Kitabı oku: «The Brands of Montana»

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Extract

Copyright

Chapter One

Clint McAllister heard the familiar click of a bullet being chambered. He’d slept just like a baby once he’d polished off a fifth of tequila, and he’d awakened with a well-deserved hangover. Groggy, irritated, with a massive headache, he’d stumbled over to the edge of the wooded area just beyond his campsite to relieve himself. The last thing he’d expected was to get caught with his pants unzipped, barefoot and without his revolver. Damn rotten luck.

“Put your hands up and turn around nice and slow.” Taylor Brand stood confident in the “ready” stance she had learned during concealed-weapon training. Like everything in her life, she had worked hard to be first in her class.

“Just calm down...” The cowboy lifted his left hand up but moved his right hand down to his zipper.

“Keep your hands where I can see them!” Taylor ordered, her voice clear, firm and calm. “Turn around...do it now!”

The stranger quickly lifted his right hand back up. “Look...unless you want a show, I’ve gotta zip it up before I face you. All right?”

“Do it quick.” Taylor told him. “Then turn around.”

The man tucked himself in and zipped up quickly, per the lady’s orders. His belt buckle still undone, his button-down shirt still completely unbuttoned, the cowboy raised his hands above his head and turned around slowly.

“Why are you following me?” Taylor demanded with her revolver aimed at the man’s chest.

“Boss’s orders.” The man told her, keeping his eye on the flat black barrel of her gun. “Your uncle told me to follow you, make sure you’re safe, and that’s what I’m doin’.”

Taylor stared hard at the unkempt cowboy with her hands steady on the gun. She was only one full day into her trek up to the Continental Divide. It was true that she had forgotten a lot about being in the wilderness over the years, but she had traveled all over the world for business and she had developed a heightened sense of awareness.

Once she was certain she was being followed, she had waited until the first light of morning, made a wide circle back and was able to sneak up on the cowboy much more easily than she had anticipated. The empty liquor bottle she had spotted near the cowboy’s gear most likely explained how simple it had been to ambush him—he was a drinker.

“You work at Bent Tree?” she asked him.

The cowboy gave a slight nod of his head. Now that she was getting a better look at him, he did look familiar. She remembered a cowboy who had tipped his hat to her the first day she had arrived at her uncle’s ranch. He’d been wearing a sweat-soaked chambray shirt, a black cowboy hat and boots caked with mud and manure. But just because she could place him at Bent Tree didn’t mean that he was following her on her uncle’s orders. Uncle Hank hadn’t mentioned one word of this to her before she had headed out.

“I’m lowerin’ my arms, lady. You got that?” the cowboy asked. For a man staring down the barrel of a gun, he seemed to have the mistaken impression that he was in charge of this encounter.

The man’s collar-length dark hair was unruly from the night; his face had been unshaven for several days. She wasn’t overly impressed with his height or the jailhouse tattoos on his exposed skin, but he was surprisingly fit from the look of his defined chest and shredded abs. His eyes were squinty and bloodshot, and he was obviously hungover. If he had been her employee, she would have fired him on the spot.

“And if you don’t plan on shootin’ me, you’d best holster that weapon,” the cowboy told her.

“I haven’t decided not to shoot you.” The man’s arrogance wasn’t unexpected—he was a cowboy.

Clint watched her through sore, narrowed eyes while he buttoned up his shirt. Getting caught with his pants down by Hank’s niece had sobered him up quick enough. And he didn’t like having that gun pointed at him.

“Lady—do you even know how to shoot that gun?” Clint unzipped his jeans a little so he could tuck his shirt in.

“I’m a crack shot.” she answered him. “Now, get your hands back where I can see them!”

Clint heard the slightest squeak in Taylor’s voice when she issued the command. She didn’t want him to know it, but she was rattled. And a rattled woman with a gun aimed at his chest didn’t sound like a good time.

“Look...” Clint tucked in his shirt. “You need to get on the horn to your uncle. Convince him that you don’t need me and you’ll be seein’ the hind end of my horse before you can say Gucci.”

Clint finished tucking in his shirt, zipped up his pants, buckled his belt buckle, and then pointed to the campsite.

“Now—I’m going over there...if you shoot me, you’d better do a good job. If you just graze me, you’re gonna regret it...”

“What’s your name?” she asked tersely. Clearly she had lost control over this situation. A phone call to her uncle was the next logical step.

“Clint.” The cowboy settled his hat on his head and adjusted the brim. “Clint McAllister.”

There was a bite in his tone and rigidness in his body she didn’t like at all. He was an ill-mannered man, too jagged around the edges for her taste.

“Just stay put until I talk to my uncle,” Taylor ordered when Clint started to walk over to where his horse was tethered, his saddle hoisted onto his narrow hip.

“Take it easy.” He shook his head in frustration.

This was a rotten beginning to an already lousy day.

“You take it easy.” Taylor snapped, but she holstered her weapon.

“Uncle Hank!” The connection was bad on her end. “It’s Taylor...can you hear me?”

“I can hear you...”

“I can barely hear you...but, listen... I’ve got some guy named Clint following me and he says he’s under orders from you...is that true, or should I shoot him?”

“I’d rather you not shoot him, Taylor.” Hank told her. “He’d be a hard one to replace.”

Taylor glanced quickly at Clint’s back—he wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he was listening to every word.

“Uncle Hank—I told you that I needed to make this trip on my own.”

She had taken a leave of absence from her job so she could ride the Continental Divide. Her plan was to ride a section of the divide alone; she’d never imagined it any other way.

“Negative,” Hank said in a brusque tone that she had heard many times in her life. Her uncle was a big man, physically as well as in the world of ranching, and he wasn’t fond of explaining his decisions.

Clint turned around and they locked eyes for the briefest moment before they both broke the connection.

Taylor lowered her voice. “Uncle Hank—I don’t want this. This wasn’t part of my plan.”

“Plans change.” Hank told her in a no-nonsense manner. “Take Clint with you or make a U-turn and come on back to the ranch.”

Taylor moved farther away from her cowboy bodyguard. “Did Dad call you? Is that it? Because if he did, let me assure you...”

“Your dad didn’t call me—my brother hasn’t bothered to call me in years, so I don’t expect him to start now.”

Hank was her father’s older brother. When their father, her grandfather, died, a disagreement about the validity of the will sparked a family feud that had lasted for most of her adult life.

“Uncle Hank.” She sounded like a child beseeching a parent. “Please. This is really important to me.”

“You are really important to me, Taylor. I was wrong to go along with your cockamamie idea in the first place. I’ve come to my senses now, and I’m not changing my mind. So, what’s it gonna be?”

“I have to do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t turn back now.”

“Come again?”

More loudly, she repeated. “I can’t turn back now.”

Not after she had come this far—farther than anyone in her life, including her, thought that she would go.

“It’s better this way,” her uncle reassured her.

It was pointless to disagree, so she didn’t bother to put her energy into a lost cause.

“And Taylor?”

“Yes?” She didn’t try to hide the disappointment.

“Clint knows the divide like the back of his hand—and I trust him.”

Clint didn’t have to hear the conversation to know that it wasn’t swinging in Taylor’s favor. Her body language—hunched, tense shoulders and lowered head—said it all. Which meant that he was still on the hook to babysit a woman who looked as if she’d be more comfortable getting pampered in a ritzy spa than riding the divide on horseback. She didn’t make sense to him, and he wasn’t keen on things that didn’t make sense.

“Everything squared away?” Clint asked as he swung his saddle onto the back of his sturdily built buckskin quarter horse.

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other.” Taylor swatted a fly away from her face. “I don’t know what possessed my uncle to change his mind at the eleventh hour—I don’t need a babysitter.”

Clint reached beneath his horse’s belly to grab the girth. “I ain’t no babysitter.”

Taylor cringed at the way in which Clint colorfully put a sentence together. She was an English major in college. Syntax was always her first love and double negatives made her nuts. Even though he’d managed to butcher the English language with a four-word sentence, she couldn’t deny one thing: the cowboy didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted him. They were both in the same rotten boat. And by the looks of him, there was a chance he could be persuaded...

“You could wait here for me. No one has to know,” she suggested casually. Then, when she had his attention, she sweetened the pot. “I could pay you.”

The cowboy fished a pack of unfiltered cigarettes from his front pocket and knocked one out of the pack with his hand. “That’s not gonna happen, lady.”

He needed this job. He was trying to dig himself out of a mighty deep financial hole and he wasn’t about to bite the Hank Brand hand that was currently feeding him. If he took Taylor’s money, it would no doubt be short-term gain with long-term negative consequences.

Before he put the cigarette in his mouth to light it, he offered Taylor a suggestion of his own. “You could head on back to Bent Tree and save us the hassle.”

“I’m not going back.” Taylor was firm in her response. It was easy for her uncle and this cowboy-for-hire to toss this suggestion around as if it was nothing. To them it was nothing. They had no idea what she had gone through or how much she’d given up to get to this leg of her journey. And, to her, this trek to the Continental Divide had become everything.

Clint took a drag off of his cigarette. He shook his head and when he spoke, curls of white smoke streamed out of his nose and mouth.

“Well, then...it looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

She felt tears of frustration and anger well up behind her eyes. She didn’t typically cry when she was sad—she cried when she was mad as hell. She hated Clint for not being corruptible. She pushed the tears down; they were useless to her and she needed every ounce of her energy reserve to spend another day in the saddle.

“I’ll hang back.” Clint put his cigarette out on the tip of the bottom of his boot before he tossed it into the cold fire pit. “That’s the best I can do.”

Taylor stared at the wrangler for a moment longer. She had already burned too much daylight dealing with an issue that simply wasn’t going to resolve in her favor.

“I’m afraid that you’re best isn’t good enough, Mr. McAllister.”

She had been a vice president at a large bank for many years and knew when a negotiation was over. She didn’t have anything left to say to the cowboy, so she headed back up the hill to where she had stayed for the night and broke camp as quickly as she could.

Her uncle had provided her with a small, sure-footed mare named Honey and an experienced pack mule named Easy Does It. It didn’t take her long to break camp, pack up her belongings and get ready for the day’s ride.

Prior to leaving Chicago for Montana, she had moved all of the furniture in her formal living room out of the way so she could set up a practice campsite. She read, and then reread, all of the manuals that came with her new camping gear, and she had even slept inside of the tent for several weeks to get used to sleeping on the ground.

All of her practice and preparation had paid off—she could set up and break camp with relative ease. Her uncle had personally shown her how to pack Easy’s load properly and refreshed her memory on the correct way to tack a horse. All in all, she was pretty proud of her ability.

But there was one giant fly in her ointment: mounting her horse.

She was short, she had stubby legs and she certainly wasn’t as limber as she’d been in her teens. It was a major chore to get her foot into the stirrup, but once that was accomplished she didn’t have enough strength to get her bottom-heavy body into the saddle. The only way she could mount up was to find a log or a stump to stand on and even then it wasn’t a guarantee. She knew that this was a weakness that needed to be overcome, because if she couldn’t find a makeshift mounting block one day, she would be stuck on the ground. Not good.

She led Honey over to a fallen tree she had scoped out the night before, tightened the girth and lengthened the stirrup. Honey was surefooted, that couldn’t be denied, but she was also horrible to mount. The mare was frisky from the briskness of the morning air and she danced sideways away from the log right when Taylor had managed to leverage her foot into the stirrup.

“Whoa!” Her foot was caught in the stirrup and pulled her leg forward while she wobbled precariously on the log. She ended up in a half-split position, grabbing urgently to unhook her foot from the stirrup.

“Honey, whoa!” Taylor unhooked her foot just in time to stop herself from falling forward.

That could have ended in a serious injury, and she was lucky it hadn’t. The muscles on the inside of her right thigh, already tender from a day in the saddle, had been stretched beyond their limit during that failed attempt to mount her steed.

Taylor clutched the inside of her right thigh. “Ah!”

She rubbed the muscle to stop it from contracting. But the minute she let go of that part of her body, she noticed that her left hip joint was aching.

Honey was standing quietly, perfectly still, a few feet away.

“Woman to woman, Honey—give a sister a break, okay?”

Taylor walked Honey in a semicircle and halted her right next to the log. Three more attempts and three more semicircles later, Taylor was tempted to just start walking until she found a better place to mount. It was at that moment that Clint rode into the clearing, dismounted and silently stood on Honey’s right side to stop her from moving away from the log. The cowboy adjusted her reins so the right rein was shorter, showing Taylor, without verbalizing it, how to keep the horse from moving away from her.

Once she was in the saddle he checked the tightness of her girth and the length of her stirrups. When he was done with his inspection, he led the mule over to her and handed her the lead rope.

Their eyes met for the briefest of moments, for the second time that morning, but this time she could see that his eyes were the color of the blue Montana sky. Satisfied that she was squared away, he mounted his horse and disappeared into the trees beyond her campsite.

It pained her to admit it—it really did. Clint had just gone a long way to prove his value on this trek. She hadn’t said thank you, and he hadn’t expected it. He’d done what her uncle had told him to do—watch out for her. And, then, as good as his word, he’d disappeared into the thick wall of brush and trees.

With a cluck of her tongue and a tug on the lead rope that was hooked to the mule’s harness, Taylor started guiding the mare toward the trail. She was still on her uncle’s land—Bent Tree sprawled out across thousands of acres abutting the Continental Divide. She’d make it to one more designated campsite on this trail, a campsite used by the Brand family for generations, and then she’d finally reach the mouth of the Continental Divide trail. Would the moment be exactly as she had dreamed it so many times since she was a teenager? She could hardly wait to find out.

* * *

It was simply a fact that riding on horseback all day had been much easier, and much more romantic, in her imagination than in reality. The last time she had ridden, she had been in her twenties. Years later, and now that she was pushing forty, her body wasn’t as pliable or cooperative as it once been. She was chaffed in private places, her hip joints ached, her leg muscles ached, her back ached and for some reason, her neck was stiff, too.

She had used every psychological trick and pep talk she could think of to push through the pain, stay in the saddle and make it to the next campsite. When she finally reached a landmark, a steep hill on the trail, that let her know she was nearly there, Taylor tightened her grip on the lead rope and grabbed the saddle horn in order to stop herself from flying backward in the saddle when Honey galloped up the steep hill.

At the top was a grassy plateau perfect for camping. Grateful that she had accomplished her goal, she couldn’t stand to be in the saddle for one more minute. She groaned loudly as she swung her shaking leg over her horse’s rump. She unhooked her foot from the stirrup and slid, ungracefully, gratefully to solid ground. She winced as she walked—a new blister had formed over the old blister on the back of her right heel. But, she didn’t care. She had succeeded! She had triumphed!

Taylor limped her way through the quick camping routine she had established for herself, and then once she was satisfied with her situation she backtracked on foot to go find Clint. It was ridiculous to try to pretend she was alone when she wasn’t, in fact, alone. She had tried all day long and it hadn’t worked. She’d never been good at pretending.

“What’s up?” Clint was surprised, and not pleased, to see her come around the corner. He twisted the top back onto the glass bottle he had in his hand before he tucked it back into his saddlebag.

“We may as well make camp together.”

Clint hadn’t unpacked his gear or unsaddled his horse. “That’s what you want?”

It wasn’t. But it was practical. She had always been, until recently at least, a very practical woman.

“It’s practical,” she told him. “It’s hard for you to babysit me from way down here.”

Clint nodded his head after a bit and then fell in beside her on foot instead of remounting. The silence between them was uncomfortable for Taylor—and when she was uncomfortable, she tended to talk. It was a bad habit she’d never truly been able to break no matter how many times her ex-husband complained about it.

“You must have drawn the short straw to get this gig.”

No response.

“My entire family thinks I’ve gone off the deep end.”

“Have you?”

“Gone off the deep end?” Taylor asked with a labored breath. She had exchanged her gym membership for a frequent customer card at the local bakery over a year ago. She had packed on the pounds and her cardio was at an all-time low. This trip was either going to break her or help her snap the heck out of it!

Clint nodded. She could see by the look on his face that the question wasn’t sarcastic or rhetorical—he genuinely wanted to know if he was traveling with a loony bird.

Perhaps it wasn’t wise to be so forthcoming with the cowboy, but she was tired of living a dishonest life. She’d lived with lies in her marriage—always hiding who she really was in order to fit some impossible standard of the “perfect wife.” So she told Clint the truth.

“I’m not sure.” Taylor’s brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Maybe.”