by Diana Palmer
She sat up in the middle of the mess, and angry tears ran down her soot-covered cheeks as she glared at Dal.
He was laughing so hard that he was almost doubled over.
“That’s right, laugh,” she muttered. “Santa’s going to stop by here on his way to your house to get enough coal to fill up your stocking, Dariell Blake!”
He laughed even harder.
Her father came back into the room with a file folder in one hand, stopped, did a double take, and stared at his daughter, sitting on the floor in a pile of coal.
“What the hell happened to you?” he burst out.
“He happened to me!” she cried, pointing at Dal Blake. “He said I looked like a streetwalker!”
“You’re the one in the tight red dress, honey.” Dal chuckled. “I just made an observation.”
“Your mother would have a fit if she saw you in that dress,” her father said heavily. “I should never have let you talk me into buying it.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s ruined!” She got to her feet, swiping at tears in her eyes. “I’m going to bed!”
“Might as well,” Dal remarked, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets and looking at her with an arrogant smile. “Go flirt with men your own age, kid.”
She looked to her father for aid, but he just stared at her and sighed.
She scrambled to her feet, displacing more coal. “I’ll get this swept up before I go to bed,” she said.
“I’ll do that. Get yourself cleaned up, Meda,” her father said gently, using his pet name for her. “Go on.”
She left the room muttering. She didn’t even look at Dal Blake.
* * *
That had been several years ago, before she worked in law enforcement in Missouri and finally hooked up with the FBI. Now she was without a job, running a ranch about which she knew absolutely nothing, and whole families who depended on the ranch for a living were depending on her. The responsibility was tremendous.
She honestly didn’t know what she was going to do. She did watch a couple of YouTube videos, but they were less than helpful. Most of them were self-portraits of small ranchers and their methods of dealing with livestock. It was interesting, but they assumed that their audience knew something about ranching. Meadow didn’t.
She started to call the local cattlemen’s association for help, until someone told her who the president of the chapter was. Dal Blake. Why hadn’t she guessed?
While she was drowning in self-doubt, there was a knock on the front door. She opened it to find a handsome man, dark-eyed, with thick blond hair, standing on her porch. He was wearing a sheriff ’s uniform, complete with badge.
“Miss Dawson?” he said politely.
She smiled. “Yes?”
“I’m Sheriff Jeff Ralston.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. She shook hands with him. She liked his handshake. It was firm without being aggressive.
“Nice to meet you, too,” he replied. He shifted his weight.
She realized that it was snowing again and he must be freezing. “Won’t you come in?” she said as an afterthought, moving back.
“Thanks,” he replied. He smiled. “Getting colder out here.”
She laughed. “I don’t mind snow.”
“You will when you’re losing cattle to it,” he said with a sigh as he followed her into the small kitchen, where she motioned him into a chair.
“I don’t know much about cattle,” she confessed. “Coffee?”
“I’d love a cup,” he said heavily. “I had to get out of bed before daylight and check out a robbery at a local home. Someone came in through the window and took off with a valuable antique lamp.”
She frowned. “Just the lamp?”
He nodded. “Odd robbery, that. Usually the perps carry off anything they can get their hands on.”
“I know.” She smiled sheepishly. “I was with the FBI for two years.”
“I heard about that. In fact,” he added while she started coffee brewing, “that’s why I’m here.”
“You need help with the robbery investigation?” she asked, pulling two mugs out of the cabinet.
“I need help, period,” he replied. “My investigator just quit to go live in California with his new wife. She’s from there. Left me shorthanded. We’re on a tight budget, like most small law enforcement agencies. I only have the one investigator. Had, that is.” He eyed her. “I thought you might be interested in the job,” he added with a warm smile.
She almost dropped the mugs. “Me?”
“Yes. Your father said you had experience in law enforcement before you went with the Bureau and that you were noted for your investigative abilities.”
“Noted wasn’t quite the word they used,” she said, remembering the rage her boss had unleashed when she blew the interrogation of a witness. That also brought back memories of the brutality the man had used against her in the physical attack. To be fair to her boss, he didn’t know the prisoner had attacked her until after he’d read her the riot act. He’d apologized handsomely, but the damage was already done.
“Well, the FBI has its own way of doing things. So do I.” He accepted the hot mug of coffee with a smile. “Thanks. I live on black coffee.”
“So do I.” She laughed, sitting down at the table with him to put cream and sugar in her own. She noticed that he took his straight up. He had nice hands. Very masculine and strong-looking. No wedding band. No telltale ring where one had been, either. She guessed that he’d never been married, but it was too personal a question to ask a relative stranger.
“I need an investigator and you’re out of work. What do you say?”
She thought about the possibilities. She smiled. Here it was, like fate, a chance to prove to the world that she could be a good investigator. It was like the answer to a prayer.
She grinned. “I’ll take it, and thank you.”
He let out the breath he’d been holding. “No. Thank you. I can’t handle the load alone. When can you start?”
“It’s Friday. How about first thing Monday morning?” she asked.
“That would be fine. I’ll put you on the day shift to begin. You’ll need to report to my office by seven a.m. Too early?”
“Oh, no. I’m usually in bed by eight and up by five in the morning.”
His eyebrows raised.
“It’s my dog,” she sighed. “She sleeps on the bed with me, and she wakes up at five. She wants to eat and play. So I can’t go back to sleep or she’ll eat the carpet.”
He laughed. “What breed is she?”
“She’s a white Siberian husky with red highlights. Beautiful.”
“Where is she?”
She caught her breath as she realized that she’d let Snow out to go to the bathroom an hour earlier, and she hadn’t scratched at the door. “Oh, dear,” she muttered as she realized where the dog was likely to be.
Along with that thought came a very angry knock at the back door, near where she was sitting with the sheriff.
Apprehensively, she got up and opened the door. And there he was. Dal Blake, with Snow on a makeshift lead. He wasn’t smiling.
“Your dog invited herself to breakfast. Again. She came right into my damned house through the dog door!”
She knew that Dal didn’t have a dog anymore. His old Labrador had died a few weeks ago, her foreman had told her, and the man had mourned the old dog. He’d had it for almost fourteen years, he’d added.
“I’m sorry,” Meadow said with a grimace. “Snow. Bad girl!” she muttered.
The husky with her laughing blue eyes came bounding over to her mistress and started licking her.
“Stop that.” Meadow laughed, fending her off. “How about a treat, Snow?”
She went to get one from the cupboard.
“Hey, Jeff,” Dal greeted the other man, shaking hands as Jeff got to his feet.
“How’s it going?” Jeff asked Dal.
“Slow,” came the repl
y. “We’re renovating the calving sheds. It’s slow work in this weather.”
“Tell me about it,” Jeff said. “We had two fences go down. Cows broke through and started down the highway.”
“Maybe there was a dress sale,” Dal said, tongue-in-cheek as he watched a flustered Meadow give a chewy treat to her dog.
“I’d love to see a cow wearing a dress,” she muttered.
“Would you?” Dal replied. “One of your men thinks that’s your ultimate aim, to put cows in school and teach them to read.”
“Which man?” she asked, her eyes flashing fire at him.
“Oh, no, I’m not telling,” Dal returned. “You get on some boots and jeans and go find out for yourself. If you can ride a horse, that is.”
That brought back another sad memory. She’d gone riding on one of her father’s feistier horses, confident that she could control it. She was in her second year of college, bristling with confidence as she breezed through her core curriculum.
She thought she could handle the horse. But it sensed her fear of heights and speed and took her on a racing tour up the side of a small mountain and down again so quickly that Meadow lost her balance and ended up face-first in a snowbank.
To add to her humiliation—because the stupid horse went running back to the barn, probably laughing all the way—Dal Blake was helping move cattle on his own ranch, and he saw the whole thing.
He came trotting up just as she was wiping the last of the snow from her face and parka. “You know, Spirit isn’t a great choice of horses for an inexperienced rider.”
“My father told me that,” she muttered.
“Pity you didn’t listen. And lucky that you ended up in a snowbank instead of down a ravine,” he said solemnly. “If you can’t control a horse, don’t ride him.”
“Thanks for the helpful advice,” she returned icily.
“City tenderfoot,” he mused. “I’m amazed that you haven’t killed yourself already. I hear your father had to put a rail on the back steps after you fell down them.”
She flushed. “I tripped over his cat.”
“You could benefit from some martial arts training.”
“I’ve already had that,” she said. “I work for my local police department.”
“As what?” he asked politely.
“As a patrol officer!” she shot back.
“Well,” he remarked, turning his horse, “if you drive a car like you ride a horse, you’re going to end badly one day.”
“I can drive!” she shot after him. “I drive all the time!”
“God help other motorists.”
“You . . . you . . . you . . . !” She gathered steam with each repetition of the word until she was almost screaming, and still she couldn’t think of an insult bad enough to throw at him. It wouldn’t have done any good. He kept riding. He didn’t even look back.
* * *
She snapped back to the present. “Yes, I can ride a horse!” she shot at Dal Blake. “Just because I fell off once . . .”
“You fell off several times. This is mountainous country. If you go riding, carry a cell phone and make sure it’s charged,” he said seriously.
“I’d salaam, but I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet,” she drawled, alluding to an old custom of subjects salaaming royalty.
“You heard me.”
“You don’t give orders to me in my own house,” she returned hotly.
Jeff cleared his throat.
They both looked at him.
“I have to get back to work,” he said as he pushed his chair back in. “Thanks for the coffee, Meadow. I’ll expect you early Monday morning.”
“Expect her?” Dal asked.
“She’s coming to work for me as my new investigator,” Jeff said with a bland smile.
Dal’s dark eyes narrowed. He saw through the man, whom he’d known since grammar school. Jeff was a good sheriff, but he wanted to add to his ranch. He owned property that adjoined Meadow’s. So did Dal. That acreage had abundant water, and right now water was the most important asset any rancher had. Meadow was obviously out of her depth trying to run a ranch. Her best bet was to sell it, so Jeff was getting in on the ground floor by offering her a job that would keep her close to him.
He saw all that, but he just smiled. “Good luck,” he told Jeff, with a dry glance at a fuming Meadow. “You’ll need it.”
“She’ll do fine,” Jeff said confidently.
Dal just smiled.
Meadow remembered that smile from years past. She’d had so many accidents when she was visiting her father. Dal was always somewhere nearby when they happened.
He didn’t like Meadow. He’d made his distaste for her apparent on every possible occasion. There had been a Christmas party thrown by the local cattlemen’s association when Meadow first started college. She’d come to spend Christmas with her father, and when he asked her to go to the party with him, she agreed.
She knew Dal would be there. So she wore an outrageous dress, even more revealing than the one he’d been so disparaging about when she was a senior in high school.
Sadly, the dress caught the wrong pair of eyes. A local cattleman who’d had five drinks too many had propositioned Meadow by the punch bowl. His reaction to her dress had flustered her and she tripped over her high-heeled shoes and knocked the punch bowl over.
The linen tablecloth was soaked. So was poor Meadow, in her outrageous dress. Dal Blake had laughed until his face turned red. So had most other people. Meadow had asked her father to drive her home. It was the last Christmas party she ever attended in Raven Springs.
But just before the punch incident, there had been another. Dal had been caught with her under the mistletoe . . .
She shook herself mentally and glared at Dal.
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June 1
How was Jake Murdoch, her foreman, going to react to the news?
Maud Whitcomb, owner of the Wind River Ranch, pushed her fingers through her dark hair that was threaded with silver. Sitting in her large office, she waited with anticipation. Jake was an ex-recon Marine with severe PTSD he dealt with day in and day out. As the foreman for their hundred-thousand-acre ranch for the last three years, he’d proved himself invaluable despite his war wounds. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t be happy.
Jake’s symptoms made him a loner, boarded up like Fort Knox, and he liked living alone in the huge cedar log cabin a mile from the main ranch area. Dragging in a steadying breath, Maud heard heavy footsteps echoing outside her open office door. It was early June and, for once, there was bright sunshine and a blue sky in western Wyoming.
She saw Jake’s shadow first and then him. He was six-foot two-inches tall, a solid two hundred pounds of hard muscle. His shoulders were almost as broad as the doorway he stood within. At thirty years old, any woman worth her salt would turn her head to appreciate his raw good looks and powerful physique. His temperament, however, was open to question. He was known as “Bear” around the ranch. Bear as in grizzly bear. He was terse, not PC, completely honest and didn’t brook idiots for more than two seconds.
Swiftly glancing up at him as he entered, Maud watched him take off his dark brown Stetson and saw his expression was set; any emotion he felt was hiding behind what he called his game face.
“Jake. Come on in,” she said, waving a hand toward a wooden chair in front of her desk. “How’s your mom doing?”
Grunting, Jake hung up his Stetson on a nearby hat tree and turned, boots thunking across the highly polished oak floor.
Maud girded herself. He wasn’t happy. At all. “Coffee?” It was nine a.m., and usually by this time he was out on the range, managing their wranglers. He probably wanted to be out with his hardworking crew rather than in here with her.
But they had to talk.
“Yeah, coffee’s good,” he said, making a beeline for the service on the other side of the room. He poured two cups, black, and turned. Setting one in front of her, he sat down and took a quick sip of the steaming brew. “You know my mother broke her thigh bone a couple of days ago. I just finished talking to her surgeon before coming here, and they said she pulled through the operation with flying colors. She’s resting in her room right now.”
“That’s great to hear,” Maud said, relief in her tone as she sipped the coffee. “I know they call it breaking a hip, but in reality, people break their femur or thigh bone.”
Shaking his head, Jake muttered, “Yeah. Bad anatomy, if you ask me.”
“So? What’s her prognosis?”
She saw him grimace and set the coffee down in front of him. “The surgeon says she’s going to need eight to ten weeks of care. She lives alone in Casper. And she’s fighting having a caregiver in her home twenty-four hours a day.”
Managing a sour smile, Maud said, “Like mother, like son. Right?” She saw worry in Jake’s forest-green eyes. He had been close to both his parents; his father had died at the age of fifty-five of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. For the last ten years, his mother had been on her own. Now, at sixty-five, she had a broken bone and needed help. Jake’s expression turned dark, and she saw him wrestling with the whole situation.
“I’m afraid you’re right, Maud.”
“So? What do you want to do about it?” She leaned back in her squeaky leather chair, holding his narrowing gaze. “How can we gather the wagons and help you out?” Maud made a point of being there for the people who worked for them. Jake had not asked for anything. He never did. Her experience with her wrangler vets, however, had taught her early on that those with PTSD, man or woman, never asked for help, never asked for support, and she knew it came from the shame that they had been broken by combat. “Well?” she prodded, arching a brow.
Jake squirmed. “Mom asked if I could come home and help her for those two months.” Mouth quirking, he mumbled, “I told her I couldn’t, that we had fifty grass leases with fifty different ranchers coming here, bringing in their herds by truck, in the next two weeks. I told her the Wyoming grass was thick, rich and nutritious, that the cattle would fatten up far more quickly on these lands than being put into a livestock pen. That I couldn’t leave because our work triples from June through September.”