Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Read Online Free PDF Page B

managed. She needed his water too badly to give way to her temper. “Sorry. There’s just too much to do here.”
    “Baby doll, you’re working that pretty ass to the bone. You don’t have to. I’ll take care of you. I want to. You can keep your ranch. Hell, I’ll even pipe water over for you. It’d be my wedding present to—”
    “Thanks for passing on my message,” Hope interrupted firmly, stopping the flow of unwanted words.
    Turner laughed. “All right. But you’re going to say yes one of these days.”
    Silently she hung up and turned to face Mason’s knowing eyes.
    “Still after you, huh?” the old man asked.
    “It’s just a game with him. If I said yes, he’d take off in the opposite direction like a chaparral cock.”
    Mason shook his head slowly. “Don’t you believe it.”
    Her smile was small and tight. “I don’t. But in a way, it’s true all the same. If he had me, he wouldn’t want me for more than a week or two. That’s just the way he is. He’s always been that way. He’ll die like that.”
    “Yeah, and he’ll die considerable before his time if he tries more than sweet-talking you.”
    Sudden tears burned behind Hope’s eyes. She wrapped her arms around Mason. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you,” she whispered, hugging him hard. “I love you.”
    His large-knuckled hand smoothed her hair while he returned her hug. “You’d have been buried in ice cubes, that’s what.” Then, almost too softly for her to hear, he said, “I love you, honey.” Then he turned her in his arms, swatted her paternally on her rear, and said, “Now, you git before them cows dry up and blow clean to the Perdidas.”
    “If Rio calls—”
    “Gal, you ain’t been listenin’ to me,” Mason interrupted impatiently. “Rio will find you. He don’t need no help from me, and he sure don’t need no swaggering, yellow-bellied son of a bitch like Turner to point the way.”
    Hope gave up. She gulped a fast swallow of lemonade and left Mason to enjoy the spoils of her hasty exit.
    He took the glass, emptied it, and called after her from the porch, “Beans and beef at sundown.”
    “And salad,” she yelled as she climbed into Behemoth’s dusty cab. “There’s lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, and mushrooms in the refrigerator.”
    “Rabbit food! You expect me to fix rab—”
    The rest of his outraged words were lost in the roar of Behemoth’s engine. It was no accident. Hope knew that while Mason might occasionally eat, and enjoy, “rabbit food,” he felt it was beneath him actually to prepare it.
    He would do it, though, cursing every crisp leaf. And he would enjoy it, both the crisp leaves and the cursing. The ride to town was long, which meant that fresh vegetables were rare at the ranch house.
    Smiling, Hope drove past the home pasture where her breeding cattle clustered around the trough, their black coats dulled by dust. Alongside the dirt road there was a narrow pipeline pitted by sand and sun. The well that had once supplied the ranch house’s needs had gone dry more than a quarter of a century ago. Her father had drilled the well deeper and then deeper still, until he struck dense bedrock where earthquakes had taken water-bearing layers of rock and shoved them beneath bone-dry slate. He had cursed and dug another well several miles away, on the far side of the buried fault.
    The new well shared Hope’s name. It was water from the Hope that had been piped down to the ranch house and its outbuildings.
    Other, separate wells once had irrigated the nearby pastures and filled the cattle troughs to overflowing. No more, though. The fields were dead and the windmill-driven pumps that had once brought up water were disconnected, lifeless. The water that came out of the wells now wasn’t enough to keep the prime on the pumps, much less supply the needs of the black Angus, the croplands, and the scattered troughs of the range cattle.
    The well her father had named Hope