Star Valley Winter

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Before he could answer in kind, the schoolteacher stepped in to keep the peace with the same quiet diplomacy she probably used to break up schoolyard brawls. “There’s no reason you have to make a decision today. It’s only mid-November, so we still have plenty of time before Valentine’s Day. Why don’t both of you take a few days to think it over, and I’ll talk to you about it next week.”

  Ms. McKenzie rose from behind her desk. “Thank you both for coming in at such short notice,” she said, in clear dismissal. “I’ll be in touch with you next week.”

  Left with no alternative, Ellie rose, as well, and shrugged into her coat. Beside her, Lucy’s father did the same.

  “Sorry about the mix-up,” he said, reaching out to shake hands with Ms. McKenzie. Ellie observed with curiosity that for the first time the other woman looked uncomfortable, even nervous. Again she thought of that skittish colt ready to bolt. There was an awkward pause while he stood there with his hand out, then with a quick, jerky movement, the teacher gripped his hand before abruptly dropping it.

  “I’ll be in touch,” she said again.

  * * *

  What was that all about? Matt wondered as he followed the city vet out of the brightly decorated classroom into the hall. Why did Miz McKenzie act like he’d up and slapped her when all he wanted to do was shake her hand? Come to think of it, she’d behaved the same way when he came in a month earlier for parent-teacher conferences.

  She and Ellie Webster ought to just form a club, since it was obvious the lady vet wasn’t crazy about him, either. Matt Harte Haters of America.

  He didn’t have time to dwell on it before they reached the outside door of the school. The vet gave him a funny look when he opened the door for her, but she said nothing, just moved past him. Before he could stop himself, he caught a whiff of her hair as her coat brushed his arm. It smelled clean and fresh, kind of like that heavenly lemon cream pie they served over at the diner.

  He had absolutely no business sniffing the city vet’s hair, Matt reminded himself harshly. Or noticing the way those freckles trailed across that little nose of hers like the Big Dipper or how the fluorescent lights inside the school had turned that sweet-smelling hair a fiery red, like an August sunset after an afternoon of thunderstorms.

  He pushed the unwanted thoughts away and followed Ellie Webster out into the frigid night. An icy wind slapped at them, and he hunched his shoulders inside his lined denim coat.

  It was much colder than normal for mid-November. The sky hung heavy and ugly overhead, and the twilight had that expectant hush it took on right before a big storm. Looked like they were in for a nasty one. He dug already cold fingers into his pockets.

  When he drove into town earlier, the weatherman on the radio had said to expect at least a foot of snow. Just what he needed. With that Arctic Express chugging down out of Canada, they were sure to have below-zero temperatures tonight. Add to that the windchill and he’d be up the whole damn night just trying to keep his cattle alive.

  The city vet seemed to read his mind. “By the looks of that storm, I imagine we’ll both have a busy night.”

  “You, too?”

  “I do still have a few patients.”

  He’d never paid much mind to what a vet did when the weather was nasty. Or what a vet did any other time, for that matter. They showed up at his place, did what he needed them to do, then moved on to their next appointment.

  He tried to imagine her muscling an ornery cow into a pen and came up completely blank. Hell, she looked hardly big enough to wrestle a day-old calf. He’d had the same thought the first day he met her, back in August when she rode into town with her little girl and all that attitude.

  She barely came up to his chin, and her wrists were delicate and bony, like a kitten that had been too long without food. Why would a scrawny city girl from California want to come out to the wilds of Wyoming and wrestle cattle? He couldn’t even begin to guess.

  There were only two vehicles in the school parking lot, the brand spankin’ new dually crew cab he drove off the lot last week and her battered old Ford truck. He knew it was hers by the magnetized sign on the side reading Salt River Veterinary Clinic.

  Miz McKenzie must have walked, since the little house she rented from Bob Jimenez was just a couple blocks from the school. Maybe he ought to offer her a ride home. It was too damn cold to be walking very far tonight.

  Before he could turn around and go back into the school to make the offer, he saw Ellie Webster pull her keys out of her pocket and fight to open her truck door for several seconds without success.

  “Can I help you there, ma’am?” he finally asked.

  She grunted as she worked the key. “The lock seems to be stuck…”

  Wasn’t that just like a city girl to go to all the trouble to lock the door of a rusty old pickup nobody would want to steal anyway? “You know, most of us around here don’t lock our vehicles. Not much need.”

  She gave him a scorcher of a look. “And most of you think karaoke is a girl you went to high school with.”

  His mouth twitched, but he refused to let himself smile. Instead, he yanked off a glove and stuck his bare thumb over the lock.

  In the pale lavender twilight, she watched him with a confused frown. “What are you doing?”

  “Just trying to warm up your lock. I imagine it’s frozen and that’s why you can’t get the key to turn. I guess you don’t have much trouble with that kind of thing in California, do you?”

  “Not much, no. I guess it’s another exciting feature unique to Wyoming. Like jackalopes and perpetual road construction.”

  “When we’ve had a cold wet rain like we did this afternoon, moisture can get down in the lock. After the sun goes down, it doesn’t take long to freeze.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “There. That ought to do it.” He pulled his hand away and took the key from her, then shoved it into the lock. The mechanism slid apart now like a knife through soft wax, and he couldn’t resist pulling the door open for her with an exaggerated flourish.

  She gave him a disgruntled look then climbed into her pickup. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He shoved his hand into his lined pocket, grateful for the cozy warmth. “Next time you might want to think twice before you lock your door so it doesn’t happen again. Nobody’s going to steal anything around here.”

  She didn’t look like she appreciated his advice. “You do things your way, I’ll do things mine, Harte.”

  She turned the key, and the truck started with a smooth purr that defied its dilapidated exterior. “If you decide you’re man enough to help me with this stupid carnival, I suppose we’ll have to start organizing it soon.”

  His attention snagged on the first part of her sentence. “If I’m man enough?” he growled.

  She grinned at him, her silvery-green eyes sparkling, and he fought hard to ignore the kick of awareness in his stomach. “Do you think you’ve got the guts to go through with this?”

  “It’s not a matter of guts,” he snapped. “It’s a matter of having the time to waste putting together some silly carnival.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I’m a very busy man, Dr. Webster.”

  It was apparently exactly the wrong thing to say. Her grin slid away, and she stiffened like a coil of frozen rope, slicing him to pieces with a glare. “And I have nothing better to do than sit around cutting out pink and white hearts to decorate the school gymnasium with, right? That’s what you think, isn’t it? Lord knows, I don’t have much of a practice thanks to you and all the other stubborn old men around here.”

  He set his jaw. He wasn’t going to get into this with her standing out here in the school parking lot while the windchill dipped down into single digits. “That’s not what I meant,” he muttered.

  “I know exactly what you mean
t. I know just what you think of me, Mr. Harte.”

  He sincerely doubted it. Did she know he thought about her a lot more than he damn well knew he ought to and that he couldn’t get her green eyes or her sassy little mouth out of his mind?

  “Our daughters want us to do this,” she said. “I don’t know what little scheme they’re cooking up—and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I want to know—but it seems to be important to Dylan, and that’s enough for me. Let me know what you decide.”

  She closed the door, barely missing his fingers, then shoved the truck into gear and spun out of the parking lot, leaving him in a cloud of exhaust.

  CHAPTER 2

  Matt drove his pickup under the arch proclaiming Diamond Harte Ranch—Choice Simmentals and Quarter Horses with a carved version of the brand that had belonged to the Harte family for four generations.

  He paused for just a moment like he always did to savor the view before him. The rolling, sage-covered hills, the neat row of fence line stretching out as far as the eye could see, the barns and outbuildings with their vivid red paint contrasting so boldly with the snow.

  And standing guard over it all at the end of the long gravel drive was the weathered log and stone house his grandfather had built—with the sprawling addition he had helped his father construct the year he turned twelve.

  Home.

  He loved it fiercely, from the birthing sheds to the maze of pens to the row of Douglas fir lining the drive.

  He knew every single inch of its twenty thousand acres, as well as the names and bloodlines of each of the three dozen cutting horses on the ranch and the medical history of all six hundred of the ranch’s cattle.

  Maybe he loved it too much. Reverend Whitaker’s sermon last week had been a fiery diatribe on the sin of excess pride, the warning in Proverbs about how pride goeth before destruction.

  Matt had squirmed in the hard pew for a minute, then decided the Lord would forgive him for it, especially if He could look down through the clouds and see the Diamond Harte like Matt saw it. As close to heaven as any place else on earth.

  Besides, didn’t the Bible also say the sleep of a laboring man was sweet? His father’s favorite scripture had been in Genesis, something about how a man should eat bread only by the sweat of his face.

  Well, he’d worked plenty hard for the Diamond Harte. He’d poured every last ounce of his sweat into the ranch since he was twenty-two years old, into taking the legacy his parents had left their three children so suddenly and prematurely and building it into the powerful ranch it had become.

  He had given up everything for the ranch. All his time and energy. The college degree in ag economy he was sixteen credits away from earning when his parents had died in that rollover accident. Even his wife, who had hated the ranch with a passion and had begged him to leave every day of their miserable marriage.

  Melanie. The woman he had loved with a quicksilver passion that had turned just as quickly to bitter, ferocious hate. His wife, who had cheated on him and lied to him and eventually left him when Lucy wasn’t even three months old.

  She’d been a city girl, too, fascinated by silly, romantic dreams of the West. The reality of living on a ranch wasn’t romantic at all, as Melanie had discovered all too soon. It was hard work and merciless weather. Cattle that didn’t always smell so great, a cash flow that was never dependable. Flies in the summer and snowstorms in the winter that could trap you for days.

  Melanie had never even made an effort to belong. She had been lost. He could see that now. Bitterly unhappy and desperate for something she could never find.

  She thought he should have sold the ranch, pocketed the five or six million it was probably worth and taken her somewhere a whole lot more glitzy than Salt River, Wyoming. And when he refused to give in to her constant pleading, she had made his life hell.

  What was this thing he had for women who didn’t belong out here? He thought of his fascination with the California vet. It wasn’t attraction. He refused to call it attraction. She was just different from what he was used to, that’s all. Annoying, opinionated, argumentative. That’s the only reason his pulse rate jumped whenever she was around.

  A particularly strong gust of wind blew out of the canyon suddenly, rattling the pickup. He sent a quick look at the digital clock on the sleek dashboard, grateful for the distraction from thoughts of a woman he had no business thinking about.

  Almost six. Cassie would have dinner on soon, and then he would get to spend the rest of the night trying to keep his stock warm. He eased his foot off the brake and quickly drove the rest of the way to the house, parking in his usual spot next to his sister’s Cherokee.

  Inside, the big house was toasty, welcoming. His stomach growled and his mouth watered at the delectable smells coming from the kitchen—mashed potatoes and Cassie’s amazing meat loaf, if he wasn’t mistaken. He hung his hat on the row of pegs by the door, then made his way to the kitchen. He found his baby sister stirring gravy in a pan on the wide professional stove she’d insisted he install last year.

  She looked up at his entrance and gave him a quick smile. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Smells good.” He stood watching her for a moment, familiar guilt curling in his gut. She ought to be in her own house, making dinner for her own husband and a whole kitchen full of rug rats, instead of wasting her life away taking care of him and Lucy.

  If it hadn’t been for the disastrous choices he made with Melanie, that’s exactly where she would have been.

  It wasn’t a new thought. He’d had plenty of chances in the last ten years to wish things could be different, to regret that he had become so blasted dependent on everything Cassie did for them after Melanie ran off.

  She ought to go to college—or at least to cooking school somewhere, since she loved it so much. But every time they talked about it, about her plans for the future, she insisted she was exactly where she wanted to be, doing exactly what she wanted to be doing.

  How could he convince her otherwise when he still wasn’t completely sure he could handle things on his own? He didn’t know how he could do a proper job of raising Lucy by himself and handle the demands of the ranch at the same time.

  Maybe if Jesse was around more, things might be different. He could have given his younger brother some of the responsibilities of the ranch, leaving more time to take care of things on the home front. But Jess had never been content on the Diamond Harte. He had other dreams, of catching the bad guys and saving the world, and Matt couldn’t begrudge him those.

  “Where’s Lucy?” he asked.

  “Up in her room fretting, I imagine. She’s been a basket case waiting for you to get back from the school. She broke two glasses while she was setting the table, and spent more time looking out the window for your truck than she did on her math homework.”

  “She ought to be nervous,” he growled, grateful for the renewed aggravation that was strong enough to push the guilt aside.

  Cassie glanced up at his tone. “Uh-oh. That bad? What did she do?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” he muttered and headed toward the stairs. “Give me five minutes to talk to her, and then we’ll be down.”

  He knocked swiftly on her door and heard a muffled, “Come in.” Inside, he found his daughter sitting on her bed, gnawing her bottom lip so hard it looked like she had chewed away every last drop of blood.

  Through that curtain of long, dark hair, he saw that her eyes were wide and nervous. As they damn well ought to be after the little stunt she pulled. He let her stew in it for a minute.

  “Hey, squirt.”

  “Hi,” she whispered. With hands that trembled just a little, she picked up Sigmund, the chubby calico cat she’d raised from a kitten, and plopped him in her lap.

  “So I just got back from talking with Miz McKenzie.”

  Lucy pe
ered at him between the cat’s ears. She cleared her throat. “Um, what did she say?”

  “I think you know exactly what she said, don’t you?”

  She nodded, the big gray eyes she’d inherited from her mother wide with apprehension. As usual, he hoped to heaven that was the only thing Melanie had passed on to their daughter.

  “You want to tell me what this is all about?”

  She appeared to think it over, then shook her head swiftly. He bit his cheek to keep a rueful grin from creeping out at that particular piece of honesty. “Tough. Tell me anyway.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Luce. What were you thinking, to sign me up for this Valentine’s carnival without at least talking to me first?”

  “It was Dylan’s idea,” Lucy mumbled.

  Big surprise there. Dylan Webster was a miniature version of her wacky mother. “Why?”

  “She thought you’d be good at it, since you’re so important around here and can get people to do whatever you want. At least that’s what her mom says.”

  He could picture Ellie Webster saying exactly that, with her pert little nose turned up in the air.

  “And,” Lucy added, the tension easing from her shoulders a little as she stroked the purring cat, “we both thought it would be fun. You know, planning the carnival and stuff. You and me and Dylan and her mom, doing it all together. A bonding thing.”

  A bonding thing? The last thing he needed to do was bond with Ellie Webster, under any circumstances.

  “What do you know about bonding? Don’t tell me that’s something they teach you in school.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Dylan says we’re in our formative preteen years and need positive parental influence now more than ever. She thought this would be a good opportunity for us to develop some leadership skills.”

  Great. Now Ellie Webster’s kid had his daughter spouting psychobabble. He blew out a breath. “What about you?”