Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material Read Online Free Page A

turned and faced her, she leaped down out of the water truck’s high cab. Even across the dusty yard she could see a smile send creases through his leathery face as he watched her. Beneath his worn Stetson, his collar-length, fine silvery hair stirred in the wind.
    “You’re back early,” he said. “I left you some lemonade.”
    “How about ice?”
    Even as she asked the question, she tried not to smile. She knew that the old man loved ice, and he hated refilling ice trays the way a cat hates mud. When she was gone all day, she usually returned to an empty freezer, a jumble of ice trays in the sink, and an embarrassed smile on Mason’s lined face.
    He tried to look offended and failed entirely. He chuckled. “You know me too good, gal.”
    “After all these years, I should hope so.”
    Slipping her arm through his, she led him into the relative coolness of the kitchen. Two years ago, when she had come back to the ranch to live full-time, she had taken some of the money she earned modeling hosiery and transformed the worn kitchen into a bright center of ranch life.
    In January and February, when the long winds blew from the north, she and Mason played cribbage on the old oak table. As they played, she coaxed stories out of him, the lives of his father and uncles, grandfathers and great-uncles and great-grandfathers, the women they married, the children who died young and the ones who survived, the people who built and the people who destroyed.
    The living history was shared with her in the gravelly, wry words of a man almost three times her age, a man whose ancestors had known the best and the worst the West could deliver. It was her own history, too, for Mason’s family had worked alongside her mother’s family in the Valley of the Sun for more than a hundred years.
    Yet the ranch’s beauty and history had never touched Hope’s mother. She had hated the Valley of the Sun, had cursed its tawny heights and shadowed canyons with a depth of bitterness that had once terrified her younger daughter.
    “Have you ever heard of a man called Rio?” Hope asked quickly. She didn’t want to remember her mother, a woman who had loved and hated as deeply as anyone Hope had ever known.
    “Big man, easy-moving, kind of an Indian look to him?”
    “Ummm,” she agreed. “With a smile that makes you believe in life everlasting.”
    Mason shot her a sideways glance. “Musta took a liking to you. Rio don’t smile much.”
    “He was probably laughing at me,” she said, remembering Rio’s comments about dreamers and gamblers.
    “Doubt it.”
    “He don’t laugh much?” she suggested, imitating Mason’s ungrammatical drawl.
    “Good thing you got them pigtails cut, or I’d be pulling ’em sure as hell.” Mason’s smile faded as he reversed an old wooden kitchen chair and braced his arms across the back of it. “Rio don’t laugh at nobody but fools. You may be stubborn as flint, but you ain’t no fool.”
    She squeezed the old man’s shoulder affectionately. Beneath her fingers he felt like a handful of rawhide braid. Age hadn’t stooped him, or even slowed him very much. Except for the occasional arthritis in his hands, Mason was still nearly six feet of “hard times and bad water,” as her father had once described his foreman, mentor, and best friend.
    The refrigerator made a cool, companionable sound as she opened and shut it. She carried her glass of lemonade—no ice—to the table and sat down.
    “What does Rio do?” she asked.
    “Breaks horses.”
    Hope tried to match Mason’s laconic description to the complex reality of the man called Rio. “Is that all?”
    “If you’re Rio, it’s a good plenty. He’s part horse hisself. Swear to it. Ride anything that grows hair. Gentle about it, too.” Mason stretched his arms over his head with a force that made ligaments and joints shift and pop quietly. “Never knew him to bloody a horse, and he’s rode more than one that had it coming.”
    Hope took a