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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.
She had to break pieces off before she could ease it onto the ground. In the process, one of the sharp branches cut her cheek. She muttered as she felt blood on her fingers when she touched it. Well, it would mend.
She pushed the limb onto the ground with a grimace, but she was glad to see that the fence wasn’t damaged, only a little bent from the collision. She wrangled it back into some sort of order and made a note on the iPod so that she could report its location to the brothers with the GPS device she always carried with her. They were pretty high-tech for a low-budget operation, she thought. They had laptops that they used during roundup to coordinate all the activity.
She paused as the crescendo built on the soundtrack, and closed her eyes to savor it. How wonderful it must be, she thought, to be a composer and be able to write scores that touched the very heart and soul of listeners. She was musical, but she had no such talent. She didn’t compose. She only interpreted the music of others when she played the piano or, less frequently, the guitar.
“Hurt yourself?” A deep, drawling voice came from behind.
She whirled, her heart racing, her eyes wide and shocked as she faced a stranger standing a few feet away. She looked like a doe in the sights of a hunter.
He was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair under a wide-brimmed hat, wearing jeans and a weather-beaten black hat. He was smiling.
“Mr. Kirk,” she stammered, as she finally recognized Dalton Kirk. She hadn’t seen him often. He wasn’t as familiar to her as Mallory was. “Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention…”
He reached out and took one of the earphones, pursing his sensual lips as he listened. He handed it back. “August Rush,” he said.
Her eyebrows shot up. “You know the score?”
He smiled at her surprise. “Yes. It’s one of my own favorites, especially that pipe-organ solo.”
“That’s my favorite, too,” she agreed.
He glanced at the fence. “Make a note of the coordinates so we can replace that section of fence, will you?” he asked. “It will keep the cattle in for now, but not for long.”
“I already did,” she confirmed. She was still catching her breath.
“There’s an escaped convict out here somewhere,” he told her. “I don’t think he’s guilty, but he’s desperate. I love music as much as anybody, but there’s a time and place for listening to it, and this isn’t it. If I’d been that man, and desperate enough to shoot somebody or take a hostage, you’d be dead or taken away by now.”
She’d just realized that. She nodded.
“Now you see why it’s against the law to listen with earphones when you’re driving,” he said. “You couldn’t hear a siren with those on.” He indicated the earphones.
“Yes. I mean, yes, sir.”
He cocked his head. His dark eyes twinkled. “Call me Tank. Everybody does.”
“Why?” she blurted out.
“We were facing down an Iraqi tank during the invasion of Iraq,” he told her, “and we were taking substantial damage. We lost comms with the artillery unit that was covering us and we didn’t have an antitank weapon with us.” He shrugged. “I waded in with a grenade and the crew surrendered. Ever since, I’ve been Tank.”
She laughed. He wasn’t as intimidating as he’d once seemed.
“So keep those earphones in your pocket and listen to music when it’s a little safer, will you?”
“I will,” she promised, and put away the iPod.
He mounted the black gelding she hadn’t heard approaching and rode closer. “That thing isn’t a phone, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you carry a cell phone?” he added, and his lean, strong face was solemn.
She pulled a little emergency one out of her pocket and showed it to him. “It’s just for 911 calls, but it would do the job.”
“It wouldn’t. We’ll get you one. It’s essential here. I’ll tell Darby—he’ll arrange it for you.”
“Thanks,” she said, surprised. She should have been using her own phone, but she thought it might give her away. It was one of the very expensive models. The one she was carrying looked much more like something a poor cowgirl would own.
“Oh, we’re nice,” he told her with a straight face. “We have sterling characters, we never curse or complain, we’re always easy to get along with… .” He stopped because she was muffling laughter.
“Just because Cane can turn the air blue, and Mallory throws things is no reason to think we’re not easygoing,” he instructed.
“Yes, sir. I’ll remember that.”
He laughed. “If you need anything, you call,” he said. “Keep your eyes open. The man who escaped was charged with killing a man in cold blood,” he added solemnly. “Joe Bascomb. He was with me in Iraq. But desperate men can do desperate things. He might hurt a stranger, even a woman, if he thought she might turn him in to the law. He’s sworn he’ll never go back to jail.” His eyes were sad. “I never thought he’d run. I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill the other man, if in fact he did. But they’re bound and determined to catch him, and he’s determined not to be caught. So you watch your back.”
“I’ll be more careful.”
“Please do. Good help is hard to find.” He tipped his hat, and rode away.
Morie breathed a sigh of relief and got back on her horse.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE WAS SOME BIG SHINDIG planned for the following Friday, Morie heard. The housekeeper, Mavie Taylor, was vocal about the food the brothers wanted prepared for it.
“I can’t make canapés,” she groaned, pushing back a graying strand of hair that had escaped its bun. She propped her hands on her thin hips and glowered. “How am I supposed to come up with things like that when all they ever want is steak and potatoes?”
“Listen, canapés are easy,” Morie said gently. “You can take a cocktail sausage and wrap it in bacon, secure it with a toothpick and bake it.” She gave the temperature setting and cooking time. “Then you can make little cucumber sandwiches cut into triangles, tea cakes, cheese straws…”
“Wait a minute.” She was writing frantically on a pad. “What else?”
Morie glowed. It was the first time the acid-tongued housekeeper had ever said anything halfway pleasant to her. She named several other small, easily prepared snacks that would be recognizable to any social animal as a canapé.
“How do you know all this?” the woman asked finally, and suspiciously.
