Star Valley Winter Read online

  She could always go back and ring the doorbell again, she supposed. But that would probably lead to awkward questions about why her daughter was already upstairs while she lingered by the door as if ready to bolt any moment.

  She was still standing there, paralyzed by indecision, when she heard loud male groans at something from a room down the hall, then the game shifted to a commercial—somebody hawking razor blades.

  “You want another beer?” she heard Matt’s deep voice ask someone else—his brother, she presumed, or perhaps one of the ranch hands. The deep timbre of it sent those knots in her stomach unraveling to quiver like plucked fiddle strings.

  Seconds later—before she could come up with a decent place to hide—he walked out in the hall wearing tan jeans and a forest-green fisherman’s sweater. She was still ordering her heart to start beating again when he turned and caught sight of her standing there like an idiot.

  “Doc!” he exclaimed.

  “Hi,” she mumbled.

  “Why are you just standing out here? Come in.”

  She thought about explaining how the girls had abandoned her for their favorite boy band, then decided she would sound even more ridiculous if she tried. She held up the pie instead. “Where’s the best place for this?”

  “Probably in the kitchen. I was just heading there myself, I can show you the way. Here. Let me take your coat first.”

  She tensed as he came up behind her and pulled her coat from her shoulders while she transferred the pie from hand to hand. Despite her best efforts, she was intensely aware of him, his heat and strength and the leathery smell of his aftershave.

  After he hung her coat in a small closet off the entry, he took off down the hall. She followed him, trying fiercely not to notice the snug fit of his jeans or those impossibly broad shoulders under the weave of his sweater. Something was different about him today. It took her a moment to figure out what. He wasn’t wearing the black Stetson that seemed so much a part of him, nor was his hair flattened from it.

  The dark waves looked soft and thick. They would probably be like silk under her fingers, she thought. The impulse to reach out and see for herself was so strong, she even lifted a hand a few inches from her side, then dropped it quickly in mortification.

  It was much safer to look around her. This part of the house was one she hadn’t seen before, but it had the same warmth of the rest of the house, with family pictures grouped together on one wall and a huge log cabin quilt in dark greens and blues hanging on the other.

  As they neared the kitchen, the smells of roasting turkey and vegetables grew stronger, and her stomach gave a loud, long rumble. She pressed a hand to it, hoping no one else could hear but her.

  When she looked up, though, she found Matt giving her a lopsided grin, and she flushed.

  “Oh, Ellie! You made it!” Matt’s sister looked pretty and flustered as she stirred something on the stove with one hand while she pulled a pan of golden dinner rolls out of the oven with the other. “When it started to snow, I was afraid you’d decide not to make the drive.”

  “It’s not bad out there. A few flurries, that’s all. Just enough to make everything look like a magic fairyland.”

  “Wait until you’ve lived here for a few years. You won’t describe the snow quite so romantically. Oh, is that your famous pie? Does it need to go in the refrigerator?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Good. I’m not sure I could find room for it.” Cassie blew out a breath and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear just as the timers on the stove and microwave went off at the same time. The frazzled look in her eyes started to border on panic.

  “Uh, anything I can do to help?” Matt asked suddenly.

  His sister sent him a grateful look. “Actually, there is. Can you finish chopping the raw vegetables to go with that dip you like? Oh, rats,” she exclaimed suddenly. “I forgot to bring up the cranberry sauce from the storeroom. Ellie, would you mind stirring this gravy for me? I think most of the lumps are out of it—just make sure it doesn’t burn on the bottom.”

  “Uh, sure.”

  She set her pie on the only bare patch of countertop she could find and took the wooden spoon from Cassie, who rushed from the room, leaving her and Matt alone.

  He immediately went to work on the vegetables. The cutting surface was on a work island in the middle of the kitchen with only a few feet separating it from the stove, forcing them to stand side by side but facing opposite directions.

  Again she felt that sizzle of awareness but she sternly tried to suppress it. They lapsed into an awkward silence while they did their appointed jobs.

  “Everything smells divine,” she finally said.

  He seized on the topic. “Yeah, Cassidy’s a great cook. I’ve always thought she should have her own restaurant.”

  “I didn’t know Cassie was short for Cassidy.” She paused, remembering something SueAnn had told her about the middle brother, the Salt River chief of police. “Let me get this straight, you have a brother named Jesse James and a sister named Cassidy?”

  His low, rueful laugh sent the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. “Our dad was what I guess you’d call a history buff. One of his ancestors, Matt Warner, was a member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, and Dad grew up hearing stories about him handed down throughout the years. Dad was always fascinated by outlaws and lawmen of the Old West. The romanticism and the adventure and the history of it, I guess.”

  “So you’re named after this scofflaw of an ancestor?”

  “Yeah.” His voice sounded rueful again. “Matthew Warner Harte. When the others came along, I guess he just decided to stick with the same theme.”

  A Wild West outlaw. Why didn’t it surprise her that he had that blood churning through his veins? “And how did your mother handle having her own little wild bunch?”

  His shrug brushed his shoulder into hers, and the subtle movement sent a shiver rippling down her spine. “My parents adored each other,” he answered. “Mom probably wouldn’t have complained even if Dad wanted to name us Larry, Moe and Curly.”

  He sent her another lopsided grin, and she was helpless to prevent herself from returning it. They gazed at each other for a moment, side by side across shoulders, both smiling. Suddenly everything seemed louder, more intense—the slurp and burble of the gravy in the pan, the chink of the knife hitting the cutting board, the slow whir of the ceiling fan overhead.

  His gaze dropped to her mouth for an instant, just enough for heat to flare there as if he’d touched her, then his eyes flashed to hers once more before he turned abruptly, guiltily, back to the vegetables.

  Now that was interesting.

  She was still trying to come up with something to say in the midst of the sudden tension—not to mention trying to remind her lungs what they were there for—when their daughters burst into the kitchen in mid-giggle.

  They both stopped short in the doorway when they saw their parents working side-by-side. Ellie opened her mouth to greet them but shut it again when two pairs of eyes shifted rapidly between her and Matt, then widened.

  The girls looked at each other with small, secretive smiles that sent the fear of God into her. They were definitely up to something. And she was very much afraid she was beginning to suspect what it might be.

  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.”