Montana Dreaming - Nadia Nichols

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of the fading light and kindled a tiny fire at its base, more out of a need for light than for the little warmth such a small fire would cast. Blue was sluggish, shocky. She was in pain. Who knows what sort of internal injuries she might have sustained from the bear’s blows?

      The little cow dog had shared a working partnership and a special friendship with Jessie for eight years, and was irreplaceable. Blue mustn’t die. She couldn’t die. Jessie used her bandanna to bind the deepest wounds on the cow dog’s thigh, unzipped her coat and drew the shivering dog against her. Then she zipped the coat back up with the dog inside it. She fed the last of the firewood onto the small fire and sat back, cradling the trembling dog in her warmth.

      It was going to be a long, cold night.

      CHAPTER THREE

      GUTHRIE SLOANE HAD BEEN driving since well before dawn, but he was too close to home to stop now, in spite of the darkness and the near-whiteout conditions. He had a good four-wheel-drive truck and the big plow rigs were out, keeping the drifts pushed back. He’d make Bozeman inside of an hour, and with any luck would be hauling into Katy Junction just shy of midnight.

      He felt as if he’d been gone forever. When he’d left this past spring he’d wanted to go. Couldn’t wait to put as many miles as possible between Jessie Weaver and him. But over the summer his hurt and anger had faded, to be replaced by a kind of chronic depression. He’d worked hard, putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, at the fish processing plant. The job was inglorious, but it paid very well and kept him busy, kept him from dwelling on his miseries.

      That is, until he got the letter from his sister, Bernie, back in Katy Junction. “Jessie needs you,” she’d written. “She’d never admit to it, but it’s true. Please come home!”

      The day the processing plant shut down for the winter Guthrie stood on the wharf smelling the salt tang of the harbor, admiring the mountainous coastline, the rugged beauty that was Alaska, and suddenly he wanted nothing more than to go back to Katy Junction. That very day he’d closed his account at the bank, thrown his collection of moldering camping gear into his truck and headed south.

      He had no illusions about returning home to Jessie’s welcoming arms, no matter what Bernie had written. Jess had made her position clear and was not the sort of woman to say anything she didn’t mean. “We don’t share the same dreams, Guthrie,” she’d told him at their parting. “Lately all we do is fight. I think it’s best we don’t see each other anymore.”

      Or something to that devastating effect.

      Jessie’s dreams were her wild Spanish mustangs and somehow preserving some small part of the rapidly shrinking range for them to roam free. Her dreams were grand. His were far more humble and modest. He dreamed of marrying Jess and proving up that little claim he’d staked for himself along Bear Creek. He wanted to run a few head of cattle, put some acres to good alfalfa hay, tinker with farm machinery and work for his sister’s husband. He wanted to raise a few towheaded, chubby-cheeked, milk-toothed babies, love his woman, have a good dog, a good horse and a dependable truck.

      His dreams fell far short of Jessie’s aspirations. She wanted to save Montana, and was driven by a desperate passion that intimidated Guthrie. Sure, he saw where she was coming from. Who wouldn’t? Didn’t they all love the vast rolling plains and towering mountains that boldly defied distance and description?

      Guthrie downshifted to slow his truck as he came up behind a small foreign car. Visibility was poor, snow was building up on the road surfaces and his drive south would be arduous, but it would be worth it, because when he arrived, no matter what time it was, he would be home. Finally, he would be back where he belonged.

      MCCUTCHEON HAD BEEN standing on the ranch house porch for twenty minutes. It was the third time this day that he had made the long drive from town to talk to Jessie, ask her if she’d thought about his offer, tell her that she couldn’t pass it up because where else would her horses have as much running room and feel so much at home as right here on their own range?

      It was snowing hard, and had been since midafternoon. Jessie had ridden up in the high country that morning to look for her wild mares and she wasn’t back yet. And it was dark. Full dark. On a stormy night when an unexpected blue norther was piling down wind-driven snow at the rate of an inch an hour. He checked his watch again, its dials luminescent, and swore softly. This wasn’t how he’d imagined this day to be…standing on her porch—his porch, dammit—his stomach tied in knots.

      Over the sound of the wind came another sound out of the darkness—that of horse’s hooves muffled in six inches of fresh snow. “Jessie!” he shouted. He switched on his flashlight and shone it into the whirling snow. “Jessie Weaver!”

      There was no answer to his call, but the footfalls came on steadily. A horse, plastered in wet snow, plodded up to the porch rail as if he’d walked up to it hundreds of times before. The animal was exhausted. McCutcheon panned the horse with his flashlight. His initial relief plummeted at the sight of the empty saddle.

      “Oh, no,” he said. He stepped down the stairs and brushed the snow from the saddle. One of the bridle reins was broken. One of the saddlebags was unbuckled, but still full of gear. He picked up the trailing rein and led the exhausted gelding into the pole barn, where he stripped off bridle and saddle it, rubbed the horse down with a burlap sack, pitched him some hay and water and a bait of sweet feed before making for his car and town to tell the authorities that something very bad had happened to Jessie Weaver on this wild and stormy night.

      “DON’T YOU DIE on me, Blue,” Jessie said, her voice inaudible to her own ears over the moan of the wind. “Don’t you die on me! You’ve been with me too long to leave me, and I need you now more than ever. You stay right here with me and we’ll keep each other warm and safe.”

      She wasn’t frightened by the dark, but the cold scared her. It had the teeth of winter and its bite was painfully sharp. She had dressed as she always did for a high-country ride in fall, and could not lay blame on her choice of clothing. But an empty stomach didn’t help. A mug of hot chocolate and a big bowl of spiced beef and beans would see her through this night.

      Guthrie!

      Jessie jerked at the image that came so suddenly out of the darkness. The unexpected memory flooded through her and galvanized her into wakefulness. She tightened her grip on Blue and fought to quell the butterflies that fluttered through her stomach and made it hard to draw breath. Why on earth was she thinking about him now, of all times? Why was his face so clear to her—its strong, lean planes, the way it felt beneath her fingertips, the sensual roughness of his twelve-hour stubble, and his mouth, so firm and masculine…

      Those images usually only came to her at night in her sleep. During the day she could keep them at bay, overshadow them with the anger she felt at his abandoning her in the midst of such difficult times.

      “Baloney!” Jessie said, startling the dog. Blue raised her head and whined. “It’s all right, honey,” she soothed. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay….”

      Guthrie was gone. He’d run off and headed north. Alaska, she’d heard. One bad argument between them and he’d turned tail and bolted, and he’d been gone nearly five months. If that was the sort of man he was, soft and full of butter, she was better off without him. Sooner or later her heart would realize that, then those dreams of Guthrie that tormented her nights would quit.

      Jessie shivered with the cold, her trembling matching that of the injured dog she cradled beneath her coat. “I have to stay awake,” she said to Blue. “Can’t fall asleep. Don’t want to dream those dreams anymore….”

      “WHAT IN HELL is taking them so long to get here!”

      Caleb McCutcheon was mad. He paced the floor of the Longhorn between the counter and the door—a space too small for his big strides, which irritated him even further.

      “It’s the storm,” Bernie said, refilling his coffee cup then those of the others sitting at the counter. Eight locals waited there for the warden, the

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