Three river ranch, p.2
Three River Ranch, page 2
Carson ran after the animal. “Keep that dog away from the trailer!”
“Mistral,” Rory shouted, but it was no use. She couldn’t focus on the dog, not when she felt the pull of terror so strongly, the desperate need to get out, get out, get free. And something else she couldn’t put a name to, a rising, swelling fear that felt like a ticking time bomb. A countdown.
She would have run up to the trailer, but Carson grabbed her arm.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
She shook him off, focused solely on the animals thrashing in the trailer.
“What’s her name?” She spoke softly, without looking at him, her feet gliding over the weathered earth.
“Stormy. But—”
“Don’t worry,” she breathed. Reaching a hand toward the trailer, she closed her eyes. “Don’t worry, Stormy. It’s going to be okay.”
…
Was the woman out of her mind?
A stranger—pregnant, covered in dust and dirt—approaching a trailer full of exhausted, panic-stricken horses. If she opened the back, she’d be trampled. He had to stop her. He’d tackle her if he had to. Great idea, he told himself. Tackle a pregnant chick.
But it appeared that wouldn’t be necessary. As Rory neared the trailer, curiosity overcame the animals’ panic and their frantic movements slowed.
“That’s right,” Rory crooned. “There you go. It’s all right.”
Before he knew what she was doing, she’d moved to stand near the opening at the front, where Stormy’s head ducked and bobbed. The dog, now thankfully quiet, stationed itself beside him, glancing anxiously between him, her, and the horses.
“Rory,” he began, and the dog growled.
“Hush,” the woman said. He didn’t know which one of them she was admonishing, but within seconds, he forgot to care.
The mare’s eyes were enormous, her nostrils flaring wildly. Her breath came in heavy snorts, punctuated by whinnies of fear. Her hooves tattooed a nervous pattern against the nonslip flooring, but at least she wasn’t trying to kick her way out anymore.
“So,” he said in a low voice, “you know horses.”
“Hardly,” Rory answered in the same tone.
“Could have fooled me. And you did fool her.”
“No.” Rory brushed off his words. “She knows I’m as scared as she is. All I’m doing is listening. I’m…intuitive.”
Stormy had calmed enough now that Rory was able to place a hand against the side of the trailer. She leaned her face toward the horse’s bony head, whuffing softly through her nose. The dog shifted from foot to foot but kept her distance. The horse eyed them, then turned fractionally in their direction. She snorted lightly at Rory, then, to Carson’s shock, took a small step nearer the front opening of the trailer.
He leaned forward to watch more closely. Rory stood still now and continued to breathe heavily, her delicately sculpted nostrils flaring in time with the mare’s. She relaxed her gaze, and her expression took on the soft vulnerability of sleep.
For a moment, she and the horse exchanged breaths. She held her body with the still focus that allowed nothing but the animal in front of her to penetrate. Despite the dust and dishevelment, she radiated a kind of hypnotic peace that drew the animal toward her. Her lips moved softly, a low litany of meaningless words flowing between them, enveloping them with calm. It was like poetry, Carson thought, or a lullaby. Her lips looked so smooth and full, so supple.
With a start, Carson realized that he’d been staring. He took a step back, eliciting a warning growl from the dog.
The horse snorted lightly, shook her mane, and reached her head out of the trailer enough to nudge Rory on the shoulder.
Rory smiled, extended her fingers, and barely brushed over the animal’s whiskered muzzle. “Pleased to meet you, too.”
Carson, who already had a hand out to stop her, gaped. “I don’t believe this.”
“What?” she asked, without looking away from the mare.
“No one but me has ever touched this horse.”
Chapter Three
Now he tells her. A wild horse.
Her knees buckled.
“Whoa!” Carson grabbed her just before the ground rushed upward. “Time for you to sit down.”
He guided her to the cab of his truck, pushed her onto the seat.
She resisted, then thought of the baby. It was hard on her pride to accept help of any kind, hard to remember it wasn’t just her anymore. She felt a reassuring kick. “I’m fine. I am.”
“Hardly.” Carson took her chin in his hand and looked closely at her. He smelled green, like fresh-cut grass on a warm summer day. His fingers were surprisingly gentle. “How many of me do you see?”
“One.” She blinked. “How many of you are there?”
He smiled. “Close your eyes.”
She obeyed.
“Any spinning?”
She frowned. “Nope.”
“Okay then.” He moved back and Mistral’s solid warmth landed on the seat beside her, grounding her firmly once more.
She heard Carson moving about behind her, talking to the horses. He had a nice, soft voice. At least, when he wasn’t mad. Or shocked.
He’d certainly been shocked to see her touch the horse. But no more shocked than she was. Wild! And she’d gone right up to the trailer, without even thinking about her own fear of the big animal.
She didn’t know why she was sometimes drawn to certain people or animals. It was like being on autopilot, the sensation of entering someone else’s experience. That unique gift, her ability to immerse herself in another creature’s wordless emotion, allowed her to connect with the children other teachers gave up on.
She’d simply responded to Stormy the same way she would to an autistic child in the grip of a meltdown. It’s what first connected her to Des, the unusual instinct they used with special-needs children.
But Rory truly didn’t know anything about horses. At the thought of how she’d approached a wild horse, her pulse leaped again. She had to learn to control her impulses.
“You okay in here?” The man, Carson, got into the truck, carefully avoiding eye contact.
“Fine.” She had to be.
Very slowly, Carson drove the truck past the house, down the road, around a stand of oak and beech and maple, to a clearing, where a maze of tall pole enclosures stood.
“Explain to me,” she said, once they’d stopped, “why you have wild horses in your trailer? I thought people couldn’t own them.”
“No one owns Stormy,” Carson said. “But some of us try to protect horses like her.”
“From what?” Rory shuddered. “She could take on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
As if in emphasis, a fresh racket of hooves against steel rose from the trailer.
“It’s not that simple,” Carson said, looking over his shoulder as he backed the truck up to the gate. “And right now, I’ve got to get them out of this trailer.”
He swung out of the vehicle and motioned for Rory to do the same. This time, she braced herself. The moment Carson pulled open the gate, the horses burst out of the trailer, power pulsating from them like visible energy. The last one was Stormy, and he used extra care with her. Rory stood where he’d told her to, but mostly, she watched, her heart in her throat. Carson knew just where to place his body, how to move to get the animal where he wanted her to be. He waved his arms and the horse wheeled around in a flash of black hooves and mane and tail, like partners in an angry and beautiful dance. It was mesmerizing. And terrifying.
The sun was going down by the time they’d gotten all the horses safely settled, fed, and watered.
“Thanks for your help,” Carson said, leaning on a fence post. He brushed the back of his hand across his forehead. “I didn’t expect them to be quite this bad.”
Rory hung on to the top rail and squatted down, stretching out her back. She was so tired. All she’d done was hold the gate and murmur sweet nothings to the horses, but her earlier clumsiness, on top of a full day of driving, was making itself known in her lumbar spine. And she must have turned her ankle at some point. She’d be lucky if she could move tomorrow.
“I was already dirty anyway.” She glanced hesitantly up at him. “They’re beautiful. Especially Stormy.”
At her words, the tension on his brow faded. He smiled slightly, and his eyes creased in the corners. He had good teeth, she noticed with annoyance, almost—but not perfectly—straight. It was hard to resist a well-made man with hungry eyes and a nice smile.
But he was screwing things up for her.
“She’s a beauty, all right,” he murmured, looking straight at her.
Something about his expression suggested that he wasn’t referring to the horse. Her pulse accelerated and she felt heat rise in her cheeks. She hadn’t been looked at like that in a long, long time. Then the baby kicked. Rory stood abruptly, suddenly feeling every bit of dust and debris. But the movement sent her back muscles into a spasm. She clutched at it with one hand, the other clinging to a rail.
Carson jumped to catch her, but she waved him away.
“Charley horse. I’m fine,” she gasped, desperate to keep him from approaching. She scrambled to change the subject. “Before you opened Pandora’s box, you said you were trying to protect her. Protect her from what?” She nodded in the direction of the horse.
Carson’s gaze followed. He exhaled heavily and wiped a hand over his face. He was, Rory noticed for the first time, exhausted. Worried, too.
“Stormy comes from a band that’s been hiding out for years—generations—in a valley in Alberta, Canada. Their gene pool is unusual, special. A lot of wild horses actually descend from domestic stock that got away. They’ve got quarter horse and draft horse and whatnot in their makeup. Technically, they’re not wild; they’re feral. But Stormy is a true Spanish mustang.”
“Her unusual coloring, the stripe down her spine,” Rory mused. “That makes sense.”
“Most people think she’s a buckskin, but the Spanish called that color grulla.”
“Her conformation is different, too,” continued Rory, evaluating the horse. “She’s very tightly constructed, a body built to survive. The horse as God created it.”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “I thought you didn’t know horses.”
“I don’t.” She smiled at the idea. “I know dogs, though, and some things aren’t that different from one animal to another. Why’d you move her from Alberta?”
“To keep her from being shot.” Carson’s words were bitter. “Cattlemen hate mustangs. It’s a handful of horses against hundreds of thousands of cattle. Or, I should say, the dollars produced by their beef. Ranchers say the mustangs overgraze the land and their hooves damage the soil. So they chase them down with their ATVs and shoot them.”
Rory’s throat clenched. “That’s horrible.”
“I couldn’t let that happen, especially to her.”
He fell silent. Rory looked at him, questioningly.
“The stallion in her band was a mustang, too,” he eventually continued, but his voice was rough. “One of my colleagues sent a hair sample, from what was left of the body, for DNA testing. The results are as clear as I’ve ever seen.”
Rory imagined the sound of mustang hooves echoing off canyon walls, the screams of trapped animals, the terror of mares protecting their foals, the report of gunfire, the silence. Suddenly, she understood her earlier visceral response to the horse. She rested a hand against her belly, hiding beneath the loose fabric.
“She’s pregnant.” It was barely a whisper. That was the mystery she’d sensed beneath the horse’s panic. It also explained Mistral’s reaction…
Carson nodded slowly. “She’s carrying a full-blooded Spanish mustang foal, one of the last of the true wild horses of North America.”
He fastened the gate securely and slapped the dust off his hands. He glanced at Rory, his eyes narrow and challenging. “And the first to be born on my land. As soon as my father’s estate is settled, this ranch officially becomes the Three River Mustang Study Center.”
She opened her mouth but he waved her words away.
“I need to hire an assistant, not rent out the guesthouse. So, I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I’ve been planning this for a long, long time. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it work.”
She met his gaze evenly. “As of yesterday, when my damage deposit went through, the guesthouse belongs to me. I will be moving in tomorrow.”
Chapter Four
Carson watched while Rory drove off for a night at Blythe’s Bed and Breakfast, the closest thing in town to a hotel. Despite exhaustion from the long drive, his mind was whirling. Surely she wouldn’t insist on staying.
But it wasn’t the misunderstanding that preoccupied Carson. It was the woman’s instinct about the mare.
How had she known? Even researchers who’d observed the horses for months were surprised by foals that appeared seemingly overnight. But before she’d even had a proper look, Rory knew the mare was in foal. How? He thought again about those full lips, murmuring sweet nothings, those dreamy, half-asleep eyes. He gave his head a shake. First things first, he told himself. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed his lawyer’s number, yet again.
“You went over the line this time, Jonah.” Carson paced beside his truck, the cell phone pressed to his ear, punching toward the ground with his index finger. “You knew goddamn well I wouldn’t agree to taking on a renter. And she’s pregnant. Pregnant! I don’t see a man with her, either. I’m not about to play nursemaid to a pregnant woman!”
“Then you,” replied the man calmly, “should have taken my calls.”
“I was out of the country!”
“You were off-grid, Carson, not off-planet. You could have found a way if you wanted to.”
“I was in a goddamn pup tent for two weeks. I didn’t have running water. I didn’t have cell phone service. If I could have called you on my shoe-phone, I would have.”
“What can I tell you? You wanted someone on the property; you got someone on the property. Until the ranch starts making money again, you can’t afford to pay an employee, so I thought outside the box and put the place up for rent. You should be thanking me. Maybe this could be a win-win situation: reduce her rent in exchange for some clerical help, if you need assistance so badly.”
“I need more than clerical help, Jonah!”
“I hate to tell you, but there aren’t a lot of people clamoring for live-in jobs. Certainly not for what you’re offering. And if you pulled your head out for a second, you’d have noticed that the rental agreement says she’s single. Aurora McAllister could be exactly what you need.”
“Jonah. You can’t be serious.”
But he was speaking to silence. Carson Granger looked at the phone in disbelief. Lawyers.
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but so far nothing had gone the way he’d intended. Granger Lodge was in even worse shape than he’d remembered. Five years of neglect and weather had made it uninhabitable, all but ruined. It would take serious work before it could be used as headquarters for his sanctuary. The guesthouse was too far from the corrals for his comfort, but at least, until today, he’d had that option. Now, unless he wanted to square off with Rory McAllister, it looked like he’d be pitching his tent.
Five years ago, he couldn’t have cared less about the ranch. His father had never understood how his oldest son could care more about the land itself than what the land could produce: prize-winning, purebred cattle that turned into perfectly marbled steaks all red-blooded Americans would be proud to sink their teeth into. That and the Granger name was all Derek Granger had cared about. Not the native grasses that were churned into the mud by hundreds of bovine hooves. Not the disappearing mustangs.
Not his sons.
As the last ones to carry the same blood as the man who founded Three River Ranch four generations ago, Carson and his brother, Mitchell, had always known that they had two tasks to accomplish in life. One, to take over the ranch from their father. Two, to sire a son who would one day continue the legacy.
If their mother hadn’t died early, leaving them without a woman’s love during those vulnerable preteen years, perhaps Derek’s wishes would have been granted. But neither brother had many fond childhood memories.
Mitchell had refused point-blank to have anything to do with the ranch, and then he’d left for Seattle, where he’d leveraged his construction skills into a fortune as a real estate developer. He hadn’t been back to Chinook since, not even for the funeral. Mitch had a revolving string of women friends but remained determinedly single.
Derek Granger had counted on Carson’s love for the land to eventually bring him back to his roots as a cattle rancher. But the old man had underestimated Carson’s commitment to the mustangs and overestimated his desire for the Granger fortune.
Carson had left Montana right after getting his undergrad degree, grateful at least to be free. He’d hoped that Derek’s ill health might make him reconsider the conditions under which he’d grant his sons control of the Granger fortune. But he’d also accepted that the multimillion-dollar ranch might never be his. Derek wasn’t the only one with pride.
However, Carson didn’t have the luxury of pride at the moment. These horses needed somewhere to go—right now—and this was his only option. Once his research grant came through, he’d have sufficient funds to protect the group of horses he was studying, but without it, he needed to access the trust fund. Only one problem: Derek bypassed his own sons, saving the fortune for his grandchildren.
Carson had to breathe deeply to keep the anger from surging upward again.
The ranch bordered on public land over which hundreds of horses roamed, areas that were controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. Theoretically, these wild horses were protected by the BLM, but Carson knew full well that massacres like the one that Stormy had escaped in Alberta happened here just as often. And if they ventured onto private land, many ranchers simply shot them on sight.
