She had the damned stupid gourd-pod, and she would find her car again.
Lauren lost her hat. It was just-gone! She was freezing. She stopped and wrapped the long pod tail around her. It was only minimally better. She was cold.
And…where was she?
She looked around. It was all so relentlessly the same. Rolling ground. No sun. No stars. No clue as to exactly where she was. The compass said North was that way. She went south.
If only she could just get to some trees…even to mesquites.she would be better off. She was so cold.
Lauren redid the long cloth tail of the pod, wrapping it around her head, her neck, and her chest. Her teeth were chattering.
What was a damned gourd-pod worth? Why had she felt the need to go and find it—all by herself? She would probably die out there. Alone. Her bones would eventually be discovered. By then, it would have been so long, since her death, that the finders would assume she was a relic from long, long ago.
She turned to view the approaching storm and her mind saw a man on a horse. So she was hallucinating. Big deal. She didn’t have anything else to entertain her. Lauren’s mind had decided she needed to be rescued and her imagination managed to conjure that.
So she turned her back on the foolishness and trudged off—south and a little west.
Behind her, she heard horse’s hooves.
Yep. That would go right along with the idea that she was being rescued. Her imagination had always been rather vivid. She’d spent most of her childhood reading and rereading her maternal grandmother’s carefully preserved comic pages of Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant.
That grandmother was remarkable.
Lauren figured she was in the final stages of freezing, and she would go out on Prince Valiant’s horse. Okay. She could handle that.
Prince Valiant’s voice came from behind her. “Hey, where the hell are you going?”
How unprincely. Men never acted as they were supposed to act.
She stopped and turned to confront the phantom. “You’re supposed to step down, take off your hat and sweep a really good bow.” With those directions, she stood shivering with her teeth clicking and waited, her back to the storm.
He swung down from the horse with beautiful ease. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it.
That beat the bow all hollow. The coat was gloriously warm. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d already died and probably was in hell. It was so warm. Well, maybe not hell exactly. She hadn’t been that bad.
The masculine voice told her, “Get on the horse.”
Huh? She was going to hell on a horse? That seemed a nasty thing to do to a horse.
She asked the phantom, “What’s he done?”
The phantom’s face was sour. He groused, “I hate women. They always do the dumbest things.”
Warming inside the coat, she retorted heatedly, “Women? Women do dumb things? Do you know that I’m out here for only one thing?”
His interest changed and riveted. “You streetwalking?”
With great, adult patience, she replied, “I came out here with a group to-”
And she couldn’t blab a secret club’s activities. She was staunch.
“Yeah?” He encouraged her speech with his riveted attention.
Why didn’t his Stetson blow away? She was fascinated.
She saw that his shoulders were hunched. He was cold. Where was his coat? It was on her. She said, “I’ll give your coat back to you in just a minute. It’s so warm.”
And he replied nicely but he leaned close as he yelled over the sound of the winds, “As soon as you’re just about thawed, we’ll get out of here before it thunders.”
“It’s thundering?” Her eyes got big and her head jerked around.
“It’s just wind right now. It’ll get interesting in a while. Are you warm enough to get on the horse?”
“What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“This horse.” She was kind and pointed to the horse so that he’d know what she meant by the word. She didn’t think he was very bright.
But the male creature replied, “Block Head. We just call him plain Block.”
She lifted her chin a little. “He seems more intelligent than that.” She was chiding.
“He don’t know no never mind.”
She indicted the horse’s position and mentioned kindly, “He’s protecting us from the wind.”
“That’s ‘cause he don’t know not to.”
She stiffened. Then she said in her Daughters of the Alamo voice, “I’m ready to ride.”
He smiled and bit his lower lip. She was probably hostile enough now to see to herself. He said, “Give me the coat. I’ll wrap you in this here blanket. I’d take the blanket but it don’t have no sleeves. Understand?”
He was a basic man. No wonder he had so carelessly referred to streetwalking. He probably didn’t know any better. She would be careful of him. She took off the coat with steely discipline.
He took hold of her and tossed her up on the horse. Lauren didn’t shriek or sprawl because her daddy had been doing something like that to his daughters all their lives.
She landed neatly in the saddle. She would ride; he would walk. He was a gentleman under all that crudeness. He knew his mann—
Move your foot out of the stirrup.”
He was boarding the horse. too.
But he sat in back of the saddle and he shifted until he got the blanket right, covering the front of her and her legs, then he opened his coat and covered her entirely.
In a sexually stimulating, roughened voice, he commented in her ear, “It’s jest a good thing you got your own gloves.”
He spoke of those thin-skinned, driving gloves, which protected her hands from sun-browning. Sure. But thin as the leather was, the gloves were better than nothing. She said a dismissive, “Yes.”
Then he startled her as he said quite naturally, “The pod’s tail makes a pretty good cover for your head and neck.”
How’d he know it wasn’t a cantaloupe? She replied a nothing, “Umm.”
He didn’t realize the subject had been rejected by her. He said, “We’ve found a couple of them there things. What’s in them? Ones we’ve tried ta see, they just crumbled.”
She
