by Diana Palmer
“It’s not very womanly, is it?” Gelly sighed. She shifted in a deliberate way that emphasized her slender curves. She moved closer to Mallory and beamed up at him. “I’d much rather browse in a Victoria’s Secret shop,” she purred.
“Oh, yes, I can certainly see myself dipping cattle wearing one of those camisole sets,” Morie replied with a rueful grin.
“I can’t see you wearing anything…feminine, myself,” Gelly returned. Her smile had an ugly edge to it. “You aren’t really a girlie girl, are you?”
Morie, remembering how she’d turned heads in a particularly exquisite oyster-colored gown from a famous French designer, only stared at Gelly without speaking. The look was unanswerable, and it made the other woman furious.
“I hate tractors, and it’s chilly out here,” Gelly told Mallory, tugging at his arm. “Can’t we get a cappuccino in that new shop next to the florist?”
Mallory shrugged. “Suits me.” He glanced at Morie. “Want to come?” he asked.
Morie was shocked and pleased by the request. The boss, taking the hired help out for coffee? She pondered doing it, just to make the other woman even madder. Gelly was flushed with anger by now.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I’m having fun looking at the equipment.”
Gelly relaxed and Mallory seemed perplexed.
“I’m buying,” he added.
Which indicated that he thought Morie couldn’t afford the expensive coffee and was declining for that reason. She felt vaguely offended. Of course, he knew nothing about her background. Her last name might be unusual, but she’d seen it in other states, even in other countries. He wasn’t likely to connect a poor working girl with a famous cattleman, even if he might have met her father at some point. He ran Santa Gertrudis cattle, and her father’s Santa Gertrudis seed bulls were famous, and much sought after at very high prices, for their bloodlines.
She cleared her throat. “Yes, well, thanks, but not today.”
Mallory smiled oddly. “Okay. Have fun.”
“Thanks.”
They moved away, but not quickly enough for her to miss Gelly’s muttered, “Very egalitarian of you to offer cappuccino to the hired help,” she said in a tone that stung. “I bet she doesn’t even know what it is.”
Morie gritted her teeth. One day, lady, she thought, you’re going to get yours.
She turned back to the tractors with a sigh.
A red, older-model sports car roared up at the office building and stopped in a near skid. The door opened and closed. A minute later, a pleasant tall man with light brown hair and dark eyes came up to her. He was wearing a suit, unusual in a rural town, except for bankers.
He glanced at her with a smile. “Looking to buy something?”
“Me? Oh, no, I work on a ranch. I just like heavy equipment.”
His eyebrows arched. “You do?”
She laughed. “I guess it sounds odd.”
“Not really,” he replied. “My mom always said she married my dad because he surrounded himself with backhoes and earthmovers. She likes to drive them.”
“Really!”
“My dad owns this.” He waved his hand at the tractors. “I’m sales and marketing,” he added with a grimace. “I’d rather work in advertising, but Dad doesn’t have anybody else. I’m an only child.”
“Still, it’s not a bad job, is it?” she asked pleasantly.
He chuckled. “Not bad at all, on some days.” He extended a well-manicured hand. “Clark Edmondson,” he introduced himself.
She shook it. “Morie Brannt.”
“Very nice to meet you, Miss…Ms. …Mrs. …?” he fished.
“Ms.,” she said, laughing. “But I’m single.”
“What a coincidence. So am I!”
“Imagine that.”
“Are you really just looking, or scouting out a good deal for your boss?”
“I’m sure my boss can do his own deals,” she replied. “I work for Mallory Kirk at the Rancho Real,” she added.
“Oh. Him.” He didn’t look impressed.
“You know him.”
“I know him, all right. We’ve had words a time or two on equipment repairs. He used to buy from us. Now he buys from a dealer in Casper.” He shrugged. “Well, that’s old news. A lot of locals work for him, and he doesn’t have a large turnover. So I guess he’s good to his employees even if he’s a pain in the neck to vendors.”
She laughed. “I suppose.”
He cocked his head and looked down at her with both hands in his pockets. “You date?”
She laughed, surprised. “Well, sort of. I mean, I haven’t recently.”
“Like movies?”
“What sort?”
“Horror,” he said.
“I like the vampire trilogy that’s been popular.”
He made a face.
“I like all the new cartoon movies, the Harry Potter ones, the Narnia films and anything to do with Star Trek or Star Wars,” she told him.
“Well!”
“How about you?”
“I’m not keen on science fiction, but I haven’t seen that new werewolf movie.” He pursed his lips. “Want to go see it with me? There’s a community theater. It doesn’t have a lot of the stuff the big complexes do, but it’s not bad. There’s a Chinese restaurant right next door that stays open late.”
She hesitated. She wasn’t sure this was a good idea. He looked like a nice man. But her new boss seemed to be a fair judge of character and he wouldn’t do business here. It was a red flag.
“I’m mostly harmless,” he replied. “I have good teeth, I only swear when really provoked, I wear size-eleven shoes and I’ve only had five speeding tickets. Oh, and I can speak Norwegian.”
She stared at him, speechless. “I’ve never known anyone who could speak Norwegian.”
“It will come in handy if I ever go to Norway,” he replied with a chuckle. “God knows why I studied it. Spanish or French or even German would have made more sense.”
“I think you should learn what you want to learn.”
“So. How about the movie?”
She glanced at her watch. “I have to help with calving, so I’m mostly on call for the rest of the weekend. It’s already past time I was back at work. I only have a half day on Saturdays.”
“Darn. Well, how about next Friday night? If calving permits?”
“I’ll ask the boss,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow.
“I have to,” she replied. “I’m a new hire. I don’t want to risk losing my job for being AWOL.”
“Sounds like the military,” he suggested.
“I guess so. It sort of feels like it, on the ranch, too.”
“All three of the brothers fought overseas,” he said. “Two of them didn’t fare so well. Mallory, though, he’s hard to dent.”
“I noticed.” She hadn’t known that Mallory had been in the military, but it made sense, considering his air of authority. He was probably an officer, as well, when he’d been on active duty.
She saw him staring, waiting. She grimaced. “If I can get the time off, I’d like to see the film.”
He beamed. “Great!”
She sighed. “I’ve forgotten how to go on a date. I’ll have to go in jeans and a shirt. I didn’t bring a dress or even a skirt to the ranch when I hired on. All my stuff is back home with my folks.”
“You’re noticing the suit. I wear it to impress potential customers,” he said with a grin. “Around town, I mostly wear slacks and sport shirts, so jeans will be fine. We aren’t exactly going to a ball, Cinderella,” he added with twinkling eyes. “And I’m no prince.”
“I think they’re rewriting that fairy tale so that Cinderella is CEO of a corporation and she rescues a poor dockworker from his evil stepbrothers,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.
“God forbid!” he exclaimed. “Don’t women want to be women anymore?”
“Apparently not, if you watch television or films much.�
� She sighed. She looked down at her own clothing. “Modern life requires us to work for a living, and there are only so many jobs available. Not much economically viable stuff for girls who lounge around in eyelet and lace and drink tea in parlors.” Her dark eyes smiled.
“Did I sound sarcastic? I didn’t mean to. I like feminine women, but I think lady wrestlers are exciting when they do it in mud.”
She laughed explosively. “Sexist!”
“Hey, I’d watch two men wrestle in mud, too. I like mud.”
She remembered being covered in that, and pesticide, on the ranch and winced. “You wouldn’t if you had to dip cattle around it,” she promised him.
“Good thing I don’t know anything about the cattle business, then,” he said lightly. “So ask your boss if you can have three hours off next Friday and we’ll see the werewolf movie.”
She hesitated. “Won’t it be kind of gory?”
He sighed. “There’s always that cartoon movie that Johnny Depp does the voice-over for, the chameleon Western.”
She laughed. He was pleasant, nice to look at and had a sense of humor. And she hadn’t been on a date in months. It just might be fun.
“Okay, then,” she told him. “I like Johnny Depp in anything, even if it’s only his voice. That’s a date.”
He smiled back. “That’s a date,” he agreed.
THERE WAS A LOT TO DO around a ranch during calving season, and most of the cowboys—and cowgirl—didn’t plan on getting much sleep.
Heifers who were calving for the first time were watched carefully. There was also an old mama cow who was known for wandering off and hiding in thickets to calve. Nobody knew why; she just did it. Morie named her Bessy and devoted herself to keeping a careful eye on the old girl.
“Now don’t go following that old cow around and forget to watch the others,” Darby cautioned. “She can’t hide where we won’t be able to find her.”
“I know that, but she’s getting some age on her and there’s snow being forecast again,” she said worriedly. “What if she got stuck in a drift? If we had a repeat of the last storm, we might not even be able to hunt for her. Hard to ride a horse through snow that’s over his head,” she added, with a straight face.
He laughed. “I see your point. But you have to consider that this is a big spread, and we’ve got dozens of mama cows around here. Not to mention, we’ve got a lot of replacement heifers who are dropping calves for the first time. That’s a lot of profit in a recession. Can’t afford to lose many.”
“I know.” Her father had cut his cattle herd because of the rising prices of grain, she recalled, and he was concentrating on a higher-quality bull herd rather than expanding into a cow-calf operation like the one his father, the late Jim Brannt, had built up.
“Dang, it’s cold today,” Darby said as he finished doctoring one of the seed bulls.
“I noticed.” Morie chuckled, pulling her denim coat tighter and buttoning it. She had really good clothes back home, but she’d brought the oldest ones with her, so that she didn’t raise any suspicions about her status.
“Better get back to riding that fence line,” he added.
“I’m on my way. Just had to pick up my iPod,” she said, displaying it in its case. “I can’t live without my tunes.”
He pursed his lips. “What sort of music do you like?”
“Let’s see, country and western, classical, soundtracks, blues…”
“All of it, in other words.”
She nodded. “I like world music, too. It’s fun to listen to foreign artists, even if I mostly can’t understand anything they sing.”
He shook his head. “I’m just a straight John Denver man.”
She lifted both eyebrows.
“He was a folk singer in the sixties,” he told her. “Did this one song, ‘Calypso,’ about that ship that Jacques Cousteau used to drive around the world when he was diving.” He smiled with nostalgia. “Dang, I must have spent a small fortune playing that one on jukeboxes.” He looked at her. “Don’t know what a jukebox is, I’ll bet.”
“I do so. My mom told me all about them.”
He shook his head. “How the world has changed since I was a boy.” He sighed. “Some changes are good. Most—” he glowered “—are not.”
She laughed. “Well, I like my iPod, because it’s portable music.” She attached her earphones to the device, with which she could surf the internet, listen to music, even watch movies as long as she was within reach of the Wi-Fi system on the ranch. “I’ll see you later.”
“Got a gun?” he asked suddenly.
She gaped at him. “What am I going to do, shoot wolves? That’s against the law.”
“Everything’s against the law where ranchers are concerned. No, I wasn’t thinking about four-legged varmints. There’s an escaped convict, a murderer. They think he’s in the area.”
She caught her breath. “Could he get onto the ranch?”
“No fence can keep out a determined man. He’ll just go right over it,” he told her. He went back into the bunkhouse and returned with a small handgun in a leather holster. “It’s a .32 Smith & Wesson,” he said, handing it up. He made a face when she hesitated. “You don’t have to kill a man to scare him. Just shoot near him and run.” He frowned. “Can you shoot a gun?”
“Oh, yes, my dad made sure of it,” she told him. “He taught me and my brother to use anything from a peashooter to all four gauges of shotguns.”
He nodded. “Then take it. Put it in your saddlebag. I’ll feel better.”
She smiled at him. “You’re nice, Darby.”
“You bet I am,” he replied. “Can’t afford to lose someone who works as hard as you do.”
She made a face at him. She mounted her horse, a chestnut gelding, and rode off.
The open country was so beautiful. In the distance she could see the Teton Mountains, rising like white spires against the gray, overcast sky. The fir trees were still a deep green, even in the last frantic clutches of fading winter. It was too soon for much tender vegetation to start pushing up out of the ground, but spring was close at hand.
Most ranchers bred their cattle to drop calves in early spring, just as the grass came out of hibernation and grain crops began growing. Lush, fresh grass would be nutritious to feed the cows while they nursed their offspring. By the time the calves were weaned, the grass would still be lush and green and tasty for them, if the rain cooperated.
She liked the way the Kirk boys worked at ecology, at natural systems. They had windmills everywhere to pump water into containers for the cattle. They grew natural grasses and were careful not to strain the delicate topsoil by overplanting. They used crop rotation to keep the soil fresh and productive, and they used natural fertilizer. They maintained ponds of cattle waste, which was used to produce methane that powered electricity for the calving barn and the other outbuildings. It was a high-tech, fascinating sort of place. Especially for a bunch of cattlemen who’d taken a dying ranch and made it grow and thrive. They weren’t rich yet, but they were well-to-do and canny about the markets. Besides that, Mallory was something of a financial genius. The ranch was starting to make money. Big money.
Cane went to the cattle shows with their prize bulls, Darby had told her, when Cane stayed sober for a long-enough stretch. He was sort of intimidating to Morie, but he had a live-wire personality and he could charm buyers.
Dalton, whom they called, for some reason, Tank, was the marketing specialist. He drew up brochures for the production sales, traveled to conferences and conventions, attended political-action committee meetings for the county and state and even national cattlemen’s associations, and devoted himself to publicizing the ranch’s prize cattle. He worked tirelessly. But he was a haunted man, and it showed.
Mallory was the boss. He made all the big decisions, although he was democratic enough to give his brothers a voice. They were all opinionated. Darby said it was genetic; their parents had been the same.
; Morie understood that. Her dad was one of the most opinionated men she’d ever known. Her mother was gentle and sweet, although she had a temper. Life at home had always been interesting. It was just that Morie had become an entrée for any money-hungry bachelor looking for financial stability. Somewhere there must be a man who’d want her for what she was, not what she had.
She rode the fence line, looking for breaks. It was one of the important chores around the ranch. A fence that was down invited cattle to cross over onto public lands, or even onto the long two-lane state highway that ran beside the ranch. One cow in the road could cause an accident that would result in a crippling lawsuit for the brothers.
Darby had been vocal about the sue-everybody mentality that had taken over the country in recent years. He told Morie that in his day, attorneys were held to a higher standard of behavior and weren’t even allowed to advertise their services. Nobody had sued anybody that he knew of, when he was a boy. Now people sued over everything. He had little respect for the profession today. Morie had defended it. Her uncle was a superior court judge who’d been a practicing attorney for many years. He was honest to a fault and went out of his way to help people who’d been wronged and didn’t have money for an attorney. Darby had conceded that perhaps there were some good lawyers. But he added that frivolous lawsuits were going to end civilization as it stood. She just smiled and went on about her business. They could agree to disagree. After all, tolerance was what made life bearable.
She halted at the creek long enough to let her gelding have a drink. She adjusted her earphones so that she could listen to Mark Mancina’s exquisite soundtrack for the motion picture August Rush. There was an organ solo that sent chills of delight down her spine. She got the same feeling listening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor played on a pipe organ. Music was a big part of her life. She could play classical piano, but she was rusty. College had robbed her of practice time. She’d noticed a big grand piano in the Kirks’ living room. She wondered which of the brothers played. She’d never asked.
She stopped at a stretch of fence where the last snow-and-ice storm had brought a limb down. The ice was gone, but the limb was still resting on the fence, bending it down so that cattle could have walked over it. The limb was a big one, but she was strong. She dismounted, buttoned her coat pocket so that the iPod wouldn’t fall out and went at the limb.
