A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing

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.