Wind River Ranch. Jackie Merritt

to Casper, and again on the much smaller plane bound for Lander. For some reason, she couldn’t picture the ranch without her father. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Ryson Hardin—no one would be so cruel as to call a woman with a lie of that nature—but envisioning the place without Simon was next to impossible.

      At the same time, sitting stiffly in her seat, Dena wondered why she wasn’t weeping. Her throat had felt tight and achy since Mr. Hardin’s call, but she had not shed one tear. Unquestionably she suffered the sorrow one would expect to feel from such news, and yet she wasn’t able to release the tight grip she had on her emotions. In truth, she felt as though she were trapped in some sort of terrible nightmare, and in the back of her mind was the childlike knowledge that nightmares lasted only a short while. It was such an inane sensation—she was an intelligent woman and fully cognizant of the difference between a nightmare and reality—and yet she couldn’t eradicate it.

      The plane landed at the Lander airport at three in the morning. She should have been exhausted and wasn’t; obviously she was running on adrenaline.

      Deplaning with the handful of other passengers arriving in Lander at this unholy hour, Dena walked through the gate and glanced around, ardently hoping to see Nettie. She had called the ranch, once she’d known her flight schedule, and Ry Hardin had answered almost immediately, as though he’d been sitting near the phone waiting for it to ring. Dena had been hoping to hear Nettie’s voice, but when she’d asked about the older woman, Hardin had said she was in her room, ostensibly lying down.

      “This has hit her pretty hard, Miss Colby,” he’d said.

      “Maybe...maybe she will feel up to meeting my plane,” Dena had said unsteadily. But then she’d told Ry Hardin her arrival time, and he had said that he would be at the terminal.

      Nevertheless, the hope that she would see Nettie instead of a stranger waiting for her was still with her. That hope faded away as she saw a man walking toward her. Without a dram of genuine interest in Hardin himself, she took in his physical appearance. He was a tall, rugged-looking man with dark hair and eyes. His clothing was jeans, boots and a hat that he removed and held in his right hand as he approached her. He looked as much like a rancher as any man she’d ever seen.

      “Dena Colby?”

      “Yes.”

      “I’m Ry Hardin. Do you have luggage?”

      “One bag.”

      “We’ll collect it and be on our way. You must be tired.”

      “No...no, I’m fine.”

      Ry looked at her curiously. She was an attractive woman, small and slender, dressed in navy slacks, a white blouse and a navy cardigan sweater, unbuttoned. She did not appear to be devastated, as he’d thought nught be the case, although her eyes were a little too bright. Feverishly bright, he amended in his private assessment of Simon’s daughter.

      They walked to the baggage department, and Dena’s one suitcase appeared almost at once. Ry carried it and escorted her outdoors to his vehicle. Rather, it was a ranch vehicle, Dena realized when she read the sign on the door: Wind River Ranch. It was then she remembered that all of the ranch’s vehicles bore that same sign.

      She also realized there were many details about her home that she hadn’t thought of in years. Her concentration regarding anything in Wyoming had been focused almost entirely on her father. She bit down on her bottom lip painfully hard. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to walk into the house she’d grown up in and feel its emptiness.

      They were well under way before either said anything. Ry spoke first. “Nettie said you’re a nurse.”

      Dena jumped and turned her gaze to the man behind the wheel. She had actually forgotten he was there. “Pardon?” she said.

      Ry repeated himself and added, “Nursing is an admirable profession. One of my sisters in Texas is a nurse.”

      Dena tried to think of a response. She liked making new friends, and Ry Hardin seemed like a nice guy. But these were not ordinary circumstances, and there was no way she could concentrate on small talk.

      She quietly murmured, “That’s nice,” and then unconsciously turned her face to the side window, again immersed in the agony of why she was in Wyoming in the middle of this dark night.

      Her spiritless reply relayed her state of mind to Ry, who decided to say no more. If she instigated a conversation during the drive, he would, of course, participate. But he didn’t expect that would occur, and he drove with his gaze straight ahead on the road.

      After a few miles, however, he did say something else. He’d gone through the same shock and grief that Dena Colby was suffering right now with each of his own parents, and he wanted to let her know that he, too, was affected by Simon’s sudden death. “I’m very sorry about your father, Miss Colby. I liked working for him. And I respected him.”

      Drawing a breath, Dena pulled herself out of the doldrums enough to answer. “Thank you. And call me Dena,” she said. Colby was her legal name again, as she had petitioned the court for resumption of her maiden name at the tune of her divorce, which had further infuriated the Hogans, who had already been incensed over the divorce. That was when she’d started hearing some of the completely groundless lies they had been spreading around town about her, and it was also when she’d made her decision to leave Wyoming. There’d been no chance of a career in any field in Wmston, and she had wanted to make something of her life. She remembered now that she had also hoped that her leaving the area would shake her father’s determination to disown her.

      It hadn’t worked.

      As for Ry Hardin liking and respecting Simon, she didn’t doubt it. If memory served her correctly, Simon had usually gotten along with his hired hands. In fact, he had gotten along with most people. It was only with her, his daughter, his only child, that he’d been so hard and unyielding.

      Dena released a long sigh of utter anguish and stared through the window again. The countryside was familiar even in the dark, and she attempted to force herself to concentrate on landmarks. Anything was better than thinking of her reason for at long last coming home.

      But thoughts of home and the past would not be squelched, and she finally stopped fighting them. Besides, not all of her memories were painful. Her mother, for instance, had been completely kind and loving. While Opal Colby had been alive, Dena had been a happy child.

      And Simon had been a happier, more just man. Yes, now that she thought about it, he hadn’t been so strict and demanding while his wife had lived.

      And neither had Dena been so rebellious, she had to admit. In retrospect it seemed that once Opal’s sweet and gentle ways were no longer a buffer in the family, there was no family. Simon went his way every day, detouring only long enough to make sure Dena was behaving herself, which meant no makeup, the right kind of reading material and television programs—only his opinion counted, of course—very little time on the phone and a dozen other symbolic slaps in the face.

      At least that was the way Dena had interpreted her father’s harshly issued orders and oft-repeated remarks of disapproval. For a girl in the throes of puberty who had so recently lost her mother, life was miserable. Many times she had muttered to herself that she hated her father, which had not been the truth at all. What she’d wanted so much she had ached from it was for him to hug her, speak kindly to her, tell her he loved her and even tuck her into bed at night as he had sometimes done before her mother’s death.

      Now, as an adult with medical training, Dena knew that when her mother died Simon hadn’t been able to overcome his grief. He’d become hard because of internal misery, and as he hadn’t understood the emotional ups and downs of a teenager, he had continued to treat Dena as the child she had once been. He could handle a child; he hadn’t known how to deal with a budding woman. Dena had written of these things in her letters, but to her knowledge Simon had never read one of them. It was heartbreaking to envision him having destroyed or discarded her letters without opening them, but what else could she think?

      The