“Just where the hell have you been?” he demanded.
“I had business in Fargo.” It surprised Ella how easy it was now to lie to her fiancé. She shrugged indifferently. “It was something that just couldn’t be avoided, and it took a lot more time than I anticipated.” She looked him in the eyes. “And I do wish you wouldn’t just come barging into my office like this. I didn’t even know you were in the house.”
Tim cocked his head to the side, scrutinizing her a bit more carefully. Ella could tell he didn’t like her lack of deference. She liked the fact that he didn’t like it.
“You’re going to be my wife. You should have cleared it with me before you left.”
While it was true that for quite some time Ella “cleared” all of her decisions with Tim before acting on them, those times were now all behind her. Since the inclusion of Dirk, Blue, and Ben into her life, virtually everything changed. For the better.
Tim sat in the chair facing her desk. Ella would have preferred that he remain standing while she sat, but she decided against telling him so. In that moment, Ella realized she did not hate her fiancé. She pitied him a little, but she neither loved him nor hated him. She tolerated him in the manner of an adult accepting a young child’s inability to understand life’s complexities.
“I need a check, and I need it now.”
Ella smiled. “No, you want a bank draft, and you want it now. There’s a difference between wants and needs.”
She saw a muscle flicker in Tim’s jaw. “Don’t try to rile me, Ella. You might just succeed, and then maybe you wouldn’t be so pleased with yourself.”
Ella didn’t want fear to show in her eyes, but she knew it did because a moment later, Tim smiled. He was the kind of man who liked seeing fear in women.
“Sure, you remember the time I slapped you, don’t you?” he asked, his face granite-hard. “That’s a good thing to remember. You’re my fiancée, and I love you, but as soon as we’re married, there will be some changes made around here. I’ve been busting my ass running the T-3 Ranch, and I deserve something for that. I deserve a big something for that.”
In a voice not nearly as authoritative as she had hoped, Ella said, “You promised me you’d never do that again. We...we made a promise to never even talk about it again.”
He had once slapped her on the side of the head so hard that she nearly dropped to her knees, rendered only half-conscious with a ringing in her ears. She didn’t carry any mark from the assault other than the ones she carried on her soul. She told her mother she was going to call off the engagement, but Rosamond said that she had been disrespectful and that any man worthy of running a ranch the size of the T-3 would have acted similarly.
Ella looked at Tim, and as she looked at him, she could feel her mother’s presence as though she stood behind him, giving him guidance.
“How much do you want?” The words came out more woodenly than Ella would have liked. She wanted to be strong, but she wilted under Tim’s glare too many times in the past to make a clean break from bad habits.
“Five hundred.”
“Five hundred! I wrote a bank draft for you before I left! What did you do with it all?”
“Just write the fucking check.”
Tim rose to his feet, and though Ella at first inhaled sharply in fear, she very quickly had to suppress a smile. At five-foot-seven, he wasn’t nearly as big as any of her men. Either Ben or Blue could whip Tim without breaking into a sweat. And with Dirk, her big, burly Dutch lover, it wouldn’t even be a contest.
Ella picked up her pen and dipped the solid gold nib into the inkwell. How much longer did she have to finance her fiancé’s drinking and gambling? How many more dollars of her hard labor would he spend with careless indifference? It would be so easy to simply end the engagement, but that would mean putting herself in direct opposition to her mother’s wishes. Whether she liked it or not, Rosamond was a formidable enemy.
“Five hundred,” Tim repeated as Ella’s pen hovered above the check ledger. “There’s some things I’ve got to do, so I want you to stay at the ranch until I get back.”
Ella started writing the check. “But I may need to go somewhere.”
She flinched, and the pen jumped in her hand when he shouted, “Stay at the fucking ranch, Ella!” And then, in a conversational tone, “Stay here, please. I think I’m finally getting a handle on our problem with the cattle rustlers.”
Tearing the bank draft from the ledger, Ella handed it to Tim. When she looked into his eyes, she saw something hidden in them that she couldn’t read. Something, she realized, was scaring him. Something changed for Tim since she rode away and spent blissful days with her lovers.
“Things are going to change around here,” Tim said as he folded the check and put it into his breast pocket. “You’ve been riding pretty high in the saddle, Ella, and I’ve been dumb enough to let you do just that. But that’s all going to change. I’ve got to take care of something, but when I come back, we’re going to have a talk. It’ll be the kind of talk where I do all the talking, and you do all the listening. And then I’m getting a preacher and you’re going to be my wife. That’s the way your mother wants it, and that’s the way I want it, so that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Once Tim left her office, Ella began to shiver. She underestimated Tim, dismissing him as insignificant in her life. That was a mistake. He was a vicious coward. There was no doubting that. But cowardly men were sometimes the most deadly, and that was something Ella was just now beginning to fully understand.
Chapter Fifteen
Rosamond had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She experienced this feeling only once before, and that was when, during the reading of her husband’s will, she learned that the miserable, ungrateful bastard she married left everything—every last horse, cow, and red cent in his bank account—to his daughter. All the money Rosamond believed would finally be under her control was, in fact, controlled by Ella. Rosamond’s resentment of her daughter was a percolating poison in her system that wouldn’t end until she had complete control of the T-3 Ranch fortune.
But that was going to change. And it was going to change tonight. It had to change tonight because Tim told her just moments earlier that the railroad station manager, when confronted by Ben and Dirk, confessed to cattle rustling. That meant it was only a matter of time before Ella learned which people were directly involved in the cattle rustling operation. Inevitably, the daughter would learn of her mother’s duplicity. And, undoubtedly, Ella would also learn of Rosamond’s affair with Tim.
Rosamond looked at the double-barreled derringer in her hand. The weapon seemed very small, but she had no doubts as to its ability to inflict a lethal injury. Years earlier, when Rosamond had been getting quite tired of waiting for her husband’s wealth, she had considered an “accident” to be the proper way to simultaneously attain wealth and become a widow. To practice, Rosamond had taken the derringer, pointed it at a watermelon from a distance of less than ten inches, and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s roar and recoil frightened her, but seeing the watermelon literally disintegrate made Rosamond cackle with maniacal glee.
She lost her nerve back then. Her husband, Arno, was a tough, old cowboy who started with little and still managed to create one of the largest cattle and horse ranches east of the Rockies. He battled Indians and poachers, rustlers and mountain lions, and he’d come out victorious every time. Rosamond was afraid that if she should try to kill Arno, even if it was to sneak up on him from behind, he would sense it somehow. That was just the kind of man he was.
But Ella wasn’t as deadly as her father. She didn’t have his sixth sense for danger. Ella had grown up with great wealth, and though her father taught her many things, Rosamond knew that he had always insulated her from the violent days when he was creating his empire.
All Rosamond had to do was come up behind Ella, aim fast, and squeeze the trigger. The bullet would do to Ella’s head what it had done to the water
melon. Rosamond wondered whether she could actually shoot her own daughter in the head, but hardly had the question been asked when she nodded, knowing she wouldn’t lose so much as a minute’s sleep for murdering the ungrateful child.
Rosamond was convinced there wasn’t a jury in the world that would convict her of murder. She’d say it was an accident, a terrible, tragic accident. After all, no mother would murder her own daughter. Right?
Rosamond imagined herself in court, her eyes red-rimmed from crying, turning to speak directly to the jury as she explained how Ella had always been the light of her mother’s eye. And Rosamond was a respected member of her church who gave generously every Sunday, even if she did as often as not nod off during the sermon.
A smile touched her thin-lipped mouth. Tonight, Ella would have an “accident,” and then Rosamond would have her fortune.
* * * *
From her office, Ella heard Tim’s vulgarities as he shouted orders to some of the cowhands. He wanted a horse saddled immediately and promised to take a whip to anyone who slowed him down. It wasn’t long afterward that she heard the pounding of hooves as he and several men rode away from the T-3 at full gallop.
For twenty minutes, Ella sat in her office thinking. She had seen anger in Tim’s eyes before. Many times, in fact. But this time when he looked at her, there was something more than just anger. Was it fear she saw? What changed? She’d written him a bank draft for money to spend foolishly on good whiskey and bad cards, but that didn’t seem to put an end to his foul mood. Something was gnawing at him, eating at him, and she couldn’t figure out what it was.
He said he had to do something. Ella smiled as she recalled his words. There was little doubt in her mind that whatever the “something” was, it involved whiskey, laudanum, cards, or prostitutes. Perhaps all four.
But this didn’t sit quite right with her, either. Since her engagement, she’d been writing him bank drafts, and he’d been spending that money at the card tables and saloons in the territory. In all that time, he’d never shown the desperation and fury she just witnessed.
She didn’t know why Tim had ridden away from the ranch at such a furious pace, but that wasn’t what mystified Ella the most. In all their time together, she’d never known him to socialize with any of the ranch hands. In fact, he made no effort to hide his condescension of the hardworking men who kept the T-3 operating at a healthy profit.
So why would Tim want hired hands with him now? He certainly wasn’t intending to socialize with those men. Besides, not even Tim rode to saloons at a full gallop.
So where was he going? And why?
Ella was out of her chair a moment later, her feet moving without conscious thought as she considered the possible motives for the behavior of a man who, at least theoretically, would one day be her husband.
By the time she reached her office door, she was in full stride. She opened the door and nearly collided with Rosamond.
“Ella!” Rosamond snapped.
Ella sidestepped her and started down the long hallway, now nearly jogging.
“Ella, I’d like to speak to you! Now, if you don’t mind! And privately!”
The shrill quality of Rosamond’s tone carried with it another emotion that Ella couldn’t even guess at. “Not now, Mother!” she said, raising her voice and not giving a damn as she rounded the corner and hurried down the stairway to the ground floor.
From far behind her daughter, Rosamond called out, “I said now, Ella! You mind your mother! Do you hear me?”
Ella found a young stable boy tending to a calf whose mother died while birthing. Though she couldn’t remember his name, she knew he was the son or nephew of one of her more experienced workers.
“Excuse me, did you see Tim before he rode off?” Ella asked, her stride still too fast for her to appear casual.
The boy, freckle-faced and obviously intimidated by being asked a direct question by the mistress of the ranch, cleared his throat several times before answering, “Yes, ma’am, I did see Mr. Cutler before he left. He...um....”
Though Ella did not like browbeating her employees, she was in no mood to gambol about, waiting for answers. “Who did he go with? Where is he going?” Her tone was sharp-edged.
The boy’s face paled. “He...he went with some of the older guys. He went thataway,” he said, pointing southwest. “Mr. Cutler and the others packed Winchesters with ‘em with extra ammunition.”
The boy pointed in the direction of Blue’s cabin. The cabin was a long way away, but the direction was dead-on.
Why would Tim ride with cowhands straight in the direction of Blue’s cabin, armed to the teeth with Winchesters and carrying extra ammunition?
It was probably nothing, Ella told herself. Merely a coincidence. Nothing to concern herself with. Unless, just maybe....
“Saddle up Queenie!” Ella said, nearly shouting. “And I want two of the fastest tagalongs we’ve got!” She looked straight into the frightened boy’s eyes. “I want a Winchester on each mount and extra ammunition in each saddlebag. Get whoever you need to help you, but I want that done, and I want it done now!”
The boy ran off to the stables. The mistress of the T-3 Ranch had never before shouted at him like that. Never.
* * * *
Rosamond stood in the foyer, staring at the closed door her daughter just ran through. The small derringer was hidden in her hand. Hidden and useless. All she needed was for Ella to just walk into the library so they could be alone with the door closed, and the murderous deed could be done. But as she had so often in her life, Ella disappointed her mother by being headstrong and refusing to do as she had been told.
“Ma’am, can I do something for you?” a kitchen maid asked.
“Sure. You can go fuck yourself and die. Can you do that for me?”
* * * *
She’d never pushed Queenie so hard. The game Appaloosa’s long legs stretched out, eating up the prairie beneath it. A mile. Two miles. Three miles went by before Ella nudged back on the reins, slowing the mare to a rolling trot.
Ella looked back at the two tagalong chestnut geldings. Like Queenie, they were game animals and willing to run, but Ella could tell they didn’t have the heart of her favorite mare. Queenie was one of those rare but magnificent animals that was born to run far and fast.
Without stopping, Ella pulled the nearest chestnut alongside Queenie. She prepared the gelding by talking to him as they trotted side-by-side for fifty yards. Then, slipping her feet out of the stirrups, she hopped up onto her knees on Queenie’s saddle, waited several strides until she was certain of her balance, then made the short leap onto the gelding’s saddle.
“Good boy!” Ella said as the gelding adjusted to her weight in just a single stride.
Ella transferred Queenie’s reins to her left hand. She was making good time. Faster, she was certain, than Tim and his men, because they hadn’t taken with them tagalong mounts. Maybe she could catch up to them before they reached Blue’s cabin.
Beneath her right thigh, in a saddle scabbard, Ella felt the Winchester she demanded. With a pistol, she was as likely to shoot herself as her target, but her father taught her well how to use a carbine, and she was deadly accurate within one hundred fifty yards.
* * * *
It was daydreaming about Ella that saved Ben’s life. He didn’t know it at the time, but if he hadn’t bent over to pluck a four-leaf clover from the ground, intending on telling her that since they had begun sharing passion, he believed himself to be a blessed, lucky man, and the rare clover was symbolic proof of that. But hardly had Ben begun to stoop when he heard the sharp crack of a nearby Winchester and the sickening thunk! of a heavy, lead bullet slamming into the trunk of a pine tree. A moment earlier, Ben’s head had been in line with the path of the bullet.
The gap between awareness and reaction with Ben took milliseconds. “Ambush!” he shouted, bent at the waist, running a zigzagging pattern through the pine trees north of Blue’s cabin. “Ambush
! Ambush!”
A volley of bullets whizzed around him, splintering limbs, breaking off chunks of bark. Though the thick brush provided ample opportunity to approach the cabin without being seen, all those branches made getting an unobstructed shot from even a close distance very difficult. Branches snapped off the trunks of trees, and bullets grazed thick limbs before whining off into the valley below. The volley of gunfire produced nary a single drop of blood.
Just when Ben was certain there were only four shooters, and they were all behind him, a gunman stepped out from behind a tree, in front and to the right where the tree line met the valley. Ben saw him, and his stride faltered for just a second. It was Tim Murphy aiming his Winchester, and it shocked Ben because he’d never known the man to ever to do his own dirty work.
The bullet slipped between his left arm and his side, but not without gouging out a furrow of skin and meat from Ben’s ribs. The wound felt like molten steel had been poured along his ribs. Cursing his bad luck yet aware that an inch in another direction and he would be on the ground with a serious bullet wound to internal organs, he was inside the cabin an instant later.
Blue had been bathing when he’d first heard Ben shout “Ambush!” so he had water dripping down his bronzed, lean body as he stood at one of the two north-facing, fortified windows, Winchester in hand and fresh box of ammunition at his feet. Dirk was at the west wall, fully dressed with a Winchester to his shoulder and a look in his eyes that said he really wanted to put an end to this fighting quickly, and all by himself.
“Don’t be hotheaded now,” Ben said, sliding past his lifelong friend.
“Screw that.”
Ben smiled. “Well, try to save at least one or two of them for the rest of us.”
There was silence outside, but Ben doubted the attackers retreated. “Blue, this is your country. You know it best. What’s the smart way to play the hand we’ve been dealt?”
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