Page 21 of Wyoming Heart

“Now I understand why,” he said. “She’s afraid that a man she got involved with might turn out to be just like her mother’s drunk boyfriend.”

“That’s why.”

Cort was remembering the dream he’d had, of the shadowy woman crying, frightened, saying she’d never trust a man.How odd, he thought. It was almost as though he had some sort of mental link to a woman he didn’t even know.

“All of us around Catelow know about Mina. Her mother was notorious.” He glowered. “There was one boy, when Mina was sixteen. She was crazy about him. He liked her, too. He asked her out and went to the house to pick her up. Her mother was all over him. The next day, she lured the boy to her car after school and seduced him.”

“Oh good God!” Cort said angrily.

“He was too ashamed to face Mina. It got around school, too. So there went her only real taste of romance.” He shook his head. “She’s had a hell of a life.”

“Her mother should have been prosecuted for child abuse. Seducing a teenage boy!” he scoffed.

“She should have been prosecuted for what she did to Mina,” he agreed. “She hated her only child. I never understood why. Neither did Mina. She suffered after her father took off. Years and years of pure hell until her mother finally died.”

“And I thought I had it bad, with my dad’s model.”

Bart’s eyebrows went up. “How so?”

“She hated me. Well, she hated all of us kids. There were four of us. She played up to us, pretended she was crazy about us, until she got Dad to load her up with diamonds and stocks and bonds and marry her. Then the claws came out.” He sighed, remembering. “Cash hated her from the beginning. He saw right through her act. We didn’t, and it alienated him from the family. Cash got the worst of it because he was Dad’s favorite. Actually, I think Cash was supposed to inherit the ranch, but after all the drama and alienation, Cash said he’d never come back to West Texas, even after Dad saw what she really was and divorced her. Garon joined the FBI and lived all over the country. Parker’s up in Montana, with their State Game and Fish. That left me, to inherit Latigo. Dad said that if I didn’t learn to ranch, the whole place would go on the auction block. So I learned how to ranch.”

Bart was surprised. “You didn’t want to?”

Cort’s smile was world-weary. “I wanted to be a mercenary, like Cash. He lived a life more exciting than anyone else I knew. It sounded romantic. You know, a hired gun, like in the old cowboy movies.” His smile faded. “Only it’s not like that. I joined the Army because I felt patriotic. It sounded noble, you know—defend the country, go overseas to Iraq, fight insurgents.” He leaned back in his chair. “I learned what Cash already knew. That taking a life isn’t as simple as it looks on film. That seeing your friends, who’ve been with you since basic, blown into bits by an IED, having one die in midsentence right beside you from a sniper attack, those things are really sanitized even in the most realistic movies. In real life,” he added coldly, “they’re not romantic. When I got out of the service, I came home and threw myself into ranching heart and soul. I understood why Cash was so alone, why he never mixed with us, with anybody. When Garon opened doors for us with him, I went to Jacobsville to visit. We talked, a lot.” He sipped more coffee. “I understood him then. So did Garon, who’d spent years with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. All of us had killed and very nearly been killed. It’s a very exclusive club. Not one any sane person would want to belong to,” he added.

Bart nodded. “I was in Afghanistan,” he said after a minute. “I spent my whole tour of duty sleeping on the ground with a rock for a pillow, dodging snipers, hiding out from insurgents who were stalking us. When I first got home, I was so nervous that I’d jump out of my skin if a car backfired.”

Cort cocked his head. “I didn’t know you’d gone overseas.”

“We didn’t talk much until the past two years,” he reminded his cousin.

“That’s true. Imagine running into each other at a cattle convention and realizing we were related,” Cort chuckled. “That was one for the books. We were like brothers by the time we went home. Think of all the years we missed being friends, because we never knew one another.”

“You came up to see Cody a time or two, but that was while I was overseas,” Bart said.

“Yes, it was. Poor Cody,” he added quietly. “He’s still not over his wife dying.”

“She was a good doctor, they say,” Bart replied. “I guess he’ll mourn her for the rest of his life. He doesn’t date anybody. Lives with that dog she gave him the year she died.”

“Well, being alone isn’t so bad,” Cort replied. “I’ve got the ranch all to myself except for rare visits from my brothers. Even Dad was usually away in pursuit of some woman most of the time. It was just me and the cattle.”

“That’s how it is here. Just me and the cattle.” Bart grinned. “You’re right. It’s not so bad. They never complain. They never want me to buy them things. They don’t even pout when I ignore them for a whole day.”

Cort threw back his head and roared with laughter. “I never thought of it like that,” he confessed.

“Now you have,” Bart returned.

THATNIGHT,Mina had dreams. Nightmares. They came back with a vengeance, probably because of what had happened in her friend’s pasture with the calf. She got up at three in the morning and made coffee.

The house was lonely. She had cats who lived in the barn to keep away rats, but she didn’t have a pet indoors. She thought about getting a dog, but they required a lot of attention and she was having to travel on occasion to promote books. It would mean boarding a pet for long periods of time. So she went out to pet the barn cats when she was particularly lonely. Just not at three in the morning, in the dark.

She sat down at the kitchen table and sipped coffee. That man, Cort, had yelled at her and brought back terrible memories. He’d been sorry afterward. It finally dawned on her that he’d been afraid that he couldn’t save her from the charging mama cow.Imagine that, she thought to herself with a faint smile. He’d actually been afraid for her, after all the insults they’d traded back and forth.

She couldn’t go soft on him, however. That way lay disaster. Just because he’d saved her from a goring didn’t make him an object of romantic dreams. He was just a cowboy, and she knew from experience that many of the single ones were drifters, who never stayed put. They liked variety not just in work, but in women as well. Cort had a very sensual way of looking at a woman, and it didn’t take much guesswork to know that he was experienced. He’d spent the night with the happy divorcée, which tainted him in her eyes. Everybody knew the woman’s reputation. She was a man killer. Well, Cort was a lady-killer, from what his cousin said. Maybe they were a match made in heaven, the jaded man and the promiscuous woman.

It wounded her. It shouldn’t have. She had nothing invested in the cowboy who worked for Bart. She had to stop thinking about him. There was one way, at least. She carried her hot coffee to her desk in the living room and turned on her computer. When the world was sitting on her shoulders, writing was her salvation. She’d lived in her fantasy world for years, escaping her mother and the drunken boyfriends her mother brought home. It was a bright and beautiful place, where her heroes and heroines lived, and no ugliness was allowed there.

She smiled as she pulled up the chapter she was working on and began to type. She often wondered where the words came from. She had no idea what the characters were going to do until she started writing, and then they told their own story. It was a fascinating, delicious process that never failed to intrigue her. She didn’t try to understand it. She simply accepted it.

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