Montana Sky Read Free Page A

was welcome to it. No doubt she’d earned it. But Tess Mercy wasn’t walking away without a nice chunk of change.
    Looking out the window, she could see the plains in the distance, rolling, rolling endlessly, as empty as the moon. With a shudder, she turned her back on the view. Christ, she wanted Rodeo Drive.
    â€œMonday, Ira,” she snapped, annoyed with his voice buzzing in her ear. “Your office, twelve sharp. Then you can take me to lunch.” With that as a good-bye, she replaced the receiver.
    Three days, tops, she promised herself, and toasted an elk head with her brandy. Then she’d get the hell out of Dodge and back to civilization.
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    â€œI 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.
    â€œRude is a four-letter word.”
    â€œSo’s work, but it still has to be done.”
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œThey’ve come to pay respects. That’s fittin’.”
    â€œThey’ve come to gawk and prowl around the house. And it’s time they left.”
    â€œMaybe some of them did.” Bess jerked her head in a little nod. “But there’s plenty more who are here for you.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHoney, you got a right to grieve.”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œHe was a proud man,” Bess said, but