The Wrangler's Bride

by Justine Davis

“Hot water?” she’d said teasingly. “Kristina told me this was roughing it.”

  He’d given her a long look, as if gauging whether she was serious; she’d realized then that he must really think she was a pampered city girl. She hadn’t tried to tell him he was wrong; that wasn’t the kind of thing you proved with talk. She’d just keep out of his way and take care of herself.

  “I like long showers,” he’d said, rather shortly, and Mercy had been disconcerted enough at the unexpected images his words caused to be unable to answer. She’d thought herself long past thinking about Grant McClure that way, but there was no denying that the thought of him standing naked in a steamy shower did strange things to her heart rate.

  “Everybody keeps an eye on the fire in here during the winter,” he said now, gesturing toward the sizable wood stove that sat on a brick slab in a corner lined with the same brick. “It’s easier to keep the place above freezing than it is to get it warmed up from freezing.”

  She shook off the lingering effects of the unwelcome and surprisingly erotic memory. “I’ll bet it is,” she said, noting the sizable stack of wood against the inside wall. “Where’s the woodpile?”

  He nodded toward a closed door a few feet from the stove. “There’s a lean-to outside that door. We try to keep enough dry inside to get through a week. If we’re lucky, that’s the longest whiteout blizzard we have.”

  She nodded. If he was expecting shock from her at the idea of such weather, he was going to be disappointed. Yes, she lived in the city, but that city was Minneapolis, and she was no stranger to harsh weather. Although as she looked up at the Rockies on the ride out here from Clear Springs, she’d felt a tiny shiver up her spine that made her think that perhaps those mountains had a thing or two to teach anyone about real weather.

  “Chipper seems like a nice kid,” she said as she followed Grant out the front door.

  “He is just that,” Grant said. “Nice, but a kid. He just signed on full-time after he graduated high school.”

  Was there a warning somewhere in those words, Mercy wondered? Or was she again reading things that weren’t there into Grant’s words? She’d hardly been able to miss the boy’s reaction to her, the way he’d blushed and stammered the whole ride back to the ranch. But what did Grant think she was going to do, toy with the affections of an innocent kid? Suddenly the irony of it hit her, and she smiled wryly.

  “Lord, did I look at you like that? All cow-eyed and red-faced?”

  Grant stopped his long strides and looked at her sharply. Then, slowly, a smile curved his mouth. A smile that hadn’t lost any potency in the past twelve years.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted.

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was flattering, even when it was embarrassing.”

  “I never meant to embarrass you. I promise,” she added solemnly, “it’ll never happen again.”

  One corner of his mouth twitched. “Too bad. Now I might appreciate it more.”

  He turned on his heel and walked on before she could respond to that. So Grant McClure still had a wicked sense of humor, she thought. Because he had been joking. He had to have been.

  She trotted a few steps to catch up with him. He didn’t slow to accommodate her shorter strides, but she was used to that, and just walked faster to keep up. It helped keep her in shape, she reasoned, which was a good thing, no matter how annoying it might be.

  “So Chipper just started working here?”

  “Year-round, yes. He worked summers before, and used to come out on weekends, with his mother.”

  His mother? Mercy thought. “Oh?” was all she said.

  “Rita does some cooking for us.”

  Rita. An image of a dark, flashing-eyed brunette passed thorough her mind, and she couldn’t stop herself doing the math. Chipper was eighteen; if his mother had married young, she could be as young as thirty-six now. Only six years older than Grant. Hardly a prohibitive difference.

  She hoped Chipper’s father was big and burly and cranky, then chastised herself for the thought. What did it matter to her, anyway?

  “She only cooks on weekends?” she said brightly.

  “Yes, but she cooks up a storm. Enough for the whole week, and we freeze it. And she taught a couple of us enough to get through the winter when we run out of her stuff.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” she said.

  “The cooking in advance, or teaching us to cook?”

  “Both,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not much of a cook myself, as Kristina can tell you.”

  “She already did. Right after she informed me of how politically incorrect it would be of me to assume that because you’re female, you would cook.”

  “Well,” Mercy said in exaggerated relief, “I’m glad that’s out of the way.”

  “I’m sure her warning saved me from a horrible fate.”

  “Assuredly,” Mercy agreed in mock seriousness. “But I do a fine job washing dishes. Perhaps that talent might be of some use?”

  “Take it up with the guys. They usually draw straws.”

  “They? Not you?”

  He grinned. “There are some perks to being the boss.”

  She was still smiling back at him, and marveling at this unexpected lightheartedness that seemed to have overtaken her, when a trumpeting neigh snapped her head around. She turned to stare at the animal who stood in the large corral beside the biggest of the two barns she could see.

  The phrase that popped into her head was flash and fire, because this animal certainly seemed to have both. He was spectacularly marked. His head, neck and forequarters—she thought that was the right term on a horse—were a glistening black. From the shoulders, or whatever they were—she knew that wasn’t right—back over his rump and halfway down his legs, he was a pristine white with scattered dark oval spots that ranged from speckles to almost four inches across.

  Something tugged at the edges of her memory. When she was so infatuated with the teenage Grant McClure, and with all the industriousness of a young girl in the throes of her first crush, she’d determined to learn all about the things Grant was so enamored of and she knew nothing about. So she’d read, endlessly, it had seemed, about horses. And although she’d never gotten close to a real one before, beyond driving past some in a pasture somewhere, a lot of that had stuck in her mind. Not the word for shoulders, but a picture of a horse marked like this one, although brown and white, instead of black.

  “An…Appaloosa?” she asked, trying the word out tentatively as she walked toward the fence.

  “Yes,” Grant said, sounding surprised. “He’s an Appy.”

  “I saw a picture of one once,” she said, keeping it vague; never would she have admitted the lengths the child she’d been had gone to to learn about what he cared about. “Only it was brown and white.”

  “They come in all colors. And some are all white, with the spots. Leopard Appies, they call them. I’ve got a leopard mare who’s in foal to him,” he said, nodding toward the big horse.

  She came to a halt, staring at the animal who towered over her. But she wasn’t afraid of him, especially when he cocked his head to look at her with every evidence of interest.

  “He’s…beautiful.” The horse snorted as if he’d understood, tilting his big head as if preening. Mercy laughed.

  “He’s a direct descendent of Chief of Four Mile, a premier Appaloosa stud in Texas thirty, forty years ago. But don’t let the fancy lineage fool you. He’s a clown,” Grant said dryly.

  “I can see that,” she agreed. “And that spot over his eye makes him look like one.”

  It was true, she thought, that odd-looking white patch over one eye gave the horse a slightly off-center look that was comical despite his size and obvious power.

  “Careful,” Grant said as she leaned on the top rail of the fence. “He may look and act like a clown, but he’s a stallion, and they can be unpredictable.”

  She backed up a half step. “You mean like bit
ing and kicking? He does that?”

  “Well…no. At least he hasn’t yet.”

  “Oh. So you haven’t had him very long?”

  “A little over a year and a half.”

  She blinked. “He hasn’t kicked or bitten anyone in all that time, but you’re still worried?”

  Grant looked a little sheepish. “I’m not worried, I’m…baffled. I’ve never known a stallion who didn’t have at least one bad habit.”

  “And he doesn’t?”

  “Not unless you count knocking my hat off every time I get close enough,” he said wryly.

  Mercy chuckled, and the sound was quickly echoed by a soft whicker from the big horse. It was as if he’d had enough of being ignored. She glanced at Grant, who lifted a shoulder in a half shrug.

  “You’ll be okay. He really does have excellent manners. Just don’t make sudden moves that might startle him. Or touch him before he invites it.”

  He didn’t explain, so Mercy assumed it would be clear to her if and when that happened. She took back the half step she’d surrendered at Grant’s warning. The horse stretched his nose over the fence toward her, nostrils flaring as he sniffed. She let him. His breath stirred her hair, and then, amazingly, she felt the soft touch of his velvety muzzle as he snuffled her ponytail.

  The horse whickered again. He nudged the side of her head with his nose, then drew back, as if expectant. He repeated the action after a moment when she didn’t move, and Mercy felt like a not-too-intelligent creature the big Appy was trying to train. Was this the invitation Grant had meant?

  She glanced at him; he was watching intently, but his expression was unreadable, and he gave her no clue. Was he testing her somehow, for some reason of his own? And if she failed, would she be banished to the house for the duration of her stay?

  You, she told herself, are paranoid.

  And with a smile she reached up very slowly, very carefully, and patted the sleek black neck. The whicker came again, only this time Mercy would have sworn it held a note of pleasure—whether at her touch or at the fact that she’d finally figured it out, she wasn’t sure.

  “Does he have a name?” she asked, marveling at the muscle and heat and glossiness of the animal.

  “I call him Joker.”

  She chuckled as she looked over her shoulder at Grant; she was almost getting used to laughing again. “I can see why,” she said. “But is that really his name? You said you call him Joker.”

  “His registered name is Fortune’s Fire.”

  Mercy’s eyes widened. “Fortune? As in the Fortunes?”

  He nodded. “Kate left him to me.”

  “Kristina’s grandmother? Who died in that plane crash?”

  He nodded again. An odd expression came over his face as Mercy watched, one of bemusement, even bewilderment.

  “He’s worth…more than this whole place, probably, when it comes down to it,” Grant said. “And I have no idea why she did it.”

  That was the reason for that expression, she thought. He truly didn’t know why Kate Fortune had left him this beautiful animal. It wasn’t the animal himself that had him bemused, it was the fact that he owned it. She turned to look at him steadily.

  “Well, your mother married her son, right?” she said. “So you were her son Nate’s stepson. Her grandson, in a way.”

  “I suppose.” He sounded as puzzled as he looked. “But I wasn’t really anything to her. I’m not a Fortune. I never have been. Not that they haven’t been…nice enough, and I know Mom’s been married to Nate for twenty-five years, but…I just don’t fit in that family.”

  “Kate obviously thought you did, if she left you such a valuable animal.”

  He shook his head. “I still don’t get it. She left that ranch to my stepbrother Kyle, and Joker should have gone with it. If Kyle had known more about stock, I’m sure he would have fought it. He should have.”

  “Since he didn’t know, maybe he didn’t care.”

  “I tried to tell him how much the horse was worth, that there was no reason for Kate to leave him to me—”

  “You tried to give back what Kate wanted you to have, because you didn’t think you should have it?”

  Mercy felt an odd tightness in her chest as she remembered Grant at seventeen, lamenting rather than celebrating his victory in a high school swim meet, because the opposing team’s champion had been ill and unable to compete. It meant nothing, he said, if you didn’t do your best against the best. She’d thought him noble then; apparently he’d never lost that uncompromising honesty.

  “I’ve spent a year and a half trying to figure it out. If his offspring are half the horse he is, he could make this ranch rich. But why? I’ve seen a lot of Nate, but I’d only met Kate a few times.”

  “I’d say you made an impression.”

  He shifted his booted feet, as if he were uncomfortable. Then he shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Jeans worn in a way city men paid a bundle for, Mercy thought, but for all that expense, they still didn’t manage to look the way Grant did in them. But then, few men would.

  “Maybe,” he said doubtfully.

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “I’m not a Fortune,” he repeated, rather adamantly, Mercy thought. “My mother may have married one, but I don’t know how to deal with that kind of life. I don’t know how my mother puts up with it.”

  “Neither do I,” Mercy said frankly. “Sometimes I look at Kristina and envy her, with all that wealth and position, but most of the time I’m just grateful it’s not me.”

  Grant’s eyes widened slightly. Then he smiled, a wide, companionable smile that she remembered from the days when he’d actually unbent to talk to the twelve-year-old pest who had become his shadow. Even when he was exasperated with her, he’d never been mean or cruel. But she doubted Barbara Fortune would have tolerated such behavior in her son; Kristina’s and Grant’s mother was the warmest, kindest woman Mercy had ever met. She made Sheila, Nate’s first wife, look like exactly what she was, a grasping, manipulative woman who resented losing the status being a Fortune wife had given her.

  “So am I,” Grant agreed fervently. “The Fortunes may be as close to royalty as this country gets, but I wouldn’t want their problems. I always figured they were a living example of why the Minnesota state bird is the common loon.”

  Mercy blinked, then laughed. Grant’s wry commonsense outlook, which he’d had even as a teenager, was exactly what she needed, she thought.

  “That much money does strange things to people,” she said.

  “And the people around them.”

  Mercy remembered the night Kristina, devastated by the death of her grandmother, had poured out the long, convoluted and dramatic history of her family.

  “Yes,” she said, quietly now. “It must have hurt Kate Fortune terribly when her baby was kidnapped.”

  Grant’s expression turned solemn. “My mother told me Kate never believed the baby was dead. She never gave up, because they never found a body.”

  Mercy shivered. “How awful. But Kristina says her aunt Rebecca is just as stubborn. She’s convinced the crash that killed Kate was no accident, even after all this time.”

  Grant’s mouth twisted wryly. “That’s what I mean. When you’re part of that kind of family, that kind of thinking comes naturally.”

  “I suppose it has to. Things always seem to happen to the Fortunes. Look at the Monica Malone case—”

  Mercy broke off suddenly, realizing she’d been about to mention what might be a painful subject; Grant might say he wasn’t a Fortune, but still…

  “You mean Jake?” he asked, meeting her gaze levelly.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s all over the front pages. Why shouldn’t you?”

  “Because he’s related to you. Sort of.”

  Grant shrugged. “Jake may be my uncle by marriage, but that doesn’t mean I have any illusions about him. I’ve always th
ought he had a side he didn’t show much. He rules the Fortune clan, but sometimes I don’t think they really…see him.”

  “I find him rather intimidatingly aristocratic,” Mercy said honestly. “Maybe you see him more clearly because you’re a step removed.”

  He looked at her consideringly. “You’re a cop—what do you think?”

  “I don’t know enough about the case to form an opinion. And the lid is on this one, tight. Not even many rumors flying. Money can buy silence, it seems.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Did Jake being charged surprise you?”

  “Judging from the evidence they found? No. But even so, I find it hard to believe.”

  “That’s only natural. No one wants to believe that about someone you know, or are related to, no matter how distantly.”

  “I don’t know,” Grant said wryly. “Somehow it seems to be just the kind of thing to happen in the Fortune family. Those are troubled waters.”

  Mercy couldn’t argue with that. But she had to agree that it was hard to believe that handsome, well-bred, cool, calm Jake Fortune was guilty of the spectacular murder of a Hollywood icon.

  But she knew better than most that troubled waters could hide a multitude of sins.

  Three

  “Hey!”

  It came out as a yelp, and Grant couldn’t help laughing as Joker again tugged Mercy’s tidy ponytail into complete disarray. She backed away and gave the big Appy a disgusted look.

  “I’ve got to stop using that apple shampoo,” Mercy muttered, tugging at her pale blond hair.

  “It’s more than that,” he said, still chuckling. “I feed him the real thing, and I sure don’t get this kind of reaction.”

  It was nothing less than the truth; in the week she’d been here, Mercy had become the focus of the horse’s world. He neighed loudly whenever she came into sight, sulked grumpily if she didn’t pay him enough attention, and complained noisily if she paid too much attention to any other horse.

  “I’m just somebody new,” she said. “Whose hair happens to smell like his favorite snack.”

  “Not just somebody new, something. Not many women come here, and those that do tend to stay away from him.”