Wyoming Fierce

He raised his hand. She raised her jaw, daring him.

“Bodie!” her grandfather called shortly. “Don’t.”

She was trembling with anger. She wanted him to hit her. “Do it,” she dared, hissing the words through her teeth. “I’ll have the sheriff at your place five minutes later with an arrest warrant!”

He put his hand down and looked suddenly afraid. He knew she’d do it. He knew it would be the end of his life if she did.

He lifted his face. “No,” he said insolently. “Hell, no. I’m not giving you a chance to make me look bad in my town. Besides, I wouldn’t soil my hand.”

“Good thing,” she returned icily, “because I’d hurt you. I’d hurt you bad.”

“We’ll see about that, one day,” he told her. He looked around the room. “Maybe you’d better start looking for another place to live. Government housing, maybe, if you can find something cheap enough!”

Bodie’s small hands were clenched at her sides. Now he was trying to make her hit him. It was a good strategy: turn her own threats back on her. But she was too savvy for that. She even smiled, to let him know that she’d seen through his provocation.

He glared at her. “I can throw you out any time I like.”

“You can,” Bodie agreed, “when you can prove non-payment of rent. I’ll require a receipt when I give you the money. And if you want to throw us out for any other reason, you’d better have due cause and a warrant. And the sheriff,” she added with a cool smile, “because he’ll be required.”

He let out a furious curse, turned and slammed out of the house.

Granddaddy was looking very pale. Bodie ran to him and eased him down into his chair. “Easy, now, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything…!”

She stopped, because he was laughing. “Damn, girl, if you aren’t just like my mother used to be,” he said. “When I was a boy, she took a length of rope to a man who tried to take one of our cows, said it had strayed onto his land and it belonged to him. She laid into him with it and beat him to his knees, and then invited him into her house to use the phone so he could call the law and have her arrested.” His eyes twinkled. “His pride was busted so bad that he never came back onto the place. Wasn’t going to admit to anyone that a woman beat him up.”

“My goodness!”

“You’re named for her. She was called Emily Bolinda, and her nickname was Bodie, too.”

“I’d forgotten that,” she confessed, smiling. “You okay?”

He nodded. “Just a bit breathless. Listen, he’s going to get us out of here one way or another. You know that. It isn’t the money. It’s revenge. He hates me. I tried my best to keep her from marrying him. I told her we’d find a way to get enough to support you and her, but she wouldn’t listen. She wanted things for you. She knew there was no money for cancer treatments, and no insurance, and she did what she thought was best for both of us.” He shook his head. “It was wrong thinking. We’d have managed somehow.”

She sat down opposite him. “It’s not right, that people can’t get treatment because they’re poor. Not right, when some people have ten houses and twenty cars and ride around in chauffeured limousines and others are living in cardboard boxes. Taxes should be fair,” she muttered.

“Not arguing with that,” he assured her. He sighed. “Well, when do we have to go see that specialist?”

“I’m just going to call the doctor’s receptionist and find out,” she promised, and got up and went to the phone.

She was very worried. Not only about her grandfather but about the threats her stepfather had made. He was going to bleed them dry. If he couldn’t find a way to do it with the rent, he’d find another way to humiliate Bodie. He’d always hated her, because she saw through his act to the filthy man underneath. He’d had plans for her mother’s possessions, especially two pieces of jewelry that had been in the family for four generations and were worth a good bit of money. One, a ring, had emeralds and diamonds; there was a matching necklace. Bodie had them locked away. She’d never have sold them, not for worlds. They were her legacy. Her mother had given them to her months before her death. But her stepfather knew about them and wanted them. He was furious that he couldn’t find a legal way to obtain them. He’d tried to argue with the lawyer that all her property belonged to him, as her husband, but the lawyer pointed him to a handwritten note, witnesses, that her mother had given Bodie—probably anticipating that Will might try to reclaim them. The note entitled Bodie to the jewelry. No way around that, the lawyer assured Will. No legal way.

So it was war. Not only did he want the jewelry, but his younger male friend wanted Bodie. She’d laughed when he’d asked her out on a date. She knew what he was like because her mother had told her. He liked to date prostitutes and film them. She’d said that Will Jones had actually mentioned that it would be fun to film him with Bodie, and her mother had had a screaming, furious argument with him over the comment. Over her dead body, she’d raged, and for once, Jones had backed down. But it had chilled Bodie to the bone, knowing that he’d even thought up such a sleazy intention.

She hated the man with a passion. Once, she’d thought of going to the Kirk brothers and asking for help. But they were just starting to get out of the hole. She’d heard that they’d come into a windfall from the sale of several of their prize purebred bulls and that their business was growing by leaps and bounds. That had increased when Mallory had married one of the heirs to the enormous Brannt fortune. Morie Brannt was the daughter of King Brannt, who was one of the richest ranchers in Texas. He’d provided Mallory with two seed bulls rumored to be worth millions. In fact, they were kept under lock and key with a twenty-four-hour guard around them. No way was Mallory risking his prize bulls.

* * *

THE APPOINTMENT WITH the specialist had been set up for the following Monday. It was quick work, the receptionist said, because the specialist was usually booked months in advance. But Rafe Mays’s heart problem was so worrying to the doctor that the specialist had promised to work him in.

Meanwhile, she went to the bank and drew out the rent money. Her small savings were wrecked in the process. She’d have to try to get a part-time job here until school started again. Then there would be more medicines to buy, groceries....

She felt like crying, but she couldn’t let her grandfather see how despondent she was. There was no money. They lived from check to check, with no luxuries, not even a hot dog and fries on occasion from a fast-food joint. Bodie cooked plain fare, the cheapest food she could prepare, and planned one dish to last at least two days.

It was a frugal, painful existence. She frequently felt guilty at going to college at all. But when she graduated, she could at least get a job that paid a professional wage, so the sacrifices now would be worth it. Master’s work might have to wait a bit, though. In June, after graduation, if she got her bachelor’s degree in anthropology, she was going to get a full-time job and see if she could catch up the bills a bit before she went back to school. She might have to do the work/study thing, and work one year and study the next. Plenty of people did that. She could do it, too, if it meant leaving Granddaddy better off and less worried. She knew that their financial situation was as frightening to him as it was to her.

He’d suggested asking the Kirks, but reluctantly. She didn’t mention that Tank had offered to help and she’d turned him down. She couldn’t even ask Tank right now; he was on an extended trip to Europe on ranch business. Mallory and Morie had gone somewhere out of the country, as well.

“You’re friends with Cane, sort of,” he reminded her. “Wouldn’t hurt to just ask him.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “He’s really sensitive about people asking him for money, especially lately.” She didn’t add that Cane had almost been a victim of a woman who wanted it, when she’d tried to pick him up in the bar.

“I guess he is. With his disability, likely he thinks that’s all women see in him now,” he conceded.

Not for worlds would Bodie have mentioned that no woman in her right mind would turn down a man that attractive, disability or not. Cane was so sexy that memories of their brief encounter still left her tossing and turning at night. Her whole body glowed when she thought of him touching her.

She cleared her throat. No reason to go down that road, especially when Cane didn’t even remember what had happened. That was a mercy, for a lot of reasons.

“We’ll get by,” Bodie promised her grandfather.

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t you even think of giving up college,” he instructed firmly. “Worked too hard, too long, to have one person in my family with a degree. I didn’t even finish high school. Had to go to work when my mother got sick. It’s a trap. You think you can go back and finish your schooling, but once you make money, all sorts of things come up that needs it,” he added solemnly. “You leave now, you won’t go back. And that would be a pity, Bodie. A real pity.”

She smiled, went and hugged him tight. “Okay.”

He chuckled and hugged her back.

“You and me against the world,” she said when she drew away, her pale brown eyes were smiling as well as her lips.

“That’s how it goes, I reckon.” He sighed. “Don’t want to go see any specialist,” he said heavily. “I don’t like people I don’t know. Suppose he wants to throw me in a hospital and cut on me?”

“We won’t let him,” she lied.

He seemed to calm down then, as if he thought she could see the future.

“One day at a time, Granddaddy,” she said gently. “Step by step.”

He hesitated. Then he nodded.

* * *

THE SPECIALIST WAS A MAN only a few years younger than Bodie’s grandfather. To the old man’s surprise, he was led into an examination room where he was hooked up to some sort of machine that looked right at his heart through his chest. They called it an echocardiogram, a sonogram of the heart.

“Damndest thing I ever saw,” he told Bodie while they waited for the cardiologist to read the results. “They let me look at the screen. I could see inside my body!”

“New technology really is amazing,” she agreed. She was sitting nervously on the edge of her chair. She’d had a long talk with the receptionist while her grandfather was having his test, about monthly payments. The bill was going to be staggering. It was a testament to Bodie’s salesmanship that the payment plan had been agreed on. There was no question of further education after this next semester. Then, too, she had to make sure that her grades held up, so that she’d pass all her subjects and be able to graduate. So many worries. She wondered how in the world she was going to manage any of it.

“Don’t chew on them nails like that,” her grandfather instructed. “You’ll have them gnawed off into the quick.”

“Oh.” She drew her finger out of her mouth. “Sorry. I’m just nervous a bit.”