Page 2 of Too Hot To Handle

Tory pushed aside the thought that there was almost no chance that she would be able to walk nineteen miles before sundown. Without luggage she would have done well enough. There had been some days when she had driven herself to swim nearly that many miles under the sarcastic goading of her coach. She hadn’t been carrying a suitcase, however.

And then there was her knee.

Slowly Tory walked over the treacherous gravel, alert to each movement of stone beneath her right foot. She didn’t want to think about the knee injury that had finally resulted in surgery three weeks ago. She didn’t want to think about the doctor’s final frightening words, words that had sent her rushing to Arizona with no more than a few dollars and Pay ton Sundance’s letter in her purse. She had come back from an injury before. She would do it again. All she needed was the time to heal and the money to survive until she could take up the physical demands of her swim club scholarship again.

Tory was relieved when the gravel gave way to dirt road, but the relief was premature. She soon discovered that the rutted, washboard surface of the road was as tricky to walk on as the gravel had been. Trial and error taught her that the best walking was on the very edge of the road, where tires had passed often enough to make a flat trail but not often enough to leave ruts and ripples in the dirt. Her luggage tended to hang up on roadside bushes, but there weren’t many rocks to bruise her feet through the worn soles of her shoes. Where her little toes had poked through the canvas, pebbles worked into the holes and from there to her tender feet.

At first Tory stopped and emptied her shoe every time a pebble got inside. She soon gave that up. She was spending more time hopping around on one foot and dumping out the other shoe than she was walking. So she just kept going until the first pebble was joined by a second and then a third, or until her arms and shoulders sent threatening messages to her brain. Then she would stop, dump her luggage in the dirt, stretch and empty her shoes.

The carefully rationed rest stops were far too short, but Tory knew that she didn’t dare extend them. She really didn’t want to be walking through the countryside after dark. Her best chance of a safe ride into town was to catch the mail carrier somewhere along the county road. She wished that she had listened more closely to the woman’s friendly chatter as she had delivered Tory – and a generous supply of junk mail – right to the Sundance Ranch’s front door. Had the woman said that she made a loop that led back to town after a circuit of ranch roads, or had she said that she went out the south end of town and came in the north?

If it were the latter, there was no hope of getting a ride back into town. Nor did Tory want to take her chances on hitching a ride with a stranger. Living in cosmopolitan Southern California had taught her not to trust strangers. If she kept walking, she would get to town eventually. She had no such assurance if she hitchhiked.

By the time the Sundance Ranch’s dirt road met the two-lane blacktop of the county road, Tory was bathed in sweat and aching in every limb. She hoped that the road’s dark, even surface would ease the throb in her right knee. She had no such hope for the burning of her blistered palms. Swimming might have strengthened her body, but it had done nothing to toughen her hands or feet.

With a stifled groan Tory remembered the mail carrier’s words to the effect that it was five miles to the Sundance ranch house from the county road. She couldn’t believe it. She had to have walked more than five miles. It couldn’t be fourteen more miles to town.

„Stop whining,“ she muttered to herself. „Whining takes energy. Think about something pleasant – like drowning that arrogant son of Satan in the deep end of a pool.“

Stretching, smiling, Tory thought of having Reever gasping and begging for mercy at her hands. It was a fantasy she had often had about her coaches in the past when they pushed her beyond what she thought she could endure. But each time she was pushed she had learned that shecouldendure. Not only that, she had learned that she could strengthen and improve until workouts that once would have left her gasping became nothing more than invigorating exercise. Until their bodies were conditioned, though, she and her teammates had spent many hours planning complicated and satisfying vengeance on their various coaches.

But when Tory thought of revenge on Reever, the picture of him apologizing for not giving her a job kept going out of focus. In its place came a sudden, searing image of him bending down to her and his large, hard hands cupping her face gently as he whispered against her lips that now that he had found her, he would never let her go. The image shocked her. It made her realize that in a few minutes Reever had had more impact on her than other men in the same amount of years. She had never been in love, never wanted to be in love – but now she wondered what it would be like to love and be loved by Ethan Reever.

„Sidewinders will be ice-skating in Reever’s birthplace before that happens,“ Tory informed herself sarcastically, feeling a flush climb up her face. „He couldn’t have been clearer that he thought your attractions…weren’t. Face it. His eyesight is as sharp as his tongue.“

Small, stacked and sexy. You flunk on all three counts.

Tory wished that she could disagree with his assessment, but she could not. She was tall, gently rounded, and in all considered herself about as sexy as an ironing board. Although her hair was a shiny, many-hued blond, it was also a short, softly curling cap. The first rule of being a sexy blond was that your hair had to be a long, ravishing, silky mass slithering down between your shoulder blades. The second rule of a sexy blonde was that your chest had to be a double handful for any man, and your heart-shaped bottom had to swing like a bell when you walked. The third rule was that a sexy blonde was always ready, willing and able to trip a man and beat him to the floor.

„Face it, Tory. Even if you could trip that devil, you wouldn’t know what to do next.“

The thought shook Tory. She had grown up watching the sudden passions and equally sudden separations of her teammates. The pressures of competition and endless, grinding workouts were often relieved in brief, volatile affairs. She had seen that usually it was the girl who was hurt. It was the girl who paid the price emotionally, competitively and in terms of her reputation. There were exceptions, of course – boys whose competitive edge was dulled by a failed love affair or girls who changed partners as casually and frequently as they changed swimsuits – but those exceptions were very few.

Tory had decided before puberty that the dubious rewards of „love“ really weren’t worth the costs. Life had taught her that men simply weren’t capable of caring. Her father hadn’t even noticed her when he was still living with her mother, no matter how many medals Tory had won in competitive swimming. After the divorce her father had simply vanished, sending nothing to his daughter, not even a card at Christmas. Nor had her stepfather been much better. He had begrudged every penny spent on Tory, pointing out to her many times that her father was a selfish jerk who had never sent a dime on child support and never would. Her mother had rarely interceded; she was too grateful to find a man to support her. Later Tory had realized that she had been born three months after her mother’s first marriage, when her mother had been barely seventeen.

When Tory’s stepfather had been transferred to Wisconsin, she had stayed in California and moved into an apartment with three other girls from the swim club. Within days she had a job working from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. five days a week, at a nearby fast-food restaurant. Three months later she was promoted to cook when the boss found her filling in for a man who was more interested in partying than in working.

The hours were awful, the work was hard and the money was barely enough to survive on. Yet Tory wouldn’t have traded one minute of it for life with her stepfather. Her boss agreed to schedule her around her swim meets and school, and in return Tory worked even harder. When the doctor had told her to take a minimum of three months off from diving, it had been a great temptation for her to stay in Mission Viejo and work double shifts and save money.

In the end Tory had reluctantly decided against it. The doctor had been determined that she remove herself from the „narrow, unnatural, shortlived, hothouse atmosphere of Olympic athletics.“ He had flatly told her that she was to get out, all the way out, to see something more of the world than an Olympic swimming pool and then to decide if going back to diving was worth the risk of a permanent crippling injury.

Hastily Tory bent and picked up her luggage again. She didn’t want to think about the doctor. He was wrong. He had to be wrong. Her knee would heal again and be stronger than ever. She was sure of it. It would be like everything else in her life had been: if she just worked hard enough, long enough, and depended only on herself, she could do anything. Anything at all. Including walk nineteen miles through a hot Arizona afternoon and find a place to stay in a town so small that it hand-lettered changes on the population sign. Then she had to earn enough to pay for the room and to buy a bus ticket back to California.

„One thing at a time,“ Tory said aloud, stilling the rush of her thoughts. „It’s like a competition. You can’t worry about any dive but the one in front of you or you’ll fall apart. So first you walk to town. Then you can worry about the rest, one thing at a time. Just like diving.“

As Tory thought of standing on tiptoe on a platform more than thirty feet above the aquamarine perfection of an Olympic pool, she unconsciously licked her lips. At the moment, even pool water would have tasted good, chlorine and all. And to arc up and out, to turn over and over before entering the water’s stillness, to have her tired body embraced and supported by the cool water…ah, that would be heaven itself.

Head down, her duffel bag slung across her back and her blistered hand grasping the broken handle of her suitcase, Tory set off down the two-lane county road, limping slightly. As far as she could see, she was the only thing moving beneath the incredible blue of the sky. She was relieved to be so alone. She had been in cities for too long to relish the idea of meeting a stranger on that desolate road.

Reever rode along the southeast boundary of the ranch, checking the range. It had been a good winter, a wet winter. Snow had lain thickly in the steep-sided mountain valleys and had melted slowly on the slopes, providing continuous natural irrigation for the meadows. Grass and wildflowers grew in profusion, brushing his stirrups, for Reever hadn’t permitted this part of the ranch to be grazed for five years. He had wanted just one part of the Sundance to look as it had in his greatgrandfather’s time.

Sundance, Jawbone and Wolf creeks were brimming with bright water, as were the sloughs where birds gathered in wheeling clouds to raise their young. Despite the raucous birds, it was Wolf Creek itself that drew Reever’s eye. It had been a long time since he had tasted fresh trout. Although the water was still quite cold with the runoff of barely melted snow, the fish should be shaking off their winter torpor and gliding through the green pools in search of the season’s first insect hatch. Cold, clean water and winter-hungry trout – a fisherman’s dream.

Reever’s mouth turned down as he admitted that, even if he managed to tempt one of the wily trout on to a hook, it was unlikely that Cookie would turn the fish into an edible dinner. Cookie had been restless lately, which meant that one day soon the hands would show up for dinner only to find that there wasn’t any. Then the men would comb out the bunkhouse or the barn and find Cookie, drunk beyond sobering. He would stay that way for two days, two weeks, whatever it took to temporarily appease the demons within. Lately it seemed as if Cookie’s demons came more often and stayed longer.

Swearing under his breath, Reever told himself that he really had to find another cook. He’d been telling himself that for two years. He would have done it, too, but finding a cook who didn’t mind the Sundance’s isolation wasn’t easy. With another muttered curse, Reever pulled the buckskin to a stop at the crest of a bank overlooking a series of pools joined by brilliant white ribbons of tumbling water.

One of the pools was directly in the sun. The color of the water was a green so luminous that it seemed to quiver with life. He had seen nothing to compare with that green – until this morning when a girl as slender and supple as a streamside willow had watched him with sensual curiosity darkening her big eyes.