Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

watched her with eyes as deep and clear as the water she had hoped to find. He was sure. But he couldn’t explain his certainty to Hope. It was a combination of instinct and education and long experience in dry lands.
    “Well,” she said, her voice steady despite its unusual huskiness, “thanks for being honest with me. You could have cleaned out my drilling account and then walked away.”
    “Is that what you heard about me?” Rio’s tone was distant, hard.
    She shook her head, making her hair shift and shimmer darkly in the dying light. “No. And even if I had,” she added, meeting his eyes directly, “I wouldn’t have believed it after being with you. You aren’t a liar or a thief.”
    For a long moment they looked at each other, silently accepting what was being offered. She trusted him not to lie to her. He trusted her to believe him without any proof other than his word.
    “If there’s water on your land, I’ll find it for you,” Rio said. His voice was as soft and certain as when he had told her that the Hope well was dead.
    She smiled sadly. “Unless the water you find is close to the surface, I can’t afford to go after it.”
    “First let’s find the water. Then we’ll worry about drilling the well. I’ll work nights and weekends here until I’m finished with Turner’s horses. Then I’ll work full-time.”
    “I can’t afford to—”
    “My pay will be room and board for me and my horse,” he cut in, knowing what she was going to say.
    “That’s not enough.”
    “Do you have any old drilling equipment in your barn?” he asked.
    “All the way back to the first well. Why?”
    “We’ll salvage what we can. I’ve got some equipment of my own that I’ll have shipped in. Between us we’ll put together a drilling rig that won’t cost you much. Your biggest expense will be pipe, ‘mud,’ and fuel.”
    “And your fee,” she said firmly. “It isn’t fair that you work only for room and board.”
    His smile gleamed briefly in the dying light. His eyes were even darker now, as mysterious and radiant as the twilight expanding throughout the land. “It isn’t fair that you have to do the work of three men just to hang on to your ranch.”
    She shrugged. There was no help for it, so there was no point in complaining about it.
    “You’re going to work until rain falls—or you do,” he said dryly. “Right?”
    His choice of words almost made her smile in spite of the grief of losing an old dream.
    “I’m no different from anyone else,” she said matter-of-factly. “I do what I can for as long as I can, and I hope to God that it will be enough.”
    Rio thought of the men and women he had met who had worked as little as they could for as short a time as possible, and bitched every step of the way about bad luck and bad people and the unfairness of a world that didn’t give them everything they had ever wanted. Those were the people Rio avoided.
    The other people—the ones like Hope who worked their hearts out for a dream and didn’t whine when the going got rough—those were the people Rio was drawn to as inevitably as rain was drawn to the thirsty ground. Those were the people he helped, sharing their dreams for a time, giving what he could, taking only what they could afford in return.
    When the dreams changed or came true, he moved on like his brother the wind, speaking only in the wild silences of the land, searching for something that neither he nor the wind could name.
    “I’ll help you,” Rio said softly, “and hope to God that it’s enough.”
    “But I can’t afford—” she began.
    “I don’t want money as payment. If I bring in a well, I’ll leave ten mares to be bred to Storm Walker. You’ll treat the mares and their foals as your own, no better and no worse. From time to time I’ll come to the Valley of the Sun, take the horses I want, and leave the mares to be bred to your best stallion. For as long as the water in my well flows.”
    When she started