Montana Mavericks, Books 1-4

by Diana Palmer

  His guilt had grown when she left Sara and crossed the street, looking so discouraged. Then he’d unwittingly scared the hell out of her; he didn’t even want to imagine what a woman from a crime-ridden city like Washington must have felt when he came at her out of the darkness the way he had. And when she’d stood there in the street, fiercely rejecting his apology…well, damn, he’d have done almost anything to earn her forgiveness.

  Like an idiot, he’d gone too far, of course. But then, he seemed to overreact to just about everything when he was with Maggie. He knew he’d overreacted to the power of that kiss, too. He would have rated it higher than a four or a six, but it hadn’t really been all that spectacular. Had it?

  The only way to be absolutely sure, of course, was to kiss her again. He wanted to. Oh, yeah, he wanted to do it so bad, his lips itched. But what if it had been as spectacular as he remembered? He could get addicted to that kind of pleasure. And then he’d want more and more and more. Oh, hell, who was he trying to kid? He’d already made love to her in his fantasies at least fifty times.

  No matter where he was or what he was trying to do, Maggie nagged at the edges of his mind, like a pesky fly that wouldn’t go away, but wouldn’t land anywhere so he could swat it. Like a TV with the sound turned low enough he couldn’t quite hear it, but loud enough that he couldn’t quite ignore it, either. Like a song whose melody haunted him, but whose lyrics he could only half remember.

  She was just always there. He didn’t know if he really wanted to resist her. Or if he even could resist her if he really wanted to. Now, if that wasn’t a confusing mess for a supposedly rational lawyer to find himself in, he’d like to know what was.

  “I don’t know where your brain is, nephew, but it sure as hell ain’t here,” Frank said, scowling at Jackson. “What’s goin’ on with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  Frank threw down his pen, shoved back his chair and stood. “Well, I’m starvin’ to death. Let’s get some lunch.”

  “I can’t, uncle. I’m taking Maggie for a tour of the res this afternoon.”

  A knowing smile spread across Frank’s face. “Well, I guess that explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “The nothing that’s goin’ on with you.” Chuckling, Frank walked out the door, calling, “Ne-sta-va-voomatse,” as he left.

  “Right, I’ll see you later, uncle,” Jackson replied.

  He glanced at his watch and felt a sharp surge of anticipation in the center of his chest. Since it was almost one o’clock, and Maggie operated on white man’s time, she should be here any minute. Would she be nervous about seeing him again? he wondered. As nervous as he was about seeing her?

  Disgusted with himself for that admission, he gathered up the papers he’d been working on, muttering, “For God’s sake, it was just a kiss.”

  His heart lurched when he heard the outer door open, followed by muffled footsteps. And then Maggie appeared in the doorway of his office, wearing jeans, sneakers, and a bright purple shirt with intricate beading on the collar under her jacket. Her shy smile warmed him, driving every rational, self-preserving thought from his head. Damn, but he was glad to see her.

  “Hello, Jackson,” she said.

  “Hello, Maggie.”

  She paused just inside the doorway, as if she weren’t sure what to expect from him. “Are you ready to go?”

  Smiling at her, Jackson pushed himself to his feet. Before he could say anything, however, the outer door opened again.

  “Hello?” a feminine voice he didn’t recognize called from the end of the hallway. “Is someone there?”

  Maggie looked at Jackson, her eyebrows raised in a silent query. When he shrugged to let her know he wasn’t expecting anybody, she stepped back into the hallway and said, “Down here, ma’am. May I help you?”

  “Well, actually, I was hoping I could help you,” the woman said, her words accompanied by the staccato clicking of high heels striking the tile floor.

  Maggie shot Jackson an amused glance. A second later, he understood why. The woman who walked into his office was a delicate, fortyish blonde who looked as if she ought to be heading for a ladies’ luncheon at a country club.

  She wore a pastel-pink suit with a short, straight skirt, a white scoop-necked blouse, and pearls at her ears and throat. She carried a small handbag the same color as her shoes, three-inch spikes that had, no doubt, been dyed to match her outfit. Her makeup was subtle and flattering, every strand of her shoulder-length hair was combed into place, and her perfectly manicured fingernails told him any work she did with her hands was rarely more strenuous than arranging flowers.

  The woman stood in the middle of the room for a moment, glancing from Jackson to Maggie and back to Jackson, obviously trying to figure out which one of them was in charge. Impatient to learn her business and get on with his afternoon with Maggie, Jackson said, “What can we do for you, miss?”

  “Oh, it’s Mrs.,” she said, raising her left hand to her necklace, flashing a ring with a diamond the size of an acorn in it. Then she gave him a sweet smile and offered her dainty right hand to him. “Mrs. Dugin Kincaid. But please, call me Mary Jo. Everyone does.”

  “Jackson Hawk,” he said, reluctantly shaking her hand. Oh, great, he thought grimly, Maheo knew he’d always wanted to be on a first-name basis with Jeremiah Kincaid’s daughter-in-law. Maggie came forward and offered the woman a chair.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mary Jo,” she said, shooting Jackson a warning scowl. “I’m Maggie Schaeffer. I’m working with the tribe on a temporary assignment for Congressman Baldwin.”

  The woman settled herself on the straight-backed wooden chair, responding graciously to Maggie’s efforts to make polite small talk. After five minutes, Jackson had heard all the get-acquainted chitchat he could stand. He cleared his throat to gain the women’s attention.

  “What brings you to Laughing Horse, Mrs. Kincaid?” he asked.

  “Well, I know this may sound a bit strange, but if you’ll bear with me, I’ll do my best to explain,” she said. “You see, Duggie and I were having dinner at the club last night, and I heard this rumor about you folks out here, and I just had to find out if it was true. I mean, I didn’t really know if I’d be welcome, or anything, but then I thought, why not? It never hurts to ask, does it?”

  Jackson broke in when she finally paused to take a breath. “Excuse me, Mrs. Kincaid. Would you mind telling us what the rumor was?”

  “Oh, silly me, didn’t I tell you?” She let out a giggle that was annoyingly girlish for a woman her age, tipped her head to one side and batted her eyelashes at him. The effect was less than charming, as far as Jackson was concerned, but he answered as patiently as he could.

  “No, I don’t believe you did.”

  “Well, what I heard was that you folks will be starting a children’s library out here soon, and I just happen to be a children’s librarian. You see, I used to work at the library in town, but I had to quit when I married Duggie, because he’s on the library board and he didn’t really think it was proper for his wife to work for money. We have a certain…position to maintain in the community, you know.”

  Her light, breathless chatter grated on Jackson’s nerves almost as much as the ultrafeminine little gestures she made with her hands did. Honest to God, watching her talk was like watching hummingbirds zipping from flower to flower in his mother’s garden. He caught another warning scowl from Maggie, however, and decided to keep his mouth shut for the moment.

  “Anyway,” Mary Jo rattled on, “I just love children, and since it’s all right if I volunteer to work for a worthy cause, I hoped you might be willing to allow me to organize your new children’s library. I really am a very good librarian.”

  “We’ve discussed the idea of starting a children’s library, but I’m afraid we’re still at the thinking stage,” Jackson said. “We don’t have any definite plans.”

  “Oh,” Mary Jo said, her shoulders slumping, as if s
he were terribly disappointed. “I see. Then it was just a rumor.”

  “That was an awfully kind offer,” Maggie said. “Organizing a library must be a huge undertaking.”

  Mary Jo gave her a sad smile. “Well, yes, it is, but I would have loved doing it. I’m just not used to being idle, and I miss being around children so much.”

  “There’s an after-school tutoring program you might enjoy,” Maggie suggested. “We can always use volunteers to help the children with their homework.”

  Mary Jo perked right up, beaming at Maggie as if she’d offered her a winning lottery ticket. “Really? That sounds wonderful. Could I work with the little ones?”

  “You’ll have to talk to Sara Lewis about that,” Jackson said, sending Maggie a warning scowl of his own. It was bad enough this woman was a Kincaid, but her personality alone would drive him to drink, if he had to be around her much. “She’s in charge of the program.”

  Mary Jo flashed him a brilliant smile. “I’ll do it today. Oh, this will be such fun. You know, I’ve always been fascinated with Indians, and they talk about you folks in town all the time. Why, this morning one of our neighbors told me you found a body out here yesterday. Is that just another rumor?”

  “No, it’s partly true, Mrs. Kincaid,” Jackson said, hoping to scare her off for good. “We’ve only found a skeletonized arm and hand so far, but Dr. Hunter has assured the tribal police they were human remains.”

  Mary Jo shuddered delicately. “How gruesome. Do you think there was…murder involved?”

  Encouraged by her shudder, Jackson decided to lay it on good and thick. “We won’t know for certain until we find the rest of the skeleton, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. We’ve had such a bad history of violence at Laughing Horse, the FBI is sending in a forensic specialist to study the case.”

  “Really? Do you think they’ll be able to solve it?”

  Jackson studied Mary Jo for a moment. Nuts. The woman seemed to be more interested in learning the gory details of a crime than scared. This was one weird lady. She made all the right noises, but somehow, they just didn’t ring true.

  “I guess we’ll see,” he said. “You should be extremely careful when you come out here, Mrs. Kincaid. If there was foul play attached to those bones, the murderer is probably still running loose, right here on the reservation.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Mary Jo murmured. She shuddered again, then stood and said, “Well, I must go now, but I’ll be back to work with the children. And I will be careful, I promise. Thanks again. I’ll see you later.”

  With a cheery wave, she left the room, trailing a cloud of expensive perfume. Jackson waited until he heard the outer door bang shut before looking at Maggie. Arms folded across her chest, she was studying him as intently as he’d studied Mary Jo Kincaid. Uh-oh. It didn’t take a psychic to tell him he was in for it again.

  Seven

  Maggie met and held Jackson’s challenging gaze for the space of a heartbeat, then lowered her hands to her sides. She had spent the morning in her motel room, organizing her notes and thinking about him. After analyzing their stormy relationship to date, she had decided to take Jackson at his word and accept his suggestion that they start over and try to be friends.

  In the spirit of that decision, she was determined to reserve comment on his behavior toward Mary Jo Kincaid until he asked for her opinion. And maybe, with luck and patience, they could learn to have calm, rational discussions, instead of fierce, energy-draining debates.

  “I’m ready to leave, if you are,” she said with a smile. “Do you want to take your car or mine?”

  His eyebrows rose halfway up his forehead, and he stared at her for a moment. Then his face and shoulders relaxed, and the corners of his mouth curved into a grin. He grabbed his hat from the top of the bookshelf behind his desk, plunked it on his head and motioned for her to precede him through the doorway.

  “We’ll take my truck. I want to show you the grazing leases first, and the roads are rough out there.”

  Neither of them spoke again as they headed out of Laughing Horse in his battered red pickup, traveling southwest on a gravel road. Maggie settled back in the seat and gazed out the side window. The homesteads gradually came fewer and farther between, bearing little resemblance to the well-kept farms and ranches she’d seen on the outskirts of Whitehorn.

  There were no stately red barns, no satellite dishes, no elaborate sprinkler systems. Many of the houses were unpretentious clapboards with faded and peeling paint and the Spartan, cookie-cutter sameness of government construction. Others were little more than log cabins or tar-paper shacks surrounded by sagging fences and the rusting carcasses of junked vehicles, farm machinery and appliances. Some had a few chickens scratching at the dirt in the front yard, a privy and a sagging clothesline out back. Occasionally she saw a horse or a mangy-looking dog, but if there were people around, they remained out of sight.

  Maggie had seen plenty of urban poverty before, but she found this rural variety wrenched her heart with equal, if not greater, force. Americans frequently heard about the problems of the poor in their cities on the nightly news. These grim, isolated pockets of dreariness were much easier for the media to ignore; the people who struggled to survive out here were all-too-often forgotten.

  In stark contrast to the homesteads, the landscape provided a backdrop of breathtaking scenery. To the west, the jagged, snowcapped peaks of the Crazy Mountains soared into the clear blue sky like a prayer reaching for heaven. The grass covering the foothills was turning green. A large bird, probably an eagle or a hawk, floated on the air currents high overhead.

  Such poverty in the midst of so much rich natural beauty struck Maggie as some kind of a cruel joke. Did her mother’s family live in a ramshackle place like that one? Did Jackson? He finally broke the silence, startling her out of her reverie.

  “Well?” he asked.

  Maggie looked at him, raising one eyebrow at the gruff demand in his voice. “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what a paranoid bigot I am again?”

  “Do you really want me to?”

  “Not particularly, but I know that’s what you’re thinking. You might as well go ahead and say it.”

  Chuckling at his disgruntled tone, she shifted around on the seat until she was partially facing him. “I think you’re hearing the voice of your own guilty conscience, because you fibbed to Mrs. Kincaid.”

  A grin tugged at the corners of Jackson’s mouth. “No, I didn’t. Nothing I said was really a lie.”

  “Oh, huh! The story I heard, was that the elders were pretty darn positive those bones came from the old burial ground, which was why they’ve locked them up until the FBI’s forensic specialist can get here. And you deliberately led that poor woman to believe there’s a vicious killer on the loose.”

  He shrugged. “She can believe whatever she wants. But tell me, what did you really think of her?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “She was nice enough, I guess, but maybe a little…strange.”

  “Only a little?” he shot her a disbelieving look, then turned his attention to the road again and shook his head.

  “Well, actually, I thought she was pretty ditzy,” Maggie admitted with a laugh, “but I thought she seemed sincere about wanting to help.”

  “She wants something, all right, but I doubt it has anything to do with the library, or the kids.”

  “Why, Jackson?”

  “For starters, good ol’ Duggie and his father despise Indians. I can’t believe either one of them would approve of her volunteering to work out here, no matter how worthy the cause. It just doesn’t fit, unless there’s some other motive involved.”

  Maggie opened her eyes wide and lowered her voice to a spooky whisper. “Maybe she’s on a mission to infiltrate the tribe and spy for Jeremiah. Maybe she’s a pervert who gets off on kiddie library books. Maybe she’s a commie pinko rat!”

  Jackson snorted with laughter. “St
op makin’ fun of me, Schaeffer. There’s something weird about that woman, and you know it.”

  “Agreed, but can you really imagine that ditzy little woman being involved in Jeremiah’s business affairs? And if he wanted to send in a spy, wouldn’t you expect him to be more subtle than to use his own daughter-in-law?”

  “Who knows what to expect from that guy?”

  “What if Mary Jo’s last name was Smith or Jones, instead of Kincaid? Would you still be suspicious of her?”

  “Probably. Does that make me a bigot?”

  “I didn’t call you a bigot,” Maggie said, struggling to hold on to her patience. “I said you might have a problem with bigotry. For whatever it’s worth, I think we all have a touch of it somewhere in our souls.”

  “Okay. So why do you think I have such a problem with it?”

  “Because you seem to suspect the motives of every white person who offers to do anything good for the tribe. Why don’t you trust any of them?”

  “Why do you trust all of them?”

  Maggie shook her head in exasperation. “I don’t. But I at least try to give people the benefit of the doubt until they prove me wrong, Jackson.”

  “That’s fine on a personal basis. But when you’re responsible for the well-being of two thousand people, you can’t afford to make mistakes.”

  “Somebody must have really hurt you to make you feel that way,” Maggie said quietly.

  Jackson laughed again, but there was no humor in it this time. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me. I’m not one bit more suspicious of whites than anyone else who grew up on the res.”

  “Yes, you are, and it’s really a personal thing with you. Come on, Jackson, talk to me. If we’re going to be friends, I need to understand.”

  He pulled over to the side of the road, switched off the ignition and turned to face her. “Look, Maggie, I’m not saying this to be insulting, but I don’t think anyone with your background really can understand.”