by Maddy Barone
“So, who won her?”
“How would I know? Haven’t gotten a letter yet. Hell, the fight might not even have taken place yet.”
Mel smiled, even with the memory of the grisly ending of her third, very brief, marriage lingering in her mind. Not exactly a lie. She did go to the Bride Fight and was won by Jim Fosse, but she hadn’t sent a letter. Not, she snorted to herself, that Marc had a problem with twisting the truth. He could say anything with a bland, blank face, and no one would know he was lying.
Sam’s face lifted to stare up at her window. Mel stood utterly still, knowing she couldn’t be seen where she was. After a minute he looked back to the front of the house. “You had visitors last night. Indians. They had some white women with them, I heard.”
“You hear a lot.”
Sam laughed. “Sure. Folks like to talk to me. So who were they?”
“Just travelers, passing through. We sold them some supplies, and they left this morning.”
“Were the women young? Pretty?”
Marc declined to answer. Silence stretched. Mel moved slowly and carefully to wipe away the sweat gathering on her upper lip. It wasn’t nerves that made her sweat, she assured herself. The bedroom was sweltering in the humid July afternoon. She kept her gaze sweeping over the distant hills, looking for any threat, but checked Curt and Sam frequently. They sat quietly in their saddles, twenty-five yards from the house. If they thought they could force Marc to speak, they were in for a surprise. Her big brother was a champion at keeping his mouth shut. Finally, Sam gave up and spoke again.
“Mind if we fill our canteens?”
“Yeah, I do. It ain’t but a three hour ride home for you. You won’t die of thirst before then. You oughta get going.”
Mel caught the corner of Sam’s mouth tightening below the wide brim of his hat. “This ranch used to have a reputation for hospitality.”
“The Flying D is plenty hospitable. Any of our friends and family would be welcome to come in out of the sun and have a drink.”
Sam’s horse shied at his sharp jerk on the reins. “Not exactly neighborly. In fact, that sounds downright rude.”
“Yeah,” Marc drawled. “I get that way with folks who threaten to burn me out, kill my brothers, and rape my sister.”
Curt made a sudden move of his hand. Mel raised her rifle, watching him, but he settled down. “Look, Marc,” he said. “That was right after Melissa shot Rob. We were all pretty hot then, and maybe we said some things we shouldn’t have. It’s water under the bridge now.”
Really? Mel silently scoffed. Being won by Jim in the Bride Fight and taken off to a hotel to be raped and murdered by three Fosse brothers didn’t sound like water under the bridge to her. Once the three remaining Fosse brothers realized Jim, Randy, and Dave were killed by Snake, they would come hunting him. Unless they already know? She considered that. How could they? No, this was a fishing expedition. They wanted to find out what Marc knew, but he wasn’t giving them anything.
“Better get going,” Marc suggested, “if you want to get home before supper.”
Sam and Curt sat silent in their saddles. Another bead of sweat gathered on Mel’s upper lip, trembling with its own weight. It broke and rolled over her lip in a salty slide.
Sam raised one hand and tapped a spur into his horse’s flank. “We’ll be going then. See you around, Marc.”
Mel finally wiped the sweat from her lips. She kept her gaze moving over the hills instead of staring at them as they rode slowly up the road and under the arch in the fence, but she saw the two gray wolves slink through the grass behind them. She wiped sweat away again and felt the knot of worry in her chest unkink a tiny bit. Snake and Stone would follow the Fosses and make sure they didn’t double back.
“With the Wolfe boys out there, I think we’re safe from an ambush, but keep watch another fifteen minutes anyway,” Marc called.
Sara called back, “I see Mordecai and Michael out back. They’re half a mile off, and they’re walking their horses in real slow.”
Mel eased a careful breath out. Thank God, all her brothers were safe. For now. She didn’t know what would happen when the Fosses found out more of their brothers were dead, but it wouldn’t be good for the Dirks.
* * * *
Snake wasn’t sure which he liked more, the rich taste of the stew his mate made or the feel of her thigh pressed against his under the supper table. The stew was good, but the warmth of Mel’s thigh made his thoughts turn to other appetites. Last night was their wedding night, and he spent it on the floor of her bedroom, stretched out in front of the door. Tonight, he decided, he wouldn’t be sleeping on the floor. Here, at the supper table with her three brothers present, wasn’t the time or place to share that decision, but after supper he would tell her. He couldn’t wait to find out what her reaction would be.
At the head of the table, Marcus Dirk, the eldest of his brothers-in-law, swiped up the last of the gravy in his bowl with a chunk of bread. Snake judged his age to be around thirty. His short brown hair showed no gray, and his lean sun-browned face showed no wrinkles, but neither did it have the softness of youth. He nodded to Sara, sitting with Stone on the other side of the table from Snake. “That’s good bread.”
Sara flushed becomingly. “Thanks. It’s about the only thing I make that’s really good. My dad always ate whatever I fed him, but he always said the bread was his favorite.”
Stone raised a hand to tug a lock of his new bride’s wavy golden-brown hair. “It was good bread. You’ll have to show us how you make it when we get back to the den.”
Her brown eyes narrowed, and Snake braced for an explosion, but she only jerked her head aside to free her hair. Stone hid his hurt behind an expressionless face, but Snake could feel his younger cousin’s yearning to love his mate and the pain her rejection caused. He cast a sidelong glance at his own mate. Lust and mating were powerful urges, so tangled with snarled emotions that sometimes he felt like he would lose control of his wolf.
Marc pushed his bowl away and leaned back in his chair. “Well, this is the first chance we’ve had to really talk since you showed up yesterday. We’ve heard the basics of your story, but I’d like to know more.” His eyes, a harder, colder green than Mel’s, narrowed at Snake. “From what I can figure, you didn’t win Mel in the Bride Fight. So how did you wind up married to her? Hell, what were you doing in Ellsworth in the first place? You’re from Nebraska.”
Mel opened her mouth, but closed it again and settled back, looking at him. Mordecai, next to Stone across the table, and Mike, seated beside Snake, leaned forward on the elbows they planted on the table, looking like they were anxious to hear every word. They were both younger than their brother and sister. Mike was maybe in his early twenties, and the hint of roundness in Mord’s cheeks showed he was probably in his late teens. Both had the brown hair and the tall, rangy build Marc had. Snake glanced at Mel, pleased her figure was soft and plump. So womanly. So beautiful with her suntanned face framed by dark blonde hair just long enough to touch her shoulders. He curled his fingers into a fist to keep from reaching for her and turned back to Marc.
“I’ll start at the beginning. The Chief got word that his cousin Ellie was going to be a prize in the Bride Fight against her will. He sent a bunch of us down here to Kansas to bring her home.”
“The Chief?” Marc asked.
“Taye. Our cousin.” He nodded at Stone. “He’s Alpha of the Pack. You know about that?”
Marc nodded. “Some. The men turn into wolves, like you do. I know about the Lakota Wolf Clan. Same thing, right?”
“Pretty much. The Pack is part of the Clan, but we stay put at the den by Kearney, and the Clan roams the prairie.”
Stone straightened in his chair to lay a hand on Sara’s shoulder. “Except during the winter,” he told her. “The Clan has a permanent settlement in the Black Hills they stay in during the winter. I can build us a house there if you want.”
Sara twitched her shoulder away from him wit
hout looking in his direction. He slumped back, face blank. Snake mentally shook his head. His little cousin’s courtship wasn’t going well. A quick glance at Mel showed she was listening with a quiet face. Would she like to live in the sacred lands during the winter? Would a room in the den be enough for her? He would give her anything she wanted.
“So, Taye sent us down to fetch Miss Ellie,” he went on. “She’s Taye’s cousin, and Sara was with her. We planned to buy her and Miss Sara from the city council in Ellsworth. We didn’t know about Mel then, but we would have bought her too. The men in Ellsworth were set on having the fights, though, so it didn’t matter how much gold we offered for them. Ellsworth wasn’t selling. A couple of us entered the Bride Fights. Quill won Ellie and Stone won Sara.” He didn’t have to glance at Sara to know she scowled. “The first woman won was Mel.”
Marc jerked his chin at his sister. “Jim Fosse won you?”
“Yeah” she said. Snake sat closely enough to feel the tension in his mate’s body. “Him and Randy and Dave all entered the fight. I think they figured one of them would win, and Jim did. They took me to the hotel for the…And they…”
Her voice trailed off, and Snake wanted desperately to hold her, but though she hadn’t completely rejected him, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with him, either. He touched her arm lightly instead, feeling how tightly her muscles were clenched.
Marc’s narrow face showed no expression. Anyone with a nose less keen than a wolf’s wouldn’t know of the fury roiling inside him. “How bad did they hurt you?”
“Not too bad,” Mel told her hands, not looking up from her intense study of her fingers. “Snake got there before…”
She trailed off again, so Snake took over. “We saw the Fosses take her out, and we could tell she wasn’t happy, so we were glad when Quill told a few of us to go check on her, be sure she was okay. The Chief put Quill in charge, so we did what he said, but I would have gone after her anyway.” Even from a distance his wolf had taken close notice of the struggling woman. He had whined and tugged at Snake’s control, demanding to go after her.
One of Mord’s eyebrows arched. “What did he think you could do for her if she wasn’t okay?”
“Hush, Mord,” said Marc sternly. “Let the man tell the story all the way through. Once he’s finished we’ll ask our questions.”
“He probably thought I’d do what I did,” Snake told his youngest brother-in-law. “Me and Paint went after Mel and found out what room the Fosses were in at the hotel. When we got there, we could hear Mel yelling and the Fosses laughing. Sounded like they were hitting her. I heard fabric tear.” The memory roused his wolf and painted a red curtain over his vision. To calm his wolf, he laid a hand over Mel’s wrist on the table and stroked the tender skin over her pulse as if he were petting a kitten. It calmed his wolf enough so he could keep talking. “We knocked on the door, and when it didn’t open, we broke it down.”
He could feel Mel’s pulse quicken under his fingers. What did she remember of that? His few lucid memories revolved around the sight of Mel held down on the bed by two men while a third ripped her shirt. The mental image of her face turning toward him with agonized hope was crystal clear in his mind, as was her shock when his wolf tore out of him. In that one split second while he stood in the doorway, his wolf had chosen a mate. His elation at finding a mate at last was swallowed by rage at the men who dared harm her. His memories of the wolf attacking the men who dared to rape his mate were hazy but bloody.
“The Fosses were trying to rape Mel. I killed them.” Such brief, simple words to describe how his wolf tore them apart with teeth and claws. The bodies of the three Fosses were collected in several chunks for burial. “My wolf chose Mel to be my mate.”
Mel pulled her wrist out of his hold so she could wrap her arms round herself in spite of the heat lingering in the early evening air. He saw her jaw clench and her lips turn white. During their journey from Ellsworth, she hadn’t said a word about any of it to him. He smelled her horror and terror the day he found her, and though it had lessened significantly, he still caught occasional traces of it in her scent. A wolf’s mate should never be afraid of him. His wolf squeezed a snarling whine out of his throat. All the Dirks jumped in their chairs, looking at him nervously.
“None of us wolves likes to see a woman mistreated,” Stone said quietly. “It doesn’t matter who he is, a man who hurts a woman around us will get what he deserves.”
Marc’s eyes showed approval, but he said nothing, waiting for Snake to continue.
“Miss Ellie’s son was at Moore’s Mill, so we went there first to get him. Mel talked to me and Stone about coming here before going up to the den. Quill agreed because Miss Ellie wanted to be married by a priest, and your uncle could do the ceremony. You know what’s happened since then.”
Marc eased forward to put his forearms on the table. “Yeah. My uncle married you to my sister yesterday, and this morning Quill and his new wife and the other men escorting them left to go back home. Now it’s question time. One, what happened to Jim, Randy, and Dave’s bodies? Two, how long before word comes to the Fosses about their deaths? And three, you asked to be able to stay for a while, but not why you wanted to be here. All I heard was some confusing talk about lies having a particular scent that wolves could smell.”
“We buried the bodies ourselves,” Stone answered.
“What was left of them,” Sara muttered, flicking a glance at Snake.
He felt no remorse for the deaths. The Fosses deserved to die for what they did to Mel. “I don’t know how long before word comes back about the deaths. Probably not too long. We tried to keep it quiet, but anyone at the fights would have heard Jim Fosse’s name. There was no way to hide that something had happened in the hotel room, but only a few people saw the bodies. We’re here because Mel told us about your mom. She asked us to sidetrack and see if we can help.” Snake shrugged and slanted a glance at his wife. “Do you want to explain?”
She let her arms drop and met the eyes of each of her brothers, one at a time. “We’re here because Stone can tell when someone is lying. They smell different. Right, Stone?”
Stone nodded. “Yeah, a person’s scent is different, sharper, when they lie.”
The Dirk men glanced from Stone to Snake with confusion. Mord shoved an elbow into Stone’s side with a snort of a laugh. “Yeah? That’s a nice trick.”
Plainly Mord didn’t believe Mel. Snake folded his arms and asked, “Mord, who are you in love with?”
Mord’s ears went pink. “Nobody!”
“Lie,” said Stone, buttering another slice of bread.
Mord’s face flamed. “What? Who do you think I’m in love with?”
Stone shrugged. “I can’t read your mind. I can only tell when someone lies. Like I said, their scent changes.”
Marc shushed Mord with a lifted hand. He stared at Snake. “Can you tell too?”
Snake shook his head. “No. My sense of smell is decent, but nothing like Stone’s. I can sometimes make out some emotions, especially if it’s someone I know pretty well, but most people could tell me the sky was purple with green stripes, and I wouldn’t know if they were lying by their scent.”
Mord snorted. “Cute party trick, but big whoop-di-doo. You delayed your trip north just to show off your little game?”
“No! Don’t you get it?” Mel said urgently. “When the man comes to collect the ransom money for Mama, Snake and Stone can trail him and question him. They can track really well too. They can find him, and they’ll know when he’s lying. We’ll be able to find Mama and rescue her.”
A spark of excitement animated Marc’s face. “The letter will be coming any day.”
Mord’s lower lip had a barely noticeable tremble. “I haven’t seen Mom since I was seven years old. That’s how old I was when Dad died, and Mom was stolen only a week after his funeral.”
Mike leaned forward, staring across the table at Stone with guarded hope. “Honest? You kno
w when someone’s lying?”
Stone put the last bite of bread in his mouth and nodded.
“Hot damn!” Mike pounded a fist on the table, making his bowl and spoon jump and clatter. “We’ll get those bastards now!”
After that one outburst, the brothers were silent, but Snake could almost feel their jubilation. He was happy for them, but what he really cared about was the radiant smile Mel gave him.
“What actually happened to your mom?” Sara asked. “I never heard the whole story.”
The Dirks lost some of their jubilation. A dark heaviness settled over them.
“Not much to tell,” Marc said with a shrug. “Dad died of blood poisoning about eleven years ago. Not long after the funeral, all of us were out with the calves, and Mom was alone in the house, getting lunch ready. When we got home for lunch, the food was still in the oven, burnt to a crisp, but Mom wasn’t here.”
“We looked for her,” Mike said bleakly. “We didn’t see any tracks. There was no sign of a struggle. Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Mord echoed, sounding suddenly young. “We never saw her again.”
Sara reached an impulsive hand over Stone to pat Mord’s arm. “You were so young, and your dad had just died. That must have been terrible.”
Stone grabbed her hand and yanked it away from Mord. She jerked it free with a glare. Mel spoke before Sara could yell at Stone. “It was bad. I was just thirteen. A girl really needs her mother at that age. But what came next was even worse. A month later we got a package in the mail with a letter. The letter was from a man who said he had our mother, and if we wanted her to stay alive, we had to pay gold twice a year. The box…” Mel paused to swallow. “The box had the end of Mama’s finger in it. We knew it was hers because she had a scar right along the fingernail. The finger was already decomposing, but we recognized the scar. The letter said every time we failed to pay, another piece of Mama would be sent to us.”
“Cowards,” snarled Stone. “Evil cowards!”
“We buried the finger next to Dad,” Marc said, looking down at his clenched hands. “We’ve never missed a payment, even when the amount demanded increased, but if Mel hadn’t volunteered to be a prize for the Bride Fight, we’d have missed this next one. We have no money left. We’ve lost or sold most of our stock. The only thing we have now is the ranch itself, and we can’t sell that. It’s been in the Dirk family for nearly two hundred years.”