She laughed and it was bitter enough to make the lemonade seem sweet. “What cattle is there to rustle? My poor scrawny things? There’ll be no roundup this year, and I’ll have to find a way to fatten them up to make it next season. No, Victoria Hammond will be following her late husband’s lead by taking on beef below the border, where they didn’t get hit by the blizzards.”
This time his eyebrows stayed up a while. “Maybe you should consider selling out to her. She’s buying. She said so.”
Willa frowned. “I know she’s buying. She’s grabbed half a dozen of the small spreads, at bargain rates.” She looked at him, hard. “Did she ask you to . . . Caleb, are you her damn messenger?”
He winced at that. “She did ask me to approach you, yes . . . but that’s not what I’m doing.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No. I’m just telling what she told me. What her intentions are. I didn’t get the sense she wanted to take advantage of you, even if she has done, where some of the smaller ranchers are concerned.”
She stood.
Came over and planted herself in front of him and put her hands on her hips, her legs apart, a female Colossus of Rhodes.
“You really don’t know, do you, Caleb York?”
“What don’t I know?”
“She’s liable to make me an offer so paltry the other deals her man Byers wangled will make her look the soul of generosity. She thinks she has me at a disadvantage, and . . . and maybe she does.”
She sighed and joined him in the big rugged chair. He slipped an arm around her shoulders and she sat in his lap with her head on his chest like he was Daddy.
Her laugh was almost a moan. “You really don’t know anything about cattle, do you, Caleb?”
“No.”
“Aren’t interested in the least.”
“No. Well. I’m interested in a certain cattle rancher, but . . . no. My interest in beef stops when I cut into a thick steak and hope to find it nice and bloody. Tender, too, preferably.”
“Oh, you like them tender, do you?”
“I do.”
She kissed him. He kissed her.
“What this is about,” she told him, and she may have been in Daddy’s lap but he was the child being lectured, “is Sugar Creek.”
“It is? The stream with all the white sand, you mean.”
She looked up at him and nodded. “Which is why it’s called Sugar Creek, most likely, yes. It’s on Victoria Hammond’s property. It’s practically in her backyard.”
“What’s important about some little crick? You have a river running through your land.”
“The Purgatory River, yes. And what’s the Purgatory River like right now?”
He thought about it. “Fouled by rotting cattle carcasses . . . clogged with death and decay. We’re lucky we have wells in town, because that polluted stuff’s not fit to drink.”
“For man . . . nor beast.”
His head went back. “Oh. You’re saying, right now she has the only source in these parts for clean water . . . for anybody’s herd.”
“Yes. We never put anything in writing, any of us cattle ranchers. But Papa never asked anything for sharing the Purgatory’s clean water with his neighbors. Likewise any cattlemen who wanted their beef to partake of Sugar Creek were free to do so, with their neighbor’s blessing. Byers brought word to me that the Hammonds did not feel obliged to honor that understanding. Sugar Creek was theirs.”
Caleb’s features had turned stony. “That woman thought I’d do her bidding for her . . . with you. She thought she could hold that boy’s killing over my head and make me come to you and.... What the hell kind of woman uses her son’s death to gain a business advantage?”
Neither of them said anything for a while.
She curled up in his arms and managed not to cry. She would have hated herself for that. Caleb would not have held it against her, would not have seen anything female or weak about it—he was not that kind of man.
But she knew she had to be strong in the fight with Victoria Hammond that lay ahead.
They sat nestled before the stone fireplace as if it were warm and not just a cold well-arranged pile of stones, and finally she rose and held out her hand and led him to her bedroom.
They had become very intimate during the blizzard, and what followed had become an event if not regular, not infrequent, either.
Perhaps half an hour later, in her metal-post double bedstead, they lay under a cool sheet together with a light blanket at their middle, and he said, “Even with all the land that woman has grabbed up, her property pales next to yours. She covets the Bar-O—she wants it for herself, to make the Circle G the biggest cattle outfit in the Territory. She said so.”
“She can go jump.”
“You can make her jump, Willa. She has Sugar Creek, but you have all this range. Squeeze her dry.”
“She can make me the dry one.”
“I say you still have the advantage. You want some water rights—temporary at that, because the Purgatory won’t always be fouled. She wants . . . everything.”
The mistress of the Bar-O leaned on an elbow. The sheet fell to her waist and her pert breasts were exposed and she didn’t care a whit. She was comfortable with this man, and she wasn’t some fool female who had to undress in the dark with her mate.
And that’s what he was. It wasn’t official yet, but that’s what he was. Her mate.
He was propped on an elbow, too. He grinned at her. “Listen, darling child. You’ll have money coming in from the railroad, for the right-of-way you’re granting—now that spring’s here, they’ll be putting track down soon.”
“They will,” she said, nodding. “That
