Wyoming Tough

Wyoming Tough - By Diana Palmer



CHAPTER ONE




EDITH DANIELLE MORENA BRANNT was not impressed with her new boss. The head honcho of the Rancho Real, or Royal Ranch in Spanish, near Catelow, Wyoming, was big and domineering and had a formidable bad attitude that he shared with all his hired hands.

Morie, as she was known to her friends, had a hard time holding back her fiery temper when Mallory Dawson Kirk raised his voice. He was impatient and hot-tempered and opinionated. Just like Morie’s father, who’d opposed her decision to become a working cowgirl. Her dad opposed everything. She’d just told him she was going to find a job, packed her bags and left. She was twenty-three. He couldn’t really stop her legally. Her mother, Shelby, had tried gentle reason. Her brother, Cort, had tried, too, with even less luck. She loved her family, but she was tired of being chased for who she was related to instead of who she was inside. Being a stranger on somebody else’s property was an enchanting proposition. Even with Mallory’s temper, she was happy being accepted for a poor, struggling female on her own in the harsh world. Besides that, she wanted to learn ranch work and her father refused to let her so much as lift a rope on his ranch. He didn’t want her near his cattle.

“And another thing,” Mallory said harshly, turning to Morie with a cold glare, “there’s a place to hang keys when you’re through with them. You never take a key out of the stable and leave it in your pocket. Is that clear?”

Morie, who’d actually transported the key to the main tack room off the property in her pocket at a time it was desperately needed, flushed. “Sorry, sir,” she said stiffly. “Won’t happen again.”

“It won’t if you expect to keep working here,” he assured her.

“My fault,” the foreman, old Darby Hanes, chimed in, smiling. “I forgot to tell her.”

Mallory considered that and nodded finally. “That’s what I always liked most about you, Darb, you’re honest.” He turned to Morie. “An example I’ll expect you to follow, as our newest hire, by the way.”

Her face reddened. “Sir, I’ve never taken anything that didn’t belong to me.”

He looked at her cheap clothes, the ragged hem of her jeans, her worn boots. But he didn’t judge. He just nodded.

He had thick black hair, parted on one side and a little shaggy around the ears. He had big ears and a big nose, deep-set brown eyes under a jutting brow, thick eyebrows and a mouth so sensuous that Morie hadn’t been able to take her eyes off it at first. That mouth made up for his lack of conventional good looks. He had big, well-manicured hands and a voice like deep velvet, as well as big feet, in old, rugged, dirt-caked boots. He was the boss, and nobody ever forgot it, but he got down in the mud and blood with his men and worked as if he was just an employee himself.

In fact, all three Kirk brothers were like that. Mallory was the oldest, at thirty-six. The second brother, Cane—a coincidence if there ever was one, considering Morie’s mother’s maiden name, even if hers was spelled with a K—was thirty-four, a veteran of the Second Gulf War, and he was missing an arm from being in the front lines in combat. He was confronting a drinking problem and undergoing therapy, which his brothers were trying to address.

The youngest brother, at thirty-one, was Dalton. He was a former border agent with the department of immigration, and his nickname was, for some odd reason, Tank. He’d been confronted by a gang of narco-smugglers on the Arizona border, all alone. He was shot to pieces and hospitalized for weeks, during which most of the physicians had given him up for dead because of the extent of his injuries. He confounded them all by living. Nevertheless, he quit the job and came home to the family ranch in Wyoming. He never spoke of the experience. But once Morie had seen him react to the backfire of an old ranch truck by diving to the ground. She’d laughed, but old Darby Hanes had silenced her and told her about Dalton’s past as a border agent. She’d never laughed at his odd behaviors again. She supposed that both he and Cane had mental and emotional scars, as well as physical ones, from their past experiences. She’d never been shot at, or had anything happen to her. She’d been as sheltered as a hothouse orchid, both by her parents and her brother. This was her first taste of real life. She wasn’t certain yet if she was going to like it.

She’d lived on her father’s enormous ranch all her life. She could ride anything—her father had taught her himself. But she wasn’t accustomed to the backbreaking work that daily ranch chores required, because she hadn’t been permitted to do them at home, and she’d been slow her first couple of days.

Darby Hanes had taken her in hand and shown her how to manage the big bales of hay that the brothers still packed into the barn—refusing the more modern rolled bales as being inefficient and wasteful—so that she didn’t hurt herself when she lifted them. He’d taught her how to shoe horses, even though the ranch had a farrier, and how to doctor sick calves. In less than two weeks, she’d learned things that nothing in her college education had addressed.

“You’ve never done this work before,” Darby accused, but he was smiling.

She grimaced. “No. But I needed a job, badly,” she said, and it was almost the truth. “You’ve been great, Mr. Hanes. I owe you a lot for not giving me away. For teaching me what I needed to know here.” And what a good thing it was, she thought privately, that her father didn’t know. He’d have skinned Hanes alive for letting his sheltered little girl shoe a horse.

He waved a hand dismissively. “Not a problem. You make sure you wear those gloves,” he added, nodding toward her back pocket. “You have beautiful hands. Like my wife used to,” he added with a faraway look in his eyes and a faint smile. “She played the piano in a restaurant when I met her. We went on two dates and got married. Never had kids. She passed two years ago, from cancer.” He stopped for a minute and took a long breath. “Still miss her,” he added stiffly.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll see her again,” he replied. “Won’t be too many years, either. It’s part of the cycle, you see. Life and death. We all go through it. Nobody escapes.”

That was true. How odd to be in a philosophical discussion on a ranch.

He lifted an eyebrow. “You think ranch hands are high-school dropouts, do you?” he mused. “I have a degree from MIT. I was their most promising student in theoretical physics, but my wife had a lung condition and they wanted her to come west to a drier climate. Her dad had a ranch….” He stopped, chuckling. “Sorry. I tend to run on. Anyway, I worked on the ranch and preferred it to a lab. After she died, I came here to work. So here I am. But I’m not the only degreed geek around here. We have three part-timers who are going to college on scholarships the Kirk brothers set up for them.”

“What a nice bunch of guys!” she exclaimed.

“They really are. All of them seem tough as nails, and they mostly are, but they’ll help anyone in need.” He shifted. “Paid my wife’s hospital bill after the insurance lapsed. A small fortune, and they didn’t even blink.”

Her throat got tight. What a generous thing to do. Her family had done the same for people, but she didn’t dare mention that. “That was good of them,” she said with genuine feeling.

“Yes. I’ll work here until I die, if they’ll keep me. They’re great people.”

They heard a noise and turned around. The boss was standing behind them.

“Thanks for the testimonial, but I believe there are cattle waiting to be dipped in the south pasture….” Mallory commented with pursed lips and twinkling dark eyes.

Darby chuckled. “Yes, there are. Sorry, boss, I was just lauding you to the young lady. She was surprised to find out that I studied philosophy.”

“Not to mention theoretical physics,” the boss added drily.

“Yes, well, I won’t mention your degree in biochemistry if you like,” Darby said outrageously.

Mallory quirked an eyebrow. “Thanks.”

Darby winked at Morie and left them alone.

Mallory towered over the slight brunette. “Your name is unusual. Morie…?”

She laughed. “My full name is Edith Danielle Morena Brannt,” she replied. “My mother knew I’d be a brunette, because both my parents are, so they added morena, which means brunette in Spanish. I had, uh, Spanish great-grandparents,” she stuttered, having almost given away the fact that they were titled Spanish royalty. That would never do. She wanted to be perceived as a poor, but honest, cowgirl. Her last name wasn’t uncommon in South Texas, and Mallory wasn’t likely to connect it with King Brannt, who was a true cattle baron.

He cocked his head. “Morie,” he said. “Nice.”

“I’m really sorry, about the key,” she said.

He shrugged. “I did the same thing last month, but I’m the boss,” he added firmly. “I don’t make mistakes. You remember that.”

She gave him an open smile. “Yes, sir.”

He studied her curiously. She was small and nicely rounded, with black hair that was obviously long and pulled into a bun atop her head. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was pleasant to look at, with those big brown eyes and that pretty mouth and perfect skin. She didn’t seem the sort to do physical labor on a ranch.

“Sir?” she asked, uncomfortable from the scrutiny.

“Sorry. I was just thinking that you don’t look like the usual sort we hire for ranch hands.”

“I do have a college degree,” she defended herself.

“You do? What was your major?”

“History,” she said, and looked defensive. “Yes, it’s dates. Yes, it’s about the past. Yes, some of it can be boring. But I love it.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “You should talk to Cane. His degree is in anthropology. Pity it wasn’t paleontology, because we’re close to Fossil Lake. That’s part of the Green River Formation, and there are all sorts of fossils there. Cane loved to dig.” His face hardened. “He won’t talk about going back to it.”

“Because of his arm?” she asked bluntly. “That wouldn’t stop him. He could do administrative work on a dig.” She flushed. “I minored in anthropology,” she confessed.

He burst out laughing. “No wonder you like ranch work. Did you go on digs?” He knew, as some people didn’t, that archaeology was one of four subfields of anthropology.

“I did. Drove my mother mad. My clothes were always full of mud and I looked like a street child most of the time.” She didn’t dare tell him that she’d come to dinner in her dig clothing when a famous visiting politician from Europe was at the table, along with some members of a royal family. Her father had been eloquent. “There were some incidents when I came home muddy,” she added with a chuckle.

“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 the 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.

She didn’t dare mention her fashion sense here, of course. It would take away her one chance to live like a normal, young single woman.

“You went to college recently, didn’t you?” Red asked. He grinned at her surprise. “There’s no secrets on a ranch. It’s like a big family…we know everything.”

“Yes, I did,” she agreed, not taking offense.

“You live in them coed dorms, with men and women living together?” he asked, and seemed interested in her answer.

“No, I didn’t,” she said curtly. “My parents raised me very strictly. I guess I have old attitudes because of it, but I wasn’t living in a dorm with single men.” She shrugged. “I lived off campus with a girlfriend.”

He raised both eyebrows. “Well, aren’t you a dinosaur!” he exclaimed, but with twinkling eyes and obvious approval.

“That’s right—I should live in a zoo.” She made a wry face. “I don’t fit in with modern society. That’s why I’m out here,” she added.

He nodded. “That’s why most of us are out here. We’re insulated from what people call civilization.” He leaned down. “I love it here.”

“So do I, Red,” she agreed.

He glanced at the cattle and grimaced. “We’d better get this finished,” he said, looking up at the sky. “They’re predicting rain again. On top of all that snowmelt, we’ll be lucky if we don’t get some more bad flooding this year.”

“Or more snow,” she said, tongue-in-cheek. Wyoming weather was unpredictable; she’d already learned that. Some of the local ranchers had been forced to live in town when the snow piled up so that they couldn’t even get to the cattle. Government agencies had come in to airlift food to starving animals.

Now the snowmelt was a problem. But so were mosquitoes in the unnaturally warm weather. People didn’t think mosquitoes lived in places like Wyoming and Montana, but they thrived everywhere, it seemed. Along with other pests that could damage the health of cattle.

“You come from down south of here, don’t you?” Red asked. “Where?”

She pursed her lips. “One of the other states,” she said. “I’m not telling which one.”

“Texas.”

Her eyebrows shot up. He laughed. “Boss had a copy of your driver’s license for the files. I just happened to notice it when I hacked into his personnel files.”

“Red!”

“Hey, at least I stopped hacking CIA files,” he protested. “And darn, I was enjoying that until they caught me.”

She was shocked.

He shrugged. “Most men have a hobby of some sort. At least they didn’t keep me locked up for long. Even offered me a job in their cybercrime unit.” He laughed. “I may take them up on it one day. But for now, I’m happy being a ranch hand.”

“You are full of surprises,” she exclaimed.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he teased. “Let’s get back to work.”