The Wrangler's Woman

Dobe slanted a skeptical glance at Jack. “About anytime, I reckon. Maybe you can all come so I’ll only have to do it once. I’ll round up the horses and—”

“Not me,” Niki said quickly.

“Beg pardon?”

“I’m not a horse person.”

“Missy, this is a dude ranch. Horses are a real big part of it.”

Niki’s expression grew uncharacteristically stubborn. “There are a whole lot of things in this world that I can do happily, but messing with horses isn’t among them. Count me out, please.”

Dobe rolled his eyes expressively, but all he said was, “It’s up to you, missy. Tell you what, I’ll be ready first thing tomorrow morning and anyone who wants to come along is welcome.”

“Thank you,” Dani said. “And thank you for taking care of things after…after our father died. We do appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well…”

“You’ll be staying on with us, won’t you?”

Silence greeted her question, and Dani found herself holding her breath. They were starting so deep in a hole that without the continuity Dobe could provide, she couldn’t imagine what they’d do.

He let out his breath on a gusty note. “I’ll stay for a while anyway, till we see how it goes. In the meantime, I got chores.”

Turning, Dobe stomped out of the house. After a moment’s silence, Dani laughed a bit shakily. “Another crisis averted.”

Jack stirred. “Naw, no problem, he’s always like that. Just treat him fair and he’ll work his heart out for you. He goes back a real long way with this place so I think he can tell you a lot of things you need to know.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

For another long moment, she met his gaze directly, until a slight feeling of unease skittered up her spine. Looking down abruptly at the messy desktop, she said faintly, “Well, if you have to leave now… I mean, you’ve been very helpful, but I’m sure we’ve already intruded on your time quite enough.”

Jack said, “I can take a hint.” Turning toward the door, he put his hat back on his head. “If there’s anything else I can do for you—”

“You’ve done quite enough already.” The words sounded considerably more impatient than she’d intended.

“See you around, then. Ladies…” His nod included them all and then he was gone.

Everyone looked at Dani with various degrees of puzzlement. Then Toni said, “Gosh, he’s cute,” which pretty much broke the tension.

THE WOMEN HELD a war council that night over a supper of canned soup and crackers. They were all in complete agreement: their futures depended upon making the Bar K pay, so they’d knuckle down and work their fingers to the bone if need be.

Dani, proud of the lot of them, nodded approval. “It will be tougher because money is so short,” she said, “but when wasn’t it?”

“Money can’t buy happiness, anyway,” Toni said blithely.

“That’s only your opinion,” Dani snapped back. Softening her tone, she added, “It is a little strange that no money came with this place. With what we cleared for the house in Montana, though, we should be able to make it, God willing and the creeks don’t rise.”

“I can get a job,” Niki said suddenly.

Dani frowned. “Are you sure you want to do that? I mean, with all that has to be done here, you’d be working night and day.”

“It won’t be that bad. Besides, we need the cash.”

“I’ll bet they’d hire you at the chamber of commerce,” Toni predicted. “Remember what Mason said? You’re the best advertisement a town can have and you even have experience.”

Niki made a wry face. “I don’t want to do that again. I just want a job where I can maybe make a little money. Unfortunately, I’m not loaded with qualifications.”

“Tips,” Toni declared. “You need a job where you can get tips. All those cowboys at that café were just falling all over you. Maybe you could be a waitress?”

Niki perked up. “Or a barmaid.” She glanced at Dani. “Maybe we can ask Jack for—”

“Leave Jack out of it, why don’t you.” It sounded terribly ungracious, but that was how Dani felt. “I’m sure you can get any job you want without his help or anybody else’s. But a barmaid… I don’t know. I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

Her two sisters exchanged puzzled glances, but let it pass.

“While we’re splitting up jobs,” Tilly said, “I’ll handle the cooking and the kitchen, of course.”

“I’ll be Grandma’s assistant,” Toni said eagerly. “I can manage the housework, so once we get this place in shape, I’ll be the maid.” She grinned broadly. “And Dani will handle the business end of things, of course, and take care of all the outdoors stuff.”

“And,” Niki interjected, “when I’m home I’ll do whatever’s needed as long as it has nothing to do with horses.”

Nods of understanding greeted this pronouncement. Niki’s fear of horses was well known in the family; they understood its roots and accepted it with regret.

“All right,” Dani said decisively. “Tomorrow’s Sunday, so Niki and I won’t be able to get anything done in town until the next day. Then, while she fills out job applications, I’ll put an ad in the newspaper. We need wranglers and we need them bad if we hope to be ready for the first guests.”

Granny blinked. “What first guests?”

“These!” Dani held aloft a handful of reservation forms. “I found these in the desk in the big room in front—the great room, I guess you’d call it. Apparently there are quite a lot of people who come here every summer and have for years. If we can just pull everything together in time… But it’ll take help, so it’s important that we get the ad into the newspaper right away.”

“Hey,” Toni said with a smile, “things are looking up!”

“Don’t count your chickens,” Dani warned. “We can’t let down our guard for a minute. Don’t forget, this is Texas. It’s a man’s world down here. You saw how those guys swarmed around you today? Well, don’t let ’em fool you. If you give any of them an inch, he’s sure to take a mile.”

“Really?” A very faint smile curved Niki’s lips. “Are you thinking of anyone in particular, maybe someone like that good-lookin’, slow talkin’ Jack Burke?”

Dani felt hot color rush into her cheeks. She lifted her chin with hauteur. “I’m speaking of men in general. Which reminds me…” She dug around in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a scrap of paper, which she offered to Granny. “Do you think Wil Keene wrote that?”

Granny’s eyes widened and she smoothed out the wrinkles, then read aloud, “Are you having fun yet? You girls don’t know half as much as you think you do.”

Niki and Toni gasped in unison. “Where did you get that?” Niki demanded.

“Found it in the desk. Granny, do you think that’s his handwriting?”

“Mercy, your guess is as good as mine. He wasn’t big on writing letters, you know.”

They did indeed.

“But…” Granny pursed her lips. “If you ask me, it sounds just like him—are you having fun yet! It’s like…like some kind of clue to something. What in the world has that man done now?” She shook her head with obvious disgust.

And who could blame her? It was her daughter, twenty-five years younger than Wil Keene, who’d fallen for the fast-talking con man, been seduced and abandoned in short order. Granny had said over and over through the years that she would be eternally grateful her granddaughters had better sense.

“We won’t worry about it,” Dani decided for all of them. “We have too many important things to do to waste any thought or effort on a note that might not have been written by him at all. So who wants to do the grand tour with Dobe and me tomorrow morning?”

The answer was exactly nobody.

SUNDAY BREAKFAST at the huge XOX Ranch was a four-generation affair: Austin the grandfather, Travis the father, Jack the son, and Petey the orphaned, four-year-old grandson, whose parents had died tragically when he was still an infant. Gathered around the big wooden table in the dining room, they ate and argued and generally gave all-male households a bad name.

The Sunday menu never varied: chicken fried steak with home-fried potatoes, two or three fried eggs on each plate, with cream gravy over the whole thing. Jack figured if it didn’t clog your arteries and kill you, you were just lucky.

Petey dropped his spoon on the floor and looked expectantly at his uncle, a stubborn brown cowlick hanging across his big hazel eyes.

“Get it yourself,” Jack said. “I’m tryin’ to teach you to be independent, kid.”

“Ha!” Grandpa Austin snagged another huge slab of fried meat off the platter. “You help that boy, Jack.”

Travis poured coffee into his cup and his father’s. “You’re spoilin’ the boy, Pa. Jack’s right.”

Petey just sat there grinning from one to the other; he always enjoyed stirring up the pot. When his glance snagged on his uncle Jack’s, the grin slipped. He hopped off his chair to pick up the spoon, which he put back on his plate without even wiping it off.

Jack figured the boy had already met and conquered every germ on the XOX, so he let it pass.

Austin fixed Jack with a gimlet eye. “I hear them Keenes are in town,” he said.

“That’s right.” Jack hacked at his fried eggs with the edge of his fork. “Got in yesterday. Turns out they’re daughters, not sons.”

“Heard that.” Travis speared a chunk of steak. “That’ll make it easier to do what we’re afixin’ to do.”

Alarm flared in Jack. “And what might that be?”

“Buy the place, same as always.”

“Oh, that.”

“We’ll be doin’ them a favor.” Austin piped up. “It’d be hard enough for three able-bodied men with deep pockets to save that place. For three women it’ll be dang nigh impossible.”

Travis nodded. “I heard on the grapevine that no money come with the place so they gotta be strapped for cash. Seems kinda strange to me, though, all things considered.”

“Well…” Jack’s appetite was fading. “They—”

A crash shocked all thought out of him and he swung around to find Petey grinning while milk from his smashed glass traveled quickly across the hardwood floor.

“Doggone it, Petey!”

Muriel appeared, mop in hand. “I’ll handle this,” she announced, fixing the little culprit with a condemning eye. “Did you do that on purpose, Peter Burke?”

Petey caught his lower lip between baby teeth and shook his head solemnly. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I just goofed.”

Muriel’s scowl transformed into an unwilling grin. “I swear, you take after the rest of the men in your family,” she declared, flopping mop strings around in the white mess. “Just get by on charm, which is what all you Burkes do.”

Grandpa winked at son and grandson. “Charm only gets us so far, right, fellas?”

Travis shrugged and Jack groaned. His grandfather had been married and divorced three times, and his father twice. One of the main reasons Jack had never taken the marital plunge was because of the rotten family track record where women were concerned.

When Muriel had withdrawn, Travis returned to the subject at hand without missing a beat. “The thing I don’t get is, what happened to all Miss Elsie’s money and family jewels? Even a fast worker like Wil Keene would have had trouble blowing it all in less than two years. If he was spending big money, it sure wasn’t on anything a man could see, especially not that ranch.”

“He coulda been a closet gambler,” Austin speculated. “Or maybe he invested in a lot of bad stocks. I seem to recall a certain someone who tried to invest in the awl bidness a buncha years back and got took to the cleaners.”

Travis lowered his brows in warning; his losses had been so large that the entire family was in an uproar about it for months. Jack had been a kid at the time, but he remembered it well.

“Whatever,” Travis said. “Keene was stupid not to sell that ranch when he had the chance. It sure woulda spared them women a whole lot of grief.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said mildly. “They seem awful determined to make a go of it, and I, for one, wish them well.” He was thinking of Dani and the intensity of her determination to make the Bar K a success. Surely anyone who cared that much could make almost anything work. “It may take a miracle but… I think the Keene sisters might be able to make something out of the Bar K again.”

Austin obviously did not see it that way. “You’re pulling my laig.” He scowled at his grandson. “They couldn’t make a go of it even if they had plenty of money behind them, which they ain’t. Besides which, nobody’s gonna work for them, just for starters. And where, I ask you, are they gonna find dudes? Us, on the other hand…” He puffed out his chest. “We’re turnin’ reservations away.”

“Maybe we should turn a few of them toward the Bar K.”

“Not only no, but hell no. Look, you just tend to your own knittin’ and stay away from them girls. Women are nothing but trouble, as ever’ last one of us knows to our sorrow. And them Keene women are bound to be twice as bad.”

“I don’t happen to agree.”

Splat! A big glob of gravy struck the rim of Jack’s plate and splattered across the shiny wood beyond the plastic place mat. He looked up sharply to find Petey holding a spoon catapult fashion in his chubby, childish hands.

His smile was beatific and he said but a single word: “Oops!”

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