Читать книгу The Texas Blue Norther - Lass Small, Lass Small - Страница 7

It all began quite stupidly when the car phone gave its rude beep.

Lauren Davie was by then a mature twenty-seven. She didn’t instantly reply to intrusions. She was driving out west of San Antonio, there in TEXAS, and she just wasn’t curious who would be calling.

Whoever was calling on the phone gave up. There was only the hushed song of the tires touching on the asphalt. And the wind blew, trying to tumble the portion of loose blond hair that wasn’t protected by her white golf hat.

With the car top down, she was vulnerable to the winds. She loved it. There was a feeling of freedom, of escape, to drive alone in the breezes under the sun.

But she wore driving gloves. Her golf hat with its long bill was enough shade for her face. Of course, she wore a silk blouse with long sleeves, and her silk trousers covered her legs. The silks were colored in pale shades of sand.

Her car was cream colored. The top was white.

As Lauren drove along, the radio music was interrupted. She learned there was a warning of an approaching storm.

She looked around at the uninhabited area. The trees were discreetly low. The sky was clear. The surface of the land was uneven so that it wasn’t boring. The wind was gentle if one was still. At the speed she was going, with the car’s top down, the wind was searchingly frisky and intrusive.

The sun above her was obvious and it was not screened by storm clouds. It was a perfect March day. The bluebonnets were like jewels strewn across the land in blue magic.

Lauren Davie was restless. She didn’t know what was wrong with her life. She had everything she wanted. Why was she so disgruntled? What could she target in her life with criticism?

She was busy. She helped out at the hospital and the food bank. She had almost too many friends. Those same friends were trying to marry her off. Lauren wasn’t interested in being married and nailed down. What an expression.

Because one great-grandmother had been especially frugal, Lauren had her own money and was free. She didn’t need a job. She volunteered her time. She probably needed to start a business.

What sort of business? What—really—interested her enough to apply her attention to what endeavor?

Nothing she could think of at that time. If she put her mind to it, something would appeal to her. She’d make a good CEO. She would let everybody else run the whole shebang.

If everyone else ran the business, what would she do? How would her life be any different from what it was? She’d have even more money.

Her thinking was out of whack. She needed to concentrate on something that was interesting enough and stimulating enough and ragged enough that her attention wouldn’t wander.

Yes.

Of course.

Right away.

The turnoff from the highway ought to be somewhere along that particular empty stretch of the two lane road. It would be to the right and go north. Her eyes watched with some discontent.

An interestingly weird portion of her friends was taken with the game of a pretend insurrection and how to cope if the government was taken over by an enemy. To Lauren, it seemed somewhat juvenile.

She thought such an exercise was rather similar to an adult version of Dungeons and Dragons. That fascinating lure had come into being with quartersupplied video games, and later it was the alluring miracle of the 1980’s Apple Personal Computers. The Apple computer was matched with the early computer line called the Gorilla Banana, which had the dot matrix printer.

When those had burst into being, Lauren had been quite young. She hadn’t been overly interested. But her daddy had thought having the Apple II and the matrix printer would help in schoolwork.

At the time, all the kids had come to her house to see the computer and play with it. It had been an interesting time. The computer had been magic to them all.

And for her, now, to be driving out for an airplane pod drop was really another type of Dungeons and Dragons. The pod was a yellow gourd and it had a long cotton tail tied to it. The tail helped the searchers to see it fall to the ground.

At twenty-seven, wasn’t she too old for such games?

Not yet.

Lauren had become involved mostly just to get away from the routine of golf, bridge and meetings. These newer, more complicated games were a distraction.

So.

She was admitting she was bored?

Hmmm. Maybe so.

If she was only bored, what was the solution to the boredom?

Her sisters would say it would be something else that was newer. Something more stimulating. Like organizing and helping with some group, traveling and shopping…Or a man.

Searching for something new was why Lauren was driving out in the sticks, looking for a side road in order to go to a pod dropping.

In the pod would be some kind of directions. When it was retrieved, the group would “assault” some way station and conquer whoever had been designated to act as the enemy. The actual taking was benign. No rough stuff.

Well, sometimes the assault got rough. There are just people who take everything seriously—even in games like basketball, golf and cards. There were people who played so intensely that it wasn’t a game. It was war! So, basically, this pod game was a war.

Take Willard Newman. He was serious about everything. Even her. Willard had wanted her daddy’s backing. He didn’t just want Lauren Davie, he wanted her daddy to see him as kin. That way Willard would have the backing of a man who had clout.

It seemed to Lauren that no serious courter had ever seen only her. He’d seen past her to her daddy, to the Davie holdings, to security for himself.

Recognizing such a fact was somewhat diminishing.

It could be no surprise that Lauren had become sour about men. She wondered how it would be to see the light in a man’s eyes that was for her and not for her money. It would never happen. Her daddy’s name was prime in TEXAS. No one could hear her last name was Davie without asking, “He kin to you?”

They’d ask in just that way. Not if she was her daddy’s daughter, but was he kin to her.

Sourly impatient with herself, Lauren watched for the turnoff, and it finally came along with the road under her tires. She signaled needlessly. There were no other cars. She turned with skill from the lessons Mr. Soper had given her in driver’s training those years ago. And she went on, following the map.

By then, the road wasn’t divided by a painted line down the middle. It was just a road. She felt she was far, far away from civilization. Soon the road deteriorated. In TEXAS? A deteriorated road? It was still asphalt.

But that didn’t last, either. The road became a onetrack, dirt road.

Was she lost? Had she taken the wrong turn? There were no markers. The Good Guys of the exercise couldn’t allow the Enemy to know where they were.

Lauren sighed. She carried water with her always in the wide country of TEXAS. And she had the car phone.

What was the name of the road?

There had been a couple of turnoffs that had been dirt tracks, just like this one she was on.

She stopped and looked at the secret map. Lordy, Lordy, deliver her from games. The map was accurate. It showed she was to go straight ahead and she judged she had another mile at least.

How had she gotten tangled up in some game this strange?

Stupidity.

Undiminished by her own labeling, she went on, watching the mile creep on the adjusted odometer. The moving, seemingly undulating land had emptied out. Even the mesquites were scarce, but there was an occasional, lone oak. There were vast ranges and the vista was beautiful, but it was lonely and bare. It was grazed land. There were cattle out there somewhere.

The meeting place was a little past that presumed mile, but there were the other two cars. They were tucked in under the short mesquites that appeared along parts of the roads. The cars were hidden? How droll.

The short, lacy trees were gnarled, and cattle had trimmed up the branches so the trees were like useless, fragile umbrellas. The noisy couple with their mesquite-hidden cars was jubilant she had arrived.

Mark met her and opened her car door. He scolded, “Why didn’t you answer your car phone? Melissa called, she’s about to have the baby! So Gail and I are going back. You can handle this one. Tom and Buzz couldn’t make it. Jack’ll be here in no time. He’ll buzz you first, then drop the pod. Thanks, honey. We’re gone!”

And they left.

Lauren sat in her car, watching the other two cars disappear. She thought, Why am I here? What on earth am I doing? This is really dumb. At my age, I ought to know better than to get involved in something this stupid!

And there she was, dressed in silks with fragile shoes. And she was supposed to drawl through the fence and retrieve the pod?

Disgruntled, she waited.

And waited.

She looked at her watch and sighed. She looked at her silent car phone. She wondered why she was sitting there.

Eventually, she heard the sound of a small plane. She looked up. She looked around. She looked down the dirt road. At some distance, she saw the plane buzzing the mesquites clear down yonder. That would be Jack.

Jack had never struck Lauren as being particularly bright. However, he could fly a plane. She could not. But if he was that smart, why was he buzzing the mesquites, clear down there?

She had started her engine and was bouncing down the lane toward where Jack had been. Had he gone on off a way and was supposedly dropping the pod? Away from the trees? Why clear out of sight after buzzing the place to call their attention? He could have dumped the pod there!

Men are strange.

Something entirely logical to a woman is beyond a man’s grasp.

It would seem basic that if a person was going to try to communicate with someone, however secretly, he wouldn’t buzz them first and then go on off to drop the pod someplace else, out of sight.

The way he’d flown was right out over that bare, roadless land. The male retrievers had probably thought it would be rugged to then hop out of their cars and trudge off after the damned gourd.

Lauren took a steadying breath.

Then she looked in her glove compartment. Yes. A compass. She removed it. Her father had given it to her. He was another strange male. In this, her daddy had been right. For the first time since she was sixteen and passed her driver’s tests and had a car, she did need a compass. How had her daddy known such a time could come?

He’d probably understood that she would get entangled with some males whose idea of excitement was to go out onto the wide and empty land and find a plane-dropped gourd. How had her daddy known?

Well, he was male.

And with that revelation, Lauren recalled her mother sighing and mentioning just that very thing! ‘He is a man,’ she’d say. And until that very minute, Lauren had always thought her mother had been bragging and complimenting her husband, who was Lauren’s daddy. But her mother’s evaluation was a sobering thought. Her father was a man.

The compass confirmed that, as the plane had disappeared over the uneven land, it had been five degrees west of North. Okay. There was no way her car could go through that barbed wire fence and out over that land. A Jeep would have had less trouble.

So Lauren took a Great Forbearing Breath, got out of her car and began to follow a plane. She was doing that! Perhaps there is some comment that could be made about women. Why was she there?

She held the compass in her hand and at the top of the rise, she looked to see which way the plane had turned.

The plane was…gone.

Yes.

So Lauren looked for the trailing cloth that was to identify the pod. And other than the grazed and uneven land with a few rocks and a whole lot of sky, she could not see one damned thing.

It is depressing to be involved with unskilled people. Amateurs.

Obviously, Lauren Davie was included in that evaluation.

She stood at the top of the rise and examined the ground that had been under the plane. It was then she became aware the wind was blowing. She was no longer in her car with the top down. But the wind was blowing.

She took a handful of the sparse grasses and tossed them up. The wind was strong. She would have to look to her right of the plane’s path…about ten additional degrees?

She put the compass on North and walked ten degrees to the right. She saw nothing.

Lauren was a dedicated woman. She would find the damned pod. She trudged along, watching so avidly that she didn’t look up at the darkening sky.

With her intentness, it was some time before she realized the sun was gone. There was no friendly shadow accompanying her. She looked at the sky with some indignation. From where had all those dark clouds come?

And she shivered. Could the weather people be right?

Silk is a marvelous material, but even silk has its limits. Her raincoat was in her car. Her car was.that way. She had to find the damned gourd-pod.

So she searched.

And she found it! It was not with glee or satisfaction that she lifted it from the ground. It was with grim, teeth-clenched determination.

The tricky wind had played with the pod as it had fallen. It was not where it should have been, which was right…where?

Lauren stood and looked around, holding the damned cloth-tailed pod. She looked at her compass. She pointed it North.and she began to walk back the allotted degrees to her right.

She walked at an angle. She would find the car. She would never go on another pod hunt in all the rest of her life. She hoped Mark’s wife had triplets.

It took some time for Lauren to realize she could possibly be lost. She figured if she went south and west, she would find the line of mesquites. From there, she would find her convertible. The car was not only hidden among some mesquites, but she had left it with its top down. and rain or dust or something was approaching.

It was not turning out to be a good day.

She would survive…even this. She would find the convertible before she really, really needed the raincoat in the back seat. She would.

The sky darkened almost to night and the winds were not nice.

Lauren trudged along carrying the gourd-pod, which was gaining weight with every step. She was cold. She shivered violently. Her nipples were terse and pinched, and her skin agreed with the discomfort.

She could handle cold. She would find the car, the coat and put the top up, get in and turn on the heat!

The heat. It would be warm and the stream of the heat would go over her body and soothe her. She had the damned stupid gourd-pod, and she would find her car again.

Lauren lost her hat. It was just-gone! She was freezing. She stopped and wrapped the long pod tail around her. It was only minimally better. She was cold.

And…where was she?

She looked around. It was all so relentlessly the same. Rolling ground. No sun. No stars. No clue as to exactly where she was. The compass said North was that way. She went south.

If only she could just get to some trees…even to mesquites.she would be better off. She was so cold.

Lauren redid the long cloth tail of the pod, wrapping it around her head, her neck, and her chest. Her teeth were chattering.

What was a damned gourd-pod worth? Why had she felt the need to go and find it—all by herself? She would probably die out there. Alone. Her bones would eventually be discovered. By then, it would have been so long, since her death, that the finders would assume she was a relic from long, long ago.

She turned to view the approaching storm and her mind saw a man on a horse. So she was hallucinating. Big deal. She didn’t have anything else to entertain her. Lauren’s mind had decided she needed to be rescued and her imagination managed to conjure that.

So she turned her back on the foolishness and trudged off—south and a little west.

Behind her, she heard horse’s hooves.

Yep. That would go right along with the idea that she was being rescued. Her imagination had always been rather vivid. She’d spent most of her childhood reading and rereading her maternal grandmother’s carefully preserved comic pages of Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant.

That grandmother was remarkable.

Lauren figured she was in the final stages of freezing, and she would go out on Prince Valiant’s horse. Okay. She could handle that.

Prince Valiant’s voice came from behind her. “Hey, where the hell are you going?”

How unprincely. Men never acted as they were supposed to act.

She stopped and turned to confront the phantom. “You’re supposed to step down, take off your hat and sweep a really good bow.” With those directions, she stood shivering with her teeth clicking and waited, her back to the storm.

He swung down from the horse with beautiful ease. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it.

That beat the bow all hollow. The coat was gloriously warm. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d already died and probably was in hell. It was so warm. Well, maybe not hell exactly. She hadn’t been that bad.

The masculine voice told her, “Get on the horse.”

Huh? She was going to hell on a horse? That seemed a nasty thing to do to a horse.

She asked the phantom, “What’s he done?”

The phantom’s face was sour. He groused, “I hate women. They always do the dumbest things.”

Warming inside the coat, she retorted heatedly, “Women? Women do dumb things? Do you know that I’m out here for only one thing?”

His interest changed and riveted. “You streetwalking?”

With great, adult patience, she replied, “I came out here with a group to-”

And she couldn’t blab a secret club’s activities. She was staunch.

“Yeah?” He encouraged her speech with his riveted attention.

Why didn’t his Stetson blow away? She was fascinated.

She saw that his shoulders were hunched. He was cold. Where was his coat? It was on her. She said, “I’ll give your coat back to you in just a minute. It’s so warm.”

And he replied nicely but he leaned close as he yelled over the sound of the winds, “As soon as you’re just about thawed, we’ll get out of here before it thunders.”

“It’s thundering?” Her eyes got big and her head jerked around.

“It’s just wind right now. It’ll get interesting in a while. Are you warm enough to get on the horse?”

“What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“This horse.” She was kind and pointed to the horse so that he’d know what she meant by the word. She didn’t think he was very bright.

But the male creature replied, “Block Head. We just call him plain Block.”

She lifted her chin a little. “He seems more intelligent than that.” She was chiding.

“He don’t know no never mind.”

She indicted the horse’s position and mentioned kindly, “He’s protecting us from the wind.”

“That’s ‘cause he don’t know not to.”

She stiffened. Then she said in her Daughters of the Alamo voice, “I’m ready to ride.”

He smiled and bit his lower lip. She was probably hostile enough now to see to herself. He said, “Give me the coat. I’ll wrap you in this here blanket. I’d take the blanket but it don’t have no sleeves. Understand?”

He was a basic man. No wonder he had so carelessly referred to streetwalking. He probably didn’t know any better. She would be careful of him. She took off the coat with steely discipline.

He took hold of her and tossed her up on the horse. Lauren didn’t shriek or sprawl because her daddy had been doing something like that to his daughters all their lives.

She landed neatly in the saddle. She would ride; he would walk. He was a gentleman under all that crudeness. He knew his mann—

Move your foot out of the stirrup.”

He was boarding the horse. too.

But he sat in back of the saddle and he shifted until he got the blanket right, covering the front of her and her legs, then he opened his coat and covered her entirely.

In a sexually stimulating, roughened voice, he commented in her ear, “It’s jest a good thing you got your own gloves.”

He spoke of those thin-skinned, driving gloves, which protected her hands from sun-browning. Sure. But thin as the leather was, the gloves were better than nothing. She said a dismissive, “Yes.”

Then he startled her as he said quite naturally, “The pod’s tail makes a pretty good cover for your head and neck.”

How’d he know it wasn’t a cantaloupe? She replied a nothing, “Umm.”

He didn’t realize the subject had been rejected by her. He said, “We’ve found a couple of them there things. What’s in them? Ones we’ve tried ta see, they just crumbled.”

She looked at the pod, which was the size and shape of a cantaloupe. “I thought it was a distress signal from a plane flying oddly.” Jack’s flying was odd.

The man in back of her with his arms around her said, “He had enough room to land. He didn’t need any such distress signal.”

“I guess not.” But she did hear in his words that he had been watching as the plane had buzzed the mesquites and then dropped the pod.

Why had he waited in the beginning of the storm? Why hadn’t he come to her immediately? He’d allowed her to find the pod. He’d known where it was? If he was so curious, why hadn’t he retrieved it first? She would have never known if it had been found or lost forever.

This person in back of her on the horse had mentioned they had found other pods. Who all had they told of finding them? Where were the ones they’d found?

This whole adolescent activity was only a confirmation that they were all bored. They had too much spare time with little to distract them. Well, Mike’s baby might distract him for a while.

Actually, Mike had had very little to do with his wife having a baby. She’d done all the work. Come to think of it, even at a time when his wife could be very uncomfortably pregnant, Mike had run off on a pod hunt. He had.

She said lazily, “Next time, I get to sit in back.”

“The wind’s at my back,” he said next to her ear. Then his voice was different, lower, huskier. He said, “I’m sheltering you.”

She accepted that as only right and asked, “Where are we going?”

“To the nearest house.”

She was courteous. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

It began to rain quite nastily cold and wet. He pulled her head back under his chin, and she was protected. He slid his hand across her ribs below her breasts under the blanket. “You warm enough?”

Her mouth responded in a tiny, female way that was embarrassing. She told him, “My feet are cold.”

“Sit Indian-style. I’ll balance you.”

She was surprised. Here she was countering all her horse training. She was slumped back against a man and now her legs were crossed under the blanket and she was—warm.

He fumbled down her stomach and his hand slid into her trousers. “Oops, sorry. I’m trying to see if your feet’re okay.”

“They are.”

“Good.”

A lecher. She squinted a little, as she went over the karate lessons she’d taken because her daddy had insisted. She’d been good at it. She’d nailed the instructor. He’d been hostile to her after that.

If the instructor had gone along the whole way, instead of trying to escape, she would have thought he was letting her win. But he’d tried hard to win over her.

Winning had been heady.

Of course, she’d antagonized yet another male. Her father had laughed.

Her mother had altered the classic, “Never give a man an even break.” But her mother had added, “You’d lose.”

And she had. By being so confident and physically safe, she’d lost just about every male who’d come down the pike. Even all those who had been blinded by her daddy’s clout. She’d lost them all.

Which ones had she wanted?

And lying back against a crude man, she went over all of the contenders like turning pages of a diary, and there hadn’t been a one she’d really and truly wanted. To be a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had never really been tempted must be some sort of remarkable record.

She was probably freezing to death and looking back on her life in a farewell. Actually she was warm and cozy, cuddled down, cross-legged but secure on some man’s saddle. She was leaning back against him and wonderfully wrapped in his blanket and the shared coat. His right hand was innocently tucked under her left armpit.

His wrist was resting on the top of her breast, which moved with the horse’s stride. At least the man wasn’t groping her.

She didn’t realize his wrist was feeling her. Only hands did that. Not wrists or backs or arms.