Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page B

leap on the first woman he found alone and unprotected. He had looked at her with veiled male appreciation, but he hadn’t crowded her in any way.
    Even if she hadn’t been sure of her own instincts, she trusted those of Mason Graves. Any man he would be proud to claim for a son wouldn’t be the kind of man to take advantage of people weaker than he was.
    Hope’s only regret about her present situation was that she didn’t know Rio well enough to use his shoulder as a pillow rather than the dry, unforgiving ground. The thought of curling up against his living strength made her smile.
    She was still smiling when she fell headlong into sleep.
    Rio watched Hope for a long time, repeating to himself all the ways he was wrong for her and she was wrong for him. Then he lay down beside her and eased her head off the hard ground and onto his shoulder.
    She stirred vaguely but didn’t pull away. Instead she moved even closer, sighed, and relaxed against his body with a trust that made him want to shake her awake and tell her what fools they both were being.
    Trying not to think at all, Rio lay utterly still, caught in the gentle, bittersweet pleasure of holding a woman in his arms who trusted him more than he trusted himself.

Five

    T HE SUN BALANCED in crimson glory on the black outline of a distant ridge. Long shadows reached under the battered water truck, dark forerunners of night. The stock tank was more than half-full. Its clean water reflected the last burning light of day.
    No cattle milled around the tank. Having drunk their fill, the Herefords were out grazing over the rumpled land. The cattle looked like carved garnet statues set among the nearly black flames of piñon trees.
    The elegant gray mare dozed three-legged next to a clump of sage that gleamed a ghostly silver in the rich light. The single roping rein Rio preferred to use hung loosely around her neck, allowing her freedom to wander as she pleased. She needed no physical tie, for she was held by invisible bonds of training and her affection for the man who lay quietly beneath the old water truck.
    Rio looked from the thick, dark lashes lying along Hope’s cheek to the stunning transformations of sunset in a wild land. He had known many such times, days inevitably changed by condensing darkness, cool scented winds sweeping down from water-rich heights. Yet he had never known a sunset just like this one.
    In the past he had been alone with the land, and now a woman lay in his arms as quietly as sunlight in a hollow.
    It was a strange sensation to hold Hope, pleasure laced with uneasiness, as though he was a trespasser in an intriguing, forbidden land. He wondered if his Swedish grandmother had felt this way when she lay with her Indian lover, a Zuni shaman whose very existence was an affront to the Christianity that she had come to teach on the reservation.
    The mare snorted and stamped her front foot, discouraging a persistent fly. It was the only sound Rio could hear. Even the wind was quiet.
    Cool velvet shadows lapped over his feet. He knew it was past time for him to awaken the woman sleeping in his arms. He should have done it at least a half hour ago, when the hose had finished transferring the last of its water to the trough.
    Reluctantly, gently, he shifted Hope’s head back onto her hat. She made a protesting sound. He brushed his lips over her hair, breathed in the fragrance of land and woman and earth, and then leaned against the dusty tire once more, no longer touching her.
    “Hope,” he said softly.
    She didn’t stir.
    He allowed his hand to rest on her shoulder, to stroke it, to feel the woman-heat beneath the faded, dusty cotton. The temptation to slide his fingers into the shadowed opening of her collar swept over him, shaking him with its intensity. He wanted to touch the sweet curves of her breasts, to follow his hands with his mouth, to unwrap her, to take her right there, with the night blooming around them in a thousand luminous