Authors: Tami Hoag
Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Suspense, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Crime Fiction
woman to the ranch
- leastways a woman who wasn't a veterinarian or a
cattle broker or some such. It was a cinch this little mop-headed blonde
wasn't anything of the sort.
He grinned his tight little grin, tickled at the prospect of J.D.
showing something other than contempt for a female. "Why don't you climb
on down off that lop-eared creature and I'll get you a ringside seat,
Miz Jennings."
"I'd like that."
Marilee swung her leg over the mule's back and dropped to her feet,
wincing as pain shot up from her toes to the roots of her hair. As
pleasant as the ride had been, she was damn glad to have the chance to
try to put her knees side by side again
- not that it seemed even remotely
possible. She felt as bowlegged as Tucker Cahill looked.
Putting off taking those first few steps, she stuck a hand out to the
old cowboy. He gripped her fingers with a gloved hand as strong as a
vise and gave her a shake.
"You can call me Marilee," she said with a grin. "Anybody ever tell you
you look like Ben Johnson, the actor?"
Tucker cackled with glee. "From time to time. You just climb up that
rail over yonder, Marilee, and you'll see what branding is all about.
I'll see to your mule here."
"You don't have to do that."
"Oh, yes, ma'am. You're a guest at the Stars and Bars. We don't get many,
but we treat 'em right."
Marilee thanked him as he walked away, Clyde in tow, going off toward a
long, weathered gray barn. Gritting her teeth as she forced her aching
legs to move, feeling as ungainly as if she were trying to negotiate
stilts, she made her way to the corral and climbed up to sit on the top
rail. The organized chaos going on below was mesmerizing to watch. After
a few minutes, Tucker climbed up beside her, standing on one of the
lower rails and laying his arms across the top one.
"I had no idea ranchers still branded cattle," she said, fairly shouting
to be heard above the din. "I would have guessed that went out with
bustles and steam engines."
"Old ways are sometimes best. No one's come up with a better way to work
cows than from the back of a good ol' quarter horse. No one's come up
with a better system for marking cattle than a brand. Lotta open
territory in these parts. Cattle wander off, mix in with other herds."
He pointed out J.D. moving through the herd in the far holding pen on a
pale gray horse, telling her with no small amount of pride that there
wasn't a man for a hundred miles around who knew more about how to get
the most out of a horse than J.D. "Knows the cattle business inside and
out too. He's up on all the latest electronic sales networks, computer
tracking herd progress, stuff an old duffer like me don't know from
diddly. Had two years of college before his daddy died. Yes, ma'am," he
said, nodding, "J.D.'s a fine rancher and a fine hand and a good man
right down to the ground. You won't find a soul around here to tell you
different."
His ringing endorsement sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch. Marilee
found it sweet and did her best to tame her amusement.
"He's run this place since he was a kid," Tucker said, fixing his gaze
on the man J.D. had become in the years since. "And I mean that.
Tom - J.D.'s daddy - God rest him, never had his heart in the job. He gave
his to women and it'd liked to killed him. Did kill him in the end,
after Will's mama left."
Marilee studied the old man's weathered profile, a million questions
rushing through her mind. A part of her - the part that would have
protected her - resented them. She was probably better off not knowing
about Rafferty's past. If she didn't know what made him so difficult, so
distrustful, so damned hard to deal with, then her soft heart couldn't
feel sympathy or goad her into trying to heal his past hurts, or any of
the dozen other foolhardy things she would likely do. But she couldn't
stop herself from being curious, or overly sentimental, or stupidly
romantic. You'll never change, Marilee. . . .
And so the question tumbled out. "What about J.D.'s mother?"
"Died when he was just a little tyke. Cancer, God rest her. She was a
fine woman. Poor Tom was just lost without her - at least until Will's
mama breezed onto the scene.
Then he was just plain lost."
And J.D. was lost in the shuffle. Tucker Cahill didn't say that, but
Marilee pieced together the fragments he had given her and came up with
the picture: J.D., just a boy, taking on responsibilities far beyond his
years while his father wandered around in a romantic fog. If it was an
accurate picture, it explained a great deal. She felt her heart slipping
a little further out of her control, and her protective instincts
growled at her in warning. To fall for a man like Rafferty would be
asking for trouble, begging for heartbreak, she told herself. She had a
terrible suspicion her heart wasn't listening.
In what was probably a futile attempt at self-preservation, she derailed
Tucker onto an explanation of the process of sorting the cattle through
the pens and chutes.
The men perched above the chutes controlled the gates that determined
which pen an animal would be directed to depending on age and sex. In
the branding corral, calves were being run one at a time into a squeeze
chute, which tipped onto one side, forming a table. Will Rafferty and an
old man with a long gray braid worked at the squeeze chute, vaccinating,
notching ears, castrating bull calves, and marking all with the Rafter T
brand of the Stars and Bars. The whole process took little more than a
minute per animal.
She watched them do half a dozen before Will looked over and caught
sight of her. A big grin split his dirty face, and he abandoned his post
without a backward glance.
"Hey, Marilee!" he called, striding across the corral with the grace of
Gene Kelly, arms spread wide in welcome. "How's it shaking?"
"It about shook loose on the ride up here," she said dryly.
He laughed, swinging up onto the fence and turning his red baseball cap
frontward on his head, seemingly all in one motion. He settled himself a
little too close beside her, close enough that Marilee could smell sweat
and the scent of animals on him, close enough that she could see his
blue eyes were shot through with the telltale threads of a hangover. She
frowned at him, unable to sidle away because of Tucker on her left.
The old cowboy leaned ahead and shot a hard look at Will. "J.D. catches
you slacking, boy, he'll chew your tail like old rawhide."
Behind the layers of sweat and grime, Will's mouth tightened. "Yeah,
well, J.D. can just go to hell. I been working hard as he has since
sunup. I'm taking five. It's not every day we get a pretty lady for
company up here not even in the back of beyond."
"No, they're scarce as hen's teeth," Tucker admitted, clambering over
the rail and lowering himself into the corral. He jammed his hands at
the low-riding waist of his jeans and gave the younger man a significant
look.
"Especially the ones your brother invites."
Will pulled a comic face of exaggerated shock, eyes wide in his lean
face as he stared at Marilee. "J.D. invited you?
My brother J.D.
invited you?"
"Not exactly," Marilee grumbled, scowling as she watched Tucker hobble
away toward the squeeze chute to take up Will's place. "I invited
myself. He didn't tell me no."
"Well, that's something too, let me tell you. J.D. runs this place like
a damn monastery. He don't want some evil woman turning our heads from
our work."
Lucy came immediately to mind, but Marilee bit her tongue. "What about
your wife?"
"What about her?"
"Does she fall under the 'evil woman' heading?"
"Sam?
Hell no. She's a good kid." Sweet, trusting, in need of someone
to love her. The description ran through his mind, through his heart
like an arrow as he watched the monotonous routine in the branding
corral. Every time he thought of Sam, he felt as if he'd been kicked in
the head - a little ill, a little dizzy. He'd been doing his damnedest not
to think about her since the night he had seen her in the Moose.
"Kid?
What is she, a child bride?"
"Naw, she's twenty-three." He picked absently at the rusty fungus that
clung to the top of the rail. "I've known her forever, that's all. It's
hard not to think of her like a kid sister."
Which might explain why he wasn't living with his wife, Marilee thought.
if she had a husband who treated her like a kid sister, and chased
anything in a skirt besides, she figured she'd dump him too.
"So," Will said, slapping a hand on her thigh "whatcha doing here,
Marilee?
Looking for trouble?"
He bobbed his eyebrows and grinned. "That's my middle name."
"I guessed as much." She pried his fingers off her leg and scooted away
a foot, fixing him with a look. "I came to see how a ranch works."
"I'll tell you how a ranch works." Bitterness crept in around the edges
of his voice. "Day and night, week after week, month after month, year
after year, until death or foreclosure."
"If you don't like it, why don't you quit?"
He laughed and looked away, not sure whether it was her suggestion or
his answer he found so funny. A part of him had wanted nothing more than
to be rid of the Stars and Bars ever since he was a boy. But that part
of him was forever tangled with the boy who looked up to his big
brother. And the part of him that didn't want to be a screw-up was
forever tripping over the part that longed to tell J.D. to go to hell.
The cycle just tumbled on, like a rock down an endless mountainside.
"You don't quit the Stars and Bars, gorgeous," he muttered, staring off
across the chutes to the back pen, where J.D. was sorting cattle. "Not
if your name is Rafferty."
J.D. worked the herd from the back of a washed-out gray mare. This was
only her second year working cattle, but her talent was bred bone-deep.
She kept her head low and her ears pinned as she danced gracefully from
side to side, cutting calves away from their mothers and sending them
into the chutes, sorting out young heifers and sending them into another
holding pen to wait. The mare ducked and dodged, adjusting her speed as
necessary.
Her reins hung loose, her movements guided by intuition and the subtle
touches of J.D.'s spurs against her sides.
J.D. sat easily in the saddle, one gloved hand on the pommel, shoulders
canted back, bracing himself against the sudden moves of the horse
beneath him. His mind working on three levels at once studying the
cattle, was assessing the performance of the horse, and wondering if
Marilee would really show up.
He cursed himself up one side and down the other for letting a woman
take his thoughts away from his business. He didn't need the distraction
of thinking about her or the distraction of seeing her standing outside
the fence.
If he wanted a distraction, he could wonder what the hell he would do a
year from now, when Lyle Watkins and his boys would no longer be around
to help work the chutes. Tucker and Chaske would be another year older,
too old for a full day of this kind of work. God only knew where Will
would be. His only other neighbor would be Bryce.
Bryce wouldn't offer to trade work. J.D. doubted Bryce knew what real
work was. He wouldn't know or care about the code that had always
existed between neighbors here. Like the rest of his kind, Bryce had
brought his own set of values and priorities with him to Montana, all of
them foreign to J.D.
The little mare pulled herself up and blew out a heavy breath, drawing
J.D. back to the matter at hand. The group of cattle he had been working
was sorted. They would brand and vaccinate this lot, break for dinner,