“How would you know?” Trey demanded. “You’ve been down at the barn for the past hour.”
“He knows,” Jack said, “because he’s got eyes in his head.”
“Personally,” Ace said as he squirted charcoal starter into the grill, “I think it’s cute.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Trey held his eldest brother’s gaze while surreptitiously slipping the end of his thumb over the mouth of his beer bottle. They were wrong, of course. He didn’t stare at Laurie like a lovesick puppy. He wasn’t in love with her. In lust, yeah, well, he could admit to that, to himself and to her, but not to his brothers. They had to pay.
“Yeah.” Ace showed his teeth in a Cheshire Cat grin. “I do.”
“How about you, Jack?” Trey asked. “You think it’s cute?”
Jack rocked back on his heels. “I think it’s downright adorable.”
Trey nodded, studied the toe of his boot. “Adorable. Grady? You got anything to add?” Not that he thought he could get all three of them, but it was the thought that counted, wasn’t it?
Grady ran his tongue along the inside of his jaw. “No. I think they’ve pretty well covered it.”
“But you agree with them.”
“Hey, it’s no crime to fall for a pretty woman. Happens to the best of us.”
“It doesn’t matter if I say you’re all wet, huh?” Trey asked.
“Nope.” Jack shook his head. “You’re just blinded by love. Can’t see the writing on the wall.”
“We’re not all wet and you know it,” Ace said smugly.
“Well, now,” Trey said, beginning to shake his beer.
“Hey.” Ace held his hand out to ward off whatever was coming. By the look on his face he knew exactly what was coming. He started backing up.
Trey gave a final shake and removed his thumb, while aiming and turning in a half circle to get the most coverage.
Sharp barks of laughter and bellows of innocent outrage echoed from the yard to the barn and back again. No one was left dry. Even Trey got wet, if he counted where the beer squirted back on his hand and dripped onto his knee.
He had managed to get all three of his tormentors square in the face.
It was the funniest sight he’d seen in a long time, and he doubled over with laughter.
His timing might have been better, however, for as the three were swearing and wiping beer from their faces, the kids came barreling around from the backyard to see what all the noise was about, and the women came out the backdoor carrying a plate of hamburger patties for the grill, as well as paper plates and other items for the picnic tables placed end-to-end in the shade of a tall cottonwood.
Laurie had Katy strapped to her chest in the baby carrier.
“What’s going on back here?” Belinda demanded.
“Dad?” Grant tugged on Ace’s arm. “How come you and Uncle Jack and Uncle Grady are all wet?”
“Ah…uh…”
“It was an accident,” Jack offered, his lips twitching.
“Hmm.” Rachel stroked her belly and tilted her head. “And I’m wondering why it is that this so-called accident didn’t happen to Trey.”
Trey grinned. “Just lucky, I guess.”
“Or quicker on the draw,” Belinda muttered, eyeing the telltale beer bottle still in Trey’s hand.
Laurie felt the skin on the back of her neck tighten as Trey’s two brothers and his brother-in-law grinned at her. “Is there something I should know?”
Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Trey cut him off.
“No,” he said quickly. “Just guy stuff, you know. Nonsense.”
Belinda rolled her eyes. “Guy stuff usually is. You got those coals ready, slick?” she demanded of her husband.
“Almost.” Ace gave the coals another squirt of fluid, then put a match to them. The resulting poof of flames rated a rowdy cheer from the three boys.
“Amy,” Laurie called quietly. “Are you being careful with your wrist?”
“Yes, Mama. It won’t hurt anymore, ’cause Scooter licked it. Scooter’s the dog.”
Laurie nodded. “He licked it, did he?”
“Uh-huh. When we get our new house, can we have a dog?”
Oh, Laurie thought with a pang. The things her daughters had missed. “I thought we might.”
“Really?” Carrie’s eyes lit.
“Yippee!” Amy bounced and laughed. “We get a new house and a dog.”
When the kids streaked off to the backyard, accompanied by Scooter, who was in doggy heaven with so many pals to play with, the commotion around the grill settled down.
“So,” Ace said to Laurie. “You’re getting a new house?”
“Well, it will be new to us. We’ve always lived in an apartment. This will be the first time they’ve had a yard of their own. We’re all pretty excited about it.” And listen to me, Laurie thought, running off at the mouth and telling my life story when all he asked was a simple question.
“Is it near your folks?” he asked.
With a laugh Laurie shook her head. “Please, no. They’re the reason we came clear to Wyoming—we needed the peace and quiet.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “This is peace and quiet?”
“Compared to my parents’ house, it most certainly is,” Laurie stated.
“When do you get to move into your house?” Rachel asked.
“The middle of August, which is when I start my new teaching job at the same elementary school where the girls will go.”
“The middle of August,” Jack protested. “That’s barely three weeks away.”
At the reminder that the summer was racing by, Laurie cast her gaze at Trey, intending to merely sneak a peek and look away. But he was watching her, and their gazes met. Held.
Three weeks, his eyes seemed to be saying. We can enjoy each other for three weeks. How long will you make us wait?
Laurie felt heat sting her cheeks and turned sharply away. “I’m going to get Katy in out of the sun.”
One by one the rest of the women followed her, and soon it was only the men.
Trey stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked toward the front of the house. “I’m gonna check on the kids.”
“Trey,” Jack called quietly.
Trey stopped but didn’t turn around. “Yeah?”
“You’re not really going to let her leave, are you?”
They were wrong, these brothers of his. They were out of their minds. He wasn’t in love with Laurie Oliver. He wanted her, sure. But love? He’d been in love before. It hurt to have it thrown back in your face. It sucked. It sucked big green toads.
He turned his head and looked at Jack, Ace and Grady over his shoulder. They weren’t laughing now. Damn good thing, because he wasn’t in the mood to beat the crap out of them today.
“Trey? I asked if you were really going to let her leave.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Trey said, then walked away.
Chapter Nine
By the time the rest of the food had been hauled out to the picnic tables, the vultures, as Ace termed the rest of his family, were circling, demanding that he hurry up the burgers.
“You can’t rush perfection,” he stated.
“But we’re starving, Dad,” claimed Clay, his middle son.
“Yeah, starving,” echoed the youngest, Grant.
But finally he deemed the first load of burgers perfect. Nobody got their choice of well, medium or rare; they got their burgers the way Ace chose to cook them. Which was, according to consensus, just about perfect.
Everyone found a seat at the picnic tables except Katy, who was asleep in her carriage right behind Trey.
The food was disappearing, and the conversations around the table were varied, from babies to the condition of the grass up in the mountain pasture to beef prices.
“That’s on-the-hoof prices,” Trey explained to Laurie, “not supermarket prices.”
“That’s for sure,” Jack grumbled.
“No kidding.�
� Ace shook his head. “Somebody’s getting rich off cattle, but it damn sure isn’t the rancher.”
“It sure isn’t,” said eight-year-old Jason.
Laurie bit back a smile at the boy’s seriousness. It was endearing, even while it was also startling, to realize that all of this would likely one day be Jason’s, or at least partly his. At eight years old he was already learning the business of ranching.
Just about the time Jack was commenting that no one from the sheriff’s office had shown up to eat, the sheriff himself drove in and parked.
“Hey, Dane,” Trey called. “We waited on you.”
“Yeah,” the sheriff said. “I can see that.”
Jack and Lisa’s nine-month-old daughter, presently sitting on her daddy’s lap, clapped her hands and squealed in delight.
“There’s my girl.” The sheriff bent and lifted her in his arms. “Are you still my one true love?”
In answer, the tiny black-haired girl squealed again.
“You grab her, you gotta keep her,” Jack teased. “At least until I finish eating.”
“You just don’t appreciate my namesake.”
“Our namesake,” Jack corrected.
Belinda saw Laurie looking confused and explained. “Little Jackie was born in the back of the SUV on the way to town. Dane was driving, Lisa was pushing, and Jack was catching. Lisa named her Jacqueline Dana.”
Laurie blinked in astonishment. “You’re kidding.”
“About the name?”
“No, about the rest of it.”
“She’s not kidding,” Lisa said laughing. “The little she-devil decided to come, and there was no stopping her.”
Trey introduced the sheriff to Laurie; the man obviously already knew everyone else.
Laurie took a good look. He stood about six feet tall, the same as the Wilder men and their brother-in-law, Grady Lewis. He looked the same, too, with his black hair and blue eyes.
“I really am starting to feel as if my girls and I are aliens,” she said. “Don’t you have blondes or redheads in Wyoming?”
“We stop them at the border,” Dane told her gravely. “Although there was that one redhead,” he said with a sideways look at Trey.
“Old news,” Trey said darkly.
With eyes the size of saucers, Amy looked the sheriff up and down. She took in his size and the gun he wore at his hip and swallowed, placing a hand on her hair. Her blond hair. “Do you arrest them?”
“Nobody arrested us,” Carrie told her sister.
“It was just a joke, girls.” Trey winked at them. “I hear Sheriff Powell secretly likes girls with blond hair.”
Dane grinned. “That I do.”
“Pull up a seat,” Ace invited.
Everyone scooted down until there was room for the sheriff at the end of the picnic bench. Once he had a paper plate in hand, everyone started passing food his way.
“So how goes the crime fighting these days?” Trey asked.
“Around here things are pretty quiet, but up in Sublette County they think they’ve got themselves a cattle rustling operation going.”
The gazes of every person at the table, including the children—not necessarily for the same reasons—zeroed in on Dane.
“For real?” Ace asked.
“Looks that way,” Dane said. “We’re warning all the ranchers in the surrounding counties to keep close tabs on their herds.”
“You won’t have to tell us twice,” Jack said.
“You haven’t seen any signs of strangers sneaking around, have you?” Dane asked.
Ace shook his head. “Just our mysterious graveyard visitor.”
“Come again?”
“I thought you knew about that,” Jack said.
“Knew about what?”
Ace and Jack looked at each other and shrugged, then looked at Trey.
“A couple of times a year,” Trey said, “somebody hikes in from the south road to the family cemetery and leaves flowers or something on our stranger’s grave.”
Dane’s eyes narrowed. “You have a stranger buried in your family cemetery?”
Trey shrugged and grinned. “Doesn’t everybody?”
Laurie was fascinated, first by the fact that, if she was hearing correctly, the Wilders had their own private cemetery right there on the ranch. Second, they had a stranger there?
She didn’t want to intrude on the conversation, but if the sheriff didn’t ask about the stranger’s grave, Laurie was going to have to. She was about to burst with curiosity.
“Who is it?” Dane asked.
“Well hell, Dane,” Trey said. “If we knew that, we wouldn’t refer to him as the stranger.”
Dane rolled his eyes, which spoke to Laurie about the close relationship he had with this family.
“Okay,” Dane said. “How did this unknown—man?”
“Man.” Trey nodded in confirmation.
“How did this unknown man end up in your family graveyard?”
Trey shrugged. “Stoney found him out on the range one day when we were kids. The guy was already dead.”
“What of?”
Trey shrugged again. “Exposure maybe. Did we ever know?” he asked Ace.
“Not that I recall.”
“So you just buried him?” Dane asked.
“What else could we do? Nobody knew who he was. They sent wires out all over the country with his description.”
“Wires?” Jason asked.
Belinda leaned forward to answer Jason. “It’s what they did before e-mail.”
“Oh.”
Laurie couldn’t help herself; she was too curious to wait until the men got all the information out. “No one claimed him? No one identified him, or reported someone like him missing?”
Ace shook his head. “Never turned up anything. So we buried him.”
“But why here? Why not in town?” she wanted to know. “I thought a family cemetery would be, well, for family.”
“Around here,” Trey told her, “family is a relative term. No pun intended.”
“The guy was found on the Flying Ace,” Ace told her. “That more or less made him our responsibility.”
“Ours, period,” Trey said.
Laurie cocked her head. “Who else is buried there besides actual members of your family?”
“Number three,” Lisa, Jack’s wife, said, “you’ve been neglectful. Laurie’s been here, what, three weeks? You should have taken her up there by now and let her see for herself.” To Laurie she said, “It’s a great place. You can stand there and feel the generations of Wilders and others who built this place into what it is. Even the original owners, who lost this land to that first Wilder in a poker game, are buried there.”
Dane Powell finished off his first hamburger and built himself a second. “And you say somebody puts things on this stranger’s grave?”
“Yeah,” Ace answered. “Two or three times a year we find fresh flowers and other things on the grave.”
“Other things?”
“Once there was a full bottle of Jim Beam,” Ace said.
“I remember that,” Trey said. “That was years ago.”
“Had another one last year,” Ace told him.
“You don’t have any idea who’s doing it?”
Ace shook his head. “We find tracks heading south toward the road. It’s somebody with small feet. Sometimes boots, sometimes athletic shoes.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything in my files about it,” Dane said. “Didn’t you ever report it?”
“Sure we did,” Ace admitted. “But your predecessor never tried to do anything about it.” He shrugged. “We’re used to it now.”
“You want me to look into it?” Dane asked.
Ace thought about it a minute, looked around to his wife, his brothers, his sister. “Nah,” he told Dane. “If we decide we want to catch the person, we’ll handle it ourselves.”
“Okay, have it your way. But keep an eye out for strangers, in case tho
se rustlers head this way. Especially once you bring the herd down out of the mountains. Let me know if you spot anything odd.”
“Will do,” Ace said.
“Fair enough,” Dane said. “Are there any more of those baked beans?”
“You have a wonderful family,” Laurie said to Trey on their way home that evening.
“They have their moments,” Trey said.
His remark may have been casual, but his voice was filled with affection.
“Carrie and Amy had a ball. Didn’t you, girls?”
“It was the best,” Carrie said. “Thank you for taking us riding again, Mr. Trey.”
“Yes,” Amy piped up. “Thank you a whole bunch, Mr. Trey.”
“You’re welcome a whole bunch. It’s the least I can do for the two girls who drew me those great horse pictures. I even snagged some magnets from Donna so we can put them up on the refrigerator.”
“Cool,” Amy said.
“How’s Katy doing back there?” Laurie asked.
“She’s sleepy,” Carrie said. “She wants to get home and go to bed.”
“I know just how she feels,” Laurie said.
When they walked in the door of the house a short while later, the telephone was ringing.
Trey answered. The hint of a frown he’d been wearing all the way home deepened. He held the receiver out to Laurie. “It’s for you.”
“Is it Donna? What did we leave behind over there?”
Trey shook his head. “It’s not Donna.” He didn’t know what Carrie and Amy’s relationship with their father was like, and didn’t know if Laurie would want them to know the man was calling. He cut his gaze toward the girls and back again.
“Come on, girls,” he told Carrie and Amy. “While your mom’s on the phone, why don’t you help me get Katy settled?”
“We can help you change her diaper if you want us to,” Carrie offered as they followed him toward the hall. “We know how.”
Laurie’s voice carried to them from the kitchen. “How did you get this number?”
It sounded to Trey’s ears more like an accusation than a statement of curiosity. Her attitude relieved him somewhat. He was just enough of a snake in the grass not to want her to enjoy getting a call from another man.
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