Montana Sky Read Free Page A

and back to civilization.
     
    “I SHOULDN ’ T HAVE TO REMIND YOU THAT YOU GOT guests downstairs, Will.” Bess Pringle stood with her hands on her bony hips and used the same tone she’d used when Willa was ten.
    Willa jerked her jeans on—Bess didn’t believe in little niceties like privacy and had barely knocked before striding into the bedroom. Willa responded just as she might have at ten. “Then don’t.” She sat down to pull on her boots.
    “Rude is a four-letter word.”
    “So’s work, but it still has to be done.”
    “And you’ve got enough hands around this place to see to it for one blessed day. You’re not going off somewhere today, of all days. It ain’t fittin’.”
    What was or wasn’t fitting constituted the bulk of Bess’s moral and social codes. She was a bird of a woman, all bone and teeth, though she could plow through a mountain of hotcakes like a starving field hand and had the sweet tooth of an eight-year-old. She was fifty-eight—and had changed the date on her birth certificate to prove it—and had a headof flaming red hair she dyed in secret and kept pulled back in a don’t-give-me-any-lip bun.
    Her voice was as rough as pine bark and her face as smooth as a girl’s, and surprisingly pretty with moss-green eyes and a pug Irish nose. Her hands were small and quick and able. And so was her temper.
    With her fists still glued to her hips, she marched up to Willa and glared down. “You get your sassy self down those stairs and tend to your guests.”
    “I’ve got a ranch to run.” Willa rose. It hardly mattered that in her boots she topped Bess by six inches. The balance of power had always tottered back and forth between them. “And they’re not my guests. I’m not the one who wanted them here.”
    “They’ve come to pay respects. That’s fittin’.”
    “They’ve come to gawk and prowl around the house. And it’s time they left.”
    “Maybe some of them did.” Bess jerked her head in a little nod. “But there’s plenty more who are here for you.”
    “I don’t want them.” Willa turned away, picked up her hat, then simply stood staring out her window, crushing the brim in her hands. The window faced the mountains, the dark belt of trees, the peaks of the Big Belt that held all the beauty and mystery in the world. “I don’t need them. I can’t breathe with all these people hovering around.”
    Bess hesitated before laying a hand on Willa’s shoulder. Jack Mercy hadn’t wanted his daughter raised soft. No pampering, no spoiling, no cuddling. He’d made that clear while Willa had still been in diapers. So Bess had pampered and spoiled and cuddled only when she was certain she wouldn’t be caught and sent away like one of Jack’s wives.
    “Honey, you got a right to grieve.”
    “He’s dead and he’s buried. Feeling sorry won’t change it.” But she lifted a hand, closed it over the small one on her shoulder. “He didn’t even tell me he was sick, Bess. He couldn’t even give me those last few weeks to try to take care of him, or to say good-bye.”
    “He was a proud man,” Bess said, but she thought, Bastard. Selfish bastard. “It’s better the cancer took him quickrather than letting him linger. He would’ve hated that and it would’ve been harder on you.”
    “One way or the other, it’s done.” She smoothed the wide, circling brim of her hat, settled it on her head. “I’ve got animals and people depending on me. The hands need to see, right now, that I’m in charge. That Mercy Ranch is still being run by a Mercy.”
    “You do what you have to do, then.” Years of experience had taught Bess that what was fitting didn’t hold much water when it came to ranch business. “But you be back by suppertime. You’re going to sit down and eat decent.”
    “Clear these people out of the house, and I will.”
    She started out, turning left toward the back stairs. They wound down the east wing of the house and allowed her to slip into the