Joanna Sims – High Country Baby (страница 2)

“Take it easy.” He shook his head in frustration.

This was a rotten beginning to an already lousy day.

“You take it easy.” Taylor snapped, but she holstered her weapon.

“Uncle Hank!” The connection was bad on her end. “It’s Taylor...can you hear me?”

“I can hear you...”

“I can barely hear you...but, listen... I’ve got some guy named Clint following me and he says he’s under orders from you...is that true, or should I shoot him?”

“I’d rather you not shoot him, Taylor.” Hank told her. “He’d be a hard one to replace.”

Taylor glanced quickly at Clint’s back—he wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he was listening to every word.

“Uncle Hank—I told you that I needed to make this trip on my own.”

She had taken a leave of absence from her job so she could ride the Continental Divide. Her plan was to ride a section of the divide alone; she’d never imagined it any other way.

“Negative,” Hank said in a brusque tone that she had heard many times in her life. Her uncle was a big man, physically as well as in the world of ranching, and he wasn’t fond of explaining his decisions.

Clint turned around and they locked eyes for the briefest moment before they both broke the connection.

Taylor lowered her voice. “Uncle Hank—I don’t want this. This wasn’t part of my plan.”

“Plans change.” Hank told her in a no-nonsense manner. “Take Clint with you or make a U-turn and come on back to the ranch.”

Taylor moved farther away from her cowboy bodyguard. “Did Dad call you? Is that it? Because if he did, let me assure you...”

“Your dad didn’t call me—my brother hasn’t bothered to call me in years, so I don’t expect him to start now.”

Hank was her father’s older brother. When their father, her grandfather, died, a disagreement about the validity of the will sparked a family feud that had lasted for most of her adult life.

“Uncle Hank.” She sounded like a child beseeching a parent. “Please. This is really important to me.”

“You are really important to me, Taylor. I was wrong to go along with your cockamamie idea in the first place. I’ve come to my senses now, and I’m not changing my mind. So, what’s it gonna be?”

“I have to do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t turn back now.”

“Come again?”

More loudly, she repeated. “I can’t turn back now.”

Not after she had come this far—farther than anyone in her life, including her, thought that she would go.

“It’s better this way,” her uncle reassured her.

It was pointless to disagree, so she didn’t bother to put her energy into a lost cause.

“And Taylor?”

“Yes?” She didn’t try to hide the disappointment.

“Clint knows the divide like the back of his hand—and I trust him.”

Clint didn’t have to hear the conversation to know that it wasn’t swinging in Taylor’s favor. Her body language—hunched, tense shoulders and lowered head—said it all. Which meant that he was still on the hook to babysit a woman who looked as if she’d be more comfortable getting pampered in a ritzy spa than riding the divide on horseback. She didn’t make sense to him, and he wasn’t keen on things that didn’t make sense.

“Everything squared away?” Clint asked as he swung his saddle onto the back of his sturdily built buckskin quarter horse.

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other.” Taylor swatted a fly away from her face. “I don’t know what possessed my uncle to change his mind at the eleventh hour—I don’t need a babysitter.”

Clint reached beneath his horse’s belly to grab the girth. “I ain’t no babysitter.”

Taylor cringed at the way in which Clint colorfully put a sentence together. She was an English major in college. Syntax was always her first love and double negatives made her nuts. Even though he’d managed to butcher the English language with a four-word sentence, she couldn’t deny one thing: the cowboy didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted him. They were both in the same rotten boat. And by the looks of him, there was a chance he could be persuaded...

“You could wait here for me. No one has to know,” she suggested casually. Then, when she had his attention, she sweetened the pot. “I could pay you.”

The cowboy fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his front pocket and knocked one out of the pack with his hand. “That’s not gonna happen, lady.”

He needed this job. He was trying to dig himself out of a mighty deep financial hole and he wasn’t about to bite the Hank Brand hand that was currently feeding him. If he took Taylor’s money, it would no doubt be short-term gain with long-term negative consequences.

Before he put the cigarette in his mouth to light it, he offered Taylor a suggestion of his own. “You could head on back to Bent Tree and save us the hassle.”

“I’m not going back.” Taylor was firm in her response. It was easy for her uncle and this cowboy-for-hire to toss this suggestion around as if it was nothing. To them it was nothing. They had no idea what she had gone through or how much she’d given up to get to this leg of her journey. And, to her, this trek to the Continental Divide had become everything.

Clint took a drag off of his cigarette. He shook his head and when he spoke, curls of white smoke streamed out of his nose and mouth.

“Well, then...it looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

She felt tears of frustration and anger well up behind her eyes. She didn’t typically cry when she was sad—she cried when she was mad as hell. She hated Clint for not being corruptible. She pushed the tears down; they were useless to her and she needed every ounce of her energy reserve to spend another day in the saddle.

“I’ll hang back.” Clint put his cigarette out on the tip of the bottom of his boot before he tossed it into the cold fire pit. “That’s the best I can do.”

Taylor stared at the wrangler for a moment longer. She had already burned too much daylight dealing with an issue that simply wasn’t going to resolve in her favor.

“I’m afraid that you’re best isn’t good enough, Mr. McAllister.”

She had been a vice president at a large bank for many years and knew when a negotiation was over. She didn’t have anything left to say to the cowboy, so she headed back up the hill to where she had stayed for the night and broke camp as quickly as she could.

Her uncle had provided her with a small, sure-footed mare named Honey and an experienced pack mule named Easy Does It. It didn’t take her long to break camp, pack up her belongings and get ready for the day’s ride.

Prior to leaving Chicago for Montana, she had moved all of the furniture in her formal living room out of the way so she could set up a practice campsite. She read, and then reread, all of the manuals that came with her new camping gear, and she had even slept inside of the tent for several weeks to get used to sleeping on the ground.

All of her practice and preparation had paid off—she could set up and break camp with relative ease. Her uncle had personally shown her how to pack Easy’s load properly and refreshed her memory on the correct way to tack a horse. All in all, she was pretty proud of her ability.

But there was one giant fly in her ointment: mounting her horse.

She was short, she had stubby legs and she certainly wasn’t as limber as she’d been in her teens. It was a major chore to get her foot into the stirrup, but once that was accomplished she didn’t have enough strength to get her bottom-heavy body into the saddle. The only way she could mount up was to find a log or a stump to stand on and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. She knew that this was a weakness that needed to be overcome, because if she couldn’t find a makeshift mounting block one day, she would be stuck on the ground. Not good.

She led Honey over to a fallen tree she had scoped out the night before, tightened the girth and lengthened the stirrup. Honey was surefooted, that couldn’t be denied, but she was also horrible to mount. The mare was frisky from the briskness of the morning air and she danced sideways away from the log right when Taylor had managed to leverage her foot into the stirrup.

“Whoa!” Her foot was caught in the stirrup and pulled her leg forward while she wobbled precariously on the log. She ended up in a half-split position, grabbing urgently to unhook her foot from the stirrup.

“Honey, whoa!” Taylor unhooked her foot just in time to stop herself from falling forward.

That could have ended in a serious injury, and she was lucky it hadn’t. The muscles on the inside of her right thigh, already tender from a day in the saddle, had been stretched beyond their limit during that failed attempt to mount her steed.

Taylor clutched the inside of her right thigh. “Ah!”

She rubbed the muscle to stop it from contracting. But the minute she let go of that part of her body, she noticed that her left hip joint was aching.

Honey was standing quietly, perfectly still, a few feet away.

“Woman to woman, Honey—give a sister a break, okay?”

Taylor walked Honey in a semicircle and halted her right next to the log. Three more attempts and three more semicircles later, Taylor was tempted to just start walking until she found a better place to mount. It was at that moment that Clint rode into the clearing, dismounted and silently stood on Honey’s right side to stop her from moving away from the log. The cowboy adjusted her reins so the right rein was shorter, showing Taylor, without verbalizing it, how to keep the horse from moving away from her.