Dark Paradise (27 page)

woman to the ranch
 
- leastways a woman who wasn't a veterinarian or a

cattle broker or some such. It was a cinch this little mop-headed blonde

wasn't anything of the sort.

He grinned his tight little grin, tickled at the prospect of J.D.

showing something other than contempt for a female. "Why don't you climb

on down off that lop-eared creature and I'll get you a ringside seat,

Miz Jennings."

"I'd like that."

Marilee swung her leg over the mule's back and dropped to her feet,

wincing as pain shot up from her toes to the roots of her hair. As

pleasant as the ride had been, she was damn glad to have the chance to

try to put her knees side by side again
 
- not that it seemed even remotely

possible. She felt as bowlegged as Tucker Cahill looked.

Putting off taking those first few steps, she stuck a hand out to the

old cowboy. He gripped her fingers with a gloved hand as strong as a

vise and gave her a shake.

"You can call me Marilee," she said with a grin. "Anybody ever tell you

you look like Ben Johnson, the actor?"

Tucker cackled with glee. "From time to time. You just climb up that

rail over yonder, Marilee, and you'll see what branding is all about.

I'll see to your mule here."

"You don't have to do that."

"Oh, yes, ma'am. You're a guest at the Stars and Bars. We don't get many,

but we treat 'em right."

Marilee thanked him as he walked away, Clyde in tow, going off toward a

long, weathered gray barn. Gritting her teeth as she forced her aching

legs to move, feeling as ungainly as if she were trying to negotiate

stilts, she made her way to the corral and climbed up to sit on the top

rail. The organized chaos going on below was mesmerizing to watch. After

a few minutes, Tucker climbed up beside her, standing on one of the

lower rails and laying his arms across the top one.

"I had no idea ranchers still branded cattle," she said, fairly shouting

to be heard above the din. "I would have guessed that went out with

bustles and steam engines."

"Old ways are sometimes best. No one's come up with a better way to work

cows than from the back of a good ol' quarter horse. No one's come up

with a better system for marking cattle than a brand. Lotta open

territory in these parts. Cattle wander off, mix in with other herds."

He pointed out J.D. moving through the herd in the far holding pen on a

pale gray horse, telling her with no small amount of pride that there

wasn't a man for a hundred miles around who knew more about how to get

the most out of a horse than J.D. "Knows the cattle business inside and

out too. He's up on all the latest electronic sales networks, computer

tracking herd progress, stuff an old duffer like me don't know from

diddly. Had two years of college before his daddy died. Yes, ma'am," he

said, nodding, "J.D.'s a fine rancher and a fine hand and a good man

right down to the ground. You won't find a soul around here to tell you

different."

His ringing endorsement sounded suspiciously like a sales pitch. Marilee

found it sweet and did her best to tame her amusement.

"He's run this place since he was a kid," Tucker said, fixing his gaze

on the man J.D. had become in the years since. "And I mean that.

Tom - J.D.'s daddy - God rest him, never had his heart in the job. He gave

his to women and it'd liked to killed him. Did kill him in the end,

after Will's mama left."

Marilee studied the old man's weathered profile, a million questions

rushing through her mind. A part of her - the part that would have

protected her - resented them. She was probably better off not knowing

about Rafferty's past. If she didn't know what made him so difficult, so

distrustful, so damned hard to deal with, then her soft heart couldn't

feel sympathy or goad her into trying to heal his past hurts, or any of

the dozen other foolhardy things she would likely do. But she couldn't

stop herself from being curious, or overly sentimental, or stupidly

romantic. You'll never change, Marilee. . . .

And so the question tumbled out. "What about J.D.'s mother?"

"Died when he was just a little tyke. Cancer, God rest her. She was a

fine woman. Poor Tom was just lost without her - at least until Will's

mama breezed onto the scene.
 
Then he was just plain lost."

And J.D. was lost in the shuffle. Tucker Cahill didn't say that, but

Marilee pieced together the fragments he had given her and came up with

the picture: J.D., just a boy, taking on responsibilities far beyond his

years while his father wandered around in a romantic fog. If it was an

accurate picture, it explained a great deal. She felt her heart slipping

a little further out of her control, and her protective instincts

growled at her in warning. To fall for a man like Rafferty would be

asking for trouble, begging for heartbreak, she told herself. She had a

terrible suspicion her heart wasn't listening.

In what was probably a futile attempt at self-preservation, she derailed

Tucker onto an explanation of the process of sorting the cattle through

the pens and chutes.

The men perched above the chutes controlled the gates that determined

which pen an animal would be directed to depending on age and sex. In

the branding corral, calves were being run one at a time into a squeeze

chute, which tipped onto one side, forming a table. Will Rafferty and an

old man with a long gray braid worked at the squeeze chute, vaccinating,

notching ears, castrating bull calves, and marking all with the Rafter T

brand of the Stars and Bars. The whole process took little more than a

minute per animal.

She watched them do half a dozen before Will looked over and caught

sight of her. A big grin split his dirty face, and he abandoned his post

without a backward glance.

"Hey, Marilee!" he called, striding across the corral with the grace of

Gene Kelly, arms spread wide in welcome. "How's it shaking?"

"It about shook loose on the ride up here," she said dryly.

He laughed, swinging up onto the fence and turning his red baseball cap

frontward on his head, seemingly all in one motion. He settled himself a

little too close beside her, close enough that Marilee could smell sweat

and the scent of animals on him, close enough that she could see his

blue eyes were shot through with the telltale threads of a hangover. She

frowned at him, unable to sidle away because of Tucker on her left.

The old cowboy leaned ahead and shot a hard look at Will. "J.D. catches

you slacking, boy, he'll chew your tail like old rawhide."

Behind the layers of sweat and grime, Will's mouth tightened. "Yeah,

well, J.D. can just go to hell. I been working hard as he has since

sunup. I'm taking five. It's not every day we get a pretty lady for

company up here not even in the back of beyond."

"No, they're scarce as hen's teeth," Tucker admitted, clambering over

the rail and lowering himself into the corral. He jammed his hands at

the low-riding waist of his jeans and gave the younger man a significant

look.

"Especially the ones your brother invites."

Will pulled a comic face of exaggerated shock, eyes wide in his lean

face as he stared at Marilee. "J.D. invited you?
 
My brother J.D.

invited you?"

"Not exactly," Marilee grumbled, scowling as she watched Tucker hobble

away toward the squeeze chute to take up Will's place. "I invited

myself. He didn't tell me no."

"Well, that's something too, let me tell you. J.D. runs this place like

a damn monastery. He don't want some evil woman turning our heads from

our work."

Lucy came immediately to mind, but Marilee bit her tongue. "What about

your wife?"

"What about her?"

"Does she fall under the 'evil woman' heading?"

"Sam?
 
Hell no. She's a good kid." Sweet, trusting, in need of someone

to love her. The description ran through his mind, through his heart

like an arrow as he watched the monotonous routine in the branding

corral. Every time he thought of Sam, he felt as if he'd been kicked in

the head - a little ill, a little dizzy. He'd been doing his damnedest not

to think about her since the night he had seen her in the Moose.

"Kid?
 
What is she, a child bride?"

"Naw, she's twenty-three." He picked absently at the rusty fungus that

clung to the top of the rail. "I've known her forever, that's all. It's

hard not to think of her like a kid sister."

Which might explain why he wasn't living with his wife, Marilee thought.

if she had a husband who treated her like a kid sister, and chased

anything in a skirt besides, she figured she'd dump him too.

"So," Will said, slapping a hand on her thigh "whatcha doing here,

Marilee?
 
Looking for trouble?"

He bobbed his eyebrows and grinned. "That's my middle name."

"I guessed as much." She pried his fingers off her leg and scooted away

a foot, fixing him with a look. "I came to see how a ranch works."

"I'll tell you how a ranch works." Bitterness crept in around the edges

of his voice. "Day and night, week after week, month after month, year

after year, until death or foreclosure."

"If you don't like it, why don't you quit?"

He laughed and looked away, not sure whether it was her suggestion or

his answer he found so funny. A part of him had wanted nothing more than

to be rid of the Stars and Bars ever since he was a boy. But that part

of him was forever tangled with the boy who looked up to his big

brother. And the part of him that didn't want to be a screw-up was

forever tripping over the part that longed to tell J.D. to go to hell.

The cycle just tumbled on, like a rock down an endless mountainside.

"You don't quit the Stars and Bars, gorgeous," he muttered, staring off

across the chutes to the back pen, where J.D. was sorting cattle. "Not

if your name is Rafferty."

J.D. worked the herd from the back of a washed-out gray mare. This was

only her second year working cattle, but her talent was bred bone-deep.

She kept her head low and her ears pinned as she danced gracefully from

side to side, cutting calves away from their mothers and sending them

into the chutes, sorting out young heifers and sending them into another

holding pen to wait. The mare ducked and dodged, adjusting her speed as

necessary.

Her reins hung loose, her movements guided by intuition and the subtle

touches of J.D.'s spurs against her sides.

J.D. sat easily in the saddle, one gloved hand on the pommel, shoulders

canted back, bracing himself against the sudden moves of the horse

beneath him. His mind working on three levels at once studying the

cattle, was assessing the performance of the horse, and wondering if

Marilee would really show up.

He cursed himself up one side and down the other for letting a woman

take his thoughts away from his business. He didn't need the distraction

of thinking about her or the distraction of seeing her standing outside

the fence.

If he wanted a distraction, he could wonder what the hell he would do a

year from now, when Lyle Watkins and his boys would no longer be around

to help work the chutes. Tucker and Chaske would be another year older,

too old for a full day of this kind of work. God only knew where Will

would be. His only other neighbor would be Bryce.

Bryce wouldn't offer to trade work. J.D. doubted Bryce knew what real

work was. He wouldn't know or care about the code that had always

existed between neighbors here. Like the rest of his kind, Bryce had

brought his own set of values and priorities with him to Montana, all of

them foreign to J.D.

The little mare pulled herself up and blew out a heavy breath, drawing

J.D. back to the matter at hand. The group of cattle he had been working

was sorted. They would brand and vaccinate this lot, break for dinner,