Wide Open Spaces

“Fool woman,” Colt choked, waving away flying particles with both hands.

“Hardly,” Holder said. “Summer Marsh is one of least foolish women I know. Something’s wrong.” Already in motion, the old vet rushed toward the back of the woman’s single-horse trailer. She joined him, flinging down the trailer’s ramp.

Well, well, well! Colt was about to get his first look at the woman his boss had sent him to Callanton to assess. He’d been hanging around town for a week, enjoying the still-pleasant October weather of eastern Oregon while he filled a notebook with information on Frank and Summer Marsh. Finally, he was about to meet the wicked witch of Forked Lightning Ranch face-to-face.

Needing time to get a grip on his automatic hostility, Coltrane shook dirt off his Stetson. Eventually, he sauntered up alongside the battered trailer. The way it lurched back and forth, he figured the Marsh woman couldn’t handle a horse any better than she managed her life.

“Hey, Quinn,” Holder yelled, his voice hollow from inside the covered trailer. “Give us a hand.”

Colt stepped into the trailer’s opening, then dived back as some screeching thing hit his shoulder and knocked his hat clean off his head. “What the hell?” He ducked, squinting to see into the dim interior of the horse van.

“Grab her” came a woman’s frantic voice. “Oh, please! She’s going to injure her good wing if we don’t subdue her soon.”

Colt saw then that the Marsh woman and Doc Holder were wrestling a full-grown eagle boasting the widest wingspan he’d ever seen. One of the shrieking bird’s wings, he realized, trailed at an odd angle. Dark, rusty blood stained the white tips of the feathers. The eagle fought her captors valiantly with her other wing. Nor was she a slouch when it came to her beak and deadly talons.

Closing his mind as to why Summer Marsh might have an injured bird in her horse trailer, Colt jumped into the fray to do what he could. Dodging behind the flapping eagle, he threw his arms around her and clamped down for dear life.

He wasn’t a soft man by any means, thanks to special-forces training in the military. If only he’d had the sense to stay out of covert operations after he left the service, he’d be in better shape now. Instead, he’d let friends talk him into an occasional private rescue mission. The five years spent as a captive in that South American hellhole, had taken their toll. The few months thereafter, which he’d spent trying to drown in whiskey, had also contributed to his current breathlessness. But hell, he’d climbed out of the gutter and now worked out regularly again. Yet his arm muscles quivered and ached as he went down on one knee to add more leverage so he could hold the bird whose heart tripped faster than Colt’s own.

“Hot damn, keep her there, son,” Myron shouted. “I’ll get my bag and tranquilize her so I can take a good look at that injury.”

Colt felt Summer Marsh’s hands close over his wrists in her effort to complete the circle around the bird. Her hands were softer than he’d imagined a woman rancher’s hands would be. Knowing that about her delivered an unexpected jolt to his stomach.

Turning his head aside, Colt gritted his teeth and concentrated instead on listening to the cadence of their combined harsh breathing. It beat hearing the Marsh woman croon low and melodically to the eagle, like a mother might do to soothe a hurt child.

True to his word, Holder returned in a flash. One pop with a slender needle and the bird went limp in Colt’s arms.

Wheezing, Holder gasped, “Quinn, do you feel up to carrying our patient into an exam room?”

“I think so. Sure.” Colt figured that, aside from helping the vet, this would give him a chance to form his own opinion of Summer Marsh. But he’d barely skirted the trailer’s hub and heard her clang the ramp shut when she darted ahead of him and stopped Holder.

“Myron, I hate to dump trouble on you and then take off before you can assess the damage. I was on my way to circuit court over in Burns when some stupid hunter trespassing on my ranch shot the eagle out of the sky. It was pure luck that she practically fell in my lap. If I don’t scoot, though, I’ll be late for the hearing. Oh, and look at me. This shirt was clean when I started.”

Colt sneaked a peek around the bundle of feathers he held. Summer Marsh didn’t look anything like the harridan he’d conjured in his mind. For one thing, she was younger—more vibrant. Her medium-length russet hair curved from a center part toward a pointed chin. What Colt saw of her skin reminded him of a commercial that touted skin cream. Light gold, not the least bit leathery, the way you saw with people who spent long hours outdoors.

She wasn’t very big, either. Colt doubted the crown of her head would reach his shoulder. And that included her footwear. Boots. All but the tips of her dusty, square-toed boots were hidden beneath a split riding skirt fanning from a narrow, belted waist. Her once-white, western-style collarless shirt was the only thing Colt could see that seemed the worse for wear. Blood streaked one sleeve below a small rip in the shoulder. Considering how hard the bird had fought, it could have been worse. Much worse.

All in all, the lady looked good. Too damned good.

“Run along, Summer,” Holder was saying. “I’ll take care of your eagle. You want to leave her overnight, or pick her up on your way home to stable with the rest of your menagerie?”

“I’ll stop by and get her. If she’s the eagle I’ve seen hunting our north pasture, she has babies nesting in Kiger Gorge. I hope she has a partner. If not, I’ll have to figure out how to bring the little ones down for feeding.”

“Like you need that chore heaped on top of Frank acting like an ass! Is he behind this hearing you’re headed for?”

“I guess. Or his lawyers.” She paused again to check her watch. When she glanced up this time, it was straight into Coltrane’s eyes. He realized her irises were gold, flecked here and there with bits of green. Hazel, he supposed was the proper term. Something in her eyes reminded Colt of the firestorm he’d witnessed earlier in the eagle. And they invoked a sympathy he didn’t want to feel.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking a step toward Colt. “We’ve never met. I’m Summer Marsh.”

“Coltrane Quinn,” he mumbled, slightly dazed by her suddenly blinding smile.

“Well, Mr. Quinn. I don’t know if you’re just passing through Callanton, or if you’ve settled in. Either way, you have my profound thanks for your willingness to help a stranger. If I can ever return the favor, you can usually find me twenty miles due east of town, somewhere on the Forked Lightning Ranch.”

Following a final wave at Holder, and after the old man’s murmured “Good luck today, Summer,” she was gone. Just the way she’d arrived, in a cloud of dust.

Colt shook off an odd sensation. Afraid he’d drop the limp bird, he hurried into Holder’s clinic.

“I realize you were first in order,” Holder told him. “If you don’t mind, though, I’d like to set this wing and place the eagle in a portable cage before she comes out from under that tranquilizer. Turn your gelding into the small corral out back of the clinic. There’s water and grazing enough to keep him happy until I finish.”

“Spirit’s okay in the trailer for now. As I was saying before all hell broke loose, I’ve wrapped his foreleg with Flexus Plus and administered Cosequin since you checked him earlier in the week. He seems to be on the mend. I’d just like another opinion before I let him bear my full weight.”

“A more professional opinion than that of a cowboy, you mean?”

“I don’t know if I’d describe myself as a cowboy, exactly.” Colt smiled across the bird stretched out on the steel table Colt smiled across the bird stretched out on the steel table. “Guess I never mentioned that I used to breed Morgan horses near Featherville, Idaho. Learned all I know about horse doctoring from Halsey Luttrell, best vet in the territory. He recommended you, by the way. Said you two met in college.”

Myron Holder scratched his beard. “Did the old son of a gun tell you I was number one in our veterinary medicine graduating class, and he was a distant second?”

Colt’s grin spread. “He neglected to pass on that detail.”

“Humph! So what brings you from that forsaken land to God’s country? I don’t imagine you’re scouting horseflesh. Not saying we don’t have our share of good ones hereabouts, but mostly there’s prime cattle in these parts.”

The smile slipped from Colt’s face. “I had a ranch sold out from under me. Since then, I’ve been doing a little of this and a little of that. At the moment I’m bunked at the Arrowroot Inn, and I’m boarding Spirit at Tucker’s Stable. Hey, as you’re something of an authority on local ranches, fill me in on the place belonging to the woman who brought in the eagle.”

The old man stared hard at Coltrane. “Summer’s a damn fine woman who’s been handed a raw deal by her snook of a husband. Ex he is now, thank goodness. But Frank’s still making mischief. That’s all I’m gonna say about them. The one who’s been most affected is their son, Rory. He’s just a little shaver. Too young to understand any of it.”

“A son?” Colt said absently, watching Myron conduct a thorough examination of the bird’s shattered wing. None of his records indicated that Marsh had a kid. Nor had he heard a single word about it when he’d nosed around town this past week.

“Hold this clamp.” The vet shoved a gleaming instrument into Colt’s hand. “I’ve gotta clean buckshot out of the wound. God damn every last city hunter who can’t tell an eagle from a pheasant. I wish Summer had nailed their ignoramus hides so they’d be sitting out their vacation in our poky. This bird’s gonna need care for a long time while her wing mends. Oh, Summer’s got the facilities, but she doesn’t need one more problem on her plate.”

“Earlier you referred to her menagerie.”

“I did?”

Colt waited impatiently for embellishment as the veterinarian set the eagle’s delicate bones and splinted them together with thin strips of nonflexible plastic.

“You seem mighty interested in Summer,” Holder finally growled. “Suppose it’s natural, though. I’ve never seen a cowboy yet who couldn’t pick out the prettiest woman in three counties.”

Colt gave a rough snort. “You’ve read me all wrong. I’ve been duly shafted by a pretty woman before. If I was planning to take sides in the Marsh matter, I’d more than likely toss in my lot with her ex.”

“Then you’d be dead wrong. But then, didn’t you say you were staying at the Arrowroot Inn? Probably means you spend time at Mason White’s Bar and Grill. I hear Frank Marsh hangs out there, bragging about what a cattle baron he is. Did nobody stop to wonder how he has the time to sit in a bar when ranching’s a twenty-hour-a-day job?” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing you aren’t in any position to align with Frank and further hurt Summer. The Forked Lightning means the world to her.”

“Hmm.” Coltrane watched Holder cage the groggy bird. He withheld his final thoughts on the subject of Summer Marsh. If she truly cared about the Forked Lightning, then he was in a position to further hurt her.

SUMMER ARRIVED AT CIRCUIT COURT Judge Roy Atherton’s chambers, ten minutes late. She hesitated before entering the room, where she could hear several men speaking, their voices low and intense. Summer thought she’d weathered the worst that could happen to her this past spring, during the Harney County court proceedings. She’d survived a bitter, name-calling divorce from Frank Marsh, her husband of eight years. Now, according to the most recent paper she’d been served, Frank was demanding she sell her beloved ranch, which had been home to four generations of Callans. Summer had always supposed that, if nothing else, she and Frank were agreed on one thing: passing the ranch to their son, Rory.

The hand she extended to open Judge Atherton’s door shook. That kind of fear was unlike her. Heavens, she wrangled beef for a living! And often supervised up to eight cowboys at any given time, all while managing a home and raising a child. She’d nursed her father, Bart Callan, through ten years of a hellish disease that had wasted his body long before taking his life. If she could do all that, she could certainly do this.

Lifting her chin, she staved off any perceptible tremor before striding into the room. All anyone there could do was hit her with words. They couldn’t touch her heart unless she let them, and she had a solid padlock on that.