A slight smile softened the otherwise unyielding lines of his face. No wonder John Turner had kept trying to lure Hope into his bed by proposing marriage. If rumor was true, she kept turning him down, had been turning the rancher down since she came back to the ranch two years ago.
That had made him curious enough to ride his mare out to the well on a day that was hot enough to cure leather. He’d wanted to see a woman who cared more for a doomed ranch than she did for any man, even a rich white-eyes.
Any other woman would have given in to the inevitability of sinking water tables and drought-ridden land. Any other woman would have shaken off the Valley of the Sun’s brutal demands like a dog coming out of water and would have been happy to curl up at Turner’s big feet.
But not this woman. She was out here alone, a battered tin bucket in one hand and her dreams in the other.
Hope put on her hat, filled the bucket, primed the pump, pulled on her gloves with a few practiced motions, and began wrestling with the crank that was supposed to start the generator. The iron handle was long and had been in the direct sunlight. Even through leather gloves, the rough iron felt warm.
Like Behemoth, the machine was stubborn. Hope had to use both hands and a lot of determination just to make the crank turn. To make it turn fast enough to start the generator took every bit of strength she had.
With a grimace she forced her tired arms to drag the crank around quickly. The generator sputtered and almost caught. Encouraged, she worked harder, thinking of her beautiful black breeding cattle waiting by their hot, dry trough. Far too hot for October, nearly November. Far too dry.
If it wasn’t for this wretched generator, she would have been forced to sell off the last of her range cattle and the first of her Angus. The thought gave strength to her aching arms. The generator coughed and shivered, but refused to catch.
“Let me help.”
The quiet male voice startled Hope. She let go of the crank and whirled around.
Only the man’s quickness saved her from getting a painful rap as the crank’s long iron handle leaped upward, completing the circuit she had begun. He lifted her out of danger with one arm and with the other hand snagged the crank handle.
Automatically Hope balanced herself by putting her hands on his shoulders. Even as she wondered who he was, her senses registered the bunched strength of his arms and the long, resilient muscles of his torso and legs.
The man moved and she found herself safely on her feet again as suddenly as she had been snatched off them.
“I—thanks,” she managed.
He nodded but didn’t look away from the generator.
Hope watched while he worked the ancient machine with a power and coordination that fascinated her. He was well over six feet tall, long-limbed, wide-shouldered. The hair that showed beneath his battered Stetson was thick and straight, as blue-black as a raven flying through the desert sky. His clothes were dusty from riding, but otherwise clean. A shadow of satin-black hair showed in the open front of his faded blue work shirt. His skin was dark, almost mahogany. His boots were like his leather belt—supple, worn, of the highest quality. The buckle closing his belt was smooth silver with an intricate inlay of turquoise, coral, and mother-of-pearl.
She recognized the Zuni workmanship and the cryptic symbols telling of a shaman calling down rain upon the thirsty land. Gradually she realized that the buckle was not an ornament for this man. Like his hair and his skin, the symbols were part of his heritage.
The generator surged into life, sucking water from the circular trough. The hose leading to the truck began to swell. She watched as the man studied the generator, made an adjustment in the hose coupling, and listened with a cocked head to the engine’s racket. In some ways he reminded her of her stallion, Storm Walker. There was a physical assurance about him that spoke of horizons explored, tests passed, and a primal awareness of his life in relation to the land around him.
The hose became as tight as a sausage. Water shot out in a fine spray from the coupling he had adjusted. There was less water wasted than usual, because he had tightened the coupling more securely than Hope ever had been able to.
“Sorry,” she said, laughing and ducking as mist beaded her face. “I should have warned you about the connection.”
He could have gotten away from the spray. Instead, he swept off his hat, unbuttoned his shirt, and let the cool water bathe him as he worked over the coupling.
She watched, fascinated in ways she didn’t understand. Unlike most cowboys, the stranger didn’t have a line of chalk-white skin beneath the band of his hat. Nor was his chest white beneath the open shirt. Despite the desert’s harsh sun, it was obvious that he spent at least part of his time hatless and bare to the waist. It was also obvious that he was a man fully alive to all of his senses. His naked appreciation of the water struck a primitive chord within her.
His hands both coaxed and coerced the metal threads of the coupling into a tighter mating. As he worked, water drops beaded brightly over the tanned skin and smoothly coiling muscles of his arms and back. Slowly the spray diminished to little more than a sheen of moisture trickling from the corroded brass and sun-bleached canvas.
He shook back a thick wedge of hair from his forehead and replaced his hat. “Sometimes the best part of life is an accident that goes right.” His voice was deep, calm, subtly gentled by a southwestern drawl.
With a brief touch he led her away from the noisy generator into the lacy shade of a clump of brush. Using quick glances, he checked the fat hose and the generator and the well.
“You can’t be a cowboy,” Hope said in a low voice, thinking aloud as she watched him.
He looked at her suddenly. She saw that his eyes were blue-black, clear, almost shocking in their intensity. They were also as aloof and private as a winter sky.
“Most cowboys have white foreheads and chests,” she explained, feeling more than a little foolish.
His smile took her by surprise. At first glance she had simply thought of him as another range rider—taller than most, yes, and stronger, but still just one more cowhand. Then he had opened himself to the diamond spray of water and smiled, and his words had revealed the humor and intelligence beneath his tanned face.
She took off her work glove and held out her right hand. “Hope Gardener.”
He held out his hand and said simply, “Rio.”
Two
RIO’S BIG HAND enveloped Hope’s. She had a distinct sensation of warmth and strength before his hand released hers. She watched him pull on his worn leather work glove again. Like his voice, his eyes, and his coordination, his hand was unexpected. Long fingers tapered to well-kept nails, hard strength that was careful of her softer flesh. It was the hand of a musician or a surgeon.
But there were scars across his knuckles, and a quickness that could either comfort or threaten.
The realization made uneasiness streak through her. She remembered another man with scarred knuckles. John Turner didn’t have any comfort in him at all. Yet Rio did. She was certain of it. There was both gentleness and warmth in his smile.
More important at the moment, there was reassurance in his way of being close to her without crowding her sexually. Turner had been good at that kind of intimidation. He still was.
Sighing unconsciously, she relaxed with Rio as she had relaxed with few men since her eighteenth birthday.
“Rio,” she murmured.
Her hazel eyes shifted focus, turning inward. She had heard that name before. Just Rio. No first or last or middle name. Spanish for “river.” She tried to remember if it was Mason who had mentioned Rio.
“I keep thinking I’ve heard that name before,” she said.
“Maps,” he offered laconically, his smile lurking just on the point of release. “Rio Bravo. Rio Colorado. Rio—”
“Verde and Amarillo and Grande,” she finished, her voice as dry as his. But unlike him, she smiled openly even though she sensed that he wasn’t going to say any more about himsel
f. “And a whole lot of other rios I’ve never even heard of, I’d bet.”
“You’d win,” he agreed. “The Indians were here first, but the Spanish knew how to write. And since white men couldn’t wrap their tongues around Indian words . . .” Rio shrugged, not finishing his sentence. The maps spoke for themselves: Spanish rather than Indian names.
Without bothering to button his shirt, he swiftly tucked it into his jeans. “Hear you’re looking for water.”
She barely listened to his words. His quickness fascinated her, as did his grace. She decided that he was more like a mountain cat than a stallion. Or maybe he was some of both, a legend born out of its time, trapped in a century that had neither appreciation of nor use for myth. Nor, she admitted silently, for Indians themselves.
It must have been hell for a man of Rio’s intelligence to suffer the casual abuse of bigots.
Then the meaning of Rio’s near-question penetrated her wandering thoughts. “Er, yes. I ran several ads for a hydrologist.”
“ ‘Willing to take risks,’ ” he quoted softly. “Like you. You’re a gambler.” His voice was dark and certain. “You’re a dreamer, too. And I’m a man who finds water.”
Hope’s smile slipped. Gambler. Dreamer. Obviously he had read her ad and thought little of her chances of finding water. Grimly she waited for the rest of his act. She had heard it all before, from other con artists. The words varied, but the meaning didn’t: she had a glowing, water-filled future if she would just trust him with her small savings.
Patiently, gathering her dream around her like armor, Hope braced herself for the disappointment of having this intriguing stranger turn into another con man who had come to the Valley of the Sun to see how many dollars he could wring from her hopes.
Even if he wasn’t a con artist, she told herself bitterly, what made a drifting cowboy think that he could find water where certified hydrologists had failed? And what vast store of experience gave him the right to make fun of her and her attempts to save her ranch?
Because that was what he was doing. He was offering to work for her and at the same time he was saying that it was useless.
Gambler.
Dreamer.
“No.” Hope’s voice was as cool and impersonal as water flowing over the steel lip of the tank. “I’m neither a gambler nor a fool. I believe there is a fighting chance of finding artesian water beneath the Valley of the Sun. That’s all I ask. A fighting chance.”
Rio’s dark eyes narrowed as he measured the change in her. Now he could believe that this slender, lonely young woman had refused John Turner and every other prowling male in the West’s Basin and Range country. The Hope who was speaking now was someone who counted no unhatched chicks, asked no favors, and took no prisoners. She knew what she wanted.
And what she wanted was the land.
He understood that. The land was what he had always wanted, the only thing that he had taken from life: the West, all of it, rich and wild.
And he was the wind moving freely over the face of that land.
“Dreamer doesn’t mean fool,” he said quietly.
Though she said nothing, Hope’s mouth flattened even more. She had watched her sister’s dreams, and her mother’s. Maybe all dreamers weren’t fools, but the dreamers she knew had died too soon, too disillusioned, crying for men who never loved them in return.
Hope had learned that she couldn’t control other people’s dreams, but she could control her own. She could ask for only what was possible.
Artesian water, not a dream of love.
Water would give back to her the one enduring thing in her life—the Valley of the Sun. The land had been here long before drought and men who didn’t love enough. The land would be here long after all men were less than dust lifting on a dry wind.
“Ask Mason,” Rio said. “Then decide.”
He turned and walked back into the sagebrush clump. When he emerged a moment later, he was riding a mouse-gray mare that moved as though she had been born in the wild and only recently tamed. Yet the horse was no more an average slab-sided mustang than Rio was an average tongue-tied cowhand. The mare might have been raised wild, but Arab blood ran hot in her veins and intelligence glowed in her wide dark eyes.
“She’s perfect,” Hope said almost reverently, thinking of Storm Walker and the incredible foals that might come of such a mating. “If you ever want to breed her, bring her to—”
“Storm Walker,” Rio interrupted. “I know.”
He reined the mare around Hope, riding as he had walked, with economy and grace and power. A tiny motion of his left hand lifted the mare into a long lope. He merged his body with the animal’s supple movements as though he was part of her.
“Yes. Storm Walker,” Hope said finally.
She was talking to herself. Only a faint hint of dust in the air remained, proof that for a time she hadn’t been alone. There was no sound but that of water falling into the rapidly filling barrel of the truck. The windmill turned slowly, bringing up more water. Despite that, the level in the tank kept dropping, liquid wealth transferred into Behemoth’s steel belly, Turner water on its way to thirsty Gardener cattle.
The thought of using someone else’s water didn’t make Hope feel like a charity case. She would have done the same for any neighbor if she had been the one with abundant water and her neighbor’s animals were bawling with thirst. John Turner had more than enough water for both ranches.
At one time her father had seen Turner’s interest in her as the salvation of the Valley of the Sun. A marriage would mean money and water piped in from the Turner ranch. Her father had been wrong. Turner had wanted only Hope’s body, not a woman to marry.
Then he had tried to take by force what she hadn’t wanted to give.
From old habit her mind shied away from the terrifying night of her eighteenth birthday. Briskly she turned off the generator, uncoupled the hose, stuffed it into place on the truck’s rack, fastened the stubborn clamps down, and swung into the cab. If she hurried, she might catch Mason before he had to drive out to the wells and refuel the generators. Mason would know about Rio. Mason knew about everyone who had ever left a mark in the West.
And despite her doubts about his honesty, Hope was certain that Rio had.
The thought of finding out more about him made her impatient with the road, the heavy truck, and her own feminine muscles. Skill, technique, and finesse could only accomplish so much. If she had Rio’s easy strength, she would have gone twice as fast and not worried about losing control of the truck on the tight corners and deep ruts.
By the time Hope drove into the ranch yard and turned off the overworked engine, she was hot and tired all over again. Even in the late afternoon the sun hadn’t lost any of its intensity. It was hot for the very end of October. Much too hot. Sweat had long since replaced cool well water on her skin.
She spotted Mason just as he climbed into the pickup truck that was the ranch’s only other transportation.
“Mason!” she called.
As he turned and faced her, she leaped down out of the water truck’s high cab. Even across the dusty yard she could see a smile send creases through his leathery face as he watched her. Beneath his worn Stetson, his collar-length, fine silvery hair stirred in the wind.
“You’re back early,” he said. “I left you some lemonade.”
“How about ice?”
Even as she asked the question, she tried not to smile. She knew that the old man loved ice, and he hated refilling ice trays the way a cat hates mud. When she was gone all day, she usually returned to an empty freezer, a jumble of ice trays in the sink, and an embarrassed smile on Mason’s lined face.
He tried to look offended and failed entirely. He chuckled. “You know me too good, gal.”
“After all these years, I should hope so.”
Slipping her arm through his, she led him into the relative coolness of the kitchen. Two years ago, when she had come back to the ranch to live full-time, she
had taken some of the money she earned modeling hosiery and transformed the worn kitchen into a bright center of ranch life.
In January and February, when the long winds blew from the north, she and Mason played cribbage on the old oak table. As they played, she coaxed stories out of him, the lives of his father and uncles, grandfathers and great-uncles and great-grandfathers, the women they married, the children who died young and the ones who survived, the people who built and the people who destroyed.
The living history was shared with her in the gravelly, wry words of a man almost three times her age, a man whose ancestors had known the best and the worst the West could deliver. It was her own history, too, for Mason’s family had worked alongside her mother’s family in the Valley of the Sun for more than a hundred years.
Yet the ranch’s beauty and history had never touched Hope’s mother. She had hated the Valley of the Sun, had cursed its tawny heights and shadowed canyons with a depth of bitterness that had once terrified her younger daughter.
“Have you ever heard of a man called Rio?” Hope asked quickly. She didn’t want to remember her mother, a woman who had loved and hated as deeply as anyone Hope had ever known.
“Big man, easy-moving, kind of an Indian look to him?”
“Ummm,” she agreed. “With a smile that makes you believe in life everlasting.”
Mason shot her a sideways glance. “Musta took a liking to you. Rio don’t smile much.”
“He was probably laughing at me,” she said, remembering Rio’s comments about dreamers and gamblers.
“Doubt it.”
“He don’t laugh much?” she suggested, imitating Mason’s ungrammatical drawl.
“Good thing you got them pigtails cut, or I’d be pulling ’em sure as hell.” Mason’s smile faded as he reversed an old wooden kitchen chair and braced his arms across the back of it. “Rio don’t laugh at nobody but fools. You may be stubborn as flint, but you ain’t no fool.”
She squeezed the old man’s shoulder affectionately. Beneath her fingers he felt like a handful of rawhide braid. Age hadn’t stooped him, or even slowed him very much. Except for the occasional arthritis in his hands, Mason was still nearly six feet of “hard times and bad water,” as her father had once described his foreman, mentor, and best friend.