as the deepest, purest mountain pool Beartooth had ever looked into.
Sensing his presence in the doorway after she had placed two loaves of bread in the warmer, she turned her head and glanced back over her shoulder. “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
Victoria gave a faint shake of her head. “You didn’t. I think I’ve finally gotten used to how quietly you, Firestick, and Moosejaw move . . . especially for such large men. Whenever I turn around, I’m prepared to find that one of you has entered the room while I was looking away.”
She spoke with an English accent, at times stronger than others, as befitting the land of her birth before coming to America and eventually to the West with a spirited cousin who was a dreamer and a hopeless romantic. That cousin—her name was Estelle, and she’d been closer than a sister ever since childhood—had convinced Victoria without a great deal of difficulty that the arranged marriage her parents were pushing her into with a man for whom she felt no love would be a tragedy she’d regret for the rest of her life. So the pair had fled together to the hopes and thrills and promises of a new country.
On the way west, to a wildly expanding world of cattle empires and endless opportunities such as Estelle had read about in books, she contracted pneumonia and died. This left Victoria jarringly alone and needing to fend for herself on the Texas frontier. Her pride refused to let her contact her family back in England for aid. She vowed to forge on in pursuit of all that she and Estelle had set out after. With her looks, she could have easily succumbed to any number of marriage proposals, but she wanted something more than to settle for an arrangement of convenience—the very thing she had escaped—as a means to simply be taken care of by someone.
So instead she sought whatever socially acceptable “woman’s work” she could find—washing, mending, cleaning, cooking—in order to get by independently. Eventually this led to her hiring on as cook and housekeeper for the men of the Double M. It wasn’t the culmination of her dreams, to be sure, but it was a safe, acceptable position, one she often had to remind herself not to become too complacent with.
“Hope you understand we don’t move the way we do to unnerve you,” Beartooth was explaining. “It’s just that, the way we lived out in the wild and up in the mountains for all those years, we learned to move silently or we might sudden-like quit livin’ at all.”
“I understand,” Victoria said. “I can’t, for the life of me, figure out why anyone would want to pursue that extreme lifestyle, but I understand how you had to adapt in order to survive.”
Beartooth smiled. “Nobody can ever appreciate that lifestyle unless they’ve felt the urge and gone on to live it. It ain’t something you can sit down and reason out as a good idea or a smart way to live. It’s something that’s either in you or it ain’t.”
“And to this day it remains in all three of you, doesn’t it?” Victoria said with a faint smile of her own. “The love for that life and those times, I mean.”
“Yeah, I reckon it does,” Beartooth admitted, somewhat surprised to hear himself say so. “But, barrin’ something drastic, I don’t see any of us ever returnin’ to it. There are plenty of old-timers still walkin’ the mountain paths and trappin’ the streams, but it’s really a young man’s game. Me and my pards, we decided we were a little long in the tooth to keep after it.”
“Nonsense. The passage of years means little to hardy men like you three.”
“Maybe not. But there are other ways to prove it.” Beartooth shrugged. “You’re right, though, about the love for that life—the savorin’ of it, I guess you could say—still bein’ in all of us. I’m pretty sure Firestick and Moosejaw feel the same way. Only, like I said, barrin’ something drastic, I don’t see any of us returnin’ to it.”
“Let’s hope not,” Victoria said. “Surely you must know there are many in these parts who would hate to see you leave.”
Her words left Beartooth at a loss for how to respond. Since settling here in the Buffalo Peak area, Firestick and Moosejaw had each found romantic interests in town. To them, Victoria was a welcome addition to their ranch life—competent and eye-pleasing in her role—but that was as far as it went. Beartooth’s feelings toward her, however, had grown into something more. And there’d been indications she might have similar feelings toward him, but as of yet, neither had gotten around to expressing anything with words.
So, Beartooth wondered, when Victoria responded to the possibility of him and his friends returning to the mountains by saying, “Let’s hope not,” then adding how there were many who would “hate to see you leave” . . . was she speaking only for the “many”—or was she including herself? Or was she perhaps speaking mainly for herself?
It was ironic, considering how Beartooth always had a smooth, easy way with women—albeit the certain kind he’d mostly come in contact with before—that here he was feeling flummoxed, not sure how to act or what to say, when it came to the first woman who might truly mean something to him. Flummoxation like this was enough to actually drive a man back up into the mountains!
With Beartooth momentarily tongue-tied, Victoria followed up on her own remark by saying, “Before you wash up for supper, would you mind bringing in some fuel for the stove’s wood bin? Otherwise I might forget and then run short for tomorrow’s breakfast. And I really dread going out to the woodpile in the predawn hour.”
“Sure. No problem,” Beartooth replied, grateful for the disruption of his awkward silence. “With all the chores you do around here, us fellas ought to do a better job of keepin’ that bin full for you—without havin’ to be asked.”
“I don’t mind fetching some for myself, except, like I said, early in the morning. A rat jumped out at me one time when it was still too dark to see well, and I’ve been skittish ever since. And right now I need to stay here and keep an eye on those pies in the oven.”
Beartooth’s eyebrows lifted. “Pies, as in more than one? I thought that was part of what I smelled. Peach, right?”
“Sorry, but no,” Victoria said, knowing how fond he was of peach pie. “They’re both blueberry this time. But I promise to make peach next, before the end of the week. All right?”
Picking up the bucket for hauling in the wood for the stove, Beartooth said, “I’ll hold you to it. And I aim to make sure you’ll have plenty of wood for the baking. In the meantime, though, blueberry ain’t exactly a hard sacrifice. So, you stay here and guard ’em good while I commence to fetchin’ your fuel.”
CHAPTER 6
“The boss sure ain’t gonna like it, I can tell you that much. Hell, I can guarantee it. He ain’t gonna like it one damn bit!”
Firestick scowled fiercely in response to these words. “Your boss ‘don’t like it’?” he mimicked. “You think me or anybody else in this town likes those three jackasses showin’ up every two, three weeks and startin’ some new kind of trouble? Well, here’s a guarantee right back at you—nobody does. Least of all me. Tolsvord’s had plenty of chances to rein in the Dunlaps and Woolsey, but all he ever does is pay their fines and wag his finger at them and then turn ’em loose to come around and stir something up all over again.”
“And that’s what he’ll do again this time. Pay their fines, I mean. Just tell me how much it is so I can let him
