The Dakota Man. Joan Hohl

it won’t take me a whole month to train someone,” she exclaimed. “I won’t have anything to do!”

      “Exactly. Consider it a small victory that I’m allowing that much.”

      She heaved a sigh of defeat. “You’re the boss.”

      “I know.” His grin lasted all of a few seconds before turning into a grimace. “Damn,” he muttered. “When the time comes, how in the hell are we ever going to find someone suitable to replace you?”

      A little over a month later, and many miles distant to the southeast, an individual ministorm raged beneath a sun-drenched corner of Pennsylvania….

      “Rat.” The scissors slashed through the voluminous skirt.

      “Louse.” A seam tore asunder.

      “Jerk.” The bodice was sheared into small pieces.

      “Creep.” Tiny buttons went flying.

      “There…done.” Her chest heaving from her emotion-driven exertions, Maggie Reynolds stepped back and glared down at the ragged shards of white watered taffeta material that had formerly been the most exquisite wedding gown she had ever seen.

      With a final burst of furious energy, she gave a vicious kick of one bare foot, scattering the pile of material into large and small pieces that glimmered in the early June sunlight streaming through the bedroom window.

      Tears pricked her eyes; Maggie told herself it was the glare of sunlight, and not the fact that she was to have been married in that designer extravagance in two weeks’ time.

      The sting in her eyes grew sharper. Just two days before, Maggie’s intended groom had thrown her a vicious curveball right out of left field. After sharing her apartment and her bed with him for nearly a year, and after all the arrangements for their wedding had been in place for months, she had come home from work to find all of his belongings gone, his clothes closet empty, and a note—a damned note—propped against the napkin holder on the kitchen table. The words he had written were imprinted on her memory.

      Maggie, I’m sorry, I really am, he had scrawled on the lined yellow paper she kept for grocery lists. But I can’t go through with our marriage. I have fallen in love with Ellen Bennethan, and we are eloping to Mexico today. Please try not to hate me too much. Todd.

      The thought of his name brought his image front and center in Maggie’s mind. Average height, sharp dresser, attractive, with coal-black hair and pale blue eyes. And, evidently, a class-A cheat. A sneer curled her soft lips. Hate him? She didn’t hate him. She despised him. So, he had fallen in love with Ellen Bennethan, had he? Bull. He had fallen in love with her money. Ellen, a meek, simpering twit, who had never worked a day in her life, was the only child and heir of Carl Bennethan, owner and head honcho of the Bennethan Furniture Company, and Todd’s employer.

      Dear Todd had just taken off, leaving Maggie to clean up the mess after him. Which in itself was bad enough. But the thing that bit the deepest was that they had made love the very night before he split.

      No, Maggie corrected herself with disgust. They hadn’t made love, they had had sex. And it hadn’t been great sex, either. Great? Ha! It had never been great. Far from it. From the beginning, Todd had been less than an enthusiastic lover, never mind energetic.

      Or was she the less-than-energetic one?

      How many times over the previous year had she asked herself that question? Maggie mused, self-doubt raising its nasty little head in her mind. In truth, she acknowledged, she had never become so passionately aroused that she felt swept away by the moment. Perhaps there was something lacking in her….

      The hell with that, Maggie thought, anger reasserting itself to overwhelm doubt. And, to hell with Todd, and men in general. In her private opinion, sex was highly overrated, a fictional fantasy.

      Outrage restored, Maggie made a low growling sound deep in her throat, and gave the rendered sparkling white pieces another scattering kick.

      “Bastard.”

      “Feel better now?”

      Maggie spun around at the sound of the smoky, dryly voiced question, to glare at the young woman leaning with indolent nonchalance against the door frame. The woman, Maggie’s best friend, Hannah Deturk, was tall, slim, elegant and almost too beautiful to be tolerated.

      Maggie had often thought, and even more often said, that if she didn’t like Hannah so much, she could easily and quite happily hate her.

      “Not a hell of a lot,” Maggie admitted in a near snarl. “But I’m not finished yet, either.”

      “Indeed?” Hannah raised perfectly arched honey-brown eyebrows. “You’re going to take the scissors to your entire trousseau?”

      “’Course not,” Maggie snapped. “I’m neither that stupid nor that far gone.”

      “Could’a fooled me,” Hannah drawled. “I’d say, any woman who’d tear apart a gorgeous three-thousand-dollar wedding gown in a fit of rampant rage is about as far gone as is possible for a woman to be.”

      Just as tall as her friend, just as slim, and no slouch herself in the looks department, with her long mass of flaming-red hair and her creamy complexion, Maggie gave Hannah a superior look and a sugar-sweet smile.

      “Indeed?” she mimicked. “Well, there’s possible, and then there’s possible. Stick around, friend, and I’ll demonstrate possibilities that’ll blow your mind.”

      “You almost scare me,” Hannah said, a thread of concern woven through her husky voice. “But I will stick around…just to ensure you don’t hurt yourself.”

      “I’m already hurt,” Maggie cried, a rush of tears to her eyes threatening to douse the fire of anger in their emerald-green depths.

      “I know.” Hannah relinquished her pose in the doorway to go to Maggie. “I know,” she murmured, drawing her friend into a protective embrace.

      “I’m sorry, Hannah,” Maggie muttered, sniffing. “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry anymore.”

      “And you shouldn’t,” Hannah said, her voice made raspy with compassion. “That son of a bitch isn’t worth the time of day from you, never mind your tears.”

      Maggie was so startled by Hannah’s curse— Hannah never cursed—she stepped back to stare at her friend in tear-drying amazement.

      Hannah shrugged. “Occasionally, when I’m seriously upset or furious, I lose control of my mouth.”

      “Oh.” Maggie blinked away the last of the moisture blurring her vision and swiped her hands over her wet cheeks. “Well, you must be seriously one or the other, because I’ve known you since soon after you arrived here in Philadelphia from flyover country, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard a swear word from you.”

      “Actually, I’m seriously both,” Hannah drawled, her tone belying the glitter in her blue eyes. “It just fries me that you’re tearing yourself apart over that…that…slimy, two-timing, money-grabbing slug.”

      “Thanks, friend,” Maggie murmured, moved by Hannah’s concern for her. “I appreciate your support.”

      “You’re welcome.” A smile curved Hannah’s full lips. “And it’s Nebraska.”

      “What?”

      “The flyover country I come from is the State of Nebraska,” she answered.

      “Oh, yeah, I knew that,” Maggie said, interest sparking in her green eyes. “What’s it like there…in Nebraska?”

      Hannah frowned, as if confused by both the question and her friend’s sudden show of interest on a topic she’d never before evinced any curiosity over. “The section I came from? Mostly rural, kind of placid, and at the time I decided to move to the big city, I thought, pretty