The rope sailed forward a few feet, and Les’s jaw dropped. She stared at the rope, then spun to face Frisco and Freddy with huge shining eyes. “I did it!”
“Keep practicing,” Frisco said to Les, before he started toward Freddy. “Of course, there’s another side to your argument.” He took the rope out of her hands and adjusted the loop, making it look easy. “If I accepted your position about behaving the way people expected me to, I’d be sitting in a saloon right now, pouring whiskey down my throat and feeling sorry for myself because folks only saw the whiskey and overlooked entirely what a fine fellow it was going into.”
Freddy stiffened and narrowed her eyes. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”
He handed her back the rope. “I didn’t say you were. I’m just saying there’s another way to look at things.” Twirling a finger, he indicated that she should work the rope. His grin made her stomach tighten. “You don’t have to like me, Miss Roark. But you do have to obey my orders, so let’s see some rope work.”
She knew what he was going to do when he walked toward her, then around behind, and to her annoyance, her heart skipped a beat. Coming up behind her as he’d done with Les, he waited until she made herself extend her aching arm, then he covered her hand and wrist with his. For a moment Freddy couldn’t move. She stared at his brown hand, and felt the warmth from his palm shoot toward the top of her scalp and down to the soles of her feet.
“Is something wrong?”
He stood so close that she felt the length and heat of him along her back. His boots and legs pressed against her skirts, and his breath fluttered a loose tendril on her cheek. Flustered, she tried to imagine why a cattleman, for heaven’s sake, could make her feel hot and shaky inside.
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said sharply. His palm was square and hard, rough with calluses, and she could feel the strength in his fingers. He had work hands, capable hands, hands that seemed oddly expressive to her.
Fighting to concentrate on the rope and not the peculiar tightness in her chest, she struggled to do as he instructed and smothered a sigh of relief when she got the rope spinning above their heads. When he stepped back to adjust the angle of her elbow, his touch seemed intimate and lingering, and she almost lost the momentum of the spin. She would have if he hadn’t immediately called, “Throw it.”
The rope sailed forward and she stared at it with the same expression of amazed elation as Les had worn. When Freddy threw back her head and gave a shout of happiness, Dal laughed.
“All right, ladies, keep practicing.” Pulling a watch from his pocket, he consulted the time. “Give it another hour on the ropes, then change into the pants I send up to the house. Drinkwater is going to take you riding.” When Les’s face paled, he raised a hand. “All you have to do today is stay in the saddle for three hours. Those three hours are going to seem like forever. And every day we’re going to add another hour.”
Twitching the rope in her hands, Freddy watched him stride toward the fence, climb over it, then walk around to the back of the house. Lean wiry men had a willowy grace to them that suggested they might bend in a strong wind. But Dal Frisco had no give in him. His backbone was as steely as his eyes, and that was a problem.
Somewhere deep inside, Freddy had assumed that she and her sisters would go through the motions, but they wouldn’t really be expected to do much of anything on the cattle drive. The genuine cowboys would do the actual work. She and Les would just ride along beside the herd.
But now, a terrible suspicion was growing that Dal Frisco didn’t see it that way.
The brake that Dal Frisco had installed on Alex’s chair was a godsend. She found it so useful that she wondered why the manufacturer didn’t install brakes on all wheelchairs.
But the brake had not solved the problem of digging a fire pit. And unless she overcame that obstacle, there was no point in even inspecting the chuck wagon that now sat in the kitchen yard. She wouldn’t have to deal with the wagon if she couldn’t dig a stupid fire pit.
First, she looked around to make sure no one was watching. Then she drew a deep breath and told herself that what she was about to do would not be the first demeaning act in her life, only one more. No one had ever died from humiliation, she reminded herself, then she twisted and squirmed and eased herself down on the ground. Like a worm.
“Stop it,” she muttered angrily. “Just do what you have to and discover if it works.”
She had enough knee to crawl, and she crawled to the spade, cursing the skirts that kept tripping her up. Gripping the handle above the bucket part, she stabbed at the ground, and discovered she hardly made a dent in the hard soil.
“I see the problem.”
Snapping her head up, she discovered Frisco leaning against the chuck wagon, watching. Scarlet flooded her cheeks, and she couldn’t breathe.