Page 31 of Wyoming Heart

Cort noticed his companion’s expression. “She isn’t quite what she seems,” he said.

Bart just smiled. “It isn’t what people really are in small towns, Cort. It’s what people think they are. Ida has a scarlet reputation.”

“Don’t worry,” Cort chuckled. “Nobody’s going to say bad things about you because I date her.”

“I know that.”

He cocked his head and his eyes narrowed. “Your neighbor. She has a real issue with men.”

Bart nodded. “She’s had a hard life. At least her cousin kept the ranch going. Her mother tried several times to sell it for ready cash. Rogan stopped her.”

“What was her mother like?” he asked.

He smiled. “Like Ida, except that she didn’t have Ida’s looks.”

He scowled. “She was divorced?”

“Her husband never divorced her. He just left. A visiting socialite fell in love with his uniform and seduced him into leaving Anthea. So Anthea took it out on Mina. We all lost count of how many men moved in with them. Mina used to hide out in the woods...well, that’s all in the past.”

“She’s afraid of men.”

“Yes.”

“No hot dates?” Cort asked with a faint smile.

“No dates. Ever.”

He scowled. “Ever?”

“She doesn’t want to take the risk,” Bart told him. “She said some of her mother’s boyfriends seemed nice until the doors were closed.”

He was recalling that Ida had said that about her second husband. Cort had never raised his hand to a woman. Neither had his father or any of his brothers. But there had been such a man, a neighbor, whose wife had run screaming into the road, bleeding and horrified. A passing motorist had stopped and given her a ride into town, to the sheriff’s office. The husband had been arrested and charged, and ended up in jail.

“I guess some people are harder to know than others,” he conceded. “But I don’t need to hit a woman to feel like a man. And I have a very low opinion of men who do.”

“So does our cousin Cody,” Bart chuckled. “He took a domestic call one Saturday night when all his deputies were tied up. A three-year-old boy had bruises all over him. His mother was bleeding and crying and her husband was drunk and aggressive and tried to fight Cody.”

“That would have been interesting to see,” Cort mused.

“It truly was. Cody made the man walk every step of the way to town and threw every charge he could think of at him. There was this really avid public defender who thought he could come in here to circuit court and throw his weight around.” He whistled.

“He learned some things, including some brand-new words that Cody taught him after the man’s client was sent to jail for five years.”

“Hardly sounds like enough,” Cort murmured.

“I’m not finished. He got five years on two of the felony counts. But it seems that he was on parole for an assault that he served time for. After he serves the five years here, he goes to Montana to serve the parole violation. Cody made sure he would.”

Cort chuckled. “Our cousin is a bad man to rile.”

“Yes, he is.” He cocked his head and smiled at Cort. “He’s not the only one.”

Cort just shook his head. He looked at Bart curiously. “How old is Mina?”

“Twenty-four,” he said. “But she looks younger, doesn’t she?”

“A lot younger.” He was surprised at her age. Bart seemed to think that she had no interest in men, but he couldn’t believe that a woman could be innocent at the age of twenty-four. Surely she’d had some experiences that Bart didn’t know about. He laughed to himself. Mina Michaels was probably as experienced and jaded as he was and didn’t like men because she’d had her fill of them. Innocence in this day and age was a joke, he was absolutely sure of it. And Mina, whatever else she was, was no innocent.

MINAWASINTERVIEWINGmen for the full-time position on her ranch. She wasn’t happy about having to do it, or about the applicants themselves. She had an attorney’s investigator running background checks on the men. Two had been fired for stealing from their employers, although the ranchers hadn’t been able to prove it. Another was wanted for child custody payments that he’d been dodging.

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