One

“He’s a mess.”

He couldn’t have agreed more. His head was splitting, his throat was raw, and his mouth tasted as if somebody had served him scrambled socks. Even his stomach, usually immune to his greater follies, was threatening revolt. He was facedown in a bed that smelled like flowers and sunshine, and he thought he’d rather be dead.

“Get on in and finish your breakfast, Hannah,” he heard another voice say. “I’ll take care of him.”

Noah cracked open an eye to find the pair of them standing at the edge of the bed. The smaller of the two—but not by much—was examining him with the considered eye of a skeptic. Freckle-faced, round-cheeked, saucy-eyed and possessing the thickest cap of bright red hair he’d ever seen, he figured her for all of six. She was standing there with her hands on her hips looking like a mother considering a misbehaving boy.

“Dirtier’n a junkyard dog, Mom,” she pronounced. “It’s a disgrace.”

Noah wondered who the heck she was. He didn’t remember hearing anything about a child. But then, in the condition he was in, he didn’t remember how he got here. He kind of felt like Judy Garland coming to after the trip to Oz. Only everything wasn’t in black and white. It was in blinding Technicolor, provided by what he was sure was a five-hundred-watt overhead light.

“Thanks, Hannah,” the taller one was saying, her consideration on him, too. “I’ll pass that along. Now, scoot.”

She gave the little girl a swat to the rump, and Hannah headed out.

Noah winced. Hannah was wearing boots. Noah knew. She set them down just a bit too deliberately against that hardwood floor for it to be unintentional. Her steps clattered like hammer blows around in his head.

The second one was still there, her posture a mirror of the littler one’s. Hands on hips, head tilted just a little, eyes wary and bright. The same red hair, although softened, deepened into an auburn that begged for the sun to find it. Same freckles over an oval face. Strong chin and soft mouth. Interesting contrast. Interesting face.

This one he knew, because of the voice. This one he’d asked for. He closed his eye again and just listened to her.

“Mr. Campbell,” she said, a little more loudly than the last time. “It’s your alarm clock calling.”

“Nice to hear it,” he managed, his well-trained voice reduced to rubble by the boilermakers the night before, not to mention the myriad variations he’d been consuming the nights before that. “Ms. McCann.”

“Then you remember me.”

“I hope so. I argued with my partner enough about you.”

“You need to get up,” she informed him, her tone gaining a layer of authority.

“Can you talk a little more quietly?” he asked, burrowing deeper into the real feather pillow he hadn’t noticed before.

“You ignore me when I talk more quietly,” she told him. “And I don’t have time to be ignored.”

“Then I really am here?”

He still didn’t open his eyes. He thought he’d just lie here a month or so and enjoy the smell of clean air and coffee, the crisp fold of sheets beneath his grimy cheek. The sensation of that sharp, slim woman standing just out of reach.

“Depends on where you think here is,” she said.

“The ranch.”

“In that case, you really are here.”

He gave his head a minimal nod that ended in a massive scowl. “Oh.”

“Bad idea?”

“Only one of many.”

“I can well imagine. Do you remember last night?”

Last night. Yes, he remembered last night. He remembered getting into the airport at Bozeman and driving. He remembered thinking that if he just got to the ranch he’d feel better. He’d find what he’d been looking for, for so long, and the grinding disappointment would ease, just a little. The sense of isolation would dissipate.

He remembered finding Westridge at sunset with the sun gilding the snow in the Absaroka Mountains to the east and the wind whistling across the meadows. He remembered the lights of the Last Chance Saloon beckoning him in the gloom. He remembered that nobody knew him there, and that for the first time in a century he’d felt himself relaxing.

Past that…

“Last night?” he echoed gently, gathering up the nerve to inch his hand toward the stubble on his jaw for a good scratch or two. “Oh, yeah. I remember it. At least the first five hours or so. The bartender’s name was Rick, and he thought boilermakers were as good an idea as I did.”

“You got my ranch hands drunk.”

He wanted to laugh. He might have if he hadn’t thought it would split his head apart. So he opened an eye and hazarded a look. “I did not hold their mouths open and make them drink.”

“You bought them rounds,” she countered in that no-nonsense way that had won him over before he’d ever set eyes on her. “Same thing. And we have to brand a couple hundred cattle today. They don’t need to be playing with cattle with a thick head.”

A sigh. “A point I’ll certainly consider much more carefully in the future.”

She gave him a bouncing nod. “You made a lot of mostly incoherent noise last night about going out with us this morning. You still interested?”

“Morning? It’s morning?”

“It’s damn near six minutes to sunrise, son.”

He recognized that tone of voice, too. “Do you realize you work for me?” he couldn’t help but ask.

She proffered a bright grin that showed off even white teeth and a surprisingly cute dimple in her left cheek. “You find someone else to make this ranch profitable without selling it to a Japanese conglomerate, you can fire me. Now, get up or forget it.”

“Then this means I don’t get the tour you promised?”

“I promised it when you said you’d be here last week. If you’re still upright at the end of the day, I’ll give you the abbreviated version. Now, let’s go.”

He closed his eye again. “I don’t suppose we could rethink this tomorrow.”

He could hear the scrape of a boot as she swung around for the door. “Fifteen minutes,” she threatened. “After that, we’re out of here.”

Just before she hit the door, she stopped. “By the way, Mr. Campbell. Do you ride?”

That did get a kind of laugh out of him, even though he had his palm pressed to his forehead to ease the pressure. “Yes, Ms. McCann,” he assured her. “I ride.”

Even if it killed him this morning, he’d ride. He hadn’t bought this ranch to sit on the porch and watch somebody else work it. He needed this place, this anchor. He needed this pragmatic woman with her bright green eyes and flashing red hair strangled into its braid to run it for him while he was away, so it would always be there. So something would always be there for him.

“By the way, yourself, Ms. McCann,” he said before she could get a good head start on him. “You never mentioned a Hannah in your employment interview.”

He thought he’d at least give her pause. He should have known better, even though he’d only met her over the phone. “You never asked, Mr. Campbell.”

And then, closing the door without a sound, she was gone.

Dulcy McCann, that was her name. Dulcy. Noah had envisioned a blond girl, all fresh skin and sweet eyes and gingham. Something from a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, that would go with the name.

Dulcy McCann’s face went with her voice instead. Pinkcheeked from the wind, sharp edged and wide-eyed, with the kind of mouth that could deliver much harsher judgments in its configuration than its product. A full mouth, with lips that should relax more, so people might know she wasn’t quite as hard. Quite as rigid.

She was sleek looking from necessity and hard work rather than fashion. Much too petite to really be able to handle the work, no matter what she said. No matter what the profit-andloss statements said. A more slip of a girl, his mother would have said, even in jeans and flannel shirts and down vests. Crackling with energy, possessing a smile like the flash of the sun through a gray sky.

It had been Ethan who’d insisted on letting her stay on as manager when they’d bought the ranch. Ethan who’d done most of the interviews when they’d finally decided to buy the Lazy V. Noah had been too busy in fantasyland to spend the time needed to talk stock and breeding and long-term goals. Noah had been making the obscene money that had allowed him and his cousin to buy a cattle ranch for him to escape to.

And now he was here. He was in the place he’d dreamed about since he’d been six years old and sitting out on the fire escape by Ethan’s bedroom. Home. A big white Victorian house with a wrap-around porch where he could sit with coffee after dinner to watch the evening creep across the high mountains. Wide corrals stocked with sturdy quarter horses and meadows dotted in white-faced Herefords, and a nearby river begging to be fished.

He’d been waiting for so long, and they’d gone to such great lengths to get him here. And now he was too hung over to enjoy it. Hell, he was too hung over to even go out there and give his best on the trail.

It didn’t mean he wouldn’t.

Groaning at the cacophony the movement set up in his head, Noah swung his long legs over the side of the bed and teetered to his feet. He needed to change. He needed to shower. He hadn’t cared about doing it for close to two weeks.

Why couldn’t Isabelle have seen how good this could be? Why couldn’t she have understood?

It didn’t matter.

Noah scrubbed his hands through his hair and searched around for the luggage he should have brought with him. He caught sight of a mirror instead.

He couldn’t help but offer it a grin. What would his press agent say at that sight? he wondered. His agent would faint dead away. There wasn’t a person on earth who would mistake that red-eyed, gray-faced, haggard looking bastard in the mirror for Cameron Ross. Which was just what Noah wanted.

No one in this valley knew who had really bought the Lazy V, and that was the way it was going to stay. Noah had long since perfected the transition from everyman to star, that infinitesimal something that lit the cameras and disappeared in the glare of normal day, the magic that still kept him almost invisible when he wanted to be.

It helped, of course, that the real Noah was nothing like the swashbuckling, sophisticated Cameron people expected. It also helped that Noah had developed a deviously simple diversion to send the press in the wrong direction. He just prayed like hell the people of Montana would see just what they expected and no more. Because what they saw was the truth.

Cameron Ross lived in Hollywood where fantasy was the coin of the realm. The man who came to the ranch was Noah Campbell.

She didn’t even knock on the door. Just swung it open as if unconcerned with what she’d find inside. There was just a little too much humor in those sharp green eyes for Noah to think she didn’t know exactly what she was doing, though.

“Here,” she said, tossing a pile of clothing at him. “The sheriff didn’t bring your luggage along with you last night. Since you were already wearing your boots, you can use some of Slim’s work stuff until you get the rest.”

Noah all but blanched. “The sheriff?”

Dulcy McCann tilted her head again. “Oh, yeah. I hope you wanted to make a grand entrance, Mr. Campbell. Cause you sure did.”

And then, before he could talk back to her, she walked on out.

I have an Oscar, Noah thought in consternation as he stared at the closed door. I own a house in Malibu, a townhouse in New York and the entire damn island of St. Denis. I have women across the world sending me their underwear in the mail. Why should I put up with this?

Because this was the smoothest running ranch in Montana, and Dulcy McCann didn’t have a clue who he was. That was why.

Suddenly beset by the urge to whistle, Noah Campbell tossed his borrowed clothing over his shoulder and headed into the bathroom for a quick shower.

Dulcy reached the kitchen at warp speed hoping nobody would notice that the color in her cheeks wasn’t just windburn. What a way to start out a morning. What a way to start a week of branding. She had a thousand things to do, a million things to keep in her mind. And from the moment she’d walked into that bedroom this morning, all she’d been able to think about was the man who was now her boss.

Brother. Just what she needed.

She needed this job, this ranch. She needed the chance to do what she did best. And she needed to do it with a free enough hand that the whispers of surprise and outrage would settle a little around Westridge at the idea that little Dulcy McCann was manager of a spread like the Lazy V.

She did not need to keep fighting the absurd impulse to grin.

Dulcy wasn’t sure what she’d thought had lurked behind that honeyed baritone voice she’d deliberately courted over the phone for six weeks last fall while they’d been finalizing the various deals.

A businessman. A man accustomed to wielding power and money. She could have figured that out from the balance sheets, the influx of capital for breeding stock and renovations on the property, the terse, knowledgeable questions and answers. A man who made a dollar stretch to its limit, but a solid, sensible man who hadn’t let the little idea of a woman running his place get in the way of recognizing that woman’s ability.

She hadn’t expected the man she’d just faced, though. She hadn’t expected him to open his eyes and damn near knock her off her feet.

Blue. His eyes were blue. Blue the color of a late-afternoon mountain sky. Blue the color of the morning glories that wrapped around the arbor in the back. Blue…

“Mom? Is he goin’?”

Startled, Dulcy looked up to find Hannah standing in front of her, holding out a cup of coffee. Dulcy considered the sharp consideration of her daughter as she accepted the offering.

She still wanted to smile. She wanted to rub at her chest where the perfectly unreasonable bubble of attraction had suddenly lodged.

“Thanks, puddin’. Yeah, he’s goin’. You ready for Aunt Sally to take you to music camp?”

Hannah pulled a face. “Mom, that bus doesn’t leave for two more hours.”

Dulcy hid her consternation behind her first sip of coffee. “I knew that. I was just testing you. You helping Aunt Sally?”

“No. I’m helpin’ you. Do you like him, Mom? Is he okay?”

Is he going to let us stay? Dulcy could hear the unasked question as clearly as if Hannah had given in and asked it. Hannah, her baby, was the most outrageously gifted kid in five states. She could do, and would do, anything. If she had her feet planted firmly under her. If she knew just what to expect from life. And poor little Hannah hadn’t been able to know what to expect for a long time.

“We have a contract,” Dulcy assured the little girl, a hand to her cheek. “It doesn’t matter whether we have warts or play the piano at midnight while he’s here. If we make the ranch work, we stay.”

That won a harrumph that sounded suspiciously like the ones Hank Bellows dispatched down around the corrals. “I don’t believe we were the ones making noise at midnight.”

Dulcy grinned. “More like two. I think he’ll be okay. The sheriff said something about some lady jilting him.”

Hannah’s great brown eyes grew to astonishing proportions. “Jilted him? Him? Is she crazy? He’s gorgeous!”

Then Dulcy hadn’t been hallucinating. She frowned, anyway. “I thought you said he looked like a junkyard dog.”

“A gorgeous junkyard dog. Becky and Amy are gonna be jealous when they find out we have a guy in our house who looks like him.”

That stopped Dulcy in mid-sip. Oh, boy. That wasn’t what she needed, either. Another rumor. Another reason to suggest that Dulcy had gotten her job for the wrong reasons, kept it for the wrong reasons.

“Uh, Hannah, do me a favor. Wait on that a week or so. Can you do that?”

Hannah rolled her eyes, which, on a munchkin in a starched cotton shirt and perfectly pressed jeans, looked suspiciously adult. “I may explode or something.”

“Think of it this way. When they find out what he looks like, you can look surprised and say, ‘Oh, you think so? Well, he’s almost as good-lookin’ as my dad was.’ That’ll really get their goat.”

The idea seemed to work. “Was he really?”

“He was.”

Really.

“Get over here and eat something before you leave,” a new participant chimed in. “It’s gonna be a long day.”

A hand out to tousle her daughter’s hair, Dulcy looked up to acknowledge her cook, housekeeper, everywoman and favorite cousin. Sally stood in the middle of the big red-and-white kitchen with a towel draped over her ample shoulder and flour speckled liberally over even more generous breasts.

Sally was from the German branch of the family and carried the resemblance like a family seal. Blond hair, blue eyes, apple cheeks and ample girth. She smiled always and imparted hugs as healing as tonics. Sally was four years older than Dulcy and was graced with a natural affinity for home and hearth. Dulcy thanked providence that it was Dulcy’s home and hearth she usually graced.

“Pancakes?” Dulcy almost begged.

Sally’s smile was like a mother’s. “Banana. With a little of Homer Thompson’s sage sausage.”

Hannah headed for her coat and the back door, and Dulcy walked into the kitchen to partake of Sally’s gastronomical delights and pragmatic support.

The kitchen, as ever, when Sally was working, was a mess. Pots, pans, griddles everywhere, all awash in food fixings. Sally considered food a high art and practiced it like a magician. It was just that her rabbits tended to fall on the floor with disconcerting regularity.

“He really is a looker, huh?” she asked.

Out of sight of Hannah, who was already out the door to say goodbye to the horses and ranch hands, Dulcy rolled her own eyes. “I was expecting Ted Turner. I got Gary Cooper instead.”

Sally’s smile was salacious. “Makes comin’ to work worthwhile. He married?”

“Freshly jilted. That’s what all the noise was about last night. He and the boys were evidently seeing the lady off to fairer pastures, at least in spirit. Spirits.”

“I like a man who mourns a woman,” Sally decided, reaching up to one of the maple cabinets to pull out a huge bottle of aspirin. Then she produced a bottle of Bloody Mary mix with which to chase it down. “It’s kinda like Indiana Jones, when he lost Marian. My favorite scene in the movie.”

Sally punctuated all her conversations with movie references. Everything reminded her of a movie or something she’d read about somebody who’d made a movie. Or a TV show. Or commercials about TV shows.

“The Nazis didn’t get Mr. Campbell’s girlfriend, Sally,” Dulcy advised her dryly as she finished off the dregs of her coffee. “She walked out.”

Sally was nodding as she cracked two raw eggs into the Bloody Mary mix. “Just like Affair to Remember.”

“She was hit by a car.”

Sally also usually got the reference wrong.

“It didn’t make Cary Grant any happier.” Sally often did eventually get around to something resembling a valid point. “Is he eating breakfast?”

Dulcy scooped up her own pancakes while Sally mixed the boss’s tonic. “Cary Grant?” Dulcy retorted. “I doubt it.”

“The junkyard dog.”

“I’m not going to last through too many more junkyard dog references,” a throaty voice announced from the doorway.

Both women looked up to find their new boss slouching against the door frame as if unsure whether the floor was going to behave and stay in its place.

Sally, never at a loss for words, simply handed him the thick red concoction. “Here,” she offered. “Hangover juice.”

Noah Campbell actually smiled. “God bless you.”

“I’m Sally.” She introduced herself as she wiped flour-dusted hands across her white apron and faded jeans. “Cook, housekeeper and busybody.”

Noah Campbell took her hand as if they were at a cocktail party. “Noah Campbell. A pleasure to meet you.”

Dulcy knew she should have said something. Anything. She couldn’t quite manage it. For some reason he startled her. Unsettled her. It wasn’t just the fact that he was a lot taller than she’d thought. But then again, the night before he’d been inspecting his shoe tops as she and Bart Bixby had dragged him back to the guest room.

It wasn’t the way his just-wet hair curled past his collar where a woman would find her fingers itching to be at it, a length and lazy cut no self-respecting businessman would allow. It wasn’t the soft Texan drawl that seemed to make his words into living things that curled around a woman’s soft places and make her smile.

It wasn’t the fact that he had evidently decided not to shave, which gave the gulleys on his face deeper shadow and blurred the edges of his jaw. Dulcy couldn’t imagine a hotshot business mogul allowing himself to do that, either, but then, shaving was one of the great personal choices in Montana. If you wanted to grow a beard, you might as well do it here. And Dulcy had the feeling that Noah Campbell had the makings of a slam-bang beard.

It wasn’t even that he looked dangerous, although he did. It wasn’t that, even disheveled and wearing somebody else’s clothes, he generated an aura of power that made Dulcy feel suddenly foolish and incompetent, which he also did.

It wasn’t that he seemed sharper or less sharp. No, it was…

His eyes. He looked up at her, and Dulcy forgot her pancakes. Had she been hallucinating before? She could have sworn she’d seen blue eyes. Blue, blue eyes. They were gray now. Quiet, reasonable, perfectly respectable gray eyes, and suddenly that face that had taken her breath, merely made her pause.

Well, almost.

“You wearing contacts?” was all she could think of to say, even as she wiped her own palm down the sides of her jeans.

Even Sally stared at her. Dulcy was sure it was because the last thing a sane person should notice on this man was contact lenses.

He straightened a little as he took a huge slug of juice and grimaced with the best of them. “Is there a ban around here on nearsighted people riding horses? I thought that was only pilots.”

Dulcy could feel the heat flooding right back into her cheeks. “Pancakes?” she offered instead. “Sally makes the best in the country.”

He looked over to the well-used oak table, where Dulcy had already set out her stack of pancakes alongside Sally’s latest batch of reading material, and lost whatever color he had. “Uh, no thanks. Not now. I think I’d like to get outside.”

“You’re going to have to eat soon,” Sally told him. “Long day out there.”

He nodded, finished off his breakfast in a gulp and set the glass on the white countertop before heading for the door. “Thanks, anyway. Which way’s the barn?”

He was already halfway across the red tile floor on his way to the back door before Dulcy had the presence of mind to answer.

“Just keep going in a straight line. When you get there, introduce yourself. You already met Hannah. She’ll introduce you to Hank, and he’ll introduce you to your horse.”

“And you?”

“Do want my breakfast. I’ll be down in a minute. And see if anybody has an extra hat to fit you.”

He didn’t even turn around. “I have a hat.”

Yeah, she thought. Something straight out of an L.L. Bean catalogue to go with those brand-new, unscuffed boots you’re wearing. Something that hadn’t had a chance to build up a good sweat ring around the crown. Something that still needed to be crushed and swatted and beaten down until it was soft and familiar, the kind of hat that made you want to grab at it…

“You have a hat in Westridge,” she said abruptly. “You need one here, today.”

He just nodded and headed out the door.

For a second, left behind, the women simply stared after him as his shadow drifted off through the predawn gray.

“DOA,” Sally said.

Dulcy translated that to mean, he looks as good as Dennis Quaid did in DOA, all nasty and sad.

“Lost Weekend,” Dulcy retorted evenly and headed over to where her pancakes were getting cold.

Sally watched her. “This is going to be harder than you thought.”

Dulcy plopped down in a chair and purposefully picked up knife and fork. “No it isn’t. He’ll come play cowboy for six weeks and then go home to Philadelphia where he belongs.”

Uh-huh. And in the morning the ranch would be all hers and there would be peace on earth.

As she reached for the syrup, Dulcy noticed that Sally had already bought her week’s supply of celebrity gossip. It was piled to the left of the butter like gaudy picture slides. “So,” she said, turning her attention back to her meal. “What’s-his-name is going to marry Isabelle Renoult, huh?”

If anything would get Sally’s attention away from the subject matter at hand, it was the lovelife of one of her favorite stars. Sally knew more about the horoscope-related prospects of every inhabitant of Los Angeles, Aspen and Santa Fe, than she did about a thousand things to do with flour. Just by this tabloid alone, Sally would have learned that Cameron Ross was engaged, Kevin Costner was expecting twins with a belly dancer, and Lisa Marie Presley was in contact with her father through a Sudanese channeler named Rao.

Dulcy thought she’d scored a hit when Sally sat herself down in another chair, her usual “dispensing of insider information” position.

“You don’t care who Cameron Ross is going to marry,” she accused. “You care about what Noah Campbell can do to you. When does he find out what’s going on, Dulce?”

Dulcy shot her cousin a cautionary glare. “If I can help it, he won’t.”

“Dulcy…”

Dulcy suddenly lost her taste for pancakes. Shoving her chair back, she got up and headed for her own hat. “If he finds out, we won’t have a ranch to run anymore, Sally. And I refuse to consider that option.”

“He’s not a stupid man.”

Dulcy slowed to a stop, her sight drawn out beyond the back window to where she could see the shadows of men and horses shifting impatiently down by the corral. It was the busy time of the year. Herds needed to be moved to fresh grazing land, stock evaluated and some sold, gardens and feed crops tended to. And this week, calves on five different ranches in the valley had to be branded, dehorned, castrated and vaccinated. Dulcy had all she could handle just to get it all done with the handful of men she employed. On top of that, she had the boss in for a visit. The hung-over boss. The handsome, magnetic hung-over boss. The hung-over smart boss who might just expose the truth and take away her chance to retrieve her name.

She couldn’t let that happen.

She wouldn’t.

No matter what happened.

Without another word to Sally, Dulcy opened the back door and walked out into the dawn light, ready to lie through her teeth.