He stared down at her, seeing the expensive silk dress framing her breasts, and noted the rich fabric covering the chair she sat in. All of it paid for by Joe Roark.
Then he thought about Joe’s daughters, stiff and sore, muscles bruised and aching, their hair, skin, and clothing matted with Texas mud. He pictured Alex dragging herself over the ground, and Freddy and Les hobbling out to climb on a horse knowing they faced more hours of sheer agony. Dal didn’t believe the sisters had a prayer of winning their inheritance, but if by some miracle they did, they would have done it honestly. So would he.
“You know what you can do with that offer.” Picking up his hat, he strode toward the door.
“My offer isn’t going away, sugar. You can accept right up to the very end.”
Outside her door, he sucked in a deep breath of clear, cool air, then he walked directly to the saloon, pushed through the smoke and noise, and hooked his bootheel on the bar rail. He ordered a whiskey and hunched over it, smelling the fumes and moving the glass in familiar wet circles, thinking about Montana.
Along about midnight, the bartender leaned across the counter to wipe up a spill of beer. “You going to drink that whiskey, mister, or just play with it all night?”
“What’s it to you?” Dal snarled, dropping a hand to the gun on his hip.
“Just asking, that’s all.”
He went back to sliding the shot glass up and down, forming the shape of mountains. Lola had offered him $120,000. But he noticed that she hadn’t offered to repay the fifteen thousand that she’d cheated him out of.
Brooding, he let his thoughts drift to the Roark sisters, remembered Freddy sailing through the air and splatting into the wet ground. Thought about green eyes blazing up at him out of a sheet of mud. Her breasts heaving while she sucked air, trying to get her wind back. He had looked down at her sprawled at his feet and he’d wanted to fall on her, rip off the male pants that molded her buttocks, and roll her on top of him. Every time he was near her, he felt like they were circling each other, watching and waiting.
He pushed the whiskey away and rubbed his forehead.
The liquor he’d consumed during his drinking days must have drowned his brain. He’d agreed to a doomed cattle drive that was not going to restore his reputation because he couldn’t possibly succeed. And if that wasn’t enough evidence that he was stone crazy, here he sat, in a saloon at midnight getting sweat on his brow from thinking about a green-eyed, mud-soaked actress who detested him.
If he still needed proof that he’d pickled his brain, all he had to do was think about Lola’s proposition and ask himself what kind of man turned down a no-lose offer?
In some ways, life had been a lot easier in his whiskey days.
Chapter 7
On the day the Roark sisters were scheduled to work their first longhorn, the King’s Walk hands started drifting toward the area behind the pens shortly after Freddy and Les grudgingly arrived. Until Freddy saw the men lined up along the fence, her chin had been dragging, her heart pounding, and, like Les, she was shaking with dread and half-convinced they were going to their deaths. But the sight of an audience transformed her. She squared her shoulders and told herself this was simply a scene to be played, that was all. She could do this.
“Oh no,” Les groaned beside her. “Ward came to watch.” Shoulders sagging, she turned away from the observers and cast a dismayed look at the ground.
Freddy spotted him standing apart from the ranch hands. “Just ignore him. We’ve practiced working cattle. The only difference today is that we’re going to work a longhorn.” She didn’t let herself really think about what she was saying.
“We haven’t done it without falling off our horses or making Mr. Cole shout at us.” Les lifted her eyes to stare at the longhorn the boys were bringing out, then she blinked rapidly, and whispered, “Oh, my heavens. Look at his horns.”
Grady overheard the remark and walked over to them. “That longhorn is a cow. It ain’t a ‘he.’ ” He rolled his eyes and looked them up and down. “She’s old and ain’t got much frisk left in her. Some of the boys over there think of her as a pet almost. Her name’s Daisy.”
“Daisy?” Now Freddy let herself look. Her heart sank. It looked to her like Daisy was a pair of horns with a thousand-pound animal hanging under them. “Oh, my God.”
Frisco rode up to them then, and Freddy stood a little straighter. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she could barely breathe. Shading her eyes from the sun, she cocked her head and gazed up at him with an expression as confident as she could make it.
“Remember that the horse is going to do the work. All you two have to do is stay on top of him.” Frisco’s cool blue eyes traveled over her body, then settled on Freddy’s face.
“We have done this before, Mr. Frisco,” she said, tossing her head.