The Willful Wife

The scene somehow reminded Mathis of the view from his adobe casita at sunset, watching the Sangre de Cristo Mountains turn blood red in one of New Mexico’s strangely transcendental landscapes.

That New Mexico was all about light was something he had discovered several years ago. Maybe it was why he had picked the location he did when he had started to buy up land in anticipation of the day he would retire from the business.

Mathis raised a can of ice-cold beer to his mouth and took a drink. There was no sense in getting maudlin about his past. No sense in brooding about it. The past was the past. His past was like anyone else’s in that it couldn’t be changed. And since no one was promised a future, that left only the present. So he concentrated on living in the here and now.

Besides, as he had reassured George Huxley during their meeting that afternoon, he had emerged from his past unscathed...or pretty damned close to it.

“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades , son,” came the words of Argos Hazard, one-time rancher, one-time soldier and lawman, sometime husband and father.

Maybe his father had been right, after all.

There were certainly those who would say Mathis Hazard had always been a loner and that’s why he was so good at what he did. Mathis knew his past set him apart, made him different from other men, made him alone, made him a loner.

He hadn’t thought it odd to buy a ranch in the middle of New Mexico, located between a range of isolated mountains and a secluded lake, away from civilization, his nearest neighbors a good forty miles in any direction. Lord knows, he’d had enough of so-called civilization to last him a lifetime.

It wasn’t that he had been around too many people. It was the people he’d been around and the world he’d lived in, a world most people were unaware even existed.

It was a world where a man acquired eyes in the back of his head if he wanted to survive. It was a world where nothing was what it seemed to be, where no one was who they appeared to be. It was a world where a man learned to trust only one person—himself—where experience, gut instincts and sheer bravado sometimes saved a man when intelligence alone never would, never could.

He’d always essentially been alone, Mathis recognized. He always would be. At least in New Mexico there was no pretense about it.

He took another swig of his beer.

Female companionship...well, that, as they said, was another matter altogether.

Mathis rubbed the icy can across one cheek, along his jawline and halfway down his neck. He felt rather than heard someone come up behind him. He spoke without turning around: “Know anything about women, Beano?”

“They’re more trouble than they’re worth, boss.”

Beano should know. He’d been around the corral a few times in his day. He had married and divorced three women—maybe it was four—and had had a few flings in between that had never made it as far as the altar. He was currently footloose and fancy-free.

William “Beano” Jones had hired on at the old Circle H at the age of nine. He’d spent the next half-dozen years working on a chuck wagon for Mathis’s grandfather before being promoted to bunkhouse cook. Eventually he had been moved into the kitchen at the “big house.” Somewhere along the way he had started to keep an eye out for the “boy.” Now Beano was seventy if he was a day, and he still considered it his personal duty to look after Mathis.

Only the boy, of course, had become a man, a man who had been around the corral a few times himself. He’d never officially been roped, hog-tied and branded, Mathis mused, reflecting on his own marital state ... or the lack thereof.

He had imagined himself in love once, a long time ago. He’d been nineteen. She had been eighteen, pretty, blond, wild like the wind. It had been a typical summer romance—hot and fast and furious. And then it had been over just like that.

Mathis gazed out on what he knew was a sweltering Chicago night. “What about a lady from Boston?”

“Worst kind of all, boss.”

“Why?”

He could sense Beano shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “A woman like that can make a man feel dis-com-bob-u-lat-ed.” The word was broken up into its separate syllables. “A woman like that can make a man feel like he’s meetin’ himself comin’ and goin’. She can make him forget.”

Mathis was curious. He turned his head. “Make him forget what?”

Beano flashed his trademark grin, the one that drew his mouth up into a bow and sent sparks flying in his dark chocolate-brown eyes. “I’ve plumb forgot.”

Mathis laughed out loud, spilling cold beer onto his bare chest. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“You always were easy pickin’s, boy.” It was a minute or two before Beano added another pearl of masculine wisdom. “Women,” he muttered under his breath, “can’t live with them...”

“Yes...?”

Beano left it at that.

Mathis couldn’t have agreed more. Knowing that the older man wouldn’t ask, he volunteered where he had been that afternoon. “I interviewed a client today.”

“Did you?”

“George Huxley.”

Beano made a sound in the back of his throat. Mathis knew he wasn’t uninformed, just unimpressed that the security agency’s latest client was a well-known American diplomat.

“He wants me to look after his goddaughter.”

“She the lady from Boston?”

“Yes.”

“Smells like trouble to me.”

It smelled like trouble to Mathis, too.

“I have to take the case on behalf of Hazards, Inc.,” he said, reaching up with the T-shirt in his hand and wiping it across his chest. “I don’t have any choice.”

“S’pose not.”

Mathis put the can of beer down and tugged the damp T-shirt on over his head. He stood there staring out at the lake—was that mist or steam rising from its surface?—and blew- out his breath expressively. “She’s a real looker.”

“They always are.” Beano finally spoke up. “If you need any help...”

It was the opening Mathis had been waiting for. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Apparently his cook-cum-self-appointed guardian angel was in his official mode. “What do want me to do, boss?”

“Tomorrow morning I’d like you to shave extra close and put on your best bib and tucker.”

Beano glanced down at his well-washed shirt and jeans, then lower to his well-worn everyday boots. “S’pose that means my best cowboy boots, too.”

“And your best hat.”

“The white Stetson?”

“Yup.”

“You wearing white, too?”