Montana Sky

forgiveness and the welcome of heaven. And thought that Jack Mercy would spit on anyone’s welcome into a place other than his own. Montana had been his, this wide country of mountain and meadow, of eagle and wolf.
    Her father would be as miserable in heaven as he would in hell.
    Her face remained calm as the fancy coffin was lowered into the newest scar in the earth. Her skin was pale gold, a legacy from her mother and her Blackfoot blood as much as the sun. Her eyes, nearly as black as the hair she’d hurriedly twisted into a braid for the funeral, remained fixed on the box that held her father’s body. She hadn’t worn ahat, and the sun beamed like fire into her eyes. But she didn’t let them tear.
    She had a proud face, high cheekbones, a wide, haughty mouth, dark, exotic eyes with heavy lids and thick lashes. She’d broken her nose falling off an angry wild mustang when she was eight. Willa liked to think the slight left turn it took in the center of her face added character.
    Character meant a great deal more to Willa Mercy than beauty. Men didn’t respect beauty, she knew. They used it.
    She stood very still, the wind picking up strands from her braid and teasing them into a dance. A woman of average height and tough, rangy build in an ill-fitting black dress and dainty black heels that had never been out of their box before that morning. A woman of twenty-four with work on her mind, and a raging, tearing grief in her heart.
    She had, despite everything, loved Jack Mercy. And she said nothing, not one word, to the two women, the strangers who shared her blood and had come to see their father buried.
    For a moment, just one moment, she let her gaze shift, let it rest on the grave of Mary Wolfchild Mercy. The mother she couldn’t remember was buried under a soft mound of wildflowers that bloomed like jewels in the autumn sun. Adam’s doing, she thought, and looked up and into the eyes of her half brother. He would know as no one else could that she had tears in her heart she could never let free.
    When Adam took her hand, Willa linked fingers with his. In her mind, and heart, he was all the family she had now.
    “He lived the life that satisfied him,” Adam murmured. His voice was quiet, peaceful. If they had been alone Willa could have turned, rested her head on his shoulder, and found comfort.
    “Yes, he did. And now it’s done.”
    Adam glanced over at the two women, Jack Mercy’s daughters, and thought something else was just beginning. “You have to speak with them, Willa.”
    “They’re sleeping in my house, eating my food.”Deliberately she looked back at her father’s grave. “That’s enough.”
    “They’re your blood.”
    “No, Adam, you’re my blood. They’re nothing to me.” She turned away from him and braced herself to receive the condolences.
     
    N EIGHBORS BROUGHT FOOD FOR DEATH . THERE WAS NO stopping the bone-deep tradition, any more than Willa could have stopped Bess from cooking for three days straight to provide for what the housekeeper called the bereavement supper. And that was a double pile of horseshit in Willa’s mind. There was no bereavement here. Curiosity, certainly. Many of the people who packed into the main house had been invited before. More, many more, had not. His death provided them entry, and they enjoyed it.
    The main house was a showplace, Jack Mercy style. Once a cabin of log and mud had stood there, but that had been more than a hundred years before. Now there was a sprawling, rambling structure of stone and wood, of glistening glass. Rugs from all over the world spread over floors of gleaming pine or polished tile. Jack Mercy had liked to collect. When he’d become master of Mercy Ranch he had spent five years turning what had been a lovely home into his personal palace.
    Rich lived rich, he liked to say.
    So he had. Collecting paintings and sculpture, adding rooms where the art could be displayed. The entrance was a towering atrium, floored with tiles in jewel tones of sapphire and ruby in a repeating pattern of the Mercy Ranch brand. The staircase that swept to the second floor was polished oak, shiny as glass, with a newel post carved in the shape of a howling wolf.
    People gathered there now, many of them goggling over it as they balanced their plates. Others crowded into the living room with its acre of slick floor and wide curve of sofa in cream-colored leather. On the smooth river rock of the wall-spanning fireplace hung a life-size