Dances with Wolf (8 page)

“You remember I have to leave tonight, right?”

“Yeah, I do. But it’s only three thirty. It won’t be dark ’til nine. Then you can get on your way.”

“I say we keep working.” This was how she was going to get through the evening—by focusing on the business at hand. They’d work until sundown, and she’d head straight home, tired but satisfied with a job well done.

“You’re not hungry after that drive?”

“Nope,” she lied. Her stomach chose that exact moment to growl.

“Liar!” he said.

“You heard that?”

“Doc Vickers probably heard that, all the way in Polson.” He laughed.

“Okay, fine. I’m starving. But we’re on a tight schedule. Don’t you think we should get her in the water?”

“We’ll be back in an hour.”

“Okay, fine.” She forgot how stubborn he could be.

“Great. Right now,
all
of us need a bite. Horses first, though, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

She watched Wolf measure out some barley and oats. He seemed to take pleasure in getting the proportions just right, in filling the water barrels with fresh water and removing any debris. As she watched him move quietly among his horses, she noticed the simple gestures, the care he took with them. This man loved his animals, after all. But was he willing to put Bullet’s welfare above his own? Or would he be just like every other rodeo cowboy, obsessed with winning at all costs?

She tried not to care. Wolf’s life goals were out of her control. The only thing actually in her control was the job she was brought here to do: help Bullet in whatever way she could, and teach Wolf to do the same.
Do your job
, she said to herself.
And stop thinking about the rest.

Chapter Eleven

After opening the front door for Abby, Wolf gestured upstairs. “Go ahead,” he said, “make yourself comfortable. Bathroom’s on the left if you need it. I laid out some towels, just in case you want to clean up before heading home.”

Abby climbed the open stairs. The loft was furnished with a high-mounted double bed with a barn-siding headboard. There were lamps and night tables and a reading area under a full wall of books. Despite herself, Abby was impressed.
The
cowboy rides,
she noted,
and the
cowboy also reads.

But on each of the loft’s three walls, Wolf had mounted a sign: “Cowboy Up or Sit in the Truck” and “Always Drink Upstream from the Herd” and “Don’t Squat with your Spurs On.” Ah, that was the Wolf she remembered.

In the small bathroom to the left of the loft, there were fresh dark green towels and a bar of Dial soap. The mirror above the sink was polished to a high veneer.

Abby studied her reflection. Her hair had pulled to one side, her collar was dirty, her face patterned with the evidence of Bullet’s approval. She washed her face in hot water and took a second look. There was something different about her reflection, something she hadn’t noticed for a long time. She looked almost happy.

Downstairs, Wolf was singing in the kitchen. He hadn’t turned on a radio station, but he was singing solo, a song Abby didn’t recognize. Between choruses, Stella provided a harmonizing groan or two as she watched him work at the stove.

“Need some help?” she called over the railing.

“Take your time. Got this handled, ten minutes tops, maybe fifteen,” answered Wolf. “Go ahead, freshen up. Nap in the guest room, even. Next door on your right.”

Abby, secretly thankful for a few more minutes to chill out, took off her boots and lay down on top of the bright-red down quilt in the guest room. A thrill shot through her as she imagined them lying in this bed together. She tried to push the image out of her mind, though. She could almost hear her mom’s clucking tongue, and Bridget’s, too, clucking and
tsk-tsk
ing in her ears in stereo. Plus, she could never be with Wolf if he didn’t believe in her whispering work, and she could tell he was still very much on the fence.

The mattress seemed new and was super-comfortable. Again, she was surprised. Wolf had seemed so not the nesting type. Had he done it alone, though, or had a she-wolf helped him out? What if all the nice touches, the new towels, the flannel sheets, the barn-sided headboard, the self-mocking cowboy slogans, had been installed by someone else? Abby pictured a slightly older woman, a bartender maybe, taking Wolf under her wing and teaching him how to feather a nest. Or maybe a girl his age with an eye for design. Or maybe this: Wolf had shacked up with dozens of female fans here over the years, and they’d all made their own contributions.

Unable to nap with these hundreds—no, thousands—of imagined barroom hookups on her mind, Abby searched his bathroom for evidence. She knew she was acting crazy, but she didn’t, couldn’t, stop. There was nothing in the linen closet. Stacks of carefully folded towels, extra bars of soap, extra rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. Under the claw-footed tub, nothing. Not even a telltale long hair. And in the medicine cabinet, the predictable Mennen deodorant, a cardboard case of ultra-whitening toothpaste, and a giant bottle of Scope.

She moved the mouthwash to one side. Behind it lay a small bottle of Lucky Blue Rose perfume, a dark purple liquid in a cut-glass container shaped like a horseshoe. Abby picked it up cautiously and twisted open the top. The fragrance filled the bathroom, and she waved it away frantically, then cracked the window to air the room out.

She tried to picture the perfume’s owner, but no images came to mind. Just what was Wolf’s type? She moved the economy pack of toothpaste and saw a pink Lady Gillette razor, still in its package. Maybe it belonged to the owner of the Lucky Blue Rose, and maybe not. Either way, Wolf definitely wasn’t living “Lone on the Range” out here. He was exactly the playboy she’d always imagined him to be, collecting trophies of one kind in the ring, and of another kind entirely between the sheets. The thought made her feel queasy.

To her horror, she realized how right her mom had been. Why on Earth would she come out here and poke at her old wounds? She’d thought she could prove something to herself, to her mom
and
to Wolf—show once and for all that she was over him. But here she was, poking through his medicine cabinet, confirming the obvious and making herself feel like crap.

“Abby?” Wolf called up the stairs. “
Dinner
’s ready.”

Though there was no way he would hear the door to the medicine cabinet on another floor—not while clattering away in the kitchen, anyway—she closed it with the silence of a skilled thief, heat spreading across her cheeks. She withdrew her hands and clasped them behind her back.
Enough.

“Mmm,” Abby said, mustering strength. “Smells delicious.” Okay, so this was a mistake, she knew that now. But she wasn’t going to mope around and show how much pain that damned perfume and razor had caused her. She was going to win a Best Actress Oscar for her part in a well-reviewed indie flick called, let’s see…
Resisting the Cowboy
. Yes, she’d nail this—it was the role of a lifetime. Summoning her inner Scar-Jo, she walked slowly down the stairs and saw that a table in the center of the living room had been set for two.

As
Wolf pulled out a chair for her, she sat, taking it all in. The tablecloth made of denim and white squares, two candles in holders shaped like rolls of barbed wire, a teal-colored rag rug under the table. All surely acquisitions of his throng of female admirers.
Stella,
blissfully ignorant of her owner’s internal turmoil, sighed deeply under the table and rested a single paw atop Abby’s feet.

Wolf poured them each a glass of red wine.

“Wine?” she asked. “Remember, we still have work to do out there.”

“Just a glass.” He smiled. “Pretend you’re European.”

He brought out a big salad bowl and two steaming bowls of what turned out to be a fragrant and deeply seasoned beef stew. Putting a grateful expression on her face, she wondered whether he’d made an identical meal for every girl he’d brought to this charmingly rugged lair of his.
Stop this, Abby. You are being a neurotic freak! Settle down!

“
I gotta confess,
” he said, and she braced herself. “This isn’t fresh-made. I made it in bulk a month back and froze a big batch. It was the only decent thing I could whip up in a hurry.”

“Come on,” she said. “It smells incredible.”

“I’ve got some garlic bread just about ready. My stove’s been acting up on me, so it’ll take another minute or two.” He sat down and gazed at her from across the table. “We can start on the stew.”

He watched while she took her first bite. He seemed pretty confident she’d like it, and he was right.

“What’s in this?”

“Ground beef, some spices, a few tomatoes. I just sort of followed Mom’s recipe from memory. I keep thinking to ask her to write it down, but you know. Things get a little chaotic at our house.”

“There’s something else in here.” Abby lifted a spoon to her nose. “What
is
that?”

Wolf smiled. “Chocolate.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Mom swears by it. A few ounces of unsweetened cocoa. That’
s her secret.
”

Abby bent her head over the stew and
inhaled
. Okay, so it was Karen’s recipe. And it could have been Bridget’s Lady Gillette. But the Lucky Blue Rose?

“Looks like you need some more wine.” Somehow she’d sucked down the entire first glass without even realizing it. Definitely not a Reese Witherspoon move. “And if I don’t rescue that garlic bread, it’ll be a lost cause.” He disappeared behind the checked curtains that separated the kitchen from the main room.

She sipped her wine and looked into the fire. Above the fireplace were wooden-framed pictures of the Olsen family, a pair of old spurs, and a dozen or more outsized rodeo trophies.

“Anyone would think you’d lived here a long time,” she called out to him. “You’ve made this place so comfy.”

He opened the curtains and walked back to the table, the bread wrapped in a napkin, a wide grin on his face. “I can’t say I did it without help.”

“Really?” Her heart pounded. “Who helped you?”

“Who do you think?” Wolf laughed and passed the bread to Abby. “Bridget and Mom. You think they could keep their hands off this cabin once they found out I’d bought it? I know it looks lived in, but the truth is I’ve only been able to spend a few days here between competitions. Bridget and Mom scoured every flea market between here and Polson to find all these gee-gaws.”

Her heart resumed a normal rhythm. “Oh,” she said. “Maybe Bridget mentioned it. I forget.” Of course, Bridget never had. Abby understood perfectly now why she’d never even heard about this ranch from her best friend—Bridget had been protecting her all along. Everyone thought Abby was still heartbroken, and that even mentioning Wolf would send her into a tailspin. Were they wrong? Here she was imagining Wolf had bedded half the women in the Western Hemisphere.

“Oh yeah, they came out with a whole
mess
of ideas. And by the time they were done, it was like a chick bomb exploded in here.” He chuckled. “Speaking of chick bombs, did you see some of the stuff Mom and Bridge have squirreled away up in the bathroom? Toiletries, some face cream, even some tacky perfume I bought Bridge.”

“The Lucky Blue Rose, you mean?”

“That’s the one. The three of us went out to dinner one night, and she was complaining about not being able to find her quote-unquote
favorite scent
out here in the middle of nowhere. So I stopped in and grabbed her the cheapest perfume I could find at the truck stop pharmacy down the road.”

“Really?” Relief rushed through her. “That’s a good one.”

“I thought so. More than Bridge did, anyway.”

How silly Abby had been, making up all these stories about Wolf the Womanizer.
Okay now,
Abby, stop the inquisition.

Outside, as if agreeing with her, dry lightning rimmed the fence line and a crack of thunder pealed through the valley. She looked out the window
, startled.

“It’s probably nothing,” Wolf said. “Just a quick afternoon storm, in and out before you know it.”

“The horses’ll be okay?”

“Bullet’s steady as they come. She’ll lead the other two to shelter if it starts raining.”

What about me?
Abby wondered crazily.
Will you lead me to shelter, Wolf?
Just for a minute she allowed herself to imagine his hands running over her body, and shivered with delight at the thought of them scratching her back, maybe even leaving marks. Even to herself, Abby made no sense. Around Wolf, she was an outright mess, jealous one minute, desperate for his touch the next.

Suddenly, there was a sound at the door. Feet scraping the mat followed by a series of rough knocks.

“Company?” Abby asked. She looked at her watch. It was already four fifteen. Nearly five hours of daylight left, but when were they going to get their training in?

“Wasn’t expecting anybody.” Wolf crossed the room in three reluctant strides. “Roy Bonner,” he said as he opened the door. “Expected you later, man.
Way
later. I said Tuesday morning, didn’t I?”

“Just need that digger, if you don’t mind. Didn’t think you’d have company.” Roy Bonner, tall and broad but gawky as hell, stumbled into the living room and stood awkwardly in front of Abby, his hands clasped behind his back.

“It
is
Saturday, Roy.” Wolf’s voice lowered a notch. “In case you’ve forgotten.”

“Exactly. A night for Packer’s Roost, not for a quiet dinner at home.” Roy sniffed the air and glanced curiously in Abby’s direction. “Oh,
I
see what you’ve got going on in here.”

“Abby, Roy,” Wolf said. “Roy, Abby.”

Abby stuck out her hand. “I’m just a friend of Wolf’s from home,” she said. “From the Flathead.”

He took Abby’s hand as if he’d never shook a woman’s before, then gave Wolf a look, like
nice taste in friends
. Wolf, all business, didn’t take the bait, completely ignoring the look, as if they were all still in high school and he were honorably protecting her reputation. “Abby’s come up to help me out with Bullet, Roy. Just a courtesy visit on her part.”

“
Ah, nice,
” Roy said. He gripped Abby’s hand and then backed away to stare at her even more unabashedly. “That mare was the best thing that could ever happen to a hard-luck cowboy like Wolf. That is, until she threw him on his ass.”

Abby looked sharply at Wolf. “Bullet
threw
you? When did that happen?”

Wolf shrugged and sat back down without offering a chair to Roy. Obviously, he was trying to keep the visit as short as possible, but Roy didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d respond to a subtle message. “That’s how I found out she was in trouble. We were at Roy’s brother’s arena fooling around two weeks ago, and she just went down like a top.”

“You never noticed any swelling before?” Abby frowned.

Wolf looked embarrassed. Why hadn’t he told her about the fall? Then she realized: Wolf, amazingly decorated ranch home notwithstanding, was a cowboy, through and through, and there was no way a cowboy would tell
anybody
about falling off a horse unless he absolutely had to.

Roy, an amused expression playing across his face, looked back and forth between Wolf and Abby, then pulled a third chair up to the table.

“I’d feed you if I’d invited you,” said Wolf.

“No problem, I ate already,” said Roy. “But I wouldn’t turn down a glass of vino.”

“One glass, Roy,” Wolf said. “Abby and I have to get back to Bullet’s training.”

“With this storm? Not likely.” Roy leaned back in his chair. Abby imagined the antique busting into a hundred pieces under his weight.