“Take Your Boots Off,” AJ Demanded. “Then Crawl Inside My Sleeping Bag.

“We’re going to pool our warmth.”

Jacquelyn started to shake her head.

“Look,” he insisted, “believe me, I’m not making a pass at you. When I do that, I don’t bother with tricks. But we could be in this cavern for some time yet, and you’re not freezing to death on my watch. Now stow the modesty and crawl in here.”

“Fine,” she snapped as she wiggled into the sleeping bag. “Besides, we’ve got a dozen layers of clothing between us.”

Already she was warmer. But he was so close. And so was the scent of him—dark, male and enticing. Dangerous….

Dear Reader,

Silhouette is celebrating its 20th anniversary throughout 2000! So, to usher in the first summer of the millennium, why not indulge yourself with six powerful, passionate, provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire?

Jackie Merritt returns to Desire with a MAN OF THE MONTH who’s Tough To Tame. Enjoy the sparks that fly between a rugged ranch manager and the feisty lady who turns his world upside down! Another wonderful romance from RITA Award winner Caroline Cross is in store for you this month with The Rancher and the Nanny, in which a rags-to-riches hero learns trust and love from the riches-to-rags woman who cares for his secret child.

Watch for Meagan McKinney’s The Cowboy Meets His Match—an octogenarian matchmaker sets up an ice-princess heiress with a virile rodeo star. The Desire theme promotion THE BABY BANK, about sperm-bank client heroines who find love unexpectedly, concludes with Susan Crosby’s The Baby Gift. Wonderful newcomer Sheri WhiteFeather offers another irresistible Native American hero with Cheyenne Dad. And Kate Little’s hero reunites with his lost love in a marriage of convenience to save her from financial ruin in The Determined Groom.

So come join in the celebration and start your summer off on the supersensual side—by reading all six of these tantalizing Desire books!

Enjoy!

Joan Marlow Golan

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

The Cowboy Meets His Match
Meagan McKinney

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MEAGAN MCKINNEY

is the author of over a dozen novels of hardcover and paperback historical and contemporary women’s fiction. In addition to romance, she likes to inject mystery and thriller elements into her work. Currently she lives in the Garden District of New Orleans with her two young sons, two very self-entitled cats and a crazy red mutt. Her favorite hobbies are traveling to the Arctic and, of course, reading!

Contents

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

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

One

“Jacquelyn, it’s early Monday morning, and this is Hazel McCallum calling, dear. I have a…slightly unusual request to make of you. The last time you were here, it seems we got a bit sidetracked from your interview about Jake. It might be better if we meet at my home again. Please call at your convenience to arrange a time.”

Jacquelyn Rousseaux hit the rewind button on the answering machine, feeling heat rise into her face.

Last time we got a bit sidetracked. My God, was that a polite understatement!

Jacquelyn still felt mortified for her uncharacteristic lack of restraint. Back in Atlanta, even those who had known her for years often learned little about her private life, yet, once she and Hazel had gotten to talking about life and hopes and dreams, she found she’d opened up like a floodgate to the older woman, who was practically a stranger. Jacquelyn had talked about the most personal and humiliating details of her life as if it were a catharsis.

She swept that unpleasant memory away, glancing at an old case clock in the back corner. It had kept near-perfect time in the office of the town’s newspaper, the Mystery Gazette, since 1890.

Almost 10 a.m. She returned Hazel’s call and quickly arranged to meet the Matriarch of Mystery, as Jacquelyn had secretly dubbed the famous cattle baroness, at 1 p.m. When she pressed Hazel for more information about that “slightly unusual request,” the cagey old dame told her only, “You’ll find out soon enough.”

A pleasant-looking, middle-aged woman in a beige pantsuit stepped out of a Plexiglas cubicle at the front of the office. Managing Editor, Bonnie Lofton, held a pica pole in one hand, an X-Acto blade in the other. The Gazette was one of the last weekly newspapers in the country that was not computer composed. Bonnie laid out each offset-press page by hand for a distinctly “old-time” look, in the spirit of Mystery’s upcoming sesquicentennial.

“Morning, Jacquelyn,” Bonnie greeted her summer staffer. “Was that Hazel’s voice I just heard?”

“None other. I already called her back. She wants to see me again. Won’t tell me why, either. Not even a hint.”

“Uh-huh, that’s Hazel, all right. Sometimes she’s Mystery’s biggest mystery. Her heart’s so generous, that woman won’t let one person in this valley ever go cold or hungry. But she’s the boss, and she expects everybody to know it.”

“I hope it’s not some problem with the last article I wrote,” Jacquelyn said worriedly. “I verified all the quotes and double-checked the facts.”

Bonnie gave a Gaelic wave of dismissal. “Oh, pouf! Are you kidding? You’re the best feature writer we ever under-paid. I’ll bet you anything your series on Jake McCallum ends up winning an award. Not even three years out of journalism school, and you already compose copy like a wire-service pro.”

“Oh, right. I’ll bet you say that to all the boss’s kids.”

Bonnie wagged the pica pole at her. “Your old man’s not the boss, kiddo, I am. He’s the owner, by a quirk of corporate mergers, of this and a dozen other newspapers he probably doesn’t ever read. I don’t have to suck up to him or his kids. But face it, girl—you didn’t have to come here and work for us, yet you’ve proven you’re a journalist tried and true now. You’re genuinely talented, and talent’s a blessing nobody’s money can buy.”

Jacquelyn smiled. She was pleased by Bonnie’s firm but kind words. Bonnie, like many of the native Montanans Jacquelyn had met during her summer idylls in Mystery, was more reserved and private than folks back in Atlanta. Compliments were familiar verbal rituals in the South; out West, however, one earned and treasured them.

But talent, Jacquelyn thought with an inner stab of despair, is only one dimension of personality. For all her looks and education and “correct upbringing,” she was discovering it took more, so much more, to win at life—and love.

Joe’s words came back to her, cruel and haunting, from that gray day in Atlanta. I’m sorry, Jackie, but it’s just not my fault you’re solid ice from the neck down. Gina is everything you can’t seem to be.

With two brief sentences, her fiance left her for the woman she had trusted most. She suddenly felt a trembling heat behind her eyelids. For a panicky moment she feared she was going to lose it and cry right in front of her editor. With a superhuman effort she instead willed her face into a bright smile.

“Well, talent or no, Mystery’s sesquicentennial has become Hazel’s obsession. The last story I wrote on her great-grandfather Jake was reprinted upstate, and they got some dates mixed up. Hazel practically had a cow.”

Bonnie gave her a rueful grin. “I can see why she’s touchy about her family name. It will die with her, you know. That naturally makes her urgent to leave an accurate record.”

“The last McCallum,” Jacquelyn said softly. “I chickened out when I tried to ask her why. I mean, I know her husband was killed in a car wreck near Lewistown when she was still young. But why didn’t she remarry?”

Bonnie smiled. “You may be smart as the dickens and pretty as four aces, but you still don’t understand the essence of Hazel McCallum. The tougher Westerners are, the deeper they feel things. For women like Hazel, true love comes once, and it comes forever.”

Bonnie had only meant to explain, not wound. But Jacquelyn couldn’t help filtering Bonnie’s remark through the harsh lens of recent events back in Atlanta. Sure you’ve got brains and looks, Rousseaux, she told herself. But you’re an ice princess—so much of one that your own boyfriend dumped you for your own so-called best friend.

Bonnie seemed to note the shadow that crossed her face. “Open mouth, insert foot,” Bonnie apologized, touching Jacquelyn’s shoulder in a gesture of sympathy. “I’m sorry, hon. Look, I’m all caught up on my work right now. Wanna have a cup of coffee and just shoot the breeze?”

In her secret heart of hearts, Jacquelyn welcomed Bonnie’s attempt at friendship. For years she had sensed a “secret self” within her who was desperately yearning to thaw those layers of ice. But that secret self simply was not strong enough to endure the brutal slings and arrows of romantic fortune.

Joe and Gina had hurt her at the very core of her being, had shaken not only her world but her very soul. And the only way Jacquelyn knew how to deal with such trauma was to cover it over with a layer of frost—numbing it, yes, but also leaving it fully intact. That’s precisely how Stephanie Rousseaux had taught her daughter to cope—as she herself endured a loveless marriage to Jacquelyn’s cruel, critical father.

So even as her heart secretly responded to Bonnie’s warmth, Jacquelyn knew her survival reflexes would chill the woman out.

“Thanks, Bonnie, but I’d better not. If I’m going to make the Wednesday deadline with this next installment, I’d better get to work.”

“Okay, busy lady. But the offer’s open.”

Bonnie watched her from concerned eyes. Then she added, “You know what else? When he was young, my grandpa rode for Jake McCallum on the Lazy M spread. Every man who rode for Jake could quote the old man’s favorite saying. ‘The best way to cure a boil is to lance it.”’

“All right, then, A.J.,” Hazel confirmed, “I’ll see you around, say, two o’clock this afternoon at my place? Good. I can always count on you Clayburn men, can’t I? It shouldn’t take too long.”

Hazel still used the stodgy, old black phones from the fifties. She hung the handset back in its cradle, a determined smile smoothing out the lines around her mouth.

She strolled, still lost in thought, toward a big bay window in the parlor’s north wall. At seventy-five, she considered herself still young. Every morning she arose, twisted her long, white hair into the ever-present chignon at the back of her neck and got going, running the enormous ranch from her cell phone and Jake’s original rolltop desk. She was still quite active, too, though a long succession of cattle-country winters had left her “a little rusted in the hinges,” as she often said, dismissing the arthritis in her joints.

There was still a lot of life in her that she meant to live.

But…

Halting in the window bay, she parted the curtains and the lace liners with both hands to gaze outside. Beyond the hay-raked pastures of the Lazy M, ragged tatters of cloud drifted across a late-morning sky the pure blue color of a gas flame. The lower slopes of the mountains surrounding Mystery Valley bristled with conifers and white sycamores. Higher up, the slopes were wooded only in the gulches, rising in ascending folds to granite points draped in white ermine.

Looking at the familiar yet still-stunning view made Hazel think about Jacquelyn Rousseaux and the conversation they’d had during her interview.

The girl had admitted being hurt, betrayed, deeply disillusioned. She honestly believed that love had given her the permanent go-by. Hazel had seen all that when Jacquelyn opened up to her last week. But Hazel also recognized how deeply, how desperately the young woman wanted to believe again in the old dreams, the “corny” ideals about love, men and life.

Toward that very end, among others, Hazel had a plan. She wanted, more than anything else, to see Mystery go on being the kind of town it was always meant to be. Rodeo star and dear family friend, A. J. Clayburn, fit the bill exactly; he’d been out to stud for too many years without marrying and settling down. Hazel knew full well why the cowboy’s heart was frozen, but when Jacquelyn Rousseaux began to open up to her in the interview, Hazel realized it was time the cowboy’s heart got to melting. And she’d sat looking at the cool, platinum-haired beauty who was just the one to do it.

The time was right. Hazel wasn’t getting any younger or more energetic. And she had to face the hard facts: she was the last McCallum, and she would leave no line behind her. Only one thing could keep Mystery from obliteration under an influx of careless investors and outsiders like Jacquelyn’s father, the developer Eric Rousseaux: new blood had to be carefully, passionately mixed with old. She meant to create new families from the ones already committed to the town.

Simply put, she had made a list of good folks in Mystery who needed hitching up. Despite being long past retirement age, Hazel, matriarch of all the land as far as the eye could see, was now taking on a second career—matchmaking. And one of her first clients was none other than the troubled beauty who wrote for the town newspaper.

Still, Hazel fretted about the prospects for success in Jacquelyn’s case. If someone wanted to know how a young woman might likely turn out in life, they had only to look at her mother. And Hazel had seen the abject hopelessness in the eyes of Stephanie Rousseaux, who summered in Mystery with Jacquelyn. Not exactly the ideal role model for a daughter reeling from emotional disaster.

But the plan was much bigger than Jacquelyn Rousseaux, even though it began with her. Hazel’s fires might be banked, but not her big ambition. Her idea, in fact, was literally as big as an entire town.

Again her Prussian-blue eyes sought those majestic white peaks on the horizon. For her plan to work, Hazel needed women to match those mountains. Strong, beautiful, proud, enduring women. Women just like Jacquelyn Rousseaux, broken heart, Southern drawl, disillusionment and all.

Or am I wrong this time, Hazel wondered. Mistaking hope for reality, a plow horse for a racer?

She would find out in about three hours, when Jacquelyn finally understood what the older woman expected her to do.

Two

“Jake wasn’t an educated man,” Hazel confided to Jacquelyn. “Swore like a trooper, when he thought there were no women or children nearby to hear him. Used to joke that he spoke only two languages—American and cussing. But he sure did have what they call money smarts.”

The two women sat near each other in the parlor’s nineteenth-century gilt chairs. Jacquelyn’s microcassette recorder included a tiny but powerful high-ambience remote microphone, so she could tape Hazel without rudely shoving anything into her face.

“Before he died,” Hazel resumed, “Jake even became part owner in the Comstock Lode. That was a rich deposit of silver and gold ore discovered by his old partner, Henry T. P. Comstock, near Virginia City, Nevada. Jake’s side ventures eventually allowed my grandpa to be the first cattleman in these northern ranges to develop Shorthorn and Hereford breeds. Better meat than the Longhorn stock from the Texas ranges. Sold higher, too.”

While Hazel spoke, Jacquelyn again admired Mystery Valley’s oldest and still finest ranch house. Built in the 1880s, it had replaced the original settlers’ cabin.

Its hand-hewn hemlock beams had been transported cross-country by cumbersome freight wagons. Other materials, too, had been selected to reflect success, not frontier frugality: a carved cherrywood staircase, hard-maple flooring, fireplaces manteled with blood onyx, marble and slate. On the wall behind Hazel, bright buffalo-hide shields flanked a beautiful wash drawing in a gold scrollwork frame. It depicted a small herd of Shorthorns splashing across a river, whipping the water to spray.

“Jake was a tough man,” Hazel reminisced in her deep, still-vibrant voice. “He insisted that all his children be educated, even his daughters, which was unusual in his day. That included my grandma, his daughter Mystery.”

Hazel fell silent, thoughtfully studying her young interviewer.

Jacquelyn felt as if she towered over the petite older woman, even seated, though she was only five-four. She waited for the next goldmine of information and was embarrassed to find the conversation again focused on her.

“You know I don’t cotton to short hair on women, but I think I like yours. In my day we’d call your hair color platinum. Marilyn-Monroe platinum. Quite glamorous. And I do believe your eyes are sea-green, aren’t they?”

Puzzled at the inspection, Jacquelyn quickly thumbed off the recorder. Something in the old girl’s determined visage signaled that the interview part of the visit was over. She supposed they were going to get around to the “slightly unusual request.”

“You know, Jacquelyn, at my age a woman can’t help warming her hands at the fire of the past. But while we should always recall our dead, this world belongs to the living.”

Jacquelyn raised an interrogatory eyebrow, waiting for more. “Yes?” she encouraged.

But Hazel kept her waiting, as if she was mulling possible explanations for the old matriarch’s secret.

Finally she said, “You told me last time that you want to capture the true feel of Jake’s pioneer experience, remember?”

“Of course. I hoped my articles were doing that.”

“Your articles are wonderful, dear. Quite honestly, I expected the usual twaddle and bunkum about grizzled pioneers. But you’ve captured the essence of Jake McCallum better than any other writer who’s tried. And many have.”

Hazel snatched up a copy of last week’s Mystery Gazette from a pedestal stand beside her chair.

“‘Jake McCallum,”’ she read out loud, “‘was a man who went a great distance while others were still debating whether to leave today or tomorrow.”’

The corners of her eyes crinkled deeply when Hazel laughed. “Jacquelyn, you do understand that old rascal’s basic nature. But for your own sake I want you to go that great distance, too. Or at least part of it. The important part.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“I’d like you to actually repeat Jake’s original journey. Not the entire trip, of course. As you already know, his original plan was to travel from his home in St. Louis all the way north to the Yukon to mine for gold.”

Jacquelyn smiled. “Yes. Until he was waylaid in a beautiful Montana valley to help a rancher with some straying cattle, right?”

“Right as rain. Because that rancher had a pretty daughter of marrying age named Libbie. One look at her, and Jake wrote back home that he was settling in Montana. The part of his journey that Jake’s journal mentions most was the hard, but beautiful, five-day ride through the mountains and Eagle Pass to this valley. Called McCallum’s Trace to this day.”

“And that’s the part of the journey you’d like me to make?” Jacquelyn mulled the odd suggestion for a few moments. Well, so what if it was a bit…eccentric of Hazel to suggest it? After all, Jacquelyn didn’t want to be one of those journalists who never left the office to find a story. And it really was an important piece of American history.

“All right,” she finally agreed, her face brightening. “It sounds like fun. My family has a Hummer at the summer lodge here that usually just sits in the garage. I’ll borrow it. I could also—what?”

She broke off, confused at the way Hazel was shaking her head to silence her.

“Jacquelyn, we’re talking about the ‘true feel,’ remember? Your own words. My lands, Jake didn’t cross those high-altitude passes in a Hummer—nor was there a highway, just an old Sioux Indian game trail. That’s still all there is up there.”

Jacquelyn’s jaw dropped slightly, and her eyes widened. “Hazel. You want me to ride across the original trace? Five days on horseback?”

“Well, you do ride, don’t you? I’ve seen you in your fancy riding britches. And there’s horses at your place.”

“Well…yes, I ride. But—”

Hazel dismissed her objections with a careless wave. “I rode that trail myself when I was about your age. Never in winter, of course, as Jake did. In August, just like you’ll be doing. Gets a bit nippy at night, especially up in Eagle Pass. Sure, you might even see some snow, but it’s quite exhilarating.”

“Hazel, you simply don’t understand. I ride, yes. But it’s the English style I learned at boarding school. You know—dressage, preparation for show jumping, things like disciplined turns and reverses, fancy jumps and tricky hurdles. Not trail riding in rugged mountains. Hazel, I—that is, I’ve never even been a Girl Scout. I wouldn’t know the most basic—”

“Oh, all your objections are just pee doodles,” Hazel scoffed, her eyes cutting to an ormolu clock on the mantel. “Because you’re going to have the perfect guide for this little trek.”

“Guide?” Jacquelyn repeated, immediately feeling like a parrot.

“I should say! None other than Mystery’s own world-champion saddle-bronc rider, A. J. Clayburn.”

Hazel opened up a photo album lying on the pedestal table and passed it over to her visitor. “This is A. J. at the rodeo at the Calgary Stampede, accepting his World Cup. One of the proudest days in Mystery’s recent memory.”

Jacquelyn took in gunmetal-blue eyes as direct as a Remington, an unruly thatch of thick, brown hair that touched his collar. The scornful twist to the mouth irritated her immediately. The handsome man in this photo radiated the easy calm and confidence, bordering on arrogance, of men who were good at handling animals—and thought the talent translated to women, as well.

“You’ve seen him around town, no doubt?” Hazel inquired.

Jacquelyn nodded, still too numb and confused by all this to speak. She had seen him around town, all right. How could anyone miss those metallic eyes and his wide-shouldered, slim-hipped frame? A. J. Clayburn was straight off the cover of a Western novel—but whether the hero or the bad guy, she wasn’t sure. Still, there was no mistaking the living, breathing personification of a great American myth.

But there was no way Hazel could expect her to travel McCallum’s Trace with this man. It was like putting a duck in the desert. He was utterly foreign to Jacquelyn’s genteel, urban world, and vice versa.

Hazel seemed to read some of these thoughts in her visitor’s stunned face.

“Believe me, honey,” she assured, taking the photo album back from her. “You’ll quickly learn to appreciate A.J.’s qualities. He’s what we Western gals like to call an ‘unflighty’ man. Nowadays, of course, that’s not what it once was. I don’t recall any flighty men who took Omaha Beach.”

“Hazel, I just don’t think—”

“Generally,” Hazel nattered on blithely, cutting her off, “when he’s not on the rodeo circuit, you’ll find A.J. perched on the top board of a corral somewhere in the valley.”

“Hazel, honestly, I can’t see me—”

“But he’s not riding this season, you understand. At the year’s first rodeo in Miles City, A.J. caught his spur in a cinch. The horse went over on his leg and crushed it. Now he’s knitting, but it was a bad fall. It’s not clear if the doctors will certify him for the circuit again. Leaves A.J. with some free time to take on guide jobs for me.”

“I’m sorry he’s had an accident. But—”

“Not that he’s pining away and burning any daylight,” Hazel charged on. “Lands no! A.J. stays busy—a little too busy, if you catch my meaning.” She winked. “He’s left a mighty long trail of broken hearts, but still I remember his ma and pa. They were something fierce in love. The kind you don’t see nowadays. A love like the kind I had.” Hazel smiled at her. “Oh, he’ll have a love like that one day. It’s just taken him a while to come around. In the meantime, while his leg’s been healing, he’s helping out his old partner Cas Davis. Cas runs a popular rodeo-riding school in Thompson Falls.”

Hazel finally paused to take a breath.

“I can’t do this,” Jacquelyn blurted out. “I’m sorry. Not only am I unprepared for the ride, but A. J. Clayburn is a stranger to me. I can’t just go camping in the wilderness—”

“He won’t be a stranger in a few minutes,” Hazel assured her, again glancing at the clock. “A.J. will be here any moment now to meet you.”

For a short, panicked moment, Jacquelyn felt her breath catch.

“Meet me?” she repeated foolishly, stunned at this massive loss of control in her very controlled life. Am I a mail-order bride? she almost asked in disbelief.

“Since you’ll be spending so much time alone with A.J.,” Hazel added, “I suppose I should also mention that he has a recently acquired police record.”

Jacquelyn could feel the blood drain from her cheeks. Hazel laughed.

“Steady, dear. He can be rehabilitated. I’m quite sure of it. You’ve heard of Red Lodge, Montana?”

Still shell-shocked, Jacquelyn answered woodenly. “The town where cowboys and rodeo types rendezvous every Fourth of July for a party, right?”

“I suppose you could call that annual riot a party. Anyhow, this year A.J. was arrested for riding his horse into the Snag Bar saloon. Evidently, a deputy or two ‘accidentally ran their jaws into my fist,’ as A.J. put it in court.”

Oh, great, Jacquelyn thought, her stomach sinking. So he’s a drunken brawler, too? How lucky can one woman get?

“If you really want the true feel of being with Jake McCallum and along on his ride,” Hazel told the reporter, “you couldn’t be with a more similar man. Just as Jake was, A.J. is fast out of the gate.”

Hazel laughed at the alarm that must have flickered in Jacquelyn’s eyes.

“Dear, relax. It’s just an old saying. Means a man is clear about what he wants and how to get it. Tell me…is it your skin you’re fretting about?”

“My…skin?”

“I’ve always been told you Southern women take special pride in your beautiful complexions. You’re living proof of that.”

“Thank you,” she said politely, but it was obvious that Hazel was only jabbering like this to head off any more objections about her wild idea.

She was on the verge of demanding why it was so important that she make this mountain trek. But just then a two-tone chime sounded within the parlor. Nervous fear made her heart speed up for the next few beats.

“That will be A.J.,” Hazel announced with evident satisfaction. “Donna will let him in.”

The tap of solid boot heels reached their ears as the new arrival moved through the kitchen and dining room. Jacquelyn’s trapped-deer desperation didn’t seem to escape Hazel’s notice—or her sympathy.

“Everything will be just fine, dear, I promise. I won’t sugarcoat the dangers of those mountains. But with a guide like A. J. Clayburn, you’ll be fine.”

“But I really don’t understand why this is necessary. You said you liked my articles—that they were authentic,” Jacquelyn whispered in a rush to beat the footsteps. “Why is this so important? Why?”

Something secret and mysterious glinted in Hazel’s eyes—something born of great ambition, great determination and great love. But her evasive answer only further frustrated Jacquelyn.

“Be patient. Making this journey will change your life, I assure you. Very few have taken it. Well, would you look who’s here, Jacquelyn! Timely, yet! Well, my land, A.J., don’t just stand there gawking, come on in. She doesn’t bite!”

Three

Jacquelyn paid scant attention as Hazel went through the formalities of introducing her to Mystery’s leading rodeo celebrity.

Besides feeling confused, trapped and manipulated, she was almost indignant. Somehow she felt she was being hazed, as cowboys called it when they forced cattle to move where they wanted them to go.

Or more like it, Jacquelyn punned wryly to herself, she was being Hazeled.

“Personally,” Hazel nattered while Jacquelyn gathered her composure a bit, “I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool home-body in my old age. I subscribe to the theory that a gal should never leave her time zone. But then, if some of us didn’t travel, we wouldn’t have Jacquelyn here summering with us in Mystery, would we, A.J.?”

“I guess that’s so,” the cowboy agreed reluctantly. His tone made it clear he could survive that contingency just fine.

He sat across from the two women in a leather wing chair, an immaculate gray Stetson balanced on his left knee. He wore clean range clothes and a neckerchief. Long, muscular, blue-jeans-clad legs were tucked into hand-stitched, high-heeled boots so pointy they looked like weapons. A. J. Clayburn, Jacquelyn noted reluctantly in a brief appraisal, was every bit as handsome as the photo of him in Hazel’s album.

But, in person, he also projected a sense of…physical readiness—even danger. That was undeniable even though he walked a bit stiff-legged from his recent injury.

Also undeniable was his smug awareness of his own abilities. He certainly would not shine among the old, genteel social circles back in Atlanta’s Peachtree Park, where subtlety and nuance opened doors of opportunity. But Jacquelyn had to grudgingly admit he was the kind of man she would want nearby in a crisis. Though, God knows, she’d want him gone after the trouble was over. Immediately after.

“If you youngsters will excuse me,” Hazel said, rising spryly from her chair, “I need to go upstairs and find some old letters that Jacquelyn requested for her series. You two will want to get acquainted, of course, and discuss your arrangements. I’ll try not to be too long.”

Again Jacquelyn felt dismay pulsing in her temples. Arrangements? Hazel was simply taking over her life, to hell with permission. And now came the lame pretext—she was leaving Jacquelyn virtually trapped with this arrogant, self-inflated rube.

A.J. rose politely while Hazel stood and left the parlor. So far, while Hazel was present, he had spared Jacquelyn the force of those penetrating eyes of his. Indeed, each time his gunmetal gaze touched her it slid quickly away.

As if he resented her presence.

Now that they were alone, however, all that changed. Jacquelyn felt his eyes on her, so probing and intense she felt violated by them.

“Is there a fly on my nose?” she finally asked, heat flooding into her face.

“Nope. Just looking.”

“It’s just looking, maybe, for the first few seconds. But eventually it becomes staring.”

His sardonic mouth twisted into a grin. “’At’s funny.”

“It is?”

“You don’t look like a book. But you sure-god talk like one.”

“Pardon me.” She commented, “I’ll try to sound more obtuse so you won’t feel challenged.”

Her acerbic tone didn’t daunt him at all; probably because he didn’t get the insult. She ached to dismiss him, but beneath his continued scrutiny she felt a flush heat her skin. Nervously she stood up and quickly smoothed her black matte jersey skirt over her thighs. Then she crossed to the wall behind her, covered with paintings and photographs. She could still feel the almost physical force of his stare.

“Mr. Clayburn, Hazel has told me her plan, but I’m afraid I’m not a camper, nor a horse packer. It seems she thinks I’m the best one to write about McCallum Trace, but there’s a fine young college boy interning at the office, and I think he’d be a much more appropriate choice for your—”

“You don’t have to convince me. I’m Mohammed. I can come to the mountain myself.” He jerked his head toward the door where Hazel had gone. “It’s the mountain you got to worry about moving.”

Jacquelyn looked at the empty doorway. The sinking feeling betrayed her cold bravado. The cowboy was, unfortunately, right; truer words and all that. Hazel was the mountain, and Jacquelyn Rousseaux might have an Ivy League education and a trust fund which she eschewed in order to make her own money and be her own woman, but she did not possess a backhoe.

So in the end her battle was with Hazel, not the man stuck in the room with her. Her innate Southern politeness finally won out.

“So…I understand you’re a rodeo champ,” she said, going back to her seat to wait for Hazel.

“That’s old news around here. Heard anything more interesting?”

His insolent, taunting tone made her want to spar with him. Worse was the strange feeling she had whenever his gaze raked over her. She realized she must have been far too long without male companionship because his every glance, his every stare was making her feel exposed and strangely flustered.

“You writing about cowboys, too?” he asked.

In spite of her better judgment, she retorted, “Actually I was thinking about it.” Archly she said, “In researching my articles on Jake McCallum, I read something about Montana cowboys. Is it true y’all are defensive because you’re just imitations of the true Texas cowboys?”

“’Y’all?”’ he repeated, raising one eyebrow.

To her chagrin he was unruffled. Then, to her surprise, he had managed to turn the question to her.

And Hazel seriously thought Jacquelyn would spend five days—not to mention nights—alone with this insulting, boorish hick?

There was no use in continuing the small talk. She turned her attention to an old, nineteenth-century tintype photo of Hazel’s grandmother, Mystery McCallum. Mystery wore a swag-fronted, bustled gown and a tight-laced corset to give her the wasp waist that had been fashionable then.

When A.J. spoke, his voice was so close to her ear that Jacquelyn almost flinched.

“I’ve heard that all those tight lacings sometimes kindled ‘impure desires.’ You being female and all, tell me—is that possible, you think?”

She spun around to face him, stepping back away from his invasion of her personal space. But not before she caught the scent of him—a decidedly masculine aroma of good leather and bay rum aftershave. The smell made her stomach quiver, as if it had some kind of hormonal effect on her, as if it kind of…kind of…turned her on.

She took a step backward and vowed to get out more and meet men now that she was unattached again. In her deprivation she was becoming a little too worked up about nothing. Certainly rawhide and dimestore aftershave weren’t her perferred sexual stimulants.

But then she caught another whiff of it, and she wondered if he wasn’t getting the best of her without even trying. Only pride stopped her from running from the room in terror, her nose pinched to protect her from her own unwanted chemical reactions.

With great effort she tossed him a bored, dismissive glance. “I’m so sorry. Did you say something?”

His handsome mouth twisted in a grin. “I don’t believe I whispered. I was asking you about corsets.”

“Well, I’m sorry to ruin your bunkhouse fantasies, but I don’t wear a corset and never have. But what I know from history is that tight corsets cracked ribs and deformed internal organs. They also constricted breathing and blood flow. I’m sure that’s obvious from the pictures, and I hardly think any of it was a thrill.”

“You’ve researched that, too—along with cowboys, huh, ice princess?”

It was only one silly insult among others he had already heaped on her in a brief time. But his remark cut dangerously close to memories that were still like open wounds. It’s not my fault you’re solid ice from the neck down.

For a second the old pain and humiliation rushed back, so fresh it numbed her. All over again she felt like one of those sordid, vulgar, shouting idiots on the tabloid TV shows—betrayed and publicly mortified by the very people she counted on most to sympathize with her.

The cowboy stood only a few feet away. His gleaming, invasive gaze held her while he waited for her to reply.

Hazel saved the day by arriving at the awful moment. She bustled into the parlor, skirts rustling, carrying an old-fashioned musette bag stuffed with faded envelopes.

“Here you go, Jacquelyn, some of Jake’s letters from the folks back East. I trust you two had a chance to discuss your upcoming ride?”

Jacquelyn had to fight to slow her pounding heart. It was now or never.

“Hazel, I can’t go,” she managed to say, with great difficulty, accepting the letters from Hazel. She hurried back to her chair to retrieve her recorder. Then she headed toward the wide parlor doors. During all the fluster of activity she refused to look in Clayburn’s direction.

“I’m sorry, Hazel, but it’s simply out of the question. I…I just can’t. I’m sorry.”

“All right, dear,” Hazel said, dismissing her. “It’s my fault, I suppose, for jumping to conclusions. One can’t assume the wood is solid just because the paint is pretty.”

“Yeah, she looks that way all right,” A.J.’s voice added behind Jacquelyn. “You ask me, though, the whole dang Rousseaux family needs to move their summer lodge out of here. They’d be more at home in a sunny condo in Florida or California. Among their own kind.”

Jacquelyn had been on the feather edge of rushing from the house, but Clayburn’s words acted on her like a brake. She turned to stare at him.

“And just what kind might that be, Mr. Clayburn?” she demanded, convinced her green eyes were snapping sparks.

“The grasping kind,” he told her bluntly and without hesitation. “I know all about your father and his dang plans to develop and ruin Mystery Valley. I’m no fan, Miss Rousseaux. I have no need for big-city developers and jet-setting money-grubbers who get rich off other men’s risk and labor. So what kind, Miss Rousseaux? The carpetbagging, uppity, Perrier-sipping, spoiled-brat kind who need to be brought down to size. That kind, Miss Rousseaux.”

He hurled each word at her like a poison-tipped spear.

But Jacquelyn only became even more determined and defiant. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Clayburn, that I don’t support my father in his company’s demand to develop Mystery Valley. But I’ll remind you that it’s not your place nor my place to make that decision for this community. It’s up to the town council to vote on it. And if you have an opinion, Mr. Rodeo Star, why don’t you hire someone to write it down for you and exercise your rights in this democracy of ours and give it to your town council.”

The silence almost boomed after she was through.

Hazel watched them both with the rapture of a tennis fan at Forest Hills.

Then suddenly A. J. Clayburn broke out in rude, lustful laughter. “I’ll be damned. You must be a writer. Nobody else I know could do that in a paragraph the way you just did.”

The anger almost choked her. “You know very well I’m a journalist, and it was not given to me, by the way, Mr. Clayburn. I had to work hard at it.”

“Even if Daddy does own the paper,” he taunted, his steely gaze shadowed by the rim of his hat.

“Even if Daddy does own the paper,” she defied, pronouncing every cold word.

“Then I’m half sorry we’re not going up on that mountain, miss. Maybe you could teach me a new word or two.” He looked at Hazel, resignation in his handsome smile.

“Hazel, I’ve changed my mind,” Jacquelyn announced, surprising even herself. “Mr. Clayburn, Hazel has my work and home phone numbers. Since we’ll be crossing one of the most difficult mountain passes in the Continental Divide, would I be too much of an ‘uppity, Perrier-sipping brat’ if I request at least one day to prepare?”

“You go right ahead, Miss Rousseaux. Do whatever you think is necessary,” he said as if patronizing her.

Hazel walked her out, looking way too pleased by Jacquelyn’s anger. Just as she was about to let the younger woman through the front door, Hazel whispered, “Don’t you worry about anything on the trip, Jacquelyn. A.J. will handle it. That’s why he’s the best one to take you. Oh, and by the way, don’t go teaching him any new words, either.” The older woman gave a meaningful pause. “He’d only want to learn the dirty Latin ones, anyway.”

Hazel’s Lazy M spread sat in the exact center of verdant Mystery Valley. Several thousand acres of lush pasture crisscrossed by creeks and run-off streams and dotted with scarlet patches of Indian paintbrush.

The town of Mystery, with a year-round population of four thousand, was a pleasant fifteen-minute drive due east from the Lazy M’s stone gateposts. The Rousseaux’s summer lodge was a ten-minute walk to the west, the ranch’s nearest habitation.

Jacquelyn, who had driven to Hazel’s place from the Gazette offices, turned east out of Hazel’s long driveway. Her thoughts, like her emotions, were still in a confused riot. What had she just committed herself to? How could she possibly ever endure such an ordeal—especially in the company of such a man?

Tears abruptly filmed her eyes. The extent of her vulnerability surprised and dismayed her. A. J. Clayburn’s crude baiting had brought back all the insecurities, all the bitter misery Joe and Gina had dragged her through.

Gina and Joe had proved perfect for each other, a matched set. As harmonious as the easy, breezy alliteration of their names. They were both charming, careless people, takers not givers, and honored no laws except self-survival and gratification of their sensual pleasures. And they had taught her a valuable lesson: it was easier to deal with known enemies than with phony friends.

At least, she had to admit as she reached the outskirts of town, A. J. Clayburn wasn’t feigning friendship.

She parked her car. When she entered the office, the red light was on over the darkroom door, which meant Bonnie was busy making photo-offset plates for the next issue of the paper. She left a brief note explaining Hazel’s imperious request, then hung up her hat for the day.

She was returning to her BMW, angle parked out front, when a throaty female voice cut into the tumult of her thoughts.

“Hey, there! How’s ’bout a ride for an old geezer?”

Jacquelyn saw her mother veer toward her along the brick sidewalk, carrying a plastic shopping bag. It bulged from the weight of several clinking liquor bottles.

“I walked to town,” Stephanie Rousseaux explained, “with all sorts of healthy aerobic intentions. But next time I get the fitness urge, I’ll remember to wear tennis shoes. Good God, my feet are killing me! I can’t wait until your father and I return to Atlanta. How I wish at least one of our local rednecks would exchange his pickup truck for a limo service.”

At forty-eight, Stephanie was still a striking woman, her hair covering the right side of her face in a hip style. Though lately she was stouter than she had been and a bit more grim around the mouth. She made it a point of honor to always be civil and even-tempered. But while she was far too cultivated and controlled to ever create an emotional scene, Stephanie had developed a chilly, disengaged manner that stymied others around her. Including her own daughter.

“Some of the local yokels,” Stephanie remarked as her daughter backed out into the sparse traffic of Main Street, “seem surprised that I’m still sober at midday.”

“Mother,” Jacquelyn pleaded, “please don’t start with that.”

“Start with what, Miss Goody Two-shoes?” Stephanie countered, adjusting her diva shades. “I’m quite proud that I have strict rules concerning my addiction. I’m disciplined, just like your dear old dad. After all, baby, decorum should rule everything, don’t you agree? Even a Southern debutante’s failed life.”

Mine or yours? Jacquelyn felt like shouting. But there was no point. She knew her mother meant herself.

“You know,” Jacquelyn said, keeping her tone patient and persuasive, “they have A.A. meetings out here, too, Mom. I checked it out. And you know, Dr. Rendquist told you—”

“Zip it. Renquist doesn’t know his elbow from his libido. The only reason I go to him is because he keeps me in touch with the charming Prince Valium. I’ve decided A.A. is for the great unwashed masses. Your elitist mother has a better system.”

Stephanie shook the bag, clinking the glass bottles inside to emphasize her point.

“Discipline. No therapy until the sun goes down. I despise a daylight drunk. Those lushes at A.A. lack discretion, self-control.”

Discretion and self-control. Two traits instilled in Stephanie back in Queen Anne County, by parents whose ancestry traced back to the First Families of Virginia. Traits that had proven invaluable for surviving a loveless marriage to a faithless, hypercritical man.

Jacquelyn ached to say something that might break through to her mother’s inner core. She knew, from her own childhood memory of her mother, that she had once possessed a deep well of inner feeling. But that well had long since gone dry.

Jacquelyn had borne silent witness for many years. By now Stephanie Rousseaux merely went through the motions of living. She simply reminded herself to change her facial expression now and then, so people would think she was properly “involved.” But in fact her existence had become a long, unbroken silence—the empty and meaningless stillness left behind when love and hope are abandoned.

And there was nothing her daughter could tell her to make things different. Stephanie was the frost queen Jacquelyn feared she herself was becoming—had perhaps already become. A chip off the old ice block.

Now Jacquelyn watched the town of Mystery roll past the car windows, alone with her thoughts. Downtown Mystery still included plenty of its original red brick buildings with black iron shutters—nothing fancy, just practical and sturdy. But the ornate, nineteenth century opera house with its scrollwork dome still placed the community a cut above plain saloon towns. So did the stately old courthouse, the only gray masonry building in town.

“Not exactly the height of sartorial splendor or exotic cuisine,” Stephanie drawled in her droll, husky voice. “But no squalid industrial sprawls, either. Although your father is working on that as I speak—that is, unless he’s relieving his stress with one of his new consultants.”

Consultants. The euphemism of choice, Jacquelyn realized, to designate the string of mistresses that Eric Rousseaux seemed to require in order to “validate his manhood.”

Hazel’s Lazy M Ranch slid by on their left as Jacquelyn headed toward the Rousseaux’s summer lodge at the western edge of Mystery Valley. A. J. Clayburn’s old rattletrap pickup truck was just at the entrance, turning to town. He passed them, tipping his hat while he went. Jacquelyn wondered if he recognized her car, or if he was just the good-ol’-boy type who tipped his hat to everyone in his path.

Again cold dread filled her limbs as if they were buckets under a tap. She wondered again what she had agreed to.

The Rousseaux place sat in a little teacup-shaped hollow about three-quarters of a mile west of the Lazy M. It was surrounded by bottom woods and Hazel’s pastures on the east and south, jagged mountains to the north and west.

The sprawling two-storey lodge was made of redwood timbers with a cedar-shake roof. Out back was the lodge guest house that Jacquelyn—insisting on independence—rented from her father. Additionally, there was a big pole corral, and low stables sported a fresh coat of white paint. Jacquelyn liked the lodge’s proximity to town. Often she had time to ride Boots, her big sorrel thoroughbred, into Mystery instead of driving. Though her mother and father both kept horses, too, neither of them rode much anymore.

Jacquelyn parked in the paved stone driveway out front.

“Home sweet home,” Stephanie said with lilting irony. “Thanks for the ride, kiddo.”

Jacquelyn headed through the house instead of around while Stephanie took her purchases into the basement to re-stock the wet bar. Jacquelyn encountered her father on the phone in the living room.

At fifty-one, Eric Rousseaux was trim and athletic—one of those vain middle-aged men who constantly found excuses to remove his shirt so others could admire the hard slabs of his sculpted abs and pecs.

He had accumulated his considerable fortune in newspaper publishing. Eric owned controlling interest in several major daily newspapers and a handful of smaller weeklies. Including, by monopolistic takeover, the Mystery Gazette. Recently, however, he had diversified into land-site development ventures.

“Money,” her father had once solemnly informed her, using the old cliché, “is like manure. It has to be spread around.”

Eric tossed his daughter a careless wave as she entered the room. Before she could hear what he was saying, he backed into his den and closed the door with his heel—talking in private on the phone was something he did a lot these days.

Was “the Lothario of the ink-slinging industry,” as her mother called him, involved in yet another romantic intrigue? Stephanie’s liquor consumption lately suggested he was.

A hopeless weight seemed to settle on her shoulders as Jacquelyn escaped to her house. A.J.’s words from earlier pricked at her again like nettles: huh, ice princess?

Cold on the surface, cold within. Everybody, it seemed, sensed a basic lack in Jacquelyn—something missing down deep inside her. Some empathetic quality necessary to complete her femininity. But the empathy was there, all right, and anyone who sensed the chink in her armor pounded away at it incessantly, so the scab never got a chance to heal.

Ice princess…daughter of the ice queen. “I’ll bet you even pee icicles,” Joe had insulted her on the night he unceremoniously dumped her for Gina.

Suddenly huge tears welled in her eyes, and she sat on the edge of her couch. Mother was back in the big house, hiding in the basement, waiting for sundown and the night’s first dose of anesthetic. Father was in his den, either arranging a bribe or a nooner. Yes…home sweet home!

Just why should she, Jacquelyn wondered, be able to nurture any belief in love? Who, in this travesty of a family, could have any confidence that they were worthy of love and affection—much less able to express it to others?

The phone on the table chirred. She cleared her throat, took a few deep breaths and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Y’all requested one day’s notice,” A. J. Clayburn’s mocking voice informed her without preamble. “So that’s what y’all are getting. Be ready at sunrise tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your place.”

“That’s not a full day’s notice. That’s impossible. I—”

But she was protesting for the benefit of her own walls—the line went dead when he hung up on her.

Four

Jacquelyn had never bragged about being a morning person. Yet here she was, shivering in the damp chill well before sunrise, miserable as a draftee in the rain.

“C’mon, Boots,” she urged her reluctant sorrel mare. “It’s only the headstall, I promise. No cold bit in your mouth this time, honest, girl.”

Boots, however, kept trying to back into her stall. She wanted nothing to do with any equipment this early in the morning. The seventeen-hand thoroughbred was well trained and of a sweet disposition. But Jacquelyn once made the thoughtless mistake, early on a cool morning like today, of slipping an unwarmed bit into the mare’s mouth. Now Boots always rebelled at being rigged in predawn chill.

Jacquelyn shook the oat bag, gradually luring Boots back out of her stall.

“I know, girl, I know. This ‘reliving Western history’ is for the birds, huh? That’s a girl, c’mon, that’s a sweet lady.”

Each time Boots exhaled, the breath formed a ghostly wraith of smoke. This late in summer, Montana mornings had quite a snap to them. And Jacquelyn knew it would be even colder up in the high altitudes of Eagle Pass. As a native Georgian, she shared the Southerners’ deep aversion to cold weather. Better a hurricane than a frigid night.

Last night she had crammed some warm clothing into a duffel bag along with her microrecorder and a notepad. But she still had to assemble all her riding gear. This rushing at the last minute was totally idiotic. She liked to plan carefully for a trip, with plenty of notice. Instead, she was being instantly “mobilized,” with Hazel and A. J. Clayburn her tyrannical, heartless commanders.

“’Atta girl,” she praised when Boots, finally realizing she would not have to take the bit, dipped her head and let Jacquelyn slip a headstall on her. She tied a lead line to the ring and led her mare out into the grainy semidarkness of the corral.

She was carrying her saddle and pad out of the tack room when A.J.’s battered pickup rounded a rear corner of the house and parked in front of the corral gate. A two-stall horse trailer was hitched to the rear.

He somehow managed to poke his head out of the open window without disturbing his neatly crimped Stetson. He thumbed the hat off his forehead, grinning at her. The glare of a big sodium-vapor yard light cleanly illuminated the scornful twist of his mouth.

“Stir your stumps, girl!” he called out the window. “Time is nipping at our fannies. Drop that sissy saddle and let’s hit the trail.”

“Hit the…? May I suggest we at least load up my horse and saddle?”

“Won’t need ’em,” he informed her curtly, turning off the engine and swinging down lithely from the truck.

Begrudingly she felt a twinge of animal attraction to his good looks. But she shoved the feeling away as soon as she recognized what it was. Lust was sure not going to help her in the situation she was about to get herself into. It would only cause problems.

“Oh? I suppose I’ll be riding double with you?” A.J. glanced toward Boots. “As rare a privilege as that would surely be for me,” he drawled with evident sarcasm, “it won’t be necessary. Is that your horse?”

She nodded, staring up at him. He was still tall, even outside, with the mountains behind him tipped with the first pink buds of dawn light. Beside him she seemed inconsequential, and hopelessly female. No match at all.

He went back to the horse trailer and swung open the double doors.

“It’s a good-looking animal,” he conceded. “Good breeding and solid lines. That sorrel of yours is a fine flatland horse. Long-legged animals do real well in deep snow in open country. But we’re going up into the mountains. That means we need good mountain ponies.”

While he said this, he showed her the two horses in the trailer. That is, Jacquelyn assumed the two ugly, stubby-legged beasts were horses.

Despite her foul mood, she laughed so hard she almost dropped her saddle.

“Don’t tell me,” she managed between sputters of mirth. “You rescued them from a rendering plant?”

“Girl, you don’t know nothing about horses, do you? These ain’t riding-academy nags, they’re genuine mountain mustangs. Some call ’em Indian scrubs. They’ve got the endurance of doorknobs.”

She looked askance at their dish faces, bushy tails, and mongrelized confusion of colors and markings—no controlled bloodlines here.

“I won’t ride a pretty horse like yours up in the mountains,” he assured her, guessing her thoughts. “A pretty horse is a petted horse. And a petted horse is a spoiled horse.”

Something aggressive in his tone hinted he wasn’t talking just about horses.

She looked at him. By his glance he was obviously summing her up, taking in her designer black quilted barn jacket, her English custom-made paddock boots, and subtracting them from the value of her character. But then his gaze seemed to linger along the generous swells of her chest, and suddenly her net worth seemed to rise again.

It was still dark enough outside to hide the embarrassment heating her cheeks. Leave it to a macho redneck to view a woman like a piece of meat. But she supposed being a flank steak was better than an icicle.

She turned her attention back to the ponies. “Look, they’re not just ugly. They’re also so…little,” she objected.

“‘Praise the tall, but ride the small.’ Sure, they’re barely fourteen hands. But look at those short, thick, strong legs. That’s what you need on rocky, narrow trails. These animals were born in the mountains, they’re surefooted as wild goats. That bluegrass beauty of yours ever been up high in the rim-rock in a forty-mile-an-hour wind?”

That goading twist to his mouth made her anger flare. She felt half-tempted to slap it right off his arrogantly handsome face.

“No,” she admitted, resenting him for his know-it-all smugness and the way his eyes still seemed to lower to places below her neckline.

“You can leave that English saddle behind, too. I brought you a better one.”

“Better one?” She snorted derisively. “I’ll have you know this was custom-made for me at—”

“Sure, it’s just fine—for a dog-and-pony show in London. But it’ll be useless to you up in the mountains. Price tags ain’t the issue. Up there you’ll need something between your legs.”

She flushed to the roots of her hair. “I beg your pardon?” she demanded. Each syllable was so distinct it seemed chiseled.

He grinned. She was convinced he had see-in-the-dark eyes like a cat because she swore this time he saw her blush.

“Ease off, girl. I’m talking about a saddle horn. You’ll need one to stay mounted on steep slopes.”

He closed the trailer door on the mustangs.

“C’mon, girl,” she called to her mare. “We’ll let the cowboy have his eight seconds. You get to stay home.”

She tried to coax Boots to come to her so she could lead the mare back into her stable. But the sorrel was excited by the presence of unfamiliar horses; she kept sidestepping away each time Jacquelyn tried to grab the lead line.

A.J. moved up beside her and gave a soft, fluting whistle. Boots answered with a friendly whicker, then trotted right over and nuzzled the hollow of his shoulder as if they were old and dear friends.

You damned traitor, she thought, watching her horse with a petulant frown. She grabbed the lead line and took Boots back toward her stall.

A.J. greeted her when she came back outside. “Hazel asked me to give you this.” He added, smirking, “Seeing’s how you took off so suddenly yesterday.”

He slid a folded sheet of paper from the pocket of his vest.

“What is it?”

“An itinerary, I think she called it. Hazel’s got some definite ideas how she wants this trip to be.”

She started to unfold the sheet, but he stayed her hand with an iron grip. The calluses, thick on his palm, brushed her skin like friction burns.

“You can look at it in the truck,” he told her brusquely. “I don’t waste time when I’ve got something to do. Let’s go.”

She pulled her hand free. It tingled afterward, so much so she tucked it along with the sheet in the hip pocket of her jeans.

He had his door halfway open when she said, “Before we get going here, I just want to make one thing clear—while you seem to be very good at giving orders, I expect you to be my guide, not a drill sergeant. I’m going with you because my job has led me here. But it’s not the rodeo ring, and I’m not one of your adoring fans you can tell jump.”

“Not yet,” he conceded with a whisper and an infuriating grin.

She took a deep breath to fire another salvo, but he stopped her by raising one hand like a traffic cop.

“Look, Scarlett, I ain’t doing this baby-sitting job because I like your company, either. I’m doing a favor for Hazel. She put me in charge of this little excursion because I know where to go and how to get there. So let’s get this straight from the start—when you’re under my watch, I say how it’s going to be, and that’s the way of it. You don’t like those terms, stay home. I’ll tell Hazel you went puny on her.”

Jacquelyn felt as if a steamroller had just gone over her. “You don’t negotiate at all, do you?”

Again he trapped her in the full force of his metallic-gray gaze. “Depends what I’m after.”

Her heart skipped.

He gave a harsh bark of scorn. “Now get in,” he ordered, “or stay here. I’m damned if I care what a rich, spoiled, snot-nosed bawler like you does, but if you’re not going, tell me so I can get these ponies back to their pasture before they founder.”

She stared at him for a long moment. Then, for reasons she couldn’t shape into words, she lumbered up into the passenger seat of the pickup.

They turned onto the road in strained silence, away from Mystery Valley to the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

As for the “itinerary” Hazel had sent along… Jacquelyn realized, only moments after unfolding the hand-drawn map, that the scheming cattle baroness had some grand design in mind.

She couldn’t believe how detailed Hazel’s notes were regarding what she was to write about. Not only was she to follow Jake’s exact path, but Hazel insisted she was to camp in the same spots. The culmination of the trip was to be a night spent in the log cabin on Bridger’s Summit—the original dwelling where Jake had taken his new bride on their honeymoon.

Numbly she folded the paper up and tucked it into her jacket. At least it’s not the dead of winter, she consoled herself, staring at the man hunkered down in the seat next to her.

Still, she couldn’t help thinking this trip was going to be a lot more grueling—and perhaps even dangerous—than it looked on paper.

The two-and-a-half-hour drive led them gradually lower, along tortuously winding mountain roads. Their route, according to Jacquelyn’s map, roughly paralleled hidden Eagle Pass and McCallum’s Trace.

The adventure still wasn’t real to her. She looked at the man sitting next to her and wondered what kind of character he would ultimately prove to be. She would certainly know more about him on their return trip to Mystery.

He glanced at her and caught her staring.

She looked away, uncomfortable with the feeling of being virtually trapped with a man so utterly different from her that she lacked any vocabulary to describe him. A. J. Clayburn was indeed entirely unlike anyone she’d ever met before—and yet she couldn’t deny a certain…fascination in watching the solid thigh and calf muscles bunch under his blue jeans as he worked the clutch and brakes.

The shared silence wasn’t free of conflict. She had nothing against country-and-western music, in moderation. But she was convinced he deliberately kept the radio volume near full blast to unsettle her. And it was working. Her nerves jangled to every twang.

A little over an hour into their drive the road dipped sharply, and the old pickup bounced hard like a tank leaping a ditch. One of the chrome radio knobs fell off.

She retrieved it from the floor, her head bumping into that same muscle-bunched thigh she had just been looking at. Flustered, she straightened and stuck the nob on the volume control.

“Perhaps with the money you make from guiding this trip,” she suggested in a baiting tone, “you can put a down payment on a new pickup.”

His sun-slitted eyes cut to her, then back to the road. The hat kept half of his face in shadow.

“If pickup trucks’re status,” he assured her, “then I got plenty. I drive this old gal because I happen to like her. The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

“Just a suggestion.” She settled back against the worn seat. “I just figured a big rodeo star like you’re supposed to be would want to show off a bit, that’s all.”

He gave a snort. “Stars live in Hollywood. And rodeo ain’t my business, it’s my love.”

She waited, but he didn’t volunteer any more information.

“Whatever your business,” she offered, “Hazel certainly does speak well of you.” Her tone also seemed to add There’s no accounting for taste.

“Hazel and me think a lot alike. Especially about Mystery.”

The accusation in his tone made her bristle. For a moment she pretended to stare at a dead snake she spotted hanging from a farmer’s fence—a local custom to entice the rain. But his not-so-subtle reminder that she was an unwelcome outsider finally prompted her to retort.

“If you’re trying to make some point about foreigners,” she told him archly, “don’t let me scare you.”

“The point is simple. The empty spaces are dwindling out West. And stupidity and greed and Eastern capital will ruin them. Hazel is doing her best to fight it. But she might as well try to hold the ocean back with a broom.”

“Because of people like me, you mean?”

“Maybe not you, exactly,” he conceded reluctantly.

“But like my father, right? Trying to push through his Mountain View residential park with its aerial tramway?”

“Look, I was raised not to speak bad of a person’s parents to their face. So I’ll leave names out of it, okay? But we’ve got us a few folks around Mystery Valley that don’t like boomtowners. We don’t need people who come into town just to profit quick and then move on—leaving us with the mess.”

She started to speak. But he pointedly reached over and cranked the radio volume back up, letting music drown her out.

“‘Why is the rich man always dancing,”’ he twanged along with the singer on the radio, “‘while the poor man pays the band?”’

Around noon on Tuesday Hazel stepped outside into the coppery sunshine of her front yard. Her Prussian-blue eyes gazed toward the distant, serrated peaks of the mountains. If all had gone well this morning, by now A.J. and Jacquelyn should be on the trail.

“As the twig is bent,” Hazel said softly to the beautiful summer day, “so the tree shall grow.”

She’d done her level best to get her ambitious plan off to a strong start. If she did the thing right, then her beloved town would still be here generations from now—and still worthy of the love she felt for it. It was the perfect time to execute the plan. She was still sharp and plenty spry. And although she was still Montana’s cattle queen, she had a top-notch foreman running most of the operation now. She had plenty of time for the one place on God’s green earth she loved best of all. Her Mystery was more than just old buildings and monuments. It was also a collective legacy, the communal memory of a shared past. And perhaps most important of all: it was the home of ghosts who still lived there, their voices whispering in the skitter of autumn leaves, howling in the fierce winter winds.

Behind the old woman, in the kitchen, a radio deejay’s voice droned on unnoticed.

“…this weather advisory just received here at KTIX in Lewistown. You cattlemen out there with stock up in the high-altitude summer pastures might want to drive them down to lower slopes during the next couple of days. The National Weather Service has just forecast a late-summer snowstorm for the front ranges of the northern Rockies. Up to thirty inches could be dumped on the peaks, greatly increasing the danger of avalanches and flash floods. Batten down, folks! Looks like La Niña can throw tantrums even in the Big Sky Country…”

Five

“You’ll ride this one,” A.J. informed Jacquelyn in a curt tone that bordered on surly.

He led one of the geldings down the short ramp behind the trailer.

“It’s a good animal, but tricky as a redheaded woman. Watch him, especially when you cinch the girth. He likes to hold in air so he can dump the rider later.”

She studied the unlikely steed. The mustangs, with their stunted stature and barrel chests, struck her as ugly, ungracious animals. But they did have impressive muscle definition and powerful haunches.

“Yours is called Roman Nose,” he added. “He was named after a renegade chief who led the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers in this area.”

“I know who he was,” she answered, impressed with his knowledge but unwilling to show it.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Y’all do research, don’cha?”

By now she was too dismayed to rise to his bait. The mountain ride wasn’t the most brilliant endeavor she’d ever agreed to, but she was stuck with it now.

Or was she? She glanced all around, trying to decide if she was really going to do this.

The spot hardly seemed like an auspicious start to a ride Hazel promised would change her life. A.J. had referred to this area as a “jumping off place”—a little foothills hamlet called Truth or Dare, population 740. Last century it had been a stage-relay station. Now it was the last cluster of gas stations, restaurants and motels before the short-grass foothills gave way to the riotous upheaval of the Rocky Mountains.

“Heads up!” he shouted. He had moved to the bed of the truck and was tossing out supplies. Despite his warning, the pack he’d tossed toward her rolled into her legs hard enough to almost knock her down.

“Look,” he told her, his face granite edged. “I ain’t talking to hear my own voice. Pay attention! I said to start rigging your horse. You’ll have to adjust those stirrups for your legs.”

She sent him a resentful stare. Then she lugged the worn saddle over to where she’d tethered Roman Nose in a patch of lush grass. They were leaving A.J.’s truck and trailer parked safely in a lot behind a gas station on the western edge of town. From here the mountains were so close she could clearly make out the blue columbine and white Queen Anne’s lace dotting their lower slopes.

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