“Why should I?” Karla said, unable to keep the defensiveness out of her voice. “It’s our decision. We will make our own plans!”
When Pilar said nothing, Karla turned to her, her smooth-cheeked, heart-shaped face flushed with beseeching. “Surely if we love each other, there will be no trouble. Isn’t that right, Pilar?”
The older woman dropped her eyes demurely and let her gaze stray across the official papers and cloth-bound account books littering the huge desk before her. She said gently, “It is a different world here than the one you are used to back east, mi amor. In the East, I think things must be libre como un pajaro.” She looked around the room searchingly. “How do you say? Looser. Here, the old traditions . . . they are still followed. Especially by men such as your abuelo, Don Vannorsdell.”
“But—”
“Karla!” The burly voice rose beyond the office, on the heels of a door slam.
She turned to the door as boots clacked on the flagstones in another part of the house.
“Karla, are you here?” her grandfather’s voice boomed in the cavernous dwelling.
Karla glanced at Pilar once more, reluctant to end the conversation, then lifted her chin to the broad, open entrance to the hall. “In your office, Grandpa!”
The pounding had grown quieter as the man bent his old legs for the kitchen. It grew louder now as he approached the office. Paul Vannorsdell’s stocky figure appeared in the dim doorway, a craggy, florid face under a flat-brimmed leather hat, the brim of which looked mouse-chewed.
He peered into the room. “What on earth are you two doing in here?”
“We are cleaning your office, senor,” Pilar hurried to explain, raising her feather duster as if for evidence.
“We are cleaning and discussing the womanly aspects of love,” Karla said, good-naturedly jibing the old man.
When she’d first come to the Arizona Territory from Philadelphia, after her parents had been killed in a train collision, she’d found her grandfather, whom she’d never met, to be every bit the irascible old hermit her mother had once told her he was. In the two years since, however, Karla had probed the chinks in his armor, and had even gotten him to laugh a time or two.
At the moment, however, that armor was solid. The gray-brown eyes did not smile. The carefully trimmed gray-brown mustache capping his thin upper lip did not so much as twitch. Vannorsdell’s shoulders seemed to pull together for a moment, tensing. His craggy face flushed slightly, and then, visibly suppressing an angry impulse, he crouched and forced a cunning smile into his eyes as he beckoned to Karla. “Come on, daughter. I have something to show you outside.”
Reluctant to snap away from the passion of the previous conversation, Karla frowned. “Outside?”
“Hurry!”
A moment later they were descending the broad fieldstone porch steps—the stocky old Dutchman in baggy trousers and a doeskin vest, the young brunette in green jeans and plaid flannel shirt, her hair pulled back in a pony tail and secured with a turquoise-studded barrette. Her jeans stretched taut across her rounded hips and thighs. She wore a horsehair belt, which she’d braided herself, and high-heeled brown boots with red stars tanned into the pointed toes.
They crossed the hard-packed ranch yard surrounded by adobe-brick outbuildings, to one of several peeled-log corrals east of the L-shaped bunkhouse. The west-angling sun softened the light and the pulsing heat, tinging the adobes with pink and conjuring brown shadows.
Several of Vannorsdell’s sweaty, dusty drovers stood near the corral, smoking and talking. Hearing the screen door slap shut, they turned to Karla and her grandfather, shaping whiskery grins around their brown paper cigarettes.
Inside the corral stood the rancher’s number two man, Dallas Tixier, holding the head stall of a fine white Arabian. The horse shook its small, elegant head and lowered its broad snout, peering at the group with wary curiosity. Its high-set tail swished once, and its copper eyes reflected the pink hues of the adobes. Beside the animal, Tixier grinned, squinting his blue eyes and flashing a gold eyetooth under his black sombrero.
Placing her hands on the corral’s top rail, Karla whistled. “Who belongs to that fine animal?”
The old man quirked a grin. “You do.”
Karla’s mouth fell open but she didn’t say anything.
Vannorsdell announced proudly, “Born in Arabia, that fine animal was. A prince from one o’ them fine desert castles raised him from the best bloodstock anywhere in the world. I bought him from a rancher near Soledad.”
Karla studied the old man, skeptically. The drovers flanked him. They said nothing as they smiled at Karla. “He’s . . . for me?”
“Sure he is.” Vannorsdell glanced conspiratorially at the men behind him, winked, and turned back to his granddaughter.
Karla looked at the fine Arab, which shook its head impatiently and snorted. It wasn’t her birthday or either of her dead parents’ birthdays or any other special day that she could remember. Finding no discernible reason for the present from a man who rarely gave presents of any kind, much less Arabian horses, she turned back to her grandfather, frowning. “But why?”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” The old man laughed. The men behind him chuckled. Vannorsdell jerked his head at the Arabian. “Go get acquainted, girl!”
Karla studied the horse again. She couldn’t help feeling she was being led into a trap of some kind. She felt guilty for such a notion. In the two years she’d known him, she’d gradually grown to, if not love, at least respect her grandfather. But it had been a hard-won respect, a regard that the old frontierman’s ill temper and narrow-mindedness frequently poked and prodded and sometimes even strained to the breaking point.
“What’re you waitin’ for?” the old man urged, his voice climbing high.
Karla glanced at him, shrugged, hitched up her jeans with both hands, and crouched through the fence. She crossed the corral and held out her hand to the horse. The Arabian’s round eyes appeared as wary as hers.
Keeping its cream tail high, it backed a step, and Tixier, holding the halter rope taut in his gloved right hand, said, “Ho now.” The horse lifted its snout, glared down at Karla, and twitched its nose.
“Easy, boy,” Karla said gently, lifting her hand to its snout. “Easy, now. There . . .”
She turned to her grandfather, who was staring over the corral at her, with the dusty drovers lined out to his left. Still half expecting the ground to open beneath her feet, Karla raised brows bleached by the desert sun. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Senorita,” said Dallas Tixier, shaping a grin as he peered at her from under the horse’s cocked head, “I think your eyes say it all.”
Karla looked the horse over, ran an appreciative hand over its shivering withers. “How old is he?”
“Three,” Tixier said. “A fine, fine animal.”
“He’s saddle-broke,” Vannorsdell called to her. “A good rider. Calm, too, for an Arab. I told Tixier to find me a good, calm horse that won’t turn twister at rattlesnakes or prairie dogs . . . since you ride all over creation,” he added with a disapproving tone.
Karla’s frequent riding of the greenest broncs in her grandfather’s remuda had been a bone of contention between them. Vannorsdell didn’t think a young woman should ride anything but old mares with a sidesaddle, much less wear men’s denims, boots, and a pistol on her hip. And she shouldn’t ride every day. As headstrong as the old man, Karla had won that battle, but she helped Pilar cook and clean, as well.
Tixier offered the halter rope to Karla. “There is some light left, senorita. Why don’t you take him for a ride around the buildings? Shall I get a saddle . . . ?”