Christmas at Blue Moon Ranch (9 page)

“I think they
all have.” Daniel lowered himself to sit on a bale of straw. “Losing a father…a
husband…isn’t something you get over quickly.”

“Jamie Mercado
was a decent man. Not the steadiest, maybe…” The foreman shrugged.

Daniel knew
Willa would hate being the subject of gossip. But maybe Nate could help him
understand her better. “Not steady, how?”

“He liked
speculating—invested in some crazy projects over the years. Willa only found
out about a couple of them after he died and the money wasn’t there for paying
the bills.”

“Hmm.” So Willa’s
husband had left her in debt. Yet she felt she owed it to him to keep the ranch
together and felt guilty for selling part of it. If she couldn’t trust her own
husband, how would she ever trust a stranger? “So, do we have a place to park
Calypso until I can get these boards nailed up?”

“I’ll tie him up
with some hay for the time being.” Nate accepted the change of subject with a
nod. “He’ll be good till we’re done.”

True to his
word, Rob arrived about three-thirty each afternoon for the rest of the week
and worked hard for two solid hours without protest or complaint. Daniel didn’t
ask if Willa had objected to the arrangement and the boy didn’t volunteer any
information.

The three of
them didn’t really talk much at all. Daniel needed most of his strength for the
work itself and to force his body to cooperate. He took as few breaks as
possible, especially while Rob was present, and went to bed dead-tired at
night.

Thursday,
though, Rob looked over at him while they waited for Nate to cut a board for
the side of the barn. “You went to Iraq, like my dad.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you fight
in many battles?”

“I saw my
share.”

“What’s it
like?”

Daniel debated
his answer for a moment. “Loud. Hot. Dirty and confusing. Scary.”

Rob curled his
lip. “You were scared?”

“I don’t know
anybody who wasn’t. You look death in the face, then follow orders, anyway. That’s
a soldier’s job.”

The boy nodded.
“I guess so. What kind of stuff did you do?”

“Well…” Daniel
sifted through his memories, trying to find some that were G-rated. “We helped
build two schools and a hospital. I did some mentoring for Iraqi kids, coached
soccer for a couple of teams—”

Rob dismissed
those efforts with a snort. “Did you hunt down terrorists?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Did you kill
any of them?”

“When I had to.”
Too often.

“How many? Did
you get medals and stuff?” The boy’s eyes glowed with excitement. He raised his
arms as if he held a rifle and mimicked the sound of weapon fire, jerking the
imaginary gun with each shot. “Pow. Pow, pow, pow. Pow.”

Daniel sliced
his straight arm down across the boy’s hands. “War is a terrible experience,
Rob. Don’t ever take it lightly.”

They were still
staring at each other when Nate came back with the board. Daniel excused
himself from the nailing process and returned to the house, where he sat for a
long time in the dark, thinking about all the buddies he’d lost to war. Including
one he’d never met…Jamie Mercado.

By sundown on
Friday, the corrals and the cattle pens were in good shape—clean, repaired and
functional. Daniel handed Rob a crisp fifty-dollar bill. “I appreciate the
effort. Anytime you want to come around, we’ll have work for you.”

Rob’s eyes went
round in his dirty, sweat-streaked face. “Wow…thanks!”

“Thank you.”
Daniel swiped at his forehead with his shirt sleeve—the October weather in
south Texas resembled his memories of summer in Ohio. “Have you got time for
one more quick chore?”

Still staring at
the fifty, the boy said, “Sure.”

Daniel led the
way into the house, where three moving boxes still sat in the living room. “Would
you help me move these into the bedroom?”

Rob squatted
beside a box as if to lift it on his own, but couldn’t get it off the floor. “Man,
that’s heavy. What’s in there?”

“Army gear,” Daniel
said, carefully casual. “Boots, uniforms, junk I carried around with me. I’ll
get the other side.”

Despite Daniel’s
aching back, the two of them moved the three containers into a corner of the
bedroom. Each time they set down a box, the clank of metal hinted at the true
nature of the contents. Daniel ignored the sounds, and Rob didn’t ask for an
explanation.

At the front
door, Daniel handed the boy an extra ten dollars. “Thanks again, Rob. Can you
ride your pony home in the dark?”

Without meeting
his eyes, Rob shrugged one shoulder. “Sure.”

He called Willa
a little while later just to check. “And I wanted to thank you for letting him
help out. Nate and I are grateful.”

“Rob made the
choice,” she said stiffly. “He had to work after dinner all week to get his
chores here done, and then stay up late with his homework.”

“He must have
big plans for the money,” Daniel joked. “What’s he got his eye on—a new video
game?”

Willa didn’t say
anything for a long time. “He wanted to share it with Susannah and Toby for
lunch money. He heard me talking to Lili and Rosa about the bills and decided I
can’t afford to buy his school lunch.”

Then she cut the
connection without another word.

After practicing
with Calypso in one of the corrals all week, Daniel welcomed Nate’s suggestion
for a Saturday ride across the pasture land of the New Moon. A portable
mounting block made getting into the saddle much less of a chore, and they set
out midmorning armed with a map, a sack of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.

They came across
the first break in the fence about an hour later. Nate hopped off his sorrel
pony, Daze, and went to inspect the wire.

“Cut.” Stepping
outside the ranch boundary, he examined the ground beyond the fence. “Hoofprints.”
He frowned in disgust. “ATV tracks. Damn rustlers.”

“Rustlers?” Daniel
sat up straight. “In the twenty-first century?”

“Bet your beef
on it.” Nate came back to his horse. “There’s a good market over in Mexico for
beef, with no questions asked about the brand or the source.”

“So somebody’s
been rustling Mercado cattle, is that what you’re saying?”

“Yep.”

Daniel
registered the sense of a big empty space where his guts used to be. Not only
did he have to learn the ranching business from the ground up, but he had to
deal with cattle thieves, too? Was he really up to the challenge? “Does Willa
know about this?”

Nate shrugged
one shoulder. “I expect she does. Come to think of it, I heard the sheriff
mention something about rustlers out this way a few weeks ago. Miss Willa
would’ve reported the theft, wouldn’t she?”

“That would make
sense.” Daniel stifled his first impulse, which was to ride—what was the
expression…hell for leather?—back to the Blue Moon and confront Willa about the
rustling immediately. “Do you think this is the only break in the fence?”

In the course of
the day, they discovered two more points where the wire had been cut, plus four
places where the line had been dragged down by the cattle themselves. They made
note of the locations, so the hands could ride out on Monday and start making
repairs.

“We’ll get this
taken care of before the cattle arrive,” Nate assured him. “Looks like the
pasture and the water holes are in good shape otherwise. That rainstorm we had
coupla weeks ago really did some good for the grass.”

“Glad to hear
it.” Daniel avoided thinking about the storm, and the night with Willa, as much
as possible. Fortunately, he worked so hard most days that he fell into bed too
exhausted even to dream…well, except for those early mornings when he awoke
sweating and stiff with desire, and the fragrance of Willa’s hair was as real
to him as the sheet clenched in his fists.

Back at the barn
in the late afternoon, he helped Nate settle the horses for the night, said
goodbye to his foreman until Monday morning and gave himself the luxury of a
long, hot shower. Then, cleaned up but no less furious than he had been at
eleven that morning, he drove his truck down to the Mercado house and stopped
in the drive.

Rosa greeted him
at the front door. “Why, Major Trent, what a pleasure to see you! Please, come
in.” She led the way into the main parlor, with its high ceiling, gold-framed
paintings and more of the dark wood furniture with leather upholstery that he’d
seen in the dining room.

“Is Willa here?”

“I believe she
came in a few minutes ago. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour. Can I
persuade you to stay?”

He thought of
what he had to say to her niece. “Thanks, Miss Rosa, but I…I’m going into town
when I leave here. Another time, maybe.”

Her eyebrows
drew together in disappointment. “That’s too bad. I hope you can join us soon. Have
a seat and I’ll find Willa for you.”

Daniel didn’t
sit down, but browsed the pictures on the walls, instead. He was examining the
recent portrait of a handsome man in a National Guard uniform—Jamie Mercado, he
was sure—when footsteps approached on the tile floor of the entry hall.

He turned to
find Willa standing in the doorway. “Daniel? I’m surprised to see you.” Her
tone was startled but not unfriendly. She even smiled a little.

The sight of her
was enough to weaken his resolve. He didn’t want to fight with Willa Mercado. He
wanted to make her laugh, to hold her hand and kiss those wide, soft lips.

Then he gave
himself a mental kick in the butt. “I was surprised, myself, when Nate and I
found evidence this morning that rustlers have been stealing your cattle.”

Willa stepped
forward to grip the back of a chair. “I—”

“I can
understand your reluctance to sell off part of the Blue Moon. I gave up
expecting a neighborly welcome, and you did warn me not to look to you for
help.”

Even from across
the room, he could see her cheeks flush bright red at the memory.

“But I had a
right to know about the rustlers, Willa. You should have told me my cattle
would be at risk on that property. Anyone I hire to work for me is in danger if
we decide to interfere and these misfits play rough. By any standard, you owed
me a warning. What the hell were you thinking?”

Willa rounded
the chair, dropped onto the seat and covered her face with her hands. “I—I
didn’t expect you to move so fast. I thought you would take more time to get
your crew, set up your operation.”

“So you were
planning to tell me at some point?”

She looked up
and nodded. “Of course. I hoped having somebody on the northern side of the
ranch would create a buffer between the Blue Moon and the rustlers. I’d planned
to work with the owner, get the sheriff involved, see if we couldn’t catch them
in the act…”

“Using somebody
else’s herd as bait, right?” Daniel sat down in the chair directly across a low
table from her. “And then you found out your new owner was a cripple.”

“No! I didn’t
think about it like that.” Willa pounded her fists on the arms of the chair. “I’m
sorry—I should have told you sooner. But there’s so much to do, to consider…I’m
still getting used to the idea of that land belonging to somebody else. And
after what happened—”

She stopped, a
horrified expression on her face, and looked behind her as if she expected to
see the whole family standing there, listening.

“Nobody’s
there.” At another time, he might have smiled at her concern. Today he was just
too damn mad.

A deep breath
lifted her slim shoulders. “I didn’t mean to put you in danger. We moved our
cattle, and I thought it would be weeks, maybe months, before you had your
own.”

“Actually, what
you think is that I won’t be there past Christmas.”

Her gaze dropped
away from his. “I
hoped
the rustlers would give up, go prey on someone
else. I was going to tell you. Soon.”

“But you have alerted
the sheriff?”

“The first time
I realized I was missing cattle. He can’t spare staff to patrol the perimeter
full-time. Unless we catch them red-handed…” She shrugged. “I don’t have a big
enough crew for that kind of duty. The rustlers pretty much have the run of the
desert.”

“We’ll see about
that.” His anger vented, Daniel felt fatigue wash over him. “I don’t intend to
contribute to their lifestyle.”

“But—” she stood
up as he got to his feet “—what are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “I
don’t have a plan, yet. Only intentions.”

She gazed at him
doubtfully. Daniel couldn’t resist reaching out to stroke his fingertips along
her cheek. “I’ll be okay,” he said quietly.

For a second,
she submitted to his touch. Then her shoulders stiffened and her chin came up. “I’m
sure you will. If you need some of my cowboys, let me know and we’ll see what
we can work out.” Turning on her heel, she headed for the front door, clearly
expecting him to follow.