Knight in a White Stetson (4 page)

Chapter 4

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H
enry ran the swather along the edge of the last row, following a straight line, the blades of the machine neatly cutting the hay and laying it behind in long, perfect rows. Henry had always loved this job. It was the engineer in him, he thought. Nothing like straight lines to satisfy an engineer. Calla would be satisfied.

Calla.

Straight lines were all well and good, he thought, but curvy lines had their merits, too.

There was no air-conditioning in the cab of the swather, and he felt the sweat bead down from his hair to his neck and soak into his T-shirt. A wonderful feeling. A little hard work, a little healthy lust. Definitely a good sweat.

Henry looked back over his shoulder at the beautifully cut rows of sweet alfalfa. It had been years since he’d been in a swather, the summer his grandfather died and Henry’s father, already a prominent physician, had sold the farm in central California to real-estate developers who turned the rich soil under and planted fifteen hundred identical, neatly spaced, half-acre house lots with views of the delta.

Henry reached the end of his perfect row and turned the swather deftly, plunging it forward into the tall, purple-budded alfalfa of the next section. The smell of cut alfalfa was one of his favorite scents, and he closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

Calla.

He opened his eyes and headed for a point at the end of the field. She’d sneaked her wily way into his thoughts every few minutes since she scooted out from under that truck yesterday and thrust her hand at him like a man.

She wasn’t as beautiful, he thought, as some women he’d seen. After all, he’d worked in Los Angeles for the past two years. He saw the most beautiful women in the world every day. She wasn’t even beautiful like Heidi was, like most of the women to whom he’d ever been attracted. Heidi had been blond and willowy thin, her skin light, her eyes the crystal blue of the Pacific Ocean. She’d worn clothes in the latest fashion, and she’d looked perfect in them, her model’s figure shown to its best.

Henry, rich and young and smart, had dated several thin, beautiful blondes before he married Heidi, but she was by far the most captivating.
To me and everyone else,
Henry thought, his mouth twisting into a grimace.

But Calla wasn’t thin and blond. He tried to imagine any woman he knew hefting that tire down from the back of that dusty pickup, and couldn’t. He smiled. Calla was definitely not willowy. Her chest was strong and wide, with breasts that looked firm and heavy and high, even in those god-awful work shirts. Her hair was the color of rich chestnuts and her eyes were an astonishing shade of hazel, flecked with jade.

He tried to imagine the color of her nipples. Dark, he decided. Wine-colored, or maybe the blush of soft plums. The swather took a sudden dip sideways and ruined Henry’s perfect row. So much for an engineer’s brain, he reflected.

There was definition in her slender arms and Henry knew those sleek muscles didn’t come from a weight machine or thrice-weekly aerobics classes. He’d watched her break loose those rusted lug nuts in wonder. How he’d kept himself from running his hand along her strong neck and into the sweaty crease at her elbow, he’d never know.

He’d like to have seen her legs. They weren’t miles long, like Heidi’s were, but he thought they’d wrap nicely around his back.

Oh, pull yourself together, Johannsen.
He was a highly educated man. He knew a budding obsession when one whacked him over the head.

He turned the swather again. He’d been right about his dilemma in the kitchen this morning. He had been celibate too long.

It was the only reasonable explanation for how unreasonably he wanted Calla. He’d wanted her under that pickup yesterday afternoon, on the barn floor later that night, this morning on the kitchen table after her father had stepped outside; would have taken her without a second thought if she’d but crooked a finger in his direction.

He’d almost kissed her when she slapped him on his back this morning, even though he knew she was laughing at him. He’d almost reached behind him and pulled her hand to his chest and kissed her.

He’d lain awake all last night, tossing and turning in his sleeping bag, wondering how she tasted, how soft her lips were. He’d spied on her,
spied on her!
when she walked Dartmouth to his car last night, and grunted in disgust when he saw the bastard lean forward and touch his lips to hers.

And he’d wondered idly how easily the bones in Dartmouth’s skinny neck would break under his hands.

Henry looked back at the row he just finished, annoyed by the slight, compensating dip in the alfalfa. Calla’s nipple, he reminded himself. He turned again.

A swarm of gulls followed the machine, greedily scooping up the mice that ran from their destroyed nests. An old bird dog he’d seen shaded up under a tree on Calla’s front lawn that morning trotted happily beside the swather, row after row, turning when Henry turned. Ah, farming. It was boring, steady, peaceful work. He could have stayed on that swather the rest of his life, he thought.

He had just made another row when he caught the movement of a horse out of the corner of his eye.

It was Calla, atop a young sorrel. Two perfectly matched, glossy-coated border collies flanked the horse, keeping their eagle eyes and sharp noses on the wild-looking cow in front of Calla’s horse. Calla kept the cow against the fence line, guiding it slowly toward an open gate at the end of the field next to the one Henry was swathing.

She looked over at him. He was too far away to see her face, but he knew she was smiling at him. He waved. She raised one slender hand and held it aloft for a moment. Not a wave, really, more like a salute, he thought. He chuckled aloud.

* * *

Calla eased the cow through the gate. She looked down at the dogs. They hadn’t taken their eyes off the animal.

“Take a bite,” she said. They took off in a rush of black and white, silently nipping at the heels of the wild cow. The cow kicked and bucked her way across the empty field.

“Come back,” she called softly. Instantly, the dogs wheeled and returned to her side. Serves you right, you old biddy, Calla thought. The cow had given her more trouble than a herd of reckless heifers, alternately running at her and from her. She’d wasted a whole morning and it wasn’t even her cow. What she didn’t do for her neighbors, she thought, shaking her head as she turned her pretty sorrel and pointed him toward the barn.

She looked over her shoulder. Henry was more than halfway through the huge field of alfalfa. She swept the rows of hay with the critical gaze of someone who knows her job well. Pretty good, she acknowledged. One little dip, but otherwise nice and straight. He had done this before.

She watched the swather cut its way down another row. He’ll work out okay, she decided. At least for the farming. She’d have to wait and see how well he’d do when he moved to camp to watch the cows and work on the miles and miles of Bennett Mountain fence lines. Ranch hands were so unpredictable.

But she couldn’t see Henry going off and leaving the herd for a drunk in town. She couldn’t see him overlooking a saggy fence just because he’d have to climb to get to it. She couldn’t see him taking a too young horse down a too steep rocky canyon, bruising him and rendering him useless for the remainder of the summer; all things Lester had done in the past.

She could trust Henry. She knew it already. He’d do the right thing.

She watched him a moment more. And felt a stirring inside her, a feeling that had become alarmingly familiar in the hours since Henry had leaned his long frame against her barn door.

Now, if she could just be trusted to do the right thing.

Chapter 5

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I
t took two weeks to put up the hay. Henry ran the swather, Lester came along after him a few days later with the baler, and Calla came after Lester with the stacker. Together they put up four hundred tons of sweet, Sulphur Lake hay. Calla was thrilled at how smoothly everything went.

It was the first year she hadn’t had to fight with Lester at every turn. Every summer he’d argued with her about the moisture content of the hay and the number of bales in a stack and the position of the stacks in the hay yard. But this summer he did as he was told. Calla was surprised how much free time she had now that she didn’t have to spend time arguing with Lester. She suspected Lester’s compliant mood had a lot to do with Henry.

He was a little afraid of Henry, she knew.

Henry was up every morning before anyone else. He wolfed down his breakfast, usually before Calla was even back from her chores in the barn, and was out on the swather all morning. He came in for lunch and to flirt briefly with Aunt Helen, who was thrilled at having another man to compliment her cooking, and then he was gone again. When he finished for the day, he took his evening meal into the bunkhouse. He never ate with the family in the evening. Not like Lester. No one else seemed to notice that was odd, but Calla wondered at it. Ranch hands had always eaten at the McFadden table. It was tradition.

Henry didn’t come in and watch TV at night. Or stay around the ranch on Sundays. Or inquire after her health or ask for advances on his pay. He didn’t follow her into the barn in the mornings. Never touched her wrist again with his thumb, in that heated, hypnotic way.

He was the perfect employee. Darn it.

Clark had left a week into haying. He’d gone East again. Calla never missed him when he was gone, her life was too busy for that kind of nonsense, she told herself, but she found herself wishing he’d hurry back. She felt better, more comfortable, when he was around every night. Even though she saw almost nothing of Henry after that first day, except to wave at him occasionally from across a new-mown field or smile as he brushed past her on his way out the kitchen door, she knew she was spending less time thinking about Clark—her beloved, intended Clark—and more and more time thinking about her new ranch hand.

Calla ran the roaring, dusty stacker around the field, picking up the last of the stray bales. The empty field gave her a strong sense of satisfaction. She was never especially fond of the farming aspect of the place—that had always been Benny’s department—but she took pride in her tidy fields and intelligently planned watering system.

As she eased the top-heavy stacker along the corrugates, she watched Henry, in high rubber boots, walk the ditch bank. As soon as she’d finished stacking each field, he’d been there to start the water. She hadn’t known he’d even know how to do it. Gravity irrigation, in the age of huge pivot sprinklers, was fast becoming a lost art. But Henry’s dirt dams held and the water swept into the cleared fields with amazing speed. She couldn’t have done better herself, Calla admitted.

It was an annoying, exhilarating thought. She’d never met anyone who could do her job as well as she could, with as much determination and skill. Not since Ben. And it had been years since she’d been able to go to sleep at night knowing there was someone other than herself she could depend on.

A dangerous proposition, she knew, depending on Henry. Henry was a summer hand. She couldn’t afford to keep him on for the year, though the idea of having someone other than Lester and Jackson to help her feed the hay they’d just put up was a heady one.

No, she told herself firmly. She paid Henry just $850 a month, plus room and board—the going rate for summer cowboys—but it was more than the ranch could afford on a year-round basis. The loan, the final, magic one that had sent her to college loomed over her like a specter. She needed money more than she needed Henry.

That was why she had to concentrate on Clark. It was why she needed him to hurry back. Clark, and Clark’s money, was what was going to save the ranch. Not that she was marrying him, or
hoped
to marry him, she corrected herself, for his money. She loved him. She was sure of it. Almost sure of it. The minute she was sure of it, she’d let him know. And then she’d sleep with him, finally, and everything would be fine and she’d stop having those sweaty dreams in the middle of the night about her summer ranch hand.

She reached the dirt road that led out of the field and toward the hay yard and gunned the stacker to full speed. It wobbled precariously under the full load of hay bales, but righted itself. She glimpsed Henry out of the corner of her eye. He had looked up sharply as she roared down the lane, and she could see him in her long side mirror, watching the stacker.

Good, she thought with grim satisfaction. He’d been ignoring her pretty much completely for two weeks. She was his boss. He ought to pay a little closer attention to her.

* * *

Henry glared at the stacker as it zoomed around a corner and out of sight. He could hear it as it traveled along the road to the hay yard. It was loud. She must have floored it.

He shook his head and went back to shoveling mud around the corrugate. She had almost tipped it when she came off the field. But she knew what she was doing and he resisted the almost overwhelming urge to run across the field and yank her from the seat of the huge machine. He’d like to shake her sometimes, the way she thundered around.

She drove everything like that, the pickup, Helen’s little car, the tractors, even the riding lawnmower he’d seen her on the evening before. She went everywhere full tilt, a bat out of hell.

He dipped his shovel into the thick, sucking mud and slathered it onto the small dam he was building to hold back the irrigation water.

Haying was finished, the irrigation started again. Tomorrow Lester would take over switching the water from earthen dam to earthen dam, along the complicated system of narrow canals and ditches laid out a hundred years earlier by Calla’s great-grandfather. Henry would move to the camp in the hills to look after Calla’s herd. He was looking forward to it. Desperately. He hadn’t asked Calla about her relationship with Dartmouth, but it was pretty clear she was serious. He didn’t know if he could stand to be around when the guy came back. For that matter, he didn’t know if he could stand Calla brushing against him in the doorway of the kitchen anymore, or smiling at him over her coffee cup, her hair damp and fragrant from her morning shower.

He was glad to be going. Being constantly turned on for the past fourteen days was getting to him.

* * *

Calla parked the stacker in the equipment yard next to the other two tractors, hopped lightly to the ground, and walked slowly through the shadowy alleyway the long stacks of bales made in the hay yard. It was a relief to get the first cutting up; and this year without the rain that could spoil it. She must be living right.

She glanced up. Then again, maybe she wasn’t. Henry was walking toward the bunkhouse, his irrigating shovel over his shoulders, his wrists hooked loosely over the handle.

She simply couldn’t help herself; she stopped for a minute and watched him walk. His head was down, as though he were concentrating on every step, and she could see where his sunburned neck slid powerfully down toward his ax-handle-broad shoulders. The man had some body, she thought, not for the first time. Not even for the first time that day.

As if he’d read her thoughts, Henry halted his stride and looked over at her. Calla’s breath caught in her throat, though she couldn’t have said why.

He walked across the narrow road, straddled the low fence and approached her slowly, his wrists still over the handle of his shovel. When he reached her, she smelled clean sweat and damp mud and could just glimpse the suggestion of the hair of his armpits at the stretch of his short sleeves. The sight quickened the pace of her heart for some reason, and she flared her nostrils to suck in the smell of him as soon as she dared again to breathe.

“Hey,” she said, sounding just a little strangled.

“Hey.”

Calla jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Hay,” she said feebly. He didn’t even smile. Oh, smooth, Calla. She stared at him, unable to look away, though instinct told her now would be a good time to run.

“Can I ask you a question?” Henry stretched a long, sinewy arm past her and leaned his shovel against the stack behind her head. Slowly, slowly, as though she might bolt at any sudden movement. Her eyes dipped shut as he neared—and she sniffed at him again—then popped back open.

“Uh, okay.”

“Are you going to marry Dartmouth?”

“What?”

If she didn’t stop smelling him like that, he was going to have to do something drastic, Henry thought. He took a step forward, backing her toward the stack. “Are you going to marry Dartmouth?” He pressed closer, then stopped. That was drastic enough for him. “It’s a simple question.”

Calla stumbled backward until she could feel the heavy scratch of hay through her clothes. Henry’s voice was oddly thick and he was so close now she could see the tight cords in his throat.

“Are you?” he whispered. Drastic, hell. This was deadly. His eyes drifted shut involuntarily. He sniffed at her now. “Are you?”

“Who’s Dartmouth?” she managed to ask, before his mouth was on hers. He leaned slowly into her, pushing her against the haystack, crushing her in the most wonderful manner, and had his way.

That’s all she could think as he kissed her. And kissed her again, pulling at her lips, plucking kisses from her. He’s having his way with me. Then he tipped his head to one side and deepened the kiss, sliding his tongue along her still-closed mouth. And she stopped thinking altogether.

Her mouth opened to allow the tiniest moan to slip past.

“Calla,” he murmured against her lips, and dove in.

She made no effort to raise her arms and twine them around his neck, they came around him of their own accord, and she met the pressure of his body with an equal force. Henry groaned deep in his chest and braced his hands on the haystack behind her, while his body started an astonishing bump and grind against hers.

Her head suddenly weighed about eighty pounds, and it dropped back at the erotic contact, breaking his kiss. For moments they just breathed on one another, his eyes shut tight in concentration, hers half-lidded, watching him, amazed.

Fast, so fast. From nothing to this … so fast. She let herself drift. She’d go at any speed he’d take her.

His fingers gripped the stack to keep from tearing at her clothes to get to the skin underneath. But he unclamped them now, his discipline in tatters. They met at the back of her skull as he pulled her back to his mouth.

But, oh, they wouldn’t stay still. He ran them under her arms and to her back, down then to her bottom, pulling her up to meet his painful, heart-stopping arousal, staying there for the longest, excruciating moments while he moved against her. Then clutching her to him though she could get no closer, he banded his arms against her back, then released his fierce hold to brush his fingertips against the soft sides of her breasts.

He tried, God knows, he tried to be content with that. But every ordered thing about him, every restraint, every moderate, cautious habit, drained right out of his body. Or was burned away by the heat, he didn’t know. He brought his hands between their bodies. And touched her. Finally, to be touching her.

The moan that left her mouth to come to his was like a gift. His chest constricted, and all he could think was that he hadn’t felt this sweet piercing wonder before, not even the first time he’d touched a woman, not even as a young man. He levered himself away from her body to watch his hands on her.

“Calla,” he breathed, lifting the weight of her breasts in his hands, molding her, stroking, then slowly lifting his head to see her eyes glaze as he ran his thumbs over her hardened nipples, feeling her rise to meet his touch through her work shirt and bra.

“Oh.” Her breath caught. “Oh.” And again. The sensation was too much, by a million miles too much. Moisture flooded her, blood pumped at her center, every pore and vessel and nerve opened to him.

He dropped to his knees in the hard-packed dirt of the stack yard, burying his face between her breasts, seeking the sex, the solace, the heat of her. He took a nipple between his teeth and gently bit her through her clothing.

Calla felt herself slipping slowly down to the ground in front of him, eager for a closer connection. Her strong hands clutched at him, seeking a more intimate touch.

The sound of the horn was unbelievably loud in her ears. Her eyes flew open and she looked over to see Lester waving wildly at her from the ranch truck. A little scream escaped her, a completely different kind of little scream from the one Henry had swallowed with his mouth a moment before. She struggled to her feet, her knees oddly weak.

“Damn,” she said, her hands clawing into the hay behind her. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Henry had considerably less trouble regaining his footing, and steadied her with one hand. Then, without looking at her, he strode quickly over to Lester’s truck where it hugged the fence of the stack yard, and leaned across the fence into the open passenger window.

“I’m going to kill you, Lester,” Henry said through gritted teeth. “You scared Calla half to death. What the hell are you doing?”