The Cowboy Meets His Match

“Discipline. No therapy until the sun goes down. I despise a daylight drunk. Those lushes at A.A. lack discretion, self-control.”

Discretion and self-control. Two traits instilled in Stephanie back in Queen Anne County, by parents whose ancestry traced back to the First Families of Virginia. Traits that had proven invaluable for surviving a loveless marriage to a faithless, hypercritical man.

Jacquelyn ached to say something that might break through to her mother’s inner core. She knew, from her own childhood memory of her mother, that she had once possessed a deep well of inner feeling. But that well had long since gone dry.

Jacquelyn had borne silent witness for many years. By now Stephanie Rousseaux merely went through the motions of living. She simply reminded herself to change her facial expression now and then, so people would think she was properly “involved.” But in fact her existence had become a long, unbroken silence—the empty and meaningless stillness left behind when love and hope are abandoned.

And there was nothing her daughter could tell her to make things different. Stephanie was the frost queen Jacquelyn feared she herself was becoming—had perhaps already become. A chip off the old ice block.

Now Jacquelyn watched the town of Mystery roll past the car windows, alone with her thoughts. Downtown Mystery still included plenty of its original red brick buildings with black iron shutters—nothing fancy, just practical and sturdy. But the ornate, nineteenth century opera house with its scrollwork dome still placed the community a cut above plain saloon towns. So did the stately old courthouse, the only gray masonry building in town.

“Not exactly the height of sartorial splendor or exotic cuisine,” Stephanie drawled in her droll, husky voice. “But no squalid industrial sprawls, either. Although your father is working on that as I speak—that is, unless he’s relieving his stress with one of his new consultants.”

Consultants. The euphemism of choice, Jacquelyn realized, to designate the string of mistresses that Eric Rousseaux seemed to require in order to “validate his manhood.”

Hazel’s Lazy M Ranch slid by on their left as Jacquelyn headed toward the Rousseaux’s summer lodge at the western edge of Mystery Valley. A. J. Clayburn’s old rattletrap pickup truck was just at the entrance, turning to town. He passed them, tipping his hat while he went. Jacquelyn wondered if he recognized her car, or if he was just the good-ol’-boy type who tipped his hat to everyone in his path.

Again cold dread filled her limbs as if they were buckets under a tap. She wondered again what she had agreed to.

The Rousseaux place sat in a little teacup-shaped hollow about three-quarters of a mile west of the Lazy M. It was surrounded by bottom woods and Hazel’s pastures on the east and south, jagged mountains to the north and west.

The sprawling two-storey lodge was made of redwood timbers with a cedar-shake roof. Out back was the lodge guest house that Jacquelyn—insisting on independence—rented from her father. Additionally, there was a big pole corral, and low stables sported a fresh coat of white paint. Jacquelyn liked the lodge’s proximity to town. Often she had time to ride Boots, her big sorrel thoroughbred, into Mystery instead of driving. Though her mother and father both kept horses, too, neither of them rode much anymore.

Jacquelyn parked in the paved stone driveway out front.

“Home sweet home,” Stephanie said with lilting irony. “Thanks for the ride, kiddo.”

Jacquelyn headed through the house instead of around while Stephanie took her purchases into the basement to re-stock the wet bar. Jacquelyn encountered her father on the phone in the living room.

At fifty-one, Eric Rousseaux was trim and athletic—one of those vain middle-aged men who constantly found excuses to remove his shirt so others could admire the hard slabs of his sculpted abs and pecs.

He had accumulated his considerable fortune in newspaper publishing. Eric owned controlling interest in several major daily newspapers and a handful of smaller weeklies. Including, by monopolistic takeover, the Mystery Gazette. Recently, however, he had diversified into land-site development ventures.

“Money,” her father had once solemnly informed her, using the old cliché, “is like manure. It has to be spread around.”

Eric tossed his daughter a careless wave as she entered the room. Before she could hear what he was saying, he backed into his den and closed the door with his heel—talking in private on the phone was something he did a lot these days.

Was “the Lothario of the ink-slinging industry,” as her mother called him, involved in yet another romantic intrigue? Stephanie’s liquor consumption lately suggested he was.

A hopeless weight seemed to settle on her shoulders as Jacquelyn escaped to her house. A.J.’s words from earlier pricked at her again like nettles: huh, ice princess?

Cold on the surface, cold within. Everybody, it seemed, sensed a basic lack in Jacquelyn—something missing down deep inside her. Some empathetic quality necessary to complete her femininity. But the empathy was there, all right, and anyone who sensed the chink in her armor pounded away at it incessantly, so the scab never got a chance to heal.

Ice princess…daughter of the ice queen. “I’ll bet you even pee icicles,” Joe had insulted her on the night he unceremoniously dumped her for Gina.

Suddenly huge tears welled in her eyes, and she sat on the edge of her couch. Mother was back in the big house, hiding in the basement, waiting for sundown and the night’s first dose of anesthetic. Father was in his den, either arranging a bribe or a nooner. Yes…home sweet home!

Just why should she, Jacquelyn wondered, be able to nurture any belief in love? Who, in this travesty of a family, could have any confidence that they were worthy of love and affection—much less able to express it to others?

The phone on the table chirred. She cleared her throat, took a few deep breaths and picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Y’all requested one day’s notice,” A. J. Clayburn’s mocking voice informed her without preamble. “So that’s what y’all are getting. Be ready at sunrise tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your place.”

“That’s not a full day’s notice. That’s impossible. I—”

But she was protesting for the benefit of her own walls—the line went dead when he hung up on her.

Four

Jacquelyn had never bragged about being a morning person. Yet here she was, shivering in the damp chill well before sunrise, miserable as a draftee in the rain.

“C’mon, Boots,” she urged her reluctant sorrel mare. “It’s only the headstall, I promise. No cold bit in your mouth this time, honest, girl.”

Boots, however, kept trying to back into her stall. She wanted nothing to do with any equipment this early in the morning. The seventeen-hand thoroughbred was well trained and of a sweet disposition. But Jacquelyn once made the thoughtless mistake, early on a cool morning like today, of slipping an unwarmed bit into the mare’s mouth. Now Boots always rebelled at being rigged in predawn chill.

Jacquelyn shook the oat bag, gradually luring Boots back out of her stall.

“I know, girl, I know. This ‘reliving Western history’ is for the birds, huh? That’s a girl, c’mon, that’s a sweet lady.”

Each time Boots exhaled, the breath formed a ghostly wraith of smoke. This late in summer, Montana mornings had quite a snap to them. And Jacquelyn knew it would be even colder up in the high altitudes of Eagle Pass. As a native Georgian, she shared the Southerners’ deep aversion to cold weather. Better a hurricane than a frigid night.

Last night she had crammed some warm clothing into a duffel bag along with her microrecorder and a notepad. But she still had to assemble all her riding gear. This rushing at the last minute was totally idiotic. She liked to plan carefully for a trip, with plenty of notice. Instead, she was being instantly “mobilized,” with Hazel and A. J. Clayburn her tyrannical, heartless commanders.

“’Atta girl,” she praised when Boots, finally realizing she would not have to take the bit, dipped her head and let Jacquelyn slip a headstall on her. She tied a lead line to the ring and led her mare out into the grainy semidarkness of the corral.

She was carrying her saddle and pad out of the tack room when A.J.’s battered pickup rounded a rear corner of the house and parked in front of the corral gate. A two-stall horse trailer was hitched to the rear.

He somehow managed to poke his head out of the open window without disturbing his neatly crimped Stetson. He thumbed the hat off his forehead, grinning at her. The glare of a big sodium-vapor yard light cleanly illuminated the scornful twist of his mouth.

“Stir your stumps, girl!” he called out the window. “Time is nipping at our fannies. Drop that sissy saddle and let’s hit the trail.”

“Hit the…? May I suggest we at least load up my horse and saddle?”

“Won’t need ’em,” he informed her curtly, turning off the engine and swinging down lithely from the truck.

Begrudingly she felt a twinge of animal attraction to his good looks. But she shoved the feeling away as soon as she recognized what it was. Lust was sure not going to help her in the situation she was about to get herself into. It would only cause problems.

“Oh? I suppose I’ll be riding double with you?” A.J. glanced toward Boots. “As rare a privilege as that would surely be for me,” he drawled with evident sarcasm, “it won’t be necessary. Is that your horse?”

She nodded, staring up at him. He was still tall, even outside, with the mountains behind him tipped with the first pink buds of dawn light. Beside him she seemed inconsequential, and hopelessly female. No match at all.

He went back to the horse trailer and swung open the double doors.

“It’s a good-looking animal,” he conceded. “Good breeding and solid lines. That sorrel of yours is a fine flatland horse. Long-legged animals do real well in deep snow in open country. But we’re going up into the mountains. That means we need good mountain ponies.”

While he said this, he showed her the two horses in the trailer. That is, Jacquelyn assumed the two ugly, stubby-legged beasts were horses.