The Lies Uncovered Trilogy (Books 4, 5, and 6 of The Dancing Moon Ranch Series) (52 page)

"Good boy, Sultan," Ryan said, while patting the horse on the neck.

"His name's Rocinante," Annie pointed out.

"Not anymore," Ryan said. "He doesn't like being named after an old work horse."

Annie looked at Ryan, dubiously. "What do you know about Don Quixote's horse?"

Ryan shrugged, like what he was about to tell her was common knowledge, and said, "That he was
scrawny, awkward, and past his prime. Even Cervantes referred to him in
Don Quixote
as a hack. On the other hand, Rodrigo Díaz, also known as El Cid, had a horse named Babieca who was best friends with a horse named Sultan, who was owned by Prince Sancho, the son of King Fernando the 1st of Spain. El Cid was Prince Sancho's knight, so Sultan and Babieca were in many battles together, and they remained friends even after both their masters were killed, right up until Sultan died. It's a good name. It suits him. He's almost black and he'll one day have a harem." Ryan ran his hand up the stallion's neck and scratched between his ears, and the big horse bobbed his head up and down.

Annie didn't know anything about El Cid, but Ryan was obviously familiar with the story of Don Quixote, so she had no reason to doubt his story about El Cid's and some prince's horses being friends. She was curious where he got the information though, and very surprised that he seemed to know something beyond the usual bronco-busting, bull-riding nonsense that was the entire focus of most rodeo cowboys.

Still, she was miffed that Ryan took it upon himself to rename
her
horse. "You could have asked me first before changing his name," she said. "He is my horse."

"Fine then. Pick another name," Ryan replied.

It bothered Annie that she liked the name Sultan better than Rocinante. And he was right. Rocinante
had
been a scrawny horse. The story was one her father told her when she was a child, and the name of Don Quixote's horse stuck. "I suppose Sultan's okay," she conceded.

Ryan smiled a sort of self-assured half-smile, like he knew he was right, which bothered her. It also bothered her that Ryan looked so good on Rocinante… or Sultan, like they belonged together, with Sultan's long flowing, sooty, brownish-black mane and tail about the color of Ryan's hair, and Sultan's dark, slate-gray coat almost a match to Ryan's shirt, like Ryan picked the shirt to match his mount, which Annie didn't believe.

Sultan also acted as if he'd finally found a rider who was on to him, and he didn't intend to test it but was ready for a good ride. But Ryan's ability with horses wasn’t what was holding Annie’s concern right now. She couldn't dismiss the look on his face earlier, when the men claimed they were too busy to show him the trails, and he challenged her into doing it, which meant getting her alone. Little points of light shone in his dark eyes, and his mouth curved into a kind of smile she could only describe as Machiavellian…

"I'm ready when you are," Ryan said. He guided Sultan to where Annie sat on Bridgette, who was prancing and bobbing her head.

Deciding she wanted to be done with this afternoon outing as soon as possible, Annie gathered the reins, and said, "We’ll start on the trail to where there are pictographs on the side of a box canyon on BLM land, and we'll do it at a fast clip so this won't take all afternoon." Before Ryan could reply, Annie clucked her tongue and gave Bridgette a kick, sending the mare bolting forward and breaking into a gallop while heading across a wide-open meadow that stretched toward a grove of cottonwood trees in the distance.

It was no time before Ryan caught up and was galloping alongside Annie, while yelling,
"Is this supposed to be a race or do you always ride hell bent for leather?"

Annie glanced over her shoulder at him and yelled back,
"I have stuff to do this afternoon so I thought I'd speed things up some. Do you have a problem with that?"

"No, that works for me too,"
Ryan said, keeping pace with her.
"So where are we headed?"

"Toward the cottonwood trees and up the mesa behind them,"
Annie yelled.

"Fine. I'll meet you at the top of the mesa
." Leaning forward, Ryan gave Sultan his head and the big animal lengthened his strides, leaving Annie in a pall of dust. It wasn't long before Sultan reached the cottonwoods and was negotiating the trail that zigzagged up the side of the mesa, taking it in a series of leaps and lunges, which Annie knew wouldn't phase the big horse, who’d once roamed free and was used to navigating rugged terrain. But Bridgette didn't have the stamina to keep up, so she let the mare take the trail at her own much slower pace.

By the time she reached the top of the mesa, Ryan was waiting, with his hand draped over Sultan's withers and a dark look on his face. When Annie pulled Bridgette to a head-bobbing halt and faced Ryan, he eyed her with irritation and said, "Okay, let's get it out in the open."

Puzzled with Ryan's change in attitude, Annie said, "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the way you've acted toward me from the moment I arrived. You've been to my family's ranch several times, the last time being the day of my brother's wedding, but we've never talked, not once. Your father hired me to do a job here and that's what I intend to do, but for some reason you have it out for me."

"If you're referring to what happened with the beans, you've jumped to conclusions," Annie said. "I told you I was a klutz. You just happened to be in the way when I tripped."

"And when you tripped, you just happened to have a plate of beans and a hippy burger with barbecue sauce on it in your hands, and you just happened to launch a rocket shot to my racket and balls," Ryan said. "I've even tried to reconstruct, in my mind, how you coordinated all that, and I still can’t figure out the physics behind it."

"Inertia," Annie replied. "When you reached out you startled me and I tripped and kept on going until acted upon by an outside force, which was you."

Ryan let out a sardonic laugh. "It seems there's a lot of inertia whenever you're around. So what's with the helicopter pilot? Did you double him over through inertia too?"

Annie looked at Ryan with a start. "Where did you hear about him?"

"I get around," Ryan said. "I take it the guy took a different position from yours."

"You might say that," Annie replied. "That was Stan Davis. He worked for my father before he decided to become a helicopter pilot."

"And you gave him the knee treatment because.?"

"He flips burros," Annie replied. "They can't run fast enough to keep up with the horses when the helicopters are rounding them up, and Stan was laughing with his buddies about using the helicopter runner to flip burros in mid-flight, which leaves an injured animal to die a slow death. And yes, I doubled him over. In fact I sent him to his knees and told him it was only a sample of what would happen if he ever did it again."

Ryan seemed to be mulling that over. But after a few moments, he said, "And the local cowboys? It seems the name Annie Kincaid's well known among them too."

"I take it you stopped by Pete's on the way here since it's a cowboy hangout," Annie said.

Ryan nodded. "There were four of them at a table. They seemed to know you well. Did you send them to their knees too?"

"If it's the four I'm thinking of, no, I accidentally toppled a pitcher of beer on them and their pizza," Annie replied. "I found out they were making bets as to who'd be first to get me in bed."

"Who won the bet?" Ryan asked.

"Are you looking to get kneed again?" Annie replied.

"I'm safe for the moment," Ryan said. "But I take it you don't like cowboys."

"Not the rodeo bunch," Annie replied, "which is most of the guys around here, including you. You pride yourselves in participating in the stupidest sport on the face of the planet, and after the ride's over, the women who cheered you on while you were bouncing up and down on a two-ton bull, fawn all over you, oohing and aahing and puffing up your already overinflated egos instead of telling you you're idiots for risking your lives for nothing more than eight seconds of misplaced glory." She could tell from the way the muscles in Ryan's jaw were bunching that he wasn't too happy with her put down.

"It's not that dangerous if you know what you're doing," Ryan said, in defense.

"Yeah, right," Annie replied, with irony. "The truth is, you rarely see a bull rider past thirty because he's too broken up to continue, and most of those in their twenties have no teeth, can hardly walk, have had multiple broken bones and concussions, have been stomped on or pounded into the dirt, and were carried out on a stretcher, but that's okay because they can watch the rodeo from a wheelchair the next season and still get applauses when they wheel themselves out because they're still on planet earth." She had to catch her breath after that diatribe, mainly to regroup her thoughts. The problem was, her argument didn't work with Ryan because he didn't fit any of the scenarios she'd just thrown at him. In fact, he appeared to be all in one piece and still put together, very nicely. Which annoyed her. Even his smile was near perfect.

Ryan straightened his back and squared his shoulders, like he was getting ready to poke a few more holes in her analogy, and said, "I'm twenty-four and I've been riding bulls and broncs since I was twelve and nothing's happened."

"Maybe not yet," Annie countered, "but if a nudge from a knee can double you over, think what it would be like to have a two-ton, bucking, kicking, angry bull who's trying to get rid of a flank strap, stomp you there. I imagine it would bring a whole new meaning to the word swagger, while also raising your voice a couple of octaves."

To Annie surprise, and annoyance, Ryan gave her that half-smile again, like he'd somehow won their verbal sparring, which made her uneasy. In fact, everything about Ryan Hansen made her uneasy. He was too confident, too smug, and although she hated to admit it, too handsome for her peace of mind. But since she wasn't one to be taken in by looks, it wouldn't be difficult to put him in his place if he decided to slap down his money with the betting boys at Pete's Pub and start sweet-talking her.

"Just for the record," Ryan said, "that wasn't a nudge I got from your knee, it was a battering ram. But out of curiosity, have you ever let a man get close enough to kiss you?"

"If you're asking if I've ever been kissed, yes," Annie replied, "but I've never kissed a man back because I haven't found one around here worth kissing."

Ryan gave a short, dry laugh. "I don't imagine any around here would be interested in trying either, so I guess it evens out."

For some reason, hearing the truth from Ryan bothered Annie. She didn't have a very good reputation with the cowboys in Harney County, mainly because she was on the opposite side from them in some very important issues—rodeos, bow hunting, helicopter roundups, leg-hold traps to name a few—and she hadn't been shy about letting anyone and everyone know exactly how she felt and what she thought of the lot of them. Standing at the entrance to Harney County's biggest yearly event while holding up a sign protesting bull riding, bronco busting, and racing mustangs didn't get her any points either.

When she said nothing to counter Ryan's comment, he said in an irritated voice, "Let's get on up the trail and get this over with. I have things I'd rather be doing."

Ryan's impatience to be done with her also bothered Annie, though she couldn't figure out why, except that maybe she'd lost some of the edge she'd set in place with the plate of beans. She also realized it would be harder than she'd expected to stay ahead of him. He appeared to be an unpredictable man in the sense that what was reflected on his face wasn't necessarily what was going on in his mind. He wasn't blatant in the way he eyed her when talking, unlike the local cowboys at Pete's who gawked and focused on her breasts and made it clear they were interested in her for only one reason, and it wasn't to get a kiss from her. It was to get Annie Kincaid in bed and make a claim, then announce it to the others and collect their money.

Turning Bridgette, she gave the mare a kick and sent her trotting along the flat top of the mesa where, in the far distance, and across a landscape broken by gorges and mesas with slopes dotted in willow and aspen and cottonwood trees, stood the snowy rugged peaks of Steens Mountain, a single mountain that cut into a view that seemed to go on forever.

After about fifteen minutes the trail led to a break in the rim then cut down along the west side of the mesa in a zigzag path to the valley below. They followed alongside a stream for a short distance then entered the narrow mouth of a canyon that was faced on both sides with rock walls. The stream there was flowing quickly, and in a wide flat area between the stream and the canyon wall stood a grove of poplars intermingled with willows. A short distance beyond the grove of trees, Annie reigned in.

When Ryan stopped beside her, she pointed upward to the side of the canyon where images were painted on the rock-face wall, and said, "Those are the pictographs. No one's figured out what they're supposed to be but you can point them out to the guests, and that's about it for this trail since the canyon dead ends about another twelve-hundred feet."

She was about to double back to the ranch when Ryan dismounted. "I want to take a closer look," he said, while tying Sultan to a poplar. Walking over to the rock wall, he launched himself onto a large boulder then grabbed a fistful of roots poking out from between two large rocks and pulled himself up to the next level where he stood studying the images.