“All right,” he said finally, staring toward the dust and shouts billowing up inside the corral. “First, get out of those skirts and get into some pants so you can move.”
“I don’t own any pants,” she explained in a voice that told him he should have known this. And maybe he should have. “Les is with the seamstress now. They’re making us some trousers.”
Walking away from her, he slapped his hat against his thigh and swore.
He was good at cattle and poker, good at reading a trail. He’d been very good at drinking. But he wasn’t good at women. He didn’t understand their ways or their thinking.
“If you and your sister don’t start learning how to be a puncher today, you aren’t going on this drive.” He stared into her eyes. “If the three of you fail to meet my very reasonable requirements to keep your butts alive, then there isn’t going to be a drive, and it’s going to cost me sixty thousand dollars and my future. If that happens, I am going to be one pissed cowboy.”
“I’m going to be one pissed cowboy, too, Mr. Frisco,” she whispered, looking up at him with those huge green eyes. “Because unless this drive is successful, I don’t have a future either.”
He continued staring at her, fighting a sudden urge to laugh. Standing there in her fashionable black dress with her silly little parasol, she looked about as far from a cowboy as a person could get.
Until this minute, she’d been wearing a chip on her shoulder. Now she looked up at him with a moist appeal in her gaze, stripped bare of her pride. He saw a raw vulnerability that he doubted few people who knew her would have believed her capable of exhibiting.
His swore under his breath. Something about this mercurial woman attracted him almost as much as she irritated him. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A half dozen men turned to look, and he motioned one of them forward, handing him the coils of rope. “Teach Miss Roark how to make a lasso,” he said gruffly. “When she learns that, teach her how to use it.”
“Wait,” she said, her eyes filled with alarm and her voice spiraling upward. She clutched his arm. “I can’t… those steers are so…”
His muscles tightened beneath her fingers. “We won’t start with a live one.” When she felt his arm harden, she hastily dropped her hand and spun toward the cowboy so she didn’t see Dal frown then step back and rub his arm. He didn’t want to think about her grabbing him.
Inside the barn he found a pair of sawhorses and carried them outside to the space between the barn and house. Then he went up to the house, and he lifted down the steer head over the parlor fireplace. After a few minutes of tinkering, he’d lifted the sawhorses to approximate the height of a steer, and he’d nailed the head on the end of one, nailed a stick to the other. He beckoned Freddy and the cowboy forward.
This is “Marvin Drinkwater,” she said by way of introduction.
Freddy walked around the contraption he’d built, took off a glove and touched the tip of the horns, shuddered, and closed her eyes. Her dark lashes swept her cheeks, a crescent of ink against a milky background. Now what the hell was he doing, thinking about eyelashes?
“All right, Drinkwater,” he said irritably. “Work on roping in the morning, and put the ladies up on a cutting horse in the afternoon. I’ll get the other one.”
As Freddy had predicted, he found Les sewing and chatting with a seamstress from town. When she saw him standing in the sitting-room doorway, her expression altered to one of sullen dislike. So that’s how it was. This one was easy to read.
“What happened to your cheek?” he asked bluntly. If she’d been in an accident, he hoped the injury was limited to the bruise on her cheek and hadn’t incapacitated her further.
“Not that it’s any of your business, Mr. Frisco, but I got up two nights ago and bumped into the edge of my bedroom door.” Scowling, she lowered her needle and a length of butternut-colored material.
He gave her the same speech he had given Freddy. And then he waited. When she was finally ready to step outside, he led her toward the branding corral, having decided she needed to see the same demonstration he’d shown Freddy.
The next longhorn came snorting and pounding into the corral, and Les’s mouth rounded, her eyes widened, and her hands flew to cover her face. She peeked through her fingers with terrified eyes. When Dal put out a hand to steady her, she forgot that she disliked him and leaned on him gratefully, gasping for breath and trembling.
“I can’t,” she whispered, staring as three cowboys took down the steer.
The stink of burning hair and scorched cowhide filled his nostrils, and he had to raise his voice above the bellowing outrage of the steer and the shouts of the men. “Yes, you can,” he said, offering reassurance that he didn’t believe himself.