A Wolf In Sheep′s Clothing
A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing
Joan Johnston
Harriet Allistair came west to Montana to build a new life, convinced that inheriting her uncle's farm offered the chance to prove herself to her family, to the world and most important, to herself.But that was before she met Nathan Hazard. The Hazard-Allistair feud had endured for generations–and Nathan understands why after meeting proud, stubborn Harriet. From his neighboring ranch, Nathan is counting the minutes till desperation drives her off his family's land.But he hasn't counted on this infuriating woman getting under his skin, making him wonder if ending the feud once and for all could mean a new beginning for them both.
Dear Reader,
I’m always surprised when secondary characters in a book insist on having their own story told. Harriet Alistair and Nathan Hazard showed up in Never Tease a Wolf, and I couldn’t resist telling the rest of their story in A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the two romantic adventures take place simultaneously, so you’ll once again be seeing Abigail Dayton and Luke Granger from Never Tease a Wolf.
Those of you who’ve been reading my Bitter Creek series—The Cowboy, The Texan and The Loner—will note that Harriet and Nathan are also engaged in a feud over the ownership of land, this time for grazing sheep, that’s been ongoing for generations. It’s a theme inherent to the settlement of the West, where land was there for the taking, and the strongest claimed what they could.
I hope you’ll enjoy this modern-day love story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Happy reading!
JOAN JOHNSTON
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Do’s and Don’ts for the Western Tenderfoot at the beginning of each chapter come from The Greenhorn’s Guide to the Woolly West by Gwen Petersen, and are used with permission of the author. I am also indebted to Gwen for the invaluable background information provided in her equally hilarious guide to ranch life, The Ranch Woman’s Manual. Both books are available from Laffing Cow Press in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I would also like to thank Jim Rolleri of the County Extension Service in Big Timber, Montana, for generously parting with every brochure on sheep ranching he could find in his files. Finally, I would like to thank Jim Overstreet, a banker in Big Timber, Montana, who was kind enough to have lunch with me at The Grand and suggest the sort of financial foibles to which a sheep man can be prone.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
1
What do newcomers find abounding in Woolly West towns?
Answer: Quaintness and charm.
Nathan Hazard was mad enough to chew barbed wire. Cyrus Alistair was dead, but even in death the old curmudgeon had managed to thwart Nathan’s attempts to buy his land. Cyrus had bequeathed his tiny Montana sheep ranch to a distant relative from Virginia, someone named Harry Alistair. For years that piece of property had been an itch Nathan couldn’t scratch—a tiny scrap of Alistair land sitting square in the middle of the Hazard ranch—the last vestige of a hundred-year-old feud between the Hazards and the Alistairs.
Nathan had just learned from John Wilkinson, the executor of the Alistair estate, that Cyrus’s heir hadn’t let any grass grow under his feet. Harry Alistair had already arrived in the Boulder River Valley to take possession of Cyrus’s ranch. Nathan only hoped the newest hard-nosed, ornery Alistair hadn’t gotten too settled in. Because he wasn’t staying. Not if Nathan had anything to say about it. Oh, he planned to offer a fair price. He was even willing to be generous if it came to that. But he was going to have that land.
Nathan gunned the engine on his pickup, disdaining the cavernous ruts in the dirt road that led to Cyrus’s tiny, weather-beaten log cabin. It was a pretty good bet that once Harry Alistair got a look at the run-down condition of Cyrus’s property, the Easterner would see the wisdom of selling. Cyrus’s ranch—what there was of it—was falling down. There weren’t more than five hundred sheep on the whole place.
Besides, what could a man from Williamsburg, Virginia, know about raising sheep? The greenhorn would probably take one look at the work, and risk, involved in trying to make a go of such a small, dilapidated spread and be glad to have Nathan take it off his hands. Nathan didn’t contemplate what he would do if Harry Alistair refused to sell, because he simply wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
As he drove up to the cabin, Nathan saw someone bounce up from one of the broken-down sheep pens that surrounded the barn. That had to be Harry Alistair. Nathan couldn’t tell what the greenhorn was doing, but from the man’s agitated movements it was plain something was wrong. A second later the fellow was racing for the barn. He came out another second later carrying a handful of supplies. Once again he ducked out of sight in the sheep pen.
Nathan sighed in disgust. The newcomer sure hadn’t wasted any time getting himself into a pickle. For a moment Nathan considered turning his truck around and driving away. But despite the Hazard-Alistair feud, he couldn’t leave without offering a helping hand. There were rules in the West that governed such conduct. A man in trouble wasn’t friend or foe; he was merely a man in trouble. As such, he was entitled to whatever assistance Nathan could offer. Once the trouble was past and they were on equal footing again, Nathan could feel free to treat this Alistair as the mortal enemy the century-old feud made him.
Nathan slammed on the brakes and left his truck door hanging open as he raced across the snowy ground toward the sheep pen on foot. The closer Nathan got, the more his brow furrowed. The man had stood up again and put a hand behind his neck to rub the tension there. He was tall, but the body Nathan saw was gangly, the shoulders narrow. The man’s face was smooth, unlined. Nathan hadn’t been expecting someone so young and…the only word that came to mind was delicate, but he shied from thinking it. He watched the greenhorn drop out of sight again. With that graceful downward movement Nathan realized what had caused his confusion. That was no man in Cyrus Alistair’s sheep pen—it was a woman!
When Nathan arrived at her side, he saw the problem right away. A sheep was birthing, but the lamb wasn’t presenting correctly. The ewe was baaing in distress. The woman had dropped to her knees and was crooning to the animal in a low, raspy voice that sent shivers up Nathan’s spine.
The woman was concentrating so hard on what she was doing that she wasn’t even aware of Nathan until he asked, “Need some help?”
“What? Oh!” She looked up at him with stricken brown eyes. Her teeth were clenched on her lower lip and her cheeks were pale. He noticed her hand was trembling as she brushed her brown bangs out of her eyes with a slender forearm. “Yes. Please. I don’t know what to do.”
Nathan felt a constriction in his chest at the desperate note in her voice. He had an uncontrollable urge to protect her from the tragic reality she faced. The feeling was unfamiliar, and therefore uncomfortable. He ignored it as best he could and quickly rolled up his sleeves. “Do you have some disinfectant handy?”
“Yes. Here.” She poured disinfectant over his hands and arms.
Nathan shook off the excess and knelt beside the ewe. After a quick examination, he said flatly, “This lamb is dead.”
“Oh, no! It’s all my fault.”
“Maybe not,” Nathan contradicted. “Can’t always save a case of dystocia.”
“What?”
“The lamb is out of position. Its head is bent back, not forward along its legs like it ought to be.”
“I read in a book what to do for a problem delivery. I just didn’t realize…” She reached out a hand to briefly touch the lamb’s foot that extended from the ewe. “Will the mother die, too?”
“Not if I can help it,” Nathan said grimly. There was a long silence while he used soapy water to help the dead lamb slip free of the womb. Almost immediately contractions began again. “There’s another lamb.”
“Is it alive?” the woman asked, her voice full of hope.
“Don’t know yet.” Nathan wanted the lamb to be born alive more than he’d wanted anything in a long time. Which made no sense at all. This was an Alistair sheep.
“Here it comes!” she exclaimed. “Is it all right?”
Nathan waited to see whether the lamb would suck air. When it didn’t, he grabbed a nearby gunnysack and rubbed vigorously. The lamb responded by bleating pitifully. And Nathan let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.
“It’s alive,” she said in a tear-choked voice.
“That it is,” Nathan said with satisfaction. He cut the umbilical cord about an inch and a half from the lamb’s navel and asked, “Where’s the iodine?”
Nathan helped the ewe to her feet while the woman ran to fetch a wide-mouthed jar full of iodine. When she returned he held the lamb up by its front legs and sloshed the jar over the navel cord until it was covered with iodine. He set the lamb back down beside its mother where, after some bumping and searching with its nose, it found a teat and began to nurse.
Nathan glanced at the woman to share the moment, which he found profoundly moving no matter how many times he’d seen it. Once he did, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She was watching the nursing lamb, and her whole face reflected a kind of joy he had seldom seen and wasn’t sure he had ever felt. When the lamb made a loud, slurping sound, a laugh of relief bubbled up from her throat. And she looked up into his eyes and smiled.
He was stunned. Poleaxed. Smitten. In a long-ago time he would have thrown her on his horse and ridden off into the sunset. But this was now, and he was a civilized man. So he simply swallowed hard, gritted his teeth and smiled back.
Her smile revealed a slight space between her front teeth that made her look almost winsome. A dimple appeared in her left cheek when the smile became a grin. Her bangs had fallen back over her brows, and it took all his willpower not to brush them back. Her nose was small and tilted up at the end, and he noticed her cheeks, now that they weren’t so pale, were covered with a scattering of freckles. Her lips were full, despite the wide smile, and her chin, tilted up toward him, seemed to ask for his touch. He had actually lifted a hand toward her when he realized what he was about to do.
Nathan was confused by the strength of his attraction to the woman. He didn’t need—refused to take on—any more obligations in his lifetime. This was a woman who looked in great need of a lot of care and attention. This kind of woman spelled RESPONSIBILITY in capital letters. He shrugged inwardly. He had done his share of taking care of the helpless. He hadn’t begrudged the sacrifice, because it had been necessary, but he was definitely gun-shy.
When he chose a woman to share his life, it would be someone who could stand on her own two feet, someone who could be a helpmate and an equal partner. He would never choose someone like the winsome woman kneeling before him, whose glowing brown eyes beseeched him to take her into his arms and comfort her.
Not by a long shot!
Nathan bolted to his feet, abruptly ending the intense feeling of closeness he felt with the woman. “Where the hell is Harry Alistair?” he demanded in a curt voice. “And what the hell are you doing out here trying to handle a complicated lambing all alone?”
His stomach knotted when he saw the hurt look in her eyes at his abrupt tone of voice, but he didn’t have a chance even to think about apologizing before a spark of defiance lit up her beautiful brown eyes and she rose to her feet. Her hands balled into fists and found her hipbones. She was tall. Really tall. He stood six foot three and she was staring him practically in the eye.
“You’re looking for Harry Alistair?” she asked in a deceptively calm voice.
“I am.”
“What for?”
“That’s between him and me. Look, do you know where he is or not?”
“I do.”
But that was all she said. Nathan was damned if he was going to play games with her. He yanked the worn Stetson off his head, forked an agitated hand through his blond hair and settled the cowboy hat back in place over his brow. He placed his fists on his hips in a powerful masculine version of her pose and grated out, “Well, where the hell is he?”
“He’s standing right here.”
There was a long pause while Nathan registered what she’d said. “You’re Harry Alistair?”
“Actually, my name is Harriet.” She forgave him for his rudeness with one of those engaging smiles and said, “But my friends all call me Harry.”
She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and before he could curb his automatic reaction, he had her hand clasped in his. It was soft. Too damn soft for a woman who hoped to survive the hard life of a Montana sheep rancher. He held on to her hand as he examined her—the Harry Alistair he had come to see—more closely.
He was looking for reasons to find fault with her, to prove he couldn’t possibly be physically attracted to her, and he found them. She was dressed in a really god-awful outfit: brand-new bibbed overalls, a red-and-black plaid wool shirt, a down vest, galoshes, for heaven’s sake, and a Harley’s Feed Store baseball cap, which meant she’d already been to Slim Harley’s Feed Store in Big Timber. Nathan hadn’t realized her hair was so long, but two childish braids fell over each shoulder practically to her breasts.
Nothing wrong with them, a voice inside noted.
Nathan forced his eyes back up to her face, which now bore an expression of amusement. A flush crept up his neck. There was no way he could hide it or stop it. His Swedish ancestors had bequeathed him blue eyes and blond hair and skin that got ruddy in the sun but never tanned. Unfortunately his Nordic complexion also displayed his feelings when he most wanted them hidden. He dropped her hand as though it had caught fire.
“We have to talk,” he said flatly.
“I’d like that,” Harry replied. “After everything we’ve just been through together, I feel like we’re old friends, Mr.—Oh, my,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Nathan Hazard.”
“Come on inside, Nathan Hazard, and have a cup of coffee, and we’ll talk.”
Nathan was pretty sure he could conduct his business right here. After all, how many words did it take to say “I want to buy this place?” Only six. But he was curious to see the inside of Cyrus Alistair’s place. He had heard the tiny log cabin called “rustic” by those who had actually been inside, though they were few and far between.
Against his better judgment Nathan said, “Sure. A cup of coffee sounds good.”
“I don’t have things very organized,” Harry apologized.
Nathan soon realized that was an understatement. Harry took him in through the back door, which led to the kitchen. What he saw was chaos. What he felt was disappointment. Because despite everything he had already seen of her, he’d been holding out hope that he was wrong about Harry Alistair.
The shambles he beheld in the kitchen of the tiny cabin—dishes piled high in the sink, half-empty bottles of formula on the counters, uneaten meals side by side with stacks of brochures on the table, several bags of garbage in one corner, and a lamb sleeping on a wadded-up blanket in the other—confirmed his worst fears. Harry Alistair needed a caretaker. This wasn’t a woman who was ever going to be anyone’s equal partner.
Harry had kicked off her galoshes when she came in the door and let them lie where they fell. Her down vest warmed the back of the kitchen chair, and she hooked her Harley’s Feed Store cap on a deer antler that graced the dingy, wooden-planked wall.
Poor woman, he thought. She must have given up trying to deal with all the mess and clutter. He hardened himself against feeling sympathy for her. He was more convinced than ever that he would be doing her a favor by buying Cyrus’s place from her.
While he stood staring, Harry grabbed some pottery mugs for the coffee from kitchen cupboards that appeared to be all but bare. He was able to notice that because all the cupboards hung open on dragging hinges. As quickly as she shoved the painted yellow kitchen cupboards closed, they sprang open again. And stayed that way. She turned to him, shrugged and let go with another one of her smiles. He stuck his hands deep into his pockets to keep from reaching out to enfold her in his arms.
Not the woman for me, he said to himself.
The walls and floor of the room consisted of unfinished wooden planks. A step down from “rustic,” he thought. More like “primitive.” The refrigerator was so old that the top was rounded instead of square. The gas stove was equally ancient, and she had to light the burner with a match.
“Darned thing doesn’t work from the pilot,” Harry explained as she set a dented metal coffeepot on the burner. “Make yourself at home,” she urged, seating herself at the kitchen table.
Nathan set his Stetson on the table and draped his sheepskin coat over the back of one of the three chrome-legged chairs at the Formica table. Then he flattened the torn plastic seat and sat down. The table was cluttered with brochures. One title leaped out at him—“Sheep Raising for Beginners.” He didn’t have a chance to comment on it before she started talking.
“I’m from Williamsburg, Virginia,” she volunteered. “I didn’t even know my great-uncle Cyrus. It was really a surprise when Mr. Wilkinson from the bank contacted me. At first I couldn’t believe it. Me, inheriting a sheep ranch!
“I suppose the sensible thing would have been to let Mr. Wilkinson sell the place for me. He said there was a buyer anxious to have it. Then I thought about what it would be like to have a place of my very own, far away from—” She jumped up and crossed to the stove to check the coffeepot.
Nathan wanted her to finish that sentence. What, or whom, had she wanted to escape? What, or who, had made her unhappy enough that she had to run all the way to Montana? He fought down the possessive, protective feelings that arose. She didn’t belong to him. Never would.
She was talking in breathless, jerky sentences, which was how he knew she was nervous. It was as though she wasn’t used to entertaining a man in her kitchen. Maybe she wasn’t. He wished he knew for sure.
Not your kind of woman, he repeated to himself.
“Do you have a place around here?” Harry asked.
Nathan cleared his throat and said with a rueful smile, “You could say I have a place that goes all around here.”
He watched her brows lower in confusion at his comment. She filled the two coffee mugs to the very brim and brought them carefully to the table.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?” she asked as she seated herself across from him again.
“My sheep ranch surrounds yours.” When she still looked confused he continued, “Your property sits square in the center of mine. Your access road to the highway runs straight across my land.”
A brilliant smile lit her face, and she cocked her head like a brown sparrow on a budding limb and quipped, “Then we most certainly are neighbors, aren’t we? I’m so glad you came to see me, Nathan—is it all right if I call you Nathan?—so we can get to know each other. I could really use some advice. You see—”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupted.
In the first place it wasn’t all right with him if she called him Nathan. It would be much more difficult to be firm with her if they were on a first-name basis. In the second place he hadn’t come here to be neighborly; he had come to make an offer on her land. And in the third, and most important place, he had absolutely no intention of offering her any advice. And he was going to tell her all those things…just as soon as she stopped smiling so trustingly at him.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, pausing a second between the two syllables, unable to make himself address her by the male nickname. “You probably should have taken the banker’s advice. If the rest of this cabin looks as bad as the kitchen, it can’t be very comfortable. The buildings and sheds are a disgrace. Your hay fields are fallow. Your access road is a mass of ruts. You’ll be lucky to make ends meet let alone earn enough from this sheep ranch you inherited to enjoy any kind of pleasant life. The best advice I can give you is to sell this place to me and go back to Virginia where you belong.”
He watched her full lips firm into a flat line and her jaw tauten. Her chin came up pugnaciously. “I’m not selling out.”
“Why the hell not?” he retorted in exasperation.
“Because.”
He waited for her to explain. But she was keeping her secrets to herself. He was convinced now that she must be running from something…or someone.
“I’m going to make a go of this place. I can do it. I may not be experienced, but I’m intelligent and hardworking and I have all the literature on raising sheep that I could find.”
Nathan stuck the brochure called “Sheep Raising for Beginners” under her nose and said, “None of these brochures will compensate for practical experience. Look what happened this afternoon. What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?” He had the unpleasant experience of watching her chin drop to her chest and her cheeks flush while her thumb brushed anxiously against the plain pottery mug.
“I would probably have lost both lambs, and the ewe, as well,” she admitted in a low voice. She looked up at him, her brown eyes liquid with tears she was trying to blink away. “I owe you my thanks. I don’t know how I can ever repay you. I know I have a lot to learn. But—” she leaned forward, and her voice became urgent “—I intend to work as hard as I have to, night and day if necessary, until I succeed.”
Nathan was angry and irritated. She wasn’t going to succeed; she was going to fail miserably. And unless he could somehow talk her into selling this place to him, he was going to have to stand by and watch it happen. Because he absolutely, positively, was not going to offer to help. There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. He had been through this before. A small commitment had a way of mushrooming out of control. Start cutting pines and pretty soon you’d created a whole mountain meadow.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, “the reason I came here today is to offer to buy this place from you.”
“It’s not for sale.”
Nathan sighed. She’d said it as if she’d meant it. He had no choice except to try to convince her to change her mind. “Sheep ranching involves a whole lot more than lambing and shearing, Harry-et.” He was distracted from his train of thought by the way the flush on her cheeks made her freckles show up. He forced his attention back where it belonged and continued. “For instance, do you have any idea what wool pool you’re in?”
She raised a blank face and stared at him.
“Do you even know what a wool pool is?”
She shook her head.
“A wool pool enables small sheepmen like yourself to concentrate small clips of wool into carload lots so that they can get a better price on—” He cut himself off. He was supposed to be proving her ignorance to her, not educating it away. He ignored her increasingly distressed look and asked, “Do you have any idea what’s involved with docking and castrating lambs?”
This time she nodded, but the flush on her face deepened.
“What about keeping records? Do you have any accounting experience?”
“A little,” she admitted in a quiet voice.
He felt like a desperado in a black hat threatening the schoolmarm, but he told himself it was for her own good in the long run and continued, “Can you figure adjusted weaning weight ratios? Measure ram performance? Calculate shearing dates? Compute feed gain ratios?”
By now she was violently shaking her head. A shiny tear streaked one cheek.
He pushed himself up out of his chair. He braced one callused palm on the table and leaned across to cup her jaw in his other hand and lift her chin. He looked into her eyes, and it took every bit of determination he had not to succumb to the plea he saw there. “I can’t teach you to run this ranch. I have a business of my own that needs tending. You can’t make it on your own, Harry-et. Sell your land to me.”
“No.”
“I’ll give you a fair—a generous—price. Then you can go home where you belong.”
She was out of his grasp and gone before he had time to stop her. She didn’t go far, just to the sink, where she stood in front of the stack of dirty dishes and stared out the dirt-clouded window at the ramshackle sheep pens and the derelict barn. “I will succeed. With or without your help.”
She sounded so sure of herself, despite the fact that she was doomed to fail. Nathan refused to admire her. He chose to be furious with her instead. In three angry strides he was beside her. “You’re as stubborn as every other hard-nosed, ornery Alistair who ever lived on this land!” He snorted in disgust. “I can sure as hell see now why Hazards have been feuding with Alistairs for a hundred years.”
She whirled to confront him. “And I can see why Alistairs chose to feud with Hazards,” she retorted. “How dare you pretend to be a friend!” She poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “How dare you sneak in under my guard and pretend to help—”
“I wasn’t pretending,” he said heatedly, grabbing her wrist to keep her from poking him again. “I did help. Admit it.”
“Sure. So I’d be grateful. All the time you only wanted to buy my land right out from under me. You are the lowest, meanest—”
He wasn’t about to listen to any insults from a greenhorn female. A moment later her arm was twisted up behind her and he had pulled her flush against him. She opened her mouth to lambaste him again and he shut her up the quickest, easiest way he knew. He covered her mouth with his.
Nathan was angry, and he wasn’t gentle. That is, until he felt her lips soften under his. It felt like he’d been wanting her for a long time. His mouth moved slowly over hers while his hand cupped her head and kept her still so he could take what he needed. She struggled against his hold, her breasts brushing against his chest, her hips hard against his. That only made him want her more. It was when he felt her trembling that he came to his senses, mortified at the uncivilized way he’d treated her.
He abruptly released the hand he had twisted behind her back. But instead of coming up to slap him, as he’d expected, her palm reached up to caress his cheek. Her fingertips followed the shape of his cheekbone upward to his temple, where she threaded her fingers into his hair and slowly pulled his head back down.
And she kissed him back.
That was when he realized she was trembling with desire. Not fear. Desire. With both hands free he cupped her buttocks and pulled her hard against him. For every thrust he made, she countered. He was as full and hard as he’d ever been in his life. His tongue ravaged her mouth, and she responded with an ardor that made him hungry for her. He spread urgent kisses across her face and neck, but they didn’t satisfy as much as the taste of her, so he sought her mouth again. His tongue found the space between her teeth. And the inside of her lip. And the roof of her mouth. When he mimicked the thrust and parry of lovers, she held his tongue and sucked it until he thought his head was going to explode.
When he slipped his hand over her buttocks and between her legs, she moaned, a sound that came from deep in her throat and spoke of an agony of unappeased passion.
And the lamb in the corner bleated.
Nathan lifted his head and stared at the woman in his arms. Her brown eyes were half-veiled by her lids, and her pupils were dilated. She was breathing as heavily as he was, her lips parted to gasp air. Her knees had already buckled, and his grasp on her was all that kept them both off the floor.
Are you out of your mind?
He tried to step away, but her hand still clutched his hair. He reached up and drew her hand away. She suddenly seemed to realize he had changed his mind and backed up abruptly. Nathan refused to look at her face. He already felt bad enough. He had come within a lamb’s tail of making love to Harry-et Alistair. He had made a narrow escape, for which he knew he would later, when his body wasn’t so painfully objecting, be glad for.
“I think it’s time you left, Mr. Hazard,” Harry said in a rigidly controlled voice.
He couldn’t leave without trying once more to accomplish what he’d come to do. “Are you sure you won’t—”
The change in her demeanor was so sudden that it took him by surprise. Her expression was fierce, determined. “I will not sell this land,” she said through clenched teeth. “Now get out of here before—”
“Good-bye, Harry-et. If you have a change of heart, John Wilkinson at the bank knows how to get in touch with me.”
He settled his hat on his head and pulled it down with a tug. Then he shrugged broad shoulders into his sheepskin-lined coat. Before he was even out the kitchen door Harry Alistair had already started heating a bottle of formula for the lamb she had snuggled in her arms. It was the first time he’d ever envied one of the fleecy orphans.
The last thing Nathan Hazard wanted to do was leave that room. But he turned resolutely and marched out the door. As he gunned the engine of his truck, he admitted his encounter with Harry-et Alistair had been a very close call.
Not the woman for you, he reminded himself. Definitely not the woman for you.
2
Are there bachelors in them thar hills?
Answer: Yep.
Once the lamb had been fed and settled back on its pallet, Harry sank into a kitchen chair, put her elbows on the table and let her head drop into her hands. What on earth had she been thinking to let Nathan Hazard kiss her like that! And worse, why had she kissed him back in such a wanton manner? It was perfectly clear now that she hadn’t been thinking at all; she’d been feeling, and the feelings had been so overwhelming that they hadn’t allowed for any kind of rational consideration.
Harry had felt an affinity to the rancher from the instant she’d laid eyes on him. His broad shoulders, his narrow hips, the dusting of fine blond hair on his powerful forearms all appealed to her. His eyes were framed by crow’s-feet that gave character to a sharp-boned, perfectly chiseled face. That pair of sapphire-blue eyes, alternately curious and concerned, had stolen her heart.
Harry wasn’t surprised that she was attracted to someone more handsome than any man had a right to be. What amazed her was that having known Nathan Hazard for only a matter of hours she would readily have trusted him with her life. That simply wasn’t logical. Although, Harry supposed in retrospect, she had probably seen in Nathan Hazard exactly what she wanted to see. She had needed a legendary, bigger-than-life western hero, someone tall, rugged and handsome to come along and rescue her. And he had obligingly arrived.
And he had been stunning in his splendor, though that had consisted merely of a pair of butter-soft jeans molded to his long legs, western boots, a dark blue wool shirt topped by a sheepskin-lined denim jacket, and a Stetson he had pulled down so that it left his features shadowed. The shaggy, silver-blond hair that fell a full inch over his collar had made him look untamed, perhaps untamable. Harry remembered wondering what such fine blond hair might feel like. His lower lip was full, and he had a wide, easy smile that pulled one side of his mouth up a little higher than the other. She had also wondered, she realized with chagrin, what it would be like to kiss that mouth. Unbelievably she had actually indulged her fantasies.
Harry wasn’t promiscuous. She wasn’t even sexually experienced when it came right down to it. So she had absolutely no explanation for what had just happened between her and the Montana sheepman. She only knew she had felt an urgent, uncontrollable need to touch Nathan Hazard, to kiss him and to have him kiss her back. And she hadn’t wanted him to stop there. She had wanted him inside her, mated to her.
Her mother and father, not to mention her brother, Charlie, and her eight uncles and their dignified, decorous wives, would have been appalled to think that any Williamsburg Alistair could have behaved in such a provocative manner with a man she had only just met. Harry was a little appalled herself.
But then nothing in Montana was going the way she had planned.
It had seemed like such a good idea, when she had gotten the letter from John Wilkinson, to come to the Boulder River Valley and learn how to run great-uncle Cyrus’s sheep ranch. She loved animals and she loved being out-of-doors and she loved the mountains—she had heard that southwestern Montana had a lot of beautiful mountains. She’d expected opposition to such a move from her family, so she’d carefully chosen the moment to let them know about her decision.
No Alistair ever argued at the dinner table. So, sitting at the elegant antique table that had been handed down from Alistair to Alistair for generations, she had waited patiently for a break in the dinner conversation and calmly announced, “I’ve decided to take advantage of my inheritance from great-uncle Cyrus. I’ll be leaving for Montana at the end of the week.”
“But you can’t possibly manage a sheep ranch on your own, Harriet,” her mother admonished in a cultured voice. “And since you’re bound to fail, darling, I can’t understand why you would even want to give it a try. Besides,” she added, “think of the smell!”
Harry—her mother cringed every time she heard the masculine nickname—had turned her compelling brown eyes to her father, looking for an encouraging word.
“Your mother is right, sweetheart,” Terence Waverly Alistair said. “My daughter, a sheep farmer?” His thick white brows lowered until they nearly met at the bridge of his nose. “I’m afraid I can’t lend my support to such a move. You haven’t succeeded at a single job I’ve found for you, sweetheart. Not the one as a teller in my bank, not the one as a secretary, nor the the one as a medical receptionist. You’ve gotten yourself fired for ineptness at every single one. It’s foolhardy to go so far—Montana is a long way from Virginia, my dear—merely to fail yet again. Besides,” he added, “think of the cold!”
Harry turned her solemn gaze toward her older brother, Charles. He had been her champion in the past. He had even unbent so far as to call her Harry when their parents weren’t around. Now she needed his support. Wanted his support. Begged with her eyes for his support.
“I’m afraid I have to agree with Mom and Dad, Harriet.”
“But, Charles—”
“Let me finish,” he said in a determined voice. Harry met her brother’s sympathetic gaze as he continued. “You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. You’ll be a lot happier if you learn to accept your limitations.”
“Meaning?” Harry managed to whisper past the ache in her throat.
“Meaning you just aren’t clever enough to pull it off, Harriet. Besides,” he added, “think of all that manual labor!”
Harry felt the weight of a lifetime of previous failures in every concerned but discouraging word her family had offered. They didn’t believe she could do it. She took a deep breath and let it out. She could hardly blame them for their opinion of her. To be perfectly honest, she had never given them any reason to think otherwise. So why was she so certain that this time things would be different? Why was she so certain that this time she would succeed? Because she knew something they didn’t: she had done all that failing in the past on purpose.
Harry was paying now for years of deception. It had started innocently enough when she was a child and her mother had wanted her to take ballet lessons. At six Harry had already towered over her friends. Gawky and gangly, she knew she was never going to make a graceful prima ballerina. One look at her mother’s face, however, and Harry had known she couldn’t say, “No, thank you. I’d rather be playing basketball.”
Instead, she’d simply acquired two left feet. It had worked. Her ballet instructor had quickly labeled her irretrievably clumsy and advised Isabella Alistair that she would only be throwing her money away if Harriet continued in the class. Isabella was forced to admit defeat. Thus, unbeknownst to her parents, Harry had discovered at a very early age a passive way of resisting them.
Over the years Harry had never said no to her parents. It had been easier simply to go along with whatever they had planned. Piano lessons were thwarted with a deaf ear; embroidery had been abandoned as too bloody; and her brief attempt at tennis had resulted in a broken leg.
As she had gotten older, the stakes had gotten higher. She had only barely avoided a plan to send her away to college at Radcliffe by getting entrance exam scores so low that they had astonished the teachers who had watched her get straight A’s through high school. She had been elated when her distraught parents had allowed her to enroll at the same local university her friends from high school were attending.
Harry knew she should have made some overt effort to resist each time her father had gotten her one of those awful jobs after graduation, simply stood up to him and said, “No, I’d rather be pursuing a career that I’ve chosen for myself.” But old habits were hard to break. It had been easier to prove inept at each and every one.
When her parents chose a husband for her, she’d resorted to even more drastic measures. She’d concealed what looks she had, made a point of reciting her flaws to her suitor and resisted his amorous advances like a starched-up prude. She had led the young man to contemplate life with a plain, clumsy, cold-natured, brown-eyed, brown-haired, freckle-faced failure. He had beat a hasty retreat.
Now a lifetime of purposeful failure had come home to roost. She couldn’t very well convince her parents she was ready to let go of the apron strings when she had so carefully convinced them of her inability to succeed at a single thing they had set for her to do. She might have tried to explain to them her failure had only been a childish game that had been carried on too long, but that would mean admitting she’d spent her entire life deceiving them. She couldn’t bear to hurt them like that. Anyway, she didn’t think they’d believe her if she told them her whole inept life had been a sham.
Now Harry could see, with the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, that she’d hurt herself even more than her parents by the choices she’d made. But the method of dealing with her parents’ manipulation, which she’d started as a child and continued as a teenager, she’d found impossible to reverse as an adult. Until now. At twenty-six she finally had the perfect opportunity to break the pattern of failure she’d pursued for a lifetime. She only hoped she hadn’t waited too long.
Harry was certain she could manage her great-uncle Cyrus’s sheep ranch. She was certain she could do anything she set her brilliant mind to do. After all, it had taken brilliance to fail as magnificently, and selectively, as she had all these years. So now, when she was determined to succeed at last, she’d wanted her family’s support. It was clear she wasn’t going to get it. And she could hardly blame them for it. She was merely reaping what she had so carefully sowed.
Harry had a momentary qualm when she wondered whether they might be right. Maybe she was biting off more than she could chew. After all, what did she know about sheep or sheep ranching? Then her chin tilted up and she clenched her hands in her lap under the table. They were wrong. She wouldn’t fail. She could learn what she didn’t know. And she would succeed.
Harriet Elizabeth Alistair was convinced in her heart that she wasn’t a failure. Surely, once she made up her mind to stop failing, she could. Once she was doing something she had chosen for herself, she was bound to succeed. She would show them all. She wasn’t what they thought her—someone who had to be watched and protected from herself and the cold, cruel world around her. Rather, she was a woman with hopes and dreams, none of which she’d been allowed—or rather, allowed herself—to pursue.
Like a pioneer of old, Harry wanted to go west to build a new life. She was prepared for hard work, for frigid winter mornings and searing summer days. She welcomed the opportunity to build her fortune with the sweat of her brow and the labor of her back. Harry couldn’t expect her family to understand why she wanted to try to make it on her own in a cold, smelly, faraway place where she would have to indulge in manual labor. She had something to prove to herself. This venture was the Boston Tea Party and the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand all rolled into one. In the short run she might lose a few battles, but she was determined to win the war.
At last Harry broke the awesome silence that had descended on the dinner table. “Nothing you’ve said has changed my mind,” she told her family. “I’ll be leaving at the end of the week.”
Nothing her family said the following week, and they’d said quite a lot, had dissuaded Harry from the course she’d set for herself. She’d been delighted to find, when she arrived a week later in Big Timber, the town closest to great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch, that at least she hadn’t been deceived about the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Montana. The Crazy Mountains provided a striking vista to the north, while the majestic, snow-capped Absarokas greeted her to the south each morning. But they were the only redeeming feature in an otherwise daunting locale.
The Boulder River Valley was a desolate place in late February. The cottonwoods that lined the Boulder River, which meandered the length of the valley, were stripped bare of leaves. And the grass, what wasn’t covered by patches of drifted snow, was a ghastly straw-yellow. All that might have been bearable if only she hadn’t found such utter decay when she arrived at great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch.
Her first look at the property she’d inherited had been quite a shock. Harry had been tempted to turn tail and run back to Williamsburg. But something—perhaps the beauty of the mountains, but more likely the thought of facing her family if she gave up without even trying—had kept her from giving John Wilkinson the word to sell. She would never go home until she could do so with her head held high, the owner and manager of a prosperous sheep ranch.
Harry had discovered dozens of reasons to question her decision ever since she’d moved to Montana, not the least of which was the meeting today with her nearest neighbor. Nathan Hazard hadn’t exactly fulfilled her expectations of the typical western hero. A more provoking, irritating, exasperating man she had never known! Whether he admitted it or not, it had been a pretty sneaky thing to do, helping her so generously with the difficult lambing when he knew all along he was only softening her up so that he could make an offer on her land.
Thoughts of the difficult birthing reminded her that she still had to dispose of the dead lamb. Harry knew she ought to bury it, but the ground was frozen. She couldn’t imagine burning it. And she couldn’t bear the thought of taking the poor dead lamb somewhere up into the foothills and leaving it among the juniper and jack pine for nature’s scavengers to find. None of the brochures she’d read discussed this particular problem. Harry knew there must be some procedures the local ranchers followed. Surely they also had deaths at lambing time. But she’d dig a hole in the frozen ground with her fingernails before she asked Nathan Hazard what to do.
For now Harry decided to move the dead lamb behind the barn and cover it with a tarp. As long as the weather stayed cold, the body wouldn’t decay. When she could spare the time, she would take a trip into Big Timber and strike up a conversation with Slim Harley at the feed store. Somehow she would casually bring up the subject of dead lambs in the conversation and get the answers she needed. Harry’s lips twisted wryly. Western conversations certainly tended to have a grittier tone than those in the East.
Harry couldn’t put off what had to be done. She slipped her vest back on, pulled her cap down on her head and stepped back into her galoshes. A quick search turned up some leather work gloves in the drawer beside the sink. A minute later she was headed back out to the sheep pens.
Harry actually shuddered when she picked up the dead lamb. It had stiffened in death. It was also heavier than she’d expected, so she had to hold it close to her chest in order to carry it. Despite everything Harry had read about not getting emotionally involved, she was unable to keep from mourning the animal’s death. It seemed like such a waste. Although, if the lamb had lived it would have gone to market, where it would eventually have become lamb chops on some Eastern dinner table.
Maybe she ought to call Nathan Hazard and take him up on his offer, after all.
Before Harry had a chance to indulge her bout of maudlin conjecture she heard another sheep baaing in distress.
Not again!
Harry raced for the sheep pens where she had separated the ewes that were ready to deliver. Instead she discovered a sheep had already given birth to a lamb. While she watched, it birthed a twin. Harry had learned from her extensive reading that her sheep had been genetically bred so they bore twins, thus doubling the lamb crop. But to her it was a unique happening. She stopped and leaned against the pen and smiled with joy at having witnessed such a miraculous event.
Then she realized she had work to do. The cords had to be cut and dipped in iodine. And the ewe and her lambs had to be moved into a jug, a small pen separate from the other sheep, for two or three days until the lambs had bonded with their mothers and gotten a little stronger.
Harry had read that lambing required constant attention from a rancher, but she hadn’t understood that to mean she would get no sleep, no respite. For the rest of the night she never had a chance to leave the sheep barn, as the ewes dropped twin lambs that lived or died depending on the whims of fate. The stack under the tarp beside her barn got higher.
If Harry had found a spare second, she would have swallowed her pride and called Nathan Hazard for help. But by the time she got a break near dawn, the worst seemed to be over. Harry had stood midwife to the delivery of forty-seven lambs. Forty-three were still alive.
She dragged herself into the house and only then realized she’d forgotten about the orphan lamb in her kitchen. He was bleating pitifully from hunger. Despite her fatigue, Harry took the time to fix the lamb a bottle. She fell asleep sitting on the wooden-plank floor with her back against the wooden-plank wall, with the hungry lamb in her lap sucking at a nippled Coke bottle full of milk replacer.
That was how Nathan Hazard found her the following morning at dawn.
Nathan had lambing of his own going on, but unlike Harriet Alistair, he had several hired hands to help with the work. When suppertime arrived, he left the sheep barn and came inside to a hot meal that Katoya, the elderly Blackfoot Indian woman who was his housekeeper, had ready and waiting for him.
Katoya had mysteriously arrived on the Hazard doorstep on the day Nathan’s mother had died, as though by some prearranged promise, to take her place in the household. Nathan had been sixteen at the time. No explanation had ever been forthcoming as to why the Blackfoot woman had come. And despite Nathan’s efforts in later years to ease the older woman’s chores, Katoya still worked every day from dawn to dusk with apparent tirelessness, making Nathan’s house a home.
As Nathan sat down at the kitchen table, he wondered whether Harriet Alistair had found anything worth eating in her bare cupboards. The fact he should find himself worrying about an Alistair, even if it was a woman, made him frown.
“Were you able to buy the land?” Katoya asked as she poured coffee into his cup.
Nathan had learned better than to try to keep secrets from the old Indian woman. “Harry Alistair wouldn’t sell,” he admitted brusquely.
The diminutive Blackfoot woman merely nodded. “So the feud will go on.” She seated herself in a rocker in the kitchen that was positioned to get the most heat from the old-fashioned wood stove.
Nathan grimaced. “Yeah.”
“Is it so important to own the land?”
Nathan turned to face her and saw skin stretched tight with age over high, wide cheekbones and black hair threaded with silver in two braids over her shoulders. He suddenly wondered how old she was. Certainly she had clung to the old Blackfoot ways. “It must be the Indian in you,” he said at last, “that doesn’t feel the same need as I do to possess land.”
Katoya looked back at him with eyes that were a deep black well of wisdom. “The Indian knows what the white man has never learned. You cannot own the land. You can only use it for so long as you walk the earth.”
Katoya started the rocker moving, and its creak made a familiar, comforting sound as Nathan ate the hot lamb stew she’d prepared for him.
Nathan had to admit there was a lot to be said for the old woman’s argument. Why was he so determined to own that piece of Alistair land? After all, when he was gone, who would know or care? Maybe he could have accepted Katoya’s point of view if he hadn’t met Harry Alistair first. Now he couldn’t leave things the way they stood. That piece of land smack in the middle of his spread had always been a burr under the saddle. He didn’t intend to stop bucking until the situation was remedied.
Nathan refilled his own coffee cup to keep the old woman from having to get up again, then settled down into the kitchen chair with his legs stretched out toward the stove. Because he respected Katoya’s advice, Nathan found himself explaining the situation. “The Harry Alistair who inherited the land from Cyrus turned out to be a woman, Harry-et Alistair. She’s greener than buffalo grass in spring and doesn’t know a thing about sheep that hasn’t come out of an extension service bulletin. Harry-et Alistair hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of making a go of Cyrus’s place. But I never saw a woman so determined, so stubborn….”
“You admire her,” Katoya said.
“I don’t…Yes, I do,” he admitted with a disbelieving shake of his head. Nathan kept his face averted as he continued, “But I can’t imagine why. She’s setting herself up for a fall. I just hate to see her have to take it.”
“We always have choices. Is there truly nothing that can be done?”
“Are you suggesting I offer to help her out?” Nathan demanded incredulously. “Because I won’t. I’m not going to volunteer a shoulder to cry on, let alone one to carry a yoke. I’ve learned my lessons well,” he said bitterly. “I’m not going to let that woman get under my skin.”
“Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps you already care for her. Perhaps you will have no choice in the matter.”
Nathan’s jaw flexed as he ground his teeth. The old woman was more perceptive than was comfortable. How could he explain to her the feeling of possessiveness, of protectiveness that had arisen the moment he’d seen Harry-et Alistair. He didn’t understand it himself. Hell, yes, he already cared about Harry-et Alistair. And that worried the dickens out of him. What if he succumbed to her allure? What if he ended up getting involved with her, deeply, emotionally involved with her, and it turned out she needed more than he could give? He knew what it meant to have someone solely dependent upon him, to have someone rely upon him for everything, and to know that no matter how much he did it wouldn’t be enough. Nathan couldn’t stand the pain of that kind of relationship again.
“You must face the truth,” Katoya said. “What will be must be.”
The old woman’s philosophy was simple but irrefutable. “All right,” Nathan said. “I’ll go see her again tomorrow morning. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get involved in her life.”
Nathan repeated that litany until he fell asleep, where he dreamed of a woman with freckles and braids and bibbed overalls who kissed with a passion that had made his pulse race and his body throb. He woke up hard and hungry. He didn’t shave, didn’t eat, simply pulled on jeans, boots, shirt, hat and coat and slammed out the door.
When he arrived at the Alistair place, it was deathly quiet. There was no smoke coming from the stone chimney, no sounds from the barn, or from the tiny, dilapidated cabin.
Something’s wrong.
Nathan thrust the pickup truck door open and hit the ground running for the cabin. His heart was in his throat, his breath hard to catch because his chest was constricted.
Let her be all right, he prayed. I promise I’ll help if only she’s all right.
The kitchen door not only wasn’t locked, it wasn’t even closed. Nathan shoved it open and roared at the top of his voice, “Harry-et! Are you in here? Harry-et!”
That was when he saw her. She was sitting on the floor in the corner with a lamb clutched to her chest, her eyes wide with terror at the sight of him. He was so relieved, and so angry that she’d frightened him for nothing, that he raced over, grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, leaving the back door standing wide open? You’ll catch your death of cold,” he yelled, giving her shoulders a shake to make his point. “Of all the stupid, idiotic, greenhorn—”
And then it dawned on him what he was doing, and he let her go as abruptly as he’d grabbed her. She backed up to the wall and stood there, staring at him.
Harry Alistair had a death grip on the lamb in her arms. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were wide and liquid with tears that hadn’t yet spilled. Her whole body was trembling with fatigue and the aftereffects of the shaking Nathan had given her. Her mouth was working but the words weren’t coming out in much more than a whisper.
Nathan leaned closer to hear what she was trying to say.
“Get out,” she rasped. And then, stronger, “Get out of my house.”
Nathan felt his heart miss a thump. “I’m sorry. Look, I only came over—”
Her chin came up. “I don’t care why you came. I want you to leave. And don’t come back.”
Nathan’s lips pressed flat. What will be must be. It was just as well things had turned out this way. It would have been a mistake to try to help her, anyway. But there was a part of him that died inside at the thought of not seeing her again. He wanted her. More than he’d ever wanted a woman in his life. But she was all wrong for him. She needed the kind of caretaking he’d sworn he was through with forever.
It took every bit of grit he had to turn on his booted heel and walk out of the room. And out of her life.
3
What is accepted dress-for-success garb for country women?
Answer: Coveralls, scabby work shoes, holey hat and shredded gloves.
I am not a failure. I can do anything I set my mind to do. I will succeed.
Over the next two months there were many times when Harry wanted to give up. Often, it was only the repetition of those three sentences that kept her going. For, no matter how hard she tried, things always went awry. She had been forced to learn some hard lessons and learn them fast.
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Joan Johnston
Harriet Allistair came west to Montana to build a new life, convinced that inheriting her uncle's farm offered the chance to prove herself to her family, to the world and most important, to herself.But that was before she met Nathan Hazard. The Hazard-Allistair feud had endured for generations–and Nathan understands why after meeting proud, stubborn Harriet. From his neighboring ranch, Nathan is counting the minutes till desperation drives her off his family's land.But he hasn't counted on this infuriating woman getting under his skin, making him wonder if ending the feud once and for all could mean a new beginning for them both.
Dear Reader,
I’m always surprised when secondary characters in a book insist on having their own story told. Harriet Alistair and Nathan Hazard showed up in Never Tease a Wolf, and I couldn’t resist telling the rest of their story in A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the two romantic adventures take place simultaneously, so you’ll once again be seeing Abigail Dayton and Luke Granger from Never Tease a Wolf.
Those of you who’ve been reading my Bitter Creek series—The Cowboy, The Texan and The Loner—will note that Harriet and Nathan are also engaged in a feud over the ownership of land, this time for grazing sheep, that’s been ongoing for generations. It’s a theme inherent to the settlement of the West, where land was there for the taking, and the strongest claimed what they could.
I hope you’ll enjoy this modern-day love story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Happy reading!
JOAN JOHNSTON
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Do’s and Don’ts for the Western Tenderfoot at the beginning of each chapter come from The Greenhorn’s Guide to the Woolly West by Gwen Petersen, and are used with permission of the author. I am also indebted to Gwen for the invaluable background information provided in her equally hilarious guide to ranch life, The Ranch Woman’s Manual. Both books are available from Laffing Cow Press in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I would also like to thank Jim Rolleri of the County Extension Service in Big Timber, Montana, for generously parting with every brochure on sheep ranching he could find in his files. Finally, I would like to thank Jim Overstreet, a banker in Big Timber, Montana, who was kind enough to have lunch with me at The Grand and suggest the sort of financial foibles to which a sheep man can be prone.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
1
What do newcomers find abounding in Woolly West towns?
Answer: Quaintness and charm.
Nathan Hazard was mad enough to chew barbed wire. Cyrus Alistair was dead, but even in death the old curmudgeon had managed to thwart Nathan’s attempts to buy his land. Cyrus had bequeathed his tiny Montana sheep ranch to a distant relative from Virginia, someone named Harry Alistair. For years that piece of property had been an itch Nathan couldn’t scratch—a tiny scrap of Alistair land sitting square in the middle of the Hazard ranch—the last vestige of a hundred-year-old feud between the Hazards and the Alistairs.
Nathan had just learned from John Wilkinson, the executor of the Alistair estate, that Cyrus’s heir hadn’t let any grass grow under his feet. Harry Alistair had already arrived in the Boulder River Valley to take possession of Cyrus’s ranch. Nathan only hoped the newest hard-nosed, ornery Alistair hadn’t gotten too settled in. Because he wasn’t staying. Not if Nathan had anything to say about it. Oh, he planned to offer a fair price. He was even willing to be generous if it came to that. But he was going to have that land.
Nathan gunned the engine on his pickup, disdaining the cavernous ruts in the dirt road that led to Cyrus’s tiny, weather-beaten log cabin. It was a pretty good bet that once Harry Alistair got a look at the run-down condition of Cyrus’s property, the Easterner would see the wisdom of selling. Cyrus’s ranch—what there was of it—was falling down. There weren’t more than five hundred sheep on the whole place.
Besides, what could a man from Williamsburg, Virginia, know about raising sheep? The greenhorn would probably take one look at the work, and risk, involved in trying to make a go of such a small, dilapidated spread and be glad to have Nathan take it off his hands. Nathan didn’t contemplate what he would do if Harry Alistair refused to sell, because he simply wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
As he drove up to the cabin, Nathan saw someone bounce up from one of the broken-down sheep pens that surrounded the barn. That had to be Harry Alistair. Nathan couldn’t tell what the greenhorn was doing, but from the man’s agitated movements it was plain something was wrong. A second later the fellow was racing for the barn. He came out another second later carrying a handful of supplies. Once again he ducked out of sight in the sheep pen.
Nathan sighed in disgust. The newcomer sure hadn’t wasted any time getting himself into a pickle. For a moment Nathan considered turning his truck around and driving away. But despite the Hazard-Alistair feud, he couldn’t leave without offering a helping hand. There were rules in the West that governed such conduct. A man in trouble wasn’t friend or foe; he was merely a man in trouble. As such, he was entitled to whatever assistance Nathan could offer. Once the trouble was past and they were on equal footing again, Nathan could feel free to treat this Alistair as the mortal enemy the century-old feud made him.
Nathan slammed on the brakes and left his truck door hanging open as he raced across the snowy ground toward the sheep pen on foot. The closer Nathan got, the more his brow furrowed. The man had stood up again and put a hand behind his neck to rub the tension there. He was tall, but the body Nathan saw was gangly, the shoulders narrow. The man’s face was smooth, unlined. Nathan hadn’t been expecting someone so young and…the only word that came to mind was delicate, but he shied from thinking it. He watched the greenhorn drop out of sight again. With that graceful downward movement Nathan realized what had caused his confusion. That was no man in Cyrus Alistair’s sheep pen—it was a woman!
When Nathan arrived at her side, he saw the problem right away. A sheep was birthing, but the lamb wasn’t presenting correctly. The ewe was baaing in distress. The woman had dropped to her knees and was crooning to the animal in a low, raspy voice that sent shivers up Nathan’s spine.
The woman was concentrating so hard on what she was doing that she wasn’t even aware of Nathan until he asked, “Need some help?”
“What? Oh!” She looked up at him with stricken brown eyes. Her teeth were clenched on her lower lip and her cheeks were pale. He noticed her hand was trembling as she brushed her brown bangs out of her eyes with a slender forearm. “Yes. Please. I don’t know what to do.”
Nathan felt a constriction in his chest at the desperate note in her voice. He had an uncontrollable urge to protect her from the tragic reality she faced. The feeling was unfamiliar, and therefore uncomfortable. He ignored it as best he could and quickly rolled up his sleeves. “Do you have some disinfectant handy?”
“Yes. Here.” She poured disinfectant over his hands and arms.
Nathan shook off the excess and knelt beside the ewe. After a quick examination, he said flatly, “This lamb is dead.”
“Oh, no! It’s all my fault.”
“Maybe not,” Nathan contradicted. “Can’t always save a case of dystocia.”
“What?”
“The lamb is out of position. Its head is bent back, not forward along its legs like it ought to be.”
“I read in a book what to do for a problem delivery. I just didn’t realize…” She reached out a hand to briefly touch the lamb’s foot that extended from the ewe. “Will the mother die, too?”
“Not if I can help it,” Nathan said grimly. There was a long silence while he used soapy water to help the dead lamb slip free of the womb. Almost immediately contractions began again. “There’s another lamb.”
“Is it alive?” the woman asked, her voice full of hope.
“Don’t know yet.” Nathan wanted the lamb to be born alive more than he’d wanted anything in a long time. Which made no sense at all. This was an Alistair sheep.
“Here it comes!” she exclaimed. “Is it all right?”
Nathan waited to see whether the lamb would suck air. When it didn’t, he grabbed a nearby gunnysack and rubbed vigorously. The lamb responded by bleating pitifully. And Nathan let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding.
“It’s alive,” she said in a tear-choked voice.
“That it is,” Nathan said with satisfaction. He cut the umbilical cord about an inch and a half from the lamb’s navel and asked, “Where’s the iodine?”
Nathan helped the ewe to her feet while the woman ran to fetch a wide-mouthed jar full of iodine. When she returned he held the lamb up by its front legs and sloshed the jar over the navel cord until it was covered with iodine. He set the lamb back down beside its mother where, after some bumping and searching with its nose, it found a teat and began to nurse.
Nathan glanced at the woman to share the moment, which he found profoundly moving no matter how many times he’d seen it. Once he did, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She was watching the nursing lamb, and her whole face reflected a kind of joy he had seldom seen and wasn’t sure he had ever felt. When the lamb made a loud, slurping sound, a laugh of relief bubbled up from her throat. And she looked up into his eyes and smiled.
He was stunned. Poleaxed. Smitten. In a long-ago time he would have thrown her on his horse and ridden off into the sunset. But this was now, and he was a civilized man. So he simply swallowed hard, gritted his teeth and smiled back.
Her smile revealed a slight space between her front teeth that made her look almost winsome. A dimple appeared in her left cheek when the smile became a grin. Her bangs had fallen back over her brows, and it took all his willpower not to brush them back. Her nose was small and tilted up at the end, and he noticed her cheeks, now that they weren’t so pale, were covered with a scattering of freckles. Her lips were full, despite the wide smile, and her chin, tilted up toward him, seemed to ask for his touch. He had actually lifted a hand toward her when he realized what he was about to do.
Nathan was confused by the strength of his attraction to the woman. He didn’t need—refused to take on—any more obligations in his lifetime. This was a woman who looked in great need of a lot of care and attention. This kind of woman spelled RESPONSIBILITY in capital letters. He shrugged inwardly. He had done his share of taking care of the helpless. He hadn’t begrudged the sacrifice, because it had been necessary, but he was definitely gun-shy.
When he chose a woman to share his life, it would be someone who could stand on her own two feet, someone who could be a helpmate and an equal partner. He would never choose someone like the winsome woman kneeling before him, whose glowing brown eyes beseeched him to take her into his arms and comfort her.
Not by a long shot!
Nathan bolted to his feet, abruptly ending the intense feeling of closeness he felt with the woman. “Where the hell is Harry Alistair?” he demanded in a curt voice. “And what the hell are you doing out here trying to handle a complicated lambing all alone?”
His stomach knotted when he saw the hurt look in her eyes at his abrupt tone of voice, but he didn’t have a chance even to think about apologizing before a spark of defiance lit up her beautiful brown eyes and she rose to her feet. Her hands balled into fists and found her hipbones. She was tall. Really tall. He stood six foot three and she was staring him practically in the eye.
“You’re looking for Harry Alistair?” she asked in a deceptively calm voice.
“I am.”
“What for?”
“That’s between him and me. Look, do you know where he is or not?”
“I do.”
But that was all she said. Nathan was damned if he was going to play games with her. He yanked the worn Stetson off his head, forked an agitated hand through his blond hair and settled the cowboy hat back in place over his brow. He placed his fists on his hips in a powerful masculine version of her pose and grated out, “Well, where the hell is he?”
“He’s standing right here.”
There was a long pause while Nathan registered what she’d said. “You’re Harry Alistair?”
“Actually, my name is Harriet.” She forgave him for his rudeness with one of those engaging smiles and said, “But my friends all call me Harry.”
She stuck out her hand for him to shake, and before he could curb his automatic reaction, he had her hand clasped in his. It was soft. Too damn soft for a woman who hoped to survive the hard life of a Montana sheep rancher. He held on to her hand as he examined her—the Harry Alistair he had come to see—more closely.
He was looking for reasons to find fault with her, to prove he couldn’t possibly be physically attracted to her, and he found them. She was dressed in a really god-awful outfit: brand-new bibbed overalls, a red-and-black plaid wool shirt, a down vest, galoshes, for heaven’s sake, and a Harley’s Feed Store baseball cap, which meant she’d already been to Slim Harley’s Feed Store in Big Timber. Nathan hadn’t realized her hair was so long, but two childish braids fell over each shoulder practically to her breasts.
Nothing wrong with them, a voice inside noted.
Nathan forced his eyes back up to her face, which now bore an expression of amusement. A flush crept up his neck. There was no way he could hide it or stop it. His Swedish ancestors had bequeathed him blue eyes and blond hair and skin that got ruddy in the sun but never tanned. Unfortunately his Nordic complexion also displayed his feelings when he most wanted them hidden. He dropped her hand as though it had caught fire.
“We have to talk,” he said flatly.
“I’d like that,” Harry replied. “After everything we’ve just been through together, I feel like we’re old friends, Mr.—Oh, my,” she said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Nathan Hazard.”
“Come on inside, Nathan Hazard, and have a cup of coffee, and we’ll talk.”
Nathan was pretty sure he could conduct his business right here. After all, how many words did it take to say “I want to buy this place?” Only six. But he was curious to see the inside of Cyrus Alistair’s place. He had heard the tiny log cabin called “rustic” by those who had actually been inside, though they were few and far between.
Against his better judgment Nathan said, “Sure. A cup of coffee sounds good.”
“I don’t have things very organized,” Harry apologized.
Nathan soon realized that was an understatement. Harry took him in through the back door, which led to the kitchen. What he saw was chaos. What he felt was disappointment. Because despite everything he had already seen of her, he’d been holding out hope that he was wrong about Harry Alistair.
The shambles he beheld in the kitchen of the tiny cabin—dishes piled high in the sink, half-empty bottles of formula on the counters, uneaten meals side by side with stacks of brochures on the table, several bags of garbage in one corner, and a lamb sleeping on a wadded-up blanket in the other—confirmed his worst fears. Harry Alistair needed a caretaker. This wasn’t a woman who was ever going to be anyone’s equal partner.
Harry had kicked off her galoshes when she came in the door and let them lie where they fell. Her down vest warmed the back of the kitchen chair, and she hooked her Harley’s Feed Store cap on a deer antler that graced the dingy, wooden-planked wall.
Poor woman, he thought. She must have given up trying to deal with all the mess and clutter. He hardened himself against feeling sympathy for her. He was more convinced than ever that he would be doing her a favor by buying Cyrus’s place from her.
While he stood staring, Harry grabbed some pottery mugs for the coffee from kitchen cupboards that appeared to be all but bare. He was able to notice that because all the cupboards hung open on dragging hinges. As quickly as she shoved the painted yellow kitchen cupboards closed, they sprang open again. And stayed that way. She turned to him, shrugged and let go with another one of her smiles. He stuck his hands deep into his pockets to keep from reaching out to enfold her in his arms.
Not the woman for me, he said to himself.
The walls and floor of the room consisted of unfinished wooden planks. A step down from “rustic,” he thought. More like “primitive.” The refrigerator was so old that the top was rounded instead of square. The gas stove was equally ancient, and she had to light the burner with a match.
“Darned thing doesn’t work from the pilot,” Harry explained as she set a dented metal coffeepot on the burner. “Make yourself at home,” she urged, seating herself at the kitchen table.
Nathan set his Stetson on the table and draped his sheepskin coat over the back of one of the three chrome-legged chairs at the Formica table. Then he flattened the torn plastic seat and sat down. The table was cluttered with brochures. One title leaped out at him—“Sheep Raising for Beginners.” He didn’t have a chance to comment on it before she started talking.
“I’m from Williamsburg, Virginia,” she volunteered. “I didn’t even know my great-uncle Cyrus. It was really a surprise when Mr. Wilkinson from the bank contacted me. At first I couldn’t believe it. Me, inheriting a sheep ranch!
“I suppose the sensible thing would have been to let Mr. Wilkinson sell the place for me. He said there was a buyer anxious to have it. Then I thought about what it would be like to have a place of my very own, far away from—” She jumped up and crossed to the stove to check the coffeepot.
Nathan wanted her to finish that sentence. What, or whom, had she wanted to escape? What, or who, had made her unhappy enough that she had to run all the way to Montana? He fought down the possessive, protective feelings that arose. She didn’t belong to him. Never would.
She was talking in breathless, jerky sentences, which was how he knew she was nervous. It was as though she wasn’t used to entertaining a man in her kitchen. Maybe she wasn’t. He wished he knew for sure.
Not your kind of woman, he repeated to himself.
“Do you have a place around here?” Harry asked.
Nathan cleared his throat and said with a rueful smile, “You could say I have a place that goes all around here.”
He watched her brows lower in confusion at his comment. She filled the two coffee mugs to the very brim and brought them carefully to the table.
“Am I supposed to know what that means?” she asked as she seated herself across from him again.
“My sheep ranch surrounds yours.” When she still looked confused he continued, “Your property sits square in the center of mine. Your access road to the highway runs straight across my land.”
A brilliant smile lit her face, and she cocked her head like a brown sparrow on a budding limb and quipped, “Then we most certainly are neighbors, aren’t we? I’m so glad you came to see me, Nathan—is it all right if I call you Nathan?—so we can get to know each other. I could really use some advice. You see—”
“Wait a minute,” he interrupted.
In the first place it wasn’t all right with him if she called him Nathan. It would be much more difficult to be firm with her if they were on a first-name basis. In the second place he hadn’t come here to be neighborly; he had come to make an offer on her land. And in the third, and most important place, he had absolutely no intention of offering her any advice. And he was going to tell her all those things…just as soon as she stopped smiling so trustingly at him.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, pausing a second between the two syllables, unable to make himself address her by the male nickname. “You probably should have taken the banker’s advice. If the rest of this cabin looks as bad as the kitchen, it can’t be very comfortable. The buildings and sheds are a disgrace. Your hay fields are fallow. Your access road is a mass of ruts. You’ll be lucky to make ends meet let alone earn enough from this sheep ranch you inherited to enjoy any kind of pleasant life. The best advice I can give you is to sell this place to me and go back to Virginia where you belong.”
He watched her full lips firm into a flat line and her jaw tauten. Her chin came up pugnaciously. “I’m not selling out.”
“Why the hell not?” he retorted in exasperation.
“Because.”
He waited for her to explain. But she was keeping her secrets to herself. He was convinced now that she must be running from something…or someone.
“I’m going to make a go of this place. I can do it. I may not be experienced, but I’m intelligent and hardworking and I have all the literature on raising sheep that I could find.”
Nathan stuck the brochure called “Sheep Raising for Beginners” under her nose and said, “None of these brochures will compensate for practical experience. Look what happened this afternoon. What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?” He had the unpleasant experience of watching her chin drop to her chest and her cheeks flush while her thumb brushed anxiously against the plain pottery mug.
“I would probably have lost both lambs, and the ewe, as well,” she admitted in a low voice. She looked up at him, her brown eyes liquid with tears she was trying to blink away. “I owe you my thanks. I don’t know how I can ever repay you. I know I have a lot to learn. But—” she leaned forward, and her voice became urgent “—I intend to work as hard as I have to, night and day if necessary, until I succeed.”
Nathan was angry and irritated. She wasn’t going to succeed; she was going to fail miserably. And unless he could somehow talk her into selling this place to him, he was going to have to stand by and watch it happen. Because he absolutely, positively, was not going to offer to help. There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. He had been through this before. A small commitment had a way of mushrooming out of control. Start cutting pines and pretty soon you’d created a whole mountain meadow.
“Look, Harry-et,” he said, “the reason I came here today is to offer to buy this place from you.”
“It’s not for sale.”
Nathan sighed. She’d said it as if she’d meant it. He had no choice except to try to convince her to change her mind. “Sheep ranching involves a whole lot more than lambing and shearing, Harry-et.” He was distracted from his train of thought by the way the flush on her cheeks made her freckles show up. He forced his attention back where it belonged and continued. “For instance, do you have any idea what wool pool you’re in?”
She raised a blank face and stared at him.
“Do you even know what a wool pool is?”
She shook her head.
“A wool pool enables small sheepmen like yourself to concentrate small clips of wool into carload lots so that they can get a better price on—” He cut himself off. He was supposed to be proving her ignorance to her, not educating it away. He ignored her increasingly distressed look and asked, “Do you have any idea what’s involved with docking and castrating lambs?”
This time she nodded, but the flush on her face deepened.
“What about keeping records? Do you have any accounting experience?”
“A little,” she admitted in a quiet voice.
He felt like a desperado in a black hat threatening the schoolmarm, but he told himself it was for her own good in the long run and continued, “Can you figure adjusted weaning weight ratios? Measure ram performance? Calculate shearing dates? Compute feed gain ratios?”
By now she was violently shaking her head. A shiny tear streaked one cheek.
He pushed himself up out of his chair. He braced one callused palm on the table and leaned across to cup her jaw in his other hand and lift her chin. He looked into her eyes, and it took every bit of determination he had not to succumb to the plea he saw there. “I can’t teach you to run this ranch. I have a business of my own that needs tending. You can’t make it on your own, Harry-et. Sell your land to me.”
“No.”
“I’ll give you a fair—a generous—price. Then you can go home where you belong.”
She was out of his grasp and gone before he had time to stop her. She didn’t go far, just to the sink, where she stood in front of the stack of dirty dishes and stared out the dirt-clouded window at the ramshackle sheep pens and the derelict barn. “I will succeed. With or without your help.”
She sounded so sure of herself, despite the fact that she was doomed to fail. Nathan refused to admire her. He chose to be furious with her instead. In three angry strides he was beside her. “You’re as stubborn as every other hard-nosed, ornery Alistair who ever lived on this land!” He snorted in disgust. “I can sure as hell see now why Hazards have been feuding with Alistairs for a hundred years.”
She whirled to confront him. “And I can see why Alistairs chose to feud with Hazards,” she retorted. “How dare you pretend to be a friend!” She poked him in the chest with a stiff finger. “How dare you sneak in under my guard and pretend to help—”
“I wasn’t pretending,” he said heatedly, grabbing her wrist to keep her from poking him again. “I did help. Admit it.”
“Sure. So I’d be grateful. All the time you only wanted to buy my land right out from under me. You are the lowest, meanest—”
He wasn’t about to listen to any insults from a greenhorn female. A moment later her arm was twisted up behind her and he had pulled her flush against him. She opened her mouth to lambaste him again and he shut her up the quickest, easiest way he knew. He covered her mouth with his.
Nathan was angry, and he wasn’t gentle. That is, until he felt her lips soften under his. It felt like he’d been wanting her for a long time. His mouth moved slowly over hers while his hand cupped her head and kept her still so he could take what he needed. She struggled against his hold, her breasts brushing against his chest, her hips hard against his. That only made him want her more. It was when he felt her trembling that he came to his senses, mortified at the uncivilized way he’d treated her.
He abruptly released the hand he had twisted behind her back. But instead of coming up to slap him, as he’d expected, her palm reached up to caress his cheek. Her fingertips followed the shape of his cheekbone upward to his temple, where she threaded her fingers into his hair and slowly pulled his head back down.
And she kissed him back.
That was when he realized she was trembling with desire. Not fear. Desire. With both hands free he cupped her buttocks and pulled her hard against him. For every thrust he made, she countered. He was as full and hard as he’d ever been in his life. His tongue ravaged her mouth, and she responded with an ardor that made him hungry for her. He spread urgent kisses across her face and neck, but they didn’t satisfy as much as the taste of her, so he sought her mouth again. His tongue found the space between her teeth. And the inside of her lip. And the roof of her mouth. When he mimicked the thrust and parry of lovers, she held his tongue and sucked it until he thought his head was going to explode.
When he slipped his hand over her buttocks and between her legs, she moaned, a sound that came from deep in her throat and spoke of an agony of unappeased passion.
And the lamb in the corner bleated.
Nathan lifted his head and stared at the woman in his arms. Her brown eyes were half-veiled by her lids, and her pupils were dilated. She was breathing as heavily as he was, her lips parted to gasp air. Her knees had already buckled, and his grasp on her was all that kept them both off the floor.
Are you out of your mind?
He tried to step away, but her hand still clutched his hair. He reached up and drew her hand away. She suddenly seemed to realize he had changed his mind and backed up abruptly. Nathan refused to look at her face. He already felt bad enough. He had come within a lamb’s tail of making love to Harry-et Alistair. He had made a narrow escape, for which he knew he would later, when his body wasn’t so painfully objecting, be glad for.
“I think it’s time you left, Mr. Hazard,” Harry said in a rigidly controlled voice.
He couldn’t leave without trying once more to accomplish what he’d come to do. “Are you sure you won’t—”
The change in her demeanor was so sudden that it took him by surprise. Her expression was fierce, determined. “I will not sell this land,” she said through clenched teeth. “Now get out of here before—”
“Good-bye, Harry-et. If you have a change of heart, John Wilkinson at the bank knows how to get in touch with me.”
He settled his hat on his head and pulled it down with a tug. Then he shrugged broad shoulders into his sheepskin-lined coat. Before he was even out the kitchen door Harry Alistair had already started heating a bottle of formula for the lamb she had snuggled in her arms. It was the first time he’d ever envied one of the fleecy orphans.
The last thing Nathan Hazard wanted to do was leave that room. But he turned resolutely and marched out the door. As he gunned the engine of his truck, he admitted his encounter with Harry-et Alistair had been a very close call.
Not the woman for you, he reminded himself. Definitely not the woman for you.
2
Are there bachelors in them thar hills?
Answer: Yep.
Once the lamb had been fed and settled back on its pallet, Harry sank into a kitchen chair, put her elbows on the table and let her head drop into her hands. What on earth had she been thinking to let Nathan Hazard kiss her like that! And worse, why had she kissed him back in such a wanton manner? It was perfectly clear now that she hadn’t been thinking at all; she’d been feeling, and the feelings had been so overwhelming that they hadn’t allowed for any kind of rational consideration.
Harry had felt an affinity to the rancher from the instant she’d laid eyes on him. His broad shoulders, his narrow hips, the dusting of fine blond hair on his powerful forearms all appealed to her. His eyes were framed by crow’s-feet that gave character to a sharp-boned, perfectly chiseled face. That pair of sapphire-blue eyes, alternately curious and concerned, had stolen her heart.
Harry wasn’t surprised that she was attracted to someone more handsome than any man had a right to be. What amazed her was that having known Nathan Hazard for only a matter of hours she would readily have trusted him with her life. That simply wasn’t logical. Although, Harry supposed in retrospect, she had probably seen in Nathan Hazard exactly what she wanted to see. She had needed a legendary, bigger-than-life western hero, someone tall, rugged and handsome to come along and rescue her. And he had obligingly arrived.
And he had been stunning in his splendor, though that had consisted merely of a pair of butter-soft jeans molded to his long legs, western boots, a dark blue wool shirt topped by a sheepskin-lined denim jacket, and a Stetson he had pulled down so that it left his features shadowed. The shaggy, silver-blond hair that fell a full inch over his collar had made him look untamed, perhaps untamable. Harry remembered wondering what such fine blond hair might feel like. His lower lip was full, and he had a wide, easy smile that pulled one side of his mouth up a little higher than the other. She had also wondered, she realized with chagrin, what it would be like to kiss that mouth. Unbelievably she had actually indulged her fantasies.
Harry wasn’t promiscuous. She wasn’t even sexually experienced when it came right down to it. So she had absolutely no explanation for what had just happened between her and the Montana sheepman. She only knew she had felt an urgent, uncontrollable need to touch Nathan Hazard, to kiss him and to have him kiss her back. And she hadn’t wanted him to stop there. She had wanted him inside her, mated to her.
Her mother and father, not to mention her brother, Charlie, and her eight uncles and their dignified, decorous wives, would have been appalled to think that any Williamsburg Alistair could have behaved in such a provocative manner with a man she had only just met. Harry was a little appalled herself.
But then nothing in Montana was going the way she had planned.
It had seemed like such a good idea, when she had gotten the letter from John Wilkinson, to come to the Boulder River Valley and learn how to run great-uncle Cyrus’s sheep ranch. She loved animals and she loved being out-of-doors and she loved the mountains—she had heard that southwestern Montana had a lot of beautiful mountains. She’d expected opposition to such a move from her family, so she’d carefully chosen the moment to let them know about her decision.
No Alistair ever argued at the dinner table. So, sitting at the elegant antique table that had been handed down from Alistair to Alistair for generations, she had waited patiently for a break in the dinner conversation and calmly announced, “I’ve decided to take advantage of my inheritance from great-uncle Cyrus. I’ll be leaving for Montana at the end of the week.”
“But you can’t possibly manage a sheep ranch on your own, Harriet,” her mother admonished in a cultured voice. “And since you’re bound to fail, darling, I can’t understand why you would even want to give it a try. Besides,” she added, “think of the smell!”
Harry—her mother cringed every time she heard the masculine nickname—had turned her compelling brown eyes to her father, looking for an encouraging word.
“Your mother is right, sweetheart,” Terence Waverly Alistair said. “My daughter, a sheep farmer?” His thick white brows lowered until they nearly met at the bridge of his nose. “I’m afraid I can’t lend my support to such a move. You haven’t succeeded at a single job I’ve found for you, sweetheart. Not the one as a teller in my bank, not the one as a secretary, nor the the one as a medical receptionist. You’ve gotten yourself fired for ineptness at every single one. It’s foolhardy to go so far—Montana is a long way from Virginia, my dear—merely to fail yet again. Besides,” he added, “think of the cold!”
Harry turned her solemn gaze toward her older brother, Charles. He had been her champion in the past. He had even unbent so far as to call her Harry when their parents weren’t around. Now she needed his support. Wanted his support. Begged with her eyes for his support.
“I’m afraid I have to agree with Mom and Dad, Harriet.”
“But, Charles—”
“Let me finish,” he said in a determined voice. Harry met her brother’s sympathetic gaze as he continued. “You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment. You’ll be a lot happier if you learn to accept your limitations.”
“Meaning?” Harry managed to whisper past the ache in her throat.
“Meaning you just aren’t clever enough to pull it off, Harriet. Besides,” he added, “think of all that manual labor!”
Harry felt the weight of a lifetime of previous failures in every concerned but discouraging word her family had offered. They didn’t believe she could do it. She took a deep breath and let it out. She could hardly blame them for their opinion of her. To be perfectly honest, she had never given them any reason to think otherwise. So why was she so certain that this time things would be different? Why was she so certain that this time she would succeed? Because she knew something they didn’t: she had done all that failing in the past on purpose.
Harry was paying now for years of deception. It had started innocently enough when she was a child and her mother had wanted her to take ballet lessons. At six Harry had already towered over her friends. Gawky and gangly, she knew she was never going to make a graceful prima ballerina. One look at her mother’s face, however, and Harry had known she couldn’t say, “No, thank you. I’d rather be playing basketball.”
Instead, she’d simply acquired two left feet. It had worked. Her ballet instructor had quickly labeled her irretrievably clumsy and advised Isabella Alistair that she would only be throwing her money away if Harriet continued in the class. Isabella was forced to admit defeat. Thus, unbeknownst to her parents, Harry had discovered at a very early age a passive way of resisting them.
Over the years Harry had never said no to her parents. It had been easier simply to go along with whatever they had planned. Piano lessons were thwarted with a deaf ear; embroidery had been abandoned as too bloody; and her brief attempt at tennis had resulted in a broken leg.
As she had gotten older, the stakes had gotten higher. She had only barely avoided a plan to send her away to college at Radcliffe by getting entrance exam scores so low that they had astonished the teachers who had watched her get straight A’s through high school. She had been elated when her distraught parents had allowed her to enroll at the same local university her friends from high school were attending.
Harry knew she should have made some overt effort to resist each time her father had gotten her one of those awful jobs after graduation, simply stood up to him and said, “No, I’d rather be pursuing a career that I’ve chosen for myself.” But old habits were hard to break. It had been easier to prove inept at each and every one.
When her parents chose a husband for her, she’d resorted to even more drastic measures. She’d concealed what looks she had, made a point of reciting her flaws to her suitor and resisted his amorous advances like a starched-up prude. She had led the young man to contemplate life with a plain, clumsy, cold-natured, brown-eyed, brown-haired, freckle-faced failure. He had beat a hasty retreat.
Now a lifetime of purposeful failure had come home to roost. She couldn’t very well convince her parents she was ready to let go of the apron strings when she had so carefully convinced them of her inability to succeed at a single thing they had set for her to do. She might have tried to explain to them her failure had only been a childish game that had been carried on too long, but that would mean admitting she’d spent her entire life deceiving them. She couldn’t bear to hurt them like that. Anyway, she didn’t think they’d believe her if she told them her whole inept life had been a sham.
Now Harry could see, with the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, that she’d hurt herself even more than her parents by the choices she’d made. But the method of dealing with her parents’ manipulation, which she’d started as a child and continued as a teenager, she’d found impossible to reverse as an adult. Until now. At twenty-six she finally had the perfect opportunity to break the pattern of failure she’d pursued for a lifetime. She only hoped she hadn’t waited too long.
Harry was certain she could manage her great-uncle Cyrus’s sheep ranch. She was certain she could do anything she set her brilliant mind to do. After all, it had taken brilliance to fail as magnificently, and selectively, as she had all these years. So now, when she was determined to succeed at last, she’d wanted her family’s support. It was clear she wasn’t going to get it. And she could hardly blame them for it. She was merely reaping what she had so carefully sowed.
Harry had a momentary qualm when she wondered whether they might be right. Maybe she was biting off more than she could chew. After all, what did she know about sheep or sheep ranching? Then her chin tilted up and she clenched her hands in her lap under the table. They were wrong. She wouldn’t fail. She could learn what she didn’t know. And she would succeed.
Harriet Elizabeth Alistair was convinced in her heart that she wasn’t a failure. Surely, once she made up her mind to stop failing, she could. Once she was doing something she had chosen for herself, she was bound to succeed. She would show them all. She wasn’t what they thought her—someone who had to be watched and protected from herself and the cold, cruel world around her. Rather, she was a woman with hopes and dreams, none of which she’d been allowed—or rather, allowed herself—to pursue.
Like a pioneer of old, Harry wanted to go west to build a new life. She was prepared for hard work, for frigid winter mornings and searing summer days. She welcomed the opportunity to build her fortune with the sweat of her brow and the labor of her back. Harry couldn’t expect her family to understand why she wanted to try to make it on her own in a cold, smelly, faraway place where she would have to indulge in manual labor. She had something to prove to herself. This venture was the Boston Tea Party and the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand all rolled into one. In the short run she might lose a few battles, but she was determined to win the war.
At last Harry broke the awesome silence that had descended on the dinner table. “Nothing you’ve said has changed my mind,” she told her family. “I’ll be leaving at the end of the week.”
Nothing her family said the following week, and they’d said quite a lot, had dissuaded Harry from the course she’d set for herself. She’d been delighted to find, when she arrived a week later in Big Timber, the town closest to great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch, that at least she hadn’t been deceived about the beauty of the mountains in southwestern Montana. The Crazy Mountains provided a striking vista to the north, while the majestic, snow-capped Absarokas greeted her to the south each morning. But they were the only redeeming feature in an otherwise daunting locale.
The Boulder River Valley was a desolate place in late February. The cottonwoods that lined the Boulder River, which meandered the length of the valley, were stripped bare of leaves. And the grass, what wasn’t covered by patches of drifted snow, was a ghastly straw-yellow. All that might have been bearable if only she hadn’t found such utter decay when she arrived at great-uncle Cyrus’s ranch.
Her first look at the property she’d inherited had been quite a shock. Harry had been tempted to turn tail and run back to Williamsburg. But something—perhaps the beauty of the mountains, but more likely the thought of facing her family if she gave up without even trying—had kept her from giving John Wilkinson the word to sell. She would never go home until she could do so with her head held high, the owner and manager of a prosperous sheep ranch.
Harry had discovered dozens of reasons to question her decision ever since she’d moved to Montana, not the least of which was the meeting today with her nearest neighbor. Nathan Hazard hadn’t exactly fulfilled her expectations of the typical western hero. A more provoking, irritating, exasperating man she had never known! Whether he admitted it or not, it had been a pretty sneaky thing to do, helping her so generously with the difficult lambing when he knew all along he was only softening her up so that he could make an offer on her land.
Thoughts of the difficult birthing reminded her that she still had to dispose of the dead lamb. Harry knew she ought to bury it, but the ground was frozen. She couldn’t imagine burning it. And she couldn’t bear the thought of taking the poor dead lamb somewhere up into the foothills and leaving it among the juniper and jack pine for nature’s scavengers to find. None of the brochures she’d read discussed this particular problem. Harry knew there must be some procedures the local ranchers followed. Surely they also had deaths at lambing time. But she’d dig a hole in the frozen ground with her fingernails before she asked Nathan Hazard what to do.
For now Harry decided to move the dead lamb behind the barn and cover it with a tarp. As long as the weather stayed cold, the body wouldn’t decay. When she could spare the time, she would take a trip into Big Timber and strike up a conversation with Slim Harley at the feed store. Somehow she would casually bring up the subject of dead lambs in the conversation and get the answers she needed. Harry’s lips twisted wryly. Western conversations certainly tended to have a grittier tone than those in the East.
Harry couldn’t put off what had to be done. She slipped her vest back on, pulled her cap down on her head and stepped back into her galoshes. A quick search turned up some leather work gloves in the drawer beside the sink. A minute later she was headed back out to the sheep pens.
Harry actually shuddered when she picked up the dead lamb. It had stiffened in death. It was also heavier than she’d expected, so she had to hold it close to her chest in order to carry it. Despite everything Harry had read about not getting emotionally involved, she was unable to keep from mourning the animal’s death. It seemed like such a waste. Although, if the lamb had lived it would have gone to market, where it would eventually have become lamb chops on some Eastern dinner table.
Maybe she ought to call Nathan Hazard and take him up on his offer, after all.
Before Harry had a chance to indulge her bout of maudlin conjecture she heard another sheep baaing in distress.
Not again!
Harry raced for the sheep pens where she had separated the ewes that were ready to deliver. Instead she discovered a sheep had already given birth to a lamb. While she watched, it birthed a twin. Harry had learned from her extensive reading that her sheep had been genetically bred so they bore twins, thus doubling the lamb crop. But to her it was a unique happening. She stopped and leaned against the pen and smiled with joy at having witnessed such a miraculous event.
Then she realized she had work to do. The cords had to be cut and dipped in iodine. And the ewe and her lambs had to be moved into a jug, a small pen separate from the other sheep, for two or three days until the lambs had bonded with their mothers and gotten a little stronger.
Harry had read that lambing required constant attention from a rancher, but she hadn’t understood that to mean she would get no sleep, no respite. For the rest of the night she never had a chance to leave the sheep barn, as the ewes dropped twin lambs that lived or died depending on the whims of fate. The stack under the tarp beside her barn got higher.
If Harry had found a spare second, she would have swallowed her pride and called Nathan Hazard for help. But by the time she got a break near dawn, the worst seemed to be over. Harry had stood midwife to the delivery of forty-seven lambs. Forty-three were still alive.
She dragged herself into the house and only then realized she’d forgotten about the orphan lamb in her kitchen. He was bleating pitifully from hunger. Despite her fatigue, Harry took the time to fix the lamb a bottle. She fell asleep sitting on the wooden-plank floor with her back against the wooden-plank wall, with the hungry lamb in her lap sucking at a nippled Coke bottle full of milk replacer.
That was how Nathan Hazard found her the following morning at dawn.
Nathan had lambing of his own going on, but unlike Harriet Alistair, he had several hired hands to help with the work. When suppertime arrived, he left the sheep barn and came inside to a hot meal that Katoya, the elderly Blackfoot Indian woman who was his housekeeper, had ready and waiting for him.
Katoya had mysteriously arrived on the Hazard doorstep on the day Nathan’s mother had died, as though by some prearranged promise, to take her place in the household. Nathan had been sixteen at the time. No explanation had ever been forthcoming as to why the Blackfoot woman had come. And despite Nathan’s efforts in later years to ease the older woman’s chores, Katoya still worked every day from dawn to dusk with apparent tirelessness, making Nathan’s house a home.
As Nathan sat down at the kitchen table, he wondered whether Harriet Alistair had found anything worth eating in her bare cupboards. The fact he should find himself worrying about an Alistair, even if it was a woman, made him frown.
“Were you able to buy the land?” Katoya asked as she poured coffee into his cup.
Nathan had learned better than to try to keep secrets from the old Indian woman. “Harry Alistair wouldn’t sell,” he admitted brusquely.
The diminutive Blackfoot woman merely nodded. “So the feud will go on.” She seated herself in a rocker in the kitchen that was positioned to get the most heat from the old-fashioned wood stove.
Nathan grimaced. “Yeah.”
“Is it so important to own the land?”
Nathan turned to face her and saw skin stretched tight with age over high, wide cheekbones and black hair threaded with silver in two braids over her shoulders. He suddenly wondered how old she was. Certainly she had clung to the old Blackfoot ways. “It must be the Indian in you,” he said at last, “that doesn’t feel the same need as I do to possess land.”
Katoya looked back at him with eyes that were a deep black well of wisdom. “The Indian knows what the white man has never learned. You cannot own the land. You can only use it for so long as you walk the earth.”
Katoya started the rocker moving, and its creak made a familiar, comforting sound as Nathan ate the hot lamb stew she’d prepared for him.
Nathan had to admit there was a lot to be said for the old woman’s argument. Why was he so determined to own that piece of Alistair land? After all, when he was gone, who would know or care? Maybe he could have accepted Katoya’s point of view if he hadn’t met Harry Alistair first. Now he couldn’t leave things the way they stood. That piece of land smack in the middle of his spread had always been a burr under the saddle. He didn’t intend to stop bucking until the situation was remedied.
Nathan refilled his own coffee cup to keep the old woman from having to get up again, then settled down into the kitchen chair with his legs stretched out toward the stove. Because he respected Katoya’s advice, Nathan found himself explaining the situation. “The Harry Alistair who inherited the land from Cyrus turned out to be a woman, Harry-et Alistair. She’s greener than buffalo grass in spring and doesn’t know a thing about sheep that hasn’t come out of an extension service bulletin. Harry-et Alistair hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of making a go of Cyrus’s place. But I never saw a woman so determined, so stubborn….”
“You admire her,” Katoya said.
“I don’t…Yes, I do,” he admitted with a disbelieving shake of his head. Nathan kept his face averted as he continued, “But I can’t imagine why. She’s setting herself up for a fall. I just hate to see her have to take it.”
“We always have choices. Is there truly nothing that can be done?”
“Are you suggesting I offer to help her out?” Nathan demanded incredulously. “Because I won’t. I’m not going to volunteer a shoulder to cry on, let alone one to carry a yoke. I’ve learned my lessons well,” he said bitterly. “I’m not going to let that woman get under my skin.”
“Perhaps it is too late. Perhaps you already care for her. Perhaps you will have no choice in the matter.”
Nathan’s jaw flexed as he ground his teeth. The old woman was more perceptive than was comfortable. How could he explain to her the feeling of possessiveness, of protectiveness that had arisen the moment he’d seen Harry-et Alistair. He didn’t understand it himself. Hell, yes, he already cared about Harry-et Alistair. And that worried the dickens out of him. What if he succumbed to her allure? What if he ended up getting involved with her, deeply, emotionally involved with her, and it turned out she needed more than he could give? He knew what it meant to have someone solely dependent upon him, to have someone rely upon him for everything, and to know that no matter how much he did it wouldn’t be enough. Nathan couldn’t stand the pain of that kind of relationship again.
“You must face the truth,” Katoya said. “What will be must be.”
The old woman’s philosophy was simple but irrefutable. “All right,” Nathan said. “I’ll go see her again tomorrow morning. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get involved in her life.”
Nathan repeated that litany until he fell asleep, where he dreamed of a woman with freckles and braids and bibbed overalls who kissed with a passion that had made his pulse race and his body throb. He woke up hard and hungry. He didn’t shave, didn’t eat, simply pulled on jeans, boots, shirt, hat and coat and slammed out the door.
When he arrived at the Alistair place, it was deathly quiet. There was no smoke coming from the stone chimney, no sounds from the barn, or from the tiny, dilapidated cabin.
Something’s wrong.
Nathan thrust the pickup truck door open and hit the ground running for the cabin. His heart was in his throat, his breath hard to catch because his chest was constricted.
Let her be all right, he prayed. I promise I’ll help if only she’s all right.
The kitchen door not only wasn’t locked, it wasn’t even closed. Nathan shoved it open and roared at the top of his voice, “Harry-et! Are you in here? Harry-et!”
That was when he saw her. She was sitting on the floor in the corner with a lamb clutched to her chest, her eyes wide with terror at the sight of him. He was so relieved, and so angry that she’d frightened him for nothing, that he raced over, grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, leaving the back door standing wide open? You’ll catch your death of cold,” he yelled, giving her shoulders a shake to make his point. “Of all the stupid, idiotic, greenhorn—”
And then it dawned on him what he was doing, and he let her go as abruptly as he’d grabbed her. She backed up to the wall and stood there, staring at him.
Harry Alistair had a death grip on the lamb in her arms. There were dark circles under her eyes, which were wide and liquid with tears that hadn’t yet spilled. Her whole body was trembling with fatigue and the aftereffects of the shaking Nathan had given her. Her mouth was working but the words weren’t coming out in much more than a whisper.
Nathan leaned closer to hear what she was trying to say.
“Get out,” she rasped. And then, stronger, “Get out of my house.”
Nathan felt his heart miss a thump. “I’m sorry. Look, I only came over—”
Her chin came up. “I don’t care why you came. I want you to leave. And don’t come back.”
Nathan’s lips pressed flat. What will be must be. It was just as well things had turned out this way. It would have been a mistake to try to help her, anyway. But there was a part of him that died inside at the thought of not seeing her again. He wanted her. More than he’d ever wanted a woman in his life. But she was all wrong for him. She needed the kind of caretaking he’d sworn he was through with forever.
It took every bit of grit he had to turn on his booted heel and walk out of the room. And out of her life.
3
What is accepted dress-for-success garb for country women?
Answer: Coveralls, scabby work shoes, holey hat and shredded gloves.
I am not a failure. I can do anything I set my mind to do. I will succeed.
Over the next two months there were many times when Harry wanted to give up. Often, it was only the repetition of those three sentences that kept her going. For, no matter how hard she tried, things always went awry. She had been forced to learn some hard lessons and learn them fast.
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Joan Johnston
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Harriet Allistair came west to Montana to build a new life, convinced that inheriting her uncle′s farm offered the chance to prove herself to her family, to the world and most important, to herself.But that was before she met Nathan Hazard. The Hazard-Allistair feud had endured for generations–and Nathan understands why after meeting proud, stubborn Harriet. From his neighboring ranch, Nathan is counting the minutes till desperation drives her off his family′s land.But he hasn′t counted on this infuriating woman getting under his skin, making him wonder if ending the feud once and for all could mean a new beginning for them both.