Montana Sky

Keats, was as soft as a down pillow. His mind, when it came to matters of law, of justice, of simple right and wrong, was as hard as granite.
    He had a deep and long-standing affection for WillaMercy. And he hated that he had no choice but to put her through hell.
    “I’ve never lost anybody close to me,” Nate began. “I can’t say I know how you feel.”
    Willa kept walking, past the cookhouse, the bunkhouse, by the chicken house where the hens were going broody. “He never let anyone get close to him. I don’t know how I feel.”
    “The ranch . . .” This was dicey territory, and Nate negotiated carefully. “It’s a lot to deal with.”
    “We’ve got good people, good stock, good land.” It wasn’t hard to smile up at Nate. It never was. “Good friends.”
    “You can call on me anytime, Will. Me or anyone in the county.”
    “I know that.” She looked beyond him, to the paddocks, the corrals, the outbuildings, the houses, and farther, to where the land went into its long, endless roll to the bottom of the sky. “A Mercy has run this place for more than a hundred years. Raised cattle, planted grain, run horses. I know what needs to be done and how to do it. Nothing really changes.”
    Everything changes, Nate thought. And the world she was speaking of was about to take a sharp turn, thanks to the hard heart of a dead man. It was better to do it now, straight off, before she climbed onto a horse or into a rig and rode off.
    “We’d best get to the reading of the will,” he decided.

TWO
    J ACK MERCY ’ S OFFICE , ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF THE main house, was big as a ballroom. The walls were paneled in yellow pine lumbered from his own land and shellacked to a rich gloss that lent a golden light to the room. Huge windows provided views of the ranch, the land and sky. Jack had been fond of saying he could see all a man needed to see from those windows, which were undraped but ornately trimmed.
    On the floor were layered the rugs he’d collected. The chairs were leather, as he’d preferred, in rich shades of teal and maroon.
    His trophies hung on the walls—heads of elk and bighorn sheep, of bear and buck. Crouched in one corner as though poised to charge was a massive black grizzly, fangs exposed, glassy black eyes full of rage.
    Some of his favored weapons were in a locked display case. His great-grandfather’s Henry rifle and Colt Peacemaker, the Browning shotgun that had brought down the bear, the Mossberg 500 he’d called his dove duster, and the .44 Magnum he’d preferred for handgun hunting.
    It was a man’s room, with male scents of leather and wood and a whiff of tobacco from the Cubans he liked to smoke.
    The desk, which he’d had custom-made, was a lake of glossy wood, a maze of drawers all hinged with polished brass. Nate sat behind it now, fiddling with papers to give everyone present time to settle.
    Tess thought he looked as out of place as a beer keg at a church social. The cowboy lawyer, she thought with a quick twist of her lips, duded up in his Sunday best. Not that he wasn’t appealing in a rough, country sort of fashion. A young Jimmy Stewart, she thought, all arms and legs and quiet sexuality. But big, gangling men who wore boots with their gabardine weren’t her style.
    And she just wanted to get this whole damn business over with and get back to LA. She rolled her eyes toward the snarling grizzly, the shaggy head of a mountain goat, the weapons that had hunted them down. What a place, she mused. And what people.
    Besides the cowboy lawyer, there was the skinny, henna-haired housekeeper, who sat in a straight-backed chair with her knobby knees tight together and modestly covered with a perfectly horrible black skirt. Then the Noble Savage, with his heartbreakingly beautiful face, his enigmatic eyes, and the faint odor of horses that clung to him.
    Nervous Lily, Tess thought, continuing her survey, with her hands pressed together like vises and her head lowered, as if that would hide the bruises on her face. Lovely and fragile as a lost bird set down among vultures.
    When Tess’s heart began to stir, she deliberately turned her attention to Willa.
    Cowgirl Mercy, she thought with a sniff. Sullen, probably stupid, and silent. At least the woman looked better in jeans and flannel than she had in that baggy dress she’d worn to the funeral. In fact, Tess decided she made quite a picture, sitting in the big leather chair, her booted foot resting on her knee, her