asked as Abigail came rushing into the kitchen.
“No fire. I just came to see if you needed some help,” Abigail maintained.
“You mean you’re not out of breath because of Dylan Janos? Now, that’s hero material,” Raj dreamily declared, tilting her head in the direction of the foreman’s cabin.
Abigail shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s just a guy.”
“A darn good-looking one.”
“His hair is too long.”
“Hah!” Raj said triumphantly. “You’re tempted.”
“I am not!” Abigail denied.
Raj gave her a look that said she knew better.
“Okay, I might have been tempted at first,” Abigail allowed. “In the very beginning, when he saved me. For a minute or two.”
“Wait a second!” Raj squealed. “This is the first I’ve heard about him saving you. From what?”
“Boredom,” Abigail retorted.
“Yeah, right. You’ve never been bored a minute in your entire life. Now, come on, tell me everything!”
“You know I took Wild Thing for a run this morning? Well, we hadn’t been out long when she suddenly took off, and I couldn’t stop her. She was heading right for that stand of woods in the north pasture, the one with the prairie-dog holes. Anyway, Dylan showed up out of no place and helped out.”
“Helped out how?” Raj asked. “Anything that required you to end up in his arms?” Seeing the blush on Abigail’s face, she crowed, “Aha! I knew it.”
“I told you, I might have been tempted, but I got over it. Real fast. He’s a cowboy.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Raj said dreamily.
“Cut that out. He’s working here. I’m his employer. And I am not about to repeat my past mistakes. You know my rule—no more cowboys. I’ve sworn off of them for good.”
“You know what Katharine Hepburn said—‘If you obey all the rules…you miss all the fun.’”
“I have all the fun I can manage at the moment, thank you very much,” Abigail retorted tartly. “Besides, you’re hardly an objective observer in all this. You’re practically as bad about cowboys as I am.”
“Nonsense. I am merely a fan of Western US. social life and customs.”
“Yeah, right. That’s putting it mildly. You think John Wayne walked on water and you got your master’s degree in Western culture by writing a thesis on the cowboy as mythical hero.”
“Not the most practical thing I’ve ever done,” Raj admitted. “But then I’m not one to conform to expectations.”
Raj had left her native India at the tender age of fifteen, to visit a third cousin who owned a restaurant in New York City. That had been twenty years ago, and she’d often told Abigail that she’d never looked back. By the time Abigail had met her in Great Falls, Raj was working as a waitress by night and taking college courses by day.
The first time Abigail had visited Raj’s tiny studio apartment, she’d been overwhelmed by the Western memorabilia—classic posters of John Wayne and Barbara Stanwyck Westerns covered the cracked plaster walls, while their movies on video filled the bookcases and overflowed onto the floor.
It was a love that Abigail shared. She was lucky to have been able to combine her two loves—books and Western life—into her second career as a Western-romance writer.
“Yes, well, a lot would say that I wasn’t practical leaving my job at the library in Great Falls to come up here and live on this ranch. My parents especially,” Abigail noted wryly. “They think I’m crazy, that this is some passing phase I’m going through, and they’re praying that I’ll ‘come to my senses’ is the way my father put it, and sell the place.”
“To that idiot who was here earlier?”
Abigail nodded. “My parents just don’t understand, and I don’t know how to explain it to them. The thing is that I feel such a sense of peace here, a sense of belonging. When I look at those mountains out there—” she swept her hand toward the large window facing east “—it just feels right in here.” She pressed her clenched hand against her chest.
“Then you did right coming here.”
“Have I told you how much I appreciate you coming up here and spending the summer with me?” Abigail said.
“Oh, yeah,” Raj mockingly retorted, “it was a real hardship for me to leave my cubbyhole apartment in Great Falls and spend two months in these gorgeous surroundings.”
“At least in Great Falls you didn’t have to deal with moose on your doorstep.”
“That made our first morning here exciting, didn’t it?” Raj recalled with a grin. “And I have a feeling that Dylan’s presence is going to make the rest of our summer rather exciting, as well.”
“He’s a little less homely than that moose was,” Abigail replied with a saucy grin. “But I’d be surprised if he stays the entire summer. His kind doesn’t tend to stay in one place very long.”
“He might surprise you.”
“You can count on it,” Dylan stated from the doorway.
Abigail swung around, her face turning red as she wondered how much of their conversation he’d overheard.
She found out when he mockingly added, “And I’m deeply honored that you think I’m less homely than a moose.”
To her relief, Abigail was saved from having to make a reply by the noisy entrance of Shem Buskirk and his two grown sons, Hondo and Randy. Shem had worked on her father’s ranch a few summers when she’d been a child. He’d been the only applicant Abigail had gotten in reply to an ad for help at the ranch. Considering the fact that Hoss owned the newspaper in the nearest town, Big Rock, she supposed she was lucky to have gotten her ad run at all. Hoss had told her that no one would answer it. He’d been wrong.
Not that Hoss considered Shem much of a threat. No one knew how old Shem actually was, but he told stories about his mining days in the Crazy Mountains in the early 1930s. He had a shock of white hair almost as wild as Ziggy’s, while his face had more lines on it than a Manhattan road map. He’d turned down her offer of ranch foreman, claiming responsibility like that wasn’t his strong suit, but had agreed to work for her.
His two sons—Hondo and Randy, as ageless as Shem—had just shown up with him. They were willing to work for room and board. The bunkhouse was empty anyway, so Abigail let them stay on. Neither one of them had what it took to be foreman.
The two “offspring,” as Shem called his sons, reminded her of Mutt and Jeff, with Randy as tall and skinny as a rail while Hondo was much shorter and heavyset. Neither one was real bright, but they were adequate workers, although they didn’t do anything without being told first. However, at this point, Abigail couldn’t afford to
