Wyoming Brave

“Just leave them there,” he said when he noticed Merrie watching television in the living room. “Delsey can deal with them in the morning. Good night.”

“Good night,” she called after him.

Well, at least he was speaking to her, Merrie thought wistfully. She finished watching her program, then turned the television off.

She was about to switch the light off in the kitchen when she remembered the partridges in the sink. It would be a shame to leave them there all night and expect poor Delsey to dress them even before she could start breakfast the next morning.

She pulled up a trash can and went to work. It didn’t take long. She had them dressed and in baggies in the fridge. She dealt with the refuse, taking it outside to the garbage can, so the men could haul it off to the county landfill. They took a load most days.

She went to bed, feeling a sense of accomplishment. It was a rare feeling for a woman who’d hardly ever lived, except in the shadow of a tyrant.

* * *

SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS to breakfast. Voices came up the staircase.

“I left them right there in the damned sink!” Ren growled. “I can’t think what became of them.”

“They’re in the fridge,” Merrie said.

He glared at her. “You don’t put dead birds...”

“Ren?” Delsey held up the Ziplock bags with the dressed partridges in them.

He frowned. His eyes snapped back to Merrie with a question in them.

“Mandy taught me how,” she said simply. “She’s our housekeeper, back home, although she’s more like a mother. She thought we needed to know how to do more than just cook. She even taught us how to dress chickens.”

Ren was fascinated. She didn’t seem the sort of woman who’d take to such a basic sort of occupation. She looked fragile, citified, as if she’d faint at the sight of blood. But Grandy’s wound hadn’t sent her swooning. She’d watched tapes of branding without flinching. Now, here she was field dressing game. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known a woman besides Delsey who could do that. He tried to picture Angie, in her Paris gowns, soiling her hands with bird feathers in a sink.

“If it bothers you that much, I can glue the feathers back on,” Merrie began outrageously.

He hid the smile the words engendered. “Full of surprises, aren’t you, Miss Grayling?”

“Just one or two, Mr. Colter.” She frowned. “Colter. There was a mountain man, Jim Bridger’s protégé, they said, named John Colter. I heard a song about him on an old album my mother had.”

“Yes. He discovered fumeroles and hot springs on the Shoshone River near Cody, as the story goes,” Ren related as they sat down to breakfast. “They nicknamed it Colter’s Hell, although most people thought he was spinning a tall tale until they actually saw it.”

“I’ve never been there,” Merrie said.

“Yellowstone National Park is near there. It’s beautiful,” Delsey remarked. “Pass the strawberry preserves, there’s a dear.”

Merrie handed them to her. “It’s a place I’d love to see. Yellowstone, and the Little Big Horn Battlefield, and the museum.”

“More history,” Ren remarked.

Merrie smiled softly. “I live on YouTube. I’ve been on tours of all those places, but I’d love to see them in person one day. Especially the battlefield. Mama said that one of our relatives actually was in the fight.”

“In the cavalry?” he asked.

She cleared her throat. “Not exactly.”

He paused in the act of lifting the spoon from his coffee cup and stared at her.

“My great-great-great-grandfather was a full-blooded Oglala Lakota.”

His eyebrows arched as he studied her closely.

“I know, I don’t look it. But my mother’s father had black hair and eyes and very dark skin. It was from her father’s side that we got our blood.”

Ren pursed his lips and chuckled. “One of my ancestors was Northern Cheyenne.”

“They fought the Lakota,” she mused.

“Tooth and nail. Well, usually, except at the Little Bighorn, when they joined together to fight Custer and his men.”

She ate a spoonful of Delsey’s delicious scrambled eggs. “How’s Hurricane?” she asked.

He gave her a cold glance. It still rankled that she’d been able to do something with a horse that he couldn’t. “Healing,” was all he said.

She just nodded. He made his antagonism for her so obvious. It was uncomfortable.

He finished breakfast, threw down the last swallow of his coffee and got to his feet.

“Wear a muffler,” Delsey said without looking up.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he bit off.

“Wear a muffler,” she repeated. “You’re still not well.”

He muttered something about overprotective mother hens. But he got a scarf and wrapped it around his neck before he put on his coat and hat.

Delsey got up and fetched a big thermos. “Hot coffee. It’ll keep your insides warm.”

“My insides are already warm.” He grimaced, bent and kissed her wrinkled cheek. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

Merrie didn’t lift her eyes until he was out the door and gone. She sipped coffee with a wistful glance at Delsey. “I set him off just by being in the house.” She sighed. “He really dislikes me.”

“It wouldn’t matter who you were, child,” Delsey said with a smile. “That she-cat razed his pride, made him a laughingstock on social forums online.” She shook her head. “She was vindictive. None of what she said about him was true, but it was almost impossible to counter it.”

“Yes, it is.” She wondered what the woman had said about Ren. He was proud. It must have hurt his feelings very badly to be ridiculed in a way he couldn’t fight.

There was the sound of a big truck out front, followed by a door slamming and a knock at the door.

Delsey went to answer it, and she stared blankly at the parcel service driver. “You sure that’s for here?” she asked him with a grin.

“If there’s a Miss Grayling here, it is,” he replied, putting a stack of boxes just inside the front door. A flutter of snowflakes entered with them.

“It’s my art supplies!” Merrie enthused. “Oh, thank you!”

“That’s all art supplies?” Delsey asked, shaking her head. “What’d you do, order live models?”

The parcel driver chuckled, waved and left.

“It’s an easel and some canvases and a lot of paints,” Merrie replied. “I was afraid to ask Sari to send my supplies out here from Texas. I didn’t want anybody to trace them.”

“Oh, yes,” Delsey agreed, remembering. “That stalker.”

Merrie frowned. Well, perhaps Ren hadn’t felt comfortable telling Delsey the truth. It didn’t matter. Surely the FBI was hot on the trail of the contract killer by now.

“So I thought it would be better to order them from here,” Merrie added. “Do you have a pair of scissors?”

“Something better.” She grinned, went into the kitchen and came back with a knife in a leather pouch. “Ren gave it to me for my birthday. It’s made by the same people who made the skeet gun he uses in competition.”

“He shoots?”

She nodded. She bent to open the packages. “Not so much these days. Mostly he hunts elk or deer or partridge. Business is so complex here that he doesn’t get a lot of time off.”

“The men stay very busy.”

“That’s ranching, honey,” Delsey said. “There’s always something.”

“It was that way at our ranch, too,” Merrie confessed. “But we only had horses. No cattle. I don’t know much about them yet, but I’ll learn. YouTube is great!”

Delsey gave her a droll look. “Ren is better. Why don’t you ask him to take you around and show you how he manages cattle?”

She sighed. “He’d point me to the path that leads down to the stables and tell me to help myself,” she said with a wistful smile. “He doesn’t want me around. Randall must have known that, before he brought me here. I should have stayed in Comanche Wells.”

Delsey touched her hair gently. “No. You should be here, where you’re safe. Ren will come around. You’ll see. Now let’s get these things into the studio.”

* * *

THEY MOVED THE art supplies into the room that Merrie was using for a studio. “Did his mother really paint?” she asked.

Delsey nodded. “Yes. His father never remarried. He loved his ex-wife until the day he died.”

Merrie’s lips parted. “Ren didn’t say that his mother painted, did he?”

Delsey winced. “He never talks about her. Never calls her. She sends cards and letters—well, she used to—and he sends them right back, unopened. I don’t think he’s even seen her since he graduated from college and came here.” She shook her head. “It’s sad. His mother was a nice person, from what Randall says about her, and she grieves for Ren.”

Merrie didn’t know what to say. She drew in a long breath. “Our mother was like spring itself,” she commented, idly touching the unassembled easel in its box. “She loved us so much. She was always doing things with us, taking us places, loving us. After she died, life was a nightmare.”

Delsey didn’t pry, but she was openly curious. “What did she die of?”

Merrie bit her lower lip. “We think our father killed her. Please don’t tell him,” she said, nodding toward the door with a worried expression, indicating that she meant Ren. “Our father was violent. Paranoid. She died of a concussion, but one of our local doctors thought it was murder. He tried to do an autopsy, but he was suddenly called out of town, and Daddy paid somebody to do it while he was gone and classify it as an accidental death.”

“Why didn’t the doctor protest?”

“Because Daddy made threats to the people in charge.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. “You can’t imagine the fear he instilled in people. He had something on every single person who worked for him—even Mandy. Mandy had a brother who was in the mob up north. Daddy threatened to have her brother sent to prison. He knew people who could plant evidence. Everybody in Comanche Wells, where we live, was scared of him. Even people in Jacobsville were. He terrorized the whole community.”

“You had people in law enforcement...”

“Who had families,” Merrie said gently. “If you threaten someone’s child, it makes an impression. He was very good at intimidation.” She didn’t add that he was richer than just about anybody in that part of Texas.

“My goodness,” Delsey said worriedly. She studied the younger woman and read the lingering fear. “Well, he can’t hurt you anymore.”

“No.” Merrie let out a soft laugh. “We can finally leave towels on the floor. The rugs don’t have to be straight. The bed doesn’t have to be inspected to make sure it’s made right. We can have disorder, for the first time in our lives. I even have mismatched towels in my bathroom.” She grimaced. “He used the belt on me once for doing that.”

“Mr. Ren’s father used a belt on him, too, he said.”

“Not like mine did, I imagine, with the belt buckle. It was a heavy one, too, made of metal. I have...scars.” She swallowed and moved away. “That’s all in the past now. He can’t hurt us anymore.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been a very rough childhood.”

“Worse. We couldn’t go to parties or learn to dance or drive, we couldn’t go on dates. My goodness, I’m twenty-two years old and I’ve never even been kissed!”

Delsey was shocked. “But you’re Randall’s girlfriend...”

“No, I am not,” she said firmly. “I’m Randall’s friend, and that’s all.” She smiled. “You see, he’s one of those men who likes lots of women. He doesn’t love them, he just uses them, and when he’s bored, he goes and finds another one. Sari and I went to church. We were taught that women don’t play around before marriage. Actually, we were taught that men shouldn’t, either. That children came of love between two people, in marriage, and that children deserved two parents to raise them.” She gave Delsey a sheepish look. “That doesn’t get us far with modern people. So we keep to ourselves.”

“Child, there are a lot of people who still feel that way. It’s just that they’re shouted down and made to feel inferior because they have those beliefs. It’s a test, of a sort. If we believe in something, we shouldn’t have to defend those beliefs.” She laughed. “Isn’t it funny how some people say we need to respect the opinions and beliefs of other people, and then they go to town on us for being religious? They don’t respect the beliefs of anybody except themselves, and they don’t really believe in anything past having a good time and doing whatever they please. Rules are for fools.”

“I really like you,” Merrie said softly, and smiled. “You’re like our Mandy, back home. She’s been with us since we were very small. After Mama died, she sort of became our mother, if you know what I mean.”

“Sort of like me and Ren.” Delsey laughed. “I love Randall, too, but he isn’t around much. He does most of the marketing and showing for the Black Angus purebred seed bulls that our Skyhorn Ranch is famous for. He’s gone most of the year.”

“He’s good with people,” Merrie said. “I liked him the first time I saw him. But he wasn’t the sort of man I could ever get interested in. I’m no party girl.”

“Did he think you were?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. He flirted with me, but I don’t know how to flirt. I tried to go on a date one time, with a cowboy I knew. Daddy found out. He had the cowboy chased clean out of the state, threatened him with an old felony charge he’d been acquitted of.” She swallowed. The memory was harsh. “Then he knocked me down the stairs and...” She stopped. “I never tried to go out with anybody again.”

“Oh, child,” Delsey said softly. “I’m so sorry!”

“So I wasn’t really comfortable with the idea of going places with Randall. I didn’t tell him much, but I let him know that it was dangerous for me to date anybody, and that we were too different to be involved with each other. But I told him I’d love to be his friend.” She smiled. “That worked out much better. He’s very nice.”

Delsey, looking at her, could understand why Randall might have wanted to get involved with her. She was pretty and sweet and kind. But Randall could never settle for just one woman. He was too flighty. Ren, on the other hand, was certain that Merrie was like Randall’s other girlfriends who came here. Most of them came on to Ren. They were glittery women who had modern attitudes about sex. Delsey didn’t approve, but it wasn’t her place to say anything. If one of Randall’s women ended up in Ren’s bed, it didn’t concern her. They knew the score. She frowned. She hoped Ren wasn’t putting Merrie in that category. There could be consequences. He wasn’t around the woman enough to know her background, and Randall hadn’t been forthcoming about her. It was a recipe for disaster.

Well, that wasn’t a problem that needed solving today. Delsey continued to help Merrie put her canvases and paints and accessories away, including the fine brushes she used.

“What are you painting?” Delsey asked, looking pointedly at the sketchbook on the easel.

“Promise you won’t tell him?” Merrie asked worriedly.

“I promise.”

She pulled up the cloth she’d draped over an old canvas she’d found and displayed the contents. The painting was only a sketch right now. She’d found a leftover canvas in the room and used it to sketch her subject while she’d waited for her art supplies to arrive. Since she had neither paint nor drawing pencils, she’d used a soft lead #2 pencil to do the preliminary outline.

Even so, the image was so realistic it could have walked off the canvas. Delsey actually gasped.

“You said you painted a little,” Delsey exclaimed. “This isn’t... It’s magnificent!” she said, lost for the right words.

Merrie smiled. “Thanks. I’ve always loved to draw. Sari said that we might buy...” She almost said “an art supply store,” but she caught herself. She didn’t want to give away her monied background. It usually intimidated people. “That we might be able to exhibit my work at the local art store.”

“Art store, nothing,” Delsey scoffed. She looked at the sketch with soft eyes. “You captured that look on his face that I could never understand.”

“It’s sorrow,” Merrie said quietly. “He’s alone, inside himself. He can’t get out, or let anyone else in. He’s strong, and tender, and brimming over with love. But he doesn’t really trust women. Or like them very much.” She turned to Delsey, who seemed surprised at her perception of Ren. “How did he get mixed up with that woman you told me about?”

Delsey bit her lower lip. “Angie? She was one of Randall’s girls. He brought her here to visit. She knew that Ren had more money than Randall inherited from his father, so she went after Ren. She was always wrapped around him, playing up to him. He’s a lonely man, for the most part, and she was aggressive physically. If you want my opinion, she made him so hungry that he got engaged to her in desperation. Then he found her with two of his business associates at a party. Apparently the three of them were romantically involved. Ren took the ring off her finger and flushed it down the toilet, with her watching.”

“Poor Ren.”

“She even spread lies about Ren online. We know a man who works for local rancher Mallory Kirk—Red Davis. Red’s a wonder. He can hack anything. The FBI tried to hire him, but he likes cattle better than people, so he refused. He did some work for Mallory’s brother, when his girlfriend was targeted by her vicious stepfather with obscene Photoshopped pictures online. He got rid of every trace. He did the same for Ren. Angie was arrested and prosecuted for what she did to him. She got off with probation, but she never put a word out about him again. Still, it’s made him bitter. That was months ago. He’s still brooding about it.”

“I noticed.”

“He’s not generally a mean person. I’m sorry that he’s been so hard on you. If you’d met under different circumstances, he might have reacted differently.”

“In other words, if Randall hadn’t brought me here.”

“Exactly. You’re the first woman Randall has brought here since Angie. That probably helped set him off.”

Merrie sighed. Just her luck, to be attracted to a man who had a false impression of her because of Randall. She was only just realizing why Ren resented her presence here.

“I probably should go back home,” she said, thinking out loud.

“He’s not mad at you,” Delsey countered. “Besides, aren’t you trying to get away from that man who’s stalking you?”

Merrie turned, frowning. She was putting these people in danger just by being in the house with them. Delsey was so like Mandy back home; sweet and kind and loving. “There are things you don’t know about me,” she began.

The sound of the phone ringing downstairs interrupted them.

“Oh, goodness, I’ll have to get that. I told Ren we should have phones upstairs and he said it was a waste of money,” she muttered on the way downstairs. “It isn’t his poor old legs that get worn out running up and down stairs to answer phones!”

Merrie chuckled to herself. She looked at the sketch of Ren on the canvas. It captured the very essence of the man himself. It was, she decided, going to be the best painting she’d ever done.

* * *

SHE WORKED ON IT tirelessly for a week, reworking it until she had it just the way she wanted it. When it was finished, she turned it to face the wall, just in case he walked in, and started painting one of Hurricane.

She was late to supper one night, and Ren was inflexible about house rules again, so she didn’t get to eat. She had a sandwich in the small cooler in her room that Delsey had provided. She washed it down with a bottle of spring water, also from Delsey. She hoped Ren wouldn’t discover her stash of food. He probably wouldn’t approve. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t become accustomed to rigid rules of behavior back home. She’d just hoped it wouldn’t be like that someplace else. Maybe everybody was like her father and Ren, wanting things just so and refusing to change.

She tiptoed back down to her art studio after she finished the sandwich, wearing her nightgown and a thick white cotton robe that covered every inch of her except for her bare feet. She’d forgotten to pack slippers.

The door to the studio was ajar. She opened it, and there was Ren, gaping at the portrait of Hurricane that she’d just finished.

He heard her come in and turned. He was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved red flannel shirt with a black checkerboard pattern. His feet were in socks, not boots. His hair was mussed, as if he’d brushed it back in irritation.

“You did this?” he asked, amazement in his whole look.

“Well...yes,” she confessed, flushing. She hoped he hadn’t looked at the other canvas. She glanced at it, relieved to see that it was still turned to the wall.

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