The Cattleman's Unsuitable Wife (Wells Cattle Company Book 1)

by Pam Crooks

  Zurina’s tidy home had a welcoming feel. A woman’s touch.

  Hers.

  Some of his unease lifted.

  “Would you like a glass of wine?” she asked.

  He preferred a cigarette. And since he’d never acquired a taste for wine, a cold beer if she had one. Which apparently she didn’t.

  “Coffee would be fine. Thanks,” he said instead.

  “I have just made some. Sit.”

  She pulled out the only available chair left at the table. Trey hoped the rickety thing would hold his weight.

  He pulled off his hat. Sat carefully. The chair proved sturdy, and he relaxed, then faced the three men staring at him.

  A lesser man would’ve been intimidated, he decided, staring back at each one in turn. Their black-eyed glowers and knitted brows declared their resentment for him still ran strong.

  Trey ignored their antagonism. The longer he dallied, the less time he had to track down Allethaire. The longer he stayed away from her, the more danger she was in.

  He opened his mouth to start a serious discussion on how best to track down Mikolas, but Zurina slid a cup of steaming coffee in front of him, then added a plate heaped with thick slices of sourdough bread and a hunk of something pale.

  His intentions withered. That hunk of something pale worried him.

  He cleared his throat and shot a quick glance up at her, but it seemed she’d gotten real busy all of a sudden filling her father’s glass with wine.

  Trey didn’t know if he should throttle her—or beg her mercy. She had to know she’d put him in one helluva predicament.

  He casually lifted his cup, took a sip of the strong brew to buy himself some precious time, and watched her. Willed her to look at him.

  After she poured for her uncle, then moved over to her cousin, she finally gave up ignoring him.

  Their glances met.

  What the hell is this? his demanded.

  Her brow arched. What? You don’t like it?

  Like it, hell. She knew damn well he wouldn’t like it.

  Whatever it was.

  She leaned over the table and positioned the almost-empty wine bottle in the center. Her nearness filled his senses. Her womanly scent, too, and the warmth of her body.

  “You’ll find the sheep’s milk cheese delicious, Mr. Wells,” she said smoothly. “It’s called ‘Manchego,’ and it’s Uncle Benat’s specialty.”

  “That so?”

  Her uncle nodded gravely. “My grandfather first made it in Spain, where the sheep lived on the dry plains. I come to America, and I make it here. I age it. Six months. When it is ready, I smear the cheese with olive oil, so that it tastes very Mediterranean. Like it is from Spain.”

  “That so?” Trey said again, feigning interest.

  Zurina strolled past him and leaned a slender hip against the sideboard, crossed her arms and regarded him with a challenging arch to her brow.

  “Try it, Mr. Wells,” she purred.

  She knew damn well no self-respecting cattleman would eat anything that smacked of sheep, and Trey had already done more than his share of tolerating the woollies. He let them graze on Wells range, hadn’t he? Sun River Valley.

  He drew the line at eating sheep.

  Yessiree.

  He smirked inwardly. He knew the game Zurina played. And she played, expecting him to refuse.

  He took another sip of coffee. Swirled it in his mouth. Debated the merits of letting her win. Debated, too, the consequences from refusing while three of her strong-willed, cattleman-hating, trigger-happy relatives watched.

  Would they refuse to help him find Mikolas? Woodrow? Allethaire? Would they have suggestions where Trey should look but out of spite keep them to themselves?

  Trey set his coffee down. He couldn’t risk it. Damn it to hell, he didn’t dare.

  He gathered his willpower and buried his pride—cattleman’s pride. He broke off a chunk of the pale Manchego-or-whatever-it-was-called and threw it in his mouth. By the time he swallowed, it took all the muscles in his face to keep from showing his revulsion.

  The cheese had a potency to it, all right. A strange, nutty, sheep taste.

  “It’s even better with wine,” Zurina murmured, handing him a fresh glass of that, too.

  Calling himself all kinds of a coward, he snatched it from her and tossed back a gulp.

  Both the sheep cheese and Basque wine slid down his throat and into his belly.

  There. He’d done it.

  Uncle Benat nodded his approval.

  Deunoro leaned back in his chair with a slow, satisfied grin.

  Gabirel visibly relaxed with a sigh of admiration.

  And Zurina gifted him with a languid smile that tilted his world and warmed his blood and made him think of long, hot nights.

  He knew, then, he’d passed their test.

  Chapter Ten

  Watching him, knowing how much it cost him, something went soft inside Zurina’s heart.

  Trey showed some of the fairness Papa had always associated with him. As a cattleman, Trey had met her family halfway. He’d been willing to step through the door into the sheepman’s world.

  But not too far.

  She hid her amusement. It hadn’t been easy for him to eat the cheese. To drink the wine. Doing so had forced him to commit an act most cattlemen considered unspeakable.

  But he’d done it. With only a slight bruising to his pride.

  “My son is a good man, Mr. Wells.” Papa’s voice sounded strong in his conviction, and all eyes swung toward him, including Zurina’s. “Why he puts his name on the ransom note is a mystery to me.”

  “To all of us,” Uncle Benat added.

  “He claims to have the woman, Allethaire. If it is true, and we must believe it is so, I know in my heart he has good reason to have her,” Papa finished, looking somber.

  “Can’t think of any reason that might be good, Gabirel.” Trey speared him with a hard glance. “Holding a defenseless woman against her will is wrong. Demanding money for her makes it worse. He’s paired up with Woodrow Baldwin, who’s rustling WCC cattle. And we can’t forget what Woodrow has done to your sheep.” Trey leaned back in his chair with the grimness of a judge who’d just pronounced a death sentence. “Both of them must be stopped.”

  Zurina had never known her brother to act like this. Devious and calculated and greedy. Hearing Trey talk about him, as if he were a criminal of the worst kind, was like hearing about a complete stranger.

  Mikolas was hurting and angry. She suspected he was feeling lost, too, his identity taken after he’d learned what Sutton Wells had done. If she had to make excuses for her brother, it would be those.

  Yet they didn’t make what he’d done acceptable and right. For once, she had to agree with Trey. Mikolas had to be stopped.

  “I’m here because I want him found.” Trey spoke each word in a clipped, tight voice, but Zurina heard the veiled plea in the words as well. “I’m hoping you can help.”

  “We have been talking about that.” Deunoro nodded gravely.

  “Helping you,” Uncle Benat clarified.

  “We think we know how.”

  Zurina’s glance swung to her father in surprise. “You do?”

  “How?” Trey demanded.

  “We have thought of one place he might be.” Looking grim, Papa rubbed his chin, as if even now he considered it a long shot.

  “Where?” Zurina asked.

  For days, weeks, she had wracked her brain thinking. She’d imagined herself in Mikolas’s body, feeling his feelings, what he might do, where he might go.

  No one had seen him. No one had heard from him. She’d failed at every turn, and so had her father.

  “Rogers Pass,” he said.

  Slowly she straightened.

  She’d not been there in years, not since she was a young girl. The last time had been terrible, so frightening, she shouldn’t have forgotten.

  Rogers Pass. Rogers Pass.

  Why ha
dn’t she thought of it before?

  Why hadn’t anyone?

  “It is a bad place for the Vascos,” Deunoro said sadly. “The journey very difficult.”

  “Not even the sheep will go there.” Uncle Benat shook his head.

  Trey’s glance jumped between them. “So why would Mikolas? Woodrow?”

  “It’s the perfect hideout.” Zurina’s certainty grew, along with the pounding of her heart. “Very isolated. Mikolas would know this. He would know they would be safe.”

  Trey frowned his skepticism. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Because there is little grass for the cattle, and it’s high in the mountains,” Zurina said.

  “Only our family knows of it,” Deunoro said.

  A shadow darkened her father’s features. “And fur trappers.”

  “It is worth a try, is it not?” Uncle Benat demanded. “To look for him in the pass?”

  “Yes.” Zurina’s feet began to move, past Trey’s chair. Past Deunoro’s. “I will go right away.”

  Trey’s head came up. “What?”

  Papa appeared stricken. “’Rina, are you sure?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “What happened there—”

  “Was a long time ago.” She flung back the curtain to her small room and went inside.

  “If it’s as dangerous as you all think, then Zurina has no business riding out,” Trey said.

  She envisioned him scowling at the other three as she yanked open the drawer to her old dresser and pulled out her woolen sweater.

  “I can do it,” she called out.

  “Give me directions, and I’ll go myself. With the posse,” he called back.

  She snorted and didn’t care if he could hear. “You would only get lost with them.”

  “Tell her she stays, Gabirel.”

  On the other side of the drape, Trey’s voice rumbled with command, and who was he to tell her father what to do? Who was he to say what she could do?

  Zurina yanked back the curtain and poked her head out. “You want to go by yourself, Trey? You want to get lost? Fine. It doesn’t matter to me. If Mikolas is there, I’ll find him first.”

  She pulled back again and dropped a pair of thick socks onto the sweater, kicked off her sandals and went for her ankle boots.

  “You’re not strong enough to be left alone, Gabirel,” Trey protested. “Do you have someone to care for you if Zurina takes off?”

  Zurina stilled. That she hadn’t thought of. In her haste and hope to find Mikolas, she’d forgotten how fragile Papa was.

  “My wife will watch over him.” Uncle Benat spoke up quickly. “Neria will take good care of him, and we do not live far from here.”

  Zurina blew out a big breath of relief. She trusted her aunt Neria implicitly. Papa was sure to get better under her watchful eye. Besides, he was already on the mend. He wouldn’t be too much of a burden.

  “Thank you, Uncle Benat,” she called out and pulled on her socks and boots.

  “Hunting down these outlaws is work not meant for a woman.” Trey’s tone had grown hard. A little desperate. “It’s dangerous, it’s tough, and she could get hurt.”

  “She knows where to go, Mr. Wells,” Papa said.

  “Send a man in her place.”

  “Who is not out with their flocks?” Uncle Benat asked. “Gabirel is too sick. Me, I am too old.”

  “And I have never been to this Rogers Pass. I would get lost, too,” Deunoro said, regret in his voice.

  “Zurina is the only one who can do this,” Gabirel said firmly. “There is no one else.”

  The responsibility of what she must do weighed heavily upon her shoulders. She would not think of what had happened there, all those years ago, in that tiny cabin hidden in the woods. If he could, Papa would spare her the journey. The memories. Anyone in her family would.

  But she relished a new opportunity to find Mikolas. To help Allethaire. To exact justice on Woodrow Baldwin for destroying the Vasco flock.

  Zurina vowed to do it all, with or without Trey’s help.

  As much as Trey hated to admit it, coming up here to see Zurina had turned into a big mistake.

  He riveted a hard stare on that curtain. He had to find a way to convince her to stay put. It was clear something had happened to Zurina at Rogers Pass. No one was saying what, and why the men in her family would consent to her returning he couldn’t comprehend, but her place was here, in her home, taking care of her father.

  Where she’d be safe.

  She was just going to have to accept the fact Rogers Pass was no place for her. She’d have to learn, too, he had every intention of hunting down Mikolas without her.

  He didn’t need Zurina’s help anymore. His destination changed the circumstances, and he needed the posse’s help more.

  Impatience rolled through him at being forced to wait until she emerged from her room when every muscle in his body ached to march in there and make her stay behind.

  He leaned back in his chair. A gully-washer of worry poured through him for all Allethaire was going through while he sat here, doing nothing but be a victim of propriety. Allethaire wouldn’t be in danger if it wasn’t for him, and he refused to make the same mistake with Zurina.

  The curtain swished open. Zurina emerged from her room with a determined stride that took her straight past him to the sideboard. Trey noted the sweater she carried and the rolled blanket under her arm, and from the way she threw bread and cheese into a towel, she’d be out the door in moments.

  He stood. “Zurina, listen to me.”

  She ignored him. “I’ll bring the rifle, Papa. And extra cartridges. Give me all you have.”

  “God save us, Zurina, if you have to shoot your own brother,” Gabirel said, making a Sign of the Cross. But he rose with Benat’s assistance and shuffled toward a shelf in the corner of the kitchen.

  “I will saddle the mare for you, Zurina,” Deunoro offered.

  “Thank you.” He headed outside, and she cast Trey an imperious glance. “It’s not Mikolas I’d shoot, but the man with him. Woodrow Baldwin.”

  Trey scowled. “You’re not going to shoot anyone, Zurina. When it comes time for reckoning, let me do it. Or the posse.”

  “And where is your posse, eh?” She pulled the towel’s four corners together into a secure knot.

  “Not far,” Trey said. At the time, his reasoning to have them lay low had been sound—to keep from alarming the Basques while looking for Zurina. “But—”

  “You want to go down to them? Fine. I’ll leave without you. Uncle Benat, please bring Aunt Neria to me. There are some instructions I must give her.”

  Trey gritted his teeth. “Damn it, Zurina.”

  She took the box of shells her father handed her, added the old Henry rifle and her gear and strode toward the door with determined thumps of her boot heels. “I’ll be right back, Papa.”

  Benat hustled his girth after her, and Trey moved to follow.

  “Mr. Wells.”

  He halted at the sound of Gabirel’s voice behind him. It was just the two of them left in the cabin, and Trey chafed at the delay.

  “When you go to Rogers Pass, I will kill you if you hurt her,” Gabirel said slowly.

  He stood with one hand on the back of the chair, steadying himself, but he faced Trey with shoulders squared and his black eyes cold with warning.

  Trey’s gaze narrowed. “Damn you for thinking I would.”

  “Your father was a hard man. He took what he wanted. You are like him in many ways.”

  Trey found truth in the words. Sutton Wells rose to power as a wealthy cattleman by making plenty of enemies during the climb up. Now that he was gone, Trey intended to hold the reins to the WCC empire with the same hard-fisted grip as his father once held them.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he growled.

  “It was not meant as one.”

  As a sheepherder, he wouldn’t harbor any love for Sutton Wells. Trey knew it. Accep
ted it. But he’d long valued his relationship with Gabirel Vasco for the honesty and respect they kept between them.

  Gabirel’s hand fisted. “My daughter is a beautiful woman, Mr. Wells—”

  “And she’s safe with me. You have my word on it. I promise you I’ll watch out for her. She’s got no business traipsing through dangerous country. As her father, you should know it and forbid her from going.”

  “She goes for me. She goes because it is all we have left.”

  Trey’s brow arched. “Of your pride, you mean.”

  Gabirel stiffened. “It would be no different for you.”

  Trey had to give him the point. He made a reluctant nod of concession. “Under different circumstances.”

  “The night the sheep were killed, Zurina and I, we were defenseless. We could not fight back, and now we have been shamed as sheepherders. We have been destroyed.” Gabirel took a moment to breathe, to swallow. “We must find out who did this to us. We must learn why.”

  “I’ll find out for you.”

  “Only Zurina knows where to go.”

  “Damn it, Gabirel. She can tell me how to get there.”

  “And if you cannot find the exact place? Then you lose valuable time.”

  Trey recalled the terms of the ransom note and gritted his teeth. Dusk. Tomorrow. Wolf Creek. He was losing valuable time, all right, arguing a decision neither Zurina nor Gabirel intended to change.

  He swung around and headed out the door, not caring that it slammed shut behind him or that he’d not told Gabirel goodbye. Trey’s searching glance found Zurina leading a horse from her poor-excuse-for-a-barn, her cousin barely visible inside.

  Trey strode toward her, down the long side of the cabin and planted his feet in front of her. Her stride never faltered, and their gazes clashed. Her chin lifted to a defiant angle.

  She would’ve kept on walking past him with her impertinent nose in the air if Trey hadn’t hooked his arm around her waist and stopped her. In one swift move, he half-carried, half-spun her out of her stride and held her prisoner against the back of the cabin, then pressed his knee between her thighs to keep her there.