Much Ado About Mavericks Page 21

  “I do--you’re right about that. My net worth from working eight years at the law is more than my father’s lifetime of ranching.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. Most women would be quite enchanted with his bank account, but Jake wasn’t most women.

  Pointing up the hill to a clump of junipers, she said, “Up there.”

  Ben reined his horse so that he rode up the hill and behind the trees from a different direction than Jake. Just as they met to drive the cattle down, a pebble skidded past him, spooking the big bay. A ground-shaking rumble caused his horse to shy, and while doing his best to keep a good seat, he saw a boulder heading straight for Jake.

  “Look out!” he yelled, but she shooed the cows and calves without looking up.

  Ben dug his spurs into the bay’s side and galloped toward her. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her onto his lap just as a two-foot boulder bounded past them, the bay running hell-bent-for leather.

  Her hat blew off as she grasped his shoulders and hung on. “Oh, shit!”

  Well out of the slide area, Ben reined the bay to a halt and spun him around.

  “Damnation, you just saved my skin, Boston.” Jake’s eyes grew round. “Oh, my God!”

  One of the boulders had hit a young calf. The poor thing struggled to get up and run to his mama, finally falling to the ground and bawling. “We’ll wait until we’re sure the slide is over with, then we’ll see what we can do.”

  He surveyed the slope and the top of the ravine. Seeing something--someone, he squinted into the sun, hoping to get a better look. Damn, if he didn’t know better, he’d have thought he saw Peter Blacker up there.

  “It’s over. Take me to the calf. It needs doctoring.”

  Ben rode to the wounded calf--probably about three months old. “Be careful,” he said as Jake slipped off the horse. “Those little hooves can hurt.”

  “It’s a heifer. Her leg’s broke.” Jake frowned and her mouth drooped at the sides. “I ain’t shooting her.”

  “It’s all right, Jake. We don’t need to put her down.” Ben dismounted and grabbed his rope. “I’ll tie her up so she doesn’t hurt that leg more than it already is. You find something to splint it with.”

  After he hogtied the calf so the other three legs wouldn’t wreak more havoc on the broken one, he checked for other injuries. A few abrasions but nothing serious, he decided after he ran his hands all over the baby’s body.

  Jake came back carrying couple of sticks she’d fashioned as near the right size as she could get them. “I’ll set it,” she said as she kneeled by the calf, patting its head.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You tie the splint on with my piggin’ string.” She pulled the small rope out of her back pocket and handed it to him.

  The young heifer bawled loudly, her eyes rolling and her tongue hanging out when Jake yanked the little leg straight. With her knee on the calf’s flank to hold it still, she said, “Do it now before her mama hears and comes back.”

  He held the two sticks on either side of the heifer’s leg, took a couple of quick wraps, and tied off the ends. He sat back and looked at Jake. “She can’t walk for some time.”

  “I know. I’ll carry her on my horse till we get back to camp.”

  “I think you’re forgetting something.”

  She frowned. “I don’t forget nothing.”

  “But Jake, you don’t have a horse. Blue ran off during the landslide.”

  She stood and kicked a small rock down the hill. “Hell and damnation. We’ll have to gather them cows again.” She stuck her fingers in her mouth and blew an ear-piercing whistle. Turning to Ben she said, “He’ll be here shortly. Meantime, mount up and I’ll put this calf with you so she gets used to the idea.”

  Great--now he’d have to deal with a struggling, bawling calf who would undoubtedly defecate all over his leg before the day was done. He swung into the saddle and got comfortable. “Sure, hand her up.” Holding the reins in his teeth, he pulled the heifer across the saddle, over his lap.

  Just then, Blue galloped up the hill, kicking up dirt as he skidded to a stop beside Jake. “Good boy.” She patted his neck and mounted.

  “You always train your horses to come like that?”

  Jake raised her eyebrows, and stared at him. Ben had the distinct feeling she found his question ridiculous. “I guess we better meet up with the kids.”

  She gazed around the mountainside, then trotted a ways and picked up her hat. “We’ll find them cattle that run off, then we’ll meet up with the others and drive the herd back to camp.” She shielded her eyes with her Stetson and squinted at the sun. “Looks to be an hour or better till sundown. We’d better get moving.”

  * * * * *

  Jake waved her hat as the three strays spurred their ponies to a gallop when they saw her and Ben.

  “A dogie,” Homer said, pointing to the calf.

  “I want her!” Teddy cried.

  “No, I want her,” Henry stated.

  “Well, you already gots a puppy. You can’t have her.”

  Jake laughed. “All right, which of you cowhands can guess what color I’m thinking of?”

  “Blue,” yelled Homer.

  Henry called out, “Red!”

  Teddy said, “I can guess.”

  Jake rode to him and tugged his hat brim over his eyes. “Then you got the stray.” She looked at the other two and added, “I asked whether you could guess, not what color I was thinking of.” She winked. “You always got to listen to the question.”

  Teddy tugged on Ben’s sleeve. “Is it a boy, or a girl?”

  “Girl,” Ben said.

  “Heifer,” Jake corrected. She sure as hell didn’t want Teddy to make a fool of himself in front of the other cowhands.

  Teddy put his reins in his right hand and held out his left. “Put her on my pony. I’m big. I’ll take good care of her.”

  “How about I carry her back to camp?” Ben asked the boy. “She’s just a baby, but she’s bigger than you are.” Pleased with the way Ben handled the boy, she kept her silence.

  “Yeah, she’s bigger--but I’m older. And smarter.” He patted the calf on her head. “I’m naming her Suzanne.”

  “Suzanne?” Ben chuckled and cast a sidelong glance at the boy. Jake reckoned he thought naming a calf after his sister might vex her. “Why Suzanne?”

  Shrugging, Teddy said, “Because that’s the only girl’s name I know. Well, besides Jake.” He thought a minute and wrinkled his nose. “Or Henry, and I ain’t never naming a baby that.”

  “All right, Suzanne it is, then.” Ben motioned to his right. “You stay next to me so she can watch you while you’re riding. That way she’ll learn who you are.”

  Jake rode behind them, marveling at how kind Ben could be to the strays. He wasn’t the faintest bit like the other snobs she knew. Like Osbourne Callison, Ezra Lawrence’s lawyer, for one. He had always treated her like horseshit, and acted like she deserved it. She spat on the ground.

  If she had anything to do with it, that wimpy little bastard could hightail it back to Nampa before lining his pockets with Ben’s money. Truth is, she didn’t think it would come to that--she put her money on Ben. He was tough, smart, and fair.

  Her mouth went dry just looking at his broad shoulders and muscular thighs. He’d proven himself strong, and strength counted for everything in this country. Too bad he’d be in Boston within the month. He’d be a helluva rancher if he put his mind to it. And a helluva partner, too. She dismissed the whole idea and rode on.

  By the time they got to the camp Jake was plenty tired of eating alkali dirt. And of listening to that bawling calf. She knew it was hungry and thirsty. “Whip, Teddy here’s got himself a stray. Give him something to feed it.”

  Ben handed the heifer down to the old cowhand. “You can have it.”

  “It ain’t an it, Whip.” Teddy slid off his pony and scrambled to the calf, hugging her. “It’s a she, and her name’s Suzanne. She�
�s my stray.”

  Whip chuckled at Teddy, then studied the limp calf. “She’s hurting. Come along with me and we’ll see what we can do for her.”

  “Looks like we lost our littlest cowhand to doctoring,” Jake said.

  Ben jumped off his horse and cursed. Jake took a look and saw a green streak down one leg.

  “Need to do a little laundry there, cowhand?” She guffawed as she dismounted and loosened the cinch on Blue. She grabbed the bay’s reins. “I’ll take care of your horse.”

  “Thanks,” he grumbled.

  An hour later, Ben, smelling a helluva lot better and carrying a plate of beans and biscuits, sat on the log beside her. He rested his elbows on his knees, holding the plate in the middle.

  “Tired?” she asked.

  He grunted and shoveled a spoonful of beans in his mouth. Staring at the fire, he chewed for the longest time. Jake wondered if the calf shit had been one too many humps for the Boston lawyer to jump. She finished her coffee and just sat there, waiting for him to crack.

  Finally, he mumbled something.

  “Say again?”

  He swallowed, then sighed. “I like it here.”

  “Here?”

  He nodded and took another bite. After what seemed the longest time, he gazed at her and grumbled, “I like it here. The sagebrush, the cows, the kids . . .” Lowering his gaze until her breasts tingled like when he touched them, he said, “You.”

  She could hardly breathe with so much want, but he sounded like a man on his way to the hanging tree. “Well, hell,” she said, digging the toe of her boot in the dirt. “is that so bad?”

  “Yes.”

  * * * * *

  Jake stared at the stars and listened to the chorus of snoring. Everyone in camp slept except her. Not that she hadn’t tried, but when she closed her eyes, she saw Ben’s handsome face and then imagined running her hands over his broad shoulders and muscular chest. That man had a body any female would lust after. Her temperature rose ten degrees just thinking about him.

  And when she opened her eyes, she saw the same stars they’d gazed at when he rubbed her back. And other places. Then she couldn’t hold still for the want he’d planted in her.

  Ben never once said he loved her—at one time he’d said he cared for her and now he said he liked her. But he’d never said he loved her. Problem was, she loved him, and had since before the roundup although she tried not to let him know.

  But if he liked Owyhee County enough, if he liked her enough, would he stay? Surely a man as smart as he was could find a way--unless greed got in the way. He did say that he’d made a lot of money in Boston. She knew he could never make that kind of money here unless he struck gold--which some of them had.

  But not on the Bar EL. The Lawrence ranch was a cattle ranch, no place to be dug up and ruined. No, Ben would have to give up his fat wallet if he chose to stay.

  As the first streaks of dawn peeked over the mountains in the east, she made up her mind. By damn, she’d fought for every damned thing she ever got, and she’d fight for Ben. Play dirty, if needed.

  Chapter 15

  Frost settled on the land, making the morning eerily bright. Ben’s blankets crackled when he threw them off of him. Jake, already up, threw her plate in the wreck pan and saddled her horse. She never looked at him once.

  Pleased that Jake pretended that he hadn’t said what he’d said the previous evening, Ben saddled the paint and readied himself for another day. Knife day. God, how he hated castrating. And he refused to eat Rocky Mountain oysters.

  The rest of it he liked—enjoyed even. Two months ago, he wouldn’t have imagined that a day in the saddle, roping and cajoling cattle, could be so satisfying.

  And if anyone had told him that he would fall madly in love with a six-foot, red-headed, bar-brawling cowhand, he’d have laughed out loud. But he had, and he wasn’t laughing.

  He sheathed his knife and mounted the paint, who shied and high-stepped for the required two minutes. By the time roundup ended, he’d be a pretty damned good horse, Ben figured. He’d grown attached to the ornery beast—one more reason he didn’t want to leave. But he should.

  Jake rode up, reins in her left hand and her right resting on the Colt strapped to her shapely hip. “You’re riding out today.”

  He shrugged, not wanting to look like a shirker, and said, “It’s knife day.”

  “Not for you, it ain’t. Crazy Jim’s castrating today, and Whip’s looking after the strays and the heifer. You’re coming with me.”

  “Where?”

  “I gotta check out some new grazing land for next season.”

  He would have bet his Boston house, his horse, and three fingers of his right hand that she already knew every single square inch of this country. “All right.”

  He dismounted and fetched a canteen and some biscuits. The paint didn’t think highly of the canteen rubbing on his side, and snorted and stomped until Ben unhooked it from the pommel.

  “Give it here,” Jake said. “Ain’t no use pissing off a greenbroke horse.”

  He mounted, went through the high-stepping ritual again, and then they left. They rode north, fairly hard, for an hour. Jake hadn’t said much. Hell, she hadn’t uttered a word, but she seemed determined to get wherever they were going in record time. At least the paint had settled down.

  Ben had no idea why he was so drawn to this woman who had her own ideas about life. She was the only lady foreman in Idaho Territory and the best at what she did. Even though life seemed harder for her than most women, she never complained and showed genuine pleasure in the cattle, the horses, and the land.

  “Jake, how did a beautiful woman end up as the foreman on the Bar EL?”

  “Worked for it.” She shrugged her collar higher onto her neck to ward off the cold breeze. “And don’t call me a beautiful woman. Your sister is pretty. Your Boston girlfriend is beautiful—at least when she ain’t wearing whore’s clothes. I’m just a cowhand.”

  “You’re not just anything. Still, I want to know how you came to earn your living as a cowhand. Were you born around here?”

  “Don’t rightly know where I was born. Probably Texas somewhere.”

  “Where did you grow up, then?”

  “On the cattle trails. My pa rode the Goodnight Trail and all the rest them, too, and I went everywhere he went.”

  “Good Lord, he took a little girl on the cattle trail?”

  “Since I was two or so. Yep.” Jake took a drink of water from her canteen. “And don’t say nothing bad about my pa. He did the best he could and he taught me how to be a damned good cowhand up until the train ran over him in Salt Lake City.”

  “Where was your mother?”

  “She up and died. He was heartbroke about it—never did get over it. I just hope they’re together in the Big Cattle Trail in the sky.”

  “Most men would’ve sent their baby daughter to live with relatives.”

  “Most men would’ve, but he didn’t. I don’t know if there are any because he never did say and I never asked. No reason to. I belonged on the trail with him.”

  “And then?”

  “A steer broke from the pack as we were waiting for the train, and the cowpony did his job—only the steer went right on the tracks and the train killed all three of them.” She snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

  “And that was in Salt Lake. So how’d you get to Henderson Flats?”

  “Some of the men had hired on with the Bar EL, so I decided to go with them. Once we got there, Mr. Lawrence wanted to boot my ass out, but I showed him I could do a man’s work, so he agreed I could stay.”

  “And now you’re foreman.”

  “Yep.”

  The wind kicked up, blowing down the back of his neck. Reining his horse to a stop, he pulled the collar of his coat up and scrunched his neck in it.

  “Damned cold out here,” Jake said as she loosed her hair from the single long braid and tucked it in her collar. “I know a place whe
re we can get out of the wind.”

  He was so cold, all he could do was nod.

  “Firewood there, too. Fifteen minutes away.”

  “Sounds good,” he gritted out. “Let’s go.”

  They rode a while, then descended a hill to the valley. “It’s over there,” Jake said, pointing. “Follow me.”

  He didn’t know what the hell else he’d do. He’d been following her the whole damned day, with nothing but a frozen nose and ass to show for it. Studying the direction she pointed, he sure didn’t see anything that looked like shelter.

  She led him into a canyon—a beautiful little canyon with green shrubs lining a babbling creek. They rode in deeper, and Ben could hear the sound of rushing water upstream—much louder than the bubbling stream beside him.

  “This here’s Jump Creek Canyon.” She smiled as she dismounted. “Nice place, ain’t it?”

  The steep, jagged rock walls of the canyon protected a beautiful waterfall, a pond, and a pristine creek bed. The shrubbery was still green, even this late in the season, and the temperature was a good fifteen degrees warmer. “A beautiful place,” he agreed as he dismounted.

  Jake had loosened the cinch on her horse and ground-tied him. Ben didn’t trust the paint to stick around, so led him to the stream and watered him, then hobbled him before he removed the saddle. He left the blanket on, since the horse was hot and the day was cold.

  “I’ll start a fire,” Jake said as she gathered a bunch of sticks. “You bring the grub.”

  She led him along a rocky path upstream. The splashing sound of water grew louder with each step. Finally, they came upon a pretty little waterfall. “There ain’t much water this time of year—sometimes none, but it’s right pretty.”

  He had to agree.

  “C’mon.” She leapt across more rocks to a clearing on one side to a well-used fire pit dug in the sand and lined with rocks. “Indians used to live here. The Paiute.”

  * * * * *

  Jake cursed her awkwardness as she gathered more sticks of brush and juniper limbs for the fire. Ben only looked befuddled, not desirous. Hell, she hadn’t ever done this before, but she intended to make it work out, awkward or not.