His hands fisted tightly as his stomach clenched. Reality blurred. Another dark-haired woman, stretched out over her lover beneath the thin veil of a mosquito net. That time he’d turned on his heel and never looked back, the two-carat engagement ring clutched tightly in the palm of his hand.
He forced out a breath. This time he was damned if he’d run.
****
Elizabeth tried to roll off Cal without crushing any vital organs but knew she’d failed when he cried out in pain as her knee struck a glancing blow off his crotch.
“Oh my God.” She tried to sit up and help him, but he was curled up into a ball of pain, his face as white as pure Irish linen.
“I’m so sorry.” She tried to pry him into a sitting position, but the man had a grip of iron on his abused anatomy and it was like trying to move a statue.
Christ, first she’d nearly flattened the poor bastard and then she’d kneed him in the balls. She sat back in the mud and knew it was going to take a few minutes before Cal would be able to get up. Though it galled her, she knew she couldn’t stand without his help.
Movement caught her eye and she swallowed her pride as Nat Sullivan approached. She’d been dreading seeing him all morning and he had to choose now to show up.
Well crap, at least he would be able to help Cal up out of the dirt.
She watched him walking towards her, long strides covering the muddy earth with ease. She was mortified that she’d thrown herself at him yesterday, and she owed him an apology.
He looked pristine, not a speck of mud on his well-worn hide, whereas she looked like she’d been painted gray from the head down, and felt like one big muscle cramp.
She met his gaze, his blue eyes dark and intimidating. He still looked pissed.
“Nat...” she began.
“How’s the ankle, Eliza?” he interrupted. The inflection he placed on her name wasn’t pretty.
Trying to smile, it stuck on her lips at his sneer. There was nothing but cold derision in his eyes.
“Fine, thank you.” She’d behaved badly yesterday, but she had her reasons. Sticking her jaw out, she swallowed and looked him in the eye, trying to ignore the flush that rose up and heated her cheeks.
She tried again, “Nat...”
“Good.” He stepped closer and pierced her like a bug on a pin with his steely blue gaze. Leaning down he laid a work-callused finger on the top button of her jacket, resting it just below her throat. Her pulse fluttered and froze, nervous of him for the first time.
“Don’t mess with the men on this ranch, Eliza.” His eyes drilled into her. “We don’t need some goddamned prick-tease stirring up trouble around here.”
Elizabeth started to splutter, but Nat walked away, leaving Cal heaving on the ground next to her, and her stranded with a bad ankle and a soaking wet butt.
“Well,” she shouted after Nat as he climbed the fence, “I guess that makes you the prick then, huh?”
Cal sputtered a laugh, speculation rife in his eyes as he watched his boss stomp away.
“What?” She glared at him.
“Nothing,” Cal croaked.
Elizabeth scrambled to her feet but only succeeded in slipping and thudding into Cal’s hipbone.
“Awww,” he cried out.
“Sorry.” Elizabeth wanted to cry. Again. When she’d woken up, her ankle was swollen to the size of a melon and she couldn’t even get her own boots on. Luckily, ‘her being so big and all’, Cal had said that he had a pair of boots that would fit her.
He’d hoisted her onto the back of Tiger before heading out to check on the cattle. He might have been whipcord thin without a spare ounce of flesh on his body, but he sure as hell was strong.
She’d spent the next two hours trying to rope a damned fence post while the ranch hands had disappeared off to the far-flung corners of the farm to check the stock. Nat had been nowhere in sight.
And she hadn’t been able to get off the damned horse.
Some professional she was. For the first hour she hadn’t even noticed. She’d practiced in the small corral that had been cleared of snow. Wheeling backwards and forwards, she’d controlled Tiger with her knees and the lightest touch of the reins against the horse’s neck. She worked tirelessly, deep in concentration, round and round the small corral until she was dizzy with it. She’d ignored her sore ankle and applied herself to learning the art of riding western-style and to roping.
‘Rope is like a living thing,’ Cal had told her before he’d gone off and left her for two-goddamned-hours. ‘You have to think about it in its entirety, not just the bit in your hand. It’s like a flow of energy and you have to become one with the rope, let it become an extension of your arm.’
The Zen art of roping.
Well, she’d sucked at roping.
By chewing the Tylenol she’d packed in her jacket pocket, she’d managed to stay in the saddle for the whole morning, endured her numb butt, and knew it would hurt like a son-of-a-bitch tomorrow.
So two hours after Cal had left her with ‘roping wisdom for beginners’, he’d returned full of anxiety, having finally remembered that there was no one else back at the ranch to help her. Sure she could have thrown herself off the horse’s back, but she was damned if she was going to wreck the other ankle too. At this rate she’d be leaving the ranch in a wheelchair, or a body bag.
But she didn’t want to think about that.
Cal had done his best not to laugh at her woebegone state. And, convicted murderer or not, she found herself returning his grin, despite the fact that every muscle in her body felt like it had been beaten.
Hell, she should know.
She’d dismounted with all the grace of a gunshot pheasant, plummeting to earth on legs that had turned into limp noodles. Cal had tried to catch her, but she’d flattened him with momentum.
Then Nat had showed up.
She glanced at Cal who was now trying to stand, gingerly clutching his crotch.
“I am not a prick-tease,” Elizabeth said.
Cal didn’t disagree and went back to being mute as he offered her a spare hand up. Pulling her to her feet he surprised her with another grin.
“He’s jealous,” he said, “me being such a fine catch an’ all.”
Elizabeth considered that for a moment and discarded the notion. “Jealous, my ass. He’s a numbskull, bone-headed jackass,” she muttered, practicing curses.
So much for the apology she’d prepared. Nat could stuff it where the sun didn’t shine, all the way up to his tonsils.
Pain streaked up her ankle as she tried to put more weight on it. Cal pulled her arm across his shoulder and placed the other around her waist. Cautiously they moved forward through the slush, like a pair of wounded warriors, covered from head to toe in mud.
She’d made a big step forward today. Being forced to touch Cal, to get on and off the horse, had proved she could still function in a normal situation with a man who didn’t threaten her. She didn’t always freeze up and freak out.
It felt good being mad. It sure beat the hell out of being miserable.
She blew out a heavy sigh of frustration that Cal interpreted as pain and he tried to take more of her weight to help her back to her cabin. But pain wasn’t the problem for Elizabeth. Pain she could deal with.
Lust was the problem.
Lust was supposed to be a simple emotion for the unattached, but she both ached for and feared Nathan Sullivan’s touch in equal measures.
A headache built pressure within her skull.
Clutching Cal’s shoulder hard enough to bruise, she hobbled back to the cottage closely followed by Blue, who wagged his tail as they hopped up the three steps.
“Okay fella,” she said as Cal let the dog in first. The best plan of action was a hot bath and a long cold beer.
Nat Sullivan could rot in hell.
****
She spent the next few days helping out Ryan and Cal on the ranch. Today she’d been assigned to work the cattle chut
e. The weather had warmed up considerably and most of the snow had melted off the lower slopes, leaving the creeks full to bursting.
The vacation had been exactly what they’d advertised in the classifieds of the New York Times: ‘backbreaking hard work’, ‘no-frills’ and ‘basic’. It wasn’t a dude ranch, there was no hot-tub to soak in when you got saddle-sore, no trips to local tourist attractions, no refried beans for dinner. It was a plain and simple ‘working holiday’, with the emphasis on ‘work’. The contrast between ranch life and her urban existence in New York was marked by a gulf so wide they could have been on different planets. Her Fendi furs and Sergio Rossi high heels had been exchanged for Levi’s and work boots. Rather than sipping lattés, organizing exhibitions and tracking down fraudsters, she’d spent every minute of daylight looking after the stock or fixing up the ranch. Most evenings she fell asleep on the couch, too tired to move.
She’d settled in. Relaxed.
Nat avoided her altogether and headed up to the mountains to check out the snow in the summer pastures. But just because he wasn’t there didn’t mean she didn’t think about him. She’d mellowed during the week and didn’t know whether to be annoyed with him or herself. She’d kissed him and then freaked out, and then he’d jumped to his own conclusions about her cracked personality when he’d seen her lying on top of Cal. The fact that they were the wrong conclusions wasn’t really his fault; she was a mess and he was a million times better off without her. Maybe it was better this way, she decided, because nobody would get hurt.
Cal herded a small calf into the chute. It called for its mother, clattered against the railings with instinctive fear. Elizabeth was in her element, sitting on an overturned crate with her clipboard on her knee and a red pencil tucked behind her ear. She handled the small Black Angus calves like a pro, now, murmuring reassuringly to them, checking yellow ear tags and weighing each calf individually before freeing them so they could go find their mammas. Some were kept aside for fattening, most were being sent to market.
The work was easy for the most part, but tiring. They were separating out the surplus cattle and preparing the rest of the herd for tagging, castration and vaccination. The rest of the time was spent putting out salt-licks or feed for the cows and exercising the horses.
Ryan had told her that fire destroyed a swathe of upper pastures and the ranch couldn’t support last year’s herd anymore. Nobody knew if they’d get government aid either because last year’s appropriation fund had run out and nobody knew if there was any money in the kitty to spare more beleaguered farmers. Costs were rising all around. And there was the threat of BSE.
Up until a week ago, Elizabeth had had no idea that ranching was so complicated.
Elizabeth tried to put the Sullivans’ problems out of her mind. Money had never been a problem for her and she wished she could just hand over a wad of cash and make everything all right for them. But it didn’t work like that, and Elizabeth had discovered a long time ago that money didn’t make your problems disappear; it just buried them for a while.
Plus, she liked to keep a low profile about the extent of her personal wealth. She hadn’t earned it; she had inherited it at the expense of her family’s early deaths. First her parents, and then her aunt, who’d moved to the States when she’d married an American steel magnate. Elizabeth would rather have family—but you couldn’t buy family.
Chewing her pen, she mused, maybe she could do something to help the Sullivans financial problems without revealing herself. She could get her lawyers back in Ireland to set something up...maybe.
Old Ezra, the second ranch hand, was a sweet, gnarled old bear of a man, with a corrugated forehead, big ears and a nose the size of Concorde. He smiled easily, despite the look of pain that narrowed his washed-out blue eyes.
He ambled over, his potbelly forcing him to hitch up his pants along the way. He liked chatting to her, always giving her snippets of information he’d obviously read in the morning papers.
“Did you know,” he began, “that Australia is the most obese country in the whole stinking world?”
She shook her head and wondered if Ezra thought that made him thinner than all Australians.
“Nat spent a lot of time down in Australia.” Ezra spat a wad of tobacco on the ground next to his boot and squashed it into the dirt with his heel. “Said it was as hot as Hades.” He rubbed the shiny spot on his bald head as Elizabeth called out and recorded another tag-number and calf-weight, before pulling up the gate lever and letting the calf go.
Ezra looked bothered about something and it didn’t take him long to divulge.
“Imagine being real fat in such a hot place. Having to show off all that flab in those skimpy clothes.” Ezra stroked his well-defined gut that was thankfully hidden beneath a washed-out navy shirt. “Stinking ugly.”
He had a point.
Elizabeth stuffed her pencil into her mouth and tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help it. Trying to move on from the problems of exposing too much unwanted flesh, she noted, “You don’t curse much do you, Ezra?”
“Never.” He shook his head then paused with his head tilted to one side as he considered her question harder. “Well now, I guess I do in my head, but ‘stinking’ is the word that comes out of my mouth.”
“I never used to swear,” Elizabeth said, mulling it over. Since she’d attended the academy her language had taken a real nose-dive.
She stood up, but staggered on her twisted ankle.
“Feck!” she yelled. It was much better, but still weak. Her voice carried and echoed off the hills in a rare moment of silence and everyone looked up from what they were doing.
She grinned at Ezra’s appalled expression. “It’s not what you think. Feck just means damn or heck. It’s Irish.”
Ezra rubbed his belly before taking his tobacco pouch out of his back pocket and popping a tab into his mouth.
“Stinking works better for me,” he said, and then laughed a huge belly laugh as he trundled off back to the cattle.
Chapter Eight
Stone Creek, Montana, April 11th
Cal held the saloon door open for Elizabeth and she walked into a solid barrage of smoke, bodies and a blast of rock music from the sound system. She’d braced herself for country. She got rock.
Figured.
Following Ryan’s rapidly disappearing back she squeezed between groups of cowboys and pushed when space became tight.
She found a gap at the bar and Ryan miraculously grabbed a stool for her. She didn’t need it, but decided it might make a good anchor if her buddies got lucky with the ladies. She ordered a round of ice-cold beer and saluted her new friends before taking a thirst-quenching swig straight from the bottle.
The familiarity of the routine eased her mind. She’d always enjoyed the camaraderie of drinking with the boys and the bar wasn’t quite the den of iniquity it looked from the outside. It was full of cowboys wearing their best western shirts, neatly pressed jeans, highly polished boots and every size of hat, from ten-gallon to ball cap. The women varied. Most were dressed in western-style clothes, but some of the younger ones were squeezed into lycra tops and spandex.
The ‘Screw-Loose’ was a roadhouse on the edge of the small town of Stone Creek about ten miles north of the ranch. It was one big room with a horseshoe bar set against the back wall. A row of booths sat beneath the front windows where customers could eat. A few tall tables were bolted to the floor, stacked high with so many glasses they were beginning to look like crystal sculptures. Peanut shells littered the floor and crunched beneath her boots—at least that’s what she hoped was crunching beneath her boots.
A large-screen TV filled one wall; the Canadiens were hammering the Ducks 5:0. Large mirrors lined the back of the bar and added to the chaos, making the place look even more packed than it actually was. The dance floor heaved with energetic bodies writhing and shaking as Bryan Adams screamed something about coming back to you.
Ryan was rocking to the
music, looking for someone to dance with. He looked in her direction
“When hell freezes over.” She grinned and shook her head when he gave her a puppy dog expression.
Cal pulled up a stool next to Elizabeth and made his opinion on dancing clear. He sipped his beer and slouched backwards against the bar, leaning on his elbows. Elizabeth noted a group of biker boys staring at Cal, throwing him hostile glares.
Back at the ranch, she’d asked him if he’d gotten counseling when inside. Cal had told her, ‘cowboys didn’t get counseling, they got drunk.’
Elizabeth figured it wasn’t easy being a convicted murderer in a small town, and wondered why Cal hung around. It would have been easier to make a fresh start somewhere where people didn’t know your history. Hell, she should know. She shrugged it off, and figured it was nothing to do with her. She and Cal were vaguely friends, nothing more. He had his reasons for living his life the way he did and she had hers. She wasn’t about to explain hers to anybody.
Ryan spotted an old girlfriend across the room and excused himself to head off and claim her for a dance. Conversation was impossible so she and Cal just drank their beer and watched the show.
Nat Sullivan had hurt her feelings and dented her pride. Nobody had wielded that kind of power over her for a long time. She was surprised she hadn’t packed her bags and left. Maybe she just didn’t know where to go, or maybe bullheadedness had her digging her heels in. Whatever the reason, she was glad she’d stayed at the ranch.
A big guy with a long ZZ top beard and small wire-framed glasses came across and spoke to Cal, trying to include her in the conversation. She smiled at him, but didn’t answer his questions except for vague mutters that were lost in the noisy bar. She wasn’t worried about anyone recognizing her. Her disguise was good enough and the disinformation she’d left behind would take them far from this corner of the United States and only Josie knew where she really was.
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