Knight in a White Stetson
Chapter 1
C
alla switched on the radio.
She slid off the seat, jumped from the cab and walked to the front of the old Chevy truck.
“Lester Smiley,” Calla muttered, kicking the flat front tire with her booted foot, “if I ever get out of this mess, I’m coming for you.”
She thought about searching again for the jack and the lug wrench, normally stowed behind the bench seat in the cab, but she’d already spent twenty minutes tearing the truck apart trying to find them.
After the first few minutes she’d realized they weren’t there; that that half-drunk Lester had taken them out for some ungodly reason and had forgotten—or been too lazy, more likely—to put them back. But she’d kept looking, through the toolbox, under the pile of horse blankets and tack in the bed, even in the small spaces between the engine and the truck body. It gave her something to do. That and swearing. But she was tired of looking now. She was even tired of swearing.
She sat down on the plump spare tire she’d unhooked from the undercarriage of the truck and put her chin in her hands. She was twenty miles from home, on an old, mostly abandoned road the chalk trucks used when they were pulling chalk from these hills a decade ago. Nobody but she and Lester ever traveled this road anymore, not before hunting season anyway, so the chance of getting rescued out of the heat by a passing vehicle was too slim to consider.
And when she’d left the ranch that morning before dawn, she’d scrawled a note and left it on the kitchen counter, telling her father and her aunt Helen that she might spend the night at Two Creek Camp and return home the next day.
“Damn,” she muttered again, just to make herself feel better. She pulled her cowboy hat from her head and fanned away a deerfly that buzzed in the heat waves gathering in front of her eyes. “Damn, damn, damn.”
The decision not to stay at Two Creek had been a bad one, Calla admitted. But she’d wanted to get back to the ranch and clean up before dark. Clark, the man she’d met at college who was currently, and inexplicably courting her, was due in from
She was working herself toward another useless fit, she knew. Plus, she was thinking in sentences that ended with prepositions, something she had to watch, considering
Clark
‘s opinion on that sort of thing.
Calla blew out a long breath, got to her feet and reached into the truck to switch off the radio. Then she rolled the spare around to the bed and heaved it in.
A glance at the blue
She’d start out in an hour, she thought, when it wasn’t so hot. The idea of walking the twenty miles home in the dark didn’t scare her, though she was plenty mad about it. She’d spent her life in these rocky hills, on horseback mostly, or driving salt blocks around, but she’d walked her share, too. The silhouettes of Monument Rock and
She’d make five miles before dark, and when the moon came up, she’d make the next fifteen.
Calla decided to spend the hour planning her revenge on her hired man.
* * *
Someone was kicking her boot. Hard. She tried to sit up, forgetting where she was, and banged her head on the undercarriage of the truck.
“Ow,” she yelped. “Stop kicking me, you idiot.”
She dug her heels in the dirt and shot out from under the truck, dragging her hat with one hand and holding her forehead with the other. The sun, lower now but still blazing, blinded her for a minute, and she sat still on the ground, cross-legged, until her eyes became accustomed to the light.
“Well,” she said, reaching out to the figure in front of her, “now that you’ve crippled me, give me a hand up, will you?”
The boot kicker grabbed her hand and pulled her to her
feet.
With one eye still closed against the light, she looked into his face. It was grinning at her. Typical.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” the man said, still grinning. “Sorry about that. When you didn’t wake up when I yelled at you, I thought maybe you were dead under there.”
“Asleep, I guess, not dead.” She tugged on her hat. “But I am stranded. You got a jack?”
“Yeah. Hold on.”
The man went to his truck, a bigger, newer version of the Chevy Calla was driving, and pulled a jack from a box in the back.
“I need a lug wrench, too, if you’ve got one,” Calla said. She was already unloading the tire from the back.
“Hey, wait a sec with that,” the man said, glancing over at Calla in time to see her dump the spare tire from the bed of her truck and roll it over to the flat. “Let me help you.”
“Already done,” Calla said, wiping her hands on her jeans. She grabbed the jack and the lug wrench from the man’s hands. If she got the tire changed in time, she could still make it home in time to see
Clark
.
If
Clark
came.
“Wait a sec,” the man said again, trying to take the jack handle from her.
“I’ve done this before,” Calla said. She spared him a glance. No use hurting his feelings, seeing as he did stop to see if she was dead or not. “Thanks, anyway.”
The man sat back on his heels, a bit at a loss. He was sure he shouldn’t be letting this lady change her own tire, but he was equally sure she wouldn’t let him do it for her. He watched her for a minute, and tried pretty hard not to stare at her rear end.
“Uh, what’s your name?” he said to distract himself.
“Calla Bishop, nice to meet you.” Calla wiped her right hand on her jeans once more and gave the man a firm handshake. He grinned at her again. Calla stared at his white teeth. “Thanks for stopping. I thought I’d have to walk home tonight.”
“I’m Henry. Home?” The boot kicker looked surprised. “You live around here?”
“Our place is just at the base of these hills, between here and
Paradise
. At Hot
“Nope. I’m not from around here.”
“Uuuhh,” she grunted again, loosening the last nut and spinning it free with her fingers. “Really? Where you from?”
“Here and there.”
Calla, impatient to be done with tire changing and chitchat, brushed back a strand of her hair that had worked its way loose from her ponytail. “Here, take these.” She dumped the lug nuts into his palm. “You on the run from the cops, or just being mysterious?”
“Not mysterious,” the man said, smiling. “Just careful. I’m from
“Hell, yes.” Calla laughed. She yanked the flat free of the wheel and shoved it out of her way. The boot kicker rolled the spare over. “If I’d known you were a Californian, I’d never have let you rescue me.”
“You don’t look much like a woman who needs rescuing,” he commented, watching Calla heft the spare onto the wheel. Calla held out her hand for the lug nuts. He opened his hand and she scooped them up. She spun the lug nuts back on and jerked them tight with the wrench. The boot kicker watched her in silence.
“Well—” Calla straightened up after a minute and let down the jack “—thanks for your help, Henry.” She picked up the jack and the lug wrench and handed them back to the man, who had easily lifted the flat into the back of Calla’s truck. The nice face has a body to match, Calla thought.
“What help I was,” he remarked.
“Okay, well—” Calla stuck out her hand “—if you’re ever in the neighborhood. I won’t even tell anyone you’re a Californian.”
The man smiled again and shook her hand. Good teeth, Calla thought, straight and white, like piano keys. She was used to looking at teeth, being a horsewoman. And his were very nice. She wanted to tell him it was a pleasure to meet a man who didn’t have a slug of tobacco worked into his lip.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop that, she told herself sternly. They’re probably capped.
She hopped into her truck and gunned the engine. “Hey,” she called out the open window to Henry, who was still watching her, his head tipped slightly to one side. “You’re not lost or anything, are you?”
“Just sightseeing,” he assured her. He lifted one hand. “See you around.”
“Yep. See you around.”
* * *
Henry watched her spin the tires of her truck in the dirt and race away, leaving him in a cloud of dust and gravel.
No surprise she drives like that, he thought, smiling to himself. Watching her change that tire had made him feel a little lightheaded. He couldn’t tell if it was the little grunting sounds she made or the line of her long legs and rounded hips as she squatted in those Wranglers. Though he
had
tried not to stare.
He walked slowly to his own truck and tossed the jack and wrench into the toolbox in the back. He opened the door and climbed in, but he didn’t turn the key. He sat and watched the disappearing white pickup for several minutes.
Calla Bishop. She was a jolt to his system. When she’d brushed her hair back into that ponytail, he felt as if he’d been struck across his chest with a plank. It was all he could do not to reach down and wind that chestnut-colored silk around his fingers.
Henry started his pickup. The radio was still on, and he reached over and switched it off. He could just see Calla’s truck. Or rather, he could see the cloud of dust she left behind it.
She must know these roads pretty well, he thought, to be driving them so fast. He’d been picking his way across the back roads in this part of the state for a week now, and every time he got above thirty-five miles an hour he came up hard on a blind curve or a dry creek bed or a cow calmly walking in the middle of the road.
Calla Bishop. He couldn’t believe how she lifted that flat off the wheel rim. And those lug nuts were rusted on; he’d seen it from where he stood.
He turned the radio back on, and rolled up the passenger side window by pressing the button at his fingertips.
Wonder what a hot sulphur lake is?
He drove his new pickup along the old chalk road and occupied himself with looking for a place to camp for the night. He didn’t have the time, and shouldn’t have had the inclination, to be thinking about every Wrangler-clad, tire-changing, gorgeous woman he came across in this wilderness.
Still, he thought to himself, he would have liked to pull loose that ponytail.