Desert Heat (5 page)

“Dallas hardly ever drinks when he’s workin’,” Stormy said. “He’s not himself lately. He’s worried about Charlie and it’s affecting his riding. He can’t afford to keep losing if he wants to make the Finals this year.”

“You don’t have to apologize for Dallas,” Patience said. “It isn’t your fault he’s a jerk.”

Stormy looked embarrassed. “Like I said…he ain’t been himself lately.”

But Patience thought Dallas was exactly himself—rude and overbearing, arrogant and conceited. A man who was used to getting exactly what he wanted.

Well, he wasn’t getting anything from her. Whatever she had begun to feel for Dallas Kingman had evaporated completely.

Patience just wished it didn’t bother her as much as it did.

Sonofabitch!
Dallas rubbed his stinging cheek and watched Patience Sinclair walk out the door of the saloon with his friends. Sure he was drunk. He’d ridden like a beginner today and it was fast becoming a habit. He never drank when he was riding, but after his dismal performance, he just couldn’t seem to get his head on straight. When Ritchie Madden, one of the clowns, had shown up, still wearing most of his face paint, carrying a flask of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of Coors…well, things just got a little out of hand.

Dallas turned at the sound of female voices. Three little blond buckle bunnies gathered around him, grinning up at him from beneath white straw cowboy hats.

“Hey, Dallas—could we have your autograph?”

They were young, but not that young. He could take one of them home if he wanted, work out his frustrations the way he had in Alberta.

One of the girls handed him a ballpoint pen, then turned around so he could sign the back of her T-shirt. One of the others was braver, insisting he sign the front, right above her right breast. She was puffing furiously on a cigarette, talking around the end.

“They’re playing a really good song,” the short one said. She was the prettiest of the three and obviously interested. “Maybe we could dance.”

But Dallas kept thinking of Patience and what he had said to her. Damn, he couldn’t believe he had behaved like such an ass. He managed to muster a smile but it wasn’t that easy. “Some other time, darlin’.”

Turning, he started toward the bar, looking for Ritchie to drive him back to the rodeo grounds. As he crossed the room, he kept seeing Patience’s face when he’d made those lewd remarks. She looked like a pretty little filly he’d kicked in the stomach, and that was exactly the way he felt. Like he’d done something rotten to someone who didn’t deserve it.

He tried to tell himself it wasn’t important. Cowboys got drunk and said that kind of stuff all the time. Not him, but still…He wasn’t sure why he’d done it, maybe because she’d looked so damned pretty and he’d wanted her and he didn’t want to.

He tried to convince himself she’d get over it.

But it didn’t make him feel any better.

The Silver Springs Rodeo was part of the small town’s annual summer festival, which included a big flashy carnival with games and rides. A neon-lit Ferris wheel turned in the distance. Patience walked past the Scrambler, the Hammer, and the Tilt-A-Whirl, remembering times when she and her sisters had gone to the big state fair with their father.

She had always loved a carnival. She loved to ride the scariest rides, would have gladly climbed aboard any one of them that afternoon if she’d had someone to go with her. But Shari was getting ready for the show, and even Wes was busy. Patience wandered over to the section of the grounds where the carnival games were played, tried her luck with a beanbag toss, took a turn at the shooting gallery, then strolled back to the arena.

When she climbed the stairs to the narrow raised platform where the riders had begun to collect for the rodeo, the crew was still setting up, running the broncs into the chutes and the calves into the trough at the end of the arena. A couple of cowboys sat in saddles resting on the ground, their legs stretched out in front of them, boots in the stirrups, an exercise to limber up the muscles in their calves and thighs.

She didn’t see Dallas anywhere around, thank God. She didn’t want to see him. She had nothing to say to him and anything he might have to say to her was no longer of interest.

It was crowded up on the platform. The holding pens were below, one full of broncs, the other holding a herd of huge, sharp-horned Brahma bulls. Patience watched the bulls for a while, milling and blowing, stomping and slobbering and rolling their eyes. Their muscles lengthened and bunched beneath their thick skin and she wondered what possessed a sane man to climb up on the back of such a big, brutal creature. It was the danger, of course, the adrenaline rush cowboys craved.

From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw Charlie Carson walking in front of a group of riders. He climbed the stairs along with the men, waved at Patience and she waved back. The riders walked toward her, crowding the platform even more. She didn’t want to get in their way so she took a step backward. Someone brushed against her, bumping into her as he passed.

Patience heard herself scream as she started to fall. The ground came up hard, jarring her teeth and bruising her hip, knocking the air out of her lungs. She must have hit her head. For an instant, the world went black.

Her skull was pounding like blazes when she opened her eyes. Then it all came rushing back and she knew that she was in trouble. She was lying on the ground inside the pen behind the chutes and five furious Brahma bulls were staring her in the face.

“Don’t move,” a man’s voice said softly. It was Cy Jennings, the bullfighter, and she was never so glad to see anyone in her life.

“Can you stand up?” another, more familiar voice asked, and she realized two men had jumped into the small, fenced area that held the bulls.

She nodded, but had no idea what would happen when she did. She sucked in a breath and started to move. She felt Dallas behind her, his arms under hers, helping her to her feet, but the bulls were standing in front of the gate and they weren’t budging, and there was no other way out. Climbing over the fence wasn’t going to be easy with her head spinning and her legs shaking the way they were.

Cy Jennings kept the bulls’ attention fixed on him. “Move around behind me. I’ll ease them away from the gate.”

Dallas urged her slowly in that direction, moving himself a little in front of her, and she had to admit she was glad he was there. One of the bulls lowered his head and snorted at him, a big iron-gray beast with long, sharp horns that started pawing the ground, throwing up dirt with his heavy front hooves. Cy used his hat to regain the animal’s attention, working to circle the bulls away from the gate.

One of them, a massive white, banana-horn bull charged at Cy, and Dallas stepped between them, flashing his hat to draw the beast away. As soon as the gate was clear, one of the cowboys pulled it open.

“Go!” Dallas commanded and Patience ran unsteadily in that direction. She stumbled as she made it through and Wes McCauley caught her. He picked her up and carried her away from the pen and Charlie fell in beside them.

“You okay?” Charlie asked worriedly.

She nodded, twisting her head back toward the pen. “Did the guys get out of there all right?”

“They’re fine,” Wes said.

“God, Charlie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. The platform was crowded. Someone walked past and I guess we must have bumped into each other. One minute I was standing there and the next I was lying on the ground.” She didn’t tell him that for an instant up there she imagined someone had pushed her. It was just her paranoia kicking in. She had Tyler to thank for that.

Charlie looked back toward the platform. “They don’t have the best setup here. I’ve always been afraid something like this might happen. You sure you’re okay?”

“Just a little shook up. And I guess I hit my head.”

Charlie nodded to Wes, who set her down on a saddle blanket someone spread out on the grass. Dallas caught up with them and knelt beside her. For the first time she noticed the Ace bandage wrapped around his shoulder. Half the riders in the show rode with some sort of bandage or sling. Like Dallas, it didn’t seem to faze them. Rodeo was an extreme sport. The contestants knew it. They considered injuries part of the game.

“The ambulance isn’t here yet,” Dallas said. “But it’s due any minute.” Every show had an ambulance parked behind the chutes during the performance.

“I don’t need an ambulance. I already feel like a fool. I hit my head, but I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“Charlie’s been after them for years to put up some kind of a railing. Most of us have rodeoed here before so we’re used to it. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

He reached up and slid his fingers into her hair, probing the lump at the back of her head. She winced at a quick shot of pain.

“Pretty good-size goose egg back there. You got a headache?”

“No.”

He caught her chin and looked into the pupils of her eyes. “Your eyes don’t look dilated. Are you dizzy? Sick to your stomach?”

“I told you I’m fine.”

“Can you remember what happened?”

“Yes, like an idiot, I had a run-in with a pen full of two-thousand-pound bulls.”

Dallas chuckled. He studied her from beneath the brim of his hat. She could tell he wanted to say something but was having trouble spitting it out.

“Patience…I, um…About what happened at the bar…Last night I was the one who acted like an idiot. I behaved like an ass and I’m sorry. I just…” For an instant, he glanced away. “My riding’s off. I was pissed at myself. I drank too much—not that it’s any excuse. Whatever the reason, I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I don’t believe in treating a woman that way, and I give you my word it won’t happen again. I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

She was so surprised that for a moment, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Dallas Kingman apologizing? Better yet, he looked like he actually meant it.

She remembered the way he’d treated her and wasn’t sure she should let him off so easy. Then she thought about the danger he and Cy had put themselves in just now to help her.

In the end, she just smiled. “I guess, after the way you jumped in with those bulls to get me out, we can call it even.”

Dallas smiled, too. God, he had the most beautiful smile. “We kind of got off on the wrong foot, you and me. Maybe we could start over.”

“Maybe we could.”

Dallas stuck out his hand. “Friends?”

Patience fit her more slender hand into his. “Friends.”

Across the way, Charlie was returning to where she sat on the blanket. “How’s she doing?”

“Seems to be okay,” Dallas said. “Got a pretty good knot on her head. I don’t think she’s got a concussion.”

“I’m fine. I should have been more careful.”

Charlie smiled. “Don’t fret about it. Next time you will be.” For a big, rough man he could be surprisingly gentle.

Blue Cody strode up just then, lean and dark, one of the best-looking cowboys on the circuit. “Charlie, we got trouble. Someone must not have closed the gate on those bulls real good. All five of ’em are running loose on the carnival grounds.”

“Son of a bitch!” Charlie and Dallas and half a dozen cowboys started running. Patience got up from the blanket, relieved to find her head had stopped spinning. For the first time it occurred to her that it was her fault the bulls were loose.

“Oh, my God!” Patience took off running.

By the time Dallas, Charlie, and the rest of the crew reached the carnival grounds, havoc reigned. People were screaming and running. One of the bulls prowled the midway game alley and had already knocked over several of the booths. The coin toss, filled with shiny glass dishes, was a mass of splintered glass. The police were moving people toward the exits, trying to keep them calm. More black-and-whites pulled in, sirens shrieking.

Charlie motioned for Dallas and the rest of the cowboys to circle around behind the bulls.

“We’ll run ’em back this way, in through the gate next to the grandstand. Once we get them into the arena, we can move them into the pen.”

It was a good plan and it began to work as the cowboys herded them closer and closer together. More men had come to help, some of them on horseback, using their ropes and whistling. Four of the bulls were moving toward the gate at the side of the arena, but a big, tough, long-horned brindle bull had cornered half a dozen people in front of the Ferris wheel.

Both clowns appeared on the scene, their makeup only half finished and still wearing their regular jeans. Cy used his hat to turn the brindle bull, while Dallas and Ritchie Madden moved around behind him. Things were looking good until someone in the crowd made a sound and the bull whirled back in that direction. A little girl screamed and started to run and the bull lowered its head and charged after her.

Everything happened at once. The little girl tripped over one of the heavy cables on the ground in front of the ticket booth and went sprawling in the grass. Ritchie stepped in front of the bull, which caught him on the horns and tossed him a couple of feet into the air. Dallas swept the child into his arms and dodged out of the path of the rampaging bull, and Cy tossed his hat in the animal’s face. The bull charged Cy, who leapt deftly out of the way, and one of the pickup men got a loop over the brindle’s head. Another guy’s loop settled over the first.

Amazingly, the bull began to calm. Maybe it was seeing the horses, something familiar in a world that seemed to have gone mad. Whatever it was, the animal didn’t resist when the cowboys gave their ropes a little slack and whistled, urging the bull back toward the arena.

One of the guys ran over to check on Ritchie, while Dallas still held the child, a little towhead with huge blue eyes who was sobbing and clutching his neck.

“It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re safe now.”

“Is he gone?” she asked tearfully.

He held her small body a little closer, trying to reassure her. “I promise he won’t bother you again.”

“My leg hurts so bad.”

Dallas silently cursed. Laying the child down on the grass, he knelt to take a look at the leg, oddly angled beneath her ruffled pink pinafore. A crowd had gathered around them and a man shoved through, desperate to reach them.

“Where is she? What have you done with her? What have you done to my little girl?” Her father, a thin man in his thirties with receding brown hair that stuck up all over his head, came racing up beside them, ranting and raving like a lunatic.

“She tripped over a cable when she ran,” Dallas explained. “Looks like she broke her leg. The ambulance is on its way. It was already headed for the arena.”

The man knelt next to the little girl, then looked up at Dallas, who had risen to his feet. “You’re going to pay for this. I’m going to sue you people for every dime you’ve got.”

Charlie strode up just then, and Dallas spotted Patience at the edge of the circle of spectators, her face as white as chalk.

“What’s going on here?” Charlie asked.

“Are you the man who owns those bulls?”

“Yeah. I’m Charlie Carson.”

“Then I’ll tell you what’s going on. Your bull nearly killed my little girl and you, Mr. Carson, are going to pay for it. This is an outrage and it’s going to cost you plenty. You can expect to hear from my attorney no later than tomorrow afternoon.”

There were more threats and shouts, but the ambulance drove up just then and paramedics poured out of the back. Patience crossed the grass to Charlie.

“This is my fault. If I hadn’t been careless and fallen into the pen, the gate wouldn’t have been left open. The bulls wouldn’t have escaped and that little girl wouldn’t have been injured.” Her hands were shaking, her features tense. Dallas had to force himself not to reach out and touch her.

Charlie shook his head. “This wasn’t your fault, girl. In rodeo, things happen. The latch didn’t catch, or maybe it busted. Maybe them bulls just pushed on the gate hard enough to force it open.”

“I don’t know, Charlie…” Her hat was missing, her ripply blond hair tumbled around her shoulders. “Somehow I still feel responsible.”

“You listen here. You wasn’t the guy who closed the gate. If anyone’s at fault, he is.” And Charlie looked like he meant to take a piece out of the guy’s hide when he found out who it was. “Like I said, this wasn’t your fault. If I really thought it was, I’d say so.”

Patience nodded, but Dallas didn’t think she was really convinced. They walked over to where Ritchie was lying on the grass and Dallas saw that he was in worse shape that it first appeared.

One of the paramedics worked over him, checking his vital signs. “How bad is it?” he asked the clown.

“Couple of busted ribs, I figure. I think I broke my collarbone. Hurts like the holy bejesus.” He sighed. “I’ll call Junior Reese, see if he can fill in for me for a couple of weeks.”

Dallas just nodded. Junior wasn’t one of his favorite people. He and Charlie had bad blood between them going way back and Junior rarely worked a Circle C rodeo. As a clown, Junior was mostly a barrel man, but like Ritchie, he could do the funny bits whenever it was needed. It appeared to be needed now.

“Take care, pard,” Dallas said to Ritchie, who waved and sank back down on the grass. Walking next to Charlie, Dallas and Patience started back to the arena. They still had a performance to give.

Halfway there, they stepped off the dirt road, out of the way of the ambulance. Red lights flashed as the vehicle passed by them, speeding off toward St. Joseph’s Hospital in town. As soon as they reached the arena, Charlie disappeared up the stairs to the announcer’s stand and Dallas walked over to get his gear.

“You were great with that little girl,” Patience said, walking up beside him.

Dallas shrugged. “I like kids. I’m sorry she got hurt.”

“I really feel bad for Charlie.”

Dallas thought of the lawsuit Charlie would likely be facing. He had liability insurance, of course, but the policy limits weren’t that high and the little girl’s father looked like he meant to go for every penny he could get.

“Yeah,” Dallas said. “Me, too.”

That night, the Silver Springs rodeo wasn’t one of Charlie’s best. The Circle C was famous for its bucking stock, but these horses seemed edgy and out of sorts. Their rhythm was off or they had trouble coming out of the chutes. Patience found herself rooting for Dallas, who drew a horse called Black Plague, rode the eight seconds, but didn’t seem quite together the way he usually was and only scored seventy-eight points. It wasn’t enough to win and he wasn’t happy about it.

Shari raced well but her time wasn’t fast enough to place. Stormy took a second in the calf roping, so at least one of them won. Patience didn’t see any of them after the performance. Generally, there were more contestants in each event than those who performed during the rodeo, and the slack—the extra stock and riders—competed either before or after the show. Back in Llano, the team roping had gone till two o’clock in the morning.

Shari and a lot of the cowboys were still over at the arena, but Patience had opted out tonight. She was tired of breathing dust and kicking dirt. She still had a throbbing headache, and after what the bulls had done at the carnival, she wasn’t in the very best mood. She figured using her brain tonight wouldn’t be easy, but maybe she could handle reading the journal.

She thumbed it open to where she’d left off the last time.

Patience smiled. She still hadn’t found the section the missing page had come from. There were lots of pages missing so it was hard to tell how much time had passed. She caught a reference to Sam Starling and zeroed in on the passage.

A later entry read:

Patience thought about the last few lines. Apparently she and her sisters weren’t the only ones in the family who craved adventure. She read until she was yawning and her eyes began to burn, then took off her glasses and put the journal away.

That night Shari didn’t come home. Undoubtedly, she was with Stormy. Patience thought of Dallas Kingman and tried not to imagine what it would be like to go to bed with him.

Though the National Finals Rodeo in December was the biggest one in the country, paying over six million dollars in winnings, the Copenhagen Cup in Las Vegas and the Reno Rodeo the following weekend were among the top ten highest paying rodeos of the year.

“We’ll have to do some hard driving to make it,” Shari told Patience. “But it’s good money and I’d damn sure like to take some of it home.”

Dallas would be going, of course. He needed to keep his winnings up if he was going to make the Finals in December.

He and Stormy were already on their way when Shari and Patience set off the following morning on the six hundred mile run from New Mexico to Nevada, hauling their eighteen-foot trailer.

Charlie was on his way to Flagstaff, Arizona. The Circle C production crew generally stayed as close to Texas as possible. Charlie had a wife on a ranch near Bandera and he liked to get home as often as he could. Besides, the animals held up better on shorter hauls.

But Patience was traveling with Shari, whose horse was in Dallas Kingman’s trailer on its way to Las Vegas. Patience had never been there and though she had seen pictures on TV, she wasn’t prepared for the incredible array of colored lights that flashed like a neon oasis in the middle of the desert, the long lines of illumination stretching for miles across the flat dry sand.

On the outskirts of town, Shari dropped their trailer in a small RV park called the Palms, and they drove the rest of the way into the city in the brown Chevy truck.

“Dallas is the big star of the show,” Shari said, “so the MGM comps him a couple of rooms and he’s giving us one.” She grinned. “Since I’m staying with Stormy, you can have it all to yourself.” Shari hadn’t mentioned the night she spent with the tall, lanky Texan, but every time she said his name, her face lit up in a way it hadn’t before.

Patience couldn’t help a touch of envy.

It was late afternoon when they rolled up in front of the MGM, a massive emerald glass structure with more than five thousand rooms. The golden MGM lion ruled from the street out in front, and the lobby took up acres. The room they were given on the twentieth floor had double queen-size beds and a very nice décor.

Shari didn’t unpack. Instead, she phoned down to the desk and asked the operator to ring Dallas Kingman’s suite. She was grinning when she hung up the phone. Picking up her suitcase, she headed for the door.

“Don’t forget, there’s a big welcome party tonight; some rich guy here in Vegas who likes to big-deal it when the rodeo’s in town. Stormy says he lives in a regular mansion. Since the show doesn’t start till day after tomorrow, if we play a little too hard, we’ll have time to recoup before the competition. I think it’ll really be fun.”

Maybe it would be. Patience felt a frisson of excitement. She was in Las Vegas. She was going out on the town. Throwing open her suitcase, she took out her red cowboy boots and tried to decide what to wear.

In the end, nothing she owned seemed right for a gala western party in such a sophisticated city. Deciding there was still enough time to make an addition to her limited wardrobe, she left the room, went down to the concierge desk in the lobby, and asked where she might find something suitable for such an affair. Something sexy but not too sexy. Something chic, but not too chic.

“There’s a mall at the Venetian,” said an attractive, well-groomed man in his thirties whose name tag read
Bobby.
“It looks just like Venice. Even has canals with gondolas. My girlfriend loves to shop there. You might try
Cache
for something like that.”

The mall turned out to be the perfect suggestion. And the Disney-style Venice was a hoot. When Stormy and Shari dropped by to pick her up at eight o’clock, Patience met them in a red leather miniskirt that matched her cowboy boots and a sleeveless red silk top with sequins scattered around the scalloped neckline. It was sexy, but mostly just fun, and it showed off her legs and a hint of cleavage and she thought she looked good in it.

Stormy had retrieved Patience’s straw hat from where it had landed in the pen. The brim wound up with a few more crimps, which seemed to please Shari, but Patience wisely declined to wear it. Instead, she wore her hair loose, falling in waves past her shoulders, and tried not to wonder if Dallas would approve.

He wasn’t with his friends. Shari said his afternoon was booked with TV interviews. He was also filming an ad for Tony Llama boots, one of his biggest sponsors.