I—”
“Tell you what.” His hand was on her shoulder again, his head lowered close to hers. “Right now I’ve got to go find my heeler—sounds like they’ve started in on the steer wrestlin’, and that means team ropin’s comin’ up next. But why don’t we—”
“You rope?” Lauren was surprised; she hadn’t taken him for the working type.
McCullough winked, showing those teeth again. “I like to keep my hand in now and then.” He reached out to waylay a cowboy with a contestant’s number on his back coming from the direction of the arena. “Hey, Dub, seen Bronco anywhere?”
The cowboy jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Last I seen he was over at the stock pens.”
McCullough laughed. “Talkin’ the steers into lettin’ him rope ’em, I imagine.”
“Bronco,” said Lauren, when the cowboy had shared the joke and the laughter and moved on. “Is that the same one I just saw up on a bareback bronc?”
“That’s the one.”
Lauren smiled as McCullough walked her on, his arm friendly across her shoulders. “Does he rope as well as he rides?”
“Honey,” the rancher drawled, “anything involving a horse, there’s nobody in this world better. Tell you what,” he added more briskly, giving her a quick squeeze before releasing her, “why don’t you meet me for dinner tonight? A lot of the rodeo crowd, they like to get together evenings at Smoky Joe’s—know where it is? Can’t miss it—just outside of town on the highway. You’ll hear it before you see it. ’Bout eight o’clock? Good—we’ll see you there.”
And he left her to go angling off toward the livestock pens with that curiously military stride, now and then nodding to acquaintances as he moved through the crowd.
Left behind, Lauren exhaled in an exasperated gust. Then she shrugged and glanced at her watch. Maybe she’d stick around and watch the team-roping before heading back into town. After that she’d see about checking into a motel, maybe catch up on the sleep she’d missed last night before it was time to put on her war paint and strap on her armor and head for the showdown with McCullough.
She smiled to herself, exhilarated at the thought of the battle ahead. She knew McCullough’s type. If she played him right, the stallion Cochise Red was as good as hers.
Chapter 2
Bronco stood with his back and one foot propped against a corral fence post and watched the eastern sky turn from indigo to purple to mauve, to a gaudy shade of salmon streaked with gold. Ordinarily sunrise was his favorite time of day—something in his genes, he guessed, remnants of an ancient reverence of his father’s people for the Creator Sun. But this morning the appearance of that molten sliver brought him no joy. This morning it was only a prod and a portent: Time to go—bad times coming. He and the woman must be well away before they got here.
Lauren Brown. He knew Gil figured she was his trump card, but Bronco knew for a fact that taking her would prove to be the biggest mistake McCullough ever made. He also knew there was no point in trying to tell the commander that; Bronco had run into officers like him before. A smart man but arrogant, and a fanatic on top of it—a bad combination, especially when combined with some real power. It was such men, Bronco believed, who made the decisions that lost wars and turned the tides of history.
By this time, though, he himself was pretty fatalistic about the whole thing. The commander had been dead-set on this plan, and now that he’d put it in motion, Bronco figured there wasn’t much anybody could do to stop it. A bad business, destined for a bad end—for somebody. Bronco meant to make damn sure it wasn’t him.
He glanced at his watch, then looked over toward the small split-log building with the reflected glow of pinkish-yellow light showing in its barred window. After a moment he straightened and pushed away from the fence post. Her ten minutes was up. He slapped his gloves once against his Levis, then drew them on and headed for the saddle house. On the way he couldn’t help but notice that his boots were hitting the hard dirt in the same rhythm as the song inside his head, the one that kept singing: She’s bad news…bad news…bad news.
But the picture in his mind that went with the song didn’t look like bad news. It was the picture of Lauren Brown walking into Smoky Joe’s last night, looking like a Texas sunflower….
Johnny Bronco’s Saturday-night routine was a well-established tradition at Smoky Joe’s Bar and Grill. He’d generally arrive around seven o’clock, choose his favorite table along the back wall near the rest-room door and order a hamburger medium well along with the first of what usually amounted to about six beers. He’d work on the burger and the beers between trips to the dance floor and the men’s room and trying to hit on any good-looking women that happened to be in the place, until along about eleven, twelve o’clock when he’d pick a fight and get himself thrown out on his butt. The regular patrons of Smoky Joe’s didn’t seem to mind this, had even come to expect it as an essential part of the evening’s entertainment, and the management didn’t hold it against him as long as nothing got broken and nobody got hurt.
Anyway, people around there tended to cut Johnny Bronco quite a bit of slack, just as they had way back in the days when he’d been the hometown football hero, all-conference wide receiver and all-time leading scorer for the White Mountain Mustangs. Locally, there were two things a man could do that would pretty much guarantee him universal respect: be good with a football or be good with horses. Johnny Bronco happened to be both. It was a pretty sure bet that after the kind of show he’d put on out at the rodeo arena that afternoon, he wasn’t going to have to pay for very many of those beers.
The regular crowd in Smoky Joe’s had been so enthusiastic in their congratulations, in fact, that by the time Lauren Brown walked in at eight-fifteen Bronco was well ahead of the game. There were three long-necked bottles lined up on the table in front of him and a fourth cradled against the front of his bright red dancin’ shirt, and he was grinning and keeping time with the heel of his boot as he watched the energetic bunch on the dance floor muddle through the steps of “Elvira.”
He knew the minute she walked in. He’d been watching for her, of course, but even if he hadn’t, she’d have been hard to miss. He’d already noticed she was tall for a woman, reed-slender in her snug-fitting jeans and expensive stack-heeled boots and a waist-length scoop-necked knit shirt the color of sunflowers. She was the kind of woman who looked her best astride a horse—or a man, for that matter. Long strong legs, round firm breasts—not too big, just the right size to fill a man’s hands with nothing going to waste. And then there was that hair—a thick curving fall to her shoulders, the exact shade of winter grass on a cold sunny day in the high country. He could almost smell its fresh sweet fragrance, see it ripple when the wind caught it.
Bronco checked his watch again and smiled to himself. Fifteen minutes late—just enough to let McCullough know she wasn’t at his beck and call, not quite enough so that he’d be able to justify getting pissed off about it. Hell, she’d just bat her baby blues and show him her dimple, and ol’ Gil would have no choice but to chalk it up to feminine privilege. A dangerous combination for a woman—headstrong and smart. Bronco knew he’d do well not to underestimate her.
He reminded himself of that now as he lifted the bar away from the saddle-house door. He was half expecting her to ambush him with the coffee mug; he hadn’t missed the way her eyes had sharpened when he’d handed it to her, or the barely imperceptible tensing of her wrists as she’d tested its weight. She was gutsy, that one, on top of headstrong
