The Wrangler's Bride

by Justine Davis

  But no amount of aching or stiffness—and she’d certainly suffered enough of that as she used muscles she’d never known existed before—could counteract the crazy little chills that seized her when he came toward her, or the darting blasts of heat that shot through her at his touch. And the fact that more than once she’d caught Grant staring at his own hands on her, or jerking them back as if burned by the contact between them, did nothing to allay her uneasiness.

  She told herself it was simply that she was the only female around, and Grant was a red-blooded male. Sometimes, she thought, wishing she hadn’t worked quite so much around men and so didn’t know quite so much about them, he was an obviously red-blooded male, with that blood pooling in a place he was at some pains to hide. She told herself repeatedly she would be a fool to assume that his apparent arousal had anything at all to do with her, had anything to do with anything, besides her being the only woman around. He certainly hadn’t done or said anything to make her think otherwise. Or to make her think his response was anything other than unwelcome to him.

  It didn’t help much. Not when her own body betrayed her so thoroughly. True, her response to him was far less visible—there were, it seemed some advantages to being female that she hadn’t thought of before—but no less powerful. Her pulse sped up the moment she saw him, and when he touched her, even to tug mercilessly on her heels, she had an annoying habit of forgetting to breathe.

  And the longer the lessons went on, the harder her reaction was to ignore. And Grant himself didn’t look particularly happy; anytime one of those odd moments struck, when she would see him realize he’d been touching her longer than necessary, or staring at her without speaking for too long a time, he would pull back abruptly, avoiding her gaze, and stalk off like Joker in a sulk.

  She wished they could just drag it out into the open, confront the unexpected thing that seemed to be happening between them. But she didn’t know how to begin. Didn’t know if she wanted to. Didn’t know if she had the nerve to.

  Perhaps, she thought with a sigh, it wasn’t only riding lessons she needed.

  Seven

  Of all the stupid ideas he’d ever had in his life, teaching Mercy to ride had to be right up there with thinking Constance Carter would marry him.

  And that, Grant added sourly to himself, was an incident he would do well to remember. He’d thought he had learned the lesson the sophisticated Miss Carter had taught him quite thoroughly, but apparently it needed reinforcing.

  “Good night, Grant.”

  Mercy’s voice was soft, quiet, and vibrant with that husky undertone that did crazy things to his pulse rate and made him continually have to suppress a shiver.

  “Good night,” he muttered.

  He didn’t look up at her. He didn’t have to look to know what he would see; he’d been sneaking glances at her all evening. He knew how she looked, curled up on the sofa, wearing a soft pale green sweater of some fuzzy yarn over a dark green turtleneck and jeans. The color of her clothes seemed to make her eyes even more brightly green, her hair more golden. She looked…wonderful.

  They’d both been sitting in the den reading all evening, her one of his volumes on horse husbandry, him the new technothriller that was somehow not managing to hold his attention at all. Occasionally she had asked him a question, each time apologizing for interrupting him until he told her to just ask and dispense with the guilt.

  But after he’d explained his own completely un-scholarly theory about why Appaloosas had shorter tails than most other horses—from their adaptation to the brushy country they’d originally sprung from under the careful guidance of the Nez Percé people, where a long, flowing tail would have been a nuisance—she fell to silent reading, and he was again faced with the fact that the book that normally would have held him rapt wasn’t doing its job at all.

  He sensed her hesitating in the doorway, and thought he heard a small sigh before she turned and walked away. A moment later, he heard her on the stairs, and then, finally, he heard the door of her room close.

  He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. Then his mouth curved wryly; why he was feeling relieved, he didn’t know. A closed door between them—two closed doors, counting his own—didn’t do a single damned thing to keep him from thinking about her, sleeping in the room right down the hall.

  He’d been startled, even amused when it happened, that first night after she arrived, and he found himself waking from a dream in the middle of the night, a dream of her in the simple four-poster bed, curled up under the bright blue quilt. He’d chuckled, and ruefully admitted that he might have carried abstinence to the limit when he started thinking about the bane of his teenage years in such a suggestive way. Not that she wouldn’t inspire that kind of reaction in a man who hadn’t know the pest she had once been.

  When it happened again, he’d been less amused. And as the dreams continued, growing more detailed—and uncomfortably more erotic—he’d become downright irritated. Whether at himself or the woman who seemed to be the cause of it all, he wasn’t sure.

  And then he’d had this stone-stupid idea about teaching her to ride.

  He slapped his book closed with an angry motion. He let his head loll back on the recliner’s cushion, his mouth tightening even further.

  Didn’t you think about it? he chastised himself. Riding lessons, for God’s sake. They require proximity. Talking. Touching. For extended periods. He shook his head in self-disgust. You walked into it with your eyes open, McClure. But apparently your brain wasn’t connected.

  The answer suddenly struck him. He’d turn the lessons over to Chipper. He’d gotten her well started in the past week, and someone else could take over now. It was the logical thing to do. The boy, although a hard worker, was the least experienced of the hands, and therefore the most expendable. And he’d jump at the chance to spend two or three hours a day with the object of his current infatuation. And Grant could go back to running the ranch, mercifully free of Meredith Cecelia Brady’s unsettling company.

  Why hadn’t he thought of this before? It was perfect. Very pleased with himself, he went back to his book. Realizing he’d absorbed absolutely nothing of the entire last chapter, he paged back to where he’d been when she asked him about Appaloosa tails.

  Appaloosa tails.

  Joker.

  He couldn’t turn the lessons over to Chipper. Not when she was riding the stallion that was the ranch’s greatest single asset. No way could he lay that kind of responsibility on the kid. Nor would he. True, Joker had been more than a perfect gentleman from the beginning; in fact, he’d been almost unnaturally cooperative, stepping daintily, carefully, and stopping at the first sign of trouble, as if aware of the uncertainty of his rider. Some horses, and most stallions, would take that uncertainty as an invitation to rid themselves of that rider, but Joker had acted as if his only goal in life were to keep Mercy in the saddle.

  That effort on the part of the stallion, plus her excellent physical condition and her exquisite sense of balance, had enabled her to progress much faster than Grant had ever expected. And as she had progressed in her riding, so had the easy rapport between her and the big Appy, to a point that amazed him; they were rapidly developing that rarest of things—that perfect communication between horse and rider that made simply watching them a pleasure.

  But there was still no way Grant could leave the inexperienced Chipper alone to deal with Joker, should anything go wrong. Even if, as he suspected it would, Joker’s conduct continued to be impeccable, the boy himself could make things worse by his own nervousness; he’d more than once mentioned to Walt that he didn’t think he’d ever want a horse that valuable, because he’d be constantly worried about something happening to it. The poor kid would probably panic at the thought of dealing with Joker and Mercy at the same time.

  Grant slammed his book closed again, knowing it was useless. He was backed into a corner, just like that ornery bobcat he’d stumbled across in the hay barn last s
pring. And he felt about as amiable about the situation.

  It was a long time before he could bring himself to make the journey upstairs, a journey that had never seemed so long before he had to pass that closed guest room door, thinking about the woman on the other side.

  Mercy sat in the big blue armchair, her feet tucked beneath her and the quilt from the bed tucked around her, staring out into the quiet night. Once, she thought she heard the high, sweet up-and-down call of a meadowlark from the direction of the stand of tall cottonwoods on the far side of the mare’s barn, but she decided she must be imagining it; surely the little birds had long ago headed south for the winter.

  She let out a huge, breathy sigh, then nearly laughed at herself.

  “Feeling mighty melancholy this morning, aren’t you?” she asked rhetorically. Then she smiled, a soft, sad smile; that had been Nick’s quiet way of nudging her out of whatever was bothering her.

  Her breath caught. She sat motionless, waiting. The ripping, tearing pain didn’t come. She still ached at the thought of her dead friend, tears still stung her eyes at the thought of his widow and children, she was still determined to do whatever was necessary to bring down his killers. But the ache didn’t cripple her now, the tears didn’t blind her…and, to her relief, the determination wasn’t lessened by the easing of that vicious agony.

  For a moment, she felt guilty, as if by allowing herself even this much healing she were betraying Nick’s memory. But she knew it was a natural process, and knew as well that Nick wouldn’t have wanted her to continue to grieve so fiercely for him. He would have been the first to tell her to get on with it, not to let his death stop her life.

  Is that what Nick would have wanted?

  Grant’s words came back to her, and she knew now more than ever that he’d been right. Nick would no more have wished her to die along with him than he would have wished it on one of his kids. Or Allison. Not only because he’d come to like and care about her as much as she had him, but because there was another element in their relationship, unique to the job they did.

  He’d as much as told her so, she remembered now, back on their first day on patrol together.

  “If anything ever happens to me, you just keep your butt alive and get them. Put them away.”

  She had nodded, and managed a tight-voiced “You, too.”

  That had been five years ago. She’d never expected it to happen. Now it had. And she was here, instead of hunting down Nick’s killers. The fact that she’d been ordered away didn’t help much.

  She sighed again, but much more quietly this time, as she looked out over the quiet landscape. The snow was nearly gone, but Grant had told her more was on the way, maybe even by tonight. She hadn’t doubted him when he said he could smell it; he’d lived here all his life, and she figured he would know.

  She would have thought that nothing could ease such pain, that nothing could ever distract her from the devastating loss of her dear friend. But this place had. This place, and Grant McClure.

  She could no longer, she admitted ruefully to herself, write this off as the lingering remains of her youthful crush. The boy she knew and adored twelve years ago had been bright, kind, and handsome. Not that Grant wasn’t still all of those things, more so even, but now he had a man’s strength, a man’s determination, a man’s quiet power.

  And, she suspected, a man’s scars.

  The boy she worshiped had borne the scars of his divided family, but he’d told her himself he knew he was luckier than many; both his parents were reasonable, loving people, and he’d never doubted their love for him, even when their own failed.

  But the man, she guessed, had been through his own, private wars.

  He has his reasons, Rita Jenkins had said of Grant’s fixation about city people. Mercy couldn’t help wondering what those reasons were. And why the attractive woman seemed to already know. Had Grant perhaps figuratively—or even literally—cried on her shoulder?

  She smiled slightly at the thought, realizing there was no longer any sign of the jealousy that had so unexpectedly struck her; it was impossible to be jealous of the straightforward, sincere woman.

  Besides, her mind was suddenly full of the memory of how she herself had used Grant’s offered shoulder to pull herself together in the wake of the horrid nightmare that had struck again, just when she thought she had beaten it back. Before, it had taken her hours to shake off the bloody images of Nick dying in her arms, the nightmare exaggerations of herself drowning in his blood, of Nick looking at her accusingly in a way he never, ever had in reality. But somehow Grant had managed to comfort her in a way no one ever had; somehow he had beaten the hideousness back for her.

  He would have done it for anyone in her position, she told herself. Or for any friend of Kristina’s. That she was both probably only meant that he would go well beyond the obligations of a reluctant host in his efforts to console her. It meant nothing more than that. It was a measure of his own kindness, and his love for his sister. It wasn’t personal.

  So why did he pull back as if he’d touched fire every time they came into contact? Why had she felt his gaze on her countless times last night as they sat in the den reading? She’d finally resorted to asking any idle question she could think of, just to stop herself wondering about it. Finally, it had been too much, and she’d fled to her room.

  She’d still been lying awake when he at last came upstairs. She’d heard his careful tread on the steps, then down the hall, and told herself she was only imagining that he seemed to pause outside her door. And when she heard the door to the master bedroom close moments later, she hadn’t known if she was relieved or disappointed. And that fact alone made her more edgy than anything else.

  She blinked, suddenly becoming aware of what had been happening for a few moments now. Grant had been right on target. It was snowing. Quietly, steadily, the thick, fluffy flakes were falling straight down, with no sign of the wind that had blown them around in the earlier storm.

  She watched for a long time, her inner peace seeming to grow as the snow again coated the world. Odd, she thought, that something could be so lovely, so serene, when you were safe and protected, able to look and see the beauty, and yet still be so dangerous if you were forced to try to survive out in it. Out there, it was hypothermia waiting to happen. From in here, where she was cozily warm, it looked like a Christmas card.

  A Christmas card.

  Again she’d forgotten how close the holiday was. And she’d done nothing, not even gifts for her parents, although they’d told her it wasn’t necessary, under the circumstances. She knew they truly understood, but still she felt a twinge of guilt.

  You’re just feeling mopey, she chided herself. She knew that to a certain extent it was true; she’d always spent the holidays with her family, both Thanksgiving and Christmas, and missing the latter this year—for the reasons she was missing it—made her feel very isolated. But she knew it had to be; she didn’t dare go to them. It seemed she’d accomplished her main goal by coming here, to this place where no one would ever think to find her, where no one could trace her, and she couldn’t risk that by giving in to the longing to see her family again. She’d just seen them at Thanksgiving, she’d come up with a reasonable excuse for not coming back for Christmas, and there it had to stay.

  But none of that made her feel any more comfortable about the fact that she was infringing here, that at a time of year that was meant to be shared with those closest to you, she was intruding on Grant’s life. She’d known she would probably still be here, but somehow she hadn’t thought about how it would make her feel.

  And there wasn’t a thing she could do about it. She couldn’t go home, she couldn’t go to her parents, she could only stay put. Dwelling on it would do no good. And moping around would only spoil everyone else’s holiday cheer—or, worse, make them feel sorry for her.

  Resolving to at least not ruin anybody else’s celebration, she gathered up the quilt and scurried back to bed. Sh
e clenched her teeth against a shiver as her warm skin hit cold sheets, and curled up tightly until her body heat managed to warm things up. Thanks to the peace she’d found once more in the quiet, snowy splendor, she was asleep before it happened.

  “How about that one?”

  Mercy looked at the small but nicely shaped tree, then glanced back at Grant. “It’s nice.”

  He knew she was picturing the little tree in the rather sizable living room.

  “It’s a little small,” he admitted, “but I don’t have much in the way of stuff to put on it. I think there are a couple of strings of lights somewhere in the storeroom, and maybe a box of ornaments my mother left behind.”

  Mercy’s brows furrowed. “You think?”

  “I haven’t looked in a while.”

  “Walt said you don’t usually have a tree. He seemed…surprised.”

  “Er…I didn’t last year,” he said, trying to divert her.

  “Then why this year?”

  “I just felt like it, okay?”

  He knew he sounded a bit grumpy, but he didn’t want to try to explain why he’d decided to put up a Christmas tree this year, when he wasn’t sure he understood it himself. He dismounted and pulled the reins over his rangy buckskin’s head to ground-tie him; the horse had been his primary mount before Joker’s arrival, and he’d almost forgotten what a smooth stride the horse had. Not as smooth or as ground-eating as the Appy, but the buckskin was a good horse.

  “Is it by chance the same reason you had Rita bring out that ham, when she said you don’t even know how to cook one?”

  “Just mind Joker, will you, while I cut the darn tree?”