by Joanna Sims
On the way back to the Bronco, Nick said to her, “I was really expecting to deal with your brother. Won’t he want any of his father’s trophies?”
“You won’t see Brian within a hundred miles of this place,” Dallas said bluntly. “He hated Pop almost as much he hated life on the rodeo circuit. Blames Davy for all of his problems. Last I heard, he was working for Lowe’s in the garden department.”
Dallas smacked a bug that had landed on her arm, flicked it off, while she continued talking. “I always knew that I would be the one to tie up the loose ends of Davy’s life. I’m his daughter, and I loved him like crazy, so...that’s that...”
For the rest of the walk back to where they had parked, neither of them spoke. It wasn’t until they were back inside the Bronco that Nick asked, “What’s on your agenda for the rest of the afternoon?”
“Practice.” Dallas made a quick U-turn and stepped down on the gas. “You can watch if you want.”
* * *
He wasn’t the only man who wanted to watch Dallas practice barrel racing. A small group of cowboys were hanging on the fence or leaning on the fence, which surrounded the practice arena. Nick positioned himself on the opposite side of the fence and waited for Dallas to start.
“You Angus’s boy?”
Nick turned slightly to the left to see if the question had been posed to him. An older man with severely bowed legs, deep wrinkles carved into his face and a thick black mustache peppered with white stood next to him.
“I am.”
The cowboy offered his hand. “Tom Ketchum.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Your father and I go way back.” Tom joined him at the fence. “You take after him.”
Nick caught a glimpse of Dallas walking out of one of the many Bent Tree barns leading a sleekly built blue roan gelding over to the arena. She swung into the saddle and started to work the mare to warm her muscles. Once Dallas started to ride in the arena, all eyes were on her.
“She draws a crowd,” Nick said to Tom.
“That she does.” Tom chuckled. “I’ve trained her off and on since she was a kid, and it’s always been that way.”
The more Nick watched Dallas ride, the more he wanted to watch. She had that “it” factor—that intangible quality that makes the world stop and take notice without ever really knowing why.
“One of those cowboys a boyfriend?”
Tom rested his boot on the bottom slat of the fence. “Dallas isn’t the kind to get pinned down. She’s never let anything interfere with barrel racin’.”
Dallas cantered by, and even though he knew that she saw him, her focus was entirely on her horse.
“She’s ready, Ketch.”
Tom pulled a stopwatch out of the pocket of his blue-and-white-checkered shirt.
“Watch this,” Tom said to Nick.
Dallas cantered out of the arena, made a small circle and then halted at the arena entrance to wait for Tom’s signal. Dallas’s horse pranced in place, anxious to race toward the first of the three barrels placed in a triangle pattern. Once Tom gave her the signal, the rowdy cowboys quieted while Dallas galloped full throttle toward the first barrel. As Dallas rounded the first barrel, Nick heard her yell “Ho” to the mare. Once around the first barrel, Dallas urged her swift-footed gelding to gallop the short distance to the second barrel.
“Ho!” Dallas’s voice was sharp and crisp and commanding.
“Now she’ll head for the money barrel,” Tom explained.
Once Dallas rounded the third barrel, all the cowboys started to cheer and wave their hats in the air. Tom stopped the stopwatch and looked at the time.
“I’ve seen her do better.” He shook his head before he gestured for Dallas to go again. “Give her more leg when you go around the last barrel, Dallas! You’re losing a ton of time letting her drift so much!”
Now Nick understood why Dallas drew a crowd—she was a dynamic, risky rider who was sexy as hell to watch.
“Can I give you a word of advice, son?” Tom asked without looking at him directly. “Never try to corner somethin’ that’s meaner than you.”
Chapter Two
Nick hadn’t been the only man to stay until Dallas was done with her barrel racing practice. In fact, most did stay. There was something magnetic about the cowgirl—she had that unexplainable “it” thing that made a man want to follow her with his eyes.
Later that night at his hotel room, Nick reflected on his odd fascination with the barrel racer. He had always been attracted to tall women—he hadn’t gotten his father’s height, so he tended to date women who were a little taller than he was. He liked his women leggy, with a healthy bust and a reasonable family pedigree so she would fit in easily at the country club. His parents had doted on him as the only boy, and he had been, for years, an unabashed playboy. After he barely squeaked out a diploma in business from Princeton, he’d spent the better half of his twenties yachting with his friends and spending time in Europe and Dubai.
He’d dated women from all over the world, but he couldn’t recall a woman like Dallas registering on his radar screen. She was the total opposite of what typically attracted his attention: she was short, stocky, flat chested and had a mass of untamed brunette hair. She was—unkempt. It made him wonder if the fascination would stick. Would Dallas Dalton still be as interesting to him tomorrow as she had been today? Only time would tell.
* * *
“Howdy-ho!” Dallas called out to him the next morning.
“Good morning.” Nick held up his hand in greeting.
The cowgirl walked toward him wearing a brown tank top, cutoff shorts that hit her midthigh and her cowboy boots.
“I decided just to bite the bullet and make camp here for a bit.” She hitched her thumb over her shoulder toward a rickety paddock where her horse was trying to reach a piece of grass located on the other side of the fence. “Unless you mind, I’m gonna bunk here until we’re done.”
She stopped when she reached him, and that was when he felt it again—that magnetic pull toward Dallas. He usually looked up to the women on his arm, even taller in their high heels, and it was nice that he could look Dallas right in the eye, that she was shorter than he was by a couple of inches, at least.
“I was thinking the same thing.” Nick surveyed the property with his eyes. The place seemed to be more of a mess than the day before. The trip back and forth from Helena to Bent Tree was going to get old quick.
“There’s plenty of room,” Dallas said. “But no luck with the trailer. It’s a long ways away from livable. I think the cabin is our best bet if you want to bunk out here too.”
They started walking toward the small cluster of buildings near the trailer where Dallas’s famous father had spent the last years of his life as an eccentric hermit. He didn’t want to offend Dallas, especially after she had just recently lost her father, but the legend of her father didn’t match the condition of his aunt’s property. It didn’t make sense that Davy Dalton could have ended up this way. Nick hadn’t said the words aloud, and neither had Dallas for that matter, but the famous rodeo personality had been hoarding for years.
With fresh eyes, Nick stated what might have already been the obvious to his companion. “This may take more time than I originally thought.”
Dallas nodded.
“I honestly don’t know where to begin.” He didn’t normally feel overwhelmed, but he did now.
“Pop always said...the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”
* * *
Dallas had worked side by side with men her whole life. Her earliest memories were traveling from town to town, chasing rodeo money with her dad. Her father had been one of the first of his generation of rodeo men to garner endorsements, so when Davy wasn’t riding a bull or roping a calf, he was posing
for pictures at tack and feed stores. She’d only really known the nomadic life because of Davy; he’d raised her his way on his terms. The schools were always after him about the huge blocks of time she was out from school, but her father believed that she could learn a heck of a lot more about life out on the road with him than she could locked up in a school for eight hours a day.
She had loved her freedom growing up and often felt sorry for her peers who didn’t get to do as they pleased. Davy was too busy making a buck or losing that same buck gambling to regulate her every move—she made her own rules, set her own agenda. Could her father have done better by her? Sure, he could have. What parent was perfect? And yes, her childhood had left scars—some too deep and jagged and discolored to ever heal. But she was as tough as any man—she wasn’t afraid of much in life—and she was a survivor. She had Davy to thank for that.
“It’s hotter than the dickens in here.” Dallas lifted the bottom of her ribbed tank top up to her face and wiped the sweat off her face.
“Let’s take a break,” he suggested, and she agreed.
Although she had spent most of her life surrounded by men, none of them had been like Nick. In the short time she had spent with him, he had caught her attention in a way no man before ever really had. Nick was clean-cut, educated and a gentleman. And so handsome. Just like everyone else in his family, Nick had those shocking Brand-blue eyes, and she had found herself staring into them more than once. Yesterday during practice, she’d found it difficult to focus on her work with Nick watching her.
While most of her fellow barrel racers dreamed of marrying cowboys, Dallas had always wanted something different than what she’d known. She didn’t spend a whole lot of time imagining herself married, but when she did think of a husband, it was to someone like Nick.
“You need gloves.” Dallas fished a bottle of water out of her cooler and handed it to him.
Nick’s once-well-groomed fingernails were black—his hands gray from the dust and the old print off the newspapers.
Nick looked down at his free hand as if he were noticing how dirty it was for the first time. He stared at his hand for a long minute.
“I admit,” he said, “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into here.”
“No.” She finished her water and capped the bottle. “I bet not.”
Not only was Nick a handsome man, he was tougher than she had originally given him credit for. She had thought that the thick, stale, hot air, the dust and dirt, and the piles of decaying magazines and newspapers would send him packing pretty quick. But he had hung in there with her. She was impressed.
“I didn’t even think about food.” Nick squinted in the bright sunlight streaming in through the window.
“Your aunt packed a care package for me this morning. There’s more than enough to share.”
Barbara Brand, Nick’s aunt, was the matriarch of the Brand family and self-appointed caretaker of the disavowed and disenfranchised youth. Nick’s aunt had been looking after her, in one way or another, ever since she was a little girl.
They took turns scrubbing their hands in the cabin sink with a sliver of soap that had become cracked and chalky over the years. Then they turned a crate over in the yard for a makeshift table and salvaged a couple of creaky-legged wooden chairs out of the cabin; with the backdrop of the expansive, cloudless blue sky and mountain peaks in the distance, Nick joined her for lunch.
“Okay—let’s see what we’ve got here.” Dallas fished into her cooler for the care package.
“This looks to be smoked ham and Swiss on Barb’s homemade sourdough bread. And this one is...” She peeked inside the wrapping. “Roast beef and cheddar on sourdough.”
“I’ll take whichever one you don’t want.”
She wrinkled her brow at him with a shake of her head. She held out both sandwiches. “Pick.”
Nick pointed to the roast beef.
“Perfect.” She smiled at him. “I wanted the ham.”
For the first several big bites of their sandwiches, neither of them spoke. They were too hungry to try to talk and eat.
“Hmm.” Nick made a pleased sound after he had devoured the first half of the sandwich.
Dallas nodded her agreement, still chewing on a bigger-than-necessary bite. Barbara was known in the county for her cooking. If you were invited to Bent Tree to eat, you didn’t turn the invitation down. She loved to cook, she was great at it and she always made enough for plenty of leftovers.
“I appreciate you sharing your lunch with me.” Nick balled up the wrapper.
She nodded to say “you’re welcome.” “I think your aunt planned it this way. She’s always thinkin’ about everybody else.”
“You seem to know Aunt Barb pretty well.”
Dallas watched Nick stand up and stretch. He didn’t have the height of the Montana Brand men, but he had nice shoulders and a fit body. Nick’s sister, Taylor, was married to Dallas’s best friend, Clint McAllister. Nick didn’t much resemble his male cousins, but she could definitely see the family resemblance with his sister and she told him as much.
“I’ve heard that all my life.” Nick looked down at her with his lips turned up slightly into the smallest of smiles. “I got razzed pretty regularly about it by my friends. The worst days were when Taylor wore a dress.”
“Why?”
Nick crossed his arms in a relaxed, resting manner. “Oh, you know... I’d hear things like, ‘what happened to your pretty blue dress, Nicki?’ Stupid stuff like that.”
“Heck.” Dallas stood up and tossed her wrapping onto the trash heap. “I get worse than that from those cowpunchers I bunk with part of the year.”
“It does sound tamer than I remember,” Nick said with a laugh. She liked how he could laugh at himself so easily.
Dallas stood next to the Chicago native wishing that they had met under different circumstances. She wasn’t at her best right now—she was dirty and sweaty and smelly. She wanted Nick to see her as a woman, not as a work buddy.
“Are you ready for round two?” Dallas asked, half hoping he’d give up for the day.
“The sooner we start, the sooner we’re going to finish.”
They walked the short distance back to the cabin side by side.
“You must know Taylor from Bent Tree.”
“No.” She grabbed the pitchfork she had left leaning against the side of the cabin. “I know her ’cuz she’s married to my best friend.”
It must have taken Nick a minute to make the right connections in his mind, because they were back inside the cabin before he asked her, “Clint’s your best friend?”
“Yep.” Dallas stabbed a stack of papers with her pitchfork.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nick lean on the handle of his shovel.
“You bunk with men and your best friend is a man? You lead an unusual life.”
Perhaps he didn’t mean it to sound condescending and judgmental, but that was how it sounded to her ears and that was how she took it. She didn’t much care what most people thought about her life, but for some reason, it stung when it seemed like Nick was joining her naysayers.
She grunted as she lifted the heavy pile of newspapers and dumped them into the empty cart between them.
“It might seem unusual to some.” Dallas turned away from him to stop him from seeing the hurt in her eyes. “But it’s normal for me.”
* * *
They spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning out the small cabin. Years of her father’s life were spent “collecting” these papers, something he could never explain to her, and she was shoveling those years into a trash pile to be burned. She didn’t feel sad too often—but this made her feel sad.
Dallas stood by the large pile of trash they had started, and she knew that this was just the beginning of w
hat was going to be a painful journey of simultaneously discovering and discarding the secretive last years of her father’s life.
Nick wheeled another cart over to the pile and dumped it with an exhausted grunt.
“I think I’ve had enough for today,” he said to her. “How about you?”
More than enough.
“The cabin still’s got a long way ta go.” She expected Nick to suggest that they bring in a crew to clear off the land and just be done with it. She wouldn’t blame him, but she prayed that he wouldn’t. Her father still deserved his privacy. It made her heart hurt just thinking about strangers rummaging through his belongings, judging him.
“I’m not sure it’s ever going to get there,” he said.
She tucked her hands in her back pockets, glad that Nick was signaling that he was ready to leave.
“Well,” he said after she didn’t continue the conversation, “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”
“Yep.”
He started heading to where he had left his rental car. But then she saw him hesitate.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay out here by yourself?”
She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she was way more fit to rough it than he was. He was a Brand man, albeit a citified Brand man, and it was his nature to be a gentleman.
“Go on back to Helena and get some rest,” she tried to reassure him with a forced half smile. “We’ve got a full day ahead of us tomorrow.”
He hesitated for a moment longer; he gave her a quick nod to let her know that he’d gotten the message she was sending.
Once Nick was out of earshot, Dallas lowered herself onto her haunches, her arms folded tightly in front of her body, her hands pressed into her stomach. All of this was so much harder than she had thought it would be. One minute she thought she was okay and the next minute she felt like crying. And, other times, like now, she just needed to be alone.
“Oh, Pop.” Rare tears slipped onto her cheeks. “I miss you.”
* * *
Nick stood under the showerhead, letting the hot water beat down on his shoulders until the water started to run cold. He hadn’t ever worked that hard in his life. Not ever. And the only reason he had pushed himself as hard as he did was that Dallas was relentless and strong and he didn’t want to appear to be a soft city dweller in front of her.