Montana Gold

She reached out and turned the music up a little. Yep. Nothing like being in charge of the universe and feeling it in motion.

Elle rolled the window down a little more. She didn’t care if her hair did whip around her face, she loved the smell of the wind and its power on her skin. For late March, she wasn’t used to the weather being so nice and warm.

She flew on, shooting in a straight path through the dark endless space, with the dashboard’s glow the only light. Headed for somewhere new, another place where she wouldn’t have to stay. Another place she could leave whenever she wanted. This was freedom.

She glanced at the speedometer and eased her foot off the pedal. No sense ruining a good run with a ticket from the highway patrol. When the needle hit seventy, she punched on the cruise control and shifted in the seat. Holding the wheel with one hand, she took her cup from its holder and sipped the coffee. Still hot, still fragrant. Per-fect.

Los Lonely Boys were singing about heaven from the CD player, their voices soothing her mind and tickling her ears, rocking her in their rhythms.

Heaven’s right about here. On earth, it won’t ever be any better.

RodeoAustin had been a great one for her and also for Missy Jo, sleeping with a smile on her face. And now they were speeding toward the next arena, toward that eternal chance of an even more spectacular performance that kept all the rodeo cowboys and cowgirls on the road.

Toward the ultimate thrill, that primeval gamble of life against death.

That gamble that required everything the players possessed—skill, intelligence, wit, physical strength and agility. The game to end all games.

What else could she want? She was one of the most successful players. She had a talent for it. A love for it. Making her every dream come true was definitely possible.

One of these years, the top forty-five bull riders in the world would vote for her and she’d be working for the Professional Bull Riders. That was when a bullfighter knew he or she had really made it to the top—when the riders chose her to protect them.

Oh, and she’d never forget Austin because that was where she’d danced with that bronc-riding legend, Chase Lomax. The small of her back arched toward the memory of his warm hand. Her whole body wanted to move with his again.

The remembered feel of him flowed over her skin and brought his woodsy, citrusy scent to fire her blood.

Maybe that was heaven, too, being in his arms.

Heaven or not, it was a miracle. She might pretend to other people, she might keep secrets and lie or evade the truth all the time with them, but she had taken a vow not to lie to herself anymore, so she had to face it: Chase Lomax made her feel something sexual.

But she mustn’t get her hopes up too much. A thrill or two during one dance was a long way from real lovemaking.

It’s a start, though. It proves it’s possible.

Oh, yeah, and what an irony. The first man whose hands really touched her had to be a sexist woman-chaser rude enough to tell her she was in the wrong line of work.

Was it worth the risk to take it further? She knew she could by the way he’d looked at her when they left the dance floor and the way he’d kept saying things to her during dinner. He was intrigued.

However, sleeping with him could be a risk to her career, if she let his remarks about it invade her head. It might even be a risk to her heart because she couldn’t take sex lightly, and wasn’t her goal to make it mean something as well as to really feel something? Chase Lomax was famous for breaking hearts.

But the greatest risk of all would be that it would fail and destroy her hope.

Which is stupid to even think about because approximately half the human race is male and there are millions more men out there.

Too bad she wasn’t the type to try them all, one after the other. No way could she do that.

But if she decided she was afraid to go further with Chase, how would she ever know? He might be her best chance for the rest of her life to find out whether she could ever really feel anything with any man or if she would always be damaged goods. Or perhaps sexually-challenged, to be politically correct.

She felt a wry grin curl her lips. Politically correct she wasn’t.

But there was something more in Chase that drew her. A shadow of something in his eyes that made her want to know enough about him to name it.

Which made it even more important to leave him alone. She needed to find out about herself, not him. She was tangled up enough inside without getting involved or falling in love. She wasn’t ready for that. No way could she fight bulls with a distracted heart or a broken one.

On the other hand, this had to be worth pursuing, because there’d been some tension or something in the air between them last night—right from the minute Chase walked up to that table.

Yeah, sure. He wanted to tell you about your mistake.

She could go into this without her heart, though. It’d be for her body only. All she wanted was to find out if she could ever be normal.

Oh, yeah, for double sure. Remember how you couldn’t look away from that family last night? Three stairsteps, little cowgirls. A mommy and a daddy still in love, holding hands?

True. She did want that. Someday. But she had to find out about herself first. She could never get married again until she knew. She’d gotten so sick of pretending with Derek and she was not going to spend the rest of her life like that.

So if you had the guts to leave Derek, and you have the guts to be a bullfighter, why are you scared of giving Chase Lomax a whirl in the name of research? You’ve never been known for a coward, Farrell Hawthorne.

Right. She couldn’t be a coward when Farrell was her name. Her mother named her, not one of her three brothers, after their legendary great-great-grandpa.

Farrell St. Clair, legend among the real, old-time cowboys, had made a name that, to this day, still came up in every discussion of Montana’s best bronc riders ever. In spite of being born sickly and with a crippled arm during the winter of the great die-up in 1886, he’d survived and thrived as a man who could ride anything with hair on it.

Besides that, they said he’d fight a grizzly with a willow switch. He had absolutely no fear, or if he did, no one ever saw it.

Remembering those stories and knowing she was named for him was what got her through those terrible days when she was twelve. They gave her courage when she was scared to death and helpless, and they gave her courage the first time she walked into the arena as the bullfighter.

Her mother had unfailingly called her Farrell, but everybody else, from the time the baby girl had tried to say her own name, called her Elle. When she started bullfighting, though, she insisted that the rodeo announcers use her full name because it made her spirit even stronger.

Elle punched the Forward button on the CD player. Time to quit looking in the rearview mirror.

And time to quit worrying about whatever lay ahead down the road. Trying to plan for that was a waste of energy.

Worse, it was a waste of a beautiful spring night with the smell of rain on the wind.

“Really, Aussie,” she murmured, glancing at the Australian shepherd who’d put his front feet on the console to stand up and look at her, “you’re the only male animal we need around this outfit.”

Aussie gave her a melting look of agreement. Elle set the coffee back in the cupholder so she could reach over and scratch him a little. He sank back down, closed his eyes and nestled his nose between his paws. She patted his head and grasped the leather wheel again, firmly and with both hands.

She really ought to travel with Missy Jo more often. But it was hard to do—M.J. had to enter the rodeos and barrel-racings that offered the most prize money and Elle had to work the jobs that offered her contracts, of which more and more were package deals for her and Rocky and Junior. They’d just have to make the best of these rare times when they both worked the same rodeo.

Which probably was just as well. Missy Jo had romance on the brain now that she had a serious boyfriend, and she wanted to fix Elle up with somebody, too. It was sweet of her but maddening. Last night, Missy Jo had sensed the attraction between Elle and Chase and today that had been her main topic of conversation.

Something moved at the side of the road. A long way up ahead, at the end of the headlights’ beam, but Elle knew she’d seen it. She started slowing down.

Probably it was an animal. If it ran across the road in front of them, she might have a wreck trying to miss it. She looked away, then tried to spot it again as she let the speed drop all the way down to fifty.

The night was black around them. Whatever it was had been white, or she would never have seen it. She kept searching and slowing and then she saw two eyes shining in her lights, looking down the road at her. She’d have to stop, just long enough to check it out.

When she got close enough, she signaled that she was going to pull over, gradually moved onto the shoulder of the road, and slowed the rig to a stop. As she set the parking brake, Missy Jo sat up.

“What’s going on? Where are we?”

“Middle of nowhere,” Elle said. “I just want to check on something.”

“You think we’ve got a flat?”

“No. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Skitter? Is she kicking again?”

“No, M.J. Nothing’s wrong. Hang on a second.”

Elle could feel Missy’s eyes on her back as she walked along the side of the highway, following the headlights’ beams to the yellow eyes looking at her from the ground.

“You’ll get your hand bit off,” Missy Jo screamed from the truck. “Elle, you don’t even know what that is.”

“It’s a dog,” Elle called back. “It’s a Husky. Or an Eskimo.”

“If it’s hurt, it could be dangerous. Wait ’til I get there.”

Elle squatted down at a safe distance while Missy Jo ran to her, talking as she did so.

“I’m not going to let you drive another mile,” she said. “Nobody but you would stop out in the boonies in the middle of the night for a hurt dog. You can’t help him, Elle.”

But the dog stood up right then and they saw that, aside from his left hind leg hanging at a weird angle and a cut bleeding into the fur of that shoulder, he appeared to be healthy. Sort of. Under the thick—and admittedly, horridly matted—haircoat, he was too thin.

Elle started talking to him and holding her hand out for him to sniff.

“It’s just a broken leg,” she said. “A good veterinarian can fix him right up.”

“Do you see one anywhere around here?”

Elle let that pass without comment except to say, “He’s not wearing any tags.”

“You can’t do this to Carlie,” Missy Jo said with an exaggerated sigh of sympathy for the woman who was Elle’s landlady. “If you take in any more strays, you’ll have to stay home and take care of them yourself.”

“Carlie calls them her grandchildren,” Elle told her, letting the dog lick the tips of her fingers. “She likes them. They keep her from being lonesome.”

“You’re her biggest stray,” M.J. said, with her usual tendency to speak truths that struck too close to the bone. “She just doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, Elle.”

M.J. definitely had a point, but Elle did, too.

“She says—all the time—that she’s a rich widow with nothing else to do but feed, water, doctor and entertain the hurting four-footed creatures I drag in there.”

She was stroking the dog’s head by now. He was whining his thanks.

“Talking to you is like talking to a rock,” M.J. said.

“Well, what would you do?” Elle said, keeping her voice as calm as she could so as not to excite or scare the dog. “Leave him here to suffer?”

“I never would’ve stopped in the first place,” M.J. said. “But now that you’ve done it, damn it, I’ll go get a blanket.”

HE’D DONE IT NOW.

Chase moved slowly as he sat up in bed, swung his feet out onto the floor, and stood up. He was sore all over and the pain in his bad leg seared through him like a firebrand, but he tried to shut it out of his mind. He had two pins and a screw in his left femur and that same kneecap had been cracked like a walnut in his very next ride back from that surgery, but all that had healed up six months ago. Surely it didn’t mean he couldn’t take it anymore.

He wasn’t going to let his body crater on him. Not yet. No way.

He’d planned to do a little cutting today to try a couple of his colts that’d just been started. But maybe he ought to take it easy instead.

Damn. The day a man couldn’t do anything and everything that he wanted to do was the day he might as well count himself old. He wasn’t there yet. He still had two more buckles to win.

He set his jaw and walked to the window in spite of the hurt, which began to turn into a sharp ache that ran all the way up into his teeth. Probably that was only because this Montana morning at the end of March was a whole lot colder than Texas, where he’d just been. Surely it wasn’t because he had too many bones that had been broken too many times.

Carefully, he widened his stance and began to stretch, bending to one side and then the other, breathing deep against the pain and keeping his eyes on the pinkening dawn outside the window. He’d been having crazy dreams, which were what had wakened him.

He rarely dreamed. Or else he didn’t remember his dreams. All his life, he’d been so tired when he finally went to bed at night that he had no trouble sleeping no matter what. Except maybe when he was a kid and never knew when his dad would jerk him out of bed in the middle of the night to berate or beat him.

Retirement wasn’t going to change that. Whenever the day rolled around that he had to get off the road and come home to this new ranch to stay, he would keep on working. Maybe not riding all the young ones, but he’d work. He’d ridden through the pain and worked through the pain and he was going to keep right on doing it as long as he could move.

That decided, he pulled on ragged jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, his wool-lined Carhartt jacket and sheepskin moccasins. Coffee and the sunrise. That was the ticket. After that, he wouldn’t jog or run, but he’d damn sure shovel some shit. He wasn’t gonna let being the big boss and the ranch owner go to his head.

Two hours later he was on his second pot of coffee and still on the porch, feet propped up on the railing, still no boots on, doing nothing but looking around like a pole-axed steer. What a lazy bum.

In a rocking chair, no less, like he was on his last legs. He’d have to talk to that designer woman who’d picked out the furniture. What’d she think this was? A rest home for old cowboys?

He’d get up and get to work as soon as he finished this pot. He’d just sit here for a few more minutes and decide what all he needed to do today. Only two days home and then he’d be back on the road.

Home. That seemed so strange to him. This new place was home.

Big house, good quality, but not fancy. Lots of glass and wood and stone but homey. Make it look like it grew out of the ground, there in front of the big grove of aspen at the foot of the mountain. That’s what he’d told the architect. That’s what he’d got.

Now he couldn’t believe it was his. And he couldn’t believe that someday he’d be here all the time. No cowboy could rodeo forever.

Looking that fact right in the face made him feel the earth shift underneath him: What would he do with a home? Home wasn’t just for one person, was it? But two people—him and his dad—hadn’t been a home, either. Not even the three of them, when his mom was still there, had made one. He didn’t know what a home was.

But if building could make one, then he’d have one. There were two buildings and several miles of fence under construction that he could see from here, just by turning his head. There were more that he couldn’t see right now. All of it belonged to him. He was the one making it happen.

His new barns, his new outdoor arena, his new shop, his new breeding lab, his new landscaping, his new manager’s house for Tucker and his wife Helen, his new bunkhouse for whatever help they needed, his new indoor arena, his new garage, were all springing up out of the ground because he’d ordered them to be built. Except for the mountain ranges rising against the sky, all the land he could see from this spot where he sat belonged to him, either deeded or leased.

He, Chase Lomax, was settling down. Well, he was preparing to settle down. Sometime. Not yet.

But he couldn’t deny that he was building a homeplace. Something to last, a fine ranch of the kind men handed down to their children.

Which was insane. When he died, he would leave it to Shane, since he certainly wasn’t the marrying kind and wouldn’t be having any more children.

He’d put his money in the bank since those first years on the rodeo road when all he’d had was that little old trailer he’d lived in with Andie Lee and Shane. Since then, he’d operated out of one friend’s place or another, usually whichever friend was boarding Tardy Girl for him. The now twenty-five-year-old mare he called Teege or T.G. was the only thing he’d managed to hold on to all his life.

Except the saddle he’d made with his dad. The only dadlike thing his dad had ever done. He didn’t like to think about his old man but sometimes he did wish he could show him this ranch, after all the times he’d called him worthless and no-good and told him he’d never amount to anything.

He slammed his mind shut on the memory of his dad’s voice and concentrated on looking at the snow-covered mountains. This had to be the most spectacular view in the state of Montana. The best view he’d ever seen anywhere, and he’d been all over the U. S. and a lot of Canada and to Brazil with Robbie.

Chase, chilled to the bone, even though they were having a good spell of open weather, stood up and threw what was left of the coffee into a bush by the steps, set the mug on the table and gave his arms and shoulders a mighty stretch. His joints popped and his bones creaked, but at least he was all in one piece.

The sun was warming things up and he should get out in it. Maybe the wind would become a chinook—after all, most of the snow was melting from the lower elevations.

He would go change into running shoes and put in a mile or two. This afternoon, he’d lift weights and do a lot of crunches. Robbie’s Brazilian buddy, Paulo, did two thousand sit-ups a day. No wonder he was in perfect control of his body when he got on a bull. Of course, he was a lot younger than Chase.

He turned to start for the door, but the grinding of wheels on gravel stopped him. He turned, waiting idly, to see who was coming. More workmen, probably.

This was pitiful. He was so hard up for entertainment he was watching the builders drive in to work.

Nope. He knew the pickup as soon as he saw it. Andie Lee, coming to see him.

Only once before had she driven the hundred miles to his place from the Splendid Sky, the ranch where they’d met all those years ago. They’d been so young then. So young they didn’t understand the world they were in, happy in the rebellion of forbidden love: Andie Lee the princess, the owner’s stepdaughter, and Chase the saddle bum/drifter/colt breaker/wannabe rodeo champion.

The one time she’d been here was to bring their son, Shane—well, technically, her son—to camp with Chase for a couple of days. That had been before the house was completed. What would she think of it?

He didn’t really care what she thought of the house. Suddenly, he just wished he’d held on to her somehow so he wouldn’t be lonesome now.

Lately she’d been dating just one guy, a guy she’d looked at with a million feelings in her eyes the day she introduced him to Chase. And, later, she hadn’t wanted to talk about him on the phone, so that had made him feel sort of shut out. They hadn’t been lovers for several years, but they’d been friends and they were accustomed to telling each other just about everything.

Come to think of it, she’d been too busy for weeks now to talk to Chase much at all.

If she was here, this was serious. It must be bad news. Shane might be in trouble again.

She drove up to the center of the circle drive and parked in front of the steps. He took them two at a time to go meet her, hardly feeling the pain in his leg. Shane wasn’t with her.

Smiling, Andie got out of the truck and walked into his open arms, lingering in his hug for a minute without saying a word. She felt so damn good. She smelled so familiar. Now, she could make this place a home. Why the hell had he ever let her go?

“You must’ve hit the road before sunup,” he said. “Everything all right?”

She pulled back and gave him that smile again. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling.

“Everything’s wonderful. I’ve come to tell you my exciting news.”

“Is it about Shane?”

“About me,” she said. Then she turned away, took his hand, and started leading him up the steps. “Give me some coffee,” she said. “I finished mine just before I started down the mountain.”

“Got a fresh pot.”

She let go of his hand.

“I want to see your house later,” she said, “but for right now, let’s sit out here. This view is fabulous. It’s even better than the one from Micah’s place.”

“It might be too cold for you. Things’re just starting to warm up.”

“Hey,” she said. “I don’t live in Texas anymore. I can take the cold.”

When he came back with two full mugs, she was standing at the corner of the railing, looking in every direction. The sun made a halo of her hair.

“You building a town here or what?” she said.

“A little different from our Old Turkey, isn’t it?” he said, and stood very close to her after he handed her the cup.

She held the look he gave her and he felt his heart beat in his chest. When they’d lived in that trailer, they’d been lovers. That was for damn sure.

“That was a good old camper,” she said, smiling as she took a sip. “Think of the thousands of miles we put on it.”

“And how many chaps and jackets you had to paint to buy the gas when I wasn’t winning,” he said.

He loved her smile. He always had loved it.

“Can’t you just see us? That old faded turquoise camper with the rusty red one-horse hooked on behind? How is Tardy Girl doing, by the way?”

“She’s great. I’m keeping her in where it’s warm. We’ll go see her in a little while.”

“Those were great days, Chase. I’ll never forget them.”

“Sometimes I think we oughtta try it again,” he said lightly. “At least here in this house, you’d have a kitchen big enough to cook in and scratch your butt at the same time.”

She almost sloshed her coffee out. “Chase! That’s not a very appetizing image.”

But she was laughing. She was still smiling that smile.

“Well, how about it? I ain’t had no good homemade cookies since we lived in that faded old turquoise trailer.”

“You have so! I make you some for Christmas every single year!”

“Or biscuits,” he said in a pitiful tone. “Or gravy.”

He gave her his most soulful look.

“Why don’t you just stay over tonight and cook my breakfast in the morning, Andie?”

She raised her eyebrows at him. “Because I think you only love me for my cooking.”

He waggled his brows at her and looked her up and down with his teasing grin. “Nope. I love you for other reasons, too.”

She shook her head. “You never really loved me, sugar. You just thought you did. Your real love is the Rodeo Road.”

He held her gaze and the grin. “Well, yes and no. But now I’m building a home.”