He caught his horse and swung up into the saddle. Hot damn, looked like he’d maybe saved his ranch. Even better, he was gonna live another day, so he’d get to see Dusty again.
He could hardly wait to get back to camp and crawl under the chuck wagon next to her.
Chapter Seventeen
Long past midnight Alex woke to the sound of thundering hooves and bellowing cattle. Oh, no, not another stampede! She scrambled out of her bedroll and started to climb up into the chuck wagon, then noticed that Roberto was staring off into the dark and grinning.
Her heart jumped as if bitten by a scorpion. “What is it?”
“Boss,” he said.
The men woke up and cheered when they saw the ragged herd of steers pound over the hill and head toward them. Roberto tossed an armload of wood onto the dying fire. “Ees beautiful, is it not, señorita?”
Cows? Beautiful? Only to a cowboy. But she couldn’t help smiling at the four dusty, unshaven men who drove the lowing animals in to rejoin the main herd. They were so tired they were drooping in the saddle, something she’d never seen any of them do before. They tumbled off their horses, tossed their rifles in the back of the chuck wagon and immediately grabbed their bedrolls and rolled themselves up in the blankets.
All except Zach. He stopped to speak to Roberto and then Jase, stashed his rifle and revolver in the chuck wagon and sent her a tired smile. Only then did he crawl under the wagon and stretch out on his bedroll. He didn’t even bother to remove his boots!
She crept in next to him, but he had already fallen asleep. Inexplicably happy, she propped herself on one elbow and watched him. She couldn’t help it. He’d laid one arm over his eyes, and although she studied his face for a good hour, he didn’t so much as twitch. His breath pulled in and out, regular as a clock, and his chest rose and fell in the same steady rhythm.
What are you doing, staring at a sleeping man?
Back in Chicago this would be purely scandalous! But out here in this rough, untamed land, no one was watching. And even if they were, she didn’t care. She liked looking at Zach Strickland.
She released a long breath and was about to stretch out full-length on her own bedroll when his voice stopped her.
“You can build up a powerful hunger in a man lookin’ at him that way, Dusty.”
Oh, my stars and little chickens, Zach was watching me! She couldn’t think of one sensible response. Or even an unsensible one. Before she could open her mouth, he reached his hand up, curved his warm fingers around the back of her neck and pulled her head down onto his chest. In the next minute the gentle rise and fall of his breathing told her he was sound asleep.
A delicious warmth stole through her. Afraid to move for fear of waking him, she stretched out beside him and very carefully laid her arm across his midriff.
Utterly shameless, her mother would have said. But then she was quite sure Mama had never felt about a man the way Alex was beginning to feel about Zach Strickland.
In the morning, Roberto took one look underneath the chuck wagon, chuckled under his breath and “forgot” to bang his spoon in the iron triangle to announce breakfast.
* * *
Zach woke to the smell of coffee and sizzling bacon, and the sound of Dusty’s soft breathing beside him. Gently he lifted her arm away from his midsection and slid his body out from under the wagon. How he had slept through Roberto’s clattering and clanging while he prepared breakfast he’d never know. Guess maybe he was bone-tired.
And he also guessed he wasn’t inclined to move with Dusty snuggled up against him like that. Feeling her so close to him sent an odd prickle up his spine. He shook his head and headed for the spot where his cowhands sat sipping coffee.
“Gonna lay over a day,” he announced. “Juan, I know you’ve only recently come back, but ride again to Gibson. Tell him we’re coming with his cattle.”
“Si, boss,” Juan said with a nod. “Señor Gibson maybe two hours ride ahead. When I find him I tell him to wait.”
Zach nodded. “Jase, you and Skip cut out the Double Diamond beefs. Then you can drive ’em up the trail till you meet up with Gibson’s herd.”
Curly sent him a sleepy grin. “What’re you gonna do, boss?”
“I’m gonna take a bath in that creek over there, wash out my duds and shave off my whiskers while I can still see my chin.”
After breakfast, Cherry saddled up mounts for Juan and the other two hands. Just as they rode out of camp, Dusty appeared.
“Never seen you skip breakfast before, Miss Alex,” Curly observed with a bland expression. “Musta not slept good last night.”
“No, I—I slept perfectly...well. It’s just that I didn’t go to bed until—”
“Yeah,” the rangy cowhand acknowledged. “Neither did we. Boss says we’re gonna lay over a day.”
Alex settled herself by the fire pit and gobbled the bacon and biscuits Roberto had saved for her.
Zach had disappeared.
By midday she’d stopped wondering where he’d gone, took her notebook from the bottom of her saddlebag and tramped out of camp to spend the afternoon catching up on her writing. Without a doubt her newspaper articles would capture the attention of twenty thousand Chicago Times readers. Maybe more when she reached Chicago and her copy desk.
She tramped upstream along the creek bank until she spotted a spreading cottonwood tree with a thick trunk. The perfect spot.
No sooner had she settled her spine against the gray bark when she heard something, a soft flapping sound. A bird, perhaps. There it was again!
She twisted her head to study the surrounding brush and got a real shock. Two long, jeans-covered legs were stretched out on the opposite side of her tree trunk.
“Zach!”
“Yeah,” he acknowledged in a lazy voice.
“What are you doing here?”
“Readin’. I heard you come up from camp. Thought maybe you’d move on past me. What are you doing here?”
“I am organizing my notes.”
“Sounds mighty dull.”
“Oh, no. The information I am collecting on this trip is anything but dull. I intend to create simply fascinating pictures of life on a cattle drive for my newspaper articles.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you reading? Principles of Cattle Herding, perhaps?”
He laughed. “To be honest, I’m readin’ an old book a teacher gave me once.” He held up a well-thumbed edition.
“Tennyson? I don’t believe it. You are actually reading Tennyson?” For a minute she could think of nothing to say. “You mean you actually like reading?”
“Sure. Don’t you? Like reading, I mean.”
“I do, yes.”
“I never went to school, see,” he said in a low voice. “A lady on the wagon train coming West was a schoolteacher, and she taught me. Her husband was a professor of some kind. By the time we reached Colorado, I could read and write and cipher and—” He broke off. “How come you’re looking at me like that?”
She couldn’t answer right away. When she recovered her wits she blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. “Zachary Strickland, you are such a surprising man!”
“Zachariah,” he corrected. “Not Zachary.”
“Zachariah,” she amended softly. “Zachariah. Is that your real name?”
“Yeah. It’s from the Bible. Zachariah was king of Israel.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t read the Bible since she was six years old, and she didn’t remember any Zachariah. This man was not only surprising, he was...
She studied his face. Today he was clean-shaven except for the dark mustache over his upper lip. His longish black hair curled damply over his forehead. Why, he’d had a bath in the creek! All at once she felt sticky from four days of heat and grime and dust and sweat from the trail.
She gazed across the stream to a wide pool with a little waterfall tumbling into it. Perfect. Tonight, after the hands had wrapped themselves up in their bedrolls, she would come back to this spot and take a long, cooling bath.
She picked up her notebook and opened it to a page she’d folded down. “A good journalist,” she said aloud, “asks probing questions and writes down each response, word for word.”
Zach chuckled and turned his attention back to his Tennyson. “‘A young man will be wiser by and by,’” he quoted. “‘An old man’s wit may wander ’ere he die.’”
He glanced up at her and their gazes met.
“And which are you, Zach? A young man or an old one?”
“Somewhere in the middle, I guess. Not sure if I’m ever gonna be any wiser.”
Alex stared at him. Zachariah Strickland was a genuine puzzle, half cowboy and half...what? Who was this man? She forced herself to look away.
A better question might be, what is this man to me?
* * *
Next day, fifty yards from Orren Gibson’s Double Diamond outfit, Zach and Curly dismounted, and to avoid raising dust they walked the rest of the way into the camp. Gibson had invited them to supper as a way of thanking them for recovering his steers. Skip and José lagged half a mile behind with Dusty.
Gibson’s handshake was firm, and his thanks for returning his missing seventy head of stolen cattle were heartfelt. The graying ranch owner introduced them all to his cowhands, then when Dusty and Zach’s other two hands arrived, he introduced everybody all over again.