The Renegades: Cole (22 page)

And the fact that they’d known the dry drive was coming hadn’t helped any, either. They all dreaded that, Rory especially, but she had teased the crew and jollied them around and kept that smile on her face day after day, quicksand or no, cactus or no. Gallant, he’d call it.

Then she was running lightly toward him and her horse, and he stepped off Border Crossing to give her a leg up. Even the feel of her small foot in his palm would stay with him all day.

“You don’t have to do that, Lightning,” she said softly. “If I’m going to be a rancher I certainly should be able to mount by myself.”

“You can,” he said. “When you
are
a rancher.”

She gave him a playful swat.

“I am now, and you better know it.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve gotta have land to put these critters out to graze.”

“Boy, are you particular,” she said. “I thought I could just keep ‘em moving forever.”

“Delightful as this trip is,” he said as he remounted, “I think we’d finally want to end it. Especially when the blue northers blow.”

“Aw, come on, Cole, cowboy up,” she said. “Driving in a blizzard is just when it gets interesting.”

Then she rode out a little way so she could see most of the crew.

“We should reach water about midday,” she
called to them, “and they won’t graze well this early, so push them on. Cole and I’ll carry the lantern until good daylight but if you men on drag can’t see it, don’t worry. Let ‘em hold a good pace.”

“Another good decision,” he said as she rode back to him with the lighted lantern Cookie handed to her.

“Thank you so much,” she said with light sarcasm. “An old trail hand like you ought to know.”

“I’ve may have gone up the trail all the way to Montana for all you know,” he said, as she raised the lantern and led off. “I’ve had a lot of experiences you know nothing about.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” she said, her eyes straight ahead on the trail, “and I’d be willing to bet that most of them I don’t
want
to know.”

Then they set a good pace and quit talking.

They were never very far apart, though, even after the sun came up. They never were, not for long, but they both were careful not to touch. He couldn’t get away from her because his job was to protect her, yet he couldn’t truly be with her because they would become too attached.

It was torture, pure and simple, Cole decided, an ordeal that a god with a sense of humor had concocted to punish him for his sins.

A
nother week of hard driving, but this one with sufficient watering places, and they struck the endless grasslands of the Llano Estacado. Aurora and Cole rode far ahead of the herd onto the lush, waiting range, as awestruck as if they were entering the promised land. The only sound for half a mile was that of their stirrups swishing through the tall buffalo grass. At last, Cole spoke.

“We’re here. You did it, Rory.”

She turned to smile at him.

“But where’s here?”

They laughed. Out here, a person could look for miles in every direction beneath an even more infinite sky.

“You expect to find a ranch house, outbuildings and corrals with a sign reading Slash A hanging over the yard gate?”

“Why not? We deserve that, after all we’ve been through.”

He shook his head.

“Greedy, greedy,” he said ruefully. “All I’ve heard for two months now is ‘get this herd to Texas’ and now that they’re here you’re angling for your work to be done already so you can settle down and wait for winter.”

A little stab of panic shot through her. Winter. Cole would be gone.

But that wasn’t what was making her feel suddenly so forlorn. Not at all, because she was prepared for that. She had always known it.

No, it was the land itself. Somehow, this land felt bigger and more lonesome than any they’d passed through. Maybe the Comanches weren’t the only reason the Llano had been left unsettled.

“Building a house and corrals isn’t even half of it,” she said. “We’ve got to ride herd on these cattle every day. They could drift from here to Fort Worth with nothing to stop them, straight into the clutches of every outlaw and settler and traveler or trader that comes along.”

Cole took a long look around.

“Doubt we’ll have that worry today.”

She laughed, then sobered.

“I wonder how far we’d have to ride to find another person,” she said, some of her desolate feeling creeping into her voice.

“Like a merchant with a store full of supplies or a dressmaker or a milliner or a …”

“Isn’t that just like a man!”

She put her fists on her hips in mock anger and entered into the game for the distraction he was offering. She had worked too hard to get
here to let the awful, let-down feeling take her over.

You think just because I’m a woman I’ll be pining away for new clothes and hats with feathers on them. What do you expect? That I’ll be branding calves and sawing logs in my Sunday best?”

He grinned.

“I don’t see any trees.”

She glared at him.

“Mixing adobe, then!”

“That’s my stubborn Rory,” he said. “Don’t let anything stop you.”

That last word rang like a bell in the air between them.

He would be gone. By the time her hands started helping her build a house,
whatever
materials they had to use, Cole would be gone.

You
. That sounded so strange after weeks and weeks of
we
and
us
.

Soon he’d be gone, and she would never see him again. The thought hollowed her heart right out of her body.

Don’t go. Stay, Cole. Don’t go
.

The whishing of their stirrups through the grass echoed the desperate whispering in her heart.

Stay. Touch me, Cole. I’m dying of this blazing pain
.

How could she have known that going to his bed for one adventure, one new experience, would set her on fire for him? That it would call for more and more, forever?

How could she have known that his arms would be so strong, his hands so skilled, his lips so hot?

How could she hold that memory in her heart for all her life without it burning her to ashes?

For the next few days, while they held the herd on the banks of the Canadian River and made forays to the south and east looking for ranch sites, she fought the mysterious bond that had pulled her and Cole together since the moment they’d met. It had been created from her need for protection from Gates, that was all, and now that need was gone.

Whatever had come out in the trials of Gates’s henchmen, whatever had been proved against him, his name had been dragged through the mud sufficiently to stop him for now. Plus now she had taken the herd so far from Pueblo City and into such a vast, untracked country that she would be devilishly hard to find.

She didn’t need Cole any more, she told herself constantly. She didn’t need him. What she needed was to pay attention to her business of ranching.

Several days in one place and on the lush graze rested the remuda and the cattle and put flesh back onto them at a heartening rate. The last hard weeks of the drive were no longer evident in the animals or the men, who rested while she and Cole rode mile after mile. They found no sign of other people and no good
source of water for a ranch site unless they stayed on the river.

One morning, as they were saddling their horses, Aurora began to decide that that was what they’d have to do and said as much to Cole.

“Not good,” he said. “Any bandido riding across the Llano—and there are plenty even though we haven’t seen them—will be following the river. There are
comanchero
camps on it. We need to get you situated in a more private place because you’ll have enough to contend with without every bunch of long riders in the country dropping in for breakfast.”

“I’m more worried about them running off my cattle.”

“Or worse,” he said, pulling his latigo tight and securing it.

“Riders coming,” Cookie called from his post at the coffeepot hanging over the fire. “Half a dozen of ‘em. Lookin’ fer breakfast, no doubt.”

In spite of his grumbling, his voice held excitement. It had been so long a time since they had had news of any world but their own or talked to anyone not in their outfit that all the men except the two who were assigned to the herd wandered back toward the fire for another cup of coffee.

“What’d I tell you?” Cole muttered.

Then he turned and called to the crew.

“Could be comancheros. Stay close to your guns, men, and keep your eyes open.”

He had already put his rifle in its saddle scabbard, but now he drew it out.

The leader of the newcomers rode out a little ahead of the others.

“Hello, the camp,” he called in Spanish-accented English. “Rudy Gomez,
mesteñero
, at your service.”

“Wild horse hunters,” Cole said. “Watch yourself, Rory, maybe kind of stay out of sight until we find out if that’s what they really are.”

“Stay out of
sight?
This is my camp!”

He grinned.

“I thought that’s what you’d say. But if they’re a bunch of cutthroats they might try to take us and carry you off as a prize.”

She laughed.

“That’s what I hired you for, Cole McCord. To prevent that kind of happening.”

“I mean it,” he said dryly. “The very sight of you could incite them to kill us all to get to you.”

“Light-ning! You should be called He Who Is Full of Hot Wind.”

He gave her a crooked, teasing grin, held her gaze with his in that knowing look that bonded them beyond belief. She thought for a minute that he was about to kiss her.

Heat rose in her blood. Never. She could never let him do that again.

She knew it all the way through her bones and her sinews, now that she was living in torment. Cole McCord was a wise man. The kiss she had begged for at her wagon that day
would only have made the torture a thousand times worse.

“Have you forgotten our potentially dangerous guests?” she whispered.

He shook his head.

“You
are
beautiful this morning, Rory,” he blurted in an uncharacteristically unguarded moment. “You’re a definite danger to us all.”

She had to reach for more air.

He was still wanting her as much as she wanted him. Oh, dear Lord, what would happen if he made her be the strong one?

Finally she found a few words and a light tone.

“Are you getting sick? Going soft in the head? That doesn’t sound like you, Lightning, throwing compliments in all directions at the crack of dawn.”

He laughed, but the serious hunger for her flashed in his eyes for an instant. It roused an answering desire in her, one so sharp it took her breath away completely.

“I know you won’t hide,” he said at last, “but keep your hand near your gun and stay close to me.”

That’s all I want to do. Stay close to you
.

Somehow, she made her feet move and her legs hold her up. Somehow, she walked beside him, wishing he would touch her, aching to touch him, and they went out to meet their rough-looking visitors.

Gomez didn’t bother with the names of any of his men, three of whom appeared to be grizzled,
hard-looking Anglos. But they all sat their horses until asked to get down, and they didn’t mention food until invited to eat. They weren’t too clean, and their clothes and gear were well-worn, but they seemed to be friendly, at least, and intending no harm. With a hot meal in their stomachs, they rolled smokes and accepted a second cup of coffee.

“Had any luck with the mustangs?” Monte asked.

Gomez nodded.

“We have spotted several small bands of them,” he said. “We find them. We look to see if there are bigger bands, then we catch some.”

The conversation immediately turned to methods of catching wild horses.

“We used to drive ‘em into a lake,” Frank said, “tire ‘em out fightin’ the mud and the water.”

“You have a hard time to find a lake around here,” a small, older mesteñero said, and everyone laughed. “And this river is too full of quicksand.”

“How about box canyons?” Monte said. “It’s easy to make a trap to drive them into a box canyon.”

“
Si
, we do that sometime,” Gomez said, and he and Frank began exchanging advice on that method.

Aurora liked the old mesteñero with the twinkly eyes who had said there was no lake, and she felt bad the others had cut him out of the conversation before he’d gotten into it.

“
Are
there any box canyons near here big enough to hold a band of wild horses?” she asked him.

He widened his snapping black eyes and laughed.

“Big enough,” he said wonderingly, and shook his head as he took a sip of his coffee. “Big enough. Is
uno
canyon big enough to hold the earth.”

He spoke so reverently, with such awe in his voice, that it piqued her interest.

“Near here?”

He shrugged.

“Mucho, mucho far.”

He busied himself with his coffee again, then leaned forward to take the last biscuit from the Dutch oven near the fire. He ate it in two big bites and stared into the distance, seeming to forget the conversation.

“Have you seen it?” Aurora persisted. “This big canyon.”

“Oh,
si
,” he said.

He held up a gnarled forefinger.

“Uno dias.”

One day. He’d been to the canyon one time.

“Es grande,”
he said.
“Muy grande.”

He set down his tin cup and opened his arms to show how huge it was.

“Una ciudad,”
he said, “can be on its floor.”

He stretched his arms even wider.

“Agua,”
he said, “creeks
y uno
big creek.
Los arboles
, the trees, and
muchas
… grasses.”

He patted the grass where he sat.

An indescribable thrill ran through Aurora’s bones. This sounded like the tallest of tall tales, but it wasn’t. She could hear the truth in his voice, see the surety in his eyes.

Water and trees. A canyon would be a protected place on these endlessly exposed high plains. It might be perfect for her ranch.

She looked into the bright, twinkling eyes until she saw that the old man knew she believed him.

“Can you take me there,
señor?
”

He stared back at her with a look as serious as her own.

“
Si
.

“I will pay you to be my guide.”

He waved away the suggestion.

“No, you must take pay,” she said. “Scouts work hard, and they earn their pay.”

Cole had been listening to them the whole time, even while he’d been joining in the wild horse talk—she realized that when he leaned across her and spoke to the old man in fluent, rapid Spanish that was much better than her awkward efforts.
Why
had she studied French in Philadelphia? Spanish was what she needed now.

“He’ll take you to the canyon for ten head of horses,” he said. “He claims money is of no use to him.”

“Ask if five head can be delivered when we find the canyon,” she said, “and five this time next year. We’ll need lots of fresh horses while we’re building shelters and getting settled.”

When Cole translated that, the old man laughed.

“
La
señorita
,” he said, nodding sagely. “She will be here next year. She is a tough one, this
señorita
.”

He wasn’t making fun of her, though. The teasing glint in his eye held an edge of respect, and so did his voice.

He reached up and tipped his sombrero to her.

“Gabriel Martinez,” he said.

“Aurora Benton,” she replied.

They didn’t shake hands, they didn’t touch, but they sealed a bargain with their eyes. They trusted each other. They would be friends.

An hour or so later, the mesteñeros got to their feet and said their good-byes. All except Señor Martinez.

“I work for La Señorita,” he told them.

And then, in a long spate of Spanish, he bid them good-bye.

“He’s staying with you until this time next year,” Cole told her, after listening to Gabriel and his friends.

His eyes were twinkling as much as Gabriel’s had been.

Then he burst out laughing.

“You’ve been shorthanded since we threw the cattle on the trail,” he said. “Now you have a new Slash A man.”

She stared at him, surprised.

“He’s staying with us until he gets all his horses?”

“Yes, but it’s not because he doesn’t trust you to pay. He told his friends he wants to eat some good cooking for a change.”