Montana Sky

shelter in the hills. They looked around, saw nothing out of place, everything as it should be. They didn’t see any point in poking into dark corners and overturning buckets, I guess. They sure as hell have gone over the place now, every inch. Hasn’t helped. Anyway, I think about that, and the time up in the hills with Adam shot, and bleeding, and not knowing.”
    She gave Moon a slap on the flank to send her into the pasture. “Just not knowing.”
    “Maybe it is over,” Tess put in. “Maybe he’s gone off. Sharks do that, you know. Cruise one area for a while, then go off to another feeding ground.”
    “I’m scared all the time.” It wasn’t hard to admit it, not when she watched Lily walk around the side of the house laughing up at Adam. Fear and love, she’d discovered, went hand in hand. “Work helps, keeps the fear in the back ofthe mind. Ben helps. You can’t think at all when a man’s inside you.”
    Yes, you can, Tess mused. Unless it’s the right man.
    “It’s that three o’clock in the morning thing,” Willa continued. “When there’s nobody there, and nothing to hold it off. That’s when the fear creeps up and snaps at my throat. That’s when I start wondering if I’m doing the right thing.”
    “About?”
    “The ranch.” It spread out around her, her life. “Having you and Lily stay on when we can’t be sure if it’s safe.”
    “You don’t have any choice.” Tess hooked a boot in the fence, leaned back into it. She couldn’t see the land through Willa’s eyes, doubted she ever would. But she’d come to admire the pull of it, and the power. “We have minds of our own. Agendas of our own.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I’ll tell you what mine is. When my time’s up here, I’m going back to LA. I’m going shopping on Rodeo Drive and I’m having lunch at whatever the current hot spot is.” Which, she knew, would certainly not be the hot spot she’d lunched in that past autumn. “And I’m taking my share of the profits from Mercy and putting it toward a place in Malibu. Near the ocean so I can hear the waves day and night.”
    “Never seen the ocean,” Willa murmured.
    “No?” It was hard to imagine. “Well, maybe you’ll come visit sometime. I’ll show you what civilized people do with their days. Might just add a chapter to my book. Willa in Hollywood.”
    Grinning, Willa rubbed her chin. “What book? I thought you were writing another movie.”
    “I am.” Flustered, Tess dipped her hands in her pockets. “I’m just playing with a book. Just for fun.”
    “And I’m in it?”
    “Pieces of you.”
    “It’s set here, in Montana? On Mercy?”
    “Where else am I going to set it?” Tess muttered. “I’m stuck here for a year. It’s nothing.” Her fingers began to drum against the rail. “I haven’t even told Ira. It’s just something I’m fooling around with when I’m bored.”
    If that was true, Willa thought, she wouldn’t be so embarrassed. “Can I read it?”
    “No. I’m going to go tell Lily you’re dodging the shopping trip tomorrow. And don’t complain if you have to wear organdy.”
    “The hell I will.” Willa turned around and studied the mountains again. Her mood had lifted considerably, but as she watched more clouds roll in, gather, and cling, she knew it wasn’t over. Not winter, not anything.
     
    T HE DINNER PARTY WAS LILY ’ S IDEA . JUST A SMALL . Intimate, casual dinner, she’d promised. Just the three sisters, and Adam, Ben, and Nate. Her family, as she thought of them now.
    Small, intimate, and casual perhaps, but exciting for her. She would be hostess, a position she’d never held in her life, at a party in her own home.
    Her mother had always planned and managed social events when Lily was growing up. And so efficiently, so cleverly that Lily’s input or assistance simply hadn’t been necessary. During the brief time she’d lived on her own, she hadn’t had the funds or the means to host dinners. And her marriage certainly hadn’t been conducive to social occasions.
    But now things had changed. She had changed.
    She spent all day preparing for it. Cleaning the house was hardly a chore. She loved every inch of it, and Adam wasn’t a man to toss clothes everywhere or leave beer bottles cluttering the tables. He didn’t mind the touches she’d added—the little brass frog she’d ordered from a catalogue, the pretty glass ball of melting blues she’d fallen in love with at first sight in a shop in