by Cindy Dees
Wes looked dubious of that explanation and included her in the general scowl he was shooting at his mother. “Should you be driving on that ankle yet?”
She took off on crutches toward the small barn where her car was parked, and Wes kept pace beside her. She answered, “I just had a follow-up visit with Ben Cooper, and he told me I could drive a little if I was careful and took it easy.”
He snorted. “Since when do you know how to take it easy in a car?”
She snorted back. “Have you ridden in a car with your mother? She’s a menace!”
“That’s why my father insists on her driving that German tank. He figures if she crashes she has a better chance of survival in a well-made car. She has actually slowed down some in her latter years.”
That was a scary thought. They walked in silence for a minute, and then Jessica asked, “How are the cows doing? Any calves yet?”
“Nah. It’ll be three more weeks or so before calves start dropping.”
“At least it’s warming up before they get here.”
“Don’t be fooled. We’ll have at least one more big snowstorm, if not two, before spring really arrives.”
“Crazy weather you people have out here.”
“It’s the mountains. They make the weather unpredictable.” He pushed back a big sliding door and revealed her little car parked in the barn. It was clean and waxed and polished.
She looked over at Wes in surprise. “You washed my car for me?”
He shrugged. “I was bored, and it had salt on it from the road. If you don’t get that stuff off, it’ll corrode the paint right off. It’s a nice old car, and I didn’t want Montana to ruin it.”
“That was so thoughtful of you!” She smiled at her vintage 1960 Corvette fondly. “She is a sweet ride. Thanks for taking care of her.”
His scowl was back, even deeper and darker than before. “Trust me, I didn’t do it for you. I did it for the car.”
Hurt speared into her. When would she stop feeling his jabs like this? With previous boyfriends, when she’d been done with them, she was done with them. Their opinions ceased to matter to her. But for some reason, she still cared—deeply—what Wes thought of her.
Weird. Did it have something to do with him being a Marine like her father, or something else? Except, she didn’t care what her father thought of her for the most part, either. He’d smothered her as a kid and controlled her far too aggressively as she’d gotten older. She had long ago given up on ever pleasing the man and had committed to living her own life.
Of course, look where that had gotten her. Rebelling against the Old Man hadn’t turned out so well.
She sighed and climbed into her car, awkwardly positioning her bandaged ankle. Wes put the crutches in the passenger seat, leaning from the floor up to the passenger headrest.
Without a single word of farewell, he moved over to the barn door to wait for her to leave. She blinked back tears that took her by surprise. He really did hate her.
Chapter 6
Wes watched Jessica drive away, his gut roiling wildly. Why in the hell did he still react so strongly every time he saw her? If only he was sure it was just hatred tying his stomach in knots like this. But he feared it wasn’t. And that ticked him off. He had to get her out of his head!
He’d dreamed of her again last night. A hot, sexy dream of lust and love, naked bodies and naughty deeds. The kind of dream that he woke up from restless and horny and with a huge chip on his shoulder.
And what the hell was his mother doing palling around with his ex, anyway? God knew what Jessica was saying about him to his mother. Not that he cared, of course. But Miranda always had been a meddler of the first water.
Well, she and his father could just get the hell out of his life and stay out. Irritated, he turned to face his house. Its decrepit state grated on his nerves, but he didn’t have the money to do anything about it yet. The first order of business was to establish a high-quality herd of cattle, care for them and then put decent facilities around them—solid fences, a good barn and improved pasture.
He’d vowed to himself not to touch his trust fund that came from his share of the proceeds of Runaway Ranch. This was about doing something on his own for himself, by himself. No politics, no favors traded, no ties or debts to anyone. He was done with all of that. It was bad enough to be forced to come home with his tail between his legs. He’d be damned if he came crawling back to his family for a handout, too.
And Jessica Blankenship was to blame for it all.
Irritated at the world in general, he loaded up the bucket of the tractor with tools for repairing fences and headed out to work on the fence line between the Outlaw Ranch and Runaway Ranch. It was a warm afternoon, and he knew that particular fence had been in bad shape when he bought this place. Hard winter had come before he could repair all of it, however.
Sure enough, as he headed up into the high pasture above the barns, he found a whole stretch of fence that was completely down. Worse, there were plenty of fresh tracks in the mud around it. Crud. Had some of his cows wandered through the broken fence to join the herd at Runaway? He would have to take a head count when he got back to the barn.
This was, of course, why ranchers still branded cattle. It was the only way to know which animals belonged to which ranch when something like this happened.
Sure enough, when he drove back to the barn and banged on the metal feeder to call in the cows for food, only about half his herd showed up. Great. He counted heads and was down forty-six cows. Like it or not, he was going to have to make a trip over to Runaway.
It galled him to have to get in contact with his father to ask if he could come over and retrieve cows that had managed to slip off his ranch. It made him look like an amateur who couldn’t control his own herd. He might hate the idea of being reduced to being a cattle rancher, but, by God, if he was going to be one, he wanted to be a good one.
He should have known when Jessica showed up earlier that this day was going to suck from top to bottom. He finished feeding the remaining cows, stomped up to the house and jumped in his truck. He hooked it to his cattle trailer and reluctantly drove next door to Runaway Ranch.
He couldn’t help being envious of the miles of steel fences, the manicured pastures and the massive log-and-stone mansion that proclaimed the ranch’s wealth and success. Not to mention the sprawling, handsome barns and neat row of farm equipment parked under an open-sided shed. His father had close to two million dollars’ worth of tractors, plows, hay balers and other equipment, alone. The real wealth of the ranch was in the land and animals, however. John Morgan kept one of the best cattle herds in this part of the country.
Someday, Outlaw Ranch would be every bit as successful. He would work day and night until it was. And he would do it on his own, dammit. He would show his father. He would show everyone.
As he passed the main house, he got a nasty shock. What the hell was Jessica’s car doing parked here? What plot was she hatching against him now? Hadn’t it been enough to destroy his career? Was she going after his family, too? Or maybe she was just trying to poison his relationship with his family. News flash: he’d already done that for himself.
Scowling ferociously, he parked his truck beside her sports car and stormed into the main house to give her a piece of his mind.
Willa Mathers, daughter of the long-time ranch foreman, Hank Mathers, looked up from a desk tucked into a corner of the massive kitchen. She’d grown up alongside the Morgan children and was, for all intents and purposes, one of them.
“Hey, Wes. What brings you here? I thought you and John were on the outs.”
He scowled at his surrogate little sister. “We are. But I had a fence line go down and some of my cattle appear to have wandered onto Runaway land.”
“Oh, man. That sucks. How many cows are you missing?”
“Forty-six.
” Which was more than half of his herd and a bigger loss than he would be financially able to absorb. Not that he was about to admit that to anyone over here. Runaway’s herd numbered in the many hundreds, and forty-six cows would be an annoying inconvenience to them. “Do you know where my father is?”
“Last I heard, he was down in the cattle barn checking out a couple of new bulls.”
He didn’t want to ask the question, but he couldn’t resist. “What’s Jessica Blankenship doing here?”
“Is she the girl on crutches that your mother was talking to earlier?”
“That would be her.”
“Miranda’s taken her up to the old hunting cabin.”
“What the hell for?” he blurted.
“Miranda’s redoing the place. I got the impression that Jessica is some sort of interior decorator or something.”
“She is.”
“Well, there you have it. Miranda must have hired her to redo the cabin.”
If possible, his scowl deepened. Leave it to Jessica to worm her way into his family and continue making his life a living hell.
“Want me to give her or your mother a message when they get back?” Willa asked.
“No!” He glared at her fiercely. She was far too damned observant for her own good.
She grinned at him unrepentantly as if she’d known she was poking at a sore spot by asking.
“Twerp,” he grumbled.
“Jerk,” she retorted fondly.
“How’s school coming?” he asked her, relenting.
“Almost done with my dissertation. Anna has given me the last piece I needed for it. I used the way she helped Chase recover from his combat experiences as a case study.”
“What are you going to do with this PhD of yours when you finish it?”
“I’m going to help ex-military buttheads like you learn to reintegrate with civilian society to lead productive—and socially pleasant—lives.”
“I’m socially pleasant!” he exclaimed in response to her obvious dig.
“Ha. And I thought Chase was a curmudgeon when he came home! You’re grouchier than Attila the Hun, Wes.”
Offended at the comparison, Wes retorted, “Chase had PTSD from a mission gone wrong. I don’t.”
“And yet, you’re possibly more messed up in the head than he was. Why is that?”
“Don’t try to play amateur shrink with me, Willa.”
“In a few months, I won’t be an amateur. Will you answer me then?”
“No. Keep your nose out of it.”
“So you do admit you have issues.”
He threw up his hands in disgust and marched out of the house. He wasn’t interested in arguing in tricky circles with his almost-shrink, almost-sister. He jumped back into his truck and headed for the big cattle barn that would shelter upwards of a thousand heads of cattle if the weather got bad.
Today, the barn was empty. His father’s main herd must be out in one of the back pastures taking advantage of the warm sunshine and first grass of spring. The next barn over was the calving barn, and he headed there on the off chance that some of his very pregnant cows had ended up being sorted out in the past day and sent there for supplemental feed and monitoring as they approached calving.
As he stepped into the relative dark of the calving barn’s dim interior, his father boomed, “Well, well, well. The prodigal son has come home already?”
Cursing mentally, Wes gritted his teeth and said evenly, “I’m short some cattle, and I found a stretch of busted fence this afternoon. Any chance forty-six of my cows have found their way into your herd?”
“Let’s take a look.”
A quick check of the cows munching hay and resting in the barn’s main loafing shed showed that about a dozen of his most pregnant cows were in here.
John asked, “You want to leave these cows with me? I can have my guys oversee their deliveries. Make sure nothing goes wrong. I’ll have a vet here full-time starting next week until calving season is over.”
“I can take care of my own cattle, thanks,” Wes bit out, his jaw hardening even more in his effort to be polite.
“Too bad we turned the herd out up in the high pasture this morning. We’re gonna have to bring them back in and run them through the chutes to sort out your cows from ours.”
Wes winced. That would be an all-day job.
John suggested, “Why don’t you spend the night here, and we’ll get to it first thing in the morning?”
He hated the suggestion, but it made sense. His own herd was already fed for the day, and he really did want his cows back as quickly as possible and to get back to living his own life on his own land.
“Besides, your mother will be thrilled to have you for supper.”
His gaze narrowed. Staying the night would give him a chance to tell his mother to steer clear of Jessica and the trouble that seemed to follow her around. He nodded briskly. “Fine. I’ll stay.”
* * *
But when suppertime arrived and Jessica accompanied Miranda into the house at the last minute before the meal, Wes had a change of heart. Just looking at Jessica made his gut tighten into impossible knots.
“Wes!” his mother exclaimed. “What a lovely surprise!”
She stepped forward to kiss his cheek, and he took advantage of the moment to mutter, “What’s she doing here?”
“Oh, you mean Jessica? She’s redecorating the hunting cabin for me. I told her to stay here at the ranch until she’s done with the job. It’ll save her a ton of driving back and forth to town while she’s working on the place.”
Perfect. Now he knew where not to be for the next few weeks.
For her part, Jessica was silent, standing behind Miranda and looking uncomfortable. What did she have to be uncomfortable about? He was the one whose life had been destroyed.
Scowling, he took his place at the big plank table as Willa and the housekeeper, a young woman named Ella who was new at the ranch since he’d left to join the Marines, served supper. He dug into the sour cream enchiladas, arrested by how good they tasted.
Miranda commented, “Ella’s a chef by training. I keep offering to set her up in business with a restaurant of her own, but she keeps insisting she likes it out here on the ranch.”
Wes nodded at the pretty young woman. “You really should take my mother up on the offer if everything you make is this tasty.”
A shadow passed across the young woman’s face—the kind of shadow he’d seen from victims of war and violence when he’d been deployed in the field as a combat officer. What the hell had put that expression in her eyes?
He was distracted, though, by dessert—cinnamon ice cream and crispy sopaipillas so tender they practically fell apart on his fork. Jessica had been notably silent during the meal, which was unusual for her. Usually, she was in the thick of conversation, outgoing and vivacious. She had a gift for making everyone around her feel at ease.
He’d seen it any number of times when she’d acted as her father’s hostess at official dinners and the cocktail parties so vital to advancing a senior officer’s career. After all, it wasn’t what you knew, rather who you knew, when it came time for political appointments to be made. And George Blankenship had been nothing if not ambitious. The man aimed to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff one day.
Personally, Wes had found the man overbearing and arrogant, too willing to throw others under the bus in the name of advancing his own career. And that trait had transferred to the bastard’s daughter.
As coffee was poured all around, John asked his wife, “So how much is this renovation of the cabin going to cost me?”
Miranda deferred to Jessica, and all eyes turned on her. She answered smoothly, “It’s a small space, and I want to keep the design simple and functional. It won’t be ridiculously expensive.”
She quoted a figure that actually sounded cheap, given the quality of work Wes knew she was capable of. In Washington, Jessica had commanded shocking fees for redoing the homes of the wealthy who wanted authentic historic renovations.
“I’ll hold you to that, young lady,” John said, smiling.
Wes interjected, “He means it, Jessica. If you want to revise your estimate upward, do it now.”
She glanced over at him, her expression impossible to read. “You forget that I am my father’s daughter. I know exactly what to expect out of your father, a military man himself.”
John pounced on that. “Your father was military? What branch?”
“He’s a Marine, sir. Stationed at the Pentagon at the moment.”
John grinned. “Ugh. He’s hating every minute of it, isn’t he?”
Jessica shrugged. “He seems to have adapted pretty well. He considers politics to be just a different form of warfare. It’s combat in a conference room instead of in an armored personnel carrier.”
Wes snorted mentally. Truer words had never been spoken.
Jessica neatly turned the conversation back to a discussion of what color John and Miranda would like the inside of the new cabin to be.
For his part, Wes leaned back, studying Jessica. Why hadn’t she admitted who her father was? Surely she wasn’t trying to protect him. What was she up to, then?
He waited until after the meal, when his parents had settled down to read newspapers in front of the giant stone hearth that dominated the great room, and he followed Jessica down the hall to a bathroom. When she emerged, he grabbed her elbow, steered her into his father’s office and closed the door.
He backed her up against the wood-paneled walls and planted a hand over her shoulder to trap her in place. He looked down and her chest was heaving in the most disconcerting way.
All of a sudden, he was thinking about other times she’d breathed that hard. Times when she’d arched up into him, kissing him senseless, wrapping her leg around his hips and teasing him until he’d stripped her clothes off and sunk into her hot, welcoming body and lost himself—