The Princess of Coldwater Flats (3 page)

“It’s affected his mind, sure enough.” Lettie pursed her lips, folded her arms under her ample bosom and nodded as if she’d uttered the definitive last word.

“Will the Triple R be sold?” Cooper had asked, already knowing the answer. He’d planned to buy the ranch no matter what; money was a big talker. But this state of affairs made things so much easier he almost laughed aloud in delight.

“Gonna have to be, I’m afraid,” Jack murmured sorrowfully.

But Cooper hadn’t heard a word after that. Plans filled his head. He would expand his own property and have one of the area’s largest ranches. Maybe he’d make money; maybe he wouldn’t. It hardly mattered. He already possessed more than any decent soul had a right to. He only wanted to ranch. Hands-on. His palms wrapped around a shovel, his throat choked with dust. It was his dream. It had just taken him decade or so to figure it out.

How many nights had he stood at his office window, staring across a smog-gray moonscape of the Los Angeles skyline? How many times had unnamed longing filled him? How many times during his ill-fated marriage to Pamela had he asked himself if anything else was out there? Something better. Something good.

Now he knew. He wanted earth and dirt and aching muscles and plain, hard work.

But Sammy Jo Whalen was going to be a problem.
That
he could tell straight away. Was it worth his while to try to get to know her, to soften her up, so to speak? Or would it be smarter to just wait for the inevitable to happen and let the Triple R fall into his lap? She wouldn’t be able to make those payments for long, and Matt Durning was more than anxious to be rid of her bad loan. Three months? From what Cooper could see, she’d be lucky if she managed to make it for one.

But there was no doubt she’d go down kicking and screaming.

“You know, you ought to think about acquiring the Triple R,” Matt Durning suggested, unwittingly reading Cooper’s thoughts. “It’s a nice piece of land. Folks around here have always known that if Serenity and the Triple R were combined, it’d be the biggest ranch for three, maybe four, counties.”

Cooper hid his feelings on the subject. “Think Sammy Jo’ll sell it?”

“She won’t have any choice,” was Matt’s grim prediction.

Sammy Jo’s pickup bumped up the long driveway to the Triple R’s ranch house. Dust plumed out the back like the tail of a comet, which was about the speed Sammy Jo was traveling. She absently waved to the huge oak that stood like a sentinel at the turn, a ritual she’d begun as a child. Her mind churned in turmoil. Damn, damn,
damn!
How could Gil have been so foolhardy?

I’ll take care of everything…‌

“Yeah. Right.”

Yanking on the wheel, she rounded the final turn, screeching to a halt in front of the house, a sprawling, slightly dilapidated building with one shutter hanging drunkenly and about to fall off completely. Yes, the place wasn’t pretty. It never had been. Her father had built it himself and, as a carpenter, Gil Whalen made a good rancher.

Only he really wasn’t much of a rancher, especially these past few years before his death. In fact, he was about as bad a rancher as you could be.

“What did you think you were doing?” Sammy Jo demanded, slamming open the front door. Tears stood in her eyes. She was so angry at him, she could spit nails. “How could you do this to me?” she cried to the empty house.

Plunking down on the footstool, she dropped her chin into her palm, feeling like a child, an idiot and a complete failure. She’d been snookered. Snookered by her father and now by Valley Federal. It was all an elaborate plot. Gil Whalen hadn’t thought his only daughter could take care of the ranch so he’d made certain she wouldn’t get a chance.

In fury she stomped her foot on the faded hooked rug her grandmother had made. Dust soared into the air and she waved it away, coughing. For the first time that day, she saw the terrible shape her boots were in and she stomped off to the back porch and the bootjack.

Evening shadows striped the field behind the house, companion to the striated sunlight that glowed on the burnished hides of the horses and cattle and sparkled on the smooth water in the trough. The air smelled hot and dusty and tangy with the not unpleasant scent of the animals. Not unpleasant to Sammy Jo’s way of thinking, anyway.

Tugging off her boots, she stood in her stocking feet, leaning against the porch rails. Her chest was so tight she could scarcely breathe. Anger consumed her. How could Gil have done this?
How?

Worst of all, she missed him, anyway. Missed him desperately. She hadn’t known she would feel so alone, but loneliness filled her up inside.

And that made her mad, too.

She flung herself on to the cushioned porch swing and pumped furiously with her legs, forcing the sluggish, mammoth thing to creak and sway. Gil had done it on purpose. She knew it. Matt Durning knew it. Hell, the whole town knew it. It had been a last ploy to force her into marriage with Tommy Weatherwood, Coldwater Flats’s only eligible bachelor—at least in Gil’s biased opinion. Tommy was a cowboy through and through. He could rope and ranch and generally swagger his way through life with the best of them. He was good-looking, too. Women flocked to him. Of course, Tommy couldn’t stick with one woman. No way, no how. But he sure knew how to drink, and when he drank, he was downright mean-tempered and vile.

Yup, he was solid husband material. Gil could sure pick them.

And what if she’d actually sold out to Uncle Peter? What then? Gil clearly hadn’t thought of that alternative.

“Damn you,” Sammy Jo muttered softly to the slowly darkening sky. She said it without heat, her anger spent. She wasn’t really mad at her dad’s ill-conceived plans to marry her off. She was hurt that he’d left her.

“And it certainly didn’t help that you left me in such a mess,” she added sternly, just in case he was listening.

Trigger, Sammy Jo’s black-and-white border collie, loped from the fields, tongue lolling, and dropped at her feet. Nose protected by her paws, she eyed Sammy Jo expectantly, eyebrows waggling. She absently scratched the dog’s head.

There had always been a dog, just as there had always been horses and cattle. Ridge Range Ranch had been around since Sammy Jo’s great-grandfather, Jessup Whalen, had homesteaded the property. It had also always prospered, and Sammy Jo was bound and determined to keep things that way.

Narrowing her eyes, she pushed her father’s warped logic out of her mind and thought long and hard how to hang on to the ranch. Teaching little hopefuls how to stand on a pony while it was still galloping, or how to barrel-race, or generally how to look cute while doing rodeo didn’t exactly bring in the big bucks. Matt had been right on that score: she ought to sell the horses.

Sammy Jo’s gaze slid over the fields to the distant brown and black specks huddled together by a small grove of pines and aspens. A couple of Shetlands and several small quarter horses were her rodeo
nags
—thank you again, Matt Durning—and these days they preferred to while away the hours grazing and silently communing with their friends than perform.

Well, she hadn’t lied about the livestock. The Triple R had some of the best beef cattle around. What was left of them, that is.

Sighing, she recognized the truth. The land was the most valuable asset. The
mortgaged
land.

“I ought to marry Tommy Weatherwood just to show you what a miserable loser he is,” she grumbled, turning one eye to the dusky blue heavens. “Except he drinks away every dime he earns, and I don’t believe that story about his having some money stashed away.”

Heading back inside the house, she swiped the sweat from her forehead and poured a glass of lemonade. As she stood in the kitchen, her gaze arrowed through the archway to the living room and centered on her trophy case. She’d won enough blue ribbons to make a satin quilt. At one time, she could rope and ride with the best cowboys around. But a good fall off nasty old Knickerbocker, and a broken collarbone and wrist to boot, had cured her of wanting to barrel-race competitively anymore. Besides, she loved ranching. It was her life. And she was as good as any man. Better, really. She’d sure as hell been better than her father.

Her gaze settled on the tiny gilt-framed photo next to the case, her one and only reminder of her mother. Gil would have done anything to get rid of it. Ever since Irene Whalen had run off with a man half her age, leaving Gil and three-year-old Sammy Jo behind, her name had never been mentioned again. When Gil referred to her at all, his kindest label was “that tramp.” His vocabulary deteriorated from there. Sammy Jo didn’t feel too kindly toward Irene, either. The woman hadn’t exactly been flowing with the milk of human kindness, especially in the maternal sense. But she was Sammy Jo’s mother, and therefore Sammy Jo hung on to the photograph.

She made a face. She couldn’t remember that long-ago time when reportedly Uncle Peter had stopped by to gloat that Gil Whalen’s pretty wife had left him flat. Now, knowing the facts, she shuddered at the thought of that scene. Their fight must’ve been a doozy. Uncle Peter’s involvement certainly hadn’t helped her father get over her mother. And Sammy Jo suspected that the whole unfortunate series of events had shaped how her father had treated her from then on.

Gil had raised Sammy Jo as if she were a boy, and a boy is what she’d fervently longed to be. But she hadn’t been, and in the end, Gil hadn’t trusted his only daughter to run the Triple R. He wanted a man in charge, and to that end he’d argued loud and long about why she should get married. His efforts merely convinced Sammy Jo that she would never tie herself to a man. Gil, however, was as determined as Sammy Jo, and knowing her the way he did, he’d run the ranch into the ground, thinking he could force her to marry. Without another income, Sammy Jo was sunk, and in that, Gil was right.

Sammy Jo tossed back the rest of her lemonade and slammed down the glass. It was damned annoying. Gil’s outdated, old-fashioned, chauvinistic values had landed her in a heap of trouble.

“Even if I wanted to get married, no man would look at me,” she declared, half-challenging, half-afraid it was true.

Glancing at the clock, she realized the chores wouldn’t wait. She needed help but couldn’t afford it. Glenda’s husband, Carl, would be a godsend, but Sammy Jo felt guilty that she wouldn’t be able to pay him right away. That’s how she’d lost her ranch hands, even the most devoted of them. Slow payments. They hadn’t been able to afford to ride out the bad times with her.

Depressed, she grabbed her hat off a peg by the back door, whacked it several times on her thigh, ostensibly to remove dust, but partly out of frustration, jammed it on her head and strode into the blazing, orange sunset of a mountain-high summer evening.

Cooper leaned his arms on the top rail of his fence, the fence he shared with the Triple R. A stream meandered along the fence line, branching off and cutting beneath it at one point to wander across the southwest corner of his property. Cotton Creek it was called, according to Jack, and to the north it ducked under the fence to cut across the vast acreage of the Triple R.

He’d been standing here for a good half-hour. Sammy Jo Whalen was doing chores. From a distance he’d watched her walk into the barn, and he imagined she was feeding the horses. He had half a mind to ask her if she needed help because her body language said she was about done in.

But then, if her performance at the bank was any indication, she’d probably scorn his offer and make him feel like an idiot for even trying to help.

So, he stayed at the fence, his fertile mind trying to come up with a way to take control of the Triple R without evoking Sammy Jo Whalen’s ire. He didn’t doubt that she could be a regular she-cat.

There wasn’t a whole lot of light left. As he watched, Sammy Jo stepped from the barn and headed toward the house. Her weariness communicated itself to him as she refilled the trough with the hose.

He was in the process of lifting his arm to hail her when movement caught in his peripheral vision. Turning slightly, he saw one of his cows sail over the connecting fence, land on Whalen property and bound into the gathering darkness.