huge tears welled in her eyes, and she sat on the edge of her couch. Mother was back in the big house, hiding in the basement, waiting for sundown and the night’s first dose of anesthetic. Father was in his den, either arranging a bribe or a nooner. Yes…home sweet home!
Just why should she, Jacquelyn wondered, be able to nurture any belief in love? Who, in this travesty of a family, could have any confidence that they were worthy of love and affection—much less able to express it to others?
The phone on the table chirred. She cleared her throat, took a few deep breaths and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Y’all requested one day’s notice,” A. J. Clayburn’s mocking voice informed her without preamble. “So that’s what y’all are getting. Be ready at sunrise tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your place.”
“That’s not a full day’s notice. That’s impossible. I—”
But she was protesting for the benefit of her own walls—the line went dead when he hung up on her.
Four
Jacquelyn had never bragged about being a morning person. Yet here she was, shivering in the damp chill well before sunrise, miserable as a draftee in the rain.
“C’mon, Boots,” she urged her reluctant sorrel mare. “It’s only the headstall, I promise. No cold bit in your mouth this time, honest, girl.”
Boots, however, kept trying to back into her stall. She wanted nothing to do with any equipment this early in the morning. The seventeen-hand thoroughbred was well trained and of a sweet disposition. But Jacquelyn once made the thoughtless mistake, early on a cool morning like today, of slipping an unwarmed bit into the mare’s mouth. Now Boots always rebelled at being rigged in predawn chill.
Jacquelyn shook the oat bag, gradually luring Boots back out of her stall.
“I know, girl, I know. This ‘reliving Western history’ is for the birds, huh? That’s a girl, c’mon, that’s a sweet lady.”
Each time Boots exhaled, the breath formed a ghostly wraith of smoke. This late in summer, Montana mornings had quite a snap to them. And Jacquelyn knew it would be even colder up in the high altitudes of Eagle Pass. As a native Georgian, she shared the Southerners’ deep aversion to cold weather. Better a hurricane than a frigid night.
Last night she had crammed some warm clothing into a duffel bag along with her microrecorder and a notepad. But she still had to assemble all her riding gear. This rushing at the last minute was totally idiotic. She liked to plan carefully for a trip, with plenty of notice. Instead, she was being instantly “mobilized,” with Hazel and A. J. Clayburn her tyrannical, heartless commanders.
“’Atta girl,” she praised when Boots, finally realizing she would not have to take the bit, dipped her head and let Jacquelyn slip a headstall on her. She tied a lead line to the ring and led her mare out into the grainy semidarkness of the corral.
She was carrying her saddle and pad out of the tack room when A.J.’s battered pickup rounded a rear corner of the house and parked in front of the corral gate. A two-stall horse trailer was hitched to the rear.
He somehow managed to poke his head out of the open window without disturbing his neatly crimped Stetson. He thumbed the hat off his forehead, grinning at her. The glare of a big sodium-vapor yard light cleanly illuminated the scornful twist of his mouth.
“Stir your stumps, girl!” he called out the window. “Time is nipping at our fannies. Drop that sissy saddle and let’s hit the trail.”
“Hit the…? May I suggest we at least load up my horse and saddle?”
“Won’t need ’em,” he informed her curtly, turning off the engine and swinging down lithely from the truck.
Begrudingly she felt a twinge of animal attraction to his good looks. But she shoved the feeling away as soon as she recognized what it was. Lust was sure not going to help her in the situation she was about to get herself into. It would only cause problems.
“Oh? I suppose I’ll be riding double with you?” A.J. glanced toward Boots. “As rare a privilege as that would surely be for me,” he drawled with evident sarcasm, “it won’t be necessary. Is that your horse?”
She nodded, staring up at him. He was still tall, even outside, with the mountains behind him tipped with the first pink buds of dawn light. Beside him she seemed inconsequential, and hopelessly female. No match at all.
He went back to the horse trailer and swung open the double doors.
“It’s a good-looking animal,” he conceded. “Good breeding and solid lines. That sorrel of yours is a fine flatland horse. Long-legged animals do real well in deep snow in open country. But we’re going up into the mountains. That means we need good mountain ponies.”
While he said this, he showed her the two horses in the trailer. That is, Jacquelyn assumed the two ugly, stubby-legged beasts were horses.
Despite her foul mood, she laughed so hard she almost dropped her saddle.
“Don’t tell me,” she managed between sputters of mirth. “You rescued them from a rendering plant?”
“Girl, you don’t know nothing about horses, do you? These ain’t riding-academy nags, they’re genuine mountain mustangs. Some call ’em Indian scrubs. They’ve got the endurance of doorknobs.”
She looked askance at their dish faces, bushy tails, and mongrelized confusion of colors and markings—no controlled bloodlines here.
“I won’t ride a pretty horse like yours up in the mountains,” he assured her, guessing her thoughts. “A pretty horse is a petted horse. And a petted horse is a spoiled horse.”
Something aggressive in his tone hinted he wasn’t talking just about horses.
She looked at him. By his glance he was obviously summing her up, taking in her designer black quilted barn jacket, her English custom-made paddock boots, and subtracting them from the value of her character. But then his gaze seemed to linger along the generous swells of her chest, and suddenly her net worth seemed to rise again.
It was still dark enough outside to hide the embarrassment heating her cheeks. Leave it to a macho redneck to view a woman like a piece of meat. But she supposed being a flank steak was better than an icicle.
She turned her attention back to the ponies. “Look, they’re not just ugly. They’re also so…little,” she objected.
“‘Praise the tall, but ride the small.’ Sure, they’re barely fourteen hands. But look at those short, thick, strong legs. That’s what you need on rocky, narrow trails. These animals were born in the mountains, they’re surefooted as wild goats. That bluegrass beauty of yours ever been up high in the rim-rock in a forty-mile-an-hour wind?”
That goading twist to his mouth made her anger flare. She felt half-tempted to slap it right off his arrogantly handsome face.
“No,” she admitted, resenting him for his know-it-all smugness and the way his eyes still seemed to lower to places below her neckline.
