Laurie Kingery - Hill Country Cattleman

Now Violet stared at the lines she had penned during the voyage. It was utter and complete tripe, all of it. She had had no idea how to begin a novel about the American West, never having seen the land she was writing about. She had only the most amorphous idea of her hero, and how he should accomplish winning the heroine’s love.

She’d started out describing Gerald as the hero, but she couldn’t imagine Gerald as anything but what he was—an English aristocrat in tweeds rather than cowboy garb. And Edward’s constant presence by her side made Violet too self-conscious to write. It didn’t take long before she put the copybook back in her trunk and only read the book she’d brought with her.

Now, however, she had the perfect opportunity and solitude to make a brilliant new start. Ruthlessly ripping out the four pages she’d written on the ship, she crumpled them into a ball and threw them to the other end of the quilt.

Violet supposed she should start by setting the scene, and so she wrote several lines about the landscape, the cactus, the mesquite, the brightly colored wildflowers...but no, that was dull. Perhaps she should describe her hero, using Raleigh as the model as she had decided the day she arrived in Simpson Creek. But what to call him? She dared not use the same name, for her brothers would think she had developed an inappropriate, schoolgirllike infatuation for the Colliers’ foreman.

Riley? That was close to Raleigh, but perhaps too close.... She should get away from “R” names. Charlie? Marcus? Monty? Yes, Monty, that was just right.

She would start in the middle of the action.

Monty, his pistols still smoking from the shots he had fired, reined in his magnificent blue roan stallion and gazed at the heroine, who looked up at him with undisguised adoration. A tear trickled down her lovely alabaster cheek.

“You have saved me from a Fate Worse Than Death, sir, yet I don’t even know your name,” she said. “How you happened along just in the nick of time, I’ll never know, but I’ll be eternally grateful....”

He dismounted and took hold of her lily-white hand. “Why, I’m Monty—”

Here Violet stopped, chewing on the end of the pencil. What should his last name be? Brewster? Montgomery? No, something simpler—Simpson, for Simpson Creek. When the book was published and she became the darling of the literary world, her hero’s surname would be her tribute to where she’d written the manuscript.

Violet continued writing.

“I’m Monty Simpson. And what might your name be, my fair one?”

Violet giggled. Would a cowboy speak that way? Probably not. She crossed out the last three words and wrote instead, “pretty lady.”

“I’m Lily Lawrence.”

Goodness, it was hot. Milly hadn’t been exaggerating. Heat waves shimmered beyond the shade of the live oak. Violet fanned herself with the copybook, then loosened the top two buttons of her blouse. She probably ought to return to the ranch house soon, but she wanted to write a little more before she left. Besides, she hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of any cowboys, let alone Raleigh.

The heat was making her drowsy—that, and the early hour she had awakened, thanks to her nephew’s penchant for running through the house exercising his lungs. Violet took a drink from the canteen and thought about splashing some of the water on her face. Perhaps that would make her more alert....

In the distance, a cow bawled.

Surely it wouldn’t hurt to just close her eyes for a moment, and ponder the next lines of dialogue between her hero and the heroine....

Chapter Five

Raleigh had been out riding fence when he’d spotted Lady, saddled and bridled, grazing just beyond a grove of trees near the creek.

He looked around, but didn’t see Violet. Alarm struck him like an arrow of ice. Had she fallen off her mount? Was she lying nearby, unconscious and bleeding?

He galloped his roan through the gap in the fence at the creek, staring wildly around in all directions. Despite Lady’s calm demeanor, Raleigh expected to see the Englishwoman’s crumpled form somewhere in the midst of the grass or, worse yet, lying against one of the clumps of rocks.

Then he caught sight of her white shirt in the grove of trees, and breathed a heartfelt prayer of thanks.

“Miss Violet?” he called, not wanting to startle her, but not understanding why she hadn’t arisen at his approach. Surely anyone would have heard the pounding of his horse’s hooves. Unless she was injured, after all, and had only managed to crawl into the shade before fainting. Heart pounding, he approached, seeing that Violet’s eyes were closed.

She looked utterly peaceful, her clothing neither ripped nor sullied. He could see no blood, and her golden hair curled loosely about her shoulders. A floppy-brimmed hat lay nearby on the grass. Two buttons on the high-necked blouse were undone, giving him a charming view of her graceful neck. Her chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm, her breath softly escaping through parted lips. He saw some sort of notebook lying open in her lap, the pages filled with a looping script, and a pencil lying on it.

Should he wake her? He didn’t want to frighten her—he knew with the sunlight behind him, all she might see when she opened her eyes would be a hulking form looming over her. Yet he knew she wasn’t used to the heat, and if she slept much longer, she might wake up with a headache at the least.

He didn’t want to embarrass her, either. Raleigh backed up carefully, intending to approach again more noisily, calling her name. But when he turned to go, his boot snapped a twig.

She woke up with a start, eyes wide, arms flailing. “Wha—who?”

“Miss Violet, it’s me, Raleigh Masterson,” he said quickly, and watched as her eyes blinked and focused on him and the panic ebbed. “I...I didn’t want to startle you, but I thought you might have had a fall from your horse.”

She jumped to her feet, pushing a loose tendril of hair from her forehead and brushing off her riding skirt. She smiled sheepishly up at him. “No, I didn’t fall... I... It seems I fell asleep,” she said. “The heat made me drowsy.”

She didn’t seem to notice the notebook and pencil, which had fallen to the ground, and now he bent, picked them up and handed them to her. “I’m glad,” he said. “That you weren’t hurt, that is. Were you...writing a letter?” he added, nodding toward the notebook. He was curious, but mainly wanted to give them something to talk about so she could stop feeling self-conscious at being caught napping.

“No, I was actually working on my novel,” she said with a shy pride.

“You’re writing a book, Miss Violet?” He’d never met anyone who’d even thought about doing that, much less actually started one. Most of the men he worked with were almost illiterate. “Can I ask what it’s about? If you don’t mind telling me, of course,” he hastened to add, aware that his question sounded downright nosy.

“Certainly you may,” she said in a way that dispelled any notion that she was perturbed by his curiosity. “It’s a story set in Texas, as a matter of fact. That’s why I was so interested when you were telling me about the flowers and the bird the other day, you see.”

“Why’d you want to write about Texas?”

“Because the American West is so romantic and untamed,” she told him, her face glowing with enthusiasm. “Not at all like proper, civilized England.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “What about all those old castles and knights in armor, that kind of thing? That sounds pretty exciting to us Americans.”

“‘In days of old when knights were bold’?” she quoted in a singsong voice. “From what I’ve seen, those drafty old castles were a lot less romantic in reality than in the imagination.”