CHAPTER 6

Denny took her time going down the stairs because she knew some of them creaked pretty loudly. She carried her boots and placed her sock-clad feet close to the wall to diminish the chances and put her weight on them carefully, backing off each time one of the steps started to make a racket.

Her father had the best hearing of anyone she had ever known. He wouldn’t necessarily be upset if he knew she was leaving the house in the middle of the night, but it would simplify matters if she could keep the little jaunt to herself.

The hour had to be close to midnight. The big ranch house had been quiet and dark for several hours, and when Denny had looked out toward the bunkhouse from the window of her second-floor bedroom, she hadn’t seen any light or movement out there, either. People worked hard on a ranch, which meant they slept hard, too. Satisfied that everyone had turned in for the night, she had slipped off her nightdress and pulled on socks, jeans, and a shirt, then started downstairs.

She didn’t pause to put her boots on until she reached the front porch after easing the door closed behind her. She sat on the steps and worked her feet into the boots. A moment of intent listening after that told her she hadn’t roused anyone in the house, and she headed for the barn.

Even though the moon was just a tiny sliver and low in the sky, the stars provided enough light for Denny to see where she was going. She didn’t need much. She might not know every square foot of the Sugarloaf the way her father did, but she knew the ranch headquarters well enough to get around just fine. She would have to light a lantern once she got into the barn, though. She had several matches in her pocket ready to do that. She had prepared for this.

Denny knew she could lift the heavy wooden bar resting in the brackets on the main barn’s big double doors by herself—she had done it before—but she headed to the smaller door leading into the tack room.

She closed the tack room door behind her and felt around in the gloom until she found the lantern with its bail hanging on a nail in the wall. She snapped a match to life with her thumbnail—Smoke had taught her on one of her visits to the Sugarloaf when she was a little girl—and held the flame to the lantern’s wick.

When she had the lantern burning good, she carried it above her head in her left hand and went into the barn’s main area. She walked down the wide aisle between two rows of stalls and then turned left at the T-shape that stretched right and left in front of another dozen stalls in the rear part of the barn. The lantern’s glow washed over the hard-packed ground at her feet and the bits of straw and hay that spilled out under the gate of each stall.

When she reached the final one, back in the corner, she turned and raised the lantern a little higher so that its light reached over the solid gate into the enclosure. The horse that looked back at her flared his nostrils and pawed at the ground with a hoof. The look in his eyes was challenging.

The animal’s coat was a sleek, glossy black. He wasn’t overly big, just a medium-sized horse, but everything about him was perfectly formed, from his head to the tail that switched back and forth in agitation.

“Take it easy, Rocket,” Denny said quietly. “You’re smart enough that you ought to know by now I’m not going to hurt you.”

The horse blew out a breath.

Darn if that didn’t sound disparaging, thought Denny.

Rocket was a mustang, having been brought in with a group of wild horses caught back in the spring. All the others had responded to Rafael De Santos’s methods and had been turned into decent saddle mounts. Smoke had sold some of them and added the others to the Sugarloaf’s riding stock.

Rocket, though, had been stubborn. Rafael had proclaimed him to be half-gentled but still needing a lot of work. Sometimes he cooperated, and when he did, he showed he had the makings of a fine horse. When he didn’t, it took a skillful cowboy to stay on his back until he’d calmed down . . . and sometimes he never reached that point and kept bucking until the would-be rider gave up. Problem was, the cowboy never knew which Rocket he were going to get when he swung up into the saddle.

But one thing was absolutely certain. Rocket was fast . . . hence the name. When he settled down and just ran, no horse on the ranch was faster.

Denny was convinced that no horse in the whole valley was faster.

Rafael had allowed her to ride the young mustang a few times, when Rocket was in a good mood and not giving any trouble. Denny loved the way the horse responded to her. At its best, the relationship between horse and rider was such a bond that it almost seemed as if the two had become one. Denny had sensed something of that with Rocket.

“When you’re finished with him, Rafael, I want him to be mine,” she’d told the horse tamer.

Rafael had shaken his head. “I may never be finished with this one, Señorita Denny. He is stubborn like the mule. Perhaps the stubbornest horse I have ever seen.” Rafael had paused, then added, “And your padre saw you riding him the other day. He was not happy, even though the horse behaved well. He says El Volador has the eyes of a killer.”

“That’s ridiculous. He’s just a horse.”

Rafael had just cocked his head to the side. “I only tell you what Señor Smoke says, señorita. He will not be happy if you try to ride this one again.”

Denny tried to go along with her father’s wishes . . . most of the time. But he was wrong about that one, she thought as she looked at Rocket in the lantern light. The connection was there between them. She was sure about that.

“What are you doing, Aunt Denise?”

The unexpected question made her jump. She almost dropped the lantern, but she tightened her grip on it in time. Swinging around, she saw Brad standing at the corner where the aisle made its T-shape. He wore a nightshirt, but his feet were in boots.

“Brad, you shouldn’t be out here,” she told him, ignoring the question he’d asked her. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s the middle of the night for you, too,” he said. “You look like you’re going riding.”

“What? No. I’m not . . . I was just out here looking at the horses—”

“Why?”

“What do you mean? Why am I looking at the horses? Well, I like horses . . .”

“So do I,” the boy said, “but I don’t sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and come out here to look at them.”

Denny frowned. “Are you scolding me?”

“Of course not, Aunt Denise. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Don’t call me Aunt Denise. That makes me sound like I’m positively ancient, like I was forty years old or something.”

“Miss Sally said I shouldn’t call you Denny. She said it’s disrespectful, since you’re going to be my aunt once Louis marries my ma.” He thought about it. “And that’s only about twelve hours from now, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t mind being your aunt. I’m pretty happy about that, in fact, but I’ll be da—I’ll be darned if I like being addressed like I’m some old maiden aunt.”

“What’s a maiden aunt?”

“Never mind about that,” Denny said. “You’d better scoot on back to bed.”

If he left, she could still salvage her plan.

But in the morning, he might mention to his mother or Louis or someone else that he’d seen her out here with Rocket, and that might cause a problem, so it might be better to make an adjustment now . . .

“What are you gonna do?” Brad’s question broke into her rapid thoughts. “I still say you look like you’re going riding.”

Denny shook her head. “I swear I’m not. Not yet. I was just . . . talking to Rocket.”

“That wild killer mustang?”

“He’s not a wild killer mustang! He just needs the right rider.”

“Which is you, I reckon,” Brad said.

Denny gritted her teeth and drew a deep breath between them. “If I’m going to be your aunt, that means I’m almost like a parent, and I can tell you what to do. So get on back in the house. You shouldn’t have been spying on me and followed me out here in the first place.”

“I wasn’t spying on you. I just happened to be up because . . . well, I just happened to be up, and I saw you, and I was curious. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“Didn’t you ever hear about curiosity and the cat?”

“There are cats here in the barn, aren’t there? Cal told me there were, to keep the mice down. Where are they?”

“Curled up somewhere asleep, I guess,” said Denny, “where you ought to be, blast it. Are you going to do what I tell you?”

“I want to look at Rocket first.”

Denny hesitated, then moved her head to indicate he should come on down the aisle. “All right, but as soon as you’ve done that, you’re going back to the house.”

“Sure, sure.” Brad ran along the aisle to the last stall. “What about you? Will you walk back to the house with me? It’s, uh, kind of dark out there.”

That reminded Denny that he was just nine years old. Still a little kid. She sighed, nodded, and said, “Sure, I’ll go with you.”

Brad put a booted foot on one of the gate’s cross-braces, grabbed the top edge, and pulled himself up so he could look over into the stall. Rocket watched him warily but didn’t spook. Brad hooked his left arm over the top of the gate and held out his right hand. “Come here, Rocket,” he urged. “I won’t hurt you, boy.”

Denny began, “He’s not going to—”, then stopped short as Rocket took a couple of steps forward and nosed Brad’s hand.

The boy was beaming as he glanced over his shoulder. “Look! He likes me!”

“Yeah, it appears that he does,” Denny murmured. She watched as Brad stroked Rocket’s muzzle.

The mustang seemed to enjoy it.

Maybe she had been wrong about who was destined to be the perfect rider for Rocket, she told herself, then discarded that idea. He had allowed her to pet him, too, at times. After a few minutes, she said, “All right. We’d better go. We all need our sleep. Rocket, too.”

Brad gave the mustang’s nose a last scratch, then dropped to the ground outside the stall gate. “I’ve heard that he’s really fast,” he said as Denny ushered him back along the aisle toward the front of the barn. “It’s a shame he’s not gonna run in the race tomorrow. Or rather, today, I reckon.”

“Yeah, that’s a real shame.” She was smiling to herself as she blew out the lantern flame.