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Lauren sat in her car, watching the other two cars disappear. She thought, Why am I here? What on earth am I doing? This is really dumb. At my age, I ought to know better than to get involved in something this stupid!
And there she was, dressed in silks with fragile shoes. And she was supposed to drawl through the fence and retrieve the pod?
Disgruntled, she waited.
And waited.
She looked at her watch and sighed. She looked at her silent car phone. She wondered why she was sitting there.
Eventually, she heard the sound of a small plane. She looked up. She looked around. She looked down the dirt road. At some distance, she saw the plane buzzing the mesquites clear down yonder. That would be Jack.
Jack had never struck Lauren as being particularly bright. However, he could fly a plane. She could not. But if he was that smart, why was he buzzing the mesquites, clear down there?
She had started her engine and was bouncing down the lane toward where Jack had been. Had he gone on off a way and was supposedly dropping the pod? Away from the trees? Why clear out of sight after buzzing the place to call their attention? He could have dumped the pod there!
Men are strange.
Something entirely logical to a woman is beyond a man’s grasp.
It would seem basic that if a person was going to try to communicate with someone, however secretly, he wouldn’t buzz them first and then go on off to drop the pod someplace else, out of sight.
The way he’d flown was right out over that bare, roadless land. The male retrievers had probably thought it would be rugged to then hop out of their cars and trudge off after the damned gourd.
Lauren took a steadying breath.
Then she looked in her glove compartment. Yes. A compass. She removed it. Her father had given it to her. He was another strange male. In this, her daddy had been right. For the first time since she was sixteen and passed her driver’s tests and had a car, she did need a compass. How had her daddy known such a time could come?
He’d probably understood that she would get entangled with some males whose idea of excitement was to go out onto the wide and empty land and find a plane-dropped gourd. How had her daddy known?
Well, he was male.
And with that revelation, Lauren recalled her mother sighing and mentioning just that very thing! ‘He is a man,’ she’d say. And until that very minute, Lauren had always thought her mother had been bragging and complimenting her husband, who was Lauren’s daddy. But her mother’s evaluation was a sobering thought. Her father was a man.
The compass confirmed that, as the plane had disappeared over the uneven land, it had been five degrees west of North. Okay. There was no way her car could go through that barbed wire fence and out over that land. A Jeep would have had less trouble.
So Lauren took a Great Forbearing Breath, got out of her car and began to follow a plane. She was doing that! Perhaps there is some comment that could be made about women. Why was she there?
She held the compass in her hand and at the top of the rise, she looked to see which way the plane had turned.
The plane was…gone.
Yes.
So Lauren looked for the trailing cloth that was to identify the pod. And other than the grazed and uneven land with a few rocks and a whole lot of sky, she could not see one damned thing.
It is depressing to be involved with unskilled people. Amateurs.
Obviously, Lauren Davie was included in that evaluation.
She stood at the top of the rise and examined the ground that had been under the plane. It was then she became aware the wind was blowing. She was no longer in her car with the top down. But the wind was blowing.
She took a handful of the sparse grasses and tossed them up. The wind was strong. She would have to look to her right of the plane’s path…about ten additional degrees?
She put the compass on North and walked ten degrees to the right. She saw nothing.
Lauren was a dedicated woman. She would find the damned pod. She trudged along, watching so avidly that she didn’t look up at the darkening sky.
With her intentness, it was some time before she realized the sun was gone. There was no friendly shadow accompanying her. She looked at the sky with some indignation. From where had all those dark clouds come?
And she shivered. Could the weather people be right?
Silk is a marvelous material, but even silk has its limits. Her raincoat was in her car. Her car was.that way. She had to find the damned gourd-pod.
So she searched.
And she found it! It was not with glee or satisfaction that she lifted it from the ground. It was with grim, teeth-clenched determination.
The tricky wind had played with the pod as it had fallen. It was not where it should have been, which was right…where?
Lauren stood and looked around, holding the damned cloth-tailed pod. She looked at her compass. She pointed it North.and she began to walk back the allotted degrees to her right.
She walked at an angle. She would find the car. She would never go on another pod hunt in all the rest of her life. She hoped Mark’s wife had triplets.
It took some time for Lauren to realize she could possibly be lost. She figured if she went south and west, she would find the line of mesquites. From there, she would find her convertible. The car was not only hidden among some mesquites, but she had left it with its top down. and rain or dust or something was approaching.
It was not turning out to be a good day.
She would survive…even this. She would find the convertible before she really, really needed the raincoat in the back seat. She would.
The sky darkened almost to night and the winds were not nice.
Lauren trudged along carrying the gourd-pod, which was gaining weight with every step. She was cold. She shivered violently. Her nipples were terse and pinched, and her skin agreed with the discomfort.
She could handle cold. She would find the car, the coat and put the top up, get in and turn on the heat!
The heat. It would be warm and the stream of the heat would go over her body and soothe her. She had the damned stupid gourd-pod, and she would find her car again.
Lauren lost her hat. It was just-gone! She was freezing. She stopped and wrapped the long pod tail around her. It was only minimally better. She was cold.
And…where was she?
She looked around. It was all so relentlessly the same. Rolling ground. No sun. No stars. No clue as to exactly where she was. The compass said North was that way. She went south.
If only she could just get to some trees…even to mesquites.she would be better off. She was so cold.
Lauren redid the long cloth tail of the pod, wrapping it around her head, her neck, and her chest. Her teeth were chattering.
What was a damned gourd-pod worth? Why had she felt the need to go and find it—all by herself? She would probably die out there. Alone. Her bones would eventually be discovered. By then, it would have been so long, since her death, that the finders would assume she was a relic from long, long ago.
She turned to view the approaching storm and her mind saw a man on a horse. So she was hallucinating. Big deal. She didn’t have anything else to entertain her. Lauren’s mind had decided she needed to be rescued and her imagination managed to conjure that.
So she turned her back on the foolishness and trudged off—south and a little west.
Behind her, she heard horse’s hooves.
Yep. That would go right along with the idea that she was being rescued. Her imagination had always been rather vivid. She’d spent most of her childhood reading and rereading her maternal grandmother’s carefully preserved comic pages of Flash Gordon and Prince Valiant.
That grandmother was remarkable.
Lauren figured she was in the final stages of freezing, and she would go out on Prince Valiant’s horse. Okay. She could handle that.
Prince Valiant’s voice came from behind her. “Hey, where the hell are you going?”
How unprincely. Men never acted as they were supposed to act.
She stopped and turned to confront the phantom. “You’re supposed to step down, take off your hat and sweep a really good bow.” With those directions, she stood shivering with her teeth clicking and waited, her back to the storm.
He swung down from the horse with beautiful ease. He took off his coat and wrapped her in it.
That beat the bow all hollow. The coat was gloriously warm. She closed her eyes, knowing she’d already died and probably was in hell. It was so warm. Well, maybe not hell exactly. She hadn’t been that bad.
The masculine voice told her, “Get on the horse.”
Huh? She was going to hell on a horse? That seemed a nasty thing to do to a horse.
She asked the phantom, “What’s he done?”
The phantom’s face was sour. He groused, “I hate women. They always do the dumbest things.”
Warming inside the coat, she retorted heatedly, “Women? Women do dumb things? Do you know that I’m out here for only one thing?”
His interest changed and riveted. “You streetwalking?”
With great, adult patience, she replied, “I came out here with a group to-”
And she couldn’t blab a secret club’s activities. She was staunch.
“Yeah?” He encouraged her speech with his riveted attention.
Why didn’t his Stetson blow away? She was fascinated.
She saw that his shoulders were hunched. He was cold. Where was his coat? It was on her. She said, “I’ll give your coat back to you in just a minute. It’s so warm.”
And he replied nicely but he leaned close as he yelled over the sound of the winds, “As soon as you’re just about thawed, we’ll get out of here before it thunders.”
“It’s thundering?” Her eyes got big and her head jerked around.
“It’s just wind right now. It’ll get interesting in a while. Are you warm enough to get on the horse?”
“What’s his name?”
“Whose?”
“This horse.” She was kind and pointed to the horse so that he’d know what she meant by the word. She didn’t think he was very bright.
But the male creature replied, “Block Head. We just call him plain Block.”
She lifted her chin a little. “He seems more intelligent than that.” She was chiding.
“He don’t know no never mind.”
She indicted the horse’s position and mentioned kindly, “He’s protecting us from the wind.”
“That’s ‘cause he don’t know not to.”
She stiffened. Then she said in her Daughters of the Alamo voice, “I’m ready to ride.”
He smiled and bit his lower lip. She was probably hostile enough now to see to herself. He said, “Give me the coat. I’ll wrap you in this here blanket. I’d take the blanket but it don’t have no sleeves. Understand?”
He was a basic man. No wonder he had so carelessly referred to streetwalking. He probably didn’t know any better. She would be careful of him. She took off the coat with steely discipline.
He took hold of her and tossed her up on the horse. Lauren didn’t shriek or sprawl because her daddy had been doing something like that to his daughters all their lives.
She landed neatly in the saddle. She would ride; he would walk. He was a gentleman under all that crudeness. He knew his mann—
Move your foot out of the stirrup.”
He was boarding the horse. too.
But he sat in back of the saddle and he shifted until he got the blanket right, covering the front of her and her legs, then he opened his coat and covered her entirely.
In a sexually stimulating, roughened voice, he commented in her ear, “It’s jest a good thing you got your own gloves.”
He spoke of those thin-skinned, driving gloves, which protected her hands from sun-browning. Sure. But thin as the leather was, the gloves were better than nothing. She said a dismissive, “Yes.”
Then he startled her as he said quite naturally, “The pod’s tail makes a pretty good cover for your head and neck.”
How’d he know it wasn’t a cantaloupe? She replied a nothing, “Umm.”
He didn’t realize the subject had been rejected by her. He said, “We’ve found a couple of them there things. What’s in them? Ones we’ve tried ta see, they just crumbled.”
She looked at the pod, which was the size and shape of a cantaloupe. “I thought it was a distress signal from a plane flying oddly.” Jack’s flying was odd.
The man in back of her with his arms around her said, “He had enough room to land. He didn’t need any such distress signal.”
“I guess not.” But she did hear in his words that he had been watching as the plane had buzzed the mesquites and then dropped the pod.
Why had he waited in the beginning of the storm? Why hadn’t he come to her immediately? He’d allowed her to find the pod. He’d known where it was? If he was so curious, why hadn’t he retrieved it first? She would have never known if it had been found or lost forever.
