by Nora Roberts
“And you’re not?”
“Why would I have to? There was nothing wrong with me.” She trailed a finger up his thigh. “Was there?”
“Other than being stuck-up, ornery, and hardheaded, not a thing.” He hissed through his teeth when her fingers streaked up, found his weakness, and pinched.
“And you love it.” Inspired, she struggled out of her coat.
“Too warm?” Automatically he reached down to adjust the heater.
“It’s going to be,” she promised, and tugged her sweater over her head.
“What are you doing?” Shock made him nearly run off the road. “Put that back on.”
“Uh-uh. Pull over.” And she flicked the front hook of her bra so that her breasts spilled out like glory.
“It’s a public road. It’s broad daylight.”
She reached over, tugged down his zipper, and found him hard and ready. “And your point is?”
“You’re out of your mind. Anybody could come along and . . . Christ Jesus, Tess,” he managed as she slid her head under his arm and clamped her mouth on him. “I’ll kill us.”
“Pull over,” she repeated, but the teasing note had fled. Now there was hoarse and husky need as she tore open his shirt. “Oh, God, I want you inside me. All the way in. Hard, fast. Now.”
The rig rocked, the wheels spun, but he managed to get to the shoulder of the road without flipping them over. He jerked on the brake, fought himself free of the seat belt. In one rough move he had her on her back, all but folded on the seat while he struggled with her jeans.
“We’ll be arrested,” he panted.
“I’ll risk it. Hurry.”
“We—oh, God.” There was nothing under the denim but her. “You should have frozen.” Even as he said it he was dragging her hips free. “Why aren’t you wearing long johns?”
“I must be psychic.” Right now she was simply desperate, and she arched up. Her moan was deep and throaty and melded with his as he rammed himself into her.
Then there were only gasps and groans and pants. The windows steamed, the seat squeaked, and they came almost in unison in less than a dozen thrusts.
“Good God.” He would have collapsed on her if there’d been room. “I must be crazy.”
She opened her eyes, then started to laugh. Her ribs were aching before she could control it. “Nate, the respected attorney and salt of the earth, how the hell are you going to explain my bootprints on the ceiling of your truck?”
He looked up, studied them, and sighed. “Pretty much the same way I’m going to explain the fact that I no longer have a single button on this shirt.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.” She sat up, managed to locate her bra and snap it on. Giving her hair a quick shake, she boosted her hips to get her sweater. “Let’s go shopping.”
SIXTEEN
“Y OU GOT A MINUTE, WILL?”
Willa looked up from the papers spread over the desk, pulled herself out of the figures. Christ, grass seed was dear, but if they were going to rebroadcast she wanted to start now. Birth and wean weights circled in her head as she closed a ledger.
“Sorry. Sure, Ham. Problem?”
“Not exactly.”
He held his hat in his hands and eased himself into a chair. The winter had been hard on his bones. Age was hard on the bones, he corrected, and he was starting to feel the years more with every passing wind.
“I went down to the feedlot like you wanted. Looks good. Ran into Beau Radley from over High Springs Ranch?”
“Yes, I remember Beau.” She rose to put another log on the fire. She knew Ham’s bones as well as he did. “Lord, Ham, he must be eighty.”
“Eighty-three this spring, so he tells me. When you can get a word in.” Ham set his hat on his lap, tapped his fingers on the arms of the chair.
It was odd sitting there, where he’d sat so many times. Seeing Willa behind the desk, with coffee at her elbow, instead of the old man with a glass of whiskey in his hand.
Jumping up Jesus, that man could drink.
Willa struggled with impatience. Ham took his time, and everyone else’s, when he had a point to make. She often thought conversations with him were like watching a glacier move. Generations were born and died before you got to the end of it.
“Beau Radley, Ham?”
“Uh-huh. You know his young’un moved on down to Scottsdale, Arizona. Must be twenty, twenty-five years ago. That’d be Beau Junior.”
Who would be, by Willa’s estimation, about sixty. “And?”
“Well, Beau’s missus, that’s Heddy Radley. She makes those watermelon pickles that always take first prize at the county fair? Seems she’s got the arthritis pretty bad.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” If they got a break in the weather early, Willa thought as her mind wandered, she would see if Lily wanted to start a kitchen garden. A real one.
“Winter’s been hard,” Ham commented. “Don’t seem to be letting up, and it’s coming to calf-pulling time.”
“I know. I’m thinking about adding another pole barn.”
“Might be an idea,” Ham said noncommittally, then took out his tobacco and began to meticulously roll a cigarette. “Beau’s selling out and moving down with his boy to Scottsdale.”
“Is he?” Willa’s attention snapped back. High Springs had excellent pastureland.
“Done made him a deal with one of those developers.” Ham laid his tongue over the paper, spat lightly. Whether it was a comment on developers or tobacco in his mouth, Willa couldn’t have said. “Going to break it up, put in some cussed dude ranch resort and raise frigging buffalo.”
“The deal’s already made?”
“Said it was, paid him three times what the land’s worth for ranching. Goddamn city jackals.”
“Well, that’s that. We’d never match the price.” She blew out a breath, rubbed her hands over her face, then lowered them as another idea came to her. “What about his equipment, his cattle, horses?”
“I’m getting to it.”
Ham blew out smoke, watched it drift to the ceiling. Willa imagined cities being built, leveled, new stars being born, novas.
“He’s got a new baler. Barely three seasons old. Wood sure would like to have it. Don’t think much of his string of horses, but he’s a good cattleman, Beau is.” He paused, smoked some more. Oaks grew from acorns. “Told him I thought you’d pay two-fifty a head for what he had on the feedlot. He didn’t seem insulted by it.”
“How many head?”
“About two hundred, good Hereford beef.”
“All right. Make the deal.”
“All right. There’s more.” Ham tapped his cigarette out, settled back. The fire was warm, the chair soft. “Beau’s got two hands. One’s a college boy he just signed on last year out of Bozeman. One of those animal husbandry fellas. Beau says he’s got highfalutin ideas but he’s smart as a whip. Knows to beat all about crossbreeding and embryo transplants. The other’s Ned Tucker, known him ten years easy. Good cowboy, steady worker.”
“Hire them,” Willa said into the next pause. “At whatever wage they were getting at High Springs.”
“Told Beau I figured that. He liked the idea. Feels warm toward Ned. Wants him to be settled at a good spread.” He started to rise, then settled back again. “I got something else to say.”
Her brow raised. “So say it.”
“Maybe you think I can’t handle my job no more.”
Now it was shock, plain and simple, on her face. “Why would I think that? Why would you think that?”
“Seems to me you’re doing your work and half of mine besides, with a little of everybody else’s tossed in. If you ain’t in here going over your papers, then you’re out riding fence, checking pasture, looking at the equipment, doctoring cows.”
“I’m operator now, and you know damn well I couldn’t run this place without you.”
“Maybe I do.” But it had been an opening and had gotten her full attention. “And may
be I been asking myself what the hell you’re trying to prove to a dead man.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hell you don’t.” Anger hastened his words and brought him out of the chair. “You think I don’t see, I don’t know. You think somebody who tanned your hide when you needed it and bandaged your hurts don’t know what’s inside your head? You listen to me, girl,’ cause you’re too big and mean for me to turn over my knee like I used to. You can beat yourself into the ground from here to the Second Coming and it don’t mean a damn to Jack Mercy.”
“It’s my ranch now,” she said evenly. “Or a third of it is.”
He nodded, pleased to hear the echo of resentment in her tone. “Yeah, and he slapped you with that too, just like he slapped you all your life. He didn’t do what was right for you, what was fitting. Now, maybe I think more of those two girls than I did when they first came around, but that ain’t the point. He did what he did to you ’cause he could, that’s all. And he brought in overseers from outside Mercy.”
Even as her temper simmered to the surface, she realized something she’d overlooked. “It should have been you,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, Ham. It never even occurred to me. It should have been you supervising the ranch through this year. I should have thought of that before, and realized how insulting it was.”
Insulting it was, but insults—some insults—he could live with. “I ain’t asking you to think of it. And I ain’t particularly insulted. It was just like him.”
“Yeah.” She sighed once. “It was just like him.”
“I don’t have anything against Ben and Nate, they’re good men. Fair. And it would take a brainless moose not to see what Jack was up to, bringing Ben around here. Around you. But I ain’t talking about that.” He waved a hand at her as she scowled. “You got nothing to prove to Jack Mercy, and it’s time somebody said so to your face.” He nodded briskly. “So I am.”
“I can’t just push it away. He was my father.”
“We pump sperm out of a bull and stick it in a cow, that don’t make that bull a father.”
Stunned, she got to her feet. “I never heard you talk about him like this. I thought you were friends.”
“I had respect for him as a cattleman. Never said I respected the man.”
“Then why did you stay on, all these years?”
He looked at her, shook his head slowly from side to side. “That’s a damn fool question.”
For me, she thought, and felt both foolish and humbled. Unable to face him, she turned, stared out the window.
“You taught me to ride.”
“Somebody had to.” His voice went rusty, so he cleared it. “Before you broke your fool neck climbing on when nobody was looking.”
“When I fell and broke my arm when I was eight, you and Bess took me to the hospital.”
“The woman was too flustered to be driving you herself. Likely have wrecked the rig.” Uneasy, he shifted in his chair, drummed his stubby fingers.
If his wife had lived past their first two years of marriage, he might have had kids of his own. He’d stopped thinking of that, and the lack, because there’d been Willa to tend to.
“And I ain’t talking about all that. I’m talking now. You gotta back off a little, Will.”
“There’s so much going on. Ham, I keep seeing that girl, and Pickles. If I let my mind go clear, I see them.”
“Nothing you can do to change what happened, is there? And nothing you did to make it happen. This bastard, he’s doing what he’s doing ’cause he can.”
It was too close to what he’d said about her father—it made her shudder. “I don’t want another death on my hands, Ham. I don’t think I could stand it.”
“Goddamn it, why don’t you listen?” The furious shout made her turn, stare at him. “It’s not on your hands, and you’re a big-headed fool if you think so. What happened happened, and that’s that. This ranch don’t need you to be fussing over every acre of it twenty hours a day, either. It’s about time you tried being a female for a while.”
Her mouth fell open. Shouting wasn’t his way unless he was riled past patience. And never could she recall him referring to her gender. “Just what does that mean?”
“When’s the last time you put on a dress and went out to kick up your heels?” he demanded, even though it made him flush to say it. “I’m not counting New Year’s and whatever that thing was you were almost wearing that had the boys spilling drool out their mouths.”
She laughed at that and, intrigued, slid a hip onto the corner of the desk. “Is that so?”
“If I’d been your pa, I’d have sent you back upstairs for a proper dress, with your ears ringing, too.” Embarrassed by his outburst, he crushed his hat onto his head. “But that’s done, too. Now I’m saying why don’t you get that McKinnon boy to take you out to a sit-down dinner or a picture show or some such thing instead of you spending every waking hour in a pair of muddy boots? That’s what I’m saying.”
“And you’ve certainly had a lot to say this afternoon.” Which meant, she reflected, that he’d been storing it up. “Just what makes you think I’d be interested in a sit-down dinner with Ben McKinnon?”
“A blind man coulda seen the way you two were plastered together pretending to be dancing.” He decided not to mention the fact that at the poker game at Three Rocks the week before, Ben had pumped him dry for information on her. Conversation over five-card stud was as sacrosanct as that in a confessional. “That’s all I have to say about it.”
“Sure?” she asked sweetly. “No observations on my diet, my hygiene, my social skills?”
Oh, she’s a sassy one, he thought, and bit back a smile. “You ain’t eating enough to fill a rabbit, but you clean up good enough. Far as I can see, you ain’t got any social skills.” He was pleased to have worked a fresh scowl out of her. “I got work to do.” He started out, then paused. “I hear Stu McKinnon is feeling poorly.”
“Mr. McKinnon’s ill? What’s wrong with him?”
“Just a flu bug, but he ain’t feeling up to snuff. Bess made a sweet potato pie. Be nice if you took it over. He’s got a partiality for sweet potato pie, and for you. Be neighborly.”
“And I could work on my lack of social skills.” She glanced at the desk, the papers, the work. Then looked back at the man who’d taught her everything worth knowing. “All right, Ham. I’ll run over and see him.”
“You’re a good girl, Will,” he said, and sauntered out.
H E’D GIVEN HER PLENTY TO THINK ABOUT ON THE DRIVE over, two new men, another two hundred head of cattle. Her own stubborn need to prove herself worthy to a man who had never cared.
And, perhaps, her lack of sensitivity to a man who had always cared, and had always been there for her.
Had she been infringing on Ham’s territory the last few months? Probably. That, at least, she could fix. But his words on the murder, however steady and sensible, couldn’t wipe out her sense of responsibility.
Or her fear.
She shivered, bumped up the heater in the rig. The road was well plowed, easily navigated. Snow was heaped on the sides so that it was like driving through a white tunnel with white peaks spearing up into a hard blue sky.
There’d been an avalanche to the northwest that had buried three skiers. And some hunters camped in the high country had gotten caught in a blizzard and had to be brought out by copter and treated for frostbite. A neighboring ranch had lost some of its range cattle to wildcat looking for food. And two hikers climbing in the Bitterroots had been lost.
And somewhere, despite the brutal nature of winter, was a killer.
The Big Sky ski area was doing record business. More fortunate hunters claimed game was so plentiful this year that they hardly needed a weapon. Foals were already being dropped, and cattle were growing fat in feedlots and basin pastures.
Regardless of life and prosperity, death was lurking much too
close.
Lily was flushed with love and planning a spring wedding. Tess had nudged Nate into a weekend away at one of the tony resorts. And Ham wanted her to put on her dancing shoes.
She was terrified.
And hit the brakes, hard, to avoid running into an eight-point buck. She swerved, skidded, ended up sideways across the road, as the buck simply lifted his head and watched the show with bored eyes.
“Oh, you’re a beauty, aren’t you?” Laughing at herself, she rested her head on the steering wheel while her heart made its way slowly out of her throat and back to her chest. It took a fast leap back up when someone tapped on her window.
She didn’t recognize the face. It was a good one, angelically handsome, framed with curly golden-brown hair under a dung-brown hat. As his lips, accented with a glossy moustache, tipped up in smile, she slid a hand under her seat toward the .38 Ruger.
“You okay?” he asked when she rolled down the window an inch. “I was behind you, saw you skid. Did you hit your head or anything?”
“No. I’m fine. Just startled me. I should have been paying more attention.”
“Big bastard, isn’t he?” Jesse turned his head to watch as the buck walked regally to the side of the road, then leaped over the mound of snow. “Wish I had my thirty-thirty. A rack like that’d go fine on the bunkhouse wall.” He looked back at her, amused to see fear and suspicion in her eyes. “Sure you’re okay, Miz Mercy?”
“Yes.” She slid her fingers closer to the gun. “Do I know you?”
“Don’t think so. I’ve seen you around here and there. I’m J C, been working at Three Rocks the past few months.”
She relaxed a little, but kept the window up. “Oh, the poker ace.”
He flashed a grin, and it was as formidable a weapon as the Ruger. “Got me a rep, do I? Gotta say it’s a pure pleasure taking your money, indirectly, that is, through your boys. You’re a little pale yet.”
He wondered what her skin would feel like. She was part Indian, he remembered, and had the look of it. He’d never had a half-breed before. And wouldn’t that just fix Lily’s butt if he went and fucked her sister?