LITMIR.BIZ

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      “He’s going to have to get used to the fact that I’m not just some pimply-faced date. I’m here to stay, Risa. There’s no way he’s stopping me. Stopping us.”

      What had she done to deserve such devotion? she’d wondered as he kissed her. It seemed such a miracle. That a man like this could love someone like her. Too tall, too shy, too awkward. Neither brilliant nor beautiful. Never quite belonging anywhere.

      A castoff, a stray. Her younger sisters were both legitimate, but she was not.

      Ben had never bothered marrying her mother. Never troubled himself once in fourteen years to visit his daughter, not till Eva’s death. Then he’d brought Risa back to the ranch like an afterthought. When he’d adopted her and given her his name, well, that must have been for no more reason than that all Suntop stock wore his brand.

      Compared with Ben’s brusque and offhand affection, Eric’s unswerving attention was cool water in the desert. In his arms she’d found her home at last.

      But, oh, she was missing him already, and this was only the second day he’d been working. So to pass the hours till sundown, she’d ridden out with her youngest sister.

      “Who cares if we didn’t bring our swimsuits? I’m positively, absolutely melting! Come on, Risa. Race you there!” Twelve-year-old Tess Tankersly wheeled her paint pony midbridge and spurred south down the river trail.

      “Tess!” Risa had wanted to return to the Big House, in the hope of finding a message from Eric waiting there. But she couldn’t let her youngest sister swim alone. “Darn it. Wait up, you silly goose!”

      No answer but a wavering war whoop. Tess ducked her dark head alongside her pony’s neck and vanished under the green-fringed curtain of a willow tree.

      Risa growled something wordless and urged her lathered mare into a lope. Exasperating as her little sister was, she was right. It was hot today. They should have ridden into the heights instead of the valley, but Tess had wanted to show her the latest crop of yearlings. She had her eye on a black, half Arab, half quarter horse filly that she was determined to make her own. Her first grown-up mount.

      So far, Ben, in his usual fashion, had made Tess no promises. There was so much more power in maybe, than sure.

      That’s why he doesn’t like Eric, Risa told herself. Because he can’t control him. And once they married, Ben would lose control over her. She smiled as she crouched along her mare’s shoulder, willow leaves stroking her back.

      Two more twists along the narrow trail and she came to the swimming hole. Here the river made a wide bend around the cliffs on the opposite shore. The current slowed, the bottom was sand, the water deep and dark.

      Tess had shucked the saddle off her paint and was leading him into the river. She’d left her T-shirt on, thank heavens, but she’d wriggled out of her jeans. Her skinny little butt gleamed bright red with her cotton bikinis, then vanished beneath the olive-gold water. Beside her, her pony snorted and launched himself into the depths, paddling like a dog.

      “You twerp!” Risa called. Now they’d have to wait for Oscar to dry off before Tess could saddle up again.

      “He was as hot as I was.” Swimming alongside, Tess grasped the pony’s black mane and squirmed up onto his withers, then threw a leg over his surging rump. “Wheee, we’re flying!”

      “What do you think—want to swim?” Risa asked Sunrise as she folded her jeans on top of her boots. Sunny dipped her head and actually seemed to nod. Risa laughed and reached for the cinch knot. “Just like old times.”

      They swam the horses downstream as far as the next bend in the river, then back against the current, to come ashore on the opposite bank, where a narrow sandbar edged the cliffs. Sitting shoulder to shoulder, legs outstretched, digging their bare heels into the damp, sugary grit, they talked aimlessly, while Sunny and Oscar prowled the bank behind them, seeking mouthfuls of grass growing from the cracks in the rocks.

      “You’re really not going back to Yale in September?” Tess lay back on her elbows. “Dad will be sooo mad at you!”

      “He’ll get over it.” Or he wouldn’t. “Eric and I are marrying in October and that’s that, Tessums. Just as soon as he starts his job—his real job—in Denver, as a public prosecutor.” The job had been promised to him—the Denver attorney general was another friend of Eric’s family—and the coveted position would open up when one of the staff left on pregnancy leave.

      Once Eric started drawing a salary, they could marry. After that, Ben would have to make up his mind: he could smile on her decision and help her. Though this time—and from now on—he’d have to let Risa define what was help and what was interference. She hoped to transfer to the University of Colorado at Boulder; that should be a feasible commute from wherever she and Eric set up housekeeping.

      But if Ben refused to help her, refused to give them his blessing… Risa’s lips tightened as her fingertip traced a line in the sand. Well, she was marrying Eric anyhow. She’d have to work for a few years, then she’d put herself through college. This was her life and she’d live it her way. Ben had had his chance to shape her future back when it would have really counted for something, and he’d passed it by. So how could he complain now?

      “But Eric’s not a cowboy,” Tess pointed out with a child’s irrefutable logic.

      Risa smiled to herself. Her youngest sister had been raised all her life at Suntop. She could imagine no world beyond its borders, conceive of no better life than one that circled around cattle and horses. “No, he isn’t. Not every…interesting man rides.” From out of nowhere the image of Miguel Heydt flashed across her mind, his big hand clutching the saddle horn for dear life, his dark eyebrows drawn together in a mock scowl while he swore at the horses. He’d been laughing at himself, as well as teasing her, the other night. Strange, that a man who could make fun of himself seemed not weaker for it, but stronger.

      “Interesting.” Tess smirked. “You mean sexy?”

      Tess’s fiercely tomboy years seemed to be drawing at long last to a close. Sometime in the ten months Risa had been gone, Tess had discovered boys. “What would you know about sexy?” Risa teased. “You mean like Robbie Kristopherson?”

      “Robbie?” Tess made a gagging sound. “Robbie can’t even walk straight! He fell over the wastebasket in Ms. Ever’s class the last day of school! No, I mean sexy. Hot—like that new guy on the haying crew.”

      Risa’s heels stopped their rhythmic sliding. “What new guy?” Tess knew every foal that dropped, every barn-swallow that nested at Suntop, but still, surely she was much too young to have noticed…

      “The one with buns to die for! And when he takes his shirt off…!” Tess collapsed with a blissful moan and hugged herself.

      “How did you see him without a— Ben will shoot you, you goose, if you’ve been hanging around the haying crew. It’s dangerous.” And Risa didn’t mean just the machinery. The haying crew weren’t regular Suntop men but temporary workers, hired only till the fields were cut. Unknown factors, unlike the cowboys, who were all dependable, hand-picked men, who knew their boss too well to flirt with the boss’s daughters.

      “I haven’t been hanging around. But this new guy, Risa, you’ve gotta see him. He has a chest and arms like a—like a comic-book hero!”

      “You haven’t been peeking through the bunkhouse windows! Tess?” Risa prodded her in the ribs till the girl giggled and shook her head. “Hiding in the hayloft, you little lech?”

      “Uh-uh! No, stop, don’t do that! I w-watched him through my binocs yesterday, okay? When I rode out to look for b-bluebirds. He was stacking bales, then they took a break and he took off his s-shirt and dumped water over his head!”

      “Oh, well, binoculars, of course,” Risa said dryly. Add one Hunk, genus American Male, to the Life List in the back of her little sister’s Peterson’s Field Guide.

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