Half a Ranch, page 10
The sound of gears thrashing brought him back to reality. They'd have to set up camp before it got dark.
"So now what?" For a change, Mindy approached him with a smile.
Could she finally have decided to become a team player? That didn't seem possible.
"How's your voice? Can you carry a tune into the night?"
"You don't really sing to the cattle, do you? I thought that was something out of old books."
"Just kidding. Now we set up camp."
"Oh, dear. Where am I going to sleep?"
He had to be imagining the hint of sensuality that her voice carried to him.
He swept the horizon with his arm. "So long as we stay within a few hundred yards of the windmill, it doesn't really matter. Pick a spot."
"I meant I don't have any camping equipment."
"I thought of that." Bret climbed into Mindy's truck and began tossing down the packs and camping materials.
"Here's an extra bag for you. You can sleep in the supplies tent and we'll just leave a few more things in the truck." He tossed the sleeping bag to her and pointed out the mound of canvas that made up her tent. "Once I get the rest of this stuff unloaded, I'll pitch your tent."
"Don't bother. I can manage."
"Ever done it before?"
"I was a Girl Scout once." She dragged her tent a few yards from the truck and began to set it up.
"Hey boss. Going to throw down the rest of the packs? Or are you off in Never-never Land?"
Trust the hands to notice when he got distracted. Damn, ever since Mindy had arrived, he seemed to spend most of his time distracted.
"On the way," he replied. Staring at Mindy's pert backside wasn't the kind of example he wanted to set for the hands.
Bret gave the orders to make camp, pleased to see that Mindy had put up the tent with no trouble, and especially that she'd had the good sense to slip inside it where she wouldn't distract the men.
His pleased feeling lasted right about as long as it took her to change into a bathing suit.
Mindy stepped from her tent with a towel draped around her waist. A tiny bikini top was the only thing that kept her from creating a riot.
She headed toward the windmill, smiling but shaking her head at several cowboys' offers to serve as lifeguards.
Bret found himself trying to justify following her 'for her own good.' After all, there could be snakes in the water tank. Or maybe a patch of poison ivy around the base. He shook his head, hard. "Back to work, men," he called out. "Let's give Mindy a little privacy."
He kept them so busy he thought he might be the only one who saw Mindy return. She hadn't dried herself off completely, and beads of water clung to her skin, glistening like diamonds in the late afternoon sun. Her impossibly long legs made him think of a colt, but with a lot more sex appeal than any horse he'd ever met. And she'd shifted her towel from her waist to her hair, exposing the tiny bikini bottoms and plenty of thigh as well as way more of her sexy butt than he wanted any of the cowboys to see.
At least she had the sense not to wear one of those thong things coeds had been wearing back when he'd attended college. Mindy had the body for it, but he didn't think he could have stood it. His swollen excitement demanded attention as it was, and it wasn't getting it.
"Let's get dinner started," he called out in a futile effort to distract himself.
By the time they lit the Coleman stoves and cooked up a dinner, the sun had dipped below the horizon. Only a month past the summer solstice, with the hottest days of summer still ahead, the days were already noticeably shorter.
Mindy sat down only inches from him and smiled.
She was so close he could actually feel electricity run between their bodies. His arousal returned, reminding him that he had gone a long time without a woman.
"So what's next?" she asked.
He looked at her sharply. Was she really asking about ranching, or did she just want to know how soon she could expect her money? "We'll have to move every couple of days until the rain comes or we run out of pastures. With luck we'll get some rain soon. With a miracle, we may even get some rain closer to the ranch house. At least the meteorological service says we should get a break in the drought soon. As it is, we have to sell a bunch of cattle to a feeding lot up north but if we can get at least a little feed into them first, they’ll bring a bit more.
“What happens if the drought doesn’t break?”
If we don't get rain soon, we'll have to sell all but the breeding stock." He shook his head. "I don't know if the ranch could survive that."
"Can you make money selling to a feeding lot?"
"More than if we let them starve," he answered.
"My God, that would be terrible." She reached over and put one hand on his knee. Her anguished look told him that she really did care about the cattle. He imagined that she wasn't even aware that she was touching him. He definitely was--almost painfully aware of each millimeter of contact between her fingers and his jeaned legs.
"It hasn't happened yet," he said, his voice slightly strangled. "I'm counting on the rain." Without rain, they would lose the ranch. It was as simple as that.
"I saw some clouds late this afternoon."
He shook his head. "Those roll in every afternoon. I call them five o'clock clouds."
"Five o'clock clouds?"
"You know. They pile up when the temperature drops. There's lots of moisture in the air, it's just so blasted hot that it can't rain."
"Sort of like being too cold to snow?"
"I guess," he shrugged. His mind identified with sizzling heat a lot more closely than it did with cold right now.
"So we may be out here for a couple of weeks?"
"Possibly. Probably not. If we don't get rain in the next few days, your friend Andresson will call our banker. Then the banker will decide that the cattle don't look like good collateral any more and foreclose on the mortgage."
"Oh." She chewed on that for a minute or two. Then, "Can I ask you a question?"
He leaned back against a large rock, being careful not to dislodge her hand from his knee. "Shoot."
"Do you really enjoy living like this? I mean, you could lose everything, just because it doesn't rain."
"You told me that your school shut down."
"So?"
"So none of us has complete control of our environment. In the city, you have to rely on customers and your management. Here in the country there's the weather."
"The weather, and disease, and taxes, and medical bills, and whether people find out about some mad cow disease, and--"
"That's right."
"Then why do you do it?"
For the first time, he realized why she believed he'd just take his money and run. He'd have thought that someone from Nebraska would have their feet planted in the soil, but maybe Omaha was like Dallas or Houston or any other big city. They had developed their own society and ways of life that left the country far behind. "Look up," he told her.
She did. "Stars?"
"A few, anyway. On a clear night you can see so many it hurts your head to try to count them. When I was working the rodeo circuit, I spent a lot of time in the big cities. I used to look up at night and I'll be darned if I could see more than a dozen stars. Those big city lights wash out everything."
"You live here so you can see stars?" She didn't sound skeptical, just confused.
"That's just an example. I like it out here because it's closer to what's real."
"But there's real stuff in the city. Buildings and monuments and streets and people and--"
"I don't have anything against the city. After all, without the city, we wouldn't have any customers. But I'm not interested in working a job where people can lie their way out of a project and where they get paid for screwing up."
"It's not all like that."
"It was when I worked there."
She looked at him sharply. "I thought rodeos only paid when you win. That doesn't sound like making money for screwing up."
"After I got hurt, I stayed in Dallas and did construction work to pay my way through school. A ranching degree is pretty much essential if you want to amount to anything out here."
"Degree? You are full of surprises, aren't you?"
Somehow her hand had crept a few inches up his thigh. It might not mean anything to her; it meant too much for him. He took her hand, meaning to move it back down.
The instant his hand reached hers, she jerked it away.
"I guess we should hit the hay," she told him.
"Did you fill your air mattress?" He didn't want this to end so quickly.
"Of course."
****
Mindy shifted again. When she'd gotten back to her tent after swimming at the windmill, she'd discovered that the guys had filled it with supplies. Evidently they hadn't got the message that she'd be using it.
As it turned out, though, it was even more stifling in the tent than it was outside. Rather than ask the hands to unload the tent and pack the supplies back in the truck, she pulled her air mattress and sleeping bag out, put on a thin T-shirt, then tried to sleep under the stars.
For the first half of the night, she blamed mosquitoes for her inability to sleep. Around two in the morning, though, a little breeze had picked up and the bugs had vanished. The breeze made things a lot more comfortable, but it destroyed her excuse for sleeplessness.
She couldn't believe what she had done. She would never have consciously touched Bret so intimately, clinging to his thigh. But she'd done it almost without thinking, and once she'd done it, she'd been loath to let go of him.
Until he had abruptly reached down and shaken off her hand, she had imagined that he shared at least the physical side of the attraction that she felt for him. Now she didn't know what to think.
The breeze blew harder. In the distance, the windmill clattered as it shifted to pick up the wind's changed direction. Then, without the slightest warning, a huge lightning bolt split the sky, followed almost instantly by a deafening clap of thunder.
Seconds later, the first fat raindrop smacked against her nose. It was followed by countless others. Rain! The answer to Bret's prayers. Her initial elation was quickly followed by a realization that she would get soaked if she didn't do something.
Mindy pushed herself out of her sleeping bag and ran to her tent. She opened its flap and found cooking gear, food, and kerosene for the lamps stacked to the nylon ceiling. Everything had its place. Everything but Mindy. Another flash of lightening showed her that she had even less room than she'd imagined.
She leaned against a couple of large cans of kerosene while contemplating whether she could spend the night there. The strong odor coming from the cans reminded her of the flammable nature of the material. What would happen to it if lightning struck the tent? She wasn't certain it would cause an explosion, but she didn't want to be there to find out.
Outside the tent, sheets of rain blocked her view. A flash of lightning, so close that she didn't hear any gap between the light and the thunder, showed her that Bret's tent was the closest.
Leaving her dripping sleeping bag behind, she ran toward the dubious safety of Bret's tent.
****
Bret listened to the thunder and smiled. Even a localized storm like this could dump a couple of inches of rain. It wouldn't be enough, but it would buy him time, let the cattle he was selling put on a few pounds.
He and half of the hands had spent the first few hours of the night pushing the cattle back from the dry stream beds that ran through this part of the pasture. The second shift had come out just in time to get wet. With luck, it would rain all night. He knew better than to ask for more than that. The brutal sun superheated the air so totally that rain would be impossible during the day.
Another slam of thunder was accompanied by a stronger gust of wind that tugged on his tent's stakes. Damn. He had forgotten to check Mindy's tent, relying on her assurance that she knew what she was doing.
He struggled out of his sleeping bag and reached for his shirt. If he wandered out there wearing just his boxer shorts, she would probably think he was some sort of sex-crazed prowler.
Distracted by Mindy or not, he didn’t miss the movement outside.
He froze when someone tugged on the ties that held his tent flap closed. Even with the constant staccato of rain against the nylon tent, he recognized the sound of someone slipping into his tent. Bret couldn't see who it was but he had a pretty good idea who had sent him. Andresson must be getting desperate if he'd sent someone to attack him in his sleep.
Then the intruder was inside the tent not even a shadow in the pitch darkness of the storm.
Bret whipped out a leg, sweeping the ankles of the interloper, at the same time tossing off his constricting shirt.
The instant he heard the intruder fall, Bret sprang to the offensive. He rolled to the top of his attacker and caught him in a judo chokehold. Andresson had used midnight attacks to drive away several other competing ranchers. It would be like him to try a late-night raid under cover of the rainstorm. Bret wanted whoever he had caught to talk.
Soft silky hair and a yielding where he anticipated hard male pectoral muscles informed him that he might, possibly, have jumped to a false conclusion.
"I was getting wet," Mindy's choked voice informed him with a preternatural calm.
"Are you all right?" He slid his grip from her throat but didn't let her go.
"Actually--"
He didn't want to hear her tell him to get off, to leave her alone. He interrupted whatever she wanted to tell him with a kiss.
The instant his lips met hers, her body went rigid.
Bret knew he'd just made an even bigger idiot of himself. But then her lips softened and she kissed him back.
He'd spent days remembering that kiss in the truck, trying to decide whether it really had been as special as he thought, or whether the near-death experience of driving through the dust storm had distorted his senses.
Now he knew. Special didn't even begin to describe her kiss. Or describe this woman.
Mindy parted her lips and he took advantage of the opportunity, seeking out her tongue and caressing it with his own.
She responded in kind, her arms clutching his back, pulling him against her as if he alone could save her from drowning.
And he was drowning in her, swept away by a flood of emotions that he had thought he had left behind in his innocent youth. Surely a responsible rancher would never let physical responses and irrational emotion sway his judgment. Except there was nothing rational about the way he reacted to this woman.
Mindy's breasts molded against his chest, her nipples' hard nubs distanced from his chest only by a thin layer of wet shirt.
He pulled away. "You'd better get out of those wet things," he told her.
"Do you really think that's a good idea?" She didn't sound unwilling, just uncertain.
He thought it was a pretty wonderful idea. Right now, he couldn't think of a single reason not to make love to Mindy. On the other hand, since he couldn't think of anything except making love with Mindy it was quite possible that he'd missed a few relevant concepts.
Unable to find the words to argue one way or another, he caressed her cheek, pushing her damp hair away from her face.
"I'm not ready to be a parent," she told him, her voice shaky.
That was one reason. Although the thought of little Mindies running around the house didn't disturb him the way he thought it would. Even in his twenties when his hormones had ruled his mind and when he'd used sex to reaffirm his survival from bull riding, he had never wanted a woman so intensely.
"Sorry," he told her. "I just wasn't--"
"That doesn't mean you can't kiss me, though," she interrupted.
He hadn't been handed an invitation that attractive in a long time and didn't wait for her to think again.
****
"I've been thinking," Mindy told him when they broke for breath. Gray rays of light had begun to penetrate the thin nylon of his tent.
Bret realized that they must have been kissing, caressing, for four hours. Somehow, despite the lack of sleep, he didn't believe that he'd have any trouble staying awake today. He had enough adrenaline running through his system to stock a bee farm.
"What have you been thinking?"
"I know it took us all day to get the cattle up here, but it's still only a few miles from the ranch house. Why doesn't everyone spend the night at home? Where we can have beds and stuff?"
"Oh." Here he'd thought she might be thinking about him. "Two reasons, really. It's not that easy to get here. The only decent road is way out of the way for the ranch house. So although it is just a few miles as the crow flies, it would take better than an hour to drive it."
"That was one."
"Right. When you came into my tent last night, do you remember how I tripped you?"
She nodded, then blushed.
"I didn't know it was you. The fact is, I don't trust our neighbors. I believe that they're stealing our cattle every chance they get. That, along with starting a few grass fires, making sure our paperwork always gets lost at the courthouse, and trying to persuade people to spend money we just don't have. If we left our cattle up here in the north pasture unprotected, I'm afraid we'd lose them all. Without the cattle, we don't have a ranch. It's as simple as that. I already told you we've taken out loans on the livestock as well as the land."
"You really think that someone like Andresson would break the law to get the ranch?"
"I don’t just think it, I know it. Little things like the law have never bothered him. He and his slimy cronies like Henry control the courthouse."
Mindy shook her head. "Don't you think you might be a little paranoid?"
"You know the old joke? Even paranoids have enemies. You should have seen the way they swarmed over Lucy when she first purchased the property. They'd bankrupted the man who owned it before and hoped to pick up his property for back taxes. When your aunt made him an offer and paid off the taxes, they were fit to be tied."
