The problem, she decided, was that she was attracted to the wrong kind of man. Put ninety-nine good, decent men in a room and one son of a bitch, and she’d pick the son of a bitch every time. Sighing, she leaned on the fence rail.
Her penchant for picking the wrong man very likely explained why she kept thinking about Dal Frisco, much as she hated it. What she disliked most was the certain knowledge that Pa would have admired him. Pa wouldn’t have cared that Frisco was an ex-drunk. Pa would have recognized a man like himself, a cattleman, a man other men feared and respected. At least that’s how Frisco would have been perceived before he lost his last two herds. But Pa wouldn’t have put much stock in that fact either. He would have said every man deserves a second chance. Of course, Pa wasn’t staking his entire future on Dal Frisco.
Idly she wondered where Frisco was tonight and what a nondrinking man did to amuse himself. Had he already found a lady friend in Klees? It wouldn’t surprise her. A man that good-looking, that virile and sure of himself, wouldn’t have trouble attracting a certain kind of woman.
A woman like me, she thought with a long sigh. Damn.
Well, she’d learned her lesson. No more men, not for Freddy Roark. And especially not a cattleman, perish the thought. She’d grown up with a man who smelled like cowhide and cow manure, who talked cows at breakfast, lunch, and supper. There were cattle in the yard, horn chairs on the porch, and a longhorn’s head mounted over the parlor fireplace.
That wasn’t what she wanted. If she ever took up with a man again, he’d better be able to recite Hamlet. But she wouldn’t mind if he looked and moved like Dal Frisco.
“Oh for heaven’s sake.” One minute she was giving up men forever, and the next minute she was deciding a future lover’s profession and how he should look.
On the positive side, Pa’s inheritance opened interesting new possibilities. With a fortune in the bank, she could go to San Francisco, where theater people were not regarded as degenerates. There might be a good man in San Francisco who wouldn’t care that she had appeared on the boards.
Of course, she’d sworn off men forever. But aside from that…
Dal Frisco popped into her mind again, and she sighed. She was willing to wager her best hat and the pile of scripts she’d collected over the years that Dal Frisco couldn’t quote a word of Hamlet if his sorry life depended on it. He was insolent, arrogant, and ungrateful. Domineering and demanding; a cattleman. He was one drink away from falling backward into ruin.
He was the best-looking man she’d encountered in years.
And a son of a bitch if she’d ever seen one.
Chapter 4
The first thing Dal did was instruct the King’s Walk hands to begin branding the two thousand beeves provided in Joe’s will. Next, he hired five brush poppers and sent them out to the thickets to cull wild cattle out of the brush. Yesterday he’d heard back from his wrangler, and Grady Cole was on his way to Klees. Once Grady assembled the remuda, Dal would ask him to gentle the horses the women would ride. He didn’t want them up on green-broke mounts.
It felt good to be working and productive again, to be juggling a hundred details in his mind. He had a future now; all he had to do was grab it.
Before he cantered up to the ranch house, he reined in and studied the King’s Walk spread. The ranch was everything Dal had ever wanted, except he wanted it in Montana.
Touching his heels to his horse’s flanks, he rode up to the house, expecting to see Freddy and Les practicing some rope work in the yard. He didn’t see Les, but he spotted Freddy between the house and the barn. Damned if he could figure out what she was doing, but he had to admit that she looked fine doing it. The black bodice of her dress fit snugly enough to satisfy a man’s imagination and suggested a figure that made him blink twice.
For a long moment he stood beside the fence, enjoying the sight of her and trying to puzzle out what she was up to. She appeared to be drawing lines in the dirt with a long stick, while shielding the sun from her face with a tiny, black silk parasol. When he gave up trying to figure it out, he climbed over the fence and studied the lines she’d drawn in the dirt.
“What are all those chicken scratchings?”
“I am an actress,” she answered grandly, twirling her parasol above a little hat that wouldn’t have kept the sun off a flea. “I’m blocking a cattle-cutting scene.” Stepping briskly past him, she pointed to an X with her stick. “Here is where I enter. The lines near stage front represent the herd. I ride along this line.” She retraced a path with her stick. “Then suddenly, a cow—”
“Steer,” he corrected, frowning at the lines and x’s. “We aren’t trailing a mixed herd.”
“A steer breaks out of the pack.”