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  Where Eagles Fly

  A Western Time Travel Romance

  by

  LISA NORATO

  Second Edition

  Published by Lisa Norato 2015

  First published by Five Star Publishing, August 2009

  Cover Design by Dar Albert

  WHERE EAGLES FLY

  Copyright © 2009, 2015 by Lisa Norato

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, or events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording or any other means without the express written permission of the author.

  Where Eagles Fly

  It was supposed to be a simple summer road trip . . . now Shelby McCoy has three weeks to discover why she’s been sent back in time on a lonely stretch of Wyoming highway while driving to her sister’s dude ranch. A strange letter could be a clue, but unraveling the mystery won’t be easy with ornery cowboy Ruckert St. Cloud hiding his own secret and thwarting her at every turn.

  “. . . a funny, emotional and memorably romantic book that will be read again and again. It’s the kind of special book with passages you share with others because they touch you or make you laugh or pleasantly surprise you. A well-plotted time travel that will keep you guessing right to the end and a tortured hero that will open your heart to the power of love.” -Love Western Romances

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my sister, Cheryl Norato, who talked me into visiting a Wyoming dude ranch, and to Chaka, a precious little dog who loves her walks. Love always, blessings and peace, my two best friends.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  A poem by Shelby McCoy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  About the Author

  Excerpt

  A poem by Shelby McCoy

  Like the beautiful mountains on the plains

  So strong and tall I see you standing there.

  Like the soft wind that blows past,

  I hear you whisper in my ear.

  Your kisses lovingly enfold me

  As cool breezes caress my face.

  You’re so close I can touch you

  But when I reach out to you, you vanish as an illusion.

  No, you’re much more than an illusion.

  You’re like cold water to a thirsty soul.

  I can sense your presence.

  I can hear your voice.

  I can feel your nearness.

  It’s my reality connecting with yours.

  I know you’re out there trying to find me

  And I’m here waiting for you.

  Come soon, for my heart is full

  But my arms are empty.

  You are a mate to my soul, a light to my darkness,

  An awakener of my dreams.

  Chapter One

  11:03 a.m., June 4th

  Highway WYO 130, heading west towards Centennial, Laramie, Wyoming

  Shelby McCoy peered into the rearview mirror at her passenger in the back. She could tell by his heavy panting he was getting impatient for the ride to be over.

  She could also tell that the heavy thwump . . . thwump . . . thwump she was hearing signaled a flat tire. To be sure, she lowered the volume on Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony.” The CD was playing the first movement, composed by Beethoven to express the “awakening of cheerful feelings on arriving in the country,” yet Shelby felt anything but cheerful as she pulled her old Toyota RAV4 to the shoulder of the road.

  Jorge whined. Elevated in his canine booster seat, he gazed in the mirror at her with dark, bright eyes, letting her know he had to pee.

  “All right. I’m coming.”

  Shelby reached on the seat beside her for her cell. She climbed out of the car and stepped around to the back, where she unhooked Jorge’s seat harness, clipped on his leash and scooped the tiny black Pomeranian into her arms. Setting him down in the grass, she turned on her phone to call emergency road service while Jorge did his thing.

  The screen lit up. But when she tried to place the call, a “no signal” message flashed on the display.

  “Oh-no. No way,” she protested into the receiver, although, obviously, no one was listening on the other end.

  This can’t be, she puzzled, not when she’d traveled less than seventy miles from Cheyenne.

  Shelby switched off the power and tried again only to be disappointed. What a useless piece of junk. An expensive, high tech, useless piece of junk.

  After waving it above her head in search of a signal, then whacking it against her palm to no avail, self-pity reared its ugly head, and she dragged Jorge around to the other side of her sports utility vehicle to have a look at the flat.

  It wasn’t lost on Shelby that she might not be facing this particular predicament if she were in a relationship. If she were in a relationship, she and Jorge wouldn’t be vacationing by themselves. They wouldn’t be forced into figuring out how to change a flat tire, because why learn when she paid yearly for road service to do it for her?

  Road service she couldn’t reach.

  It seemed the older she grew, having turned forty on her last birthday, the harder it was to meet attractive, eligible and well-adjusted men interested in a serious relationship.

  What she wanted was a man to romance and love her, to value her for the woman she was inside. She wanted a special man, that one, true, special man. She wanted to love and cherish all his shortcomings and imperfections, because she had looked deep into the beauty of his soul and found her match.

  Was that asking too much?

  Her married girlfriends advised her she was nuts. A husband-hunting woman in this day and age had to be practical. Marriage was not some romantic fantasy. So they fixed her up on blind dates with practical, prospective men. They entered her profile on Internet dating sites. In reflection, Shelby shuddered to think how many awkward and unsuccessful encounters she’d endured. How many go-nowhere romances checkered her past. But no more. She had drawn the line, warning family and friends never to play matchmaker again. Their hearts were in the right place, but the truth of the matter was—arranged meetings did not work.

  These same friends claimed she was bitter and had given up on dating.

  Baloney. She simply had yet to find the love she wanted. There’d been moments she sensed he was so close she could reach out and touch him. But with each passing week, month, year he failed to make an appearance, his unseen presence faded like an illusion.

  And yet he was so much more than just a dream. He was real, this man of her heart. Deep inside she believed he was out there trying to find her.

  And she was ready for love. Overdue, in fact. Her heart was full, but her arms were empty.

  It was all written in her poem. She’d woken at dawn in a strange funk, melancholy and lovelorn, the verses throbbing in her head, de
manding to be scribbled down. As a songwriter, she slept with pen and paper by her bedside, and the words had spilled out of her emotions, wrenched from her gut. She couldn’t shake the feeling of them, even now.

  Stubborn romantic. The thought fueled her frustration, and she kicked the tire only to stub her toe. “Ouch!”

  Rising to her defense, five-pound Jorge bounded up to the offending flat on four springy little paws. Lifting a hind leg, he squirted the greasy alloy wheel, then stepped back and stared up at Shelby, wagging his lush plume of a tail.

  She couldn’t help herself. Out burst a giggle. Soon Shelby’s sweet, bell-like laughter went rolling down the desolate expanse of the Snowy Range Scenic Byway. As the sun warmed her face, she thanked God for this charming little devil who did so much to fill the emptiness inside.

  Then she saw it. About a half mile up ahead. Hey, wasn’t that the ranch’s mailbox? It certainly was, posted at the entrance to the ranch road. In that case, they’d walk it. They were nearly there.

  Shelby had to admit she was excited about this visit to her sister’s dude ranch.

  She couldn’t wait to see Caitlin and Michael again. Teaching music and piano to high school students in Cheyenne kept her busy throughout most of the year, so she didn’t get to visit as often as she liked. But this was summer break, and Shelby had made it clear she was ready and willing to help with the opening of the Flying Eagle Guest Ranch in any way she could. Caitlin suggested the position of hostess in the beautifully restored dining room of the rustic main lodge.

  Before leaving, Shelby pushed her round, wire-framed sunglasses down her nose and checked her reflection in the side view mirror. She smoothed the few, faint lines around her eyes with a fingertip, assuring herself it was merely the bright sunlight making them visible. Retrieving her rucksack from inside the car, she freshened her lipstick, added a touch of gloss.

  Then she reached in the back seat for a bottle of spring water and her leather aviator jacket. From Cheyenne they had climbed over one thousand feet, and even though the day was a pleasant one in early June with temperatures expected to rise as high as seventy, the area’s high altitude and mountain breezes left the morning crisp.

  Shelby locked up her white RAV4 and told Jorge, “C’mon, boy. We’re going for a walk.”

  And then they started hiking.

  It was quiet. She hadn’t seen or heard another vehicle since exiting off the Lincoln Highway. WYO 130 was deserted, a great barren asphalt strip in the midst of the Laramie Plains, surrounded by a rippling sea of green grass, distant hills and oh, yes, the sky.

  The sky . . . the sky . . . the sky. That great Wyoming sky. To her, it was the most outstanding feature of life in the West. In other parts of the country folks never took more than a passing glance at the sky. Here, it was unavoidable. Here, in the wide open spaces of Wyoming, there always seemed to be more sky than land. It filled the heavens and swallowed the earth, leaving its inhabitants feeling like they were living inside a vast, azure blue bubble.

  Inside that bubble, huge rolling clouds—dazzling white with shadowed underbellies—drifted across the plains. Shelby thought she smelled the snow of the distant Medicine Bow Mountain Range, commonly called the “Snowy Range.” The air was pure and glorious, fragrant with a hint of pine and the sage of the plains.

  Jorge was in his glory, straining at the leash, a little black powerhouse, zigzagging this way and that. All this wonderful territory to explore and no other canines around he had to share it with.

  Shelby was so amused by his enthusiasm, she didn’t heed the moments passing, didn’t realize how much ground they’d covered, until she turned and noticed her automobile was no longer in sight.

  And when had the highway turned into a narrow dirt road? The telephone poles had disappeared, and even though the countryside looked the same, Shelby got the eerie feeling something was . . . different.

  Jorge stiffened and snarled, his body tense. The snarl turned into a “woof-woof-woof,” and pretty soon all four paws were bouncing off the ground simultaneously with what Shelby recognized as his protective yipping.

  * * *

  Ruckert St. Cloud sat astride his horse Chongo and contemplated the lone figure in the road. A premonition in his gut told him it was her. He’d just been on his way into Laramie City to fetch her from the Union Pacific train station, so he’d hardly expected to find her making her way to the ranch on foot. She was tall for a woman, dressed in tight, blue denim trousers and some sort of bright, multi-colored, suit jacket worn over what looked to be a man’s white dress shirt. Despite her clothes, the sway of hips was feminine, and with no bonnet to cover her head, the morning sun glinted off her short, tousled hair so’s it gleamed the color of golden apricots.

  So this was Miss Shelby McCoy, the little range calico his mother had invited to the Flying Eagle to make his life hell for the next three weeks.

  There weren’t many things in life Ruckert was scared of, but talking to a beautiful woman ranked right up there with rattlesnakes.

  From a distance of not more’n a couple hundred yards away, they plodded towards one another, she walking, he riding, each eyeing the other warily, too fascinated to turn away.

  Ruckert settled his weight back in the saddle and Chongo obediently slowed his pace. Ruckert never used the reins to pull at a horse’s mouth; instead, in training horses, he created an environment in which they wanted to learn. And none had learned better than his Chongo hoss. Their relationship was founded on trust, such that they understood each other’s body language. Together, they waited for Ruckert’s mother and brother to catch up in the wagon.

  Ruckert felt betrayed by this woman who had given birth to him. His mouth was a sneer beneath the thick black mustache, a mustache he’d grown to hide the slight trembling of his upper lip when he spoke. How could Ma welcome a strange female into their predominantly male household when she knew the way folks reacted to his stuttering?

  Some found it funny. They’d start to smile, trying to hold back their laughter, while the effort to speak was the hardest thing in the world for him. Others offered pity. Most figured him for just plain dumb, but Ruckert lacked nothing in the way of intelligence. For some reason doctors were unable to explain—in Ruckert’s experience, this occurred mostly in social situations where he was expected to say certain things at certain times—his talk box refused to cooperate. And in trying to force the words out, he usually ended up blubbering, gasping or choking, making himself look ridiculous and embarrassing those around him. As a result, he avoided such situations and confined himself to silence when he yearned to speak. But in this self-inflicted exile, he was often considered a lone wolf, a snob, rude, even a dunce.

  Folks just didn’t savvy the embarrassment and anxiety that went along with being cursed with a stumbling tongue. And that tongue stumbled most in the presence of an attractive female.

  His mother’s spring wagon clattered up alongside him, and Ruckert glanced at her to say, “D-on’t expect me at the s-s-supper ta-ble as long as sh-sh-she’s staying at our place. Just leave a p-p-p-plate in the kitchen for me, and I’ll come eat it once I’m sure sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-she’s in b-b-bed for the night.”

  Just as he’d expected, Ma balked. “Come now, Ruckert, don’t be that way. Miss McCoy is a fine, decent girl. She won’t care nothing for your stuttering. And what’ll she think if you refuse to eat at the table with her after she’s been charitable enough to offer her services while Cookie’s in Cheyenne visiting his mother? Besides, you’ll starve yourself half to death waiting until bedtime for your supper.”

  “Oh, no, he won’t neither, Mother,” Wylie interjected. “Ruckert’s got it all figured out. He’s going to stock the barn with canned tomatoes in case his stomach starts to growl.”

  Clearly, Ma did not approve of this plan, and she dismissed both Ruckert and his thirteen-year-old brother in that infuriating way she had of changing the subject when it was not pleasing to her. She directed their attention to the
male-clad gal walking down the road, and in so doing, Ruckert knew his ma intended to set a place for him at the table just the same.

  “If that’s her,” Rose St. Cloud said, “then she must’ve taken the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage as far as the county road instead of the train into Laramie City like her grandmother wrote us she was going to do. But why would Miss McCoy do such a thing? It’s an awfully long way to the ranch on foot.” She tsk-tsked her disapproval. “Can you imagine, out in all this wind and sun with no covering for her head? Now how do you suppose Nana Tinkler would react to her granddaughter tramping about the countryside dressed like a man? Why, I like her already.”

  “Well, Ruckert don’t like her, and if Ruckert don’t like her, then neither do I.”

  Rose tsked. “I don’t feel it’s right to judge a person just ‘cause they seem a little different, but if Ruckert has another opinion, he’ll have to speak for himself.”

  Ruckert had to admit. Ma had him there.

  After closing some distance between them, his mother made another shocking observation. “Oh . . . oh my glory. That poor child. She’s blind.”

  Compassion filled Ruckert to bursting. Small, round, blackened spectacles covered Miss McCoy’s eyes. He could see them plainly now.

  “Hey, Ruckert,” Wylie called, “in all your experience, have you ever come across any sort of little black animal to make a yackety-yak-yak noise like that? Why it don’t hardly even stop to take a breath. What d’you reckon it is?”

  “D-d-damned if I know.”

  “Looks like a tumbleweed with legs,” Wylie declared. “Or one of them furs ladies stick their hands in to keep them warm. Or something the cat coughed up . . . with a head.”

  “We can see that, Wylie,” their mother said. “We’re not the one who’s blind.”

  As though to test the point, she smiled in welcome at the girl, reaching up to wave. The girl waved back.