“Hey, Mary Lee!” he called, striding across the corral with the grace of Gene Kelly, arms spread wide in welcome. “How’s it shaking?”

“It about shook loose on the ride up here,” she said dryly.

He laughed, swinging up onto the fence and turning his red baseball cap frontward on his head, seemingly all in one motion. He settled himself a little too close beside her, close enough that Mari could smell sweat and the scent of animals on him, close enough that she could see his blue eyes were shot through with the telltale threads of a hangover. She frowned at him, unable to sidle away because of Tucker on her left.

The old cowboy leaned ahead and shot a hard look at Will. “J.D. catches you slacking, boy, he’ll chew your tail like old rawhide.”

Behind the layers of sweat and grime, Will’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, well, J.D. can just go to hell. I been working hard as he has since sunup. I’m taking five. It’s not every day we get a pretty lady for company up here in the back of beyond.”

“No, they’re scarce as hen’s teeth,” Tucker admitted, clambering over the rail and lowering himself into the corral. He jammed his hands at the low-riding waist of his jeans and gave the younger man a significant look. “Especially the ones your brother invites.”

Will pulled a comic face of exaggerated shock, eyes wide in his lean face as he stared at Mari. “J.D. invited you? My brother J.D. invited you?”

“Not exactly,” Mari grumbled, scowling as she watched Tucker hobble away toward the squeeze chute to take up Will’s place. “I invited myself. He didn’t tell me no.”

“Well, that’s something too, let me tell you. J.D. runs this place like a damn monastery. He doesn’t want some evil woman turning our heads from our work.”

Lucy came immediately to mind, but Mari bit her tongue. “What about your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Does she fall under the ‘evil woman’ heading?”

“Sam? Hell no. She’s a good kid.” Sweet, trusting, in need of someone to love her. The description ran through his mind, through his heart like an arrow as he watched the monotonous routine in the branding corral. Every time he thought of Sam, he felt as if he’d been kicked in the head-a little ill, a little dizzy. He’d been doing his damnedest not to think about her since the night he had seen her in the Moose.

“Kid? What is she, a child bride?”

“Naw, she’s twenty-three.” He picked absently at the rusty fungus that clung to the top of the rail. “I’ve known her forever, that’s all. It’s hard not to think of her like a kid sister.”

Which might explain why he wasn’t living with his wife, Mari thought. If she had a husband who treated her like a kid sister, and chased anything in a skirt besides, she figured she’d dump him too.

“So,” Will said, slapping a hand on her thigh, “whatcha doing here, Mary Lee? Looking for trouble?” He bobbed his eyebrows and grinned. “That’s my middle name.”

“I guessed as much.” She pried his fingers off her leg and scooted away a foot, fixing him with a look. “I came to see how a ranch works.”

“I’ll tell you how a ranch works.” Bitterness crept in around the edges of his voice. “Day and night, week after week, month after month, year after year, until death or foreclosure.”

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you quit?”

He laughed and looked away, not sure whether it was her suggestion or his answer he found so funny. A part of him had wanted nothing more than to be rid of the Stars and Bars ever since he was a boy. But that part of him was forever tangled with the boy who looked up to his big brother. And the part of him that didn’t want to be a screwup was forever tripping over the part that longed to tell J.D. to go to hell. The cycle just tumbled on, like a rock down an endless mountainside.

“You don’t quit the Stars and Bars, gorgeous,” he muttered, staring off across the chutes to the back pen, where J.D. was sorting cattle. “Not if your name is Rafferty.”

J.D. worked the herd from the back of a washed-out gray mare. This was only her second year working cattle, but her talent was bred bone-deep. She kept her head low and her ears pinned as she danced gracefully from side to side, cutting calves away from their mothers and sending them into the chutes, sorting out young heifers and sending them into another holding pen to wait. The mare ducked and dodged, adjusting her speed as necessary. Her reins hung loose, her movements guided by intuition and the subtle touches of J.D.’s spurs against her sides.

J.D. sat easily in the saddle, one gloved hand on the pommel, shoulders canted back, bracing himself against the sudden moves of the horse beneath him. His mind was working on three levels at once-studying the cattle, assessing the performance of the horse, and wondering if Mary Lee would really show up.

He cursed himself up one side and down the other for letting a woman take his thoughts away from his business. He didn’t need the distraction of thinking about her or the distraction of seeing her standing outside the fence. If he wanted a distraction, he could wonder what the hell he would do a year from now, when Lyle Watkins and his boys would no longer be around to help work the chutes. Tucker and Chaske would be another year older, too old for a full day of this kind of work. God only knew where Will would be. His only other neighbor would be Bryce.

Bryce wouldn’t offer to trade work. J.D. doubted Bryce knew what real work was. He wouldn’t know or care about the code that had always existed between neighbors here. Like the rest of his kind, Bryce had brought his own set of values and priorities with him to Montana, all of them foreign to J.D.

The little mare pulled herself up and blew out a heavy breath, drawing J.D. back to the matter at hand. The group of cattle he had been working was sorted. They would brand and vaccinate this lot, break for dinner, then start all over again.

He would hand the mare over to Tucker to cool her out and to give the old man a break. Tucker didn’t like to admit his age, but J.D. saw it creeping up on him a little more every day, bending his back a little more, stiffening joints that had already taken too many years of abuse. In another job, Tucker Cahill would have been forced to retire by now, but there was no such thing as retirement for a cowboy. Cowboy was who a man was as much as what. Tucker Cahill wouldn’t retire any more than he would quit having blue eyes and a crooked pecker.

Besides, the Stars and Bars was Tucker’s home as much as if he were a Rafferty, J.D. thought. He had spent the best years of his life and then some working this ranch for damn little pay, and he would stay here until the pallbearers carried him off feetfirst. It was up to J.D. to make that possible. It was his responsibility to take care of the old man, to see to it that he had a roof over his head and food in his belly and a purpose in his life, just as it had been Tucker’s role to play surrogate father when Tom Rafferty had been too lost in his obsession to do the job.

The weight of that and every other responsibility pressed down on his aching shoulders for a minute. Just a minute. He didn’t allow any longer, couldn’t afford the time. Brooding didn’t get a job done.

He turned the mare toward the out gate and was struck by the sight of Mary Lee sitting up on the far rail of the branding corral, laughing at something Will said to her. Will made a wild gesture with his arms, his wide, handsome grin lighting up his face as he entertained his audience of one.

Jealousy stormed through J.D. like a charging bull. He would never have called it that out loud, but a spade was a spade. From the day Sondra and Tom had brought him home from the hospital, Will had been the center of attention, a magnet for any spotlight. He basked in even the smallest glow, and everyone laughed at him and was charmed by him. No one seemed to care that he aspired to nothing or that he gambled away two months’ worth of bank payments at a crack or that he was about as trustworthy and reliable as a stray tomcat.