He’d guided her with a touch so light and sure she wasn’t even aware of it. She’d followed him effortlessly, as if they’d been moving together, dancing together for years, a lifetime. She’d felt weightless, light as cottonwood fluff floating on a summer wind. At the back of his neck, her fingers had begun of their own volition to explore the dark mystery of his hair, while on her back she’d felt his fingers moving, slowly navigating the bumps and hollows of her spine.
And then suddenly, just like that, it had ended. Bronco had taken her back to McCullough’s table and left her there with polite but cursory thanks. Lauren had been so shaken she’d barely registered the conversation from that point on, was only dimly aware that she’d nodded acceptance of McCullough’s asking price for Cochise Red without so much as an argument and agreed to go out to his ranch and take a look at the stallion the following day.
She didn’t see what started the fight. All at once, it seemed, Smoky Joe’s had erupted in bedlam. There was a roar of sound, and the crowd surged like a single entity toward the back of the room, toward the area near the dance floor.
Unaccustomed to violence of any kind, Lauren uttered an exclamation of alarm as she started to rise. Gil McCullough, who had begun to swear matter-of-factly in a low voice, gestured for her to stay put and at the same time waved a couple of his men, who’d been leaning against the bar nearby nursing long-necked bottles of beer, over to the table.
About then the crowd parted raggedly and Johnny Bronco emerged, struggling and swinging clumsily in the grip of two beefy-looking guys wearing black cowboy hats and vests that said “Smoky Joe’s” across the back. Before Lauren had time to draw breath, they’d hustled Bronco out the front door.
The two Smoky Joe’s employees walked back into the bar, dusting their hands and grinning, waving to mixed cheers and boos from the crowd. They gave a thumbs-up to a couple of uniformed deputy sheriffs sitting at the bar, who merely smiled and shook their heads before returning to their burger and fries. McCullough leaned back in his chair and spoke to his men.
“See he gets home,” he growled in an undertone, then turned back to her with a smile of apology. “Ol’ Bronco’s the best damned horse wrangler west of the Mississippi, but he can’t hold his liquor worth beans. Never could. It’s a racial thing, I guess. He’s a half-breed Apache, you know.”
Lauren sat silently, sipping her beer. She didn’t reply, partly because she was still too shaken by the close and unaccustomed brush with violence, but also because the comment made her intensely uncomfortable. Her firsthand knowledge of Native Americans was limited, but she disliked the term half-breed, and had been raised to consider blanket statements about race objectionable on general principles.
Unperturbed by her silence, Gil shook his head. “It’s a sad story, a sad story. Unfortunately not a very unusual one in this part of the country. He grew up around here, you know.”
Lauren nodded; she remembered the rodeo announcer saying he was a “local boy.”
“Yeah, ol’ Johnny was quite a hero in these parts a while back.”
“Really?” Lauren murmured, interested in spite of herself. The beer was warming her insides, easing her pulse back to normal. She focused on her companion’s clean-shaven face and close-cropped gray hair, and tried to block out the images that wanted to linger in her mind—images of a dark angry face, hard-edged features crisscrossed with strands of long black hair…
“Football,” Gil clarified after taking a small drink of the beer he’d been nursing most of the evening. “Best damned wide receiver I ever saw—hands like a magician. All-conference, all-state his senior year—had colleges lined up to offer him scholarships.” He shook his head again and made a smacking sound with his lips. “What a waste.”
“What happened?”
The rancher shrugged. “The drinking got him. Finally either flunked out or got kicked out—depends on who you hear it from. Bronco, he doesn’t like to talk about it much. He always was wild, drank too much even when he was in high school. Came by it naturally—his old man was a drunk, died in a car accident when Bronco was in junior high. Kid never had a chance.”
“He must not be doing all that badly,” Lauren remarked with an edgy shrug. “You hired him.” And then she wondered why she felt a need to defend a man she didn’t know at all, especially from a man who obviously knew him very well.
Pictures flashed in lightning-quick succession through her mind: Bronco up on Old Number 7, whirling in slow motion in a golden fog of sun-shot dust; a pair of scuffed and well-broken-in boots, spurs without rowels; a wry smile in a dark face, and the words spoken in a soft deep voice. Horse and I have an understanding….
“I hired him because when it comes to horses, he’s the best there is,” Gil said as if he’d seen the images in her mind. But his narrowed eyes had a speculative glint that made her squirm inwardly as he watched her. As a lawyer she knew that feeling. It was the one she got when she thought she might have given away too much. Showed the opposition a few too many of her cards. “And because I thought the kid had had some bad breaks,” the rancher went on in a voice with added undercurrents. “I helped him straighten himself out after he got kicked out of the military. Haven’t regretted it yet.”
“Well…” Lauren could think of nothing else to say. She suddenly felt depressed without the least idea why. “I think I’m going to have to call it a night,” she said to Gil. “It’s been a long day.” That’s all it is, she thought. She’d driven more than five hundred miles to get here and had very little sleep, and now the beer. She was just tired.
She settled on a time to meet with Gil the following day and jotted down directions to his ranch. Mindful of the lateness of the hour and the rowdy nature of the crowd, he graciously walked her to her truck, which, since she was pulling a fair-size horse trailer, she’d parked far out on the periphery of the parking lot.
As she crossed the hard-baked dirt, bleached by the light of mercury lamps to the color of old bones, she thought about the man who’d been dumped there only minutes before.
“Don’t worry about Bronco,” Gil said as she unlocked her truck. “My boys’ll see he gets home all right.”
Unnerved by the ease with which the rancher seemed to read her mind, she said dryly, “I’d just hate to think he was somewhere on the road right now.” She climbed behind the wheel and Gil closed the door. He waited with typical Western gallantry until she’d started the engine, then touched the brim of his hat.
“Drive safe now.”
“Yeah, thanks, I will. See you tomorrow.”
He left her with a wave and headed off across the parking lot, but Lauren didn’t watch him go. Nor did she immediately put the truck in gear and pull out onto the highway. Safely, blessedly alone, she sat and stared through the windshield, cringing inwardly as she opened the door on her own self-doubts.
What’s wrong with me? How could I have been so attracted to a man who’s clearly nothing but bad news?
It must be some sort of wild gene, she thought, passed down to her from that pioneer ancestor, the one Aunt Lucy had told her about. How else to explain it? She was Lauren Brown, a bright sensible Iowa attorney, a good girl, one who’d always done the right thing, lived by the rules, lived up to everyone’s expectations. She was engaged to marry the perfect man, a good man, not to mention handsome, witty and kind.
Why, then, had Benjamin never made her feel the way she’d felt tonight, dancing with Johnny Bronco?
Johnny Bronco. What a name! Romantic notions aside, what he was was a half-Indian cowboy with a drinking problem, a propensity for violence and a undeniable way with horses and women. The last man in the world she’d ever let herself get mixed up with. What could she possibly see in a man like that? What could they possibly have in common?
As if in reply, once again a wave of remembered sensation swamped her. Oh, how