Wyoming Wildflowers: The Beginning by Patricia McLinn

her heart lift and hammer.
    “Ed, glad to see you.” A lanky man with a lush mustache extended his hand. “Missed you yesterday. I’d hoped to have a word.”
    “Mr. Gates, good to see you, too. This is —” He smiled down at her. “— Donna Roberts. Donna, this is Mr. Gates, one of the best cattlemen in this country.”
    A smile spread under the mustache. “If you’re going to say things like that, you’d both best call me Carter. Miss,” he added, lifting the front of his hat. “Can’t talk long. Need to find that scamp of mine and get started back. Tucker’s probably driving some poor soul to distraction with his questions.”
    “They’re good questions,” Ed said. “I was part of a group hanging around for the answers to his questions to those folks from Texas showing the paint horses.”
    Pride showed in the older man’s eyes, but he shook his head. “I’ll be lucky if he’s not headed south with them, everything forgotten but wanting to know more. But what I want to talk to you about if your young lady here doesn’t mind is more on your thoughts about crossbreeding continentals with Herefords.”
    “I don’t mind at all,” Donna said. Not when she saw how the older man’s interest lit Ed’s eyes.
    She listened carefully, and understood about every third word.
    But while she didn’t understand much of the spoken language, their body language didn’t require translation.
    Ed was respectful toward the older man, yet sure in what he was saying.
    For his part, Carter Gates started interested, and ended deeply impressed. Donna fought back a temptation to beam at him when he expressed the sentiment.
    “You coming to the National Western?” Carter Gates asked.
    “Afraid not.”
    “That’s a shame. They’ve opened to crossbreeds, and others would be interested in what you’re doing. If you decide to bring stock down, you let me know, and we’ll find you a spot with ours in the barns.”
    “I appreciate that, Carter.”
    They parted, but as she and Ed continued walking past display areas being dismantled and animals being led out, she quickly realized Carter Gates was not alone in being interested in and impressed by what Ed was doing on the Slash-C.
    She flashed back to watching him at the opening night party, talking to those heavyhitters. She would have been jittery and overly talkative. But Ed was at ease with others, because he was at ease with himself.
    Because he knew who he was and what he wanted to do.
    But . . . she knew who she was and what she wanted to do, too.
    She did.
    ****
    “And they talk about theater being a small world,” she said as the rancher said farewell. “You must know every soul here.”
    It had gone on like that all morning, through their lunch at a food stand, and now the afternoon.
    “Cattle can be a fairly small world, but what we’re doing here is new, and that’s an even smaller world. At the National Western, I’d be a speck in the ocean.”
    “That’s the big show in January? You mentioned that, then we got sidetracked by rodeo.”
    “Rodeo and other things.” His grin was as potent as the first kiss his words recalled. Memory of the sensations of that kiss, her responses, and all that had followed sparked through her.
    “Can’t you get away other times of the year?” Her voice sounded breathless and throaty, at odds with the prosaic question.
    “Spring’s calving season, planting, and repairing what winter brought down. Summer’s caring for stock and doing your best sunup to sundown to keep up. Then you’re into roundup and weaning and getting ’em ready for market. Winter’s your most downtime. So that’s when ranchers go to stock shows.”
    She’d had little to do with farms growing up in Indianapolis, but being surrounded by some of the most fertile cropland in the world made it impossible for even a self-absorbed theater-mad teenager not to know farmers didn’t have anything like the 40-hour work-week and annual vacation