Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (23 page)

Out on the plains, bedrock could be thousands of feet down, buried under millions of years of debris from the highlands. But here, in the canyon, gravity and regular flash floods carried away much of the loose soil.

The well itself would be beyond the reach of those seasonal floods. Rio had begun drilling in a shallow bowl above the canyon floor. Forty extra feet of drilling was a small price to pay for a well that would survive the winter floods.

After an hour or two, Hope told herself that it was foolish for her to stand around and watch pipe disappear. She should go back to the ranch, get on Aces, and check on the range cattle that were depending on scarce natural water instead of the wells.

There was also Sweet Dreams, another of Sweetheart’s calves, to check on in particular. Hope thought she had seen a slight hesitation in the heifer’s gait, but it had been too dark to be certain. After she looked over Sweet Dreams, she had to wire up the hole a coyote had dug to get to the chickens. Then there were the bills to pay and the latest tax assessment to protest.

And the drill bits—she couldn’t forget them. Some old ones had been sent off for sharpening. They were ready to be picked up in town. She also had to order two special hard-rock bits. The expense involved had shocked her, but she hadn’t protested. If Rio needed titanium alloy drills with diamond-studded teeth to find her water, that was what he would get.

Uneasiness snaked through her as she remembered Rio’s expression when he had asked for the special drill bits. He said that he might be able to get the job done with the bits he had, but it would take much too long. Though he hadn’t said anything else, she wondered if he was already getting restless, if the wind was calling his name.

The thought made her ache, even though she had to admit that she didn’t have a lot of time, either. Not when it came to the well. It was proving much more expensive to drill than she had expected. She had based her estimate on what it had cost to drill her namesake, and then had doubled it, adding a ten percent margin for error.

The margin hadn’t been big enough. A lot had changed since her namesake well had been drilled more than a quarter of a century ago. A combination of inflation and more advanced technology had sent the cost of drilling a well soaring like a moon rocket.

Just buying the parts to make Rio’s old equipment work had cost more than she had budgeted to buy an entire secondhand rig. The endless bags of “mud” used to grease the drill hole cost nearly as much as an equal weight of grain. As for pipe—you would think from the price that pipe was made of some gem-studded space-age alloy rather than plain old steel.

Though Hope didn’t say anything about it to Rio, in order to buy the new drill bits and the extra pipe he had ordered, she would have to dip into the money she had set aside to pay off the second mortgage. She had wanted to ask if he was sure,
really sure,
he would need all that pipe.

She hadn’t said a word. If he thought it would be a deep well, she would take his word for it. She had felt water and certainty flowing through him as surely as sunlight through the desert.

“Hope? Hope! You gone deaf, gal?” Mason yelled.

She blinked, startled out of her thoughts. Mason had an oilcan in one hand and was poking at the equipment that ran the drill.

“I asked you three times,” he said, “if you’re gonna check on the water out at the west end of Silver Basin.”

She put away her worries and answered him with a nod. Instantly he went back to nursing the noisy engine.

For a moment she wished she had something as useful to do at the drilling site rather than miles away. But all she could do for now was brood over what the invisible drill bit would find.

Or not find.

It was much too soon for that kind of fretting. The drill bit hadn’t even ground down as far as the deepest roots of the hardiest desert plants. If water was that close to the surface, she wouldn’t be drilling a new well here or anywhere else on the Valley of the Sun.

“Need anything?” Hope asked loudly, catching Rio’s eye.

To her surprise he nodded and gestured her over to him. Wondering what they could have forgotten at the ranch, she stepped up to the drilling area.

Rio took off his leather gloves, framed her face with his strong hands, and kissed her gently.

“You, Hope,” he said against her hair, holding her close. “I need you.”

Sudden tears burned in her eyes. She buried her face against his neck and hung on to him with all her strength.

“I’m here,” she said fiercely. “I’ll always be here for you.”

She felt his arms tighten until she could hardly breathe.

“Watch that third turn on the way out,” he said, when he finally released her. “The wheel will buck like a steer halfway through.” Then, quickly, he added, “Be careful, my beautiful dreamer. Keep that snake gun loaded and handy.”

Hope’s eyes widened. “Do you think Turner will come back?”

“No.” Rio’s voice was flat, harsh. “If I thought he’d touch you again, ever, I’d take him up in the mountains and lose him. It’s just that I . . .”

She waited, wanting him so much she ached.

He made a helpless, almost angry sound and kissed her suddenly, searchingly. He lifted his head and looked at her with eyes the color and radiance of indigo twilight. “You’re so damned precious to me. The thought of anything happening to you makes me want to grab you and hide you in the safest place on earth.”

She smiled and brushed her lips over his. “I’m fine.”

“I know. But . . .” He took her hand, peeled back her work glove, and saw again the bruise that he had noticed this morning, a mark no bigger than his fingertip. “Even a little thing like this.” His lips and tongue gently touched the bruise. “I can’t explain it. I don’t even understand it. I just know that the thought of you being hurt makes me bleed.”

She saw the intensity of his emotion in his eyes and felt it in the powerful, taut muscles beneath her hands. For the first time she had the tiniest stirring of hope that perhaps he wouldn’t leave after the well was drilled.

The possibility quivered through her, making her tremble.

It was like the possibility of an artesian well, an endless upwelling of life itself transforming everything it touched. She and Rio could live on a renewed Valley of the Sun, raising cattle and children and loving each other until the last sun had set—and still the land would go on, the water would flow, and their children would sow their own crop of dreams and know the bittersweet joys of harvest.

Rio’s breath caught at the emotion radiating from Hope. She had never been more beautiful to him, more alive, incandescent with love for him. The thought of anything dimming that joy was a tearing agony deep in his soul.

Hope—my beautiful dreamer—don’t let anything hurt you. Even me.

Especially me.

But he would hurt her, and he knew it as surely as he knew she loved him.

Twenty-three

T
HE DRILLING WENT SLOWLY
.

Day by day, December slid toward Christmas. Day by day, one piece of equipment after another gave out, protesting its burden and the patchwork nature of the rig. The delays lasted from a few minutes to much longer, depending on how soon a replacement part could be brought in.

When the bit finally reached hard rock, the pace of the drilling slowed to inches, then to fractions of inches. The special, and very expensive, bits Rio used could have gone faster, but not when they were driven by an old, cranky engine that couldn’t go for long hours at high output.

The layer of rock the drill hit was thick and ungiving. The rock didn’t hold water. There was no place within the dense crystalline stone for liquid to hide. Everything soft had been cooked out when the rock was deep within the earth’s mantle, where the heat and pressure were so great that solid rock strata melted and bent like great layers of wax.

If there was water to be found, it was farther down, beyond the dry, dense layer of stone.

Rio changed bits, drilled, changed bits again, and drilled again. The relentless work and hammering noise were numbing. Progress slowed to tiny inches that were measured in frustration and increasing incidents of mechanical breakdown.

At the end of each day, Hope no longer asked how the work was coming. The lines on Rio’s face, and on Mason’s, told her more than she wanted to know. She drove the men to Wind Canyon at dawn, picked them up at dark, and ran the ranch in between.

The rains still weren’t heavy enough to free the cattle from depending on the troughs. She hauled water from the Turner ranch. Although Turner hadn’t turned up again, she kept the rifle loaded.

Even before the first week of drilling passed, people from town and from Turner’s ranch had started showing up at the Gardener ranch house. They always had an excuse—a saddle to sell or to buy, a mare to be bred, invitations to Christmas barbecues. Invariably the conversation circled around to what was really on the visitor’s mind.

How’s the well doing, Hope? Strike anything promising yet?

Hell of a place to drill, clear up in a canyon. Everybody knows that water goes down, not up.

You lookin’ for artesian water? Ain’t never heard of no artesian well around here, and my granny was born just the other side of your ranch.

Don’t envy you none. Drilling wells is expensive as hell these days, and the price of beef just ain’t worth mentioning.

Those were the most tactful people. The others, including a few of Turner’s men, began looking at Hope like she had put a for rent sign around her neck when she became Rio’s lover. None of the men said or did anything out of line, because none of them wanted the kind of grief Rio would give them. But they looked at Hope with a lecherous speculation that made her quietly furious.

Hear Mason went up to Salt Lake for Thanksgiving. Musta been lonely for you, huh? Oh, yeah, Rio was there, wasn’t he?

Gotta hand it to him. That drifter has a good eye for how the land lays.

Hear he tried to buy a ranch around here a time back. Didn’t have no money, though. Bet your little ranch looks real good to him.

Hope ignored the men’s insinuations and sideways looks, staring them coolly in the eye until they shifted uneasily and allowed as how it was time for them to be getting back to town or to Turner’s ranch or to whatever rock they had crawled out from under.

She turned down all holiday invitations. She didn’t have the time or the energy for parties. There was nothing in her life but cattle, drilling, and Rio.

Hope bumped along the last hundred yards of road and shut off the truck’s engine. The derrick looked like a child’s toy against the soaring walls of the Wind Canyon.

“Good timing,” Rio said as Hope got out of the truck.

“Why? Did you run out of coffee?”

He grinned. “Nope. We finally broke through the hard rock. I took a core sample of what was below. I was just getting ready to look at it.”

Is there water?

But Hope didn’t say it out loud. She didn’t want to add to the pressure that showed in the tight lines around Rio’s mouth. So she waited in hungry silence while he opened the special pipe that held the core sample.

A single look at his face told her everything she needed to know.

“Dry,” he said neutrally. “Dry as the rock above it. No aquifer at this depth. But the stratum is softer than the one I just went through. The drilling will go faster now.”

And it did. Days flew by as expensive pipe and lubricant vanished down the hole in the earth as though there was no end short of China.

Rio didn’t say anything about the cores he took from time to time, or the changing layers of rock. With Mason at his side, he simply drilled and kept on drilling down through compacted soils older than man, layers of stone that had been laid down long before true mammals walked the earth, drilling down and down and down, pouring money and dreams into the dry land and getting nothing back but dulled or broken drill bits and blistered hands.

* * *

“Damn slippery damned coffeepot!” Mason growled.

Hope said, steadying the pot before it dropped, “Must be time to scour the grease off it again.”

But she knew that the problem wasn’t the pot. It was Mason’s hands. He had used them too hard, for too many hours, working alongside Rio for twelve and fourteen hours a day.

A sideways glance told Hope that Rio knew what was wrong. Mason’s hands wouldn’t heal until he rested them, but he was too proud and too stubborn to admit it. His pain showed in the deeply cut lines of his face and the dark circles beneath his eyes.

“I have to go into town this morning,” she said casually. “Mason, I want you to stay at the house. There have been too many people coming through here lately, and some of them I’ve never seen before.” She turned to Rio. “You can get along without him for a day, can’t you?”

“I’ll manage.” He had just the right mixture of reluctance and acceptance in his voice to ease Mason’s pride.

She thanked Rio with her eyes.

“Do you need anything up at the well?” she asked Rio, ignoring Mason’s mutterings that he didn’t want to “baby-sit no damn house” when there was real work to be done.

Reluctantly Rio reached into his pocket. He avoided drawing on Hope’s reserves of cash until he absolutely had to. But it was time.

“We barely have enough pipe and mud left to cover the normal lead time in ordering,” he said. “There’s only one hard-rock bit that’s still sharp for when we hit another solid stratum. The other bits are in the pickup.”

Trying not to show any emotion, she nodded and took the list. She had already dipped into the money that had been earmarked for paying the balloon on the second mortgage. Now she would have to take even more out of the special money market account.

She had known it was coming. That was why she was going to town today. She had an appointment with the bank. She was determined to renegotiate the second mortgage for another year. Or six months. Or two months.

Even one.

She had to buy enough time for Rio to drill down to the artesian water that lay beneath the dry land, waiting for the silver moment of release. She knew the water was there. She knew that he wanted to find it with the same intensity she did. Maybe even more.

He called himself a man without dreams, yet she knew that this well was Rio’s dream in everything but name.

No matter how many people had told Hope it was impossible, she hadn’t flinched away from her own dream of living on the Valley of the Sun. She wouldn’t flinch in the face of Rio’s dream, his need. She would give him all the time she had, all the pipe she could buy, all the drill bits, all of it, and never regret anything but that she had so little to give.

“Aren’t you even going to ask me how close we are to water?” he said, watching her with shadowed blue-black eyes.

“Do you know?”

“No.”

“Then,” she said with a gentle smile, “there’s no point in asking, is there?”

He caught her hand, rubbed his cheek against her palm, kissed it in silent thanks. “After weeks of drilling and nothing to show but dry rock, most people would be all over me like a bad smell.”

“Most people don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain,” she retorted.

“Dreamer.” His voice was husky. He kissed her palm again, lingering. “My beautiful dreamer.”

The warmth of that moment stayed with Hope all through the long drive to town. She ordered the drilling supplies first, paying a hefty charge for a rush delivery. Then she went to the small brick building that had a freshly painted sign out front:
COTTONWOOD SAVINGS AND TRUST
.

William Worth, the loan officer, was expecting her. He had been expecting her since loan payment checks had started coming through her money market account, eating into the funds that he knew she had reserved for the balloon payment on the second mortgage.

Worth was a patient man. He let her go through her entire speech with barely a frown to wrinkle the loose skin of his forehead.

Then he said no.

“But I’m digging a well,” Hope said as though she hadn’t mentioned it before.

“Ms. Gardener, excuse me for speaking so bluntly, but you’re basing your request for a loan extension on a fool’s dream. Your well is being dug in a godforsaken dry canyon by a half-breed troublemaker who has nothing to his name but a five-year-old pickup truck and a fine Arab mare he claims he caught running loose.”

Hope bit back hot words.

The telephone on Worth’s small, fake-wood desk started ringing, interrupting his prepared speech.

“The only way the bank could grant an extension,” he said, reaching for the phone, “would be if you found a cosigner for the note.”

Before she could say anything, he picked up the telephone, listened, and said, “Yes, sir.” He replaced the phone, stood, and went to the office door. “I have to leave for a few minutes. I’m sorry we couldn’t help you. Please keep the cosigner possibility in mind.”

The door closed behind Worth with a distinct, final sound.

Hope felt as though an icy northern wind had blown over her, sapping her strength. The refusal hadn’t been unexpected, but it was rock-solid. There was nothing in Worth’s manner that gave her any grounds for thinking that he might change his mind in the few weeks between now and the day that the note was due.

For a moment she simply sat and gathered herself for the long drive back to the ranch. As she reached for her purse, she heard the door opening and closing behind her. She turned, expecting to see the loan officer again.

What she saw was John Turner.

“Now, what kind of look is that for the man who’s going to save your ranch?” he asked, smiling thinly. “We’re going to make a deal, you and me. I co-sign that note and you come to heel when I snap my fingers. No more giving away to drifters what I’m paying good money for. You cross your expensive legs and you cross them tight or I’ll beat the living hell out of you.”

His words buzzed around Hope like flies, noisy and meaningless.

Turner pulled a sheaf of papers out of his hip pocket and tossed them down in front of her. “Take your choice, baby doll. Me and your ranch or nothing at all. And don’t kid yourself. Nothing is all you’ll have. That blankethead won’t hang around once we foreclose on the Valley of the Sun.”

All the pressures Hope had been under bit into her with steel talons. All the disappointments, the fears, the endless quest for water, the knowledge that Rio would leave when water was found—everything. Rage swept through her, burning away the despair she felt, replacing it with a firestorm of adrenaline. She shot to her feet and looked at Turner through narrowed, glittering eyes.

“Go to hell.” Her voice was soft, low, vibrating with anger.

He laughed. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

He walked toward her, stopping just short of her, so close that he could smell the subtle perfume she used. So close that when he reached inside his jacket pocket for a pen, the back of his arm almost brushed over her breasts.

“What kind of flowers do you want?” she asked coldly.

“Flowers?” He frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“Your funeral.”

He flushed with anger and the memory of how easily Rio had brought him down. “I haven’t laid a finger on you, and if you tell Rio any different, you’re lying.”

“You won’t have to wait for Rio to catch up with you,” she said, her voice brittle with contempt. “I’m not your victim to bully or to crawl all over in your bathroom fantasies. If you touch me, I’ll come after you myself. And I won’t use a kitchen knife this time. I’ll use my father’s shotgun.”

For a moment there was only silence and the thick sound of air being drawn into Turner’s lungs through nostrils pinched by rage. His lips twisted into a cruel smile.

“I’ll see you the morning after the loan comes due. Mark it on your calendar, baby doll. January sixteenth, at your ranch house, and the sheriff will be right with me. That’s the day you’ll beg to suck my cock. I’m going to enjoy hearing every word of it.”

“It won’t happen. I’m not like the other women you’ve hounded and bought and bullied into bed. I’m not like the men you’ve dangled money in front of and leaned on until it was easier for them to sell you their stock or real estate or mistress than it was to make you angry by continuing to say no.”