Breaking the Summer Range

The creek had gone thin with winter, but not so thin that grown men had ceased to quarrel over it.

By ten o’clock nearly every rancher within ten miles of Mercer’s Cut had gathered in the lee of the Bennett lower pasture fence, boots sunk in old snow and thawing mud, hats pulled low against a sky the color of pewter. The line of cottonwoods along the watercourse stood bare and black, their branches clicking together in the wind like dry bones. Beyond them the land rolled out in dun grass, patches of crusted white lingering in the shadows, and farther still rose the blue-backed hills where another storm was plainly brewing.

Rose Bennett stood with her gloves buttoned tight and her chin higher than was strictly wise.

It was not the weather that made a woman hold herself that way. It was the weight of those dozen male eyes, a physical pressure like a draft of cold air settling against the nape of her neck and the skin of her throat, waiting to see whether she would falter.

“Mr. Mercer may speak for himself,” she said.

The words fell neatly, without heat, which was more than she could claim for the pulse beating at the base of her throat. Her father had been dead eleven months. In that time she had learned—from the way Silas Crowley had offered her a ruinously low price for her west stock lot while patting her hand at the funeral, and the way her neighbors had nodded as if she ought to take it—that if a woman wished to keep a ranch from being eaten in pieces by sympathy, advice, and opportunists, she must school her voice into something cool enough to cut.

Across the trampled bank, Caleb Mercer took off his hat long enough to acknowledge her and put it back on his dark head. “I am obliged to Miss Bennett.”

A few of the men shifted. Some looked amused. Others looked as though they would rather have been calving cows in a blizzard than witnessing a disagreement between the Bennett girl and Caleb Mercer, who had doubled his acreage in six years and done it with a steadiness men respected even when they disliked him for it.

Rose watched him under her lashes, her hand tightening on the fence rail until the rough wood bit through her glove.

He stood a little apart from his foreman and the neighboring stockmen, broad-shadowed in a weather-dark coat, gloved hands easy at his sides. He had the look of a man put together out of harsh country: hard jaw, wind-burned skin, eyes the cold blue of creek ice where the current still ran beneath. Not handsome. Merely striking in the disagreeable way of cliffs and storms and other hazards.

“Then by all means,” she said. “Explain to everyone present why a man who purchased the Mercer place only four years ago now believes himself entitled to alter a crossing my family has used for fifteen.”

A murmur went round at that. Good. Let them murmur. Let them remember there had been Bennetts on this ground before Caleb Mercer ever laid claim to the north bank.

Mercer’s mouth moved very slightly, not enough to be called a smile. “If Miss Bennett wishes for dates, I can provide them. If she wishes for facts, I can do better.”

“Happily, I have a preference for both.”

Old Ezra Talbot, whose spread touched neither Bennett land nor Mercer land but who never missed the chance to insert himself into another man’s business, cleared his throat. “Best keep to the point.”

Rose did not look at him. “I am perfectly aware of the point, Mr. Talbot.”

Mercer said, “The point is spring access. The thaw comes in earnest, the upper bank softens, and if every head from the Bennett place is driven through that bend, the crossing will widen another yard by April. Then the creek cuts farther east, and I lose bank, fencing, and grass.”

“You lose mud,” Rose said. “What my cattle lose is water.”

A few hats dipped to hide expressions. Mercer’s foreman, Tom Greeley, stared fixedly at the ground.

Mercer’s gaze remained on Rose. “There is another access from your south meadow.”

“Half a mile farther for stock weakened by winter.”

“For stock, perhaps.” His eyes flicked once over her shoulder, toward the pasture. “If the real issue is convenience—”

“The real issue,” Rose said, “is that you laid new post and rail across common approach without notice.”

“It is not common approach.”

“It has been used in common long enough for every man here to know it.”

“That does not make it legal.”

That pricked. Not because the word was unfair, but because it struck too near the truth she had worried over at night with account books spread open and lamp oil burning low. Her father had arranged too much on handshakes and memory. Men praised such ways at funerals and exploited them after.

Rose folded her hands so no one would see her clench them. “I was not aware your conscience had become so exacting all at once, Mr. Mercer.”

His face altered then, though only by a shade. She saw it because she had been watching him too closely from the first moment he rode up. Something tightened behind his eyes, something old and private and hard.

“On the matter of boundaries,” he said, “I prefer exactness.”

There it was again, that faint sensation she had already had twice in his presence: that one trod near a place in him no one entered lightly. It ought to have pleased her. Instead it sharpened her curiosity, which was the more dangerous thing.

She said, “How admirable for your boundaries.”

The nearest men coughed into their gloves. Ezra Talbot gave up and grinned openly.

Mercer did not. “My fence stands on my land.”

“Your fence obstructs my water.”

“Your drovers cut my bank to ribbons.”

“Then put stones at the ford instead of acting like a petty tyrant.”

His brows lifted. “A tyrant.”

“Yes.”

“Miss Bennett, if I intended tyranny, you would not mistake it for fence work.”

The remark was quiet. It held no more than the bare words. Yet something in the way he said it seemed to move through the space between them like a struck wire. Rose felt it low in her body before she had any business feeling anything at all. Irritation, she told herself at once. Only irritation. The man had a talent for saying impossible things in a tone fit for church.

She met his eyes. “Is that meant to reassure me?”

“It is meant to save time.”

“Then you have failed in your object.”

Wind tore down the creek then, lifting the tails of coats and sending a loose sheet of sleet skimming over the grass. One of the Bennett hands swore under his breath and looked up at the sky.

Mercer followed the glance. “We should settle this.”

“We should,” Rose agreed.

Sheriff Pike had come as a witness more than an authority, but he stepped nearer now, thumbs tucked in his belt. “Seems to me there are two matters. Long use, and present damage. If neither of you means to bend, we can tramp up and look at the crossing itself.”

“That is precisely what we ought to do,” Rose said.

Mercer nodded once. “Agreed.”

The small procession set off along the creek: Pike, Talbot, two neighboring owners, Mercer and his foreman, and Rose with her ranch hand Joe Haskell half a pace behind, plainly unhappy at letting her walk into a dispute among men. Rose was unhappy too, but there was no remedy for it except to keep walking as though she had never known uncertainty in her life.

The ground worsened nearer the water. Frost gave way underfoot with a wet crunch. Brown current flashed through shelf ice and around drifts of dead reeds. At the bend the bank had indeed slumped, though not so badly as Mercer implied. Rose saw him taking in the same details she was: the trampled descent, the hoof-churned mud, the leaning posts where his new fencing stopped short of the ford.

Pike squatted, grunted, and rose. “Ground’s soft.”

“It always is in a thaw,” Rose said.

Mercer pointed with one gloved hand. “Look at the east edge.”

Rose looked because she had no choice and cursed inwardly because he was right. The current had bitten deeper there.

Talbot said, “Could brace it.”

“With what money?” asked one of the other men. “Rock this early? Haul it from where?”

Rose turned. “My men and I can reinforce the approach if Mr. Mercer removes those rails.”

Mercer said, “And next season?”

“Next season we discuss a proper easement.”

“With whose survey?”

“Any fair surveyor.”

He gave her a long look. “You speak as if fairness has ever kept peace where water is concerned.”

“No,” she said. “Only stubbornness seems to do that.”

This time the edge of his mouth did shift. Not a smile, exactly. Recognition, perhaps. It was the first moment in the morning that felt less like standing on separate cliffs and shouting across a gorge than finding, reluctantly, that the cliff opposite was made of the same stone.

It unsettled her more than outright hostility would have done.

A crack of thunder rolled over the hills.

Every head went up.

The storm had moved faster than any of them expected. A wall of slate cloud now pushed over the ridgeline, low and ugly, with a white haze of snow or hail already curtaining the far pasture.

Joe Haskell muttered, “Miss Bennett, we’d best get back.”

Pike spat into the grass. “You all heard him. No settlement today. Not in that.”

“No settlement because Mr. Mercer prefers obstruction,” Rose said.

“No settlement,” Mercer returned, “because heaven has poor timing.”

Then the wind struck in earnest.

It came with such force that Rose had to catch her hat with both hands. Sleet slashed across her face, needling skin and eyes. The horses, tied farther back among the cottonwoods, began to toss and stamp. Men shouted at one another, words blown ragged.

“Bennett place is closer south!” Joe called.

Mercer’s foreman shouted at the same instant, “Line shack’s north, quarter mile!”

The sheriff made the decision by pointing, not south toward the open pasture but north, where the creek cut into a little swale and a dark roof showed against the grass. “Nearest cover!”

The group broke at once, each man for his horse or for whatever shelter he judged he could reach. In the confusion Rose took three steps toward Joe and was hit broadside by a gust that nearly spun her. Her boot slid in half-frozen mud. Before she could fall, a hand caught her hard under the elbow.

Mercer.

The heat of his grip came through wool and sleeve with shocking force.

“This way,” he said.

“I know how to walk.”

“Then prove it.”

She ought to have jerked free. Instead she found herself moving beside him in a staggering run along the bank while sleet turned to driving snow. Behind them someone yelled for Talbot. Ahead, the little shack sharpened into view: rough-hewn logs, one window shuttered, smoke-blackened chimney listing slightly. A line shack, used by drovers in better weather and no doubt by every coyote in the county in worse.

By the time Mercer shoved the door open and got her inside, Rose was wet through at the hem and breathing as though she had raced a mile. He came in after her, dragged the door shut against the blast, and dropped the latch.

For a moment there was only darkness and the hammering of weather on the roof.

Then Mercer struck a match.

The flare lit his face from below, all planes and hollows, before he bent to the cold hearth. There was laid wood there already, dry enough to catch if handled quickly. He moved with competent speed, feeding flame to shavings, then kindling, then a split log. Orange light grew and pushed back the dim.

Rose stood very still, one hand on the rough table nearest the door, while her eyes adjusted.

The shack held one bunk built into the wall, two stools, the table, a shelf with a dented coffee pot, and not much else. The smell was of old smoke, damp wool, and cedar. Wind rattled the chinks between the logs. It was not, she thought with a flare of absurdity, a place a respectable woman ought to be trapped in with Caleb Mercer.

No one in the county would call it respectable if they knew.

As if summoned by the thought, she heard distant shouting muffled by storm, then nothing. No hoofbeats came near. No voices approached. The weather had swallowed everyone else.

Mercer straightened from the fire. “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Your ankle?”

She looked down. Mud splashed her skirts almost to the knee. “I did not twist it.”

He nodded once, as if accepting testimony from a witness he did not wholly trust. “You should come nearer the fire.”

“I am perfectly capable of deciding where to stand.”

His gaze went to the water dripping from the edge of her pelisse. “As you like.”

The answer ought not to have stung. Yet somehow it did, as though she had expected him to argue. Rose removed her gloves finger by finger and laid them on the table to dry. Her hands were cold enough to ache.

Mercer stripped off his own gloves, then his coat, heavy with snow at the shoulders. He hung it on a peg by the door and rolled back his cuffs a little before crouching to coax the fire higher. The act pulled his shirt tight across his back. Rose looked away at once and was annoyed to find that looking away did nothing to erase the impression.

“You are very certain of yourself,” she said, because silence was dangerous.

“No.”

She glanced at him in surprise.

He fed another piece of wood to the flames. “Only of some things.”

“Fences among them.”

“Banks, water, and weather. Fences are less dependable.”

For one absurd second she nearly laughed. She resisted it. “You conceal your humor with great care, Mr. Mercer.”

“So do you, Miss Bennett.”

The crackle of fire filled the little room. Outside, hail began to strike the roof like thrown gravel.

She moved at last toward the hearth because pride did not warm fingers. Mercer stepped aside without comment, leaving her the better place before the flames. The courtesy was so matter-of-fact it robbed her of any easy weapon.

“Thank you,” she said, because she had been taught manners too thoroughly to omit it, even in battle.

“You are welcome.”

The silence resumed, closer now.

Rose held out her hands to the heat. Sensation came back in painful pins. She was aware of Mercer not two feet away, of the width of him in a space this small, of the smell of clean leather and wet wool and male skin carrying a trace of cold air with it. She had stood beside men all her life—hands, drovers, neighbors, buyers at market—and none of them had ever made the room alter around her.

Perhaps because none of them had looked at her as though she were not merely a problem to be managed or a daughter filling in until a more proper arrangement could be made.

Mercer looked at her as if she were an adversary worth his full strength.

It was deeply inconvenient.

She said, “You might have let me fall.”

One brow lifted. “Is that a complaint?”

“I merely wonder whether you rescue all women you are presently disputing with.”

“No.”

“There is your exact conscience again.”

He looked at the fire for a moment before answering. “If you had gone down on that bank, you might have broken a wrist. Then Bennett stock loses more than water.”

The practicality of it should have made the exchange harmless. It did not. Something in his tone had roughened on the last words, very slightly. The awareness she had fought outside returned, warmer here, made stranger by the smallness of the shack and the storm hemming them in.

She said carefully, “You make me sound like ranch property.”

“No.” His eyes came to hers. “I make you sound indispensable.”

The fire popped sharply.

Rose forgot, for one disgraceful instant, how to breathe.

No one had called her that. Not in so plain a way. Men said capable, if they wished to flatter. They said determined when they meant difficult. They said your father would be proud, which was meant kindly and landed like a stone. But indispensable—there was recognition in it. Recognition, and something else she did not dare examine closely.

She recovered first by lifting her chin. “You are very free with judgments for a man who means to block my creek.”

“I mean to keep my land from washing away.”

“And if mine suffers in the meantime?”

“Then I expect you to fight me exactly as you have this morning.”

His voice was low. The storm seemed louder around it, not softer. Rose became aware that she had taken one step nearer while speaking, and that he had not retreated from it.

“Do you enjoy it?” she asked.

“Arguing with you?”

“If you like.”

His mouth did that near-smile again, and this time she saw how much restraint lay in it. “No.”

She stared at him.

He added, “Enjoy is not the word.”

Something hot and unsteady moved through her. It was not the sort of thing a respectable woman should permit herself even in thought, much less in a locked shack with weather between her and every civilized witness. She knew perfectly well what reputation required. She knew how quickly talk attached itself to a woman alone, how impossible it was to scrape off once dried. If they were found here together, if anyone imagined—

Yet all she could think of was the way his gaze had dropped, just once, to her mouth before returning to her eyes.

A first name, she thought wildly, would be more intimate than this and somehow less dangerous.

“Mr. Mercer,” she said, and heard the strain in her own voice.

At once something in him changed. Not softened. Checked. He stepped back a fraction, enough to restore decent distance, enough to make the loss of it absurdly noticeable.

“Yes, Miss Bennett.”

There was salvation in the formality and disappointment too. Rose despised herself for the second feeling.

She turned toward the table under pretence of rescuing her gloves. “When the storm passes, I shall still require access for my herd.”

“So you shall.”

She looked over her shoulder. “You concede that much?”

“I concede necessity. Not terms.”

“Then we are no farther on.”

“We may be.” He picked up a tin cup from the shelf, examined it, set it down again. “If the thaw worsens, I can permit limited crossing for ten days. Under supervision. Your men use the center descent only. No driving in darkness. After that, we shore the bank and have a surveyor out before spring runoff.”

Rose blinked. “You could have said so half an hour ago.”

“You were calling me a tyrant.”

“You were behaving like one.”

“Perhaps.” His gaze rested on her with disconcerting steadiness. “You are easier to bargain with in private.”

The words landed with a different weight than any he had yet spoken. In private. The little shack seemed to contract around them.

Rose answered the only way she safely could. “That sounds very much like an accusation.”

“It was intended as an observation.”

“And what do you observe, Mr. Mercer?”

A pause.

“That you do not lean on your temper when no one is watching.”

She ought to have denied it. Instead she said, “No. I lean on it most when I am frightened.”

The admission slipped out before she could stop it. She had not meant to grant him anything so personal.

Mercer’s expression altered again, and now she recognized the thing she had glimpsed before: not merely reserve, but the habit of a man who had learned to guard every vulnerable place as if exposure invited injury. He did not pounce on her confession. He did not even look triumphantly surprised.

“What frightens you?” he asked.

The question was quiet enough that she might have refused it.

She looked into the fire. “Losing the ranch by inches while everyone assures me they are helping.”

When he answered, his voice was rougher than before. “Yes.”

Only that. Yes.

Not I understand. Not some polished sympathy. A single word, carrying enough knowledge to make her turn and look at him fully.

He was not handsome. She would hold to that. But there was force in him, and loneliness, and a severity that looked less like pride the longer one stood near it than like old damage set hard. In another life, another world, she might have asked after it. In this one she barely knew him and already knew too much.

“Then perhaps,” she said, “we might manage not to ruin each other before planting.”

“Perhaps.”

The hail lessened by degrees. Snow still hissed against the walls, but the worst violence had passed. A gray blade of daylight showed at the shutter edge.

Rose drew a breath and found the room easier to bear once there was a prospect of leaving it. More dangerous, too, because departure sharpened every unsaid thing.

“You should write your terms,” she said. “So there can be no later dispute.”

“I will bring them tomorrow.”

“To the house?”

“If that is acceptable.”

It should not have mattered. Men came to the Bennett house every week on business. Yet the thought of Mercer crossing her threshold, removing his gloves in her mother’s parlor, speaking in that calm voice while the clock ticked and everyone pretended not to notice currents under the conversation, sent a strange little thrill through her.

“It is acceptable,” she said.

He moved to the door and lifted the latch a crack to test the wind. Cold rushed in at once. Rose came near enough to see past his shoulder: the world outside whitened and blurred, but no longer murderous.

Mercer looked back at her, and because the shack was still small and the moment was still too bare, the glance caught and held.

She was suddenly, acutely aware of his hand on the latch, of his body between her and the storm, of the fact that if either of them stepped half an inch forward the space would vanish.

No proper woman wanted such things.

No honest woman denied when she did.

His gaze dropped once more, unmistakably now, to her mouth. Heat washed through her, swift and fierce. For one perilous second she thought he might close the distance. Worse, she thought she might let him.

Then voices carried faintly over the snow—men calling, horses snorting, the world returning with all its claims and witnesses.

Mercer opened the door fully and stood aside.

“Miss Bennett.”

The formality struck like cold water. It was necessary. It was mercy.

She gathered her gloves, lifted her chin, and passed him without touching, though she felt the warmth of him all the same. Outside, the air bit her face and the creek ran on under its lace of broken ice as if no storm, no quarrel, and no dangerous stillness in a line shack had altered anything at all.

But when Rose looked back once from the bank and found Caleb Mercer watching her beneath the dark brim of his hat, she knew with complete and unwelcome certainty that something had begun.