McKettrick's Choice - Linda Lael Miller [60]
“It’s a little late to make that concession,” Holt retorted, keeping his eyes on Rafe and the mule. Between them, they were plowing up a whole new field. Dirt flew in every direction, and Rafe cut loose with another whoop, loving every minute of that ride, damn fool that he was.
“You wouldn’t really shoot him,” Lorelei ventured, watching the fracas.
“That’s what you think,” Holt answered. As proof, his right hand rested on the handle of his .45.
After a good fifteen minutes, Seesaw began to tire. Fifteen minutes after that, he came to see the situation Rafe’s way and settled down with a halfhearted bray and a quiver of powerful muscles.
Rafe rode the mule around in a circle, spurred him to a trot, and finally dismounted, directly in front of Holt and Lorelei. He, like the mule, was coated from head to foot in good Texas dust, and his grin was as wide as the Rio Grande.
He executed a bow and handed the reins to Lorelei.
She stared at them, then at Rafe. Holt noticed she didn’t look at him, and it was a good thing, too. He wouldn’t have wanted her to see what was probably plain in his face—cold fury, and a conflicting desire to keep her off that mule at all costs.
Gamely, she stepped in close to Seesaw. Rafe steadied him while she gripped the saddle horn, stepped into the stirrup and swung herself up. She was wearing a pair of Tillie’s trousers, a cotton shirt and a floppy hat, and as she sat there waiting for the mule to explode, the way he’d done with Rafe, she almost looked like a cowpuncher.
Holt breathed his way through the tension, and a rush of admiration that boiled up out of nowhere like a flash flood.
The mule nickered. Rafe stroked his nose, then let him go, stepping away easily but obviously ready to leap back in if old Seesaw decided to unwind.
“Give him a tap with your heels,” Rafe told her. Holt wished he’d been the one to say it, but the fact was, he couldn’t have gotten a word out if it meant his life.
Lorelei did as she was told, and the mule took a few tentative steps, swung his head to take Rafe’s measure, and decided to listen to his better angels. Next thing Holt knew, Lorelei had Seesaw up to a canter. She bounced a bit in the saddle, but with some practice, she’d get in stride with the animal’s gait.
Rafe stood beside Holt, watching, arms folded, dirty face split by a wide grin. Sunlight spilled, golden, over the eastern hills, flooding the landscape with a heated glow.
“She’s something, isn’t she?” Rafe said with frank admiration. “If I weren’t a happily married man, I believe I’d court Miss Lorelei in earnest.”
“But you are a happily married man,” Holt pointed out. He’d meant to speak the words lightly, but they came out sounding fierce.
Rafe chuckled, whistled to Chief and mounted up.
John drove up alongside Holt in the supply wagon, with the dog on the seat beside him. Tillie was on her mule, Melina close behind on her pony. The Captain, too, was ready to hit the trail.
“Are you going to stand there all day?” John demanded, gazing down at Holt with a look of knowing amusement in his eyes.
Against his will, Holt sought Lorelei, sitting atop See-saw’s back as if she’d been born there. Rafe was next to her, on Chief, still grinning.
Holt muttered a curse, waded through the horse flesh to find Traveler and climbed into the saddle.
They hadn’t even left the dooryard, and already he felt as though he’d been dragged across three states and a territory behind a freight train.
WHEN SHE THOUGHT no one was looking, Lorelei consulted her watch, which was pinned to the pocket of the cotton shirt she’d borrowed from Tillie, along with her trousers, boots and hat. Ten o’clock.
Only ten o’clock? By the ache in her thighs and lower back and the oppressive glare of the sun, it should have been at least four-thirty in the afternoon.
With every jostling step Seesaw took, Lorelei questioned her decision to undertake this journey, but she would have bitten off her tongue and swallowed it before admitting as much to Holt McKettrick.