The Wrangler's Bride

by Justine Davis

“I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  She bit her lip, stopping the broken flow of words. She felt the stinging behind her eyelids, and knew that she’d been blindsided, that talking about one of the most difficult aspects of her job had opened the door for the thoughts about the worst. Her calm since she’d been here was apparently only a facade, not true peace. Another shiver rippled through her, and it had nothing to do with the cold.

  Suddenly Grant was beside her on the swing; she hadn’t even heard him move. She was too surprised to react when he put his arms around her, and once he had, his solid strength and his radiating warmth were too comforting to pull away from.

  “It’s an ugly, dangerous job, Mercy,” he said softly. “I’ve always known that, but I’m afraid I never thought much—not enough, anyway—about the people who do it. Until now.”

  His obvious concern warmed her, but the inner alarms were going off like mad. In her current state of mind, his strength and warmth was too comforting, too tempting…and far too dangerous.

  She drew back from his embrace, trying not to do it as abruptly as she wanted to, just to free herself from the lure of his closeness.

  “I’m sorry to have dumped on you,” she said, rather stiffly.

  He looked at her intently, but didn’t protest her movement or answer her words. She stood up and moved away, until there was a relatively safe three feet between them.

  “I’ve been…having lots of second thoughts about my job lately,” she said when the silence became too tense for her. “But that doesn’t mean you have to listen to my sob story.”

  “It sounds,” Grant said after a moment, “like you need to tell someone.”

  Not you, Mercy thought instantly; the last thing she needed was to share her darkest thoughts with this man, who was already proving far too unsettling to her tenuous peace of mind.

  “I need to work through it myself,” she insisted.

  “I see you’re just as stubborn as you were twelve years ago.”

  “I’m not stubborn, just because I deal with my problems myself.”

  “I didn’t say not to deal with them yourself. Just to talk about them to somebody. Or would that impinge on your sense of independence?”

  She gave him a sharp glance. “I thought men were the ones who thought women talked about things too much.”

  “Maybe that’s it. You work around men too much—you’ve lost the knack. Or do cops bare their souls to each other?”

  Mercy’s brows furrowed, until she saw the glint of teasing humor in his bright blue eyes. “Cops,” she said wryly, “tend to bottle things up until they explode. Most of them, anyway.”

  “And you?”

  “I won’t blow up. I’m not the type, according to the department psychologist.”

  “You went to a psychologist?”

  “It’s S.O.P., after…a shooting.”

  “Did it…help?”

  “Some.” She glanced out at the snow-covered panorama; she was starting to get beyond chilled, sitting out here, not moving. “He thought coming here was a good idea.”

  “And do you? Now that you’ve been here a few days?”

  “Maybe. It’s beautiful, and there’s an elemental wildness here that…appeals to me. There’s a sort of pureness to it. It’s harsh, but…it’s clean, not evil. It’s just…life.”

  Grant looked startled at her words. “I…That’s…how I’ve always felt. It’s why I know I could never be really happy anywhere else.”

  For a long, silent moment, they simply looked at each other, blue eyes holding green, both clearly aware of the unexpected bond that had just leaped to life between them.

  It was so powerful it almost frightened her; she didn’t want to feel this, didn’t want to feel anything right now, when she knew, in her mind that she was so very vulnerable. Unfortunately, it was her heart that was reacting, not her head. Still, she knew she had to put some distance between them, even though she knew, as well, that there was no denying what had just happened. So—typically, perhaps—she confronted them instead.

  “But there are…distractions I hadn’t foreseen,” she said.

  The look he gave her then made her feel uncomfortably as if he’d read her mind. “Distractions?”

  Bad mistake, Brady, she muttered to herself. “Among other things, the fact that I’m going numb,” she said. In the head, she added to herself, but escaped to the warmth of the house before she could get herself into any more trouble.

  Meredith Cecelia Brady was the most…the most…the most maddening woman he’d ever known, just as she’d been the most maddening child.

  Grant turned over in bed and yanked the thick down comforter up to his nose, although he wasn’t particularly cold. The snow had continued off and on all day and into the night, and the thickness that had built up on the roof acted as another layer of insulation. Despite the slight wind that had kicked up, the house was, if anything, a bit warmer than it was on a snowless winter night.

  The people who made the calendars that said winter didn’t start until December had never spent much time here, he thought. Winter started whenever it darn well pleased.

  The weather wasn’t much of a diversion; his thoughts slid right back into the rut they’d been languishing in since the day Mercy had arrived. She’d driven him crazy twelve years ago, and it didn’t seem she’d lost the talent for doing it. That it was now an entirely different and vastly more uncomfortable and disturbing kind of crazy only made things worse.

  She was even disrupting his sleep, he who generally slept like the dead after a long day’s work. But here he was, tossing and turning, hearing slight wind noises he usually slept through, staring at the ceiling, ordering himself not to look at the clock and see how short a time he had left before he would have to roll out and go back to work.

  Another creaking sound, seeming annoyingly loud in his cranky mood, made him roll over onto his back in disgust. You should just get your sorry butt out of bed now, McClure, he thought. You could have gotten half your day’s work done in the time you’ve been wasting thinking about that woman.

  And wondering exactly what other distractions she’d been talking about.

  A noise that sounded, impossibly, like the downstairs door opening interrupted his unwelcome contemplations.

  Walt, he thought. Maybe something was wrong.

  He rolled out, dressing with a haste that wasn’t entirely due to the cold. He pulled on his heavy wool socks, but grabbed up his boots to carry them; he might not need to put them on, and he didn’t want to wake Mercy clattering down the stairs.

  Except, he realized as he stepped out into the hall and headed toward the top of the stairway, she was apparently already awake; the door to the guest room stood wide open. He glanced in as he went past, and saw blankets and the bright blue quilt strewn about in a manner that spoke of a sleep as restless—or as nonexistent—as his own. She must have heard the same thing he had, and come down to investigate.

  “Walt?” he called out as he went down the stairs. No answer came back at him, and he traversed the last half-dozen steps at a run. He came into the living room, skidding slightly in sock feet on the wood floor. Then he stopped dead, staring at the front door, which was standing wide open.

  Not Walt, he thought. He would never do such a thing, leave the door standing ajar like that, letting all the heat from the wood stove escape. Not when it was snowing like this outside; it was a flurry much thicker than he’d expected to see.

  “Mercy?” he called out. Still no answer. Irritated as much as mystified, he strode over to the door that led into the kitchen. The room was dark and quiet. He turned and went back toward the front door, pausing to stuff another log into the stove. He’d shut the damn door, then figure out what had happened. He knew it hadn’t blown open—he was too careful for that—and city girl or not, he didn’t think Mercy would be so careless either. She might be—

  Outside, he realized as, one hand on the doorknob, he stared out at
the tracks in the thin layer of soft snow that had accumulated, thanks to the wind, on the porch floor. Small tracks, made by tiny, delicate feet, not his own size elevens, or Walt’s extrawides.

  What the hell?

  He yanked on his boots, grabbed his heavy coat from the rack by the door and a flashlight from the shelf above the rack. Pulling the door shut behind him, he stepped onto the porch. The tracks led to the steps, down them, then straight ahead. Then they veered to the right, toward the main barn.

  He went down the steps, wincing when, as he cleared the shelter of the porch, the wind bit into the exposed flesh of his face. It was stronger than he’d thought, and he didn’t want to speculate what the temperature was with the windchill factor figured in.

  Fury welled up in him. What the hell was she doing, traipsing around out here in the middle of the night, and in the middle of a snow flurry to boot? Didn’t she realize how dangerous weather like this could be? Didn’t she know that a person could get utterly disoriented in the pure, blowing whiteness, and freeze to death a few feet from safety he never knew was there? How could she be so half-witted? So careless? He’d thought maybe she wasn’t quite as city-stupid as he’d feared, but now…

  A sense of urgency he’d never known before seized him, and he sped up his pace, straining to see the faint trail, which was growing fainter by the moment as the snow continued to fall. His powerful flashlight wasn’t worth much in the thick snow; it reflected back as much as it showed forward.

  He lost the trail to the gathering snow twenty yards from the house. He had to guess she’d been headed for the barn; he prayed she’d made it the last forty feet. The sliding door was closed, but not latched, and his tension eased a notch.

  And then tightened again in a rush as he slid it open and stepped inside.

  And saw Mercy crumpled on the floor outside Joker’s stall.

  Five

  Joker whinnied—a plaintive sound Grant had never heard from the big stallion before. It galvanized him, and he broke into a run. He slid on some loose straw and nearly went down, but recovered and kept going. Joker whinnied again, bobbing his head toward Mercy as he thrust it through the open top half of the stall’s Dutch door, as if he were afraid Grant hadn’t seen her. Grant barely managed to stop himself from telling the animal he had, as if the stallion would understand.

  She was shivering violently, her arms wrapped around herself as if she were trying to hold herself together, or physically hang on to what body heat she had left after her foolish trek through the snow. It was relatively warm here inside the barn, though not as warm as in the house, and that trek across the yard in the blowing snow would have sapped body heat rapidly.

  At least some instinctive level of self-preservation had been functioning, Grant thought as he knelt beside her; she’d put on her heavy sheepskin boots and jacket. But what the hell was that she had on underneath? Some flimsy pale green thing, as if she’d run out into the snow in her nightgown or something…

  She had done just that, he realized.

  “Are you completely crazy?” he snapped, reaching for her.

  He pulled her up to a sitting position, and opened his mouth to deliver a scathing rebuke. She looked up at him then, and the moment he saw her eyes, all his anger, all the fierce words that were about to burst loose, faded away.

  He’d never seen anyone look so utterly, completely devastated. Her eyes were wide with remembered terror, and he realized her trembling was not from cold but from reaction; she looked like someone being chased by a horror too great to face. Any idea he’d had of scolding her for her foolishness vanished.

  “Mercy?” he said, as softly, as gently, as he could. “What is it? What happened?”

  Her arms tightened around her, and she rocked back and forth with a tiny moan. And suddenly it didn’t matter to him any longer what had happened, what horror had driven her out into the snowy night, risking illness or even death; he had a fairly good idea what it was, anyway.

  He pulled open the lower stall door. It was foolish, perhaps, to trust the stallion in such a way, but the animal was so besotted with Mercy, he doubted he would do anything that might hurt her. And the big horse’s body heat would be welcome. He lifted Mercy inside, putting her down on the clean straw, closed the door again, then moved to sit beside her, opening his jacket and pulling her to him, tucking her legs, clad only in that thin green fabric he supposed was silk, against his, adding his own heat to what little she had left. That she didn’t fight him, didn’t pull away, told him more about her state of mind than any words could have.

  Joker whickered softly, lowering his nose to snuffle the top of Mercy’s head with exquisite care.

  “She’ll be all right,” Grant assured the stallion, not even caring about the absurdity of reassuring the horse; the words were meant for Mercy, just as much as for the big Appy. And probably, he admitted as she continued to shake against him, for himself, as well.

  “She just needs to get warm, and know that she’s safe, that it’s okay,” he said, continuing the pretense of comforting the horse. At least he thought it was pretense, but the stallion’s soft nickers seemed to change; as if he’d understood, they became gentle rather than plaintive.

  It had been a long time since he’d tried to comfort a woman. He wasn’t sure he’d been any good at it the few times he tried in the past, and lately he’d avoided getting close enough to one to be called upon to do it, unless it was perhaps Kristina after one of her peccadilloes, or his mother when Nate pulled something she didn’t approve of.

  And never had he tried to comfort a woman as distraught as this one. Probably because he’d never really known a woman who had to deal with the kind of nightmares Mercy’s work no doubt left her with.

  For a long time, he just sat there, holding her, trying to assess whether or not her quivering had lessened. She let him press her head to his shoulder, and he found himself dodging Joker’s black muzzle as the animal periodically nosed her hair, as if trying to get her to react as she usually did, with mock indignation. She didn’t.

  He knew now what her hair looked like down; a thick golden mane that felt as silky as it looked. He could detect the faint fragrance of the now infamous apple-scented shampoo, the smell she teasingly swore was the secret of her easy captivation of the horse. But what he detected most of all was the constant shivers that rippled through her.

  He was aware that she probably wore little or nothing beneath the nightgown that spilled out from beneath her jacket; the fragile, delicate fabric looked rather odd over the heavy sheepskin boots. He could picture too well how she would look in it, how the pale green shade would light her eyes to the peridot of the ring his mother sometimes wore. He was even aware, on some other level that wasn’t intent on simply offering comfort, that his body was responding to her closeness, but he quashed the response mercilessly; it would be the worst kind of insult to make that kind of move now, and bad enough if she was to even guess at his reaction.

  And the kind of woman Mercy was, who lived every day with the kind of thing that left her feeling like this, didn’t deserve that kind of insult, even if he was capable of dealing it.

  So instead he kept talking, not even sure of what he said, just soothing, gentling words, as if he were calming a frightened horse. He held her close, but not tightly; he didn’t want her to feel trapped, something he imagined would be far too easy, with their difference in size.

  And she let him. She stayed there, huddled against him, still shaking slightly but otherwise motionless, and utterly silent. At last, when her trembling seemed to have subsided, he lapsed into silence himself, but still held her.

  Joker seemed to relax, as well, although he watched Mercy with an alert intensity that made Grant wonder just how much the Appy understood. Animals were sensitive to human moods, he knew that; more than once, when he took Joker out in a rowdy, reckless mood, the animal had seemed to catch it, and welcome a breakneck race across the sagebrush-and-greasewood-dotted flats.
And when he was grumpy for one reason or another, the animal had seemed to know it immediately, and had stood looking at him, head tilted at an angle that inevitably made Grant think of the phrase Get over it!

  He didn’t know how long they’d been sitting there before Mercy finally spoke, in a low, small voice, words that sounded forced.

  “I’m…sorry.”

  He didn’t speak, just tightened his arms around her for a moment.

  “I…”

  Her voice trailed off, and he felt her move, moving her head against his shoulder as if to snuggle closer to him. The tiny movement, and the trust it implied, warmed him far beyond what he would ever have expected.

  “I thought it was gone. The dream. I hadn’t had it…since I came here.”

  So it was some kind of awful nightmare that had driven her out into the night.

  “I’m sorry I made you talk about it this afternoon. Maybe that’s what brought on the dream.”

  “The…doctor said I should talk about it.” He heard her sigh, a faint release of her breath that was barely audible. “Like you said. But it’s…hard. Everybody I know…knew Nick. They were grieving, too, and it seemed…so wrong to talk to them about what happened, because it was so awful, and I could never tell them the real truth, it was too horrible, too bloody, too ugly, and they were his friends, his family—”

  She bit off the tumbling words, and he felt her shiver again. He again tightened his hold, and she didn’t fight him—seemed, in fact, to lean into his embrace.

  He didn’t think he wanted to hear it, didn’t want to know what had the power to haunt this strong, resilient woman so completely, but he also knew he couldn’t bear to see her hurting so, couldn’t stand to see her try to control it so valiantly when it was screaming, clawing, to be let out.

  “Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me, Mercy.”

  “I…can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.” Joker nudged her with his nose, as if to encourage her himself. “Who better is there? I didn’t know him, it won’t hurt me, not like it would them.”