The Wildcatter. Peggy Nicholson

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      But this is Suntop, she reminded herself, where her father called her and her sisters “Princess.” Here of all places she was safe, if not always happy. She unfisted her hands.

      “Cielo,” the man said quietly, and nodded—an oddly courtly gesture.

      Spanish. “Yes, it is,” she agreed. “It’s heaven, or ’bout as close as you can get.”

      In the light now sifting down the mountaintop, his smile was a slash of white against his tawny skin. Even as she watched, the sun touched his straight, shaggy hair to bronze, his face to ruddy gold.

      There was enough light to see his dark eyes, and the amusement in their depths. “That is what it means, isn’t it?”

      “Yes, heaven—that’s exactly what it means.” Big hands casually hooked in his back pockets of his jeans, he sauntered uphill to join her.

      Risa had an impulse—born from who knows where—to turn and run…run bounding and panting down the far side of Suntop toward the safety of her father’s house.

      She stood, eyes narrowed, blood thrumming through her veins, and leaned slightly back on her heels, but still held her ground. Pinned in place by her pride. Then it hit her. “You’re—!”

      The cause of all her misery yesterday! The outing to Mesaverde had been utterly spoiled. “You’re the man in the truck!”

      “Ah. I thought that might have been you. How many women around here could have hair like a tequila sunrise?” With one last stride he stood before her. “And how’s the car?”

      That blasted car. It was Eric’s shiny new toy, a gift from his father on his graduation from Yale Law School last month. After he’d seen the damage, Eric had been in a black rage for most of the morning. “It has a dent in its door. Quite a large one.”

      She’d tried at first to hint to Eric that it had been his own fault for driving so close to the man—this man. He’d been outraged that she’d think so, called her disloyal. Whose side was she on?

      “But I don’t see it as sides,” she’d protested, retreating immediately from his anger. “I just didn’t think it was worth anyone’s being hurt.” She still didn’t. How silly to argue over right-of-way, like two Rocky Mountain bighorn rams butting heads on a one-goat trail.

      “Good. Perhaps that will teach your friend to watch his temper.”

      Hardly. After she’d realized how furious Eric was, she’d done her best to back away from their disagreement. In the six months they’d been courting, they’d never had a real lovers’ quarrel. This had seemed such a stupid subject for their first fight—a one-time event caused by a stranger who’d blundered into their charmed circle for a few unpleasant minutes, but now was gone for good.

      Or so she’d thought.

      “Well, Eric said the whole thing was your fault, actually. He says the uphill car always has right-of-way.” She’d never heard that rule before, but then, Eric knew so many things that she did not. It was one of the reasons he’d first attracted her. He seemed so assured, so at home in the wide, daunting world into which she’d been thrust when she’d gone East to college.

      “Oh, well, if Errrric says so…” The corners of the stranger’s mouth curled wickedly as he rolled his r’s. He had a very…arresting mouth for a man, with a beautifully carved, full bottom lip and a certain mobility of expression that was unlike the typical cowboy’s poker face. Or an Ivy Leaguer’s stiff upper lip. And once noticed, that mouth could not be ignored. It drew her eyes like a magnet. She frowned to break its spell.

      “And when he tried to run me down?” the stranger continued too politely. “I suppose there, also, it was my fault?”

      “He didn’t try to run you down.” Eric had insisted on that, loudly and at length, till finally she gave in and admitted that perhaps only her viewing angle had made the encounter appear so horribly close. “He was headed for the gate—we were on a straight-line course for it—and he…naturally he assumed you’d step aside.” As much as Eric had insisted on that, too, she’d had in the end to believe him. If you loved somebody, you had to believe in him. Trust him.

      “That’s what he…assumed?”

      He was giving her the lie, just by the tone of his low mocking voice. She hooked her own thumbs in her jeans pockets and tipped her chin up a haughty half inch. “Yes.”

      “I have—had—a friend who used to say, ‘Never assume. It makes an ass out of “u” and me.’”

      Arguing with an arrogant stranger was no way to spend a gorgeous dawn. She drew herself up—an action that put her on a level with most men’s eyes. But not this one. “Oh? Well, while we’re assuming, may I assume you have some very good reason for being here on Suntop? My father said you weren’t one of his hands.”

      “When your Errric was complaining, I wasn’t, señorita. But after that…your father hired me.”

      How like Ben to hire the man who’d offended her fiancé! Damaged his car! Her nails dug into her palms as it hit her. So Ben really doesn’t like him.

      And I have you to thank for that, she realized, glaring up at her companion. Her father hadn’t formed an opinion about Eric, she didn’t think, before yesterday morning. He’d still been weighing him in the balance. But once Ben made up his mind, it was carved in stone. She’d never be able to change it back to approval. You’ve spoiled everything. Everything! She would have gladly flattened her hands on this stranger’s broad chest and sent him tumbling down the mountain if she could have.

      Barring that, she had only words to pay him back for the harm he’d done. “Why would he hire you? You’re no cowboy.” Not with those work boots he wasn’t.

      Far from being wounded, he laughed. “So they keep telling me. Why is everyone so sure?”

      No way would she give him a clue. “That’s for me to know, and you to find out.” A childish, spiteful taunt.

      His dark eyebrows twitched as his mouth quirked in that odd, irresistible way again. “Finding out things, I’m very good at that. For instance, how do they call you?”

      “Miss Tankersly.” A lie. All the men called her Risa. But not this one, if she had a say in it. This one she’d never forgive. “And you?” Might as well know her enemy.

      “Miguel. Miguel Heydt del Rey.” Giving her a formal Spanish name, first his father’s surname, then his mother’s. He didn’t click the heels of his big, work-roughened boots together as he dropped his head half an inch in the faintest of mocking salutes, but still, she felt as if he had. She glanced warily down at his right hand, half expecting him to reach for hers and raise it to his lips. And if he’d done so, it would have been another kind of taunt, not so childish as hers. She shivered suddenly; the sun had yet to warm the mountain air.

      “Oh.” All at once she was at a loss for words, though not questions: Who are you? Where do you come from, with a name like that, half German, half Spanish? And why are you here, so sure of yourself, though you were hired only yesterday? And for what? Suntop took on no wannabe cowboys, only employed the best.

      Whoever and whatever he was, he was trouble. She could feel that, the way СКАЧАТЬ