Taming the Spring Range

The creek had broken its winter skin in the night.

By first light, Broken Creek ran high and brown through the lower meadow, carrying sticks, ice crust, and the cold breath of the mountains down past the cottonwoods and through the line Clara Whitfield had been watching since January. The snow was shrinking off the south slopes in ragged white strips. Mud sucked at hoof and boot alike. Every fence post on the flat wore a dark wet shine, and the air held that raw, unsettled smell of thaw—earth opening, water moving, trouble coming.

Clara drew rein on the rise above the diversion gate and looked down.

For one brief, incredulous moment, she thought the place had grown men overnight like mushrooms after rain.

Three horses stood hitched to the old wire fence. Two men in heavy coats and broad-brimmed hats were down by the bank with measuring poles. A third man stood a little apart from them, one boot braced on a rock at the creek’s edge, as if the whole business belonged to him by right of his posture alone.

Even at that distance she knew him.

Gideon Vale turned at the sound of her mare picking down the slope. He did not wave. He merely lifted his head, and the morning seemed to tighten around the line of his shoulders.

Clara felt the quick, hot leap of temper that had sustained her through three winters, two grasshopper years, and every smug piece of advice given to a woman presumed not to understand her own land. It warmed her better than her gloves.

She rode straight toward him.

The mud near the bank was too soft for foolish speed, and she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her horse slip, so she gathered Daisy up before the worst of it and brought the mare to a halt several yards from the men. One of the ranch hands touched his hat. The other looked at Gideon first and then did the same.

Gideon Vale took off his gloves finger by finger.

He was not, Clara thought resentfully, improved by daylight. If anything, broad Montana morning only made him more offensively what he was: a very tall man in a dark wool coat that fit his shoulders too well, with a hard mouth, a straight nose, and eyes the color of wet slate beneath the brim of his hat. There was a scar at one jaw hinge, pale against weather-browned skin, and another white nick across one knuckle as he peeled off the leather glove. He looked as if he had been made out of all the sternest parts of the country and had approved the arrangement.

“Miss Whitfield,” he said.

He had a deep voice, unhurried and perfectly civil. It annoyed her at once.

“Mr. Vale.” Clara kept both gloved hands on the reins. “You are on my land.”

One of the hands bent over his pole with suspicious intensity. The other found something very interesting in the current.

Gideon’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “That depends where your south marker sits after the runoff.”

“It depends on where it was set,” she returned, “which has not altered simply because you arrived with a tape and two witnesses.”

At that, one of the men coughed into his fist.

Gideon glanced back without turning his head. “Eli. Boone. Take the line to that willow stand.”

The dismissal was cleanly given. The two men obeyed with the speed of those who recognized weather in the air, though the storm was not in the sky. They gathered their poles and picked their way upstream, boots sinking in the sodden bank.

Clara waited until they were out of immediate earshot before she said, “I dislike being surveyed before breakfast.”

“I expect you dislike a good many things before breakfast.”

“Among them men who trespass.”

He looked at her horse, at the creek, at the rough plank gate she had intended to inspect, and finally back at her face. “I rode over to keep your lower pasture from washing out.”

“You rode over to decide what would suit the Vale spread.”

“That may be what it suits as well.” His eyes rested on hers with maddening steadiness. “The bank is giving way.”

She knew the bank was giving way. She had lain awake hearing the water all night in her mind. “Then I shall shore it.”

“With what crew?”

“With mine.”

He looked past her, perhaps counting the absence of anyone at her back. “You have an old foreman with a bad knee, a half-grown stableboy, and a hired man who leaves for his own place in April.”

The accuracy of it struck like a slap. Clara sat straighter in the saddle. “You have been taking inventory.”

“In this country, everyone takes inventory.”

“Of cattle, perhaps. Not of their neighbor’s weakness.”

His expression changed then, very slightly. Not softened; she doubted his face knew how. But something in it acknowledged the hit. “Prudence is not insult, Miss Whitfield.”

“It often arrives wearing insult’s coat.”

A gust came down the creek, lifting the loose ends of her veil and carrying the damp smell of silt and willow bark between them. Daisy tossed her head. Clara steadied the mare with a touch and was sharply aware of Gideon watching the movement of her hand.

She had met him twice before in company—once at church in November, once at the Harker supper in January, where he had stood apart from the laughter and the card tables, speaking little and missing nothing. He had the reputation men acquired in sparse places where every act was noticed and remembered: reliable in a storm, dangerous in a bargain, not given to drink, not given to softness, and too successful by half. Broken Creek Ranch, spread east of hers, had grown under him in six years from a struggling parcel to the largest operation in the valley. Some called it discipline. Others called it appetite.

Clara called it a problem when it turned toward Juniper Rise.

“I sent no word asking for your opinion,” she said.

“No. You sent to Dawson’s mill for timber.”

That made her still.

He went on as if he had not seen it. “Good lengths, too. More than patchwork. Which means you mean to cut a fresh channel here or reinforce the gate.”

She ought not to be surprised he knew. News traveled on wagons, in kitchens, through smithies and stores and over churchyard fences. Yet hearing her plans laid out in his calm voice felt intolerably like invasion.

“I mean,” she said, “to keep my water where it belongs.”

“And if the creek chooses otherwise?”

“Since when did men like you begin taking instruction from water?”

At last he smiled a little, though there was no comfort in it. “Since water took twenty head of a neighbor’s herd last spring and left them in pieces against the rocks.”

The image rose vividly enough to chill her despite her anger. Broken Creek in thaw was no gentle ribbon. It ran narrow and treacherous in places, then spread and undercut whole shelves of bank with no warning. A horse could go in before a rider knew the ground had shifted beneath it.

Clara dismounted before she could think better of it.

Mud caught at her boots at once. Gideon’s gaze dropped, taking in the practical dark wool of her riding habit, the hem she had pinned higher for fieldwork, the crop at her wrist, the fact that she had plainly come prepared to work and not to be admired. The look lingered one dangerous heartbeat too long.

Heat touched the back of her neck under her collar.

She gave Daisy’s reins to a fence post and walked past him down toward the diversion gate. “You may save your warnings for people who cannot read a bank.”

He moved beside her with infuriating ease. “And you may save your pride for a matter that is not likely to drown you.”

She stopped and turned so sharply that their shoulders nearly brushed. “There it is.”

“What?”

“The reason you came.”

His brows drew together.

“You all say it differently,” she said. “The preacher says providence. The banker says prudence. Ranchers say protection, and all of you mean the same thing—that a woman with land must either fail gracefully or yield it to stronger hands.”

A muscle shifted in his jaw. “If I had come to buy you out, Miss Whitfield, I would have said so.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

The answer came flat, absolute, and somehow that honesty irritated her more than evasion would have done.

They stood close enough now that she could see the dark stubble on his jaw and the chill-reddened rims of his ears where the wind caught him under the hat brim. He smelled faintly of wool, leather, horse, and clean cold air. Not cologne. Not anything soft. Entirely himself, and far too near.

Clara forced herself to look away first, down at the water cutting hard against the near bank. The old gate was a rough timber frame set to divert part of the flow toward the lateral ditch that fed her lower fields. Winter heave had twisted one hinge post. The current struck at an angle no gate ought to bear in spring.

He was right about that, damn him.

“I have no intention of selling Juniper Rise,” she said.

“No one said you did.”

“You thought it.”

“I thought you were about to lose this bank.”

She crouched to examine the post, grateful for the motion because it took his eyes off her face. “Then perhaps you should be relieved to find me here before breakfast.”

He crouched as well on the other side of the frame.

The abrupt narrowing of distance sent a ridiculous awareness skittering through her. His knee was inches from the hem of her skirt. His bare hand braced on the timber near hers, broad and rough, the scar over the knuckle whiter where the cold had tightened his skin. If she moved her fingers an inch, she would touch him.

She did not move them.

Together they studied the gate as if they were sensible allies rather than adversaries. Water hissed through the slats. Upstream, one of the ranch hands called something indistinct and received no answer.

“This brace is split,” Gideon said.

“I can see that.”

“You cannot reset it with one man and a prayer.”

“I had not intended the prayer.”

That earned her a brief sideways glance, almost approving. “No,” he said. “I did not suppose you had.”

Clara hated that a scrap of approval from him should land warm.

She reached for the timber at the same moment he did. Their hands struck.

It ought to have been nothing. A glancing collision of glove to skin, practical and quickly mended. Instead his fingers closed, instinctively or deliberately she could not tell, over the side of her hand for one astonishing second.

The world contracted.

His hand was cold from the air and very strong. Even through her glove she felt the pressure of his palm, the drag of his calluses. Her breath caught with humiliating clarity. When she looked up, he was already looking at her.

No one had ever taught her that a moment could feel indecent fully clothed, under a white morning sky, with meltwater raging a yard away. Yet there it was—an intimacy as sharp as if something private had been exposed.

He let go at once.

“So,” Clara said, and was appalled that her voice came thinner than she liked. She cleared it. “Your inspection appears to involve grabbing the owner.”

A flicker went through his eyes. “You reached where I was reaching.”

“An outrage, I know.”

“Yes.” His gaze dropped to her mouth and rose again with such speed any bystander might have missed it. She did not. “A grave one.”

The answering heat was treacherous enough to make her angry with herself.

She stood too quickly. Mud slid under one boot.

The bank gave with a wet, ugly sigh.

Clara had just enough time to understand that the shelf beneath her was moving before she pitched sideways. Her skirt tangled at the knees. The creek flashed broad and brown at the edge of her vision.

A hand closed around her upper arm with bruising force.

Gideon lunged upward, his boots sinking to the ankle as he caught her. Momentum carried them both half a stride down the sloping bank. Her shoulder struck his chest. His other arm came around her waist, hauling her hard against him while the earth slithered away beneath them into the current.

For one suspended instant they were balanced together at the lip of disaster.

Then he planted his weight, swore under his breath, and dragged them both back onto firmer ground.

Clara’s gloved hands were against his coat. One had fisted in the wool at his side. Her cheek had come to rest against the rough warmth of his scarf, and beneath that she felt the solid rise of his chest and the violent, living hammer of his heart.

Or perhaps it was her own. She could not have said.

He was holding her with no room at all between them.

The fact struck not first as impropriety but as sensation. His arm locked around her waist. The breadth of his body caged hers from collarbone to knee. The pressure of his hand at her side seemed to brand itself through wool, corset, petticoat, and skin alike. She could feel exactly how easily he had lifted and steadied her. Exactly how much strength had gone into not letting her fall.

Her face tipped back before she could stop it.

He was very close. Close enough that the hard line of his mouth was no abstraction. Close enough that she saw the quick flare of something in his expression far less disciplined than the rest of him. Not politeness. Not neighborliness. Hunger was too shameless a word for a woman standing on a muddy bank in broad day. Yet it came nearest.

The wind whipped a strand of hair loose across her cheek. His eyes followed it.

“Miss Whitfield,” he said, low and rough now.

It was a warning. To her, to himself, to the whole reckless pulse of the moment.

She became aware all at once of the men upstream, of open land, of scandal’s quick mouth. If Eli or Boone turned and found her folded against Gideon Vale like some fool girl in a dime novel, the story would cross the valley before noon and arrive at church polished bright by Sunday.

Clara pushed against his chest.

He released her immediately, stepping back as if the space between them had burned into existence.

For one strained second neither spoke.

Then she said, because dignity was a thing one rebuilt with the tools at hand, “You may add attempted murder to your morning’s work.”

His mouth twitched despite himself. “I believe I prevented it.”

“After engineering the conditions.”

“You are welcome.”

“I did not thank you.”

“No.” He drew a breath, his expression shuttering back into control. “You seldom do anything easy.”

The answer came before she thought it wise. “And you, Mr. Vale, make easy things impossible on principle.”

Their eyes held.

Somewhere a horse stamped. The creek kept rushing past as if people did not stand on its banks ruining each other’s composure.

Eli’s voice floated down from upstream. “Mr. Vale?”

Gideon did not look away from Clara. “In a moment.”

The ranch hand wisely said nothing more.

Clara bent to brush mud from her skirt though there was too much of it to matter. Her fingers were not perfectly steady. She hoped the movement appeared brisk rather than flustered.

“I see now,” she said, keeping her eyes on the stained wool, “why you brought witnesses.”

He was silent for a beat. “For the survey, yes.”

“How fortunate.”

When she straightened, he was watching her with an intensity that made her wish, absurdly, for another gust of cold. “Miss Whitfield.”

There was a difference in the way he said it this time. A fraction less formal, a fraction more dangerous, though he had altered not one syllable. She felt that difference along her nerves.

“Yes?”

“If the bank goes in earnest, your lower fields will flood by tomorrow night. The gate will not hold another hard rise.”

“I know it.”

“I can put men here by noon.”

She stared at him. “At what price?”

His expression hardened. “Not every offer conceals a trap.”

“Does this one?”

“No.”

She did not answer at once. Pride, caution, arithmetic, memory—all her old counselors began speaking over one another. Juniper Rise was not a grand place, only a hard-won one: a modest spread left to her and her younger brother in all but law after their father’s death, then held by her own management after her brother followed silver fever west and sent back too few letters. Men had expected failure to come swiftly. It had not. Men had expected gratitude for every warning. They had not received it. And Gideon Vale, whose acres bordered hers and whose cattle drank from the same difficult country, had more to gain than most if she faltered.

Yet the creek did not care for wounded pride. It would take her lucerne patch, drown the calf pasture, perhaps carve through the ditch itself if left untended. Timber alone would not set the post if the bank slumped further before night.

He saw the calculation in her face. “You can pay wages if you like,” he said. “Or timber in trade. Or keep count against whatever line the survey settles once the ground dries.”

“There will be no line settled in your favor because your men stand nearest with shovels.”

His gaze sharpened. “I said nothing of favor.”

“No. You are too careful to say things plain when saying them half-plain serves better.”

At that, something almost like temper broke the smoothness of him. “You mistake me.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

The force of it stilled her.

He took one step nearer—not enough to alarm, enough to compel. “I am not here because I think you weak.”

The words fell between them with more weight than their surface ought to carry.

Clara’s throat tightened unexpectedly. Men had called her stubborn, clever, impractical, brave for a woman, foolish as a man, and half a dozen things less fit for church company. Weak had indeed been among them, if not always to her face. To hear him deny the charge so bluntly should not have mattered. Yet it did.

“Then why are you here?” she asked quietly.

For a moment she thought he might answer with equal plainness.

Instead his gaze shifted to the creek, to the torn bank, to the practical peril that offered safer language. “Because if this channel breaks,” he said, “it will not stop at your pasture. It will take mine next.”

There it was: truth enough, and not all of it.

Clara almost smiled despite herself. “Ah. We return to self-interest. The most trustworthy of motives.”

“It generally is.”

“On that point, at least, we agree.”

A faint breath of amusement touched his face and vanished. “Will you have the men or not?”

She looked over his shoulder to where Eli and Boone waited upstream with the patience of men well acquainted with difficult stock, whether two-legged or four. Both were broad in the shoulders, mud to the calf, and trying very hard not to seem as if they noticed every minute they stood idle. Good workers by the look of them. Useful today. Dangerous to owe.

Then she looked back at Gideon Vale, who stood square in the thawing light with damp at the hem of his coat and the mark of her gloved hand still faintly visible in the wool over his ribs.

“I will hire the labor for one day,” she said. “At fair wages. Nothing more is implied.”

“Of course.”

“And the gate remains under my direction.”

One dark brow lifted. “Provided your direction does not put my men in the creek.”

“You may remove them if they begin to weep.”

“I’ll warn them.”

She should not have liked that answer. She did.

“Very well,” she said. “By noon.”

He inclined his head, accepting terms no one but the two of them would have recognized as a truce. “By noon, Miss Whitfield.”

She turned for Daisy before he could see too much in her face. The mare sidled once, impatient with the cold and the waiting, then stood for the mounting block nature had not provided. Clara gathered her skirt, set her boot, and swung into the saddle with more composure than she felt.

From horseback she had the proper advantage again. She looked down at him and found, to her irritation, that the height did not lessen his presence in the least.

“I shall expect your men to ask before shifting so much as a stone,” she said.

“I shall instruct them to ask before shifting the mountain.”

“See that you do.”

He put his gloves back on slowly, one hand then the other. “Ride carefully on the upper path. The south edge is thawing under the snow.”

There was no mockery in it, only the same infuriating competence that had put him here ahead of her.

Clara gathered the reins. “Mr. Vale.”

“Miss Whitfield.”

She turned Daisy toward home. She did not look back at once. She could feel him there nevertheless, a weight between her shoulders, as tangible as the touch of his hand had been on her waist. At the top of the rise, she broke her own rule and glanced over.

He had not moved.

Gideon Vale stood by the broken gate with the creek raging behind him, hat brim low, shoulders set against the wind, and watched her go as if he had not yet finished with the morning.

Neither, Clara suspected, had the morning finished with her.

She faced Juniper Rise again and rode on through the raw bright thaw, her pulse still unsteady and noon already looming like a promise she had no business anticipating.