by Tami Hoag
The blonde was there. He was sure of it. He could hear her laughter and her screams. His head swam and pounded with the sounds and the images. He squeezed his eyes shut and still they came in—through his ears and his fingertips. He felt the tiger ripping open his chest. The blood flowed inward instead of out, and the visions rushed in on the tide and up his throat, choking him.
He cowered behind the contorted body of a white-bark pine, clutching his rifle and weeping like a woman. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't escape in any way. He was crying too hard to take a shot. Sobbing soundlessly, his mouth torn open as if to scream, but no sound coming out. It all remained within him. The rage, the fear, the madness. And he gripped the rifle and held on. His only anchor to the real world. His only friend in the night.
The blonde laughed. The tiger screamed. The dog-boys did their dirty deeds.
He clutched his rifle and prayed to an empty sky. Please, please, fade to black. Fade to black . . .
CHAPTER
10
THE MULE eyed her, openly dubious.
“You don't think I can do this, do you?” Mari said, hefting the western saddle in her arms. It weighed a ton. When her mother had sent her to riding lessons at Baywind Stables, it had been in breeches and boots with a little velvet hunt helmet under her arm. The saddle she strapped on her rented mount was small and light. The mount she strapped it on was petite with a dainty head and kind eyes.
Clyde sized her up and all but laughed at her. His eyes were keen and clear, showing a sharp, cynical intelligence that boded ill. He flicked one long ear back and tossed his big, homely head, rattling the snaps on the cross ties.
Mari adjusted her hold on the saddle and pulled together her nerve. “Think again, rabbit ears. If Lucy could do this, I can damn well do it too.”
It occurred to her that perhaps Lucy hadn't done this. She may have had her hired hand saddle the animal for her. No matter now. The only hands Mari had were the two on the ends of her arms.
Standing on an old crate, she swung the saddle into place on the mule's back and adjusted the saddle blanket, tugging it up at his withers. She wrestled with the long latigo strap and fumbled at the unfamiliar task of dealing with the western girth, trying to remember what Rafferty had done the few times she had seen him loosen and tighten his saddle on his big sorrel horse. She nearly gave up once, ready to jump on bareback, but the thought of the uphill trail to the Stars and Bars and the fact that it had been a decade since she had ridden made her renew her efforts to get the saddle tightened down.
Once she had accomplished her task and managed to get the bridle on, she led her noble steed out into the early morning sunshine and mounted with some difficulty and little grace. She took a moment to settle herself, trying to recall without much success how it had felt to be comfortable on the back of a moving animal. Then she pointed the mule toward the trail and they set off at a walk.
Nerves were forgotten almost instantly as they climbed the trail on the wooded hillside. Mari's surroundings captured her attention almost to the exclusion of the mule. Impressions bombarded her senses—the smell of earth and pine, the delicate shape and movement of aspen leaves, the colors of wildflowers, the songs of birds, the patches of blue that shone through the canopy of branches like bits of stained glass. She breathed it in, soaked it in, taking mental notes and processing them automatically through the creative side of her brain. Fragments of song lyrics floated through her head on phantom melodies.
Clyde plodded onward, oblivious of the creative process but well aware of his rider's distracted state. He took advantage of Mari's inattentiveness, nibbling on the leaves of berry bushes as he ambled along. When they reached a clearing, he stopped altogether and dropped his nose down into the fresh clover. Mari started to pull his head up, but the view from the ridge wiped everything else from her mind.
It was spectacular. Simply, utterly spectacular. The ranch lay below them, and below that lay the valley, lush and green like a rumpled velvet coverlet. The stream cut through it, a band of glittering embroidery, shining silver beneath the spring sun. And far beyond the valley the Gallatin range rose up, paragons of strength, huge, silent, their peaks bright with snow.
From a treetop somewhere above her, an eagle took wing, its piercing cry cutting across the fabric of the morning like a razor. The bird glided toward the valley, a dark chevron against the blue sky.
Mari's breath held fast in her lungs. She had grown up in a city, had traveled to some of the more beautiful sites civilization had to offer, but no place had ever captured her as surely as this place. She sat there, a fine trembling running through her, to the core of her, feeling like an instrument on which someone had struck a perfect note. It vibrated in the heart of her, touched the very center of her, and tears rose in her eyes because she knew just how rare a moment like this was. She felt as if she had been waiting for it her entire life. Waiting to feel that sense of belonging, that sense of finally sliding into place after so many years of not fitting in.
It frightened her a little to feel it now. She had no way of knowing how long it would last, didn't know if she should grab on to it with both hands and hang on or let it pass. She thought of Rafferty and his aversion to outsiders. She wasn't from here, had come only on hiatus from the rest of her life. Just passing through. Just passing time. But time stood absolutely still as she looked out over the valley and to the mountains beyond.
She could have stayed forever right in that spot, suspended in that moment.
But somewhere ahead on the trail cattle were being branded, work was being done. Mari tugged Clyde's head up out of the clover and urged him toward the Stars and Bars.
She heard the commotion before she saw it. The bawling of cows and calves filled the air, a frantic cacophony that sang of the confusion and energy of the event. The mule pricked his long ears forward and picked up the pace of his walk, the excitement reaching him even a quarter mile down the road from the ranch. Mari fixed her gaze on the cloud of dust hovering over the corrals in the distance and nudged her mount into a trot, posting in the saddle because it was the way she had been taught.
As she neared the pens she tried to take in everything about the sight at once—the maze of weathered board fences, the movement of the groups of cattle, the men who perched above the chutes, tending to a job she could only guess at. The air was filled with the scents of dust and smoke, fresh manure and burning hide. The scene was something straight out of a John Wayne movie, Technicolor bright, Surround-Sound loud.
“Better click those teeth together, ma'am, or you're liable to catch a taste of somethin' you'd rather not.”
Mari pulled herself away from the spectacle and looked down on another walking, talking piece of western lore. The old cowboy who stood beside her was as weathered as an applehead doll, his skin burned brown and age-freckled from years in the sun. He had the stance of a man who had put in too many miles in the saddle, a little bent, a little twisted. His legs were bowed and spindly even though a fair amount of belly spilled over the top of his belt buckle. He squinted up at her from beneath the brim of a disreputable-looking gray hat, his blue eyes merry and a smile tugging shyly at one corner of his mouth.
“Tucker Cahill at your service, ma'am,” he announced. Tipping his head away demurely, he shot a stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, then glanced back up at her. “You lost or somethin'?”
“Not if this is the Stars and Bars.”
“It surely is.”
“I'm Marilee Jennings. J.D. told me I could come watch the branding if I wanted.”
Tucker damn near swallowed his chaw. His eyebrows climbed his forehead until they nearly disappeared beneath his hat. “Did he? Well, I'll be pan-fried and ate by turkeys,” he muttered.
“Excuse me?”
He shook himself like a dog, trying to shake loose the shock of her statement. He could hardly remember the last time J.D. had invited a 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. “Well, 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.”
Mari 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 Mari,” 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, Mari, 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.”
Mari 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. Mari 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.”
Mari studied the old man's weathered profile, a million questions rushing through her mind. 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 Mari 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.
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, Mary Lee!” 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 Mari 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 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 Mari. “J.D. invited you? My brother J.D. invited you?”
“Not exactly,” Mari 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 doesn't want some evil woman turning our heads from our work.”
Lucy came immediately to mind, but Mari 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, Mari 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, Mary Lee? Looking for trouble?” He bobbed his eyebrows and grinned. “That's my middle name.”
“I gu
essed 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 screwup 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 was working on three levels at once—studying the cattle, assessing the performance of the horse, and wondering if Mary Lee would really show up.
