by Anna Jeffrey
“Genetic research in large animals is where I was headed.”
“But you’d need a master’s or a PhD.”
“Sometimes things don’t work out. But when one thing doesn’t, something else usually does. In a convoluted way, ranching’s the same thing.”
As she sliced off a bite of sausage, Dahlia tried to apply that philosophy to her own life, but couldn’t make it match. She had lost track of how long it had been since something had “worked out” for her. They ate in silence until she became aware he was watching her and looked up. He had stopped eating, as if he was waiting for her attention.
“I’m not going around with anybody,” he said.
That statement and the urgency she sensed in it surprised her. They held each other’s stare for several seconds while the meaning of what he had just told her sank in. She didn’t know where he was leading her, but sheer joy danced all over her insides. She nodded. “Okay. Good. I mean, I’m glad.”
After breakfast, he helped her into her coat and remarked how cold her feet were going to be. Outside, he asked her for her keys, told her to stay on the deck and left her. He returned in Piggy’s Blazer, parked it near the steps and brought her a pair of battered rubber boots. “Put these on,” he said, standing on the snow-covered ground below the deck. He began to unbuckle her strappy high heels. She hung onto the deck rail and let him change her pretty, expensive shoes for ugly, practical boots that swallowed her narrow feet and she laughed. “These are yours? Where did they come from?”
He tilted his head to the right, taking her sight to his white 4x4 parked only a few vehicles up from where she had left the Blazer. She wondered if it had been there yesterday afternoon when she arrived.
“My truck,” he said. “In the high country, you never know when you’ll need more clothes. I keep extra boots and a coat in my truck.”
“After being here a few weeks, I can see the wisdom in that.”
Her feet were already starting to feel toasty warm in his wool-lined boots. As he handed her shoes to her, her heart softened. He was hard and blunt to the point of being crude. And gentle and honest and responsible. If she had ever met a man who could be counted on in a pinch, she suspected the man with whom she had spent the night was he. Luke McRae, cowboy. A man who lived the Code of the West.
She shook those dangerous thoughts away. Last night had been just sex and she had best not forget it. She looked out at the white landscape. “Will we have any trouble getting home?”
“Nah. Sun’s out. Roads are plowed and sanded. A few miles down the mountain it’ll be slush.”
He escorted her to the driver’s seat of the Blazer, her steps crunching in the frozen snow. After she was seated and belted in, he leaned into the window, cupped her jaw in his palm and kissed her. “No need to hurry. Just take your time, don’t stomp on the brake. If you slide, steer into it. Know what I mean?”
She nodded.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind you. I’ll look out for you.”
A downhill, ice-covered road should have terrified her, but his telling her he would take care of her was all the persuasion she needed. “Okay.”
The drive down the mountain was tense and slow, but uneventful. As the frozen snow became sparser with each descending mile, she even had a chance to admire the scenery.
When they reached the cottage, Piggy hadn’t returned. Luke walked her into the house and checked the thermostat. “Looks like your furnace is working now. But you still need a fire. Want me to build you one?”
“No need. I know how.”
He pulled her into his arms “Good. I don’t want you to freeze ’cause I’m gonna be back.” He kissed her long and deeply, then rested his forehead against hers. “Damn. Wish I could take you home with me.”
Damn. To her dismay, she wished it, too.
Chapter 13
Dahlia hung up the phone, excitement bubbling over. It was Thursday and almost two weeks since Luke and she had spent the night at the ski lodge. “Oh, my God, Piggy. I have to have a dress.”
Piggy’s eyes widened. “Where’s he taking you?”
“Boise. It’s something political. A dinner and dancing. It’s black tie.”
“Oh, my God,” Piggy echoed. “We’ll take off work tomorrow. Go shopping in Boise. Jerry thinks it’s gonna rain anyway.”
Their boss’s forecast proved to be accurate. The following morning broke with leaden skies and pouring water. Jerry canceled work until Monday.
They left Callister early and found the Towne Square Mall in Boise. Scouring the racks in the Bon Marche, they saw nothing that caught Dahlia’s eye, so they moved out of the department store into the mall. Piggy was who first spotted the world’s most perfect dress in a boutique’s window—a red silk sheath, elegant in its simplicity. When Dahlia tried it on, it smoothed down her body to knee-length, touching in just the right places. The color enhanced her skin and eye color. A strap of silk circled her neck and held the front in place while the open back showed her skin to the waist. The sales clerk gushed ohs and ahs and Piggy wise-cracked it could do double-duty as a nightgown.
An obscene price tag hung on the wisp of fabric, but Dahlia paid it. Then they dashed back to the Bon Marche for red shoes and, of course, lacy red underwear.
The chariot in which Luke came for her was a white Explorer with a logo on the side—a white bull’s head inside a wreath of green letters spelling out DAM Ranches, Inc. As soon as they were seated inside it, he leaned across the console and kissed her, smiled, then kissed her again and told her she looked pretty and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her. She couldn’t wait either and tried to recall a time she had been happier.
He had rented a room at the Evergreen Inn in Boise, which, if it wasn’t Boise’s poshest hotel, looked like it should be. He left her alone to bathe and dress while he handled some kind of business. After a self-indulgent soak in an oversized marble tub, Dahlia put on makeup, pinned her hair into a sleek chignon, then donned the red dress. For jewelry, she added only gold hoops to her ears. Anything more would have been too much.
Waiting for Luke’s return, she opened the draperies and looked over the small city of Boise. When she heard the click of the door’s lock, she turned toward it and from all the way across the room, she saw his quick intake of breath. His stare pierced her to the bone and at that moment, the dress, the shoes, the lingerie—the whole package became worth every penny it had cost.
Downstairs, in one of the banquet room, they took seats at a table with another of Luke’s siblings, Brenna, and her husband, Morgan. Brenna was congenial, but soft-spoken, just the opposite of the younger sister Dahlia had met at the Rusty Spur. Brenna remarked that Luke rarely attended these functions but when he did, he usually came alone and left as soon as he wrote the check he felt was the reason for his being invited.
Typical enough to be trite, the banquet consisted of a meal of chicken and peas, un-funny jokes and boring speeches, but none of that mattered to Dahlia. All of her attention was on her tall, taciturn escort.
The party’s roster was impressive. Idaho’s two senators were present, along with lesser politicians and representatives from most of the state’s business community. They mutually brown-nosed and glad-handed, but not Luke. Instead, the politicians sought him out, asking for his opinions and, just as Luke’s sister had said, for donations.
Luke didn’t hesitate to state his mind or tell them what he expected for his money. She admired his frankness and how, if his words were negative or critical, he softened their bite with a self-deprecating grin and a slap on the shoulder. There appeared to be no issue important to Idaho’s agricultural industries on which he wasn’t current and well-versed. She didn’t have to observe him long to conclude that the foolish cowboy she had first thought him to be didn’t exist.
As soon as the meal and the speeches ended, they moved into the ballroom. An older man whisked her away to dance. He was replaced by a younger man when the song ended an
d so it went for the evening. Dahlia had the heady sense people were watching her, was certain she saw them discussing her.
Luke stood back and said nothing, but every time she glanced in his direction, his gaze was glued to her. She had a hard time keeping her eyes off him, too. He looked so handsome, broad shouldered and trim in a black jacket and a white, banded collar shirt. And Wranglers.
The party waned and the band announced the last number. When they began “Lady in Red,” she felt someone grasp her waist and turned. Luke. He moved her to a quiet corner of the dance floor.
“I was starting to wonder if I was gonna get to dance with the belle of the ball.”
She’d had several glasses of champagne and the abundance of male attention had her ego soaring. From somewhere, a bad-girl chuckle left her throat, and as sassy as Scarlett, she teased him in an exaggerated Texas drawl, asking if he was jealous.
“Damn right. I don’t take to sharing my woman.”
His woman. The very thought took her breath.
Back in their room, they had no sooner closed the door before he was kissing her like there was no tomorrow. She kissed him back with the same heated desire and they furiously undressed each other and fell onto the bed. They slept little, dozing or talking between sessions of searing lovemaking. Each time, she thought she was drained of desire, of emotion, but when he began murmuring to her, touching her, kissing her . . .
Summer came and progressed. Dahlia was nearly delirious with happiness. With Luke’s daughters spending the summer in Boise, during the week, he made trips to town to see her. Having no privacy in the cottage and no bed except the cot, his visits often ended in the carport with steamy sex in his pickup’s front seat and his oath to buy her a real bed.
On weekends they fished in high mountain streams or from Luke’s boat on beautiful lakes. They dined in good restaurants, traveled to the San Juans to watch whales and to the Oregon coast to fish for salmon. Life with a sportsman and an outdoorsman was something she had never imagined.
And they made love with a passion she had only read about—in the boat tied up on a deserted beach, in the Jacuzzi tub in a luxury condo in Sun Valley, on a sleeping bag in the sunshine beside a trickling stream, an experience from which Dahlia came away feeling wicked and earthy.
Luke kept her separated from his life at the ranch. She had accompanied him on a few visits to Jimmy at the Boise boarding school, but otherwise, he made no attempt to include her in a relationship with his family, a fact that troubled her.
By August, the survey work was nearing completion. She attempted to discuss that she would be leaving Callister soon, but he put off conversation about her departure. Their lovemaking took on a desperate quality, as if every time would be the last. When he told her he wanted to show her the Double Deuce before she went home to Texas, she could scarcely contain the thrill.
He came early, with Jimmy, on Saturday morning to pick her up. She had dressed in jeans, a polo shirt and the cowboy boots Luke had bought her. He had said they would take his son horseback riding because it was one of the few things the boy did well. Now that he spent so much time at the school in Boise, when he came home to visit, Luke made it a point to take him riding.
The day was sunny and warm, but as they left Callister and began the climb out of Callister Valley, the temperature cooled and the scent of pine filled the air. Jimmy sat close to her and jabbered about his horse. Soon he dozed off against her side and Luke explained that the little guy slept a lot because of his heart ailment.
To say the trip was scenic was a gross understatement. In some places the ever-climbing gravel road had been sliced out of a steep hillside, leaving sheer rock walls soaring on one side and fathomless forest descending on the other. At times, dark green evergreens with trunks three feet wide lined the roadside. When they had traveled for what seemed like forever, the forest thinned, revealing an expanse of sun-baked hills and brush-filled ravines rolling down from a faraway backdrop of saw-toothed mountains. Slender-trunked evergreens, tall and straight as sentries, guarded the foot of the mountains and she knew by now the trees were called lodgepole pines.
Luke slowed at a steel cattle guard across the road and pointed out a fence corner anchored by piles of large rocks and reinforced by barbed wire. “That’s our southwest corner,” he said. Then, a while later, he stopped atop a crest in the road. “This is it. Sterling Valley.”
His low tone reflected reverence and adulation and she knew in her heart the exquisite landscape that lay before her was a far more captivating contender for his affection than a mistress or any mere human being could ever be.
“My grandfather from five generations back named it,” he added. “Proved up on it in 1840, before Idaho was a state.”
She gazed out over the vast valley of grass baked to tan by summer sun and rainless skies. On the far side, it gave way first to scattered boulders, then to long fingers of jutting granite and limestone. And finally, all of it converged to a distant dark blue peak topped by white, looming brilliant against the electric blue sky. “Your family owns all of it?”
“Everything you can see. That’s Sterling Mountain way over there. The snow on top never melts entirely.”
She felt drawn to the place herself and rolled down her window for a clearer view and a breath of the clean, silent air. “I don’t know what to say. It looks like a calendar picture.”
Looking down, she saw corrals and barns, a row of buildings made of logs, their metal roofs glinting like mirrors in the sun.
Luke’s pointing finger directed her gaze uphill and off to the right of the barns, to a rambling house of logs and stone. “There’s the ranch house.”
“Why, it looks like the ski lodge,” she murmured.
He chuckled. “A lot of people say that. It’s way older than the ski lodge. The second generation grandson, James, built it.”
“Jimmy’s namesake?” she asked and Luke nodded. “Wow,” she said, overwhelmed. The power and strength of generations in one spot with a common goal pressed on her and she wished she could imagine how having so much family and knowing its history felt.
“We’ll stay in my cabin. It’s right down there.” He pointed to a steep-roofed, log structure nestled in a pine grove nearer to the barns than to the ranch house. “I don’t live in it anymore, but it’s still my favorite place. Now, my kids and I stay in the Big House with Mom and Dad. Things are easier that way.”
“Big House?”
“The ranch house. We started calling it the Big House when my girls were little. They changed homes so often, they got confused, started calling the ranch house the Big House and the cabin the Little House. Big House just kind of stuck.”
Dahlia didn’t miss the unwitting reference to his unhappy marriage. She knew from gossip his children had known their share of emotional trials.
He distracted her from her thoughts by pointing across the valley to two more houses barely discernible on a distant ridge. “There’s where my two sisters live. When they got married and brought their husbands here, the ranch built houses for them.”
At the bottom of the hill, they rumbled across a cattle guard, through a stone and log gate and parked at a corral where a ranch hand had horses saddled and waiting. Jimmy had awakened and he began to bounce on the seat when he saw the saddled mounts. Luke had to calm him down before they entered the corral.
The horseback ride turned out to be shorter than anticipated. They hadn’t reached the other side of the valley before Jimmy’s energy began to fade. He cried to go home, so they turned back. At the corral, the child was so worn out, Luke had to almost drag him off the saddle and Dahlia thought again about the patience and gentleness with which Luke treated his brain-injured child. Some fathers would lock Jimmy away, but Luke nurtured his son with a loving fierceness that touched something at the very base of Dahlia’s soul.
At the Big House, she followed as Luke carried Jimmy through a wide front door. She felt as if she had entered a time capsu
le. The entry was huge and dim, with varnished log walls and creaking oak floors and a heavy staircase of peeled poles. And it smelled of lemon oil. Natural light spilled from a wide door opening to a great room. Old photographs and paintings in ornate frames lined the entry walls. Directly in front of her, as if he were standing post, hung a life-sized oil painting of a white haired man clad in a plaid kilt. Looking into his face was like looking into Luke’s.
She sneaked a sidewise glance and saw a massive stone fireplace and chimney taking up one wall and thought again of the ski lodge.
A middle-aged woman wearing a bib-apron and a jolly smile met them. “Jimmy’s plumb tuckered out,” Luke told her, then performed introductions. “Ethel runs things around here, keeps us organized. You two get acquainted while I put Jimmy to bed.”
As Luke carried his son upstairs, Ethel put out her right hand and Dahlia shook it. The woman kept smiling and looking like she expected comment, so Dahlia swept her hand passed the photographs and paintings. “Who are all these people?”
“McRaes,” Ethel answered as if glad to be asked. “All of them. The big one is the ranch’s founder. He was from Scotland.”
Obviously, Dahlia thought.
Ethel strolled along the row and told Dahlia the name of each frame’s occupant. She stopped and pointed to a grainy black and white photo of a man with muttonchops, a scowling face and a stiff collar. “This is who built this house,” she said. “We still use some of the furniture he had shipped from Europe. It came around the Horn.”
“Ah.” Dahlia nodded and read JAMES A. McRAE on a brass plate attached to the bottom of the frame and wondered if the letter A stood for Alan, which she knew was Luke’s middle name. At the end of the row they came to a framed photograph—an enlarged snapshot, Dahlia could tell—of Luke and an older woman horseback. Dahlia didn’t have to be told that the woman beside Luke in the snapshot was his mother.
Like a heavy cape, a sense of foreboding crept over her. Claire McRae’s temperament and her battles with Luke’s ex-wife were common lore around the Forest Service. But she said, “Oh, here’s Luke. Is this his mom with him?”
