Native Silver (10 page)

They went down the stairs and out on to the lawn that led to the stables. “I wonder if it was this green when my people had it?” she murmured, more to herself than to him, but he answered.

“Probably not in July. I think my father put in most of the watering system.”

That was all right. She could still imagine how it had been—hills of emerald green rolling beneath a china-blue sky, the fencing making white chalk marks across the landscape holding the beautiful horses in their separate worlds. And here she was, walking down the gravel path in the midst of it all.

They went through the stables, visiting the
horses and examining the modern look of the place.

“We built this complex ten years ago,” David told
her. “We had to tear down the old stables to make
room for it.”

That made her a little sad, but she had to admit the new structure was wonderful, so clean and gleaming and well-maintained. They walked out
through the far side and past the modern bunkhouse
where a few unmarried ranch workers still
lived.

“The old bunkhouse it still standing,” he told her quietly, and after her first reaction of delight, she
looked at him curiously. It occurred to her that he’d
noticed how she was looking for remnants of the
past, and he was trying to help her find them. How
was she going to manage to hate a man who did
things like that?

The old building lay in a hollow out of sight of the
house. David pulled open the door and Shawnee
stepped in, her eyes sparkling. The rough structure had stood since the turn of the century. Spare wood frame bunks still lined the walls and tattered scraps of paper, pin-ups and pictures from magazines, still clung like bits of confetti to the crumbling plaster
board. A musty smell filled the air, but underneath,
Shawnee could swear she detected the ghostly
scent of cows and horses and hard-working men.

How many lives had passed through here? She
walked over to the table and traced her finger
across a pair of initials carved into the weathered
wood.

“Listen to this,” David said, reading from some
thing written in what looked like crayon on the wall. “’Goodbye, Pete old son. You sure did live yourself to death.’”

Shawnee smiled and walked across the room to r
ead it over his shoulder. “Did you see this one?”
She pointed out a scrawl down the wall a bit.

“’There ain’t no cowpunchers in hell, cuz they
already served their time here on earth.’”

David chuckled. “Philosophical bunch, weren’t
they? I wonder what they write on the walls of the
new bunkhouse.”

Shawnee grimaced. “With today’s mores, I’d hate to venture a guess.”

He looked down at her and she took a sudden
step backwards, as though to keep out of his reach, but
he didn’t try to touch her. Instead, he watched as she threw out her arms and embraced the atmosphere. What was it about this woman that reached in and tugged at him in a way no other female had ever done?
 

A sudden vision of what she’d looked like the day before as she came surging out of the mountain stream, water shearing off her naked body in a shimmer of gold, made him catch his breath and look away. Okay. That might have something to do with it. He looked back at her and realized he liked what he saw better every time.
 

“You’re glowing,” he told her, a half-smile on his
lips. “You love this old place, don’t you?”

“Rancho Verde?” She took a breath and spun, skirt sailing out from her legs, arms raised as
though to take in the very air around her. “Yes,” she
said breathlessly, stopping at the window to wipe
away a slash of dust and give herself a view of the
rolling hills beyond. “It’s part of me.”

His gaze darkened and his answering voice was rough. “How can it be
a part of you when you’ve never really seen it before?”

Still staring out of the window, she smiled. “I’ve
seen it a thousand times. I’ve seen it through the
eyes and memories of my grandfather.” She whirled
and faced him, chin raised challengingly. “And if
your father hadn’t cheated him, I would have grown up here instead of you.”

His gaze was dark and unreadable, but he didn’t make a retort to her charge. He was wondering how she could be so sure her grandfather was right and the Santiagos—his family—were wrong. In his own prickly way, he was beginning to resent it. He didn’t see himself as a bad guy, and though he’d had plenty of struggles with his father, he didn’t see him in that role either. What was it going to take to make her face the truth? How was he going to convince her?
 

“Had enough history?”
he asked quietly. “How about going back to the house for a drink?”

A drink and a talk. They still had things to
discuss. She swallowed and nodded. “All right.”

They started back across the grass. The sun had disappeared behind the hills and the late afternoon
sky was streaked with a spray of golden peach stain.
“What’s that?” she asked, gesturing towards the big
barn that stood about a quarter of a mile away. “Old
or new?”

“It’s still the same barn,” he told her. “It’s had a lot
of work done to it, but the basic frame is still the same.” He looked at her with weary indulgence. “Don’t tell me you want to go to the barn, too?”

She nodded, and suddenly she was laughing
again. “Just for a second.” Without thinking, she reached out and put a hand on his arm. “You do understand, don’t you? I mean, I’ve heard so many
stories about this place, all my life. I just have to see
it all.” Words to explain exactly how she felt didn’t
come and she shrugged helplessly.

He covered her hand with his own. “Okay,” he said gruffly. “We’ll go to the barn.”

There were two paths stretching out from where
they stood. Both seemed to lead to the barn, but
one dipped down into the hollow while the other wound circuitously around the top of a rocky hill before turning back towards its destination.

“Ah, the proverbial fork in the road,” she said,
nodding wisely. She was feeling good now, full of
excitement and happiness at being so close to the old days, and maybe at being with this man. She wouldn’t think about the problems ahead, not yet.
Right now, David was her friend. She smiled at him
with
anticipation. “Which way shall we choose?”

David didn’t answer right away. He looked at one path, then the other, and a faint grin softened h
is face. “My brother Stewart and I used to race
here,” he told her slowly, eyes narrowing at the memory. “The lower road looks shorter, doesn’t It?”

She looked again. It not only looked shorter, it was. That much was obvious. It went straight and true while the other curled off into all sorts of
sidetracks. “Yes,” she answered. “I’m sure it is.”

His grin was wide now. “Stewart was always sure
it was, too.” He glanced down at her. “Want to try
it? Neither one of us has on running shoes, so we’ll
both have the same disadvantage.”

Her eyes widened. “You mean race, me going one way, you another?”

He nodded. “I’ll beat you,” he stated with a
swagger. “I’ll take the hill path and beat you to the
barn.”

Racing along in the dirt like a couple of kids? Shawnee laced her fingers together and looked at
the barn. What the heck, she’d never pretended to
be a sophisticate. Why start now? And there was nothing like a challenge to get her interest up.

She looked at the paths again, wondering what
the catch was. “Impossible,” she said slowly. “I’ll beat you cold.”

“Then you’ll race me?” His eyes were brimming
with laughter and she looked at the paths again.

“What happens? Does a dragon come out and bar
my way, or something?”

He shook his head. “Nothing magic, nothing dangerous. No tricks. But I promise you, I’ll win.”

There was just no way he could. Even if he ran like an Olympic sprinter, she was a pretty good
runner herself. She bit her lip.

“You’re on,” she said
at last, glad she’d worn her rope sandals. “You say
when.”

But his hand was in her hair. “A kiss for luck first,” he murmured, then his lips brushed hers
in a stroke of delicious sensation, charging her
adrenalin even higher. “Ready?”

She nodded.

“When,” he said, taking off towards the hill at an
easy lope, and she shot off down the path, running with controlled energy, sure she would be the first
to reach the barn.

The road was hard, pressed dirt and not rocky at
all. She ran quickly and confidently, raising her skirt to keep it from slapping against her legs, but when she looked up to see how David was doing, she found her vision blocked by a row of pepper
trees. All she had to do was run up on the bank and
she would be able to see where he was. She had
plenty of time, after all. He had least twice the
distance to run that she did. So she did it.

Just as she thought, he was running along smoothly, but he had so much more ground to
cover than she did, he would never make it first.
She grinned with satisfaction.
Just you wait
, David
Santiago, she thought smugly.

Suddenly the story of the hare and the tortoise
came to mind, and she frowned, running just a little
faster. She tried to see where David was now, but the trees were still in the way. Her impulse was to
run back up on the bank, but she stopped herself in time. If she kept doing that, he would win after all.

Instead, she concentrated on running as fast as she c
ould. Her
legs were beginning to ache and her breath
was coming fast, but there wasn’t much farther to
go. She could see the barn, a huge red structure on
the hill ahead . . .

On the hill! What a dummy she was! Just about at
the end of her tether, and she had a steep hill to climb. Meanwhile, David would be on his way
down from his, with enough momentum built up to carry him sailing in to the finish line. There was a
catch after all.

“David Santiago, you rat!” she puffed out, but the agony of the climb cut out any more complaining
until she arrived at the barn, red-faced and dying for oxygen, to find David, cool and comfortable,
waiting to greet her. He leaned against the barn
with casual boredom, as though he’d been waiting
ever so long.

“You’re as gullible as Stewart always was,” he
told her, shaking his head with teasing despair as
she gasped for breath in front of him, “He’d race me that way every year, spending half his time popping up on the bank so he could catch me at the trick he
was sure I’d use to beat him. By the time he got to the final hill, he’d be too exhausted to make
the climb, and then he’d accuse me of cheating.
Happened every time.”

Shawnee slumped against the side of the opening
to the barn. “My every sympathy is with your
brother,” she informed him haughtily when she had enough control to speak. “I feel like Charlie Brown
when Lucy pulls away the football.”

“You may feel like Charlie Brown,” he said,
moving smoothly towards her with a glint of purpose in his eyes, “but you don’t look much like him.”

“Good.” Laughing, she slipped away from the hand that came towards her and disappeared into
the darkness of the barn. “Charlie’s a victim,” she
called back, darting behind a high stack of bailed hay before David had followed her in, “and that’s
something I don’t intend to be.”

“To be a victim,” he said, his voice following her
although she was threading her way between the
farm machinery, totally out of his sight, “you need
to be threatened by a predator. There aren’t any predators here.”

His voice was as playful as she was feeling.
First
tag
, she thought to herself with amusement,
now hide and seek. Shawnee, my dear, what are you
doing here, returning to childhood? Or are we playing a deeper game?

“Is that right?” she called back, dashing behind another wall of hay and refusing to analyze her actions any further. “What do you call the kind of
man who would chase a woman through a barn?”

“That depends on what he does when he catches
her.”

His voice was too close. He was just about to find
her. She looked around quickly and saw a wooden
ladder leading to the loft. This time she wouldn’t
answer and give her position away.
 

But she might
have saved her energies. Climbing quickly, she
reached the top just as David put a foot on the bottom rung.

“Bad move,” he called up, climbing hand over
hand. “Now I’ve got you cornered.”

He was right. She looked around at the loose hay and
saw that there was no place left for escape. Funny how that didn’t scare her at all. Her heart
was thumping a loud pattern in her chest, but not
with fear.