MATCH MADE IN WYOMING

by Patricia McLinn

  "What makes you think they'll look for you? The company's run well in your absence all this time. The board of directors can search for a new chairman and—"

  He shook his head. "Doesn't matter how well it's run before – they're hamstrung by his will, and I'm the only one who can untie them. The bastard's made me majority owner of the company, and no vote can carry without me."

  Taylor couldn't imagine another soul sounding so bitter at being handed what amounted to a fortune. You know the phrase "filthy rich"? It was meant for my family. Rich. And filthy.

  Cal had seen too much of wealth's destructiveness to take any pleasure in its freedoms. He'd found freedom his own way, and all it had cost him was a hard shell around his heart.

  "I don't want to wait until they up the reward to the point that it'll be a nationwide manhunt. You take control of this. Get me free before they make it impossible to stay here. That's why I need your professional services." His gaze met hers for an instant that chilled her even before the words came. "Your professional expertise."

  Her professional expertise – not as a small-town lawyer, helping people through the legal dealings of straightforward lives. But her professional expertise in dealing with corporations like Bennington Chemical. The professional expertise she'd gained before turning in her Shark Lawyers of the World membership card.

  "You need a lawyer who's up-to-date on corporate dealings. I've been out of it for several years, and things change quickly."

  "I'll take my chances on you."

  It was not a vote of confidence.

  And she'd been entirely too optimistic in feeling good that he'd trusted her with his family's identity. That was a pawn he was willing to sacrifice in his larger chess game of distrust.

  A game he played ruthlessly. She'd confided in him about letting herself get so caught up in her career that she'd lost perspective on her life. And he'd used that confidence to spot a potential weakness.

  So now Cal was dangling a return to that world – near the top of that world – in front of her like a fresh pack and a book of matches in front of a reformed smoker.

  "I lost my taste for that sort of law, Cal. I won't do it."

  She pushed the money back toward him.

  He didn't move, not even his eyes, which bored into her. "Scared?"

  Find the opponent's weakness and exploit it – a ploy she'd seen used time and again in corporate law. She'd used it herself. She'd never expected Cal Ruskoff to use it against her.

  But then he wasn't Cal Ruskoff.

  If she told him no, he would walk away. Maybe that would be best. But whatever his name, she'd seen inside the man inside the shell. Which was the reason he was doing this – and the reason she couldn't say no. She had to try.

  "To represent you effectively I'll need to know more details." His gaze following her motions was like a drag on her hand as she took out a fresh yellow legal pad and poised a pen over the first line. "Let's start with why you're so sure they'll look for you rather than try to break your father's will."

  "If people weren't smart enough to know he'd make it foolproof they wouldn't be working for him. And if Christina weren't smart enough to know that she'd never have landed him. So they know I'm the key." His mouth twisted in a grimace. "And they'll search for me because they've never quit searching."

  "Tell me about that. From the start." She made the order clipped and cool.

  "After I left, I caught the first job I could crewing on a boat headed for Florida. By the time we arrived, there was a private detective waiting for me. A fellow crew member heard the owner talking to the detective and warned me. I left on another boat that night. For almost two years, I went from crew to crew. Couldn't stay anywhere because, before too long, another detective would show up."

  "Sounds like your fellow crew members helped you."

  "That was before Father put a bounty on my head. Oh, it wasn't worded that crassly, but that's what it amounted to – Information on the whereabouts will be amply rewarded.

  "Never occurred to me that he'd look for me in sailing areas. He'd never noticed my sailing, but Christina had. She had six months of being my fiancée to stockpile knowledge about my ways, and she turned them all around against me. I had to give up sailing if I wanted to keep them from finding me."

  "Because your fellow sailors were giving away your whereabouts?"

  She jotted a nonsensical note as an excuse to keep her head down. When the silence stretched, she had to look up. A frown had tucked grooves above his nose, and his eyes had gone unfocused. Then he blinked and met her gaze.

  "Only a matter of time," he said with a faint edge. But he'd recognized, maybe for the first time, that some people hadn't betrayed him despite the money offered. "The reward got bigger. Maybe my absence – or the absence of my block of votes being exercised – was making board members nervous."

  "So, you left sailing," she prompted.

  "I started working for some people running a cattle herd in Florida. I liked the work, but the water was too damned tempting, and I went to the dock one day, got talking to someone who needed crew for a race, and pretty soon I was spending most of my days off there. Until…"

  "Until?"

  "I ran into a woman who'd been a couple years ahead of me in school. I'd had a crush on her. She said she'd always noticed me. She said my secret was safe with her, because great sex was hard to come by." His mouth twisted. "She sold me out. Guess she figured with the money she could buy great sex elsewhere. By pure luck I heard a stranger asking a waitress in the dock bar if she'd seen me after one race."

  "They might have found you another way. How do you know your friend from home—"

  "I know. And she wasn't a friend. I couldn't risk going back to my job. Sent the people a message and took off west. Worked cattle a while in Texas, then headed up this way. Met up with Henry Brennan nearly three years ago, and stayed put at the Flying W ever since."

  "Okay, now let's go over it again, with the details, especially names and dates."

  His brows dropped into the familiar frown, but when she blandly took him back to the start, asking for dates and names, he answered. Briefly, and with no frills, but he did answer.

  She wrote what he told her. And when she'd covered the period after he'd left his family, she went back and filled in gaps from his earlier life, and as much as he could tell her about the business. Until she couldn't think of any more questions.

  "I'll need a great deal more information on the business, and the will if possible."

  "I've told you all I know."

  "Then to get the information, I'll need authority – probably a limited power of attorney. I'll look into what form would work best and let you know."

  "Power of attorney."

  She looked up at the flatness in his tone, and found he was watching her.

  If she got caught up in the rush of such an exciting, complicated client, then he'd be completely safe from the greater danger of letting their emotional ties develop.

  No way, Cal. You're not safe from me, not yet.

  "Yes, power of attorney. Now, if there's nothing else, I would like to make some phone calls to get started." But only after she'd pulled herself together, and she couldn't start on that Herculean task until he was out of her office. "And with the time difference to the East Coast…"

  "I'm not done."

  She could almost persuade herself that he was unwilling to leave her. Almost. If she didn't have a pad's worth of notes under her elbow.

  "What else?"

  "A will. A will nobody can break. If I die, I want half of everything that comes to me from my father's will to go to some program that lets poor kids go sailing. Find me a good one, and if you can't find one, put it in the will how to set one up. The other half goes to scholarships for the kids of ranchers. Doesn't matter what school or what they want to study." His mouth lifted in a smile that didn't melt a molecule of the blue ice in his eyes. "Even law school, as long as they have the grad
es and don't have the money. I want to see how you'd set the programs up."

  "Of course." After everything else, did he think a client who wanted to review her work was going to bother her? "Personal bequests?"

  His gaze flickered, but his answer was a solid, "No."

  "And the shares you inherited from your mother?"

  She saw that his first instinct was to disavow that, too. He'd so firmly connected the company with his father, he'd forgotten Janice Bennington Whitton's ties to it.

  "Give it to Matty."

  Before she'd done more than write Matty's name on her pad, he spoke again. "Wait. Give a third to Matty. A third to the Knighton Library – as long as they use some of it for more comfortable chairs. And a third to you."

  "I won't take it, and I won't write a will saying that. It wouldn't be ethical, and I don't want anything from—"

  "Fine." He stood abruptly. "Don't take it. Half to Matty and half to the library. It's not like I'm expecting to die soon. I just don't want that damned company dragging me down to hell if I do."

  He'd taken two long strides before she thought of one thing she had to know now. For practical reasons, yes. But that wasn't what pushed her.

  "Cal?"

  He turned back from the door, and for a heartbeat of hope, the Cal of the snowstorm looked back at her. Then he was gone.

  "What is your real name? I'll need it for any legal documents."

  He paused, his reluctance obvious. "Bennington Caldwell Rusk Whitton."

  "What did your family and friends call you?"

  This hesitation was even longer, and she knew that whatever name he gave, she would never use it, because it wouldn't belong to the man she knew.

  "Benning."

  He walked out, leaving Taylor to wonder if Bennington Caldwell Rusk Whitton was any easier to figure out than Cal Ruskoff.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  « ^ »

  "Hello."

  "Cal?" He didn't answer the faint questioning in her voice, but she didn't need it answered. Her heart was beating so hard because it had recognized his voice in two ordinary syllables. "This is Taylor, Taylor Larsen."

  "I know who it is."

  His gruff, low voice should have been cold. But it was too close to the timbre she remembered from the hours in his arms to strike anything but heat and longing deep inside her.

  "I have taken the initial steps you requested, but I have some matters I need to go over with you, to determine how you want to proceed. Could you come to my office tomorrow afternoon, say four?" Two weeks of hard work had produced some results, and no peace.

  "No."

  "Another time, then? Or another day? You can cal Lisa and set up an appointment at your conven—"

  "No time's convenient. It's calfing season. I can't get away."

  "But with the good year the Flying W had last year, Matty's hired more men."

  "Doesn't mean I can go off whenever I feel like it. Foreman has to take his turn. Better for morale."

  "When do you think you could—"

  "Just going to get busier. You come out here."

  "Oh, I don't—"

  "I'll pay for your time."

  "It's not that." But what it was – a fear of memories and longing – was not something she was prepared to discuss. "This is confidential, and with other people around…"

  "There're thousands of acres on the Flying W. I don't think we'll have a problem being alone to talk business."

  Did he mean that only in the literal sense they'd been talking about? Or did he mean that he would have no problem keeping their time alone together on business? Because he had no interest in being alone with her in any other way. Because he wasn't tempted. Because he didn't care.

  "Fine," she said with more snap than she'd intended. "I'll be there at four tomorrow."

  "Fine."

  * * *

  This is Taylor, Taylor Larsen.

  Like he wouldn't recognize her voice? He heard it damned often enough in his head.

  Like the sound of it saying his name hadn't jolted through his bloodstream? His name … Cal. Until she'd said it he hadn't known he'd feared she would start calling him Benning.

  Call her office manager and set up an appointment? Hell, no, he wasn't going to do that.

  So he'd made her come to the Flying W. Maybe that was stupid. Maybe it was even masochistic, having her here where they'd—

  But at least it would be as hard on her as it was on him.

  He hoped so, anyway.

  * * *

  Taylor parked by the barn, well away from the house, and allowed herself only a glance in that direction.

  She noticed one of the new hands Matty had hired for the Flying W heading into a metal shed that had recently been reclaimed from near dilapidation. The shed had lights against a gloomy day.

  "Let's try there," she said to her passenger, Lisa.

  Her office manager nodded. "Looks like a calving shed, so that seems reasonable."

  Stepping inside, Taylor spotted Cal at the far end. The new hand was giving him a set of metal chains. She started in that direction, but Lisa stopped her before she'd covered half the distance.

  "We better wait here. They're going to pull a calf."

  "Pull a calf?"

  "When the mother isn't having much luck pushing her calf out, they get in and pull it."

  "Pull a calf," Taylor repeated, understanding the phrase now.

  Lisa gave her a sympathetic smile. "It can get messy, and neither one of us is dressed for that kind of work."

  "No."

  But Cal was – with holey tan coveralls that showed his jeans underneath in places, a down vest over a faded blue plaid flannel shirt with sleeves rolled up well above his elbows along with another shirt beneath it, battered work boots and his equally battered brown cowboy hat. Dressed for it and suited to it.

  His calm came through in his confident movements and his low, easy voice, sure to be soothing to a mother-to-be cow, even as he gave clipped orders to the two nearby hands. If she didn't know better, she'd think he'd been raised to tend cattle in childbirth.

  Taylor couldn't see everything he was doing, but he was at the business end of the standing cow, which had its head secured in what looked like a vertical and modem version of the stocks used for punishment in colonial days.

  "He'll reach in to find out how the calf's situated," Lisa said beside her.

  "She's nearly ready," Cal said so softly Taylor almost didn't hear him.

  "He loops the chain around the calf's front feet and pulls," Lisa explained. "Sometimes that's enough."

  Taylor watched the concentration and strain in Cal's face as he braced his feet and pulled. And pulled. She knew nothing about pulling a calf, but she knew from his expression that this effort wouldn't be enough.

  "What now?" she asked Lisa in the same low voice.

  "They'll use the calf-puller."

  "The…?" Her question died out when she saw the metal and leather contraption one of the hands brought to Cal.

  The main part was a metal band shaped into a half circle, with a handle attached to the top of its curve. They fit that against the back end of the cow, strapped it in place over her hips, then connected the chains looped over the call's front feet and used a pulley for greater leverage.

  The seconds stretched tense, with only the sound of the chains clinking against metal as the links advanced, and an occasional complaint from the cow.

  "There're the shoulders," Cal said. "C'mon, girl – push. If he's not hip-locked, this might – yeah, c'mon, almost there – do it. Here he comes."

  Even before the men reacted, Taylor knew the calf had been successfully born by the grin stretching across Cal's face.

  "He's alive – and a big one!"

  "No wonder she had trouble with a young'un that size."

  "Thought for sure we'd have to cut to save this fella."

  "You did it, Cal!"

  He tamed his grin, then
met her eyes, with a look of … of … she didn't know how to describe the look, though it sent a shiver of warmth through her when he continued holding her gaze.

  Only when the chatter around him slowly subsided did he turn away, issuing orders about cleaning up the area and releasing the mother cow so she could lick her calf, cleaning and warming it and bonding at the same time.

  As he put his arms under the faucet of a deep metal tub, scrubbing up to his folded-back sleeves, and with the men scattering to follow his orders, she finally found the label for his expression.

  Satisfaction.

  A fierce satisfaction she'd never seen – no, that wasn't true. She had seen an even fiercer satisfaction in his face when they'd made love.

  She wanted to laugh at the idea of comparing pulling a calf to their lovemaking. But the lump in her throat made it impossible.

  And there were connections – the elemental nature of the act, the awe at participating in something that was somehow greater than themselves, the universality and age-old pattern of the acts.

  She couldn't begin to fathom what his feelings might be now about their lovemaking, but she was certain that, for Cal Ruskoff, taking his turn at calfing watch had to do with something deeper than his men's morale. The man who worked so hard at being cynical and bitter wanted to see this miracle of birth. Wanted, even more, to make it come out right.

  This was the true man inside the shell. This was the man who'd held her and made love to her. This was the man worth fighting for.

  She blinked hard and realized Cal was coming toward them, drying his hands and forearms on a towel.

  "Oh, there's Troy Dutton. We went to high school together. I've got to say hi." Lisa sounded more like a gushing teenager than her usual self. "I'll be right back."

  Cal nodded to Lisa in passing, but never took his eyes off Taylor. She returned his look, not certain if she did so to prove she wasn't afraid to match him look for look or because she couldn't look away.

  She wanted to talk about the birth. She wanted to ask about the calf. Instead, she retreated to safe ground.