Best Man in Wyoming

by Margot Dalton

  His panic deepened. Rex glared passionately at Lindsay, willing her to bid, but she gave him another of those sweet vacant smiles, then turned away to whisper something to Sam.

  The other party bidding on him seemed to be a group effort. He recognized three grim-looking young women from Lightning Creek, all of whom, according to Sam Duncan’s unfailing grapevine, were rumored to be having marital difficulties.

  So this was a business arrangement, Rex surmised. The women figured they could buy a lawyer for a weekend, pump him for his legal knowledge and split the costs among the three of them.

  Not such a bad idea. Rex brightened a little. In essence it was the same thing as donating his legal services or fees directly to the ranch.

  But then he remembered the law firm in Casper where he’d just been named partner, and how they frowned on any kind of non-fee-paying clients or quid pro quo legal work.

  “Absolutely no way,” the senior partner had stated at Rex’s orientation meeting, “do we want to open ourselves to any sleazy charge of professional misconduct, tax evasion or mail fraud. If you tie a shoelace for somebody, Rex, then you’re gonna bill it and charge it as a legal service. No freebies for your old auntie Elma, and no legal advice for your dentist in exchange for a root canal. You got all that?”

  “Yes,” Rex had assured his boss. “Believe me, I’ve got it.”

  So if those three women intended to buy his time with the hope of spending a weekend exploiting his legal knowledge, they were going to be sorely disappointed.

  Angelique raised the bid aggressively. Two red spots burned in her pale cheeks.

  Again Rex cast an urgent, furious glance at Lindsay. She gave him the smile of maddening innocence that he remembered from childhood, a bright, teasing look that said she knew exactly how much he was suffering but had no intention of helping him.

  Rex fought the urge to stride across the ring and shake her. Lindsay beamed up at him, her blue eyes sparkling with laughter. At last she relented and entered a languid bid just a few dollars higher than Angelique’s, electrifying the crowd.

  With the arrival of this new bidder, the three young wives soon dropped out, looking disappointed. Bidding continued between Lindsay and Angie, but the older woman finally gave up as well, waving her hand with a gesture of disgust. She gathered her huge leather bag, tossed her brochure on the floor and went stalking out, her white cape quivering with indignation.

  It was over. Rex escaped the showring and made way for Nick Petrocelli, whose uniform and rigid military bearing created a fresh stir of interest. Nick was already being bid up aggressively by a middle-aged woman sitting with some stern-looking matriarch.

  Nick would probably have to spend a weekend cleaning gutters and raking leaves at these rich women’s country homes, Rex thought with a private grin.

  But then, all things considered, the ex-Marine could have done a lot worse.

  Rex winked at his friend and left the ring, going over to sit by Lindsay and Sam.

  The old cowboy leaned forward to clap a firm hand on Rex’s shoulder, then jerked his thumb in the direction that Angelique Parrish had just stalked off.

  “Looks like Linnie saved you from a fate worse than death, son,” Sam murmured. “You better be real grateful to her.”

  Rex chuckled and reached into the breast pocket of his tuxedo, looking for a checkbook, but Lindsay put a hand on his arm.

  “Not now,” she murmured, bending close enough that he could smell the scent of her hair.

  For as long as Rex could remember she’d used the same kind of shampoo, something that smelled faintly like sage and wild roses. Nowadays, even catching a whiff of it was enough to unsettle him and make him forget what he’d been planning to say.

  “No? Why not?” he asked, his hand still on the checkbook.

  “Angie Parrish was so upset,” Lindsay murmured, “and she certainly knows I can’t afford to pay that much for a few days of your company. I don’t want her to start spreading nasty rumors about something underhanded in the auction.”

  “If I loan you the money to pay the fee,” Rex argued, “how could that be underhanded?”

  “I’ll bet Angie could think of some way to make trouble.”

  Lindsay frowned, an expression Rex enjoyed almost as much as her smile. Her brow furrowed and her blue eyes looked so troubled and intent that he wanted to laugh out loud and hug her.

  But he was never casual with Lindsay anymore, not the way they used to be when they were kids. Briefly he recalled Nick’s troubling assertion that something was wrong with her besides the constant worries over finances at Lost Springs Ranch.

  Rex leaned back, stretching an arm along the back of her seat and extending his tuxedo-clad legs. The sun light almost glistened on his polished handmade shoes. He noticed Lindsay staring down at them with an unfathomable expression, but when he caught her eye, she looked away without speaking.

  Rex watched her more closely, concerned by the hollow curve of her pale cheek and the dark-blue shadows around her eyes.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, leaning over to whisper beneath the auctioneer’s patter.

  She glanced at him in surprise. “Of course I am. This is going really well, Rex. If the rest of the bids are even half so generous, I’m pretty sure all our worries are over.”

  As she spoke, Lindsay was briefly animated and her eyes sparkled with a bit of the old fire. Still, Rex could see what Nick had been talking about. There was an underlying air of fatigue and unhappiness that didn’t seem to be touched by her present optimism.

  “All your worries, Lin?” Rex studied her closely, aware of old Sam Duncan nearby, who listened with sudden intentness.

  She looked down again to avoid meeting his eyes, turning a brochure aimlessly in her hands. “Of course,” she murmured. “What are you talking about? You sound just like Nick.”

  “Maybe you’ve been working too hard, and I know this whole thing has been really stressful.” Rex hesitated, wondering why he felt so awkward. “Anyhow,” he went on with sudden inspiration, “why don’t you take advantage of this weekend you just bought?”

  “What weekend?” Her cheeks turned pink. “Look, I didn’t buy anything, and you know it. This is all your money, Rex.”

  “But the world thinks you just purchased a bachelor,” he argued, “so why not take advantage of it? Come on, Linnie,” he continued, warming to the idea. “Pick a nice place for a holiday and I’ll take you there. I’ll look after all the details so you can just rest.”

  “Yeah, right,” she scoffed, kicking his ankle. “I can just see that happening, all right. You and me on a romantic weekend.”

  She was so scornful that Rex felt vaguely hurt. But he could sense Sam’s silent approval on his other side, so he decided to try again.

  “We’d have separate rooms, of course,” he assured her. “And you wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the beach, soak in the sun and have a long, long rest. Why not just think about it, Linnie?”

  “Because,” she said with some asperity, “it’s the silliest thing I ever heard of, that’s why.”

  “Silly?” Rex felt, stung. “To spend a holiday weekend in my company would be silly?”

  “If I’m going to take a holiday with anyone,” she said, “I can tell you, Rex Trowbridge, it won’t be some high-powered corporate animal with a shiny Cadillac and a pair of five-hundred-dollar shoes.”

  Her glance flicked over him again.

  “So who would be your dream man, Lindsay?” he asked. “A sweaty mechanic, or maybe a high-rigger with a hard hat? Or how about a cowboy in dusty chaps, smelling like manure?”

  She pretended to consider, her dimples flashing with another touch of the old mischief. “Well now, those all sound really good. I guess the smelly cowboy would be my first choice, though. Now, if y
ou two will excuse me, I have a whole lot of money to collect.”

  With that, she got up and whirled away from the auction ring, her bright hair sparkling, and left Sam and Rex to look at each other in thoughtful silence.

  CHAPTER TWO

  One year later

  WHEN SUMMER came again, the Wyoming sun shone on a much different world, at least for Lindsay Duncan and the other residents of Lost Springs Ranch for Boys.

  The bachelor auction a year earlier had been a much greater success than anyone had anticipated. Long after the actual event, a groundswell of momentum kept building. By now the media publicity had generated a flood of spin-off income they could never have imagined when she and Rex first came up with the idea during a casual brainstorming session down at her uncle Sam’s house.

  The auction had been covered by both print media and state television, and was later picked up by a national feed. When reporters discovered that a number of the bachelor weekends had ended in romance and even marriage, the media was ecstatic at this human interest angle. Pictures of Lost Springs and success stories about its work with troubled boys were flashed around the nation.

  Camera crews became a regular occurrence at the ranch, at least for the first few months after the auction, and some of the boys developed considerable skill at posing for photos and answering reporters’ questions.

  And the money kept rolling in.

  In addition to thousands of outright cash donations, a number of scholarships and several generous endowments had been established. This allowed Lindsay to raise wages, organize staff pensions, hire some additional help. She even began looking at long-held dreams like a fully equipped gymnasium and boxing ring, and a music room with good instruments and qualified instructors.

  Her father would have been so happy, she thought wistfully, sitting at her desk in the office and gazing at the drift of sunshine on a field of waving grass beyond the window.

  The Duncan family had always visualized this place not just as a haven for the abandoned, but as a training ground where underprivileged boys could learn the arts and graces of life, where they could not only survive but triumph. Robert Duncan had firmly believed these lost boys needed self-esteem almost as much as they needed food, and that music lessons were valuable even if a boy planned to be a carpenter when he grew up.

  Remembering, Lindsay smiled as she riffled through stacks of contractors’ bids for the new gymnasium.

  The floods of money had been a blessing, no doubt about it, but they also caused a lot of extra work. A happy responsibility, of course, but a pressing one, nonetheless.

  She sighed and pushed a lock of hair back from her forehead, then froze.

  The morning newspaper lay under one of the contractors’ bids. Lindsay jumped, pulling her hand away as if she’d just touched a snake, then shuddered and buried her face in her hands.

  But hiding her eyes couldn’t erase the image of that small article on the lower right-hand corner of the front page. The words were burned into her memory.

  The same thing had happened a year ago, just before the auction, and it had upset her terribly back then as well.

  Now, after all these months, she’d begun to hope the nightmare was finally going away. But Lindsay knew she was only kidding herself.

  She alone held the key. This thing was never going away until she acted, yet it had left her too afraid to do anything.

  A coward, she told herself in the stillness of her office. She was such a coward. And because of her, other people would keep being hurt...

  The smell of fresh-cut grass wafted through the window along with a strong scent of roses. The ranch seemed pastoral and safe, far removed from the kind of dark horror that gripped her mind.

  Lindsay wiped her eyes with a tissue, blew her nose and dropped the folded newspaper into a wastebasket at her desk.

  Briefly she had an urge to talk to somebody about what happened four years ago, and relieve herself of this terrible, humiliating secret.

  But she couldn’t think of anyone who could really help except for Rex Trowbridge, and the thought of telling him was simply unbearable.

  Maybe if Rex were still the man he used to be, hard-fisted, impulsive and sympathetic, quick to throw a punch and just as ready to laugh...

  Maybe then Lindsay could talk to him.

  But Rex had changed so completely in the course of pursuing his dreams. Nowadays he seemed more like a handsome clotheshorse than a man. His chief concerns appeared to be keeping his car shiny and his bank account padded.

  How could a woman ever confide her deepest secret to a man like that? Especially the kind of story Lindsay needed to tell.

  She forced herself back to work. The numbers swam in front of her eyes at first, but after a while she settled down and became engrossed in designing a computer spreadsheet to weigh the elements of the various bids, trying to decide which contractor would make best use of the ranch’s newly acquired funds.

  Suddenly she looked up, startled. Four dandelions and a tattered wild rose had appeared magically at the edge of her desk and were rising slowly into her line of vision. Next a small hand appeared, dirty and marred by a couple of scratches. The hand was quickly lowered again, making the flowers wobble.

  “My goodness,” Lindsay said loudly, addressing the window. “What on earth is going on here? Some beautiful flowers seem to be growing on my desk, and I have no idea where they came from.”

  A muffled giggle and the scuffling of boots sounded below the front of her desk.

  Lindsay grinned but kept her voice sober and thoughtful. “I’ll bet these flowers need watering, since they seem to be growing so fast.”

  She took a pitcher of water and tipped it gently over the edge of the desk, sprinkling a few careful drops onto the tight clump of wildflowers.

  A howl of protest sounded and a small boy scrambled into view, still clutching the flowers, droplets of water glistening on his curly red hair.

  “My goodness,” Lindsay said, pretending alarm. “Now there’s a boy growing out of my floor, too. What on earth is going on here?”

  “It’s me,” the child protested with a throaty giggle. “I picked you some flowers and sneaked in here to give them to you, and you never even saw me.”

  “I certainly didn’t.” Lindsay wiped the drops of moisture from his hair and took the bedraggled clump of flowers, which felt hot and limp. She smiled, wondering how long Danny had been clutching them in his dirty freckled hands.

  Lindsay crossed the room to fill a coffee mug with water, then inserted the clump of flowers and arranged them a little more gracefully before she set them back on her desk.

  “There,” she said, smiling at the little boy as she returned to her swivel chair. “Aren’t they pretty?”

  Danny nodded and studied the flowers in deep satisfaction, then came past the desk to lean against her chair.

  Lindsay put an arm around his small frame, hugging him, and frowned when she felt the way he nestled close to her.

  Poor little mite, she thought.

  Danny Graves was only eight, a sensitive, complex little boy who’d lost both his parents in the crash of their light plane two years earlier. He was the youngest child at the ranch and the older boys were generally protective of him, but Lindsay knew they could also be rough, like most adolescent males.

  Danny still missed and needed a woman’s touch, and Lindsay tried to supply it whenever she could. She also had stern private chats with some of the older boys who teased Danny for sleeping with his teddy bear or needing a light near his bed.

  “He’s much smaller than the rest of you,” she told the other youthful residents at Lost Springs. “It’s our responsibility to understand that, and keep him from being scared or miserable.”

  But lately it seemed they hadn’t been all that su
ccessful looking after their youngest resident. Divested of his bouquet, Danny left her chair and lingered by the door with a sad, pinched expression that tore at her heart.

  “So,” she said, setting down her pen and folding her hands on top of the papers, “what’s up, kiddo? Are you having fun on your holiday?”

  “Not much.” Danny looked down, kicking at the edge of the Navajo rug.

  “Not much?” Lindsay echoed, pretending disbelief. “Why, Danny Jefferson Graves, you’re eight years old and it’s summertime! How could you not be having fun?”

  He glanced up, his freckled face so twisted with misery that Lindsay’s heart was wrung.

  “The other guys don’t want me around much.” He swallowed hard and dashed a grubby hand across his eyes. “They do lots of stuff like going to the swimming hole and playing rodeo, but I’m not big enough. They think I’d just be in the way.”

  Lindsay nodded thoughtfully.

  It was true, a lot of the activities at Lost Springs weren’t geared to such a small child. Especially when the ranks of boys were so greatly thinned during the summer. Almost all the kids had somewhere to go when the school term ended. Even the parentless boys spent the summer months with relatives or other benefactors.

  Only a few like Danny had nowhere to go and were forced to cool their heels at Lost Springs, filling the long summer days as best they could until the student body returned and comforting routines started up again.

  Danny took hold of the door handle and turned it experimentally a few times, his customary procedure as he prepared to leave the office.

  “Maybe...” Lindsay said, clearing her throat, “maybe soon there’s going to be something exciting for you to do, Danny.”

  The little boy’s face lit up with sudden hope. “Something really neat?”

  Lindsay nodded soberly. “Oh yes,” she promised, “it will be really neat. All the boys who are gone now will be jealous when they get back and hear about this wonderful thing you got to do.”