The Rancher's Bride

STELLA BAGWELL

lives in the rural mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where she enjoys the wildlife and hikes in the woods with her husband. She has a son, a wonderful daughter-in-law and a great passion for writing romances—a job she hopes to keep for a long time to come. Many of Stella’s books have been transcribed to audiotapes for the Oklahoma Library for the Blind. She hopes her blind audience, and all her readers, will continue to enjoy her stories.

Chapter One (#ulink_7cc810be-8701-5348-a1f0-da9bef290808)

Rose Murdock reined the sorrel alongside the fence and stared in shocked dismay. Each of the six strands of barbed wire had been cut, then carefully twisted back together.

Quickly, she stepped down from the saddle and examined the ground on both sides of the fence. The soil was crusty and dry from a drastic lack of rain. Even so, Rose managed to pick up the faint marks of hoof tracks. Too many to count!

Leading the sorrel, called Pie, behind her, she followed the tracks down a long slope of land until she reached the river. The hoof prints stopped at the watering hole, then turned and headed back the way she’d come from the cut wire.

Someone had cut the fence to water their cattle on Bar M land! Who would have done such a thing, then fixed the fence neatly back in place? The cattle were obviously not on her land now. She’d ridden out this whole pasture today and not seen one stray.

Sighing, Rose pushed the gray cowboy hat off her head. Its stampede string caught at the front of her neck, preventing the hat from falling further than the middle of her back.

Sweat glistened on the soft features of her face. She mopped it away with the back of her denim sleeve, then carefully scanned the horizon to the east.

Across the barbed wire fence lay Harlan Hamilton’s ranch, the Flying H. From what she could read of the tracks, the cattle had come from that direction. But she couldn’t imagine the man doing such a thing without notifying her or her sisters first. Open range in New Mexico had come to an end a long time ago. No one with any courtesy or respect would drive their cattle onto another rancher’s land without asking permission first.

But then, she didn’t really know Harlan Hamilton. At least, not personally. She’d seen him maybe three separate times, the last being almost a year ago when he’d stopped by the ranch to visit her late father, Tomas.

The two of them had been friends and Tomas had spoken highly of Harlan. Yet Rose had never done more than say a polite hello to the man. Not because she had anything against the rancher next door. Saying hello was as far as she went with any man.

Well, it looked as though more than a simple greeting was going to have to be said to him now, she decided. And unfortunately it looked as though she’d been picked for the job.

Rose mounted Pie and turned him in a northerly direction. For three miles or more she rode along the fence line until she reached two rock pillars flanking a metal gate. At the top of one pillar, the words Flying H Ranch were etched in black iron.

The gate didn’t appear to be locked so she opened it, led her horse through, then carefully closed it behind her. Back on Pie, Rose rode steadily down the dirt road that cut through the desert hills east of Hondo. Knee-high sage and piñon pine grew on either side of her. Now and then a choya stood in bloom, though she didn’t see how the plants were managing to survive, much less bloom in this drought that had lasted more than two months now.

As the horse trotted on, Rose grew more nervous. She’d already been sweating from the afternoon heat, but in the past few minutes, her hands had become slick with perspiration and her mouth was as dry as the fine dust stirred by the horse’s hooves.

She didn’t relish exchanging words with Harlan Hamilton. She wasn’t good around men. Not like her sister Justine, who’d just married the local sheriff. Nor was she like her younger sister, Chloe, who wasn’t afraid to look a man in the eye and speak her mind.

But Justine wasn’t here to do her talking for her and Chloe was back at the ranch with hardly enough time in the day to work the horses and take care of the twins.

No, she couldn’t ask either of her sisters to do this for her, Rose thought with grim determination. Since her father had died and money had grown tight, the cattle had become her responsibility. It was her job to confront trespassers, whomever they might be.

More than two more miles passed before Rose spotted the house in the distance. Like her own home, it was structured in stucco and sat wedged between a row of ragged poplars and a stand of piñon pine..

As Rose rode closer, she could see the place was neither large nor elaborate. The house needed painting and, other than the scrubby trees casting a few spots of flimsy shade, there were no flowers or grass or fence to declare a dividing line between yard and pasture.

Pie didn’t have to be tethered to stay put. Rose left him a few yards away from the house and walked slowly toward the porch. Through the screen door she could hear the sound of a television playing.

She was climbing the steps when a girl of twelve or thirteen opened the door and stepped onto the concrete porch. Her straight blond hair was pulled back into a sloppy ponytail. Cutoff blue jeans covered part of her long, coltish legs; the rest of her thin adolescent figure was hidden beneath an oversize T-shirt. She looked at Rose as if visitors were an odd commodity on the Flying H.

“Hello,” Rose said. “Is Mr. Hamilton home?”

The girl gave a single nod of her head. “Daddy’s down at the barn.”

“Would it be all right if I walked down there to see him?”

The girl shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Rose turned to go, then a thought struck her and she looked back at the sullen teenager. “If your mother is in the house, she might be able to help me.”

“I don’t have a mother,” she said curtly, then went back into the house before Rose could make any sort of reply.

What a sad little girl, Rose thought. She hadn’t known that Harlan Hamilton had a child or that he was single. How long had he been without a wife and his daughter without a mother? she wondered.

As Rose approached the barn, she spotted the owner of the Flying H trying to coax a black yearling to follow a lead rope. The young horse was balking. Each time the man tugged on the rope, the animal stiffened its front legs and reared its head back.

Still unnoticed, Rose walked up to the wooden corral and stood quietly watching. Her neighbor was a big man. At least two inches past six feet, and she figured he weighed well over two hundred pounds. Faded jeans clung to his long strong legs and a gray chambray work shirt was stretched taut across his broad shoulders. He had a lean waist and large, menacing arms. Dark, almost black hair waved from beneath the straw cowboy hat on his head.

Normally Rose didn’t notice men in the physical sense. She had long ago lost her appetite for sex or romance, and what a man did or didn’t look like hardly mattered to her. But something about this man was urging her to take a closer look than usual.

The sight of a woman, a beautiful one at that, standing outside Harlan’s horsepen was more than a shock to his senses. Women didn’t visit the Flying H. As far as that went, hardly anyone ever came to see him or his daughter, Emily.

He dropped the yearling’s lead rope and slowly walked over to the fence where the woman stood. “Hello,” he said.

She extended her hand through the fence to him. “Hello, Mr. Hamilton. I’m Rose Murdock, your neighbor on the Bar M.”

Yes, Harlan remembered as his eyes skimmed over the long, chestnut braid lying against her right breast, her fair, faintly freckled skin and clear gray eyes. He’d been visiting Tomas one day and while they’d been looking over some of his racehorse stock, she’d approached the two of them to give her father a telephone message.

She’d barely spoken to Harlan that day, but he hadn’t felt slighted by her lukewarm greeting. He’d figured she’d taken him for a wrangler in need of work rather than a friend of her father’s. At the time, all three of the Murdock sisters had been single. But he’d read a few weeks ago where one of them had married Sheriff Pardee. An acquaintance of his had once made a joking remark that Harlan might enjoy a redhead cooking his meals and warming his bed. Harlan had ignored the suggestion. He didn’t want or need his bed warmed by a redheaded Murdock or any woman for that matter. One wife had been enough for him.

“So Miss Murdock, is this a social call or can I help you with something?”

The words “social call” brought a heated stain to Rose’s cheeks. “I don’t call on men socially. I’m here to talk to you about something I observed on the ranch awhile ago.”

Realizing he was still holding onto her hand, Harlan dropped it and motioned toward a piñon standing a few feet away. “Let’s get out of this sun,” he suggested, then stepped out of the corral and latched the gate behind him.

Her heart thudding with each step she took, Rose followed him to the flimsy shade. “I’m sorry to interrupt your work like this, Mr. Hamilton, but I—”

“There’s no need for you to call me Mr. Hamilton. My name is Harlan.”

Yes, she’d known his name was Harlan, but calling him by his first name was getting too personal for Rose’s taste. Still, she didn’t want to offend this man. He was her neighbor and he could make life hell for her and her sisters if he decided to be difficult.

Clearing her throat, she lifted her eyes to his face. Close up, she was immediately struck by the toughness of his features, his rough, leathery skin and hooded brown eyes. A shadow of unshaven beard darkened his chin and jaws, while sweat trickled from beneath his hatband and tracked down his temples.

“Well, Harlan,” she finally managed to say, “what I’m here about is the fence running between our properties. It’s been cut, and cattle have been herded from your pasture onto my pasture. Do you know anything about this?”

He remained silent for a long time and Rose eventually felt herself begin to wilt beneath his gaze. She could feel his eyes on her face, her lips, her bosom. Rose had never considered herself attractive to men and to have one look at her as blatantly as this was something she wasn’t quite ready to deal with.

“I suppose I should have said something to you or your family before I cut the fence. But I didn’t have any idea you’d be riding horseback that far away from your ranch.”

Rose stared at him with wide eyes. “I have to ride fence just like you do, Mr. Hamilton. And for you to take it for granted that a certain part of our boundary fence would be ignored is, well—it’s insulting.”

“I told you to call me Harlan,” he said with a sudden flare of his nostrils. “And as for the fence, I might remind you that your father and I were equal partners building it.”