by Diana Palmer
“I can imagine.” He sighed. “Cane hasn’t adjusted to the physical changes. He’s stopped going to therapy and he won’t join in any family outings. He stays in his room playing online video games.” He stopped. “Good Lord, I can’t believe I’m telling you these things.”
“I’m as quiet as a clam,” she pointed out. “I never tell anything I know.”
“You’re a good listener. Most people aren’t.”
She smiled. “You are.”
He chuckled. “I’m the boss. I have to listen to people.”
“Good point.”
“I’ll just finish getting those bales of hay stacked,” she said. She stopped and glanced up at him. “You know, most ranchers these days use the big bales....”
“Stop right there,” he said curtly. “I don’t like a lot of the so-called improvements. I run this ranch the way my dad did, and his dad before him. We rotate crops, and cattle, avoid unnecessary supplements, and maintain organic crops and grass strains. And we don’t allow oil extraction anywhere on this ranch. Lots of fracking farther south in Wyoming to extract oil from shale deposits, but we won’t sell land for that, or lease it.”
She knew they were environmentally sensitive. The family had been featured in a small northwestern cattlemen’s newspaper that she’d seen lying on a table in the bunkhouse.
“What’s fracking?” she asked curiously.
“They inject liquids at high speed into shale rock to fracture it and allow access to oil and gas deposits. It can contaminate the water table if it isn’t done right, and some people say it causes earthquakes.” His dark eyes were serious. “I’m not taking any chances with our water. It’s precious.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied.
He shrugged. “No offense. I’ve had the lectures on the joys of using genetically modified crops and cloning.” He leaned down. “Over my dead body.”
She laughed in spite of herself. Her elfin face radiated joy. Her dark eyes twinkled with it. He looked at her for a long moment, smiling quizzically. She was pretty. Not only pretty, she had a sense of humor. She was unlike his current girlfriend, a suave Eastern sophisticate named Gelly Bruner, whose family had moved to Wyoming a few years previously and bought a small ranch near the Kirks. They met at a cocktail party in Denver, where her father was a speaker at a conference Mallory had attended. He and Gelly went around together, but he had no real interest in a passionate relationship. Not at the moment anyway. He’d had a bad experience in the past that had soured him on relationships. He knew instinctively that Gelly would only be around as long as he had money to spend on her. He had no illusions about his lack of good looks. He got women because he was rich. Period.
“Deep thoughts, sir?” she teased.
He laughed curtly. “Too deep to share. Get to work, kid. If you need anything, Darby’s nearby.”
“Yes, sir,” she replied, and wondered for a moment if she was somehow in the military. It seemed right to give him that form of address. She’d heard cowboys use it with her father since she was a child. Some men radiated authority and resolve. Her father was one. So was this man.
“Now you’re doing the deep-thinking thing,” he challenged.
She laughed. “Just stray thoughts. Nothing interesting.”
His dark eyes narrowed. “What was your favorite period? In history,” he added.
“Oh! Well, actually, it was the Tudor period.”
Both thick, dark eyebrows went up. “Really. And which Tudor was your favorite?”
“Mary.”
His eyebrows levered up a fraction. “Bloody Mary?”
She glared at him. “All the Tudor monarchs burned people. Is it less offensive to burn just a few rather than a few hundred? Elizabeth burned people, and so did her father and her brother. They were all tarred with the same brush, but Elizabeth lived longer and had better PR than the rest of her family.”
He burst out laughing.
“Well, it’s true,” she persisted. “She was elevated to mystic status by her supporters.”
“Indeed she was.” He grimaced. “I hated history.”
“Shame.”
He laughed again. “I suppose so. I’ll have to read up on the Tudors so that we can have discussions about their virtues and flaws.”
“I’d enjoy that. I like debate.”
“So do I, as long as I win.”
She gave him a wicked grin and turned back to her work.
The bunkhouse was quiet at night. She had a small room of her own, which was maintained for female hires. It was rough and sparsely accommodated, but she loved it. She’d brought her iPad along, and she surfed the internet on the ranch’s wireless network and watched films and television shows on it. She also read a lot. She hadn’t been joking about her passion for history. She still indulged it, out of college, by seeking out transcripts of Spanish manuscripts that pertained to Mary Tudor and her five-year reign in England. She found the writings in all sorts of odd places. It was fascinating to her to walk around virtual libraries and sample the history that had been painstakingly translated into digital images. What a dedicated group librarians must be, she marveled, to offer so much knowledge to the public at such a cost of time and skill. And what incredible scholarship that gave someone the skills to read Latin and Greek and translate it into modern English, for the benefit of historians who couldn’t read the ancient languages.
She marveled at the tech that was so new and so powerful. She fell asleep imagining what the future of electronics might hold. It was entrancing.
* * *
JUST AT DAWN, HER CELL PHONE rang. She answered it in a sleepy tone.
“Sleepyhead” came a soft, teasing voice.
She rolled over onto her back and smiled. “Hi, Mom. How’s it going at home?”
“I miss you,” Shelby said with a sigh. “Your father is so bad-tempered that even the old hands are hiding from him. He wants to know where you are.”
“Don’t you dare tell him,” Morie replied.
She sighed again. “I won’t. But he’s threatening to hire a private detective to sniff you out.” She laughed. “He can’t believe his little girl went off to work for wages.”
“He’s just mad that he hasn’t got me to advise him on his breeding program and work out the kinks in his spreadsheets.” She laughed. “I’ll come home soon enough.”
“In time for the production sale, I hope,” Shelby added. The event was three weeks down the road, but King Brannt had already made arrangements for a gala event on the ranch during the showing of his prize Santa Gertrudis cattle on Skylance, the family ranch near San Antonio. It would be a party of epic proportions, with a guest list that included famous entertainers, sports figures, politicians and even royalty, and he’d want his whole family there. Especially Morie, who was essential to the hostessing. It would be too much for Shelby alone.
“I’ll come back even if it’s just for the night,” Morie promised. “Tell Dad, so he doesn’t self-destruct.” She laughed.
“I’ll tell him. You’re like him, you know,” she added.
“Cort’s a lot more like him. What a temper!”
“Cort will calm right down when he finally finds a woman who can put up with him.”
“Well, Dad found you,” Morie noted. “So there’s hope for Cort.”
“You think so? He won’t even go on dates anymore after that entertainment rep tried to seduce him in a movie theater. He was shocked to the back teeth when she said she’d done it in all sorts of fancy theaters back home.” She laughed. “Your brother doesn’t live in the real world. He thinks women are delicate treasures that need nourishing and protecting.” She paused for a moment, then continued. “He really needs to stop watching old movies.”
“Have him watch some old Bette Davis movies,” Morie advised. “She’s the most modern actress I ever saw, for all that her heyday was in the 1940s!”
“I loved those movies,” Shelby said.
“Me, too.” Morie
hesitated. “I like Grandma’s old movies.”
Maria Kane had been a famous movie star, but she and Shelby had never been close and theirs had been a turbulent and sad relationship. It was still a painful topic for Shelby.
“I like them, too,” Shelby said surprisingly. “I never really knew my mother. I was farmed out to housekeepers at first and then to my aunt. My mother never grew up,” she added, remembering something Maria’s last husband, Brad, had said during the funeral preparations in Hollywood.
Morie heard that sad note in her mother’s voice and changed the subject. “I miss your baked fish.”
Shelby laughed. “What a thing to say.”
“Well, nobody makes it like you do, Mom. And they’re not keen on fish around here, so we don’t have it much. I dream of cod fillets, gently baked with fresh herbs and fresh butter... Darn, I have to stop drooling on my pillow!”
“When you come home, I’ll make you some. You really need to learn to make them yourself. If you do move out and live apart from us, you have to be able to cook.”
“I can always order out.”
“Yes, but fresh food is so much nicer.”
“Yours certainly is.” She glanced at her watch. “Got to go, Mom. We’re dipping cattle today. Nasty business.”
“You should know. You were always in the thick of it here during the spring.”
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, sweetheart.”
“Love you.”
“Love you, too. Bye.”
She hung up, then got out of bed and dressed. Her mother was one in a million, beautiful and talented, but equally able to whip up exotic meals or hostess a dinner party for royalty. Morie admired her tremendously.
She admired her dad, too, but she was heartily sick of men who took her out only with one end in mind—a marriage that would secure their financial futures. It was surprising how many of them saw her as a ticket to independent wealth. The last one had been disconcertingly frank about how his father advised him to marry an heiress, and that Morie was at least more pleasant to look at than some of the other rich men’s daughters he’d escorted.
She was cursing him in three languages when her father came in, listened to her accusations and promptly escorted the young man off the property.
Morie had been crushed. She’d really liked the young man, an accountant named Bart Harrison, who’d come to town to audit a local business for his firm. It hadn’t occurred to her at first that he’d searched her out deliberately at a local fiesta. He’d known who she was and who her family was, and he’d pursued her coldly, but with exquisite manners, made her feel beautiful, made her hungry for the small attentions he gave with such flair.
She’d been very attracted to him. But when he started talking about money, she backed away and ran. She wanted something more than to be the daughter of one of the richest Texas ranchers. She wanted a man who loved her for who she really was.
Now, helping to work cattle through the smelliest, nastiest pool of dip that she’d ever experienced in her life, she wondered if she’d gone mad to come here. May had arrived. Calving was in full swing, and so was the dipping process necessary to keep cattle pest-free.
“It smells like some of that fancy perfume, don’t it?” Red Davis asked with a chuckle. He was in his late thirties, with red hair and freckles, blue eyes and a mischievous personality. He’d worked ranches most of his life, but he never stayed in one place too long. Morie vaguely remembered hearing her father say that Red had worked for a former mercenary named Cord Romero up near Houston.
She gave him a speaking look. “I’ll never get the smell out of my clothes,” she wailed.
“Why, sure you can,” the lean, redheaded cowboy assured her, grinning in the shade of his wide-brimmed straw hat. “Here’s what you do, Miss Morie. You go out in the woods late at night and wait till you see a skunk. Then you go jump at him. That’s when he’ll start stamping his front paws to warn you before he turns around and lifts his tail....”
“Red!” she groaned.
“Wait, wait, listen,” he said earnestly. “After he sprays you and you have to bury your clothes and bathe in tomato juice, you’ll forget all about how this old dipping-pool smells. See? It would solve your problem!”
“I’ll show you a problem,” she threatened.
He laughed. “You have to have a sense of humor to work around cattle,” he told her.
“I totally agree, but there is nothing at all funny about a pond full of... Aaahhhhh!”
As she spoke, a calf bumped into her and knocked her over. She landed on her breasts in the pool of dip, getting it in her mouth and her eyes and her hair. She got to her knees and brought her hands down on the surface of the liquid in an eloquent display of furious anger. Which only made the situation worse, and gave Red the opportunity to display his sense of humor to its true depth.
“Will you stop laughing?” she wailed.
“Good God, are we dipping people now?” Mallory wanted to know.
Morie didn’t think about what she was doing; she was too mad. She hit the liquid with her hand and sent a spray of it right at Mallory. It landed on his spotless white shirt and splattered up into his face.
She sat frozen as she realized what she’d just done. She’d thrown pest dip on her boss. He’d fire her for sure. She was now history. She’d have to go home in disgrace...!
Mallory wiped his face with a handkerchief and gave her a long, speaking look. “Now that’s why I never wear white shirts around this place,” he commented with a dry look at Red, who was still doubled over laughing. “God knows what Mavie will say when she has to deal with this, and it’s your fault,” he added, pointing his finger at Morie. “You can explain it to her while you duck plates, bowls, knives or whatever else she can get to hand to throw at you!”
Mavie was the housekeeper and she had a red temper. Everybody was terrified of her.
“You aren’t going to fire me?” Morie asked with unusual timidity.
He pursed his sensuous lips and his dark eyes twinkled. “Not a lot of modern people want to run cattle through foul-smelling pest-control substances,” he mused. “It’s easier to take a bath than to find somebody to replace you.”
She swallowed hard. The awful-smelling stuff was in her nostrils. She wiped at it with a handkerchief. “At least I won’t attract mosquitoes now.” She sighed.
“Want to bet?” Red asked. “They love this stuff! If you rub it on your arms, they’ll attack you in droves.... Where are you going, boss?”
Mallory just chuckled as he walked away. He didn’t even answer Red.
Morie let out a sigh of relief as she wiped harder at her face. She shook her head and gave Red a rueful wince. “Well, that was a surprise,” she murmured drily. “Thought I was going to be an ex-employee for sure.”
“Naw,” Red replied. “The boss is a good sport. Cane got into it with him one time over a woman who kept calling and harassing him. Boss put her through, just for fun. Cane tossed him headfirst into one of the watering troughs.”
She laughed with surprise. “Good grief!”
“Shocked the boss. It was the first time Cane did anything really physical since he got out of the military. He thinks having one arm slows him down, limits him. But he’s already adjusting to it. The boss ain’t no lightweight,” he added. “Cane picked him up over one shoulder and threw him.”
“Wow.”
He sobered. “You know, they’ve all got problems of one sort or another. But they’re decent, honest, hardworking men. We’d do anything for them. They take care of us, and they’re not judgmental.” Red grimaced at some bad memory. “If they were, I’d sure be out on my ear.”
“Slipped up, did you?” She gave him a quizzical look. “You, uh, didn’t throw pesticide on the boss?”
He shook his head. “Something much worse, I’m afraid. All I got was a little jail time and a lecture from the boss.” He smiled. “Closest call I’ve had in recent years
.”
“Most people mess up once in a while,” she said kindly.
“That’s true. The only thing that will get you fired here is stealing,” he added. “I don’t know why it’s such an issue with the boss, but he let a guy go last year for taking an expensive drill that didn’t belong to him. He said he wouldn’t abide a thief on the place. Cane, now, almost jumped the guy.” He shook his head. “Odd, odd people in some respects.”
“I suppose there’s something that happened to them in the past,” she conjectured.
“Could be.” He made a face. “That girl, Gelly, that the boss goes around with has a shifty look,” he added in a lowered tone. “There was some talk about her when she and her dad first moved here, about how they got the old Barnes property they’re living on.” He grimaced. “She’s a looker, I’ll give her that, but I think the boss is out of his noggin for letting her hang around. Funny thing about that drill going missing,” he added with narrowed, thoughtful eyes. “She didn’t like the cowboy because he mouthed off to her. She was in the bunkhouse just before the boss found the missing drill in the guy’s satchel, and the cowboy cussed a blue streak about being innocent. It didn’t do any good. He was let go on the spot.”
She felt cold chills down her spine. She’d only seen the boss’s current love interest once, and it had been quite enough to convince her that the woman was putting on airs and pretending a sophistication she didn’t really have. Most men weren’t up on current fashions in high social circles, but Morie was, and she knew at first glance that Gelly Bruner was wearing last year’s colors and fads. Morie had been to Fashion Week and subscribed, at home, to several magazines featuring the best in couture, both in English and French. Her wardrobe reflected the newer innovations. Her mother, Shelby, had been a top model in her younger days, and she knew many famous designers who were happy to outfit her daughter.
