Outlaw Hartes

Chapter 6

“So tell us what brings a pretty California beach girl like yourself to our desolate Wyoming wilderness.”

Matt sat forward so he could hear Ellie’s answer across the table. If he had asked that question, he grumped to himself, she probably would have snapped at him to mind his own business. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all that his brother wanted to nose around through her past.

Instead, she smiled at Jesse, seated to her left. “I’m afraid there weren’t too many beaches around Bakersfield.”

“Bakersfield? Is that where you’re from?” Cassie asked.

If he hadn’t been watching her so intently, Matt would have missed the way her smile slid away and the barest shadow of old pain flickered in her green eyes for just a moment before she shifted her gaze to the full plate in front of her. “Until I was seven. After that, I moved around a lot.”

What happened when she was seven? He wondered. And why did she phrase it that way? I moved around a lot, not My family moved around a lot?

Before he could ask, Jesse spoke. “Even if you’re not a beach girl, you’re still the best-looking thing to share our Thanksgiving dinner since I can remember.”

She laughed, rolling her eyes a little at the compliment, while Matt battled a powerful urge to casually reach over and shove his brother’s face into his mashed potatoes.

He didn’t want to admit it bugged the hell out of him the way Jesse flirted with her all through dinner, hanging on her every word and making sure her glass was always full.

Ellie didn’t seem to mind. She teased him right back, smiling and laughing at him like she’d never done with Matt.

Not that he cared. He was just worried about her getting a broken heart, that’s all. Maybe somebody ought to warn her about Jesse. His little brother wasn’t a bad sort. Not really. In fact, for being such a wild, out-of-control son of a gun after their parents died, Jess turned out pretty okay.

Matt would be the first one to admit the kid did a fine job protecting the good people of Salt River as the chief of police, a whole hell of a lot better than the last chief, who’d spent more time lining his own pockets than he did fighting crime.

But Jess still had a well-earned reputation with the ladies as a love ’em and leave ’em type. He rarely dated a woman longer than a few weeks, and when he did, she was usually the kind of girl their mother would have described as “faster than she ought to be.”

’Course, it was none of his business if Ellie Webster wanted to make a fool of herself over a charmer like Jesse James Harte, he reminded himself.

“So what brought you out here?” the charmer in question asked her again.

“My mom always wanted to move to the mountains and be a cowgirl,” Ellie’s daughter offered, helping herself to more candied yams.

A delicate pink tinged the doc’s cheeks. “Thanks for sharing that, sweetheart.”

“What?” Dylan asked, all innocence. “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

She laughed ruefully. “You’re right. I did. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to live and work in the Rockies. I met Ben Nichols when I was giving a lecture a few years ago. Afterward, when he told me about Star Valley and his practice here, I told him how much I envied him and casually mentioned I had always dreamed of living out here. I never imagined he would offer to sell his practice to me when he retired.”

So that explained what brought her to Wyoming. What interested him was why a tiny little thing like her would choose such a physically demanding job as a large-animal vet in the first place. If she wanted to be a vet, she would have been better off with little things like dogs and cats instead of having to muscle a half-ton of steer into a chute.

He didn’t think she’d appreciate the question, so he asked another one. “Where were you working before?”

She shifted her gaze across the table to him as if she’d forgotten he was sitting there. “I worked at a clinic in the Monterey area. That’s on the central coast of California—so I guess you were right, Jesse. Technically I suppose you could call me a beach girl, although I rarely had a chance to see it.”

“I’ve heard that’s a beautiful area,” Cassie said.

“It is. Pebble Beach is just south of it, and Carmel-by-the-Sea.”

“How many cattle operations did you find in the middle of all those golf courses and tourist traps?” he asked abruptly, earning a curious look from Cassie.

“Not many, although there are a few farther inland. My clients were mostly horses—thoroughbreds and jumpers and pleasure horses.”

The conversation turned then to the physical differences between working horses and riding horses and then, with much prompting by Dylan, onto the best choice for a pleasure horse for a nine-year-old girl. Matt contented himself listening to the conversation and watching Ellie interact with his family.

Even after three years of marriage, Melanie had never fit in half as well. He felt vaguely guilty for the thought, but it was nothing less than the truth. She and Cassie had fought like cats and dogs from the beginning, and Jess had despised her.

So much for his grand plan to give his younger siblings more of a stable home environment by bringing home a wife.

He should have known from the first night he brought her home after their whirlwind courtship and marriage at the national stock show in Denver that he had made a disastrous mistake. She spent the entire evening bickering with Cassie and completely ignoring Jess.

But by then it was too late, they were already married. It took him three more years of the situation going from bad to worse for him to admit to himself how very stupid he had been.

He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

He hated thinking about it, about what a fool he had been, so he yanked his mind off the topic. “Everything tastes great, as usual,” he said instead to Cassie.

She grinned suddenly. “Remember that first year after Mom and Daddy died when you tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner?”

Jess turned his attention long enough from Ellie to shudder and add his own jab. “I remember it. My stomach still hasn’t forgiven me. The turkey was tougher than roasted armadillo.”

“And the yams could have been used to tar the barn roof.”

He rolled his eyes as the girls giggled. Jess and Cassie teased him mercilessly about that dinner. Usually it didn’t bother him—but then again, usually he didn’t have Ellie Webster sitting across from him listening to the conversation with that intrigued look in her green eyes.

“Give me a break,” he muttered. “I did my best. You’re lucky you got anything but cold cereal and frozen pizza.”

He’d been twenty-two when their parents died in a rollover on a slippery mountain road. That first year had been the toughest time of his life. Grieving for his parents and their sudden death, trying to comfort Cassie, who had been a lost and frightened thirteen-year-old, doing his damnedest to keep Jess out of juvenile detention.

Trying to keep the ranch and the family together when he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

It had been a rough few years, but they had survived and were closer for it.

“At least we had to only go through Matt’s attempts to poison us for a while.” Jess grinned. “Then Cassie decided to save us all and learned to cook.”

“I had no choice,” she retorted. “It was a matter of survival. I figured one of us had to learn unless we wanted to die of food poisoning or starve to death. Matt was too busy with the ranch and you were too busy raising hell. That left me.”

Jesse immediately bristled, gearing up for a sharp retort, and Matt gave a resigned sigh. Cassie always knew how to punch his buttons. Jesse’s wild, hard-drinking days after their parents died were still a sore point with him, but that never stopped Cass from rubbing his nose in it.

Before he could step in to head trouble off, Ellie did it for him. “Well, you learned to cook very well,” she assured Cassie, with an anxious look toward Jess’s glare. “You’ll have to give me the recipe for your stuffing. I tend to over-cook it. Is that sausage I taste in there?”

She prattled on in a way that seemed completely unlike her, and it was only after she had successfully turned the conversation completely away from any trouble spots that he realized she had stepped in to play peacemaker as smoothly as if she’d been doing it all her life.

Had she done it on purpose? He wondered again about her background. She hadn’t mentioned brothers or sisters, but that didn’t mean she had none. What had happened when she was seven, the year after which she said she’d moved around so much?

He wanted badly to know, just as he was discovering he wanted to know everything about her.

* * *

“Come on, Ellie. It’s our turn to watch football.”

She looked at the dishes scattered across the table. “I can help clean up….”

“No way. The men get to do it—it’s tradition. That’s why I try to make the kitchen extra messy for them.” She smiled sweetly at her brothers. “I think I used just about every single dish in the house.”

Matt and Jesse groaned in unison. Unmoved, Cassie stood up. “Have fun, boys.”

With guilt tweaking her, Ellie let Matt’s sister drag her from the dining room, Dylan and Lucy following behind.

Cassie led her into a huge great room dominated by a towering river-rock fireplace. A big-screen TV and a pair of couches took up one corner, and a pool table and a couple of video games jostled for space in the other. As large as the room was, though, it was comfortable. Lived in, with warm-toned furniture and shelves full of books.

The girls immediately rushed to the pool table, and Cassidy plopped down on one of the plump, tweedy couches. “Boy, it feels good to sit down. I had to get up at four to put the turkey in, and I haven’t stopped since.”

“I’m sorry if I made extra work for you.”

“Are you kidding? I didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done anyway, and it’s wonderful to have somebody else with a Y chromosome at the table besides Lucy!”

Cassie picked up the remote. “So which game do you want to watch? We have blue against red—” she flipped the channel “—or black against silver.”

“I’m not crazy about football,” she confessed.

The other woman sent her a conspiratorial grin. “Me, neither. I hate it, actually. When you spend your whole life around macho men, you don’t really need to waste your time watching them on TV. Let’s see if we can find something better until the boys come in and start growling at us to change it back.”

She flipped the remote, making funny comments about every station she passed until stumbling on an old Alfred Hitchcock film with Jimmy Stewart.

“Here we go. Rear Window. This is what I call real entertainment. Could Grace Kelly dress or what?”

Ellie settled on the couch, the seductive warmth from the fireplace combining with the turkey put her into a pleasant haze.

She couldn’t remember enjoying a meal more. The food had been delicious. And with the exception of the strange tension between her and Matt, the company had been great, too.

Their banter and teasing and memories of other holidays had been a revelation. This was what a family was all about, and if she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was a part of it.

One strange thing, though. For all their reminiscing, they hadn’t brought up Lucy’s mother one single time. It was almost as if the woman had never existed. Come to think of it, nobody had ever mentioned the mystery woman to Ellie.

“What happened to Lucy’s mother?”

She didn’t realize she had asked the blunt question out loud until Cassidy’s relaxed smile froze, and she shot a quick glance at her niece. Ellie winced, appalled at herself. When would she ever learn to think before she opened her big mouth? At least neither of the girls was paying any attention to them, Ellie saw with relief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quickly. “That was terribly rude of me. It just slipped out. It’s none of my business, really. You don’t have to answer.”

“No. It’s just a…a raw subject.” She looked at her niece again, and Ellie thought she saw guilt flicker in her blue eyes, then she flashed a bitter smile. She lowered her voice so the girls couldn’t hear. “Melanie ran off with my…with one of our ranch hands. Lucy wasn’t even three months old.”

Ellie’s jaw dropped. She tried to picture Matt in the role of abandoned husband and couldn’t. Her heart twisted with sympathy when she imagined him taking care of a newborn on his own—late-night feedings, teething and all.

What kind of woman could simply abandon her own child like that? She thought of those first few months after Dylan was born, when she had been on her own and so very frightened about what the future might hold for the two of them.

Despite her fear, she had been completely in awe of the precious gift she’d been handed. Some nights she would lie awake in that grimy two-room apartment, just staring at Dylan’s tiny, squishy features, listening to her breathe and wondering what she had done to deserve such a miracle.

She couldn’t even comprehend a woman who would walk away from something so amazing.

Or from a man like Matt Harte.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, knowing the words were terribly inadequate.

Cassidy shrugged and looked toward the girls. From the raw emotion exposed on her features like a winter-bare tree branch, Ellie had the odd suspicion there was more to the story than losing a sister-in-law.

“It was a long time ago,” Cassie said quietly. “Anyway, Matt’s much better off without her. He’d be the first to tell you that. Melanie hated it here. She hated the ranch, she hated Wyoming, she hated being a mother. I was amazed she stuck around as long as she did.”

Why on earth would he marry a woman who hated ranch life? Ellie wondered. For a man like Matt who so obviously belonged here—on this land he loved so much—it must have been a bitter rejection seeing it scorned by the woman he married.

She must have been very beautiful for him to marry her in the first place and bring her here. Ellie didn’t even want to think about why the thought depressed her so much.

Cassie quickly turned the conversation to the Hitchcock movie, but even after Ellie tried to shift her attention to the television, her mind refused to leave thoughts of Matt and the wife who had deserted him with a tiny daughter.

As much as she hated bringing up such an obviously painful topic, she had to admit she was grateful for the insight it provided into a man she was discovering she wanted to understand.

No wonder he sometimes seemed so gruff, so cold. Had he always been that way or had his wife’s desertion hardened him? Had he once been like Jesse, all charm and flirtatiousness? She couldn’t imagine it. Good grief, the man was devastating enough with his habitual scowl!

After a moment, Cassie turned the tables. “What about Dylan’s father?” she asked suddenly. “Is he still in the picture?”

“He was never in the picture. Not really,” Ellie answered calmly. After so many years the scab over her heart had completely healed. “Our relationship ended when Kurt saw that plus sign on the pregnancy test.”

He had been so furious at her for being stupid enough to get pregnant, as if it were entirely her fault the protection they used had failed. He could lose his job over this, he had hissed at her, that handsome, intelligent face dark with anger. Professors who impregnated their star students tended to be passed over when tenures were being tossed around. Didn’t she understand what this could do to him?

It had always been about him. Always. She had only come to understand that immutable fact through the filter of time and experience. In the midst of their relationship, she had been so amazed that someone of Kurt’s charisma—not to mention professional standing—would deign to take her under his wing, first as a mentor and adviser, then as a friend, then as a lover during her final year of undergraduate work.

She might have seen him more clearly had she not been seduced by the one thing she had needed so desperately those days—approbation. He had told her she had talent, that she would be a brilliant, dedicated doctor of veterinary medicine one day.

No one else had believed in her. She had fought so hard every step of the way, and he was the only one who seemed to think she could do it. She had lapped up his carefully doled-out praise like a puppy starving for attention.

She thought she had loved him passionately and had given him everything she had, while to him she had been one more in a long string of silly, awestruck students.

It was a hard lesson, but her hurt and betrayal had lasted only until Dylan was born. As she held her child in her arms—hers alone—she realized she didn’t care anymore what had led her to that moment; she was only amazed at the unconditional love she felt for her baby.

“So you raised Dylan completely on your own while you were finishing vet school?” Cassie asked.

She nodded. “I took her to class half the time because I couldn’t find a sitter, but somehow we did it.”

Cassie shook her head in sympathetic disgust. “Men are pigs, aren’t they?” she muttered, just as Jesse entered the great room.

He plopped next to Ellie on the couch, scowling at his sister. “Hey, I resent that. Especially since it just took two of us the better part of an hour to clean up the mess you made in the kitchen.”

“I meant that figuratively,” she retorted. “When it comes to knowing what a woman needs and wants out of a relationship, most of you have about as much sense as a bucket of spit.”

“Don’t listen to her, Doc. My baby sister has always been far too cynical for her own good.”

Jesse grabbed Ellie’s hand, and for one horrified second she thought he was going to bring it to his lips. To her vast relief, he just squeezed it, looking deep into her eyes. “Not all men are pigs. I, for one, always give a woman exactly what she wants. And what she needs.”

His knowing smile fell just a few inches short of a leer, and she felt hot color crawl across her cheekbones at finding herself on the receiving end of it, especially from a man as dangerously attractive as Jesse James Harte.

Before she could come up with a reply, his little sister gave an inelegant snort. “See? What did I tell you? A bucket of spit.”

Ellie smiled, charmed beyond words by both of them and their easy acceptance of her. Before she could answer, she felt the heat of someone’s gaze on her. She turned around and found Matt standing in the doorway, arms crossed and shoulder propped against the jamb as he watched his brother’s flirting with an unreadable look in those vivid blue eyes.

The heated blush Jesse had sparked spread even higher, until she thought her face must look as bright as the autumn leaves in his sister’s centerpiece.

What was it about that single look that sent her nerves lurching and tumbling to her stomach, that affected her a thousand times more intensely than Jesse’s teasing?

His daughter spotted him at almost the same time she did. “Daddy, come play with us,” she demanded from the pool table.

He shifted his gaze from Ellie to the girls, his mouth twisting into a soft smile that did funny, twirly things to her insides. “I will in a bit, Lucy Goose. I have to go out and check on Mystic first, okay?”

“Mystic?” Ellie’s question came out as a squeak that nobody but her seemed to notice.

“One of our mares,” Matt answered.

“Mystic Mountain Moon,” Lucy said. “That’s her full name.”

“She’s pregnant with her first foal and she’s tried to lose it a couple times,” Matt said.

“She’s a real beauty.” Cassie joined in. “Moon Ranger out of Mystic Diamond Lil. One heck of a great cutting horse. Matt tried her out in a few local rodeos last summer, and she blew everybody away.”