oh, twenty years or so.
Burke was tapping again.
“Relax.” Fitz stretched out on his side, crunched a throw pillow under his head and tried to burrow deeper into the leather. “I can deal with it.”
“You won’t have to deal with it. You won’t be here.” Burke cursed and threw the magazine down on the coffee table. “The scheming shrew had perfect timing.”
“What do you mean, I’m not going to be here?”
“There’s been a schedule change on the location shoot. We leave for Montana on Monday. Bright and early.”
Bright and early. An extra-loud alarm and extra-strength caffeine. LAX and paparazzi on an empty stomach. “Aw, shit.”
Burke sniffed and twitched. “You got it.”
ELLIE HARRISON REINED IN her mare on the bank of Whistle Creek and frowned at the construction project turning the facade of her family’s Montana ranch house into Hollywood’s version of a Montana ranch house. Saws shrieked, air compressors whumped, dust whirled, cords twisted, crew members swore. So much money to waste, so many people to waste it. Seemed like everyone had a tiny slice of some ridiculous job, and each of those folks had an assistant.
As long as a fair share of all that money trickled into her pockets, she’d keep her mouth shut and her opinions to herself. Except for sharing her disgust with Will Winterhawk. She’d shared that and plenty more with the ranch foreman over the past twenty years, while she was growing up and he was helping to make sure she did it right.
She shifted in her saddle and glanced over her shoulder at him. “Wonder what Tom would have thought about what’s going on up there.”
Sometimes it seemed she spent most of her waking hours second-guessing what her dead husband—or his dead father—would have done with the family’s land. The weight of all that responsibility to do things the Harrisons’ way wore her down more than the job itself.
Will fingered the rope slung over his saddle horn and squinted at the scene across the creek. “I’m thinking he might have appreciated the irony of it. All that fuss and bother to make things look pretty much the way they looked before all the fuss and bother.”
“Well, all that fuss and bother is helping me pay the bills.”
“Yep.” He nodded solemnly. “There’s that, too.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning…another kind of irony, maybe. Keeping up appearances, keeping up the ranch.” His squint narrowed, and the wrinkles at the corners of his dark eyes deepened. “Maybe using Hollywood like this’ll keep Hollywood out.”
Too many of her neighbors had already sold out to L. A. millionaires, turning productive ranch lands into extravagant wilderness playgrounds. She wasn’t going to let that happen to Tom’s inheritance—or to his daughter’s future.
Will was right. Every bit of the sawing and hammering and painting, the electrical wiring and the headphone yammering, the helicopters swooping and the trucks lumbering back and forth, the dust and the noise and the confusion—none of it was anything to get herself in a twist over. Every bit of inconvenience meant dollars in the bank.
If everything went well and on time. If nothing interfered too much with normal ranch business. If no one got hurt.
She pulled herself up and out of her slump in the saddle, straightening her spine and ignoring the stitch between her shoulder blades. This phase of the filming of Wolfe’s Range would be finished in six weeks, and then the cast and crew would head back to California for the studio work. Life could get back to normal, with fodder tucked away for gossip during long winter nights and a tidy sum tucked away for making the balloon payment on the mortgage and the next round of taxes.
Debt, and the means of easing out from under it, made her stomach churn and her head pound. Sometimes it seemed financial concerns had dogged her every step for the past thirty-one years.
Thirty-one. She was still a young woman, but today she felt as old as the land she managed. “Best get on over there and play wrangler for a couple of hours,” she said.
“Don’t think they see it as much of a game.”
“I know. All that make-believe is serious business.”
“Why, Eleanor Louise,” Will said, tipping his hat back with his thumb to squint at her. “Just when I thought you didn’t have an ironic bone in your body.”
“You may be a dozen years my elder and the closest thing I’ve got to an uncle, Will Winterhawk,” she said, “but you don’t know every little thing that goes on in here.” She pointed at her chest.
“Don’t want to, most of the time. I like keeping things clean and simple.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I know when to shut the hell up and make my exit, stage left.” He kneed his piebald down into the creek bed and splashed across into Montana Movieland.
Ellie sighed and followed. She’d busied herself with early summer chores to put off an afternoon check-in with Trish Cameron, the young production assistant in charge of making things difficult. Might as well get it over with. She dismounted and carefully led Tansy, her mare, into a circus campground of big white vans, through a tangle of cables and wire and people scurrying about on mysterious tasks.
“Ellie!” Trish raised her clipboard in greeting as she approached. “There you are.”
Ellie nodded. “Just wanted to let you know we’re all set for that sunrise scene tomorrow. Got the extra stock in and a temporary corral set up for the second unit folks.”
“Uh-huh, okay, I… No, damn it,” Trish snapped at some invisible person over her headphone set. “I said— What does he mean, we’re— Oh, right, like I give a shit what he— Okay, good.”
Trish fiddled a bit with the little gray ball stuck at her ear and checked the gizmo clipped to her waist and then flipped the clipboard over to slap another scrawled sticky note on top of a wad of fluttering litter before smiling at Ellie. “All set, huh? Good. That’s great. Only now they want ten more.”
“Horses?”
“Yeah. And make ’em, you know…” She waved her hand in tight, tense circles. “Mixed.”
“Mixed?”
“Like, different colors.” Trish pulled a cell phone out of a back pocket and frowned at the screen. “More white ones. A couple of those spotted ones. Some lighter browns. You know—something that’ll be a stronger contrast on film.”
Ellie’s stomach turned to battery acid and flowed into her boots. Ten horses, in some crazy crayon assortment pack, to beg and borrow from her neighbors, round up before dark, settle in the paddocks tonight, and then move before dawn to a pasture fifteen miles, one river and a tricky stand of timber away.
Piece of cake.
Probably the piece she wouldn’t be eating for dinner tonight. No time for dinner when there was stock to wrangle for idiots
