Best Man in Wyoming

by Margot Dalton

  In a New York minute, he would.

  Rex shook his head. He could hardly believe these stunning changes in himself. It was so bizarre, like looking inside his head and finding a stranger had taken up residence there, somebody he needed to acquaint himself with all over again.

  Or could it be...

  He shook his head slowly.

  Could this home-loving, monogamous outdoorsman be the real Rex Trowbridge? Had he actually been living as an imposter all these years?

  Rex shifted in the saddle, then stood up briefly and rested his weight in the stirrups to stretch his legs. He sat back and looked around at the peaceful beauty of the mountains.

  The trail was growing steeper and the horses picked their way with increasing care. On their right, a narrow gorge plunged downward so far that they rode level with the treetops filling the valley below. To the left of the trail, little springs trickled from the mountainside and made their way down over twisted roots and mossy outcroppings, gathering strength as they plunged into the depths below.

  Rex leaned ahead to make sure all the boys were navigating this treacherous stretch carefully and letting their horses pick the trail as they’d been taught.

  “Take it easy, boys,” he called. “Everybody stay in line, and don’t stop.”

  Clint cast a brief contemptuous glance over his shoulder but the other five heads nodded earnestly in unison, concentrating on the trail.

  Rex settled back in the saddle and returned to his thoughts.

  This was something he often wondered, just what kind of person he really was, and what he might have become if his life hadn’t taken such a bitter turn early in his childhood.

  He’d never really known his father, although the man had stuck around long enough to sire a brother three years younger than Rex. But then, not too long after Dane’s birth, the old man had taken off and they’d never seen him again.

  Deanna Trowbridge, Rex’s pretty young mother, had cried without ceasing for about two months after her husband left. But then she’d picked herself up and tried to go on.

  His face tightened as he recalled those early years. They’d lived in trailer homes and motels, working the onion fields in southeastern Washington State, and once they spent a whole winter in a shed at the back of the place where Deanna was doing housework.

  The only bright spot in Rex’s life during those years had been his brother. He loved Dane, who was a fat, good-natured baby and followed his big brother everywhere with unquestioning adoration.

  For his part, Rex had taken tender care of the youngster. He’d protected Dane and fought hard to keep him safe.

  But not hard enough...

  Rex’s face tightened with pain. He strained wistfully forward in his stirrups, trying to catch a glimpse of Lindsay, but she was out of sight around a bend in the trail.

  Like somebody unable to resist probing a sore tooth, he let his mind go back to that last nightmare day when Deanna’s boyfriend came to their trailer. She always had a lot of boyfriends but most of them were good to the two little boys, bringing candy and gifts for the kids to please their mother.

  This man was different, an oil rigger with a sneering, handsome face. Deanna was crazy about him, but even ten-year-old Rex could tell the man was bad trouble. He tried to warn his mother, but she never listened. Her face would get all hot and misty whenever the man was around. She even walked different.

  But the last time Deanna’s boyfriend came to their trailer, he brought a gun. He was drunk and enraged about something, furious with her for a flirtation he kept accusing her of having with the manager of the trailer park.

  When Rex realized the danger he began to fight with the man, struggling with all his boyish strength to wrest the gun away and run off with it. For a while Deanna’s boyfriend had just laughed at him, standing arrogantly in the kitchen and letting young Rex fling himself in vain against that big hard body.

  But at last, tiring of the game, he set to work to beat the boy within an inch of his life. All Rex could remember of that terrible hour was an eternity of crushing, sickening pain.

  He woke up under a bed, hurting in every bit of himself. When he crawled out to assess the damage, his mother was dead, and so was Dane.

  Rex closed his eyes and groaned softly at the memory he seldom allowed himself to recall, even all these years later.

  But there was something about this place, the placid gait of the horses and the ageless, eternal mountains all around, that seemed to bring a man’s life into sharper focus.

  Out here you couldn’t hide from the things in your heart, because there were none of the distractions that city life offered.

  But, mysteriously, along with the hurtful memories somehow came the balm to make them endurable. No wonder people said wild places were healing.

  He heard a shout from the boys farther up the trail and saw them pointing downward. Rex followed their signals to see a flock of wild turkeys descending the slope in stately procession, their dark plumage and red wattles glittering like jewels in the morning sunlight.

  He smiled and waved back at the boys, then turned to check the packhorses at the rear of the line.

  After Deanna’s death, welfare officials had tried to find a foster home for him, but Rex hated all of them. He was still sick with loneliness for his mother and little brother, and he couldn’t talk to anybody about what had happened.

  When they caught him after his fourth time running away, he was put into juvenile detention. As soon as Rex was able to escape from that place, he headed for the streets. He’d been eleven years old, living by his wits in downtown Spokane, at a time when homeless people were still a relatively uncommon sight.

  Rex looked at Clint’s slouched body jogging ahead of him in the red shirt and wondered how many life experiences he and this sullen boy had shared, and how surprised Clint would be to hear about them.

  By the time Rex Trowbridge was brought to Lost Springs Ranch, he’d been just twelve years old but as tough and hard as whipcord. He’d understood the laws of the jungle as well as any animal, and trusted nobody.

  Lindsay’s parents, Robert and Karen Duncan, had worked hard, along with Sam, to earn the boy’s trust. Then, slowly, they’d begun to civilize him. And Lindsay had helped a lot, too, with her tomboyish sweetness and innocent trust.

  By all outward appearances, they’d succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

  But nowadays Rex often wondered how much of that tough, hungry, desperate little boy he’d actually left behind. Maybe it was the miserable child he’d once been who now drove him to succeed in his profession, to buy big impressive cars and expensive clothes and take lavish holidays he knew his friends would envy.

  But that same child, the terrified boy who’d lain shivering under the bed while his mother and little brother were being murdered, had kept him from ever loving anybody else.

  How could you give yourself to a person who might be cruelly torn away from you while you looked on in helpless pain? Better to remain free and invest your emotion in cars, works of art and other costly possessions that you were able to buy or sell at will.

  Things that could be covered by insurance, because life held no guarantees.

  Rex wasn’t sure how much of the truth Lindsay knew about his boyhood. She’d been just a little girl when they brought him to the ranch.

  He grinned, remembering her angular body and her immense capacity for imagination and daring. Nothing had scared Lindsay back in those days. She could come up with better, wilder, more exciting games than anybody. If she’d been conscious of being a girl, and different from her playmates, it never showed until she was fourteen or fifteen and began to develop shapely little breasts and a pair of curving hips.

  Oh, Linnie, Rex thought, his heart aching. What a darling you were....

  He wonde
red if she’d ever had a chance to peek at his case file. Robert Duncan always kept the boys’ records under lock and key in his office. But when Rex became the director of the board at Lost Springs Ranch, he’d looked up his own file and removed it so nobody would ever learn that sad story of pain and terror, or be able to read about the humiliating times he’d broken down and sobbed when talking to the ranch psychologist.

  Ancient history, he told himself grimly, sitting erect in the saddle. All of it was ancient history. No point in thinking about it...

  “Hey!” He glanced at his watch and called forward, up the line of riders. “Somebody pass the word to Lindsay that it’s time to start looking around for a place where we can stop and have our lunch.”

  “All right!” Lonnie Schneider called back, so eagerly that the other boys began to torment him with good-natured teasing.

  * * *

  AT THE END of the first day, they stopped to camp in a high meadow when the wind began to freshen and the shadows fell long and silent across the trail.

  The group dismounted and each rider unsaddled his own horse and gave it a rubdown. The boys hobbled around for a while, avoiding each other’s eyes, everybody trying not to show just how stiff and sore they felt after a long day in the saddle.

  Lindsay watched them in amusement, noting that even surly Clint was limping just a little, though he did his best to hide it.

  Rex, though, seemed amazingly fresh. He carried the sacks of cooking supplies and food over to her and set them on the grass with a flourish.

  She watched him with approval. “Nobody would ever suspect you were a lawyer in real life. You look just like a cowboy.”

  He grinned and leaned toward her. “That’s good, Linnie,” he murmured, lowering his voice so none of the boys could hear. “Because I hear you’ve got the hots for cowboys.”

  “Not after ten hours on the trail.” She turned away to hide her smile. “By that time, the only thing I’m lusting after is a soft bedroll and a good sleep.”

  “How about a soft bedroll and some good company?” he suggested.

  “Rex...” she began warningly.

  But he was already gone, striding off across the campsite and directing the saddle-weary boys to their various tasks.

  Despite howls of protest, everybody fell to work with surprising efficiency. Clint, Rex and Allan concentrated on the horses, getting them fed, brushed and settled. Under Rex’s supervision the two boys made an impromptu corral by stretching a couple of rows of lariat rope around a circle of tree trunks. As an extra precaution, they staked out a couple of the livelier horses on ground hobbles.

  Lindsay worked with Lonnie and Danny to make the cooking pit and start preparing their meal. Meanwhile the Bernstein twins dug a latrine in a thick grove of trees just down the slope, made an ingenious sling to keep food supplies suspended out of reach of bears, and set up Lindsay’s tent at the edge of the camp, discreetly removed from the rows of sleeping bags.

  “We’ll do Lindsay’s air mattress,” Jason called out, getting the little pump from his brother’s pack. “And maybe Danny’s. But the rest of you guys have to look after your own.”

  “Thank you, Jason,” Lindsay said from across the campsite, where she was emptying cans of beans into a big cooking pot.

  Danny crushed each can when she finished with it, stomping it flat with his little boots and putting it away carefully in the waste sack.

  “Good campers don’t leave one single thing behind,” Lindsay told the boy. “We’ll carry out everything we use, so nobody can even tell we were here. That way the wilderness stays pure and clean for other people to use.”

  Danny watched, round-eyed and solemn, as Tim Bernstein inflated an air mattress, then arranged Danny’s small bedroll on top of it, complete with teddy bear.

  “I can’t believe I’m really going to sleep out here all night,” he breathed. “Right in the mountains.”

  Lindsay emptied the final can of beans and set it down on the grass for him to squash. “Are you afraid, sweetheart?”

  “’Course not,” he said scornfully.

  But she sensed some hesitation in the little boy’s manner, and wondered if he would be quite as brave when night fell across the mountains.

  * * *

  THEY FINISHED their meal of bread, cheese, beans and fruit, then made pots of black tea that the boys drank with lashings of powdered cream and brown sugar.

  By the time the camp was tidied and the waste materials stored away, the woods had filled up with inky darkness that seemed even denser beyond the glow of the big campfire.

  Noises drifted in from the woods. They heard squirrels chattering overhead, the hooting of owls and the high-pitched singing yelps of distant coyotes. The boys gathered around the fire, their young faces ruddy in the glow of leaping flames as they told the kind of stories dear to the hearts of boys everywhere, scary tales of corpses and monsters and massacres.

  Lindsay sat in front of her tent on a blanket, sipping a mug of the hot sweet tea. Rex lay next to her with his hands folded behind his head, booted feet casually extended, gazing upward at the sky.

  “Too bad it’s so cloudy,” he commented. “There’ll be a full moon in a few nights, you know. But it looks as if we won’t get to see it for a while.”

  Lindsay cast him a sideways glance, conscious of his nearness with every fiber of her being. “That’s just as well,” she said, taking another sip of tea. “The full moon makes the horses restless. This way we’ll sleep more peacefully.”

  “But it’s not nearly as romantic.”

  “Romantic!” she said, trying to scoff. “Who thinks about romance on a trail ride with six rowdy boys?”

  “I do.” Lazily he reached up to rub her back, stroking and kneading the aching muscles.

  Lindsay sighed with pleasure. For once she didn’t move away. In fact, she edged a little nearer to him.

  “That feels so good,” she murmured. “I thought I was in pretty good shape, but it still takes stamina to spend ten hours on horseback.”

  “Do you have lots of stamina, Linnie?” His voice was teasing, but with a husky edge. Out of sight of the boys he slipped his hand under her sweater, then her shirt, and began to caress her naked back.

  His touch seemed to chill and burn at the same time. This time she forced herself to pull away, trying to look casual as she tucked her shirt in again.

  “Don’t you think it’s bad for Danny to listen to all those scary stories?” she asked. “What if he has nightmares?”

  “I don’t think he’s even listening,” Rex said. “Look, he’s practically asleep.”

  Lindsay smiled fondly, watching the little boy drowsing against an upturned saddle.

  Danny was trying so hard to be one of the big boys. But he was clearly exhausted by the day’s ride, the fresh air and food and the warmth of the fire. His ruddy head wobbled from side to side, and his eyes kept dropping shut.

  “I’ll look after him,” Rex said when Lindsay started climbing to her feet. “You just relax.”

  She sank back gratefully, still sipping her tea, and watched as Rex skirted the fire, plucked the smallest, sleepiest camper from the group of boys and carried him over to the row of sleeping bags.

  Working skillfully, he stripped off Danny’s jeans and boots, tucked the child into the sleeping bag and settled the teddy bear in the crook of his arm. Rex patted and kissed the flushed cheek, murmured a few last words and returned to Lindsay.

  “Sound asleep before I zipped up the bag,” he reported.

  “You’re so sweet with him,” Lindsay said, still moved by his tenderness. “Where did you ever learn to look after a little boy like that, Rex?”

  He sprawled beside her and reached for his own tea. “I had a brother once, a long time ago.”

  Lindsay
turned to look at him in surprise. “Really? You never once told me that, and I’ve known you more than twenty years.”

  “I keep telling you...” he said, his eyes glittering in the shadows.

  “...there are all kinds of things I don’t know about you,” Lindsay finished for him. “I know that, Rex. And most of those things will have to remain a mystery.”

  She turned away deliberately, her heart pounding, but his hand was toying with the hem of her shirt again.

  “Aren’t you going to be lonely in that tent all night?” he whispered. “What if a bear gets in there?”

  “If I find any bears in my tent, I’ll scream really loud,” she said without looking at him.

  “But what if it’s just a big friendly bear who likes to kiss and cuddle?” His fingers were roaming over her bare skin again, stroking and caressing.

  “If you’re going to insist on doing that,” Lindsay said in a low voice, “then rub the small of my back, please. It feels so tight and sore.”

  Obediently he began to work his strong fingers just above her belt, while she sighed with pleasure and lifted her face to the warmth of the distant fire.

  “Rex,” she said at last.

  “Hmm? Linnie, you have such beautiful skin. Just like warm silk.”

  “Does this trail seem a little bit strange to you?”

  “I thought you were the one who knew these trails. Does this feel good?” he added, probing a muscle along her spine.

  “It feels heavenly. In another minute I’ll curl up and purr and start shaking my leg.”

  He chuckled. “So why are you worrying about the trail?”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. “It just seems to me that we’re getting awfully high, almost as if we’ve already crossed the first range of mountains.”

  His hands continued their gentle ministrations. “But that would never happen, Lin. Sam says the ranch horses are all trained to pick their way around these trails on the eastern slope, and start working their way back toward Karl Fuller’s place.”

  “I know.” Lindsay backed closer to him, loving the soothing feel of his hands. “Sam told me I didn’t need to worry about the trails at all, just give the lead horses enough rein and let them pick their way. And that’s what I’ve been doing all day, but it still feels like we’ve climbed too high.”