by Linda Turner
He said it casually enough, as if he couldn’t care less whether she was or not, but his family knew him too well. Grinning, Merry warned, “Don’t waste your time, Romeo.”
All innocence, he blinked. “What? I just asked if she was going to be there.”
Far from fooled, Joe grinned, “Yeah, right. That was real subtle, little brother. You try that on the lady, and she’s going to eat you for lunch. If you want to keep your hide in place—and your ego—you’ll steer clear of her.”
“She doesn’t date, Zeke,” Janey told him bluntly. “And it isn’t because she hasn’t been asked. She just doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but her wolves.”
Far from discouraged, he only flashed his dimples at her and winked. “That was before she met me. Trust me, Sis, the lady won’t know what hit her.”
“But—”
Stopping her sister’s protest with just a look, Merry smiled broadly at him. “You go, boy. Just let me know when you ask the lady out so I can sell tickets. This is going to be good.”
The VFW hall had been built after World War I and was still the largest building in town. Rented out for parties, occasionally used for political rallies and town meetings, it held two hundred people comfortably but seldom drew more than fifty. Tonight the parking lot was full, and cars had spilled over into the street. It looked as though just about everyone in the county had shown up for the town meeting.
Quickly circling the parking lot one more time and finding nothing, Elizabeth told herself this was what she got for not watching the clock closer. Punctuality wasn’t normally a problem for her, but the entire day had been out of sync. Maybe it was because of last night’s storm, which had finally blown itself out, and the fact that everyone had been late to work because of the huge drifts that had piled up, but nothing had seemed to go right. The phones were down for a while, she couldn’t find paperwork, and to make matters worse, her allergies were acting up. Given her choice, she’d be home in bed right now with the covers drawn over her head and the phone off the hook.
But she had a town meeting to chair, and as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t postpone it. It was too important. People had very real concerns, and this was her chance to convince them that as much as they disliked the wolves roaming free in their neck of the woods, they really did have nothing to fear.
Resigned to the fact that she was going to have to park down the street, she pulled out of the parking lot and finally found a spot three blocks away. A glance at her watch reminded her that the meeting had been scheduled to start five minutes ago. Swearing softly, she grabbed her notes, thanked God she’d had the sense to wear her boots, and stepped out into the cold night air.
Harried, her thoughts on the speech she’d been working on all week, she pushed through the VFW hall’s double doors and almost bumped into Nick Kincaid, who was standing just inside the foyer. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she began. “I—”
Whatever she was going to say next drained right out of her head at the sight of the man standing next to him. Tall and lean, his angular jaw neatly shaved and his jet-black hair fighting a curl, he should have been a stranger to her. They’d only spoken briefly, and then in the middle of a blizzard, when they were both bundled up and barely visible in the dark, blowing snow. But blizzard or no blizzard, she’d have known Zeke McBride on the dark side of the moon. There was just something about the man—the way he held himself, the breadth of his shoulders—that a woman didn’t forget.
And he knew her She saw recognition flare in his deep blue eyes, watched amusement curl the edges of his mouth, and suddenly her bold announcement from last night hung in the air between them as clearly as if she’d just shouted it to the heavens.
My husband’s on his way. He’s the Falls County sheriff.
Realization hit her then, stunning her. He knew Nick. She only had to look at the two of them, to see the way they’d been talking and laughing when she’d walked up, to know that they were obviously old friends. So last night, when she’d claimed to be married to the sheriff, he’d known all along that she was lying. And he hadn’t said a word—then. Now, however, was a different matter.
She could see the devilish glint in his eyes, the wicked laughter he made no effort to hide. Any second now he was going to ask Nick about his wife, and she’d sink right through the floor. Unless she could beat him to the punch and tell Nick about last night herself.
She opened her mouth to do just that, but before she could say a word, Nick stepped forward with a smile of greeting. “There you are! I was beginning to wonder if something had happened to you. I guess you know you’ve got a full house tonight.”
“Yes. The closest parking place I could find was three blocks away. Nick, there’s something I need to tell you—”
“Have you met Merry McBride’s brother?” he asked before she could pull him off to a private corner to confess. “I know you’re in a hurry to get the meeting started, but you two might want to talk later—you’ve got a lot in common. Zeke’s a wildlife biologist. Zeke, this is Elizabeth—”
“Davis,” she said quickly, cursing the heat that climbed into her cheeks as Zeke’s grin broadened. Drat the man, he was really enjoying this! “We met last night,” she told Nick stiffly. “I had some trouble on the way home and Zeke stopped to help me. The weather was so crazy, though, that we didn’t take time to properly introduce ourselves.” Shooting him a look that just dared him to expose her, she smoothly extended her hand and gave him a cool smile. “How do you do?”
A gentleman would have followed her lead and graciously let her little white lie die without comment. But she only had to look in Zeke’s laughing eyes to suspect that he was no gentleman. She knew it for a certainty when his fingers closed around hers and he teased huskily, “Nice to meet you, Elizabeth Davis. I hear you live all by yourself out at the old Murphy place.”
Her heart lurched in her breast, but if he expected her to squirm, he was in for a rude awakening. She didn’t rattle so easily. “That’s right. I’ve leased it for the rest of the year.”
“Funny, but I thought you were married I wonder where I got that idea.”
Carefully extracting her hand from his, she looked him right in the eye and traded him smile for smile. “I can’t imagine. But you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”
“I don’t. And I try not to embarrass a lady when I can avoid it.”
“Oh, really? That’s good to hear. I guess the women of Liberty Hill can relax then, can’t they?”
Enjoying himself, he grinned. “For now. But one of them owes me—big-time.”
Her heart thumping crazily in her breast at the idea of owing Zeke McBride anything, Elizabeth thought he was entirely too sure of himself. Color tingeing her cheeks, she said coolly, “You know what they say about paybacks, but I wouldn’t count on collecting anytime soon if I were you. Now, if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got a town meeting to start. The natives are getting restless.”
She fled, leaving the two men staring after her. Confused, Nick looked from her slim form disappearing into the crowd to Zeke, who was grinning broadly. “Would you like to tell me what the hell that was all about? I haven’t got a clue.”
Chuckling, Zeke slapped him on the back. “Don’t ask, old buddy. You don’t want to know.”
Chapter 2
“Isn’t he gorgeous? It’s the eyes. Did you notice? They just dance with laughter. And I always did like a man with a great sense of humor. No wonder the women around here could never resist him. He smiles at you, and you just want to melt.”
In the process of getting her notes together, Elizabeth glanced up in distraction at her assistant and frowned. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Not what,” Tina Ellison retorted with a grin. “Who. Zeke McBride! I’d heard talk about him, but you know how gossip is. People exaggerate. But look at him! Is that not the best-looking thing you ever saw in your life or what?”
Looking anywhere but at th
e back of the hall where Zeke stood with Nick Kincaid, Elizabeth refused to admit any such thing. “You’d better not let Peter hear you talking that way. You know how jealous he gets.”
Unrepentant, she only laughed. Tina’s husband, Peter, didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. Totally devoted to her and sappy in love after ten years of marriage, he trusted her completely. And Tina felt the same way about him. “Peter knows he has nothing to worry about. But just because I’m married doesn’t mean I’m blind. And that is one fine specimen. Of course, he doesn’t have a faithful bone in his body, but he is easy on the eye.”
She had a point, but Elizabeth had no intention of admitting that. From what she had seen, Zeke McBride was far too sure of himself already, and she didn’t doubt it was because women had been making fools of themselves over him from the time he was old enough to smile up at them from his crib. She didn’t intend to join his fan club.
“Why do I have a feeling I don’t want to hear this?” she said dryly. “You know how I feel about you gossiping, Tina.”
Five years her senior, Tina hadn’t been in town any longer than she had—just three months—but she loved to talk. Within a matter of days of moving to Liberty Hill, she knew the skinny on just about everyone in town. “Yeah, but this is good, boss. And I didn’t actually snoop around You know how people talk. All I did was listen.”
“But you don’t have to repeat it.”
“But I’m only telling you,” she pointed out reasonably. “And if you don’t hear it from me, you will from someone else. Everyone’s talking about it. He was engaged to a doctor in Chicago and she caught him with another woman a week before their wedding! Can you imagine? She had this big fancy shindig planned and had to cancel the whole thing at the last minute. Talk about low! The poor girl must have been mortified.”
Elizabeth didn’t doubt that for a minute. Time and time again as a child, she’d watched her mother suffer the embarrassment of her father’s little affairs. He had tried to be discreet, but they’d lived in a small town in Idaho, and there were some things that just couldn’t be hidden. Everyone had known when her father had strayed; everyone had talked when her mother invariably took him back. To this day, Elizabeth didn’t know how her mother had borne it—she just knew she never intended to follow in her footsteps. She didn’t care how good-looking a man was, she wanted nothing to do with him if he was a flirt.
“I imagine she was,” Elizabeth said stiffly. “But we’re not here to talk about the locals. If we don’t get this meeting started, we’re going to have a riot on our hands.”
The huge crowd packed into the hall was, in fact, already more than a little hostile. Not that Elizabeth was surprised. She was an outsider in charge of a government project to reintroduce wolves into the area for the first time in over sixty years, and the local ranchers didn’t have the power to stop her. She was just as concerned about their rights as she was the wolves, but all they could see was she was going to release killers into the midst of their cattle. In their eyes that made her the enemy.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, but as she stepped to the podium to face her detractors, her stomach was a lump of nerves. This was her least favorite part of the job. Still, her smile was cool and self-possessed as she said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot to cover, so let’s get started. For those of you who didn’t attend the other meetings, I’m Elizabeth Davis, the project leader for the wolf recovery program, and I’d like to thank you for coming. As most of you know, the wolves are scheduled to be released from their holding pen at Eagle Ridge a week from Friday, and I know you have a lot of questions.”
“You’re darn right we do!” a gravelly voice called out from somewhere near the back of the room. “And it’s about time we got some answers. We want to know what Uncle Sam’s going to do to protect our cattle when you let those killers loose.”
“And don’t tell us the bastards won’t kill!” an angry old man on the other side of the room growled as he jumped to his feet to scowl at her. “They killed in the thirties and they’ll kill now.”
“Statistics show—”
“To hell with statistics!” a woman three rows back from the podium cried. “Statistics don’t mean squat to a dead calf.”
Hostility vibrated in the air—angry grumblings that buzzed from every corner of the room and came at Elizabeth in waves. Another woman might have been alarmed, but she’d been through this before, when she’d worked with the team that reintroduced wolves into Yellowstone. Then she’d received hate mail and death threats, and more than once she’d come out of her apartment to find all four of her tires slashed. And as much as she’d hated it, she’d understood. People were angry, and anger always stemmed from fear. They were afraid of the wolves, and they had a right to be. There was nothing reassuring about the animals. They were unpredictable, they ran in packs, they killed. And yes, sometimes they preyed on cattle and sheep. But those instances were rare. Very rare. And that was what she had to get across to this crowd.
She didn’t fool herself into thinking it would be easy. This was the West, and people didn’t like to be told what they could, and could not do on their own land. When it came to protecting what was theirs, they got downright touchy. Contingency plans for rogue killers meant nothing to them once their animals were dead. In the eyes of most citizens, all wolves were killers and they wanted them gone, if not from the entire West, then at least from their little corner of it.
Holding up her hand to stop the angry mutterings, she said into the tense silence, “I know you might not believe me, but I really do sympathize with your concerns. That’s why I scheduled this meeting, so I could bring you up to speed on the release date and discuss the problems any of you are having with that.”
Glancing around the room, she met people’s hostile gazes head-on. “I’m not going to stand up here and he to you and tell you that a wolf isn’t ever going to look twice at your livestock. But I will tell you that elk—not cattle or sheep—is his dinner of choice. And when he can’t have elk, coyotes are easy pickings. So either way, the odds are that you have nothing to worry about when it comes to your livestock.”
“Tell that to Matthew Grisham,” a thin-faced elderly woman said coldly from the front row. “And Ned Berry and the Lane bunch. I can name you dozens of families that almost went under because those murdering monsters took a liking to the taste of beef and wiped out half their herds. Some of them had to file bankruptcy. Some of them never recovered. A few even sold out and moved to the city and never came back where they belonged. All because of those damn wolves.”
“But that’s not going to happen this time,” Elizabeth assured her. “We’re not going to just turn the wolves loose to roam free. They’ll be carefully monitored. And at the first sign of trouble, any rogue killers will be shipped out of here.”
“Before or after we’re all bankrupt?”
She tried to explain that she would never stand by and let the situation get so desperate, but she might as well have saved her breath. Most of the people in the crowd had already decided that the government was comprised of a bunch of liberal tree huggers who cared more about cramming a bunch of ruthless killers down their throats than their rights, and there was nothing Elizabeth could say to persuade them otherwise.
Not that she didn’t try. For the next hour, she patiently answered questions—and accusations—and explained the steps of the program over and over again. But when the meeting finally broke up, people were just as resentful as ever.
Resigned to the fact that she was, in all likelihood, never going to win the more hostile citizens over, she smiled ruefully as Peter and Tina joined her at the podium while the rest of the crowd headed for the exits. “Well, that went rather well, don’t you think?”
“Oh, yeah,” Peter drawled, his grin mocking. “For a public lynching.”
“For a moment there, I thought you were toast,” Tina told her, her brown eyes dancing behind her glasses. “But you gav
e ’em what for, boss. I’m proud of you. Let’s celebrate. We can pick up a bottle of wine—”
“No celebrating until the project’s a success,” she reminded her. “And if tonight was any indication of the progress we’re making with people, we’ve still got a long way to go.”
She didn’t have to tell Tina or Peter how quickly things could turn nasty. They’d been at Yellowstone with her. They’d been refused service at gas stations and restaurants and even been thrown out of their apartment. They’d seen firsthand how people could lash out in fear and hate, and for all their sakes, she hoped people showed more restraint in Colorado.
Reading her mind, Peter said soberly, “It’s not as bad as Yellowstone. People might not like us being here and they don’t hesitate to speak their minds when they get the chance, but the phone calls are usually at a decent hour, and they’re not as vicious as I expected. All and all, the locals are tolerating us, and that’s more than a lot of folks did last time.”
“And things will be much better once the wolves are actually released and the ranchers realize they don’t have nearly as much to fear as they first thought,” Tina added. “They’ll come around. It’s just going to take some time.”
Elizabeth knew most people were decent—but those weren’t the ones she was worried about. It was the fanatics, the survivalists who went a little too far, the antigovernment types who saw all government projects as a threat to their rights, that were as unpredictable as the wolves they claimed to hate. So when she gathered her notes and slipped into her coat, it went without saying that Tina and Peter would walk her to her car, now that the crowd had dispersed and the streets were dark and empty.
Her Jeep was right where she’d left it, under a streetlight, and appeared untouched. Still a block away, she told her friends, “You don’t have to walk me the rest of the way. I’ll be fine—”