adjusted the focus for a
sharper image, “four hundred pounds. And look at those curved
canines!”

Thor’s blue eyes narrowed in critical
evaluation of all they had seen. “Something just doesn’t wash here.
First the knee-deep fog, then the woolly mammoth, now we’ve got a
forty million-year-old saber-toothed cat. I just don’t buy that
we’ve stumbled into a time warp.”

Nate suddenly strangled on his tobacco juice.
“I’ll be double damned. What about
her
? What about the
naked female savage
up there with the tiger!”

A forceful yank brought the binoculars back
to Thor’s eyes.

If the sun and too much lunch hadn’t rendered
her heavy with sleep, she would have heard them sooner. Now it was
too late. A dozen men, horses in tow, had already mounted the
precipice, cutting off any escape.

She had no place to run.

Her only alternative was to stand her ground
and wait until the rest of her group returned. They couldn’t be
much longer. Hell, they were already two hours overdue. All she had
to do was stall and she did have an edge. The fingers of her right
hand locked around the thong collar that circled the big cat’s
muscular neck.

Smiling slightly and listening to her
powerful companion purr, she doubted any of these men had nerve
enough to get too close. But if they tried, she had a few tricks up
her sleeve. She knew exactly what to say and do to make the tawny
feline go from purring cat to snarling tiger.

The men were now only twenty feet away. A
silent battle ensued. She stared at them. They stared at her.
Astonishment, incredulity, and intrigue chased themselves over
assorted sun-bronzed masculine faces.

She decided to play dumb. Let them make the
first move. Perhaps keep them guessing, keep them wondering, keep
them off-balance – just until the others arrived.

Her inherent sense of self-preservation and
survival took over. She judged each man individually, assessing her
own odds. The three teenage boys were quickly dismissed. Her eyes
gauged the others. They varied in age from mid-twenties to sixties.
Bodies matched faces – tough and strong, courtesy of hard, physical
labor. She knew she could quickly disable six of the wranglers
rather quickly.

Her gaze shifted to the man leading a
wild-eyed buckskin stallion. Despite the fact that no one had
violated the silence, she did not doubt that he was the boss. While
the black hat he was wearing cast a shadow on his face, she easily
recognized an unmistakable air of self-confidence and authority. It
showed in his powerful build, in his walk and his impressive
carriage.

And if such nicely packaged masculine charms
had been displayed in any other place and under any other
circumstances, she would have been the first one to show
appropriate feminine appreciation. But this was not the right time
or the right place.

She did, however, notice a subtle change in a
few of the younger cowboys. It was her fault, she quickly
acknowledged. The silence had gone on too long. While she had been
assessing them, they had been assessing her. Caution and disbelief
had been replace by that old hormonal curse, lust.

When she saw leers slant a half-dozen lips,
her thumb and forefinger pressed into the cat’s neck. His wide
mouthed, fanged snarl immediately sent the horses into hysterics
and restored more respectful expressions on the men’s’ faces.