Friday. How about first thing Monday morning?” she asked.
“That would be fine. I’ll put you on the day shift to begin. You’ll need to report to my office by seven a.m. Too early?”
“Oh, no. I’m usually in bed by eight and up by five in the morning.”
His eyebrows raised.
“It’s my dog,” she sighed. “She sleeps on the bed with me, and she wakes up at five. She wants to eat and play. So I can’t go back to sleep or she’ll eat the carpet.”
He laughed. “What breed is she?”
“She’s a white Siberian husky with red highlights. Beautiful.”
“Where is she?”
She caught her breath as she realized that she’d let Snow out to go to the bathroom an hour earlier, and she hadn’t scratched at the door. “Oh, dear,” she muttered as she realized where the dog was likely to be.
Along with that thought came a very angry knock at the back door, near where she was sitting with the sheriff.
Apprehensively, she got up and opened the door. And there he was. Dal Blake, with Snow on a makeshift lead. He wasn’t smiling.
“Your dog invited herself to breakfast. Again. She came right into my damned house through the dog door!”
She knew that Dal didn’t have a dog anymore. His old Labrador had died a few weeks ago, her foreman had told her, and the man had mourned the old dog. He’d had it for almost fourteen years, he’d added.
“I’m sorry,” Meadow said with a grimace. “Snow. Bad girl!” she muttered.
The husky with her laughing blue eyes came bounding over to her mistress and started licking her.
“Stop that.” Meadow laughed, fending her off. “How about a treat, Snow?”
She went to get one from the cupboard.
“Hey, Jeff,” Dal greeted the other man, shaking hands as Jeff got to his feet.
“How’s it going?” Jeff asked Dal.
“Slow,” came the reply. “We’re renovating the calving sheds. It’s slow work in this weather.”
“Tell me about it,” Jeff said. “We had two fences go down. Cows broke through and started down the highway.”
“Maybe there was a dress sale,” Dal said, tongue-in-cheek as he watched a flustered Meadow give a chewy treat to her dog.
“I’d love to see a cow wearing a dress,” she muttered.
“Would you?” Dal replied. “One of your men thinks that’s your ultimate aim, to put cows in school and teach them to read.”
“Which man?” she asked, her eyes flashing fire at him.
“Oh, no, I’m not telling,” Dal returned. “You get on some boots and jeans and go find out for yourself. If you can ride a horse, that is.”
That brought back another sad memory. She’d gone riding on one of her father’s feistier horses, confident that she could control it. She was in her second year of college, bristling with confidence as she breezed through her core curriculum.
She thought she could handle the horse. But it sensed her fear of heights and speed and took her on a racing tour up the side of a small mountain and down again so quickly that Meadow lost her balance and ended up face-first in a snowbank.
To add to her humiliation—because the stupid horse went running back to the barn, probably laughing all the way—Dal Blake was helping move cattle on his own ranch, and he saw the whole thing.
He came trotting up just as she was wiping the last of the snow from her face and parka. “You know, Spirit isn’t a great choice of horses for an inexperienced rider.”
“My father told me that,” she muttered.
“Pity you didn’t listen. And lucky that you ended up in a snowbank instead of down a ravine,” he said solemnly. “If you can’t control a horse, don’t ride him.”
“Thanks for the helpful advice,” she returned icily.
“City tenderfoot,” he mused. “I’m amazed that you haven’t killed yourself already. I hear your father had to put a rail on the back steps after you fell down them.”
She flushed. “I tripped over his cat.”
“You could benefit from some martial arts training.”
“I’ve already had that,” she said. “I work for my local police department.”
“As what?” he asked politely.
“As a patrol officer!” she shot back.
“Well,” he remarked, turning his horse, “if you drive a car like you ride a horse, you’re going to end badly one day.”
“I can drive!” she shot after him. “I drive all the time!”
“God help other motorists.”
“You . . . you . . . you . . . !” She gathered steam with each repetition of the word until she was almost screaming, and still she couldn’t think of an insult bad enough to throw at him. It wouldn’t have done any good. He kept riding. He didn’t even look back.
* * *
She snapped back to the present. “Yes, I can ride a horse!” she shot at Dal Blake. “Just because I fell off once . . .”
“You fell off several times. This is mountainous country. If you go riding, carry a cell phone and make sure it’s charged,” he said seriously.
“I’d salaam, but I haven’t had my second cup of coffee yet,” she drawled, alluding to an old custom of subjects salaaming royalty.
“You heard me.”
“You don’t give orders to me in my own house,” she returned hotly.
Jeff cleared his throat.
They both looked at him.
“I have to get back to work,” he said as he pushed his chair back in. “Thanks for the coffee, Meadow. I’ll expect you early Monday morning.”
“Expect her?” Dal asked.
“She’s coming to work for me as my new investigator,” Jeff said with a bland smile.
Dal’s dark eyes narrowed. He saw through the man, whom he’d known since grammar school. Jeff was a good sheriff, but he wanted to add to his ranch. He owned property that adjoined Meadow’s. So did Dal. That acreage had abundant water, and right now water was the most important asset any rancher had. Meadow was obviously out of her depth trying to run a ranch. Her best bet was to sell it, so Jeff was getting in on the ground floor by offering her a job that would keep her close to him.
He saw all that, but he just smiled. “Good luck,” he told Jeff, with a dry glance at a fuming Meadow. “You’ll need it.”
“She’ll do fine,” Jeff said confidently.
Dal just smiled.
Meadow remembered that smile from years past. She’d had so many accidents when she was visiting her father. Dal was always somewhere nearby when they happened.
He didn’t like Meadow. He’d made his distaste for her apparent on every possible occasion. There had been a Christmas party thrown by the local cattlemen’s association when Meadow first started college. She’d come to spend Christmas with her father, and when he asked her to go to the party with him, she agreed.
She knew Dal would be there. So she wore an outrageous dress, even more revealing than the one he’d been so disparaging about when she was a senior in high school.
Sadly, the dress caught the wrong pair of eyes. A local cattleman who’d had five drinks too many had propositioned Meadow by the punch bowl. His reaction to her dress had flustered her and she tripped over her high-heeled shoes and knocked the punch bowl over.
The linen tablecloth was soaked. So was poor Meadow, in her outrageous dress. Dal Blake had laughed until his face turned red. So had most other people. Meadow had asked her father to drive her home. It was the last Christmas party she ever attended in Raven Springs.
But just before the punch bowl incident, there had been another. Dal had been caught with her under the mistletoe . . .
She shook herself mentally and glared at Dal.
DIANA PALMER
KATE PEARCE
REBECCA ZANETTI
photo credit: Dylan Patrick