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Straight to My Heart

By Davalynn Spencer

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Fremont County, Colorado
Spring, 1879


Whit Hutton eyed the rimrock. His buckskin’s ears swiveled toward a deep fissure, nostrils flaring for scent.
No padded foot dislodged loose shale. No yellow eye glinted from the shadows, no tail whipped in the cool predawn. But she was there.
He heeled Oro up the ledge that hugged the cliff face, let the gelding pick his way along the incline at a cautious clip. More bighorn mountain sheep than horse, Oro took them higher while Whit kept his eyes on the rimrock and one hand at the ready.
His father’s Colt lay holstered on his right hip, and a Winchester rested easy in the saddle scabbard. Trouble was, Whit didn’t know what he’d need. If he spotted her from a distance, he’d use the rifle. But if he rode up on its lair, he’d do better with the handgun.
And if the cat got the jump on him, it’d be too late for either one.
The hair on his neck stood. Feline eyes were watching.
Two calf carcasses in as many weeks proved an old lion stalked the herd—one too slow for a swift pronghorn or mule deer. It needed easy pickin’s, and Hubert Baker’s cow-calf operation appeared to be the chosen chuck wagon.
Oro heaved them up and over the edge and Whit reined around for a view of Wilson Creek bottom. The sleeping Bar-HB covered the stream-fed valley and several thousand acres of unseen park, timber ridges, and rocky ravines. Baker, Whit, and the Perkins brothers called it home. Along with three hundred cow-calf pairs.
Lately, so did Baker’s granddaughter, Olivia Hartman.
Whit turned his head toward a distant, rhythmic ping, not surprised that the echo carried so far on the clear air this early. Train barons were fighting for the narrow right-of-way up the Arkansas River canyon, and crews with both the Denver and Rio Grande and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe were racing to lay track through the gorge. Only one railway would fit where sheer granite shot a thousand feet straight up from the river. And that rail owner would benefit mightily from the lucrative Leadville silver strikes.
While rich men pawed the earth and lawyers bandied, ranchers like Hubert Baker were still driving their cattle to mining camps a few at a time or in herds to Pueblo or the Denver railhead. Ten days of dust-eating trail, that one.
He shifted, squeaking the saddle leather in tribute to riding drag. No more, since Baker crippled himself and put Whit in charge. Which meant Buck and Jody Perkins ate dirt on the drives like Whit had when he was an upstart. With no ma or pa of their own, the towheaded Perkins boys were happy enough to get chuck and a bed in the bunkhouse.
At least they hadn’t lit out after easy money laying track for the feuding railroad companies.
The sun broke free, climbed Whit’s back, and jumped into the valley. He looked over his shoulder, dipped his brim against the new light, and turned Oro toward the ranch house and breakfast. The cat had eaten. Now it was his turn.
His stomach snarled and he hoped Baker’s granddaughter had whipped up some of her white gravy. She’d come to the ranch after her grandmother’s death a month previous, and the little gal could fix up biscuits and gravy better than anything Whit had ever tasted. ’Cept his ma’s cooking, of course. Couldn’t beat her potbelly biscuits, as his preacher pa called them.
Guilt snagged a rib as Whit tied Oro at the house rail and walked around back to the washstand. He hadn’t been home in three months, and he suspected his parents and little sister held it against him. But he had responsibilities now. He couldn’t be traipsin’ off to Cañon City whenever he wanted.
His spurs jangled against the kitchen floor and he continued through to the dining room, where the Perkins brothers were already elbow deep in steak and eggs. Baker insisted his hired hands eat at the house since his beloved Ruth passed. The old rancher was lonely. Whit could see it in his eyes when he looked at Livvy, a younger image of her mother, Hannah, Baker’s only child. Whit used to tease the pig-tailed girl at church picnics when her family visited from Denver. But he hadn’t figured on scrawny Olivia Hartman growing up to be such a good cook. And a beauty to boot.
“You wash?” She leveled her blue eyes at him, ready to fire if he gave the wrong answer.
“Yes, ma’am. Right out back at the washstand. Even used soap this time.”
Jody grunted but didn’t stop chewing to comment.
“Hands.” She leaned slightly forward, demanding he lift his calloused fingers to her pretty little nose.
He pulled a wounded look across his face. “You don’t believe me.”
His mouth must have twitched, for she straightened to take the plate back to the kitchen. He jerked his hands out, palms up, and stepped as close as he could and still be the gentleman his parents raised.
Livvy sniffed, and her eyes smiled if her lips didn’t. “Good.” She set the plate on the table to the right of Baker, who sat at the head, and retreated to the kitchen.
Whit watched her disappear through the doorway. Someday he’d be sharing his meals in private with a woman like that.
“See any tracks?” Baker cut into a biscuit and sopped it in gravy.
Whit hung his hat on the chair back and took his seat. “No, sir. Too much shale in those bluffs to leave track. But I found her latest kill in the cottonwoods, half covered with leaves and brush.”
He gulped his coffee, welcomed the kick. “But she was up there this morning. I could feel her.”
Buck snorted. “You’ll feel her, all right. Just as soon as she leaps down on that buckskin o’ yours and snaps your neck in two.”
“Won’t happen.” Whit cut his steak and met Buck’s jab with a poker face. “She’s waitin’ for a corn-fed one. Like you.”
Jody choked on a piece of meat and grabbed his coffee, sloshing most of it onto his plate in the process.
Baker didn’t join the fun like he usually did, and his soberness dampened the younger men’s humor. Whit laid down his fork and took up his coffee. The boss had something on his mind and Whit would just as soon hear it straight-out.
~
Livvy stood at the stove and wiped her hands on her apron. Pop wasn’t his jovial self this morning. She had hoped the men could wheedle him into a better humor, but their good-natured bantering wasn’t breaking through the dour mood he’d carried home from town yesterday.
She stirred the gravy in wide slow circles, listening for Pop’s voice. It came low and tense, and she stilled the spoon to concentrate on his words.
“I’m sure you all know about the feuding that’s been going on over the railway the last couple of years.”
Knives and forks scraped against her grandmother’s Staffordshire china, and a coffee cup clinked on its saucer. No one spoke, and she imagined the others nodding somberly.
“I don’t want my men getting mixed up in any rail war.” Pop’s voice carried an edge. “This blasted railroad business is going to get someone killed, and it better not be any of you.”
Someone cleared his throat. Whit, she guessed, who usually spoke for all the hired hands.
“We’re too busy,” Whit said. “Gathering starts today, and I figure we’ll be branding for two or three days. We don’t have the time or notion to be riding up that canyon taking pot shots at our neighbors.”
Pop cursed and Livvy clapped a hand over her mouth.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “Those train barons have called in outside guns and they’re offering money to any man that will sign on with them.”
“Which side?”
The heavy silence meant Pop was staring a hole through young Jody, the only one foolish enough to ask such a question.
“Not that I’m thinkin’ on joining them, mind you. I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Both sides.”
A cup slammed into its saucer and Livvy flinched. She had only eight of the original twelve left, and the way Pop and these cowhands treated her grandmother’s lovely blue-and-white china, she’d have no unchipped cups by summer’s end. Tin suited them better, but at the dining table Pop insisted on the “good dishes.” A tribute to his beloved Ruthie.
Chair legs combed the carpet as someone stood.
“You can count on us,” Whit said. “We work for this outfit, not some railroad company.”
Buck and Jody quickly agreed and flatware clattered against plates.
Livvy hurried to the sink, filled a dishpan, and set it on the stove, grateful again that her grandfather had the convenience of an indoor hand pump.
Pop and the boys made their way through the kitchen, thanking her as always. Whit went out the front. She checked the other water pan already on the stove and returned to the dining room for the rest of the dishes. Through the lace curtain she saw Whit at the hitching rail, adjusting Oro’s cinch. A few steps closer, and she could watch him unnoticed—something she did too often of late. Comfortable in the knowledge that he couldn’t see her through the lacework, she wrapped her arms around her waist and studied his dark, angular profile.
Jaw shadowed with stubble, he was still lean but no longer the gangly boy who had chased her in the church yard. So different, yet so much the same.
How did he see her now? As the skinny little girl who’d begged him to push her in the swing and cried when he teased her? Or as a woman who had lost that child’s heart to hero worship years ago?
He looked at the window. Livvy sucked in a breath and tightened her arms, holding her place, lest movement give her away. A slow easy smile tipped his mouth and he nodded once. Then he gathered the reins, swung into the saddle, and touched his hat brim before riding away.
Her vision darkened and she swayed. Reaching for a ladder-back chair, she gasped for air, her temples throbbing. This had to stop. She couldn’t spend all summer holding her breath every time Whit Hutton looked at her.
She finished clearing the table, set a small leftover steak on the sideboard, and covered it with a napkin. Then she carefully placed the china in the dishpan and checked through the kitchen window for the men’s whereabouts. Satisfied that they were busy elsewhere, she grabbed a sharp knife and went out the front door.
An overgrown lilac bush billowed with deep purple blooms beside the dining room window. Carefully she cut three bunches and held them to her nose as she walked to the hitching rail. Glancing at the barn and bunkhouse, she turned to face the window. The lace curtains blocked her view of the chair where she had stood. Convinced that Whit could not have seen her through the sheer fabric, she went inside to search for a vase among her grandmother’s crystal.
The heavy oak door opened right into the dining room with no formal entry hall. The ranch house had grown out each end of the original square-log cabin, spreading into a comfortable home. A small porch announced the entrance, but Mama Ruth had never bemoaned the informality. She had directed her British ancestral convention to more important things.
Like décor.
The Bar-HB might be a working cattle ranch, but Ruth Baker had swept a generous hand through her house where furniture and carpets, crystal and china were concerned. Livvy chose a lovely hand-painted vase from an ornate curio cabinet. She fussed with the heady blooms, slicing off the bottom of one bunch so its heart-shaped leaves cupped over the vase’s lip. Several four-point blossoms dropped to the tablecloth and the rich perfume filled the room.
Mama Ruth loved lilacs, and every window in the rambling house had a bush nearby that bloomed profusely from late spring into early summer—gentle lavender, brilliant white, or deep purple. Even the dainty detail that edged the vase replicated the delicate blooms.
Livvy removed the soiled cloth to reveal the fine cherry wood table, then stepped back to view the lilacs.
Whit could not possibly have seen her. So why did he act as if he knew she was there? How full of himself he was—just as he’d always been—assuming she stood at the window. That arrogant air had not changed one bit since their childhood.
She glanced down at the simple bodice of her blue calico and the full white apron that covered her skirt. Had it shown through the curtain?
Or had he felt her eyes on him?

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