Diana Palmer - Wyoming Brave

“I promise you, he isn’t usually this unreasonable,” Delsey began.

“I just rub him the wrong way. Some people are like that. It’s okay.” She smiled reassuringly. “I won’t tell him you fed me,” she added.

Delsey laughed. “Well, not right away,” she replied.

CHAPTER THREE

MERRIE FINISHED A preliminary sketch of Ren, one she planned to turn into a portrait of him later. He really was a striking man, she thought, studying it. But there was something more than just looks there. He was strong and independent and deliberate in the way he went about things. It was all there, in her sketch.

She was so glad that Hurricane had received the care he needed. The vet really knew what she was doing. She’d go back out and check on him tomorrow. Meanwhile, she worked on sketching Ren’s portrait. She loved the hard lines of his face, the incredible masculinity that radiated from him. He brimmed with authority, but not like her father had. Her father had been cruel and domineering. Ren tended to dominate, too, but not in a cruel way.

Delsey had told her that Ren almost never had a drink. But she was sure he’d had whiskey on his breath when he came to see her after her nightmare. He’d looked guilty and haunted after he’d snapped the belt and she’d run away from him. So there was kindness there, inside him. He just didn’t let it show. He was like a wolf who’d put his paw in a fire and drew it back at once, resolving never to go near fire again. Some woman had hurt him badly, Delsey had said. She didn’t think he was the kind of man who went through women in droves, like his brother, Randall. She liked Randall very much as a friend, but she’d never have wanted him for a boyfriend. He was flighty and he loved women. He never stuck with one for longer than a few weeks, and she was sure he’d never been in love. One day, she thought with laughter, he’d meet his match.

She put a campfire and a wolf in the background of Ren’s portrait. It seemed to suit. She added lodgepole pines for a backdrop. She drew him in the shepherd’s coat and the wide-brimmed hat he wore around the ranch. He looked very lifelike, as if he could walk off the page of the sketchbook.

She wished she had her paints and canvases, but those were back in Texas. She’d hesitated to use her cell phones, even though Paul had assured her they couldn’t be traced. And it wasn’t as if she could have her painting supplies sent up here, not without the risk of having someone notice where they were going. Paul had worried about the man Timmy Leeds had hired to kill Merrie. He’d sounded very professional, and Paul mentioned that he’d been in the business for many years. Men who weren’t competent got weeded out fast.

Here, in Wyoming, she could forget for hours at a time that she was being hunted. She gave a thought to Ren and Delsey, and prayed that she wasn’t putting them in harm’s way just by living in the house with them. But, then, Randall had assured her that Ren had state-of-the-art surveillance and very capable bodyguards on the place. He’d also assured her that Ren knew exactly why she was here. It relieved her a little.

She remembered that Ren had told her to go shopping for a coat. She’d have to do that. Maybe there was an art supply store in town. Wait, what about Amazon? She could have kicked herself for not thinking of it sooner. She had an account, with her brand-new credit card backing it up.

She pulled out her cell phone, loaded the app and started shopping for supplies. It didn’t take long to find everything she needed. Now she just had to find a room to paint in. She’d ask Ren.

But not today, she decided. He was bound to be in a snarly mood when he came in from working around the ranch. It amazed her how much there was to do on a ranch this size. There were buildings that had to be repaired, stalls in both the barn and stable that had to be scrubbed and filled with fresh hay, tack that had to be mended, machines that had to be worked on—it was a never-ending process.

Then there were the cattle. In bad weather, cowboys paid even closer attention to them. The herds were checked several times a day by cowboys, who were expected to be out working no matter how bad the weather got.

Most of the outbuildings, Delsey had told her, were made of steel. It was durable, and even snow that packed several feet in winter couldn’t collapse the roofs. There were lean-tos out in the sweeping fenced pastures, for the cattle to shelter in when the weather got rough, and those were also made of steel, with sloping roofs. Heated water troughs were everywhere. The men carried hay out to the cattle when snow got deep. It was placed in troughs with grates, so there wasn’t so much waste as the cattle ate. There were many corrals where horses were worked. Some were used to contain animals when they were due to be branded, tagged, castrated and inoculated. Those had loading chutes. Animals were herded down them either to trays used to work the calves, or to loading docks where the beef steers were loaded en route to other pastures or buyers.

Merrie had read about spring roundup on ranches, and she really would have loved to see the process. But it was October. No roundup was going on now. Instead, she found a DVD that showed the process on Skyhorn, the name of Ren’s big ranch.

While he was out, she put it in the DVD player, gathered up her knitting basket and settled back to watch the men work.

She was knee-deep into knitting a hat and watching Ren talking to a reporter about how branding was done when she heard a door open. She thought it was Delsey and paid no attention, until she heard a deep voice behind her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ren asked curtly.

She jumped, and looked up from her knitting with red cheeks. “Sorry. Was it okay if I use the DVD player?”

He scowled as he noticed her subject matter. He swept off his hat and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “I’d forgotten about that,” he murmured. “A reporter for a local station was doing a story about ranches and wanted to interview me. I don’t usually do them, but he was known for fairness in journalism.”

Her eyes asked the question.

He dropped into the leather armchair that nobody else was supposed to sit in and stared at her. “We get a lot of people who want to shut down the beef industry entirely.” He shrugged. “Opinions are like...well, everybody has one,” he said, amending what he’d been about to let out.

“I guess so,” she said. “The cattle industry may be an artificial use of land, but buffalo and other ruminants have been around for a very long time. Animal gases may contribute to climate change, but I’d put nuclear testing and volcanic eruptions at the top of any list I made about gases in the atmosphere.”

He raised one dark eyebrow. His attention was drawn to the interview she was watching. They were using the branding iron on the steers.

“That doesn’t bother you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I know about branding. Some people said freeze branding was better, but it sheds off with the coat. A burned brand lasts forever.” She glanced at him. “I even know what a running iron is. But I didn’t learn that from the video,” she said, nodding toward the screen. “I love to read Zane Grey novels. I guess I have every book he ever wrote.”

“Me, too,” he confessed. “What’s your favorite?”

“The Light of Western Stars,” she said. “You know, the hero was loosely based on a real person, Red Lopez, who fought on the Arizona border during the Mexican War in 1910.”

Both his eyebrows went up. “You know your history.”

“I would have studied it,” she said. She lowered her eyes to her knitting. “But I was tired of people shadowing me. Daddy wouldn’t let us leave the house unless somebody was with us. I took art classes at our local community college instead of doing a degree.”