The Rancher's Bride

by Stella Bagwell

  “Debts?”

  In the back of her mind, Rose knew she was beginning to sound like a parrot, but she couldn’t help it. This man was tossing remarks at her that she couldn’t begin to understand.

  Harlan recognized genuine confusion when he saw it. This woman with her smooth, creamy skin and shiny chestnut hair knew nothing of what he was talking about.

  “I’m…” he paused as he glanced over his shoulder at the yearling trotting around the dusty corral. “If you’ll pardon me a minute, I’ll let the yearling loose and we’ll go up to the house and talk.”

  Rose had already been in this man’s company far longer than she’d wanted or expected to be.

  “Can’t you say whatever it is you have to say now? I came over here on horseback, and it’s going to take me awhile to get back home as it is.”

  Surprise lifted his dark brows. “You rode over here?”

  “Why, yes,” she said. “Is something wrong? Have your horses been quarantined for sleeping sickness or something?”

  He shook his head. “No. There’s no problem like that,” he assured her but didn’t go on to explain that she looked far too fragile and feminine to have ridden several miles in this searing heat. “And you don’t have to worry about riding back home,” he told her. “I can haul you and your horse to the Bar M.”

  She unconsciously straightened her shoulders. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” he said, then went to tend to the yearling.

  Once he was finished, the two of them walked the short distance to the house. At the back, they crossed a groundlevel porch, then entered a door which took them directly into a small kitchen.

  Dirty dishes were piled in the sink and the remnants of where a meal had been cooked still littered the stove, but the oval Formica table standing in the middle of the room had been cleared and wiped.

  Harlan motioned for Rose to take a seat. “We have iced tea or soft drinks if you’d like,” he offered.

  As Rose pulled out a chair, she immediately started to decline the drink, then suddenly thought better of it. She’d been out in the heat for several hours and had only stopped to drink from her thermos a couple of times. Keeling over with heatstroke was the last thing she wanted to do in front of this man.

  “Iced tea would be nice,” she told him.

  He fixed two glasses of the drink, gave one to Rose, then placed the other one at the end of the table to her left.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Feeling more than awkward, she watched him leave the room. The television was still playing somewhere in another part of the house. Rose supposed Harlan’s daughter was watching it and as her gaze wandered around the untidy kitchen, she couldn’t help but think the girl was like the yearling he’d been working with earlier. She probably balked at doing anything except what she wanted.

  Rose had taken several sips of the cold, sweetened tea when Harlan returned with a folded white paper in his hand.

  After taking a seat, he handed her the document. “Before we talk anymore about the water, I think you need to see this.”

  Rose’s heart was suddenly pattering out of control, but whether it was reacting to Harlan’s closeness or the dread of what she was about to read, she wasn’t sure.

  Praying her hands would remain steady, she unfolded the legal-size document and quickly scanned the typewritten paragraphs. By the time she reached the end of the page every last drop of blood had drained from her face. A sick feeling roiled in her stomach.

  “This is—unbelievable!” she said in a voice hardly above a whisper.

  “Believe me, Miss Murdock, it’s legal and binding.”

  Rose lifted her eyes to his. “I’m not doubting its authenticity,” she quickly assured him. “I’m talking about my father—”

  Biting down on her lip, she looked away from him. How could Tomas have done such a thing to his family, she wondered sickly. First that woman—his mistress, whom they still hadn’t been able to track down! For all they knew she might turn up any day and demand more money, or even worse, her babies back. Now this!

  Forcing her gaze back to him, she said, “I must tell you Mr.—Harlan, my sisters and I knew nothing of this. We’re, well, actually we’re finding that our father kept a good many things from us while he was alive. But this is—I can’t imagine what he was thinking!”

  Harlan could see she was clearly wounded by the knowledge that her father had borrowed money from him and used the Bar M as collateral. Hell, if his old man had done such a thing to him, he’d be more than wounded, Harlan thought. He’d be wanting to draw blood.

  “Did he tell you why he wanted the money?” Rose asked. “Why did he come to you rather than go to the bank?”

  The pain in her gray eyes bothered Harlan. He looked away from her as his forefinger unconsciously slid up and down the side of the cold, sweaty glass.

  “He didn’t say exactly what he wanted the money for and I didn’t ask. Tomas was my friend. When I first moved onto this place, he helped me while others didn’t bother to offer. Your father didn’t have to tell me why he needed the money. I was just glad to be able to help him out. As to why he came to me rather than the bank, well—” Harlan shrugged and forced himself to look at Tomas’s daughter. “I got the impression he didn’t want to have to do any explaining and that maybe he had already borrowed to the hilt.”

  It didn’t surprise Rose that this man was so intuitive. There was something about his strong presence that told her he’d done, seen and lived a lot in his thirty-some years. He was no man’s fool.

  Rose’s fingers tightened on the promissory note in her hands. “Daddy was—we used his life insurance to pay off his debts. At least, the ones we were aware of. Are you— calling us in on this?”

  Harlan glanced at her sharply. She seemed to expect the very worst from him. Was she always so negative? Or was she only reacting that way to him?

  “Why, no. I’m not calling you in on the loan.”

  She felt sick with relief. “That’s hard to believe.”

  Her eyes were full of moisture. She blinked them several times as she looked at the paper in her hands. Harlan suddenly felt like a bastard, although he didn’t know why. When he’d loaned Tomas Murdock money, he’d done it to help the older man, not jeopardize his ranch or his family.

  “I’m not a loan shark.”

  With slow, jerky movements, Rose refolded the paper and lay it on the table a few inches from Harlan Hamilton’s tough, tanned fingers. “That’s obvious. The payment has been overdue for some time now and you haven’t notified or billed us. Why?”

  Harlan wasn’t really sure why. It wasn’t as if he was set for money. Since the drought had hit, he could use the thousands he’d lent Tomas. Even in the cooler season of the year, the Flying H needed water wells drilled. But he’d been loathe to collect the debt.

  “I knew Tomas had died. And I figured you and your sisters had plenty on your minds as it was.”

  Rose never had had a high opinion of men, and over the past few months since she’d learned of her daddy’s infidelities, she’d lost even more respect for the male gender. To think that this man had considered her and her family’s grief before himself was hard for Rose to digest.

  “I must tell you…at the present, there’s no way we could find the money to pay you back. Even if we sold the last head of cattle we had, we couldn’t come up with what our father borrowed from you.”

  She was telling the truth. Harlan could see that plainly. He could also see that Rose Murdock was not a frivolous woman. She was plainspoken and no-nonsense. What surprised him about her admission was that the Bar M could be that drained of funds.

  Harlan had lived here for seven years. His neighbors to the west owned the largest ranch in the county, perhaps one of the largest in the whole state of New Mexico. They raised good cattle and even better horses. They had plenty of rich grazing land along the Hondo river and several skilled cowboys to ta
ke care of it all. But what she’d just said about repaying the loan and the fact that she’d been line riding herself told Harlan things had changed drastically on the Bar M.

  The whole idea was hard for Harlan to absorb, but not nearly as hard, he figured, as it was for Rose Murdock. “I’m not worried about you paying me back right now.”

  Nerves clenched her stomach like a vice. “You should be.”

  “I need water more than I need money.”

  He took off his battered straw hat and ran a hand through his hair. It was the color of sable and just as shiny. Worn a bit longer than the current fashion, the dark strands fell haphazardly across his forehead and curled around his ears and neck. The front of his shirt was soiled and a large patch of sweat had soaked through the gray material in the middle of his chest. Rose thought he looked a bit like she’d imagined the cowhands did who worked this land when it was still a wild, dangerous territory. Rough, tough and just a little reckless.

  “I can’t understand you,” she said. “You have the power right there—” she pointed at the piece of paper “—to take the Bar M. It could legally be yours now if you wanted to push the issue.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t want to take your home away from you.”

  Suddenly it was all too much for Rose. Pressing the heel of her hand against her forehead, she closed her eyes and let out a long, weary sigh.

  “I came over here,” she said, “to ask you about a simple cut in the fence. Instead, I learn that the Bar M owes you several thousand dollars!” Opening her eyes, she turned her gaze to his face. “You could have at least warned us about this!”

  She sounded both accusing and defeated. Harlan wanted to comfort her somehow but realized there wasn’t much he could do. He couldn’t tell her to simply forget the loan, that he would dissolve her father’s debt. The money had been a big part of Harlan’s savings. He’d worked, scrimped and sacrificed for years to obtain that much money. He couldn’t afford to give it away, no matter how bad he felt for this woman.

  Draining half his tea, he ran his hand through his hair again, then got to his feet and moved to the other side of the room. He’d never had a woman in his kitchen before. His wife had died before he and Emily had moved to New Mexico. The sight of Rose Murdock sitting at the table with her hat hanging against her back, her light red hair curling wildly about her face and her small breasts jutting against her denim shirt was more than a little distracting for him.

  “I’m sure this was the last thing you expected or wanted to hear,” he said, moving over to the sink filled with dirty dishes. “And I wish like hell your father had never borrowed the money in the first place.”

  “But he did,” Rose said quietly. She looked over at him as he turned on the tap and squirted soap over the mound of plates and glasses. “How soon will you need a payment?”

  “It isn’t necessary to discuss the money part of it now. I’d rather talk about water.”

  This man literally had the Bar M in his hands if he wanted it, yet he chose not to move in for the kill. Rose couldn’t believe he was being so bighearted. What was he doing, waiting like a hawk for his prey to weaken?

  “How can we help you?”

  His back turned to Rose, he said, “You can open up part of your land to me.”

  Chapter Two

  Of the three Murdock sisters, Rose had always been the quiet, levelheaded one. She was sweet tempered and rarely ever showed an outward display of emotion. But the shock of Harlan’s words shot her to her feet. “Open our land to you?”

  Harlan glanced over his shoulder. Her breasts were heaving and her hands were fluttering helplessly at her sides. He could see she was struggling not to be upset, but the flash in her gray eyes and the quaver in her voice told him she was losing the battle to hold on to her emotions.

  “Back in east Texas my friends told me I was crazy to move out here on the New Mexico desert But I’ve come to love this place and I don’t want to lose it, or my cattle.” He turned and leveled his dark eyes on her. “I expect you’d rather let me use a pasture with water than meet the stipulations of your daddy’s loan.”

  Something about this rancher made Rose forget to keep her distance. With a boldness that was completely foreign to her nature, she marched over to within a step of him.

  “Are you threatening me? Is that what this is all about?”

  Suddenly there was a comical twist of frustration on his face. “Look, Rose, if I’d wanted to take your home away from you I could have done it legally several months ago! I’m not a vulture. I’m just a man trying to make a living. All I’m asking for is a little help from the Bar M. And under the circumstances, I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

  Of course he had every right to ask for water. In fact, Rose knew she should be down on her knees thanking God that Harlan Hamilton wasn’t demanding more. Still, the idea of opening the ranch to someone else was like inviting a stranger into her bedroom. The Bar M had been Murdock land for more than forty years. No one had so much as leased a foot of it, or even walked across it. Each section of pasture was like a room in the ranch house. She didn’t want interlopers in her home.

  With a surrendering shake of her head, Rose said, “No, you’re not asking too much. But I must tell you I’m in the same situation you are, Harlan. What bit of grass I have left is burning and I need it for my own cattle.”

  Harlan wasn’t a man to take advantage of anyone who happened to be down on their luck, and that included a beautiful woman. But at the moment he was having tough luck of his own.

  “I can understand that. But I need water wells drilled and pumps installed. Doing that takes lots of money. Money that I loaned to Tomas,” Harlan replied. “I have no intention of going into debt, and I’m not going to sell my cattle. If it makes you feel any better, you can count the use of your water as the first payment on the loan.”

  Rose was backed into a corner with no way out. She had no choice but to let him have what he asked for and hope and pray his wants would stop there.

  Squaring her shoulders, she jammed her hat back on her head, then tugged the brim down on her forehead. “I’m not a difficult woman, Harlan, nor am I foolish. I’ll meet you tomorrow at the boundary fence and we’ll decide what to do with your cattle and mine. Now I should be heading home before dark catches me.”

  She turned to go. Harlan immediately called her back.

  “If you galloped all the way back to the Bar M you couldn’t beat the dark. I’ll take you.”

  “My horse—”

  “The stock trailer is already hooked onto the truck. It won’t be any problem to take you both home.”

  If it wasn’t for Pie stepping on a sidewinder in the dark, she would have insisted on riding back alone. She didn’t want to climb into a vehicle with this man. In fact, if she didn’t get away from him soon, she was certain she’d never be able to breathe properly again.

  “Very well,” she conceded.

  Harlan walked over to an open doorway leading to other parts of the house. “Emily?”

  A few moments passed before the teenager appeared in the doorway. “You wanted me?” she asked her father.

  Harlan introduced his daughter to Rose, then added, “I’m going to drive Miss Murdock back home. Would you like to come with us?”

  The girl threw a suspicious glance at Rose. “No.”

  Harlan sighed. “You haven’t been off the place for several days. It would do you good to get out of the house, Emily.”

  Having been a schoolteacher the past five years had taught Rose many things about children. She knew that underneath petulance was usually a need for attention or love. As for Emily, there was a sad, depressed look about the girl that tugged at Rose’s heart.

  “I know what the Murdock place looks like,” Emily said with a toss of her head.

  “If that’s the way you feel about it,” Harlan said to her, “then I expect you to have this kitchen clean by the time I get back.”

&nbs
p; The bored look on the girl’s face suddenly turned indignant. “But, Daddy,” she protested. “I’ll miss my program and—”

  “No buts. You didn’t want to go, so stay here and make yourself useful. And turn that darn TV off. If I come back and hear it on, it’s going to stay off for a week.”

  Turning to Rose, he nodded toward the door leading to the back porch. “If you’re ready, let’s go.”

  Rose looked at the teenage girl. “Goodbye, Emily. I hope we meet again, soon.”

  For a moment, Rose thought Harlan’s daughter was going to rebuff her but then a faint smile crossed the girl’s thin face.

  “Goodbye, Rose.”

  Once the two of them were outside the house, Harlan said, “I hope you’ll overlook Emily’s rudeness. She’s been in one of her moods lately.”

  “I used to be a schoolteacher, so I’m accustomed to teenagers’ moods,” Rose replied.

  They rounded the house and Rose was relieved to see that Pie was only a few steps away from where she’d left him. She reached for the horse’s reins, but Harlan immediately took them from her. As he led the horse toward the barn Rose followed him. The sun was already down and shadows were lengthening on the dry, cracked ground beneath their feet. While they walked, Rose kept her eyes on the dusty toes of her boots.

  “You say you were a teacher. Does that mean you’ll not be teaching when school begins in September?”

  “The ranch needs me now,” she said frankly.

  Harlan glanced over at her downcast head. Things were obviously much worse at the Bar M than he’d expected and that worried him for more reasons than one.

  A few minutes later they were traveling west across Flying H land. The evening air was beginning to cool. Rose removed her hat so that the breeze coming through the open cab would blow her hair.

  As the ranch house disappeared behind them, Rose couldn’t help but wonder if Harlan’s daughter was cleaning the kitchen or watching TV. Did her daddy spoil her, misunderstand her, love her? The questions pestered her until she finally said, “It must be a very quiet life for Emily during the summer months. Does she do any activities with friends her age?”