by Cindy Dees
Work boots? Good grief. He really was planning to torture her!
She emerged from the guest bedroom feeling like a snowman. Wes was in the living room with a pair of what looked a lot like combat boots but clunkier, if that was actually possible.
“If you wear a couple pairs of socks, these should work.”
He held out the boots and she grimaced at their weight. “Are there lead blocks in these?”
“Steel toes. You need them when working around large animals and heavy equipment.”
Animals? Equipment?
Deeply skeptical of whatever he had planned for her, she donned the three pairs of socks that he lent her and the boots. Silently he handed her a pair of wool-lined leather work gloves. She followed him out the side door between the kitchen and dining room. A mudroom extended the full width of the end of the house. Cold bit through her clothes instantly, and she shivered as Wes passed her a thick parka and an ugly knit cap. Fashion be damned. It was freezing out here. She yanked on the cap and pulled the parka’s hood up over it for good measure.
Wes donned a big sheepskin coat and led her outside. Bright sunshine glittered off the snow, blinding her. She squinted against the glare and followed the dark blob of Wes down the porch steps. He broke a path through the drifts and she followed close on his heels. An icy wind picked up the powdery snow, coating her clothing and stinging her skin everywhere it was exposed to the air.
He slid open a big barn door on a squeaky track, and she slipped inside the decrepit barn behind him. It was warmer in here. Quiet. It smelled of sweetgrass on a summer day. And it was crammed with fuzzy red cows with curly white faces.
She cringed beside Wes as one of them turned to sniff her with its wet pink nose.
He spoke soothingly, no doubt so he wouldn’t upset the animals—because God knew he didn’t give a damn about her feelings. “They won’t hurt you. They’re Herefords. One of the gentlest breeds of cattle. Think of them as giant, docile puppies, and you’ll have their temperament about right.”
“Really? They seem so...big.”
He laughed. “Bulls—they’re big. And muscular. These are all cows. They’ll start calving in the next month or so. See their big bellies? And how their sides stick out?”
“They’re pregnant ladies? That’s so cool. Can I pet them?”
“You don’t pet a cow. But you can scratch them. They like to have their shoulders scratched right here or, if they like you, around their ears or under their chin. Like this.” The cow he demonstrated on all but lay down on his hand, so happy she was to be scratched.
“That’s adorable!” Jessica exclaimed under her breath.
Wes gave her a withering look. “Cows are not adorable. They’re good-looking or well built or have nice conformation.”
“Well, yours are adorable. Look at those curly faces! I’m dying.”
Wes rolled his eyes. “Good thing you won’t be here to see the calves. They have knobby knees and whiter, curlier faces than their mamas. Now they are adorable.”
“Isn’t it too cold for calves to be born?” she asked in concern.
“Spring will be here in another month. There will be green grass in the pastures and it’ll be warm in the daytime. I’ll bring the cows inside at night for a few extra weeks so the calves aren’t killed by predators.”
“Killed?” she exclaimed. The nearest cows threw their heads up in alarm, and she muttered, “Sorry.”
“You don’t have to say you’re sorry to cows. Since when did you become such an apologizer, anyway?”
She looked over at him in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“You never used to be sorry for anything. You were fearless and took life head-on. No regrets. No looking back. What happened?”
She shrugged. “The nightclub happened.”
“How’d you get drugged?” He sounded reluctant, like he hated to ask but had been dying to ask the question for a long time.
“The guy you pulled off me tried to pick me up and I turned him down. He came back a few minutes later carrying a drink and apologized really nicely. It didn’t even occur to me that he would try to get even by dropping a roofie on me. God, it was so easy for him to incapacitate me.”
“Scary,” he muttered.
“You think it’s scary! It terrifies me how close I came to being raped. I never did get a chance to thank you for charging in to the rescue like you did. You saved my life.”
“If you’re trying to tell me it was worth destroying my life for, don’t. There were other ways to save yourself that didn’t involve me. You could have called the police directly.”
She rubbed the shoulders of the nearest cow absently and was surprised when the animal leaned into her hand a little. She confessed, “I was afraid the police wouldn’t believe me. Or that they would think it was my fault for ingesting the roofie in the first place. I knew you would believe me and come right away.”
He scowled. “Gee. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’m so glad my reliability and gullibility made me behave as forecast.”
“I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Don’t.” To punctuate his order, he moved away from her, winding into the closely packed herd of cattle.
“Where are you going?”
“To feed,” he answered unhelpfully.
She debated staying here by the door, on her own with the unknown feeding behaviors of cows, or following him. She opted for Wes. He might hate her guts, but he was a known quantity.
She stepped in something squishy, and a pungent odor immediately rose up. Oh. My. God. Horrified, she didn’t look down and kept on going, praying Wes wouldn’t be furious that she’d stepped in a fresh cow pie in his boots.
He stood behind a long feeding trough on the other side of a gate made of steel pipe. She quickly unlatched the gate, slipped through and relatched it behind her. Wes handed her a big metal scoop. “Start throwing corn in the trough. Don’t stop until I tell you to.”
She dug with gusto into a huge burlap bag of dried cracked corn and dumped a scoop of corn into the long, V-shaped feeder. The cows moved into a line, side by side, every one poking its nose into the trough eagerly.
She moved a little bit down the line to scoop and dump again. And again.
By the twentieth time she’d scooped and dumped, she’d added pain to the rhythm. Scoop. Pain. Dump. Pain. Scoop. Pain. Dump. Pain. Her shoulders and back ached, her arms burned and even her hands ached from the weight of the corn.
“More?” she called. She’d lost sight of Wes and had no idea where he’d gone off to.
“Keep scooping.” His voice was muffled and came from above her. She realized a partial second floor jutted out to right about where she stood. A hayloft, maybe?
She looked up at the loft just in time to catch a face full of fine green hay leaves. They got in her eyes and mouth and tasted sweet and green, but the hay dust made her sneeze violently. She stepped back under the overhang hastily and realized with dismay that her hair was full of hay. He had done that on purpose!
Scowling, she combed her fingers through her hair in a futile effort to get the bits of clinging hay out. No luck. She was covered in the stuff.
“Are you scooping?” he called down. “Those poor, pregnant cows are hungry.”
Jerk. She resumed scooping, keeping a wary eye on where big flakes of hay were flying down into the feeder from above. Any time he neared her, she prudently stepped back out of the way. Eventually, when she’d laid down a line of corn along the entire fifty-foot-or-so length of the trough, and had gone back to the beginning and replenished it again, Wes called down, “That’s enough corn.”
She sagged, exhausted. She must have scooped three hundred pounds’ worth of the kernels. Wes came down from the loft and joined her. She asked him, “Do you scoop all that corn every day?”
&nb
sp; He shrugged. “I just pick up the bags and walk down the feeder with them. Takes me about thirty seconds.”
“And you made me do it one scoop at a time?” she exclaimed.
“I didn’t think you could pick up a hundred-pound sack of corn.”
Oh. Well, there was that. She looked up at him sidelong, and for a fleeting moment his dark, dark blue eyes glinted with humor. It was just a glimpse of the old Wes, the man she’d fallen for, but he was still in there. Hiding, maybe, inside the angry, bitter man he’d become.
She looked down the line of contentedly munching cows. “Will you keep them inside until the snow melts?”
“Good Lord, no. They’ll go outside as soon as they’re done eating. Because they’re in the late stages of pregnancy, I’m supplementing their forage to make sure they’re getting plenty of high-quality nutrition. They’ll go outside and graze on the exposed grass and will dig through the snow to expose more roughage for themselves.”
“Won’t they get cold?”
“Have you taken a look at their coats? Their fur’s nearly three inches long. If anything, I have to guard against them getting too warm inside this barn and shedding out their winter hair too soon.”
“I had no idea you knew so much about cows.”
He rolled his eyes. “What part of ‘I grew up on a ranch in Montana’ didn’t you get?”
“It’s one thing to hear it. It’s another to see exactly what that means.”
“Well, now you’ve seen it. You can go back to DC and resume your regularly scheduled jet-set life.”
But that was the thing. She couldn’t go back. Her previous life had been irrevocably taken from her when she’d realized how terribly vulnerable her party-girl lifestyle had made her to predators like the man who’d drugged her.
Aloud, she mused, “I’m not sure what my regularly scheduled life should look like anymore.”
Wes snorted. “That makes two of us.”
She frowned. “It looks to me like you’ve settled right back into your old life. You own a ranch. Some cows. A house.”
He turned on her abruptly, and the fury in his stare made her step back from him. He ground out, “I never wanted this life for myself. I joined the Marine Corps to escape this. But you took my escape away from me and forced me right back here to the one place I swore I would never end up.”
He might as well have punched her in the stomach. Only now was the true enormity of what she’d done to him starting to sink in. She hadn’t really given any thought to what he would do after he left the military. Her father was always talking about how he couldn’t wait to be a civilian again. It had never dawned on her that all soldiers might not feel the same way.
“Wes, I’m really sorr—”
“Save it. I already told you, I don’t want your apology.”
“Is there some way I can make it up to you?”
“Yeah. Get me my commission back.”
If only. Her father had supposedly pulled all kinds of strings to keep him out of jail. No way could anyone, not even her father, get Wes his rank and position back. Not after he’d half killed a man with his bare hands.
The temporary truce between them while feeding the cattle was apparently over.
“Go inside the house,” he bit out.
“What are you going to do?”
“Plow my damned driveway so you can get the hell out of here.”
Stung, she retreated along the path they’d created before. She stopped in the mudroom to doff her boots and outer layers of clothing. Dispirited, she cleaned up the breakfast dishes and tidied the kitchen. Except for the quiche in the fridge and the new furniture arrangement, no one would know she’d ever been here. Wes could get on with his life, and she...
She didn’t know what she was going to do.
Chapter 5
Where did one go when one’s life was in danger? Was a run-down ranch in Montana far enough out of the way that she would be safe here or not? Or would she lead the killer straight to Wes if she stayed here?
Maybe she should decamp to some exotic island far away, take up a new identity and sit on a beach watching sunsets. With the trust fund from her mother, she could afford to do it. But she would be bored out of her mind in about a week. And then what? She would go totally stir-crazy. She was a project kind of girl. She needed to stay busy and have something to do.
In the past, she had put her energy into knowing the best restaurants, finding the most on-trend clubs, spotting the latest fashion craze just before it hit. Her it-girl blog and YouTube channel had amassed a substantial following over the past few years. She’d parlayed that popularity into an interior design business that had been growing quickly before she’d fled Washington.
But Sunny Creek, Montana, couldn’t have more than a handful of houses in need of redecorating. And it wasn’t like the locals would hire her after Wes got done trashing her reputation. Which she probably deserved. Still, it would leave her at loose ends with nothing to do.
The sound of a tractor engine fractured the deep silence, and she listened glumly as Wes attacked Mother Nature with a vengeance, all in the name of getting rid of her.
She moved over by the living room window to watch him on the tractor. For a man who professed to hate this life, he seemed pretty good at it. He handled the tractor like a pro, dragging aside snow with an angled blade on the back of the tractor and shoveling away the big drifts with a bucket on the front of it. Gradually a path emerged, heading across the pasture toward the main road.
Panic began to set in. He hadn’t listened to her. Maybe he wasn’t in danger, as isolated as he was and with all his neighbors looking out for him. But she—she had no such protections. All of a sudden, the isolation of this decrepit little homestead began to look a lot less terrible. In a place like this, no one would ever find her. She could hunker down and be safe from the world. Too bad Wes despised her with a burning passion.
She heard the tractor drive back up toward the house and, a moment later, the sound of her car starting. Taking one last, wistful look around Wes’s sanctuary, she stepped outside onto the porch.
Wes was just unfolding his tall, athletic frame from her little car, and she was riveted by the sight of his broad shoulders and long, muscular legs encased in denim. From the first moment she’d ever laid eyes on her father’s new aide, she’d wanted him. There was something so magnetic about him—she just couldn’t look away. Even now, with that awful beard and shaggy hair, he was still one of the best-looking men she’d ever seen.
If everyone in the world had their own personal kryptonite, he was hers.
Too bad she’d completely alienated him and would never get to be with him again. She didn’t relish the long years ahead, knowing he was out in the world somewhere, hating her.
She strode across the porch, head held high, determined not to cry in front of him again. That was probably why she didn’t see the missing porch step and stepped down into thin air. She pitched forward as her foot went down between the slats of wood. Her ankle wrenched violently, and she fell hard to the frozen ground. Only the thick layer of snow prevented her from racking up further injuries.
Wes rushed forward and was by her side in an instant. “Don’t move,” he ordered sharply.
Dammit, she felt tears squeezing out of the corners of her eyes. “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” she mumbled.
“Did you hit your head?” Wes demanded.
“No. I’m fine. No need to make a big deal out of me being a klutz.” She sat up and Wes put an arm behind her shoulders, raising her the rest of the way upright. Lord, she’d forgotten how strong he was. Apparently, life on a farm did nothing to diminish the toned power of a Marine.
She tried to stand up and her right ankle gave a mighty shout of protest. She went right back down to the ground, and Wes immediately reached for her ankle.<
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“Cripes. I can feel the swelling through your boot,” he muttered. “You’ve sprained your ankle, at a minimum. You might even have broken it. A doctor’s going to have to look at it.”
She closed her eyes in mortification. Of course, she would choose this exact moment to lose her natural grace entirely. Wes helped her to her feet again, and this time she held her right foot off the ground, making no effort to put any weight on it. “If you’ll tell me where I can find a doctor, I’ll be on my way—”
Wes interrupted briskly, “You can’t drive with that foot injured. You won’t be able to operate the gas pedal and brakes safely.”
“I’ll drive with my left foot.”
“On these roads? Just after a snowstorm? I think not,” he snapped. “I’ll drive you to Hillsdale. There’s an urgent care clinic there. Doc Cooper will take care of you.”
And now she was an even greater pain in the butt than she’d already been to him. Great. She was undoubtedly upgrading from hated to pariah in the man’s mind. “Just call me a cab or something.”
“This is Montana, not Manhattan.”
She rolled her eyes at him. Without further words, he grabbed her right hand, pulled it across his shoulders and hoisted her over to the front porch. “Sit,” he ordered. “I’ll pull the truck up to the porch. Back in a minute.”
She followed orders and sat glumly. If it was possible to make a bigger hash of seeing Wes again, she didn’t think she could have done much better than this. A big pickup truck plowed through the snow from the barn onto the cleared path he’d made for her car. Wes parked and jumped out to fetch her. She hopped on one foot to the truck with his help and then awkwardly climbed into the vehicle.
Wes climbed onto the driver’s seat, jaw clenched, and headed off his property.
As they clattered over the metal grate under the entry arch, she asked, “What’s the grate for?”
“It’s called a cattle grate. Cows won’t walk over it, so it acts like a fence to keep them on the property. But vehicles can still get through without having to open and close gates behind them.”