Noah couldn’t shake the feeling of unreality, as if he were playing a scene in one of his movies. He found himself sitting in a completely furnished dining room in his completely furnished house that had come with a temporary family, and they were eating dinner as if this happened every night.
Somebody should say something, like “Isn’t this weird?” Somebody should take note of the fact that none of them belonged at this ironed and gleaming table with its fresh-cut flowers and sparkling crystal.
Somebody could have even mentioned the fact that after sharing meals with some of the more notorious beauties in the world, Noah shouldn’t have been so taken with a scrawny, guileless woman with manure on her boots and a six-year-old she still hadn’t explained.
Somebody should. But Noah, distracted by the sight of autumn red hair and flashing eyes, seduced by the almost hallucinogenic sense of family, knew he wasn’t going to be the one to do it.
“So,” he said instead, for once at a loss for easy conversation. “How long did you work for your aunt?”
Dulcy didn’t even bother to look up from the pork roast she was unselfconsciously devouring. “About a year. Aunt Cordelia never did get along with the other ranchers in the valley. I was just another little burr under their saddles.”
Noah almost forgot the food on his own plate. “You didn’t mind?”
“Why should I mind?”
“She enjoys being a burr,” Hannah piped up from her place across from her mother.
Dulcy gave a wry chuckle. “Thank you for the character analysis, Hannah.”
Hannah stiffened a little. “Well, you said—”
“Yep, I sure did. But it doesn’t mean you have to repeat it every chance you get.”
Noah couldn’t help but smile. They were so easy together. He envied them both. He ached, suddenly, for a scene like this he could really feel a part of, instead of observe as a visitor.
“You’re a burr, too, Mr. Campbell,” Hannah spoke up.
Noah blinked. “I am?”
Dulcy grinned. “Aunt Cordelia delighted in selling the place to you. It meant she didn’t have to sell it to one of her neighbors. Or, God forbid, one of her kin.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You weren’t even the high bid on the place.”
“Who was?”
Dulcy shrugged. “Who knows? That was part of Aunt Cordelia’s fun. She just let everybody know she’d sold to a stranger for less money than she’d been offered by other people.”
“Nice lady.”
“A surprise in every package.”
“And you had to live here with her?”
Hannah laughed. Dulcy grimaced. “Uh, no. We lived in the foreman’s house.”
Noah let an eyebrow slide north.
“It smelled,” Hannah proclaimed.
Dulcy went back to her meal. “Just because she hired me didn’t mean she liked me any more than she did Uncle Mike or Walt Stewart. We moved up here when she moved out.”
Noah couldn’t help it. “Just kind of took over, huh?”
Dulcy was grinning back, her eyes bright. “It’s what you pay me for, boss.”
“Evidently.”
She chuckled. “If you want, we’ll camp out while you’re here. Seems an awful lot of trouble, though.”
Noah had been so involved in the challenge in Dulcy’s eyes that he’d forgotten the little girl sitting on the other side of the table.
“You’re not going to make us move back, are you?” Hannah demanded, her voice suddenly small and uncertain.
Dulcy reached across to take her daughter’s hand. “Hannah…”
The perfect truth was that Noah spent a fraction of a moment considering it. He’d come here for peace. He wasn’t at all sure he was going to get any peace with Dulcy McCann under the same roof, reminding him at every turn just why he’d bought the ranch. With whom he’d planned to share it.
But to be perfectly honest, he sincerely doubted he’d get any peace no matter where she was on the ranch.
“Please,” Hannah begged. “It scares me.”
“No,” Noah assured her as quickly as he could. “Of course not. I mean, if you moved down there, who’d play the piano for me?”
He knew he’d been taken when Hannah’s expression went from desolate to exultant in the space of a heartbeat. It didn’t seem to matter. He was going to let her get away with it.
“Should I play now?” she asked. “It helps the digestion, you know.”
“You’re kidding,” he retorted. “It didn’t help my digestion any when I had to play.”
It was Hannah’s turn to admit surprise. “You play the violin?”
“The piano,” he admitted sheepishly. “I’m not that good.”
Hannah waved aside his disclaimer, her eyes alight again. “You can accompany me,” she decided. “Mom doesn’t play anything but a lariat and her nose.”
“Her nose.”
This time the little girl giggled. “She says it’s cheaper than a mouth harp.”
Noah took a look at the sparkle in Dulcy’s eyes and laughed. “And here Ethan said I’d be bored in Montana.”
Hannah did play for them on the violin, a petite instrument for a petite girl, who somehow got sweet music from it. Dulcy found herself watching Noah watch Hannah. He didn’t just endure it, he enjoyed it. He seemed to know where the music was going, and appreciate how Hannah sent it there.
Dulcy was jealous. If there was one thing she would change in her life, it was the fact that God had failed to give her the ear to appreciate the miracles her daughter was performing. She knew without having to ask that Noah had that ear and more. It made her wonder just what kind of piano he played.
She was still wondering when she came back down from tucking Hannah into bed to find him holding that miniaturized violin in his hand as if trying to decipher its mysteries.
“You weren’t just being a mother,” he admitted with a genuine smile as he set the violin back into the case and followed her into the kitchen. “She really does have talent.”
“That’s what I keep hearing,” Dulcy said, setting the last of the dinner dishes in the sink. “All I know is that it’s hell being intimidated by a six-year-old’s command of music.”
“Yeah, but you know more about bulls than any woman I’ve ever met.”
Dulcy grinned. “I know what to do with them, anyway. You want that tour now? I usually do a last check before bed, anyway.”
Noah took in the pile of pots and pans scattered over most of the kitchen surfaces. “Shouldn’t we clean up?”
Dulcy snorted unkindly and walked over to retrieve her hat from the rack. “Sally wants to fix fancy food, let her clean it up.”
If Noah was going to see the ranch, he had to follow her out the door. That was precisely what he did.
Outside, the sky was midnight velvet, strung with stars like a broken necklace. The air was clean and sweet with the smell of freshly cut clover, and the trees whispered with a late breeze. Without waiting for Noah to catch up, Dulcy set off for the outbuildings and paddocks where some of the stock dozed in the soft starlight.
“We have two separate animal barns,” she said as she walked. “One for the horses, one for the cattle who need it. We also have shelters farther out for wintering. With what you pay for your cattle, you don’t really want them lost out in the mountains when it snows.”
“Of course not.”
The only lights here came from the dawn-to-dusk lighting around the outbuildings, a rectangle or two from the house and bunkhouse. No city, no neon or helicopters or police cars. The only sounds Dulcy could hear were the dogs in the valley trying to outdo a coyote, a bell or two tied to the throat of an animal, and the steady wash of night wind through the trees. She wondered whether Noah would notice. Whether he would realize how magic it was.
She wondered whether he would love this valley as much as she did.
“Where’s the herd now?” he asked.
“Summer pasture. The day before we brand our herd, we do Cletus’s along the west fence. It’s a smaller ranch, so most of our hands will be out bringing our herd to the corrals.”
“Still at about three hundred units?”
Dulcy looked over, not sure whether his command of the situation made her feel better or worse. A unit comprised of a cow and her calf. Three hundred calves. A big ranch. A big responsibility.
“Yep. You’ll be introduced to most of them in a few days.”
She thought Noah would follow her into the barns. Instead, he wandered over to the nearest fence, where he could see out over the valley and the horses and cattle penned there.
“You have some of the cattle here,” he said. “Why?”
Dulcy joined him at the rail fence. “Medical problems that don’t do well on the range. We get a certain number of cases of mastitis every year. The mother has to be separated and treated, and the calf hand fed or enticed onto somebody else’s teat if he’s not old enough to wean.”
Noah looked over at her, surprised. “You do that on a ranch this size?”
Dulcy knew she should keep her mind on calves and feed and milk. She couldn’t seem to pull her attention away from those soft, clear eyes of his, though. The roughened angles of his jaw, darkened now with that incipient beard. The sense of energy he radiated, even leaning his forearms against a paddock fence and staring into the night.
Before she’d met Noah Campbell, she’d wanted him to remain an absent landlord, so she could run the ranch. So she could almost imagine it to be hers.
Suddenly, in the dusk, with his eyes half in shadow and his hands resting alongside hers on the fence, she wanted more. She wanted him to join himself to this land.
She wanted him to see in it what she did.
Dulcy hoped like hell he didn’t hear her drag in that very unsteady breath. “You have prize cattle here,” she said. “I don’t like to lose any of them.” Then she turned away to see those white faces in the darkness. “Besides, if you lived with Hannah, you wouldn’t be able to let a calf starve to death, either.”
Noah’s chuckle was earthy, familiar, easy. Dulcy wanted to rub it over her skin like a rough towel. “How does she stand sending them away? Doesn’t she know what you raise them for?”
“Sure. But it’s easier to pretend they’re at a cattle playground when they’re gone.”
“Of course.”
They just stood there a moment, side by side, resting against the wood and watching the Herefords sleep in the dark. Comfortable. Companionable. Easy.
Dulcy could almost imagine that they did this every night. Saw the ranch to sleep together, protecting it from all the predators out there, both four-legged and two-legged.
She could almost imagine that he had already decided, once and for all, to let her belong here.
“Dulcy?”
“Mmmm.”
“Is that calf walking backward?”
Dulcy grinned. “That’s Wrong Way Corrigan.”
“He’s really walking backward?”
He was walking backward toward them. He must have heard Dulcy’s voice and responded, just the way he always did. Wrong Way was a sucker for a scratched ear and a few senseless compliments.
Dulcy squatted down to where she could reach him when he backed against the fence and turned his pretty white face to her.
“He has pink eye,” she explained to Noah, who towered over the two of them. “It was so bad we had to sew his eyes shut. It took him about ten minutes to figure out that it hurt less to back into barbed wire than shove his face in. Now he walks backward.”
Wrong Way bawled, a high, mournful little sound that reminded Dulcy of nothing so much as Hannah whining for attention. Dulcy scratched.
Noah joined them, so that his bent knee slid along the inside of hers. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s like having a twohundred-pound golden retriever.”
He reached out then, too, his hand tentative, his face relaxed and smiling. Dulcy looked at his hand. Chafed and a little blistered from the hard day’s work, dark against the calf’s white, white coat. Flat, square nails and big knuckles. Workman’s hands. Perfectly tended workman’s nails.
“Your hands got pretty beat up today,” she mused. “Can’t get a manicure out here, ya know.”
Noah pulled his hand back to examine it himself. “Yeah, they’re never going to be the same after this.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
He allowed one eyebrow to lift. “Nobody’s checked my hands since Sister Pancretia in sixth grade.”
Dulcy grinned again. She was always grinning around him. “Sally says that well-tended hands are important in big business. At least, they are in the movie business, which is what she’s conversant with.”
“Well then, I guess I should be glad I’m just a manufacturer, huh?”
“A manufacturer and a rancher,” Dulcy amended for him.
For some reason her words touched him. She could see it in the sudden stillness in his eyes. In the shifting of posture and the quick duck of his head.
“Thank you,” he said. “I take that as a compliment.”
“That’s how it was given.”
Noah nodded again, his eyes up to the night, his thoughts once again his own. Without saying another word, he got to his feet. Dulcy gave Wrong Way a final pat before joining him.
“How far does the ranch extend?” he asked suddenly.
Dulcy turned to find him at a dead stop some ten feet away. His head was back, his hat off, his eyes out to the sky and the faint glow of snow on the Absarokas in the distance.
Dulcy couldn’t see Noah’s expression. Somehow, though, she knew what he was feeling. She could sense it, like a sympathetic resonance in her own chest. It was calling to him, seducing him, compelling him. It was beginning to wrap itself around him like a voluptuous woman, and he didn’t stand a chance.
At least, she hoped not.
My God, she thought, stunned. His eyes were glistening. Glistening, as if they carried more there than calm consideration.
She could see the edge of his jaw in the faint light, could see the hollows of his cheeks and the way the breeze tugged at his hair. She could see that his eyes were half-closed, as if the valley were best felt and smelled and heard.
Dulcy had seen men curse in this valley. She’d seen them fight and struggle and defend. She’d never yet seen one fall in love.
“It’s a hard place,” she said, anyway.
Noah looked down at her, and she thought for just a second how his eyes were as ghostly pale as that distant, moon-touched snow.
“Trying to scare me off?”
“Making sure you understand. A lot of people have come to these mountains. A lot of people have left.”
It was so quiet, suddenly, as if even the wind had died in anticipation. Dulcy felt her heart kick in again, painful and hard. Anticipating his answer, dreading it, no matter what it was, because suddenly things had changed again.
“Especially the greenhorns?” Noah asked gently.
She just shrugged, trying so hard to remain passive.
His smile, when it came, was slow. Pure. Bright in the darkness, as if it swelled from someplace inside and simply spilled out.
“Most greenhorns didn’t have the manager I do” was all he said.
Dulcy heard more. She heard words he wouldn’t allow himself to say yet. Words he wasn’t allowed to share. She heard a current in that voice that bespoke secrets she had no party to.
She heard yearning and determination and dreams, and they all somehow revolved around standing in the darkness of a Montana night, talking about land and animals and survival.
And she didn’t know how to answer.
She did the only thing she could. “Want to see the horses first?”
Noah grinned. “I’d love to see the horses.”
Noah woke slowly the next morning and got out of bed even more slowly. He had expected to hurt. He hadn’t expected to feel as if he’d just been dragged behind a car. He ate breakfast this time, knowing perfectly well he wasn’t going to last another long day without food in his stomach, and he blessed Sally all over again when she medicated him with aspirin for his aches and coffee for his thick head. And then, just like the day before, he rode out with the hands to brand cattle.
This time they did the Flying Diamond, where Walt Stewart raised Simmental cattle and some of the best quarter horses in the state. It was a well-run ranch, with newly painted out-buildings and straight fences, and branding went without a hitch.
By the time they got to Mike Murphy’s Triple M on the third day, Noah had had the chance to try his hand at almost all the work being done and was looked to as just another rancher in the valley. He walked away from the day more sore and tired and elated than he had in the past ten years.
Then he reached home and realized that Hannah was practicing.
Dulcy came upon him as he stood in the side yard considering his options.
“You want her to stop?”
He looked over at Dulcy and thought how much she had already become part of his life. How Hannah had brightened his mornings with her insouciance and charm.
“No. I think this might be a good time for me to take a ride across the ranch, though.”
Dulcy’s face folded into concern. “I can’t go with you right now, I’m afraid. I need to run into the vet’s for my supplies and then get a part for the harvester. Want to come to town?”
Noah shook his head. “You never answered my question the other night. Just how far can I ride and stay on Lazy V property?”
Dulcy pulled off her hat and pushed a few damp tendrils of hair from her dust-covered forehead. “You can just about ride all day,” she said. “See the foothills across the river over there?”
Noah followed the generous arc of her hand to where it pointed beyond the Bitter River at the far end of the valley from the ranchhouse. Beyond, the land rose in a pine and aspen field that beckoned, cool and dark and mysterious, up to the rocky slopes of the closest mountains.
“Those my trees?” he asked, a little chagrined by the almost childish enthusiasm in his voice.
Dulcy must have heard it, too, because she smiled. “When I have the time, I’ll ride most of the property with you. You’ll see it goes a pretty good distance in that direction. Beyond that slope are two more before you reach real high country. A lot of the wintering cattle are tucked into those folds. The summer ranges are back up behind the house in those hills. You’ll see that when we move the cattle up next week. But if you want to cross the Bitter over there, you’ll see the trail in the trees. Follow that, and you can’t go wrong.”
Noah nodded, smiled. “See you for dinner.”
It only took him ten minutes to saddle Doofus for the ride up. Noah was even more tired today than he had been before, since he’d done a lot more actual cattle wrestling. It didn’t matter. He needed to get some space between himself and the other occupants of his ranch, and he couldn’t think of a better way of doing it.
By the time Noah led Doofus from the barn, both Dulcy and the old battered pickup truck were gone. There were still oddenough sounds emitting from the house that Doofus pricked his ears and whuffled. Hank had a couple of the hands working on repairing the outbuilding that held the farm equipment, and a couple more were putting away newly delivered feed.
The ranch was running smoothly, just as it had since Noah had bought it four months ago. Just as it had since Dulcy had taken over as manager.
Noah couldn’t ask for more. It was everything he’d held in his imagination all those years. It was more. So much more.
He thought about that as he mounted Doofus and turned him out toward the open valley. He thought about it as they first cantered and then flat-out galloped in the late-afternoon sun that was gilding the western slopes and glinting off the river.
He was alone. No press, no fans, no business types who only wanted to help his career, no sycophants just wanting his business, his attention, his time.
Alone. Bent over a fast horse, riding across the land he’d busted his butt to get. The land he could call home. The land he could cultivate and protect and hand down to his children.
His children.
Children like Hannah, maybe, bright and inquisitive and unpredictable. Amazing individuals in spite of their parents’ stamp.
Hannah had her mother in her. Not her eyes, those were probably her father’s…whoever her father was. No, Dulcy lived all over again in Hannah’s smile, brilliant and sudden and brash. In that particular coin of her hair, a gold-red that defied description, that pulled your eye to it with its unexpected depths and hues. She looked back out from that expression of confidence, that no-nonsense view of the world.
Dulcy lived on in Hannah’s hugs and her memories.
Noah ached with unexpected yearning. The yearning he’d pushed down for so long. The hunger to belong, just like he seemed to in his dining room, in his kitchen after meals when they all gathered to do the dishes and dab soap suds on noses and toss dishes as if it were a carnival sport.
He longed, suddenly, not simply to be able to return to this ranch, but to return to this ranch as it was now.
He wanted it to be not only his home, but his family.
Damn, he needed to talk to Ethan. To measure this against his cousin’s amazing pragmatism. He needed Ethan to remind him that he knew perfectly well he’d expected to bring Isabelle here. To see her eyes light with the discovery of these mountains; these wind-swept spaces.
To see his children grow in her, to be passed the gift of her beauty, her talent, her perceptive, insightful mind.
By now, Noah should have known better than dream dreams like that. He was in this alone. Probably for good. He needed the person he loved to love him here. As he was, without artifice. But the minute a woman found out about Cameron Ross, Noah Campbell was never enough.
And he couldn’t be Cameron Ross.
He wasn’t.
He stopped for a minute on the trail to turn and look back at the valley. His ranch lay there, spread out along the folds of the eastern edge like a model he might have put together on his living room floor as a boy. The white, big-porched house, as pristine and perfect as a man could envision, with eyelet lace curtains puffing out the bedroom windows with the wind, the tree swing out front and the garage to the side, all ringed by cottonwood and elms. Down the hill a little, the red out-buildings and barns, the animals meandering over the grass, the miles of fence, white and tidy all the way out to the main road where the gatepost boasted that this was the Lazy V Ranch.
Noah looked down on it and smiled and continued on up through the trees.
If this was all he could have, he’d take it. He’d take the wide open spaces, the normal life, the hard, satisfying work. He’d be more than happy to take the neighborly interest and unconcerned opinions and mundane routine.
Noah didn’t know how long he rode. He really didn’t pay attention to where he was, except for the fact that the path was getting steep and winding, and that he’d lost track of the house. He watched the blue of the sky deepen and the lazy afternoon clouds bump against the nearing mountains. He listened to the brush of the wind and heard a moose calling somewhere for its mate.
He began, for the first time in ten years, to relax and enjoy what he had. He began for the first time in his life to toy with the idea that what he had accomplished was a good thing. He was feeling so good in fact, that when disaster struck, it caught him unprepared.
Something punched him in the arm. Noah cursed, looked down at it, not sure what he expected to see. Almost instantaneously, he heard the first crack, and Doofus screamed. The horse reared up, and Noah went down.
He still hadn’t figured out what had happened when he hit the ground head first and blacked out.