Wyoming Fierce. Diana Palmer

going to be for her, trying to pay off her used textbooks that she’d charged on her credit card. Now she was going to have to try to pay for her grandfather’s utility bill, as well. Gas was so expensive, she thought miserably. The poor old man already had to choose between groceries and blood pressure meds. She’d thought about asking her neighbors, the Kirks, for help. But the only one of them she knew well was Cane, and he resented her. A lot. It would be dicey asking him for money. If she even dared.

      Not that he didn’t owe her something for all the times she’d saved people from him in the little town of Catelow, Wyoming, not too far from Jackson Hole. Cane had lost an arm overseas in the Middle East, after the last big conflict but while he was still in the service. He’d come home embittered and icy cold, hating everyone. He’d started drinking, refused physical therapy, refused counseling and then gone hog wild.

      Every couple of weeks, he treed the local bar. The other Kirk brothers, Mallory and Dalton, always paid the bills and they knew the owner of the tavern, who was kind enough not to have Cane arrested. But the only person who could do anything with Cane was Bolinda, or Bodie as her friends called her. Even Morie, Mallory Kirk’s new wife, couldn’t deal with a drunken Cane. He was intimidating.

      Not so much to Bolinda. She understood him, as few other people did. Amazing, considering that she was only twenty-two and he was thirty-four. That was one big age difference. It never seemed to matter. Cane talked to her as if she were his age, often about things that she had no business knowing. He seemed to consider her one of the guys.

      She didn’t look like a guy. She wasn’t largely endowed in the bra department, of course. Her breasts were small and pert, but nothing like the women in those guy magazines. She knew that, because Cane had dated a centerfold model once and told Bodie all about her. Another embarrassing conversation when he was drunk that he probably didn’t even remember.

      She shook her head and tried again to concentrate on her biology textbook. She sighed, running a hand through her short, wavy black hair. Her odd, pale brown eyes were riveted to the drawings of internal human anatomy, but she just couldn’t seem to make her brain work. There was going to be a final next week, along with an oral lab, and she didn’t want to be the student trying to hide under the table when the professor started asking questions.

      She shifted on the carpeted floor, on her stomach, and tried again to concentrate. Music started playing. Strange. That sounded like the musical ring of her cell phone, the theme from the Star Trek movie…

      “Hey, Bodie, it’s for you!” her grandfather called from the next room, where she’d left her cell phone in her coat pocket.

      She muttered something and got to her feet. “Who is it, Granddaddy?”

      “I don’t know, sugar.” He handed Bodie’s cell phone to her.

      “Thanks,” she whispered. “Hello?” she said into the phone.

      “Uh, Miss Mays?” came a hesitant voice over the line.

      She recognized who was calling immediately. She ground her teeth together. “I won’t come!” she said. “I’m studying for a biology test. I’ve got a lab, to boot…!”

      “Aw, please?” the voice came again. “They’re threatening to call the police. I think they’ll do it this time. The newspapers would have a field day…”

      There was a pregnant pause. Her lips made a thin line. “Oh, damn!” she muttered.

      “Darby says he’ll come get you. In fact,” the cowboy added hopefully, “he’s sitting right outside your house right now.”

      Bodie stomped to the window and looked out the blinds. There was a big black Kirk ranch truck parked in the driveway, with the lights on and the engine running.

      “Please?” the cowboy asked again.

      “All right.” She hung up in the middle of his “Thank you!”

      She grabbed her jacket and her purse and slipped into her boots. “I have to go out for an hour. I won’t be too long,” she told her grandfather.

      Rafe Mays, used to the drill, pursed his lips. “You should get combat pay,” he pointed out.

      Bodie rolled her eyes and walked out the door. “I hope I won’t be long,” she said before she pulled it shut.

      * * *

      SHE GOT INTO THE TRUCK. Darby Hanes, the Kirks’ longtime foreman, gave her a wistful smile.

      “I know. I’m sorry. But you’re the only person who can do anything with him. He’s tearing up the bar. They’re getting tired of the weekly routine.” He pulled out into the road, after making sure she had her seat belt on. “He had a date last night up in Jackson Hole. Ended badly, I’m guessing, from all the cussing he did when he got home.”

      She didn’t reply. She hated knowing about Cane Kirk’s girlfriends. He seemed to have a lot of them, even with his disability. Not that it made any difference to her. Cane would still be Cane no matter what. She loved him. She’d loved him since she graduated from high school, when he presented her with a bouquet of pink roses, her favorite, and a bottle of very expensive floral perfume. He’d even kissed her. On the cheek, of course, like a treasured child more than like an adult. Her grandfather had worked for the Rancho Real until his health failed and he had to quit. That had been while Cane was still in the military, after the second Gulf War, before the terrible roadside bomb had robbed him of most of his left arm, and almost of his life.

      She supposed Cane was fond of her. It wasn’t until last year that everyone had discovered her almost magical ability to calm him when he went on drinking sprees. Since then, when he went on benders, Bodie was recruited to fetch him home. There had been a brief period of time when he’d gone to therapy, been measured for a prosthesis and seemed to be adjusting nicely to his new life.

      And then it had all gone south, for reasons nobody knew. His bar crawls had become legendary. The expense was terrible, because his brothers, Mallory and Dalton, had to pick up the expense. Cane got a monthly check from the army, but nobody could entice him to apply for disability. He went to show cattle, with a cowboy who handled the big bulls for him, and he was the idea man for the Kirk ranch. He was good at PR, worked to liaison with the national cattlemen’s lobby, kept up with current legislation that affected the cattle industry and generally was the spokesman for the Kirk ranch.

      When he was sober.

      Lately he wasn’t. Not a lot.

      “Any idea what happened?” Bodie asked curiously, because Darby would know. He knew everything that went on around the Rancho Real, or “royal ranch” in Spanish, named by the original owner, a titled gentleman from Valladolid, northwest of Madrid, Spain, who started it way back in the late 1800s.

      Darby glanced at her and grimaced. It was dark and very cold, even with the heater running and the old but serviceable coat Bodie was wearing.

      “I have an idea,” he confessed. “But if Cane ever found out I told you, I’d be standing in the unemployment line.”

      She sighed and fiddled with the fanny pack she wore in lieu of carrying around a cumbersome purse. “She must have said something about his arm.”

      He nodded faintly. “That would be my guess. He’s really sensitive about it. Funny,” he added solemnly, “I thought he was getting better.”

      “If he’d get back in therapy, mental and physical, he’d improve,” she replied.

      “Sure, but he won’t even talk about it. He’s sinking into himself,” he added quietly.

      “There goes that theoretical physics mind working overtime again,” she teased, because most people didn’t know about Darby’s degree in that field.

      He shrugged. “Hey, I just manage cattle.”

      “I’ll bet you sit around in your room at night imagining the route to a new and powerful unified field theory.” She chuckled.