The pearl-buttoned Western shirt, black with a bold gray arrow design across the chest, molded a torso that appeared more muscular than she’d at first suspected.The jeans were snug, too, and looked mighty fine in the front.She didn’t need him to turn around to picture how they looked in the back.The black hat was pulled low over his blue eyes, eyes that flashed with a cool kind of fire, as if the clothes had awakened something elemental in him.Sure as shootin’, T.R.McGuinnes had turned into cowgirl bait.And she was the one who’d suggested they spend the night together.Her plan had just become more complicated.
ChapterFour
T.R.loved the first two hours of the trail ride.Despite the heat that baked his back and thighs, he enjoyed the rhythm of the horse beneath him, the acrid scent of sun-warmed bushes and blossom-studded cactus plants, the call of birds and the caress of an occasional cool breeze.
The hat shaded his face and the leather saddle cupped his groin in a pleasant grip.
Freddy had assigned him to Mikey, a brown horse with a black mane and tail.Mikey’s head bobbed pleasantly as they clopped along the trail behind Freddy’s mount, a reddish mare named Maureen, after Maureen O’Hara, one of John Wayne’s leading ladies.T.R.had never ridden horseback behind a woman before and hadn’t realized how sexy the view could be.
He felt vaguely guilty about his thoughts, but not guilty enough to censor them.Freddy’s firm buttocks rested lightly in the saddle as they walked, but brief periods of trotting sent her into a graceful posting motion that was decidedly erotic.His manhood tightened in response to the suggestive movement, but he didn’t plan to indulge in anything beyond innocent fantasy.The True Love already had too much emotional baggage for his taste.He wasn’t about to add another entanglement by becoming sexually involved with the foreman.
Freddy led him to the south boundary of the ranch, and from there they rode west, then north toward Whitlock’s property.T.R.glimpsed clusters of cattle, but they were never close enough to get a really good look.The sales brochure had mentioned a herd of about two hundred female Herefords, ten bulls and whatever calves had been born that spring.Freddy pointed out a twenty-acre horse pasture fenced with barbed wire to separate the horses turned loose in the pasture from the cattle that roamed the rest of the property.Farther on was another fenced pasture that held a scattered herd of approximately a hundred red-and-white Herefords.
“Those belong to Duane,” Freddy said over her shoulder.“They carry his brand, the D-Bar.He’s working on an experimental breeding project, so we keep his stock separated from ours and lease him the land.Ours forage on whatever they can find, but Duane has to feed this bunch.”
“Have you had a roundup yet?”he called ahead to her.
She turned in her saddle.“Three weeks ago.That’s the one time we’re booked solid because we let the guests help.”
T.R.nodded.He was sorry he’d missed that.
As they headed east, toward the mountains, T.R.began to feel discomfort.He checked his watch and realized he’d expected to be back at the ranch by now.Maybe he’d underestimated his endurance.
A short time later, Freddy gestured to her left.“That adobe building over there is the original homestead built by Thaddeus Singleton.”
T.R.stood in his stirrups, glad for a reason to stretch and get his behind out of the saddle.He studied the squat, flat-roofed structure that wasn’t much bigger than a single-car garage.A hundred years of sun and rain had battered and bleached the earthen blocks, strong winds and animals had knocked holes in the walls.Yet the pioneer in T.R.admired the spirit of the man who had carved out this foothold in a hostile land.
“I can take you a little closer, if you’re interested,” Freddy said.
He probably shouldn’t agree to detours, considering the condition of his thighs, but he didn’t want to seem like a wuss, either.“Sure.”
As they drew closer, he noticed that a wooden lintel remained in place over the front door, and the ever-present heart with an arrow through it had been burned deep into the wood.In a far corner of the roofless building, the adobe was blackened, as if by fire.
“What caused that?”he asked, pointing.
“Hikers staying here for the night, most likely.”Freddy leaned her forearms on her saddle horn and gazed at the ruins.“I’ve found all sorts of evidence of people camping here.Leigh and I have talked about fencing the building off and eventually restoring it, but the corporation hasn’t been interested and Leigh and I don’t have the money.My grandfather poured that concrete floor in the thirties, back when the roof was still intact and we used this place for temporary shelter if we were caught out here in bad weather.That’s the last improvement the place had.”
“I see.”He wasn’t interested in preservation.Attach too much sentimentality to the place by creating a shrine to the original homesteader, and future developers might run afoul of the historic preservation police.He wanted this prize parcel to be unencumbered when it went on the block.
“Thaddeus’s wife, Clara Singleton, once held off a raiding party of twenty Apaches from the roof of that house,” Freddy said.“The parapet was about three feet high back then, and she used a ladder to climb up and pulled it after her.She had three guns there, and she crawled around firing them in succession, so the Apaches thought there were more people at the house.Thaddeus was off rounding up strays.She drove off those Apaches all by herself.”
“That’s quite a story.”T.R.had noticed the defiant tilt of her chin, the flash in her eyes as she told it.No one could doubt that Freddy had inherited courage and determination from Clara Singleton.Unfortunately, in this modern-day struggle for control of the True Love, he and his partners would be cast in the role of marauding Apaches, and this time the Singleton women were outgunned.
“Clara was quite a woman.”Freddy clicked her tongue and urged Maureen down the trail with a nudge of her heels.“There’s a dry wash up ahead,” she called over her shoulder.“Want to lope the horses a little?”
“Sure.”Maybe a good run would release some of the tension building in him.He’d thought that after fifteen years of commodities trading, he’d be immune to attacks of conscience about making money from the misfortunes of others.The free-enterprise system produced the healthiest economy in the world, but you had to play by the rules.People made money or went broke according to the demands of the market, and woe to the investor who worried about the hindmost.
He eased Mikey down a rocky embankment into a wide sandy riverbed littered with tree branches rubbed smooth by rushing water.He’d heard about flash floods and imagined this was the sort of place one would happen.But the sky was an unrelenting blue.
With a whoop and a flick of her reins against Maureen’s polished rump, Freddy took off down the wash.
With no prompting, Mikey leaped after her, and T.R grabbed the saddle horn with one hand and his hat with the other.
After the first moment of surprise, he gripped the horse with his thighs, crammed the hat more firmly on his head, and grasped the reins as he leaned into the wind.
A fantasy created by years of Saturday-afternoon matinees came true in that moment — T.R.McGuinnes, famous gunslinger, galloped his cow pony under an endless sky, the hot wind flattening his Western shirt against his chest and whipping the horse’s mane against the backs of his hands.
As he drew alongside Freddy, he looked over at her.She grinned at him, and in that pell-mell moment, with his heart pumping from the excitement of the run, he experienced a rush of emotion that scared the hell out of him.Immediately, he began reining in his horse.Within five seconds, T.R.McGuinnes, commodities trader and emotional conservative, was back in the saddle.
