Brock chuckled at the animal’s look of pain and indignation. “That stuff smarts a bit, don’t it?” he said cheerfully. “I guess I shoulda warned you.”
With effortless ease, he wrestled the animal back to the ground, knelt on the calf’s flank and untied the rope binding the legs. The calf kicked and rolled free, then heaved himself upright and faltered away to the other side of the corral.
Brock watched as the little animal shook his head dazedly a few times, then appeared to realize that the dreadful pain was over and the torturing barbs had vanished miraculously from his nose. Finally the calf lifted his head, bellowed joyously and trotted out through a partly open gate to the larger pen where his mother waited, lowing to her overgrown baby in soft anxious tones.
Brock grinned as he watched the reunion. His dog, Alvin, appeared at the gate and sat gazing up at the big man, tongue lolling hopefully.
“Hi, Alvin,” Brock said. “You look hungry. Lunch time already?”
Alvin regarded his master with concentrated attention, one ear drooping. He was a small, engagingly ugly dog, mostly Australian blue heeler with a liberal dash of something else, possibly Scotch terrier, that gave his mottled blue-gray hide a disreputable shaggy look. Alvin’s eyes were dark and perennially sad, as if the world was just a little too much for him but he was prepared to struggle bravely on.
In actual fact Alvin was a coward, especially terrified of cats and thunderstorms. He was also a lazy hedonist, dedicated to little more than his single-minded pursuit of something to eat and somewhere to sleep. He lifted his head now and looked at Brock in mournful silence, sighing heavily.
“All right, all right,” Brock said, chuckling. “Just give me a minute, okay? I’ll put this stuff away in the barn an’ be right with you.”
Apparently mollified, Alvin fell in step beside his master, plump sides twitching as he trotted along at the big man’s feet.
“Pore little bull calf. He was sure hurtin’ some, Alvin. Likely hasn’t eaten anything for a couple days, either,” Brock said to the dog, with the companionable ease of a man who spent much of his time with animals.
In fact, Brock often conversed with animals more easily than people.
Brock Munroe’s values were basic and straightforward. He believed in hard work, fair play, being loyal in friendship and honest in business. He liked thick steaks, cuddly puppies and starlit nights, watercolor sunrises and gentle quiet women.
But he loved nothing in all the world as much as these five thousand rolling acres of trees and hay meadows, scrub brush and cactus, that spread out around him in the bright October afternoon sun.
The Double Bar ranch had been in the family for generations, like so many others in the Hill Country, but had fallen on hard times in recent years. Brock’s father, Dave Munroe, had been a carefree, hardliving man, entirely capable of leaving his ranch at the height of calving season and driving off to some poker game he’d heard of in the next county, often straggling home days later, bedraggled and broke.
Brock’s mother died when he was just twelve, leaving the boy alone with his unreliable father. And, as so often happens in such cases, Brock had grown up with a sense of responsibility far beyond his years. By the time he was sixteen he was running the big tumbledown ranch almost single-handed, and covering for his father so well that most of the neighbors didn’t even suspect what was going on.
This was partly because young Brock never complained about his situation to anybody, not even his closest friends. He saw no need to complain, or to make any attempt to change his life. Brock Munroe loved his father and he loved his home. From earliest boyhood, nothing mattered to him as much as keeping the ranch together, striving against all odds to make it viable.
Old Dave Munroe had finally driven his truck off the edge of the river road one stormy night a few years ago, and after that Brock’s life was lonelier but a lot less complicated.
“Yeah, he was a real ol’ hummer, Dad was,” Brock said to his dog, remembering how hard he’d had to struggle to pay off his father’s debts. “But he sure enjoyed life while it lasted, you gotta say that much for him.”
Alvin sighed in polite agreement and lingered impatiently on the doorstep, looking up with hopeful eyes at the big man beside him.
Brock grinned. “You don’t give a damn about life an’ death an’ ultimate fulfillment, do you, Alvin? You just wanna know where your next meal’s comin’ from. An’ more important, when it’s comin’. Right?”
Alvin gave his master a disdainful look and pushed in front to enter the house first, his plump body swaying as he made his way through a welter of scattered paint cans, old rags, bits of sandpaper and discarded pieces of plywood.
“Gawd, what a mess,” Brock muttered aloud.
“Alvin, when’s the work gonna settle down around here enough for me to finish all this, d’you think?”
Alvin made no reply, except to pause by his dish and squat. He stared up at Brock with passionate concentrated attention, his mouth partly open, his tail thumping gently on the worn linoleum.
Brock upended the paper sack of dog food, tipped a liberal amount into Alvin’s bowl and then washed his hands thoroughly at the sink. He wandered across the room, towel in hand, to give the contents of his fridge a gloomy inspection.
“What I need,” he told Alvin with a wistful note in his voice, “is a wife. You know that, Alvin? A wife would be so nice to have around.”
Alvin glanced up briefly, jaws moving with rhythmic speed, dark eyes half-closed in bliss. Then he dropped his head and buried his nose once more in his dish.
Brock watched the dog for a moment, a little sadly. At last he turned, took a few slices of bread, a chunk of salami and an apple from the fridge and wandered into the living room, which was also cluttered with renovation materials.
Brock had begun the improvements to the old house earlier in the year, when he realized that, for the first time in living memory, he was actually going to have some extra money.
Still, he was doing all the work himself, learning as he went along from manuals and how-to books. Like everything Brock did, his carpentry was neat, precise and destined to last a lifetime. But the work was time-consuming and there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to complete the tasks.
Another, more serious problem was the fact that he needed advice on things like planning and color selection. For instance, Brock wasn’t at all sure how to make his kitchen convenient to work in, or which colors to choose, or where to place windows to get the most light.
Sometimes Brock toyed with the idea of asking advice of a longtime friend like Lynn McKinney or Carolyn Townsend, somebody who could give him a woman’s point of view. But he always shied away from the prospect, and he wasn’t even sure why.
Of course he told himself it was just because the place was such a mess that he didn’t want anybody to see it. But he suspected that his reluctance went deeper than that. After all, people like Lynn and Carolyn and Mary Gibson were all good friends, nice women, neighbors he’d known all his life.
The problem was, they just weren’t her.
Brock frowned and lowered himself into his sagging old cut-velvet armchair, thinking about the shadowy woman who lived at the back of his mind.
She’d been his fantasy as long as he could remember, this lovely fragrant delicate woman with the shining dark hair and vivid blue eyes, the dainty curved body and regal lift to her head. More times than he could count, he’d seen her smiling though the clouds when he rode out to bring in the cattle before a storm, heard her laughter drifting on the autumn wind, felt the