Matt stiffened at the casual way Frankie spoke the words. “I told you, I’m not a hired gun. And I’m dang sure not a paid killer.”
“That’s not what I meant. Sooner or later, Kane and his kinfolks will come after us again. That ambush last night was just the start of it. When that happens, we’ll need help fighting him off. That’s where you come in.”
“And if Kane happens to wind up with a slug in him—”
“We dang sure won’t grieve for him,” Frankie said.
Matt understood. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I was to sort of patrol the place. You know, keep an eye out for Kane and his bunch.”
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say. Let’s go.”
“You’re coming along, too?”
“Pa and the boys don’t need me right now, and it’ll help if you know the countryside hereabouts.”
Matt couldn’t argue with that, so he and Frankie left the cave where the Harlow still was located and returned to the barn. Matt saddled up his stallion while Frankie got a big bay gelding ready to ride.
“That looks like a lot of horse,” Matt commented. “You sure you can handle him?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he knew they were a mistake. Frankie snorted contemptuously, gave a defiant toss of her head, practically vaulted into the saddle, and said, “Let’s see you keep up with me, Bodine!”
With that, she galloped out of the barn, and all Matt could do was go after her.
He swung up onto his horse and put the animal into a run. Frankie had already opened up a lead as she raced off to the west, paralleling the ridges. A thin cloud of dust coiled up into the air from her horse’s hooves.
Despite that lead, Matt’s rangy gray stallion soon began closing the gap. The horse wasn’t much for looks, but he had plenty of speed and stamina and could run all day if he needed to. Matt saw Frankie glancing over her shoulder at him. He wasn’t sure what she was trying to prove. Probably that she was as good as her brothers. From what Matt had seen so far, he wasn’t sure but what she was already better.
They flashed past the fields where the family’s corn crop grew. The green leaves and tasseled ears waved back and forth a little as a morning breeze stirred them. The plants were shorter and scrubbier than the ones Matt had seen growing in other, more fertile places, but they had plenty of ears on them. He wondered if the Harlows ever roasted any of those ears, or if they all went to make moonshine.
Still in the lead, Frankie sent her mount curving around the fields and took off toward the south. Matt stayed close behind her, holding his horse in a little now so that he wouldn’t overtake her. He was curious where she was going, and letting her win seemed to be the best way to find out.
A few minutes later, when they were out of sight of the Harlow homestead, Frankie galloped up a long swell of ground and didn’t slow down when she reached the top of it. Her horse was airborne for a second as it crested the slope at a full gallop. Matt reined in his horse even more as he reached the top in time to see Frankie’s mount land nimbly on the far slope and keep running. He would have been willing to bet that she had done this before.
At the bottom of the hill, a creek twisted across the prairie. A few trees stood along its banks. Frankie brought her horse to a stop under one of those trees and slipped down from the saddle.
Matt reached her side a moment later. Frankie was breathing hard from the exhilaration of the gallop. Matt tried not to stare at the way her breasts rose and fell under the red-checked shirt she wore, but it wasn’t easy.
“This is one of my favorite spots around here,” Frankie said as Matt dismounted. She pointed to some low hills rising in the distance. “Those knobs aren’t anything like the Smokies, but at least they’re not just flat prairie. They remind me a little of home, and so does this stream.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty,” Matt agreed. “As pretty as any place around these parts, I guess.”
“You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you?”
“Quite a few, I reckon,” Matt replied with a nod. “Sam and I have been on the drift for a few years.”
In truth, they had seen almost everything from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, from the Rio Grande in the south to the Milk River in the north. Folks talked about somebody having been to see the elephant. Matt Bodine and Sam Two Wolves had not only seen the critter on numerous occasions, they had walked right up and shaken hands with it. Or trunks, as the case might be.
“How’d the two of you wind up riding together?”
Matt smiled. “That’s too long a story to tell. Let’s just say we sort of grew up together, way up yonder in Montana. That’s still what we consider home, although we don’t get up there very often.”
“So you just…drift? Don’t you have any ambition?”
“Oh, I reckon we do. It’s just not time for us to worry about it yet. We’re still young, after all.”
Frankie gazed off into the distance. “I have ambition,” she said without looking at Matt. “I want to go to San Francisco and see the ocean. And I’d like to go back home someday, only with plenty of money so that folks would know I was a success.”
“Most people consider a woman a success if she has a good home and family,” Matt pointed out.
Frankie glanced sharply at him. “Well, that’s not the way I look at it,” she snapped. “I don’t need some man to take care of me, when what that really means is burdening me with a whole mess of squalling brats.”
“I guess you just don’t have much of a maternal instinct,” Matt said.
“Never you mind about my maternal instincts.” She led her horse over to one of the trees and looped its reins around the slender trunk, tying them so they wouldn’t slip. “I reckon it’s warmed up enough now.”
“Warmed up enough for what?” Matt asked.
“This,” Frankie said as she lifted her hands to the buttons of her shirt and began to unfasten them.
Chapter 18
“Whoa!” Matt exclaimed in surprise. “Hold on there!”
Frankie had the top three buttons undone already, and as the shirt began to fall open, the cleft between her breasts became visible. She paused in what she was doing, though, and asked, “You want me to stop? Why?”
“Well…blast it…” Matt searched for words. “I told you last night you don’t have to pay me back for helping you and your family. You sure don’t have to do it this way.”
Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “Let me ask you, Bodine…Do I strike you as the sort of person who does anything she doesn’t want to do?”
“Well…no,” Matt admitted.
“And right now, I want to go skinny-dipping. This is as close to a swimming hole as we’ve got around here.”
With that, she turned around so that she faced the creek instead of Matt and finished stripping off her shirt. He couldn’t help but admire the smooth, clean lines of her bare back as she tossed the shirt onto a bush. She held onto a tree trunk with one hand and used the other to pull her boots and socks off. Then her hands went to the buttons of her jeans.
She paused and looked back over her shoulder. “You can come in if you want. It’s up to you.”
Then she unfastened the jeans and pushed them down over the graceful curve of her hips. Matt had to swallow hard as he watched her drape the jeans over the same bush as her shirt. Then she waded out into the creek.
“Aw, the hell with it!” Matt muttered as he reached for the buttons of his own shirt.
Frankie had told the truth. She didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, and Matt knew it. Sometimes, a fella could beat his head against his own best instincts all day, he thought, when what he ought to do was just open his eyes and see things for what they were.
A couple of minutes later, his own duds were draped over a bush and he was wading out into the creek, too. Frankie had sunk up to her neck and was stroking around, swimming as best she could in the relatively shallow water. The creek was cool but not actually cold, Matt discovered as the water crept up his thighs.