Montana Sky

helped herself to a snifter of brandy from the decanter. She was still listening to the promises and pleas of Hollywood when she saw Lily and Adam stroll by the window.
    Interesting, she thought, and sipped. The little mouse and the Noble Savage.
    Tess had done some quick checking before she’d made the trip to Montana. She knew Adam Wolfchild was the son of Jack Mercy’s third and final wife. That he’d been eight when his mother had married Mercy. Wolfchild was Blackfoot, or mostly. His mother had been part Indian. The man had spent twenty-five years on Mercy Ranch and had little more to show for it than a tiny house and a job tending horses.
    Tess intended to have more.
    As for Lily, all Tess had discovered was that she was divorced, childless, and moved around quite a bit. Probably because her husband had used her for a punching bag, Tess thought, and made herself clamp down on a stir of pity. She couldn’t afford emotional attachments here. It was straight business.
    Lily’s mother had been a photographer who’d come to Montana to snap pictures of the real West. She’d snapped Jack Mercy—for all the good it had done her, Tess thought.
    Then there was Willa. Tess’s mouth tightened as she thought of Willa. The one who had stayed, the one the old bastard had kept.
    Well, she owned the place now, Tess assumed, shrugging her shoulders. And she was welcome to it. No doubt she’d earned it. But Tess Mercy wasn’t walking away without a nice chunk of change.
    Looking out the window, she could see the plains in the distance, rolling, rolling endlessly, as empty as the moon. With a shudder, she turned her back on the view. Christ, she wanted Rodeo Drive.
    “Monday, Ira,” she snapped, annoyed with his voice buzzing in her ear. “Your office, twelve sharp. Then you can take me to lunch.” With that as a good-bye, she replaced the receiver.
    Three days, tops, she promised herself, and toasted an elk head with her brandy. Then she’d get the hell out of Dodge and back to civilization.
     
    “I SHOULDN ’ T HAVE TO REMIND YOU THAT YOU GOT guests downstairs, Will.” Bess Pringle stood with her hands on her bony hips and used the same tone she’d used when Willa was ten.
    Willa jerked her jeans on—Bess didn’t believe in little niceties like privacy and had barely knocked before striding into the bedroom. Willa responded just as she might have at ten. “Then don’t.” She sat down to pull on her boots.
    “Rude is a four-letter word.”
    “So’s work, but it still has to be done.”
    “And you’ve got enough hands around this place to see to it for one blessed day. You’re not going off somewhere today, of all days. It ain’t fittin’.”
    What was or wasn’t fitting constituted the bulk of Bess’s moral and social codes. She was a bird of a woman, all bone and teeth, though she could plow through a mountain of hotcakes like a starving field hand and had the sweet tooth of an eight-year-old. She was fifty-eight—and had changed the date on her birth certificate to prove it—and had a headof flaming red hair she dyed in secret and kept pulled back in a don’t-give-me-any-lip bun.
    Her voice was as rough as pine bark and her face as smooth as a girl’s, and surprisingly pretty with moss-green eyes and a pug Irish nose. Her hands were small and quick and able. And so was her temper.
    With her fists still glued to her hips, she marched up to Willa and glared down. “You get your sassy self down those stairs and tend to your guests.”
    “I’ve got a ranch to run.” Willa rose. It hardly mattered that in her boots she topped Bess by six inches. The balance of power had always tottered back and forth between them. “And they’re not my guests. I’m not the one who wanted them here.”
    “They’ve come to pay respects. That’s fittin’.”
    “They’ve come to gawk and prowl around the house. And it’s time they left.”
    “Maybe some of them did.” Bess jerked her head in a little nod. “But there’s plenty more who are here for you.”
    “I don’t want them.” Willa turned away, picked up her hat, then simply stood staring out her window, crushing the brim in her hands. The window faced the mountains, the dark belt of trees, the peaks of the Big Belt that held all the beauty and mystery in the world. “I don’t need them. I can’t breathe with all these people hovering around.”
    Bess hesitated before laying a hand on Willa’s shoulder. Jack Mercy hadn’t wanted his