Whirlwind - Janet Dailey Page 0,13

the reservation to the east, but since it added two hours to the time from Kingman, Lexie had chosen the more direct route.

“Want me to drive?” Ruben had awakened and was sitting up in back.

“No, I can make it home. It’s not much farther.”

“Fine.” Ruben was a man of few words. He’d come to work for the Champions seventeen years ago, when Lexie was a little girl. Widowed now, he was an elder in his tribe. He had two married daughters living on the reservation, but his home, for years, had been a small converted trailer on the ranch. His needs were simple, his loyalties beyond question.

A roadrunner sprinted ahead of the truck and vanished behind a clump of prickly pear cactus. Dust as fine as face powder billowed from under the wheels of the rig, coating the windows. Heat waves shimmered above the horizon. Even the morning was hot. The rest of the day was bound to be a scorcher.

But with luck, the weather was about to change. In the southern sky, the first thready clouds were moving north from the Mexican highlands—a sign that the summer storms would soon begin.

“Monsoon.” Ruben gazed out the dusty side window.

“Looks like it might be coming early. Good,” Lexie agreed. The yearly monsoon season meant green grass in the pastures for the bulls and horses and the thirty head of beef cattle the ranch still raised. One less worry. But there was no shortage of other concerns.

As the road wound its way toward the pass, she struggled to push aside the issues she’d left behind in Kingman—Cory’s terrible injury and his wife’s worries; Brock Tolman’s scheme to get his grasping hands on her prize bull; and the all-too-charming cowboy who worked for her enemy—the cowboy whose face and voice and laugh had claimed a permanent spot in her memory, whether she wanted him there or not.

Forget him, she told herself. The man’s already proven he can’t be trusted. And you’ve already got enough on your plate!

That plate was truly full. Her father’s death had left the ranch with an almost weekly slate of summer rodeos under contract. Lexie had taken on the task of getting the bulls to the venues, with Ruben’s help, leaving Tess to manage the ranch. The burden of responsibility was beginning to wear on both sisters, but especially on Tess, whose biggest worry was keeping the ranch solvent.

And then there was the menacing note she’d found on her windshield. Was it a joke, or was the ranch really under threat? What if she’d been wrong, keeping its disturbing contents to herself?

A raven, perched on a dead cholla stump, flapped away as the truck approached. Some of the locals believed ravens were bad luck. But Lexie, who was as local as anybody, had been to college and didn’t hold with superstition.

Her hands gripped the steering wheel as she negotiated the last steep switchback. With a long breath of relief, she crested the pass and started the descent into the high valley, an oasis of rolling yellow grassland, fed by seasonal springs and deep wells.

Glancing down from the top of the narrow road, she could see the sprawling tile-roofed ranch house, with its enclosed patio and the large satellite dish on the roof. The house was framed by grassy pastures on the west and a complex of corrals, outbuildings, and a windmill on the east. Three properties shared the valley. The Alamo Canyon Ranch—named long ago for a place that was now federal land—was the largest. The much smaller ranch next door belonged to their neighbor, Aaron Frye, who also managed the third property. Owned by a Phoenix investment company, it was used for growing hay.

Only now, with home in sight, did Lexie realize how tired and hungry she was. All she wanted to do was sit down to a plate of Callie’s scrambled eggs, hash browns, and bacon with black beans, scrub down in the shower, and crawl into bed for a few hours of blessed sleep.

But that wasn’t going to happen. The bulls would have to be unloaded, watered, and fed their ration of high-protein Total Bull feed. Then Tess would want to brief her on everything that had happened at the ranch while she was gone. And Lexie could also expect to be grilled about the trip to the rodeo in Kingman. Maybe this would also be a good time to tell her sister about the threatening message. Sleep would have to wait.

“Something’s wrong.” Ruben’s voice startled