to her waist, her dark eyes lustrous with turbulent emotion and her lithe figure vibrant with life.
He had risen from his chair, compelled by her very presence to leave off the frittering details that comprised his logically structured and suddenly stifling lifestyle. The urge to tear off his silk tie, suit jacket and vest, to take her hand and flee the office he had worked so hard to get, flee the tangled city streets, the noise and the chaos of the white man’s world and return with her to the place of his ancestors, became really overwhelming. She had reawakened in him the mystery and wonder he had felt as a young boy on the Crow Indian reservation when counting all the colors of a Rocky Mountain sunset.
“I need your help,” she had said, and with those four powerful words she had altered the very fabric of his carefully constructed life.
The ranch house was dark. He parked where he usually did and walked up the porch steps, bearing the small box of food in his arms. Knocked on the door and heard her little cow dog moving about, but nothing else. He looked toward the pole barn. Had she gotten back all right? He was about to set the food down and go check for her horse, when the door opened.
“Jessie?” he said. “It’s Steven. I brought you some food.”
The silence stretched while he waited patiently and then she said in a low, weary voice, “Thanks, but I’m not hungry.”
“Hunger will come. This isn’t the end.”
“It feels like the end.”
Steven stepped past her then, not waiting for her to invite him inside. The room was cold and dark. He fumbled for the table he knew was there and set the cardboard box down. “Light the lamps,” he said.
She did so reluctantly as he went about the business of kindling a fire in the kitchen’s woodstove. While it caught he found a pan and poured the soup into it, then laid the sourdough loaf atop the cast-iron stove to warm. “I’ll come back Sunday morning. Early. I’ll bring help. Pete Two Shirts manages the Crow Indian buffalo herd. It’s the largest herd in the country—over fifteen hundred head. Remember? You said you’d like to see the buffalo someday. Our bi’shee, grazing over the land, like the old times.
“Pete’s a good man with horses. We’ll ride up and find your mares for you,” he said, reaching down a bowl from a shelf and setting it on the table. “I’d come tomorrow, but Pete works at the agency. I’d come alone, but I’m not good with horses. Anyway, there’s no rush. McCutcheon says to take all the time you need. We’ll get your truck fixed, too.”
Eyes grave, he took her ice-cold signing hand in his. He turned it over and saw the shallow cut she had drawn across her palm. “When I go, you eat something. Tend to yourself. Get some sleep. This isn’t the end. It is a beginning.”
He left her then, because he knew she needed solitude in which to grieve for what she’d lost.
CALEB MCCUTCHEON couldn’t sleep. He lay in his bed, fingers laced behind his head, and listened to the rain. The luminous dials on the bedside clock read 2:00 a.m. No traffic passed the little motel some twenty miles northwest of Katy Junction. He had chosen to stay close to the ranch rather than return to Bozeman, and had brought a bottle of champagne with him from the city, planning to celebrate after the signing, but he felt no desire to celebrate now. All he could think about was that girl.
He hadn’t expected to meet Jessica Weaver and be completely swept up in her turmoil. Steven Brown had told him bits and pieces about her—that she’d lost her mother when she was seven years old, that she’d inherited the ranch when her father died a year ago, that he’d left her with insurmountable debts and that she’d struggled to make ends meet, waitressing at the local diner nights, working the ranch by day. She’d raised fine bloodstock—Spanish horses—and sold the foals before they hit the ground, but it hadn’t been enough. Too big a ranch, too much work, way too much debt. Too much for one woman alone.
He’d waited several months to sign, and now the historic Weaver ranch belonged to him…and he didn’t feel the least bit good about it. Could he have done things differently? Would anything have made it easier for her? The money certainly hadn’t eased her pain. That much was obvious when she fled the lawyer’s office without the bank check.
McCutcheon sighed. Jesus, he was getting soft, pitying a woman he’d just made wealthy even after all her enormous debts had been settled. “She chose to sell the ranch to me,” he’d said to those gathered for the signing. “She could’ve kept it by selling off parts to developers—they’ve been after it for years. She could’ve kept the house, the outbuildings, enough land to run a small herd of horses. But she didn’t. She chose to sell.”
The words had echoed in the room and sounded false even to his ears, for he was fully aware that Jessica Weaver had made the greatest of sacrifices. Rather than see the land divvied up in lots, she had ensured that it would remain whole for eternity. She had done this the only way she’d known how: by writing numerous conservation restrictions into the deed, thereby taking a tremendous loss in land value.
On her own, in a last-ditch move of sheer desperation, she had approached a local chapter of the Rocky Mountain Conservancy with her plight, and there she had found Steven Brown, a full-blooded Crow Indian and an environmental advocate, whose legal knowledge had made him a perfect choice for the Conservancy’s chairman. Brown had phoned him to ask if he might be interested in looking at the property, since the Conservancy did not have the funds to purchase it outright. Through previous contacts, Brown had known of his interest in buying a big ranch. He explained that the land holding was a watershed of great ecological value embracing critical plants and wildlife. As well, it provided an important buffer to the Greater Yellowstone system.
Were there any buildings on the property? he had inquired of Brown. Oh, yes, he was told. Some of them dating back to the 1800s. Brown’s description of the ranch had intrigued him enough to schedule a flight within the week to view the property. One look and he was sold on both the ranch and the girl, Jessie Weaver. That she loved the land was apparent to anyone who watched her gaze out upon it. That she would give it up in the manner she had only proved the depth of that love. It must have been a terribly difficult thing for her to do.
As if that weren’t enough, just before the signing she had broken her arm. How would she fix her truck, load her things, round up her little band of broodmares all by herself? She’d ridden ten miles in that rainstorm to make it to the property closing. She was tough, but she needed help. Maybe he could arrange for some for her. Or maybe… Maybe he could provide it himself. Hell, why not? He’d fixed his share of beaters in his teen years. He could repair her truck easily enough. He could do a lot for her. Maybe then he’d feel the joy he thought he’d be feeling right now.
In the morning. He’d go in the morning, first thing. Somehow, he’d make things right with Jessie Weaver.
CHAPTER TWO
THE RAIN BROKE at dawn and a stiff wind blew out of the west, driving the wet with it and bringing a chill out of the mountains that crisped the grass and glazed the water buckets with ice. Jessie poked up the fire in the kitchen stove and put the coffeepot on to boil. She didn’t bother to light a lamp. The murky darkness suited her mood. The little cow dog, Blue, sulked at her heels, sensing her disquiet and misery, and tried to dispel it with frequent displays of affection that went unnoticed, unreturned. Her arm ached, but she welcomed the pain. It was a distraction she needed.
This place had always been her home. This place was her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandparents and a handful of loyal hands long dead now and buried with the family in the plot up on the hill.
