Masked Cowboy (Men of the White Sandy) (3 page)

“Well, after you get off work tonight, you can come over and tell me what the Sam Hill just happened here.”

Chapter Two

The knock on the door—swift and solid—made Mary Beth jump. She grabbed her Bowie knife off the table. Better safe than sorry. “Who is it?” she yelled, hoping she didn’t sound as panicked as she felt.

“Dr. Hofstetter? It’s me, Robin!” Robin yelled back.

Mary Beth’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Just a sec.” She stowed the knife back in the sheath and opened the door.

Robin grinned and held up a six-pack. “I brought a housewarming gift.”

“How old are you again?” Mary Beth scolded as Robin sauntered past her.
Jeez, I sound like my mother
. She shuddered.

“I turned twenty-one two months ago,” Robin giggled, sounding more like a teenager than an adult. She popped a can’s top and handed it to Mary Beth, then opened one for herself. “But we’re not here to talk about me. You were drooling all over Jacob.”

“Everyone was drooling all over Jacob,” Mary Beth shot back. “So tell me why everyone drools all over Jacob.”

“Oh, where to begin?” Robin asked as she took a drink.

“Start with the mask part and go from there.” Mary Beth sighed as she collapsed on the one spot of the couch that didn’t have a box of books on it.

“The masked cowboy.” Robin sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Has he always worn the mask?”

“No. He lost his face about three years ago.”

Recent. He was probably still having depth perception problems, like that one-eyed horse that kept walking into doorframes back in vet school. “What happened?”

“He said he got into a brawl at the bar in Sturgis over a girl.”

Right. Sturgis. Mary Beth remembered they were less than three hours away from motorcycle heaven. “You don’t sound like you believe that.”

“I don’t.” Robin took another drink. “You should have seen him back before he had to wear that mask. I mean, he was Indian perfection on a horse. Hair almost down to his ass, face carved of stone—the rest of him carved of stone—man, he was freaking perfect. Number one hunk on the rez.” Her eyes got dreamy at the memory.

Mary Beth was feeling a little dreamy herself. “You knew him?”

“He played football with my oldest brother, Ronny—the one who owns the café—and my second-oldest brother, Randy, at the consolidated high school on the rez.”

“Sure,” Mary Beth said, trying to sound like she knew that.

“God, how I lusted after him. He and Ronny and Randy would come over after practice and race their horses up and down before they jumped in the pond out behind our house and—” She shivered, but the room seemed several degrees warmer to Mary Beth. “You should have
seen
him.”

“I think I saw enough today. How old is Jacob?” Honestly, it didn’t really matter. What mattered were those abs and forearms and
especially
that trail of hair. But she was curious.

“Twenty-six, I think. Ronny turned twenty-seven last fall, and Jacob was a year behind him.”

Damn. She had three years on him. But now was not the time for self-pity. Now was the time to pump Robin for all the info she could. “So you don’t think he got into a brawl?”

“I know Jacob, and he doesn’t drink. He’s one of those Indians who believes the white man’s alcohol is the ruination—” she pulled the
ruin
part of the word out, like she was calling pigs “—of the tribe. Very righteous.”

Righteous? A man who nearly pulled off a full monty in the middle of town was
righteous
? “Really?”

“Sure. Helped us get a loan from the tribe so we could buy the café.”

“Your brother knows about the show?”

“Of course he knows about the show. Ladies’ hour, he calls it. Trust me, in this town, there’s no way we’d make it if we didn’t get the business Jacob pulls in every night.”

“So that’s why he does that? He’s helping a friend?”

“Sure, part of it,” she shrugged, taking another swig. “But…”

Mary Beth slid off the couch, getting down on Robin’s level. “But…”

“I think it’s because of the mask. He didn’t do it before. I think he thinks that if everyone’s looking at that rock-hard body, no one will see his messed-up face.”

“Distraction.” Her mind reeled. Of all the coping mechanisms, that had to be one of the more
unique
ones she’d ever heard of. It was like he was hiding in plain sight.

“Absolutely. And you saw all those women.” Robin giggled. “You should have seen yourself gawk at him. He likes you, you know.”

“Wait, what?”

“He only undoes the top button, but today, he undid two. He was showing off for you.”

“Whoa.
Whoa
.” Mary Beth repeated, finishing her bottle as the image of his black-blue treasure trail ending at the horizontal line of thicker hair floated before her.
That
was flirting around these parts? “So how well do you, um, know him?”

Robin smiled dreamily. “He kissed me, really kissed me for my sixteenth birthday. I swear, I would have given it up to him right then and there in the middle of the party. But he just stepped back, tipped his hat and said, ‘Robin,’” her voice dropped into a reasonably good impression, “just like he does every night at the café.”

She wasn’t going to be jealous. That was an order. “He doesn’t do that in the winter, does he?”

“Any night it’s over sixty, he’s out there.” As Robin worked through the beer, her accent got a bit thicker, but it was a lovely sound. Completely different from the Midwest drawl Mary Beth was used to.

Only another three months to watch the show. She couldn’t help but wonder how many buttons he’d undo tomorrow. Was hoping for three being greedy? “Is he married?”

Robin smirked, her eyes knowing. “You like him too.”

“Let’s be honest. I like parts of him.” They both giggled. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“Which is why we’re here,” Robin replied, sweeping her arms out to encompass the entire living room crowded with boxes. “No, he’s not married. He dated this girl from the rez in high school pretty seriously, but she was a lot older than I was, so I didn’t really know her. I think she married someone else and they got off the rez. Maybe they moved to Pierre or something.” She shrugged.

“That’s it? He had a high school sweetheart, he kissed you when you turned sixteen and he puts on a striptease every night in the summer?”

“That’s it.” She got a greedy look in her eyes. “It’s almost like he’s uncharted territory just waiting to be discovered. God, I’d love to discover what he’s got in those pants.”

Mary Beth whistled, more to keep from saying something that her mother would have said than anything. “But back to the mask. If he didn’t get messed up in a bar brawl, how did it happen?”

“No one knows, except maybe that little albino.” Robin shrugged, getting up to fetch two more beers. “He was gone for a month or two, and one day he rides into town wearing the mask and leading her to school on that broken-down nag. No one had ever seen her before. Mrs. Browne said that he said she was his daughter.”

“So she’s a girl?”

“That’s Kip. She’s always wearing the same blue pants and a baggy T-shirt.” Robin twisted the caps off both bottles and handed one to Mary Beth. “It’s like he’s trying to hide her or something.”

“How do you hide an albino in the middle of Indian country?” But the moment she said it, she realized it was just like what he was doing with the mask and the show—hiding in plain sight.

Why would anyone do that?

“I don’t know. He won’t tell anyone where she came from or who her mother is—not even Ronny.”

“She just appeared out of thin air? How the hell does that make any sense?”

“It doesn’t,” Robin agreed. “She seems pretty slow too. Mrs. Browne says she just sits in her chair all day long, staring at whatever is in front of her.”

“Autistic?”

Robin nodded. “Mrs. Browne is a nice lady,” Robin went on. “She really cares about Kip, but I don’t think she understands that girl at all. At least she keeps Kip in the schoolhouse until Buck goes by.”

“Okay, that’s the next thing. What is up with Buck McGillis?”

“Mr. Faith Ridge? He’s a bad man, Dr. Hofstetter. You stay clear of him.”

Mary Beth looked at the suddenly gloomy young woman drinking her third beer far too fast. “How bad?”

“You heard the man. No one says no to Buck McGillis.”

“I can’t stay clear of him,” she moaned. “He’s the biggest client we have—he’s like three-fourths of our entire business.”

“He owns everything. He doesn’t own the town proper, but Faith Ridge is like a bowl in the middle of a huge ranch. He owns most of the land around the town on this side of the White Sandy.”

“Who owns the rest?”

“The Lakota tribe.” The word Lakota came out strong and proud, the accent even thicker as she stressed the
ko
. “We used to own everything, a long time ago,” Robin patiently explained. “The McGillis family has been chipping away at the edges of the reservation for decades, maybe longer.”

“So why does Jacob work for a slime like him?”

“To keep a Lakota hand on the land. Did you know that Jacob is the grandson of a powerful chief?”

Mary Beth shot her a smarmy look. “You didn’t tell me that until right now.”

“Well, a Plenty Holes has been running this tribe for a long time. Jacob is the first to step away from the Council.”

“Because of Buck? Why?”

“It’s not a big secret, although I wouldn’t say it to Buck’s face if I were you.” She winked. “Jacob’s a smart fellow. Went to college, got one of them—oh, you know—masters in something business—”

“An MBA? He’s got an MBA?” Indian perfection on a horse with an MBA. Almost too good to be true, she mused.

“Yeah,” Robin slurred, the beer finally working on her tiny body. “An MBA. He probably figures if he can just outsmart ol’ Buck there, he can steal the land back. He cut his hair and got hired. Worked up to manager real quick like too.”

Mary Beth wondered what was more dangerous—outsmarting Buck or working for him. “Okay, Robin, why aren’t you at college?”

“I wanna go. I really do. But Ronny needs me at the café. Our parents died a while back, and Randy and Ricky went off and married white chicks.” Mary Beth winced, but Robin kept going. “They don’t come back around much anymore, so it’s like it’s just me and Ronny. I really worry about the big lug.”

“Robin,” Mary Beth said, sounding a whole lot like her mother again, “you should go to college. If Jacob can do it, so can you.”

She beamed, her eyes blinking at slightly different speeds. “You really think?”

Okay, I’m just guessing, Mary Beth thought as she emphatically nodded. She knew next to nothing about Jacob Plenty Holes, and not a whole lot about the sloshing young woman sitting before her. But it was obvious that Robin wanted to go, and who was she not to help her?

“Well,” she murmured into her beer, “I do have the forms for Sinte Gleska University.”

It sounded tribal. Not Ivy League, Mary Beth mused, but not everyone needed Ivy League in this world. “Perfect. I’ll help you fill them out.”

“Really?” Her eyes popped wide open in excitement. “You will?”

“Sure. That’s what big-sister types do. We nag little-sister types until they do what we think they should.”

“Deal.” Robin grinned.

This was the Robin who had watched Jacob’s show, humming in pleasure next to her. But there was that other Robin, the one who’d bolted in terror the moment one Buck McGillis had showed up. “Robin,” she asked the goofily grinning young woman, “why did you bring me dessert tonight?”

The grin died as she got up and got the last beer, swigging half of it before she sat back down. “No one says no to Buck McGillis,” she said, her eyes scrunched up tight.

No one says no to Brian Greevy
. The words slipped out of the small box in her mind where she kept them locked away, and she remembered the way he’d said it as he backhanded her. She’d been sixteen when she’d come home from a date to find Skeevy Greevy alone in the house, Mom out buying more beer for him. He’d pinned her down and hit her, but Mary Beth had refused to go down without a fight. She’d kneed him in the crotch and then done it again, just for good measure, before she’d gotten a kitchen knife and called 911.

She’d gotten rid of Skeevy Greevy. Mom had finally found the backbone to leave him after that. They’d bounced around for a while before Mom had gotten a job as a nurse and finally got her life back under control—all because Mary Beth had dared to say no to Skeevy Greevy.

Mary Beth had thought that she’d left all that behind her. But now?
Jesus
,
what the hell have I gotten myself into here
?

Robin was still sitting there, her eyes shut. Mary Beth’s heart broke for her. Mary Beth might have fought her way out of a shitty situation, but Robin hadn’t been able to. That much was clear. “Jacob came by to do the show and saw the bruises under the makeup. He’s a smart fellow. You’ll like him a lot,” she repeated. “He figured what had happened, and since then he’s kind of kept an eye on me. God, I wish he didn’t look at me like I was his kid sister.” She took another drink.