The Best Man Read online

  “Tell Luther Moreland and the Roark sisters that I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Making them wait told him that he still had a little pride.

  I’ll take the job. You got yourself a trail boss.”

  Aside from the introductions, those were nearly the only words Dal Frisco had spoken. When Luther began to explain the conditions, Frisco had raised a hand and said, “You covered everything when we first spoke.”

  A rush of relief made Freddy’s shoulders sag. The cattle drive would occur. Leaning against the horsehair sofa, she studied the one man willing to give her and her sisters a chance, remembering that she’d observed him at the cemetery on the day of Joe’s funeral.

  Dal Frisco wasn’t handsome in a classical sense, but women would notice and remember his rugged good looks. He was tall, comfortable in his bones, and his gaze was cool almost to the point of insolence. He had a slow glance that set something loose in the pit of Freddy’s stomach, something hot and fluttery. Where Jack Caldwell had that oddly smooth look that many gamblers had, Frisco radiated a hard inflexibility that few women could meet without seeing a challenge.

  Right now he gazed at them as if taking their measure, and it seemed to Freddy that his steady eyes lingered on her a fraction longer than on her sisters. It irritated her that she responded to his attention.

  When Frisco finally spoke, his deep, almost raspy voice startled her. “Can you ride a horse?” he asked Alex, running a glance over her wheelchair.

  “I used to ride,” Alex answered reluctantly, lacing her hands together. “But I’d be terrified to attempt it now. My right leg was amputated just below the knee.” When Frisco looked at the one boot on the chair’s footrest, color flooded her face.

  “Could you drive the chuck wagon? Do the cooking for the outfit?”

  Alex looked uncertain. “I haven’t done much cooking. We’ve always had a cook.”

  “Mrs. Mills, if you can’t ride and you can’t handle the cooking, then there’s no place for you on this drive.”

  “You’re very blunt,” Alex said, sharply.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am. Now what’s it going to be? Are you coming or staying?”

  Alex pressed her lips together and gripped her hands. “I guess I could try.” Her chin lifted. “If that’s the only… I’ll do the cooking.”

  “Start figuring what supplies you’ll need to feed twelve hands for four months. In a day or so I’ll take you out to a brush popper’s camp and show you a chuck wagon.” He swung his gaze toward Freddy and Les. “Before this drive starts trailing, I want to see both of you cut a beeve out of the herd, rope a steer, and hit a target with a six-shooter. You’ve got about six weeks to learn, seven at the outside. We leave the first of April.”

  Freddy stared in disbelief. She glanced at Les’s open mouth, then back at Frisco. “That’s… we can’t… how are we going…”

  Frisco looked at her with an intensity that made her press backward into the sofa cushion. “In case no one has explained this, here’s what you’re going to do. You’ll herd cattle. You’ll ride night watch. You’ll handle a stampede when it happens. Not if it happens, Miss Roark, when it happens. You’ll ford rivers and swim cattle. You’ll chase strays.” He shrugged broad shoulders. “Before we reach Abilene, you’ll have been hotter than you’ve ever been, wetter than you’ve ever been, and more exhausted than you believed was possible. You’ll be dirty, sunburned, and you’ll stink of horseflesh and cowhide. I hope to hell all of you will still be alive. A cattle drive is a brutish, dangerous undertaking, and there are going to be times when you’re lonely and frightened. If you think you can’t pull your share, if you can’t learn what you need to learn, say so now and withdraw.”

  “We can’t possibly learn all that in six weeks,” Les whispered. Her face was as white as the lace doilies covering the arms of her chair.

  “No, you can’t. You’ll have to learn most of it on the trail, and I hope all of you learn fast. But unless you can perform the basics before we ride out, you don’t go. Those are my conditions. If you can’t stay in the saddle for ten hours, if you can’t rope a steer or shoot at a predator, then I don’t want you. Ignorance can get you or someone else killed.”

  “What if none of us can perform the miracles you’re demanding?” Freddy snapped.

  He gazed at her from clear blue eyes as cool as a winter sky. “Then I’m out of a job, and you three lose your inheritance. We leave on April 1, or we don’t go at all. If we leave any later, the herds ahead of us will have grazed out most of the good grass.”

  Freddy glared back at him, but she didn’t speak. He was calling the shots as if they worked for him instead of the other way around. But he also sounded confident and sure of himself. When he spoke, there was no doubt that he knew what he was talking about.

  “You’ll handle the money?” he asked Luther. When Luther frowned and nodded, he issued his next directive. “Go over our budget and find me enough money to hire some brush poppers. Five men at a dollar a day for two weeks ought to do it.”

  “Brush poppers?” Alex asked in a faint voice. She still looked stunned.

  “Yes, ma’am. You need to sell two thousand cattle in Abilene. We’re going to lose a few along the way, so we’ll try to start with about twenty-three hundred if we can. Roark is supplying you two thousand beeves in his will, but he didn’t restrict you to that number. Right?”

  “That’s correct,” Luther said.

  “We’ll pull some extra beeves out of the brush. They’ll be wild as hell until we get them road broke, but they’ll give you a little breathing room.” He glanced at the liquor decanter on the tray near the bookcase. “One thing you all need to understand. You take your orders from me.”

  Freddy opened her mouth, then changed her mind and made herself remain silent, uncertain why she felt combative when she looked at him. The feeling was instinctive, almost protective, as if the force of his masculinity might overwhelm her if she didn’t resist.

  “If you don’t pull your weight, if you endanger my outfit, then you’re out. I’ll make the decision, and I’ll leave you in the nearest populated area. If you don’t agree to this condition, then we don’t have a deal.”

  Freddy stood. “And if you take one drink along this drive, Mr. Frisco, then you’re out.”

  His confidence and cool assurance, the way he was laying down rules, irritated her. He should have expressed at least a little gratitude that they were offering him a chance to redeem his reputation when no one else would.

  His gaze intensified and a half smile pulled at his lips. “Fair enough.” A long slow glance traveled over her black gown up to the curly dark tendrils pulling out of the twist on her neck. His frank appraisal heated Freddy’s cheeks and made her mouth go dry, made her want to slap his face. She might have if his stare had lasted a moment longer, but he turned to include the others. “We didn’t discuss my fee.”

  She sat down abruptly, deeply annoyed by her strong reactions to this man.

  Luther touched his bow tie and cleared his throat. “What is your fee, Mr. Frisco?”

  “I want the steers. Win or lose, whatever those longhorns sell for goes in my pocket.”

  “What do longhorns sell for?” Alex inquired.

  “At current market prices, the cattle should bring roughly thirty dollars a head, depending on delivery weight and condition. That’s my fee.”

  Freddy did the math then joined her sisters in a gasp. Even Luther sucked in a hard breath. “That’s sixty thousand dollars!”

  “That is outrageous, sir,” Luther snapped. “That is not the usual boss’s fee.”

  Dal Frisco nodded. “There’s nothing ‘usual’ about this drive, Mr. Moreland. If we’re successful, everyone gets a second chance, everyone gets what they want. The ladies here get their father’s estate, I get a ranch in Montana. Everyone wins except the widow.”

  “But if we’re not successful, if we only manage to get a thousand cattle to Abilene,” Alex sa
id through white lips, “then Lola wins Father’s estate. And you want to profit even if you turn us into paupers. That is absolutely not acceptable.”

  Frisco shrugged. “My fee is not negotiable. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’m afraid the Roark sisters will have to ‘leave it,’ ” Luther said tightly. “These ladies don’t own the cattle and won’t own them unless they win Joe Roark’s estate. Therefore, they cannot pledge them as your fee. According to the conditions set forth in the will, I’m authorized to pay you fifty dollars a month out of the funds allocated for this drive.”

  Frisco placed his hat on his head and stood. “Then we’re through talking.”

  “Wait.” Freddy’s mind raced. “If we win, we’ll own the longhorns.” She thought a minute. “If you’re as good as you claim you are, then you’ll agree to tie your money to the same conditions we’re bound to. If we win, you can have the damned cows; we’ll give them to you as your fee. But if you can’t get two thousand head to Abilene and we lose, then so do you. You don’t get the cows, you don’t get fifty dollars a month for your time and work, you get nothing. Just like us.” Her chin rose and her eyes flashed a challenge. “That’s a fair offer, Mr. Frisco.”

  “I agree,” Alex said in a strained voice. “If you’re unwilling to tie your fortune to ours, then good day to you, sir.”

  “You have one hell of a nerve,” Freddy couldn’t resist adding.

  He laughed, revealing a flash of white teeth. “I expect I do.” He smiled at all of them. “I’m as good as I claim. I’ll run two thousand steers into the Abilene yard.” He glanced at Luther. “Draw up the contract, Mr. Moreland. If we take in two thousand steers or more, I get the entire sales price. If we bring in one beeve less, you don’t owe me a cent. We all walk away with nothing.” He tipped his hat. “I’ll be in touch.” After a minute they heard the front door bang shut.

  Freddy sagged against the sofa back. A rush of confusing emotions pulsed at the base of her throat. “That arrogant so-and-so has forgotten who is working for whom!”

  “No, he hasn’t,” Alex said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “From now on Dal Frisco is the boss. We work in his outfit and do as he says.” She drew a deep breath. “You had a good idea, Freddy. I feel marginally better that you tied his ridiculous fee to his performance.”

  Surprise lifted her eyebrows, and Freddy felt an embarrassing rush of gratitude. She didn’t remember the last time Alex had paid her a compliment, assuming that Alex ever had.

  “He’s a tyrant.” Les slapped at her skirt as if something unpleasant had settled in the folds. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Ward that we entrusted our future into the hands of a drunk who thinks he’s some kind of royalty. And his fee!” A worried line settled between her eyebrows.

  Luther stood and began gathering his papers. “Well. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

  “For what we’re paying him, he’d better know what he’s doing.” The odd thing was that Freddy had emerged from the interview believing that he did. She couldn’t sort out why he irritated her, which only added to her annoyance. “We are actually going to take part in a cattle drive,” she said in a wondering voice. It hadn’t seemed possible. It still didn’t.

  The part of a cowhand would be challenging and physically demanding, but after a minute’s thought, she saw how she would play it. The heroine needed to display courage and endurance, needed to be what scripts described as plucky. And learning to rope a steer didn’t seem so overwhelmingly daunting when she reduced it to stage business.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that Dal Frisco made an unlikely hero for the scenes she was imagining. In fact, this entire cattle drive was stunningly miscast. If the miscasting hadn’t been so worrisome and potentially dangerous, she would have laughed out loud.

  When she emerged from her reverie, Luther had gone, and her sisters were rousing themselves from a shocked lethergy.

  Alex looked at Freddy. “There’s no point in moving back to your place in town. You might as well stay on here. This is where you’ll be learning to”—she waved a slender, listless hand—“do all those things Mr. Frisco mentioned.”

  Freddy’s heart sank. She had been counting the days until she could leave the ranch and get away from her sisters. Sighing, she said, “I’ll send someone to pick up the rest of my things.”

  How were they going to get through this without killing each other?

  Chapter 3

  How could she possibly manage? Any attempt to visualize herself participating in a cattle drive terrified Alex as much as the fear of losing her share of the inheritance.

  “Don’t think about it,” she whispered, pulling a warm shawl tighter around her shoulders.

  Because of a recent cold spell, the night air was chilly, and a slight breeze carried the odor of cattle and manure from the barn to the front porch, where she sat. As a child she had hated the pungent stink of cattle and the unsettling sense of limitless space. She still did. It occurred to her that she had spent most of her life dreaming about escaping from the smells and open spaces of Texas, and she had almost made it.

  Lifting a hand to her forehead, she closed her eyes. The differences between the East and West were profound. In Boston, people would be dressing for dinner at this hour, preparing to dine. Here, it was called supper, served indecently early, and no one dressed. Back East, good manners masked a fascinating game of subtleties. In the West, manners and etiquette surrendered to bluntness and convenience. What passed for society in Texas didn’t bear thinking about.

  What surprised her was how little things had changed during the five years she had been gone. The pervading stench of the cattle was the same, and the brush thickets appeared as dense and thorny. Aside from weathering, the ranch house hadn’t changed at all. The only one of Joe’s wives to leave no mark on the ranch house was Lola. And thank heaven for that.

  She couldn’t recall the woman’s name without shuddering. What on earth had Joe been thinking when he married Lola? He had condemned his daughters for unconventional behavior, then he’d brought home a woman so far beyond the pale that unconventional didn’t begin to describe her. A woman who would wear grey and reveal cleavage at her husband’s funeral. Another shudder twisted her lips.

  That Lola could end by owning the ranch, the cattle, Joe’s property investments, even Alex’s mother’s silver tea set, made her despair. She couldn’t stand the thought.

  What was she going to do about the cattle drive? No, don’t think about it yet.

  She had already dismissed Mrs. O’ Shane and everyone but her cook. Her carriage was gone and the matching bays she’d been so proud of. She had discreetly sold all her jewelry except the black pearls and her wedding ring. If Luther Moreland had not included the fare for her journey, she would have had to borrow money to afford the long trip home.

  It wasn’t fair that her inheritance was in doubt. It wasn’t fair that Payton had died and she had lost her leg. She gripped the arms of her wheelchair and fought a scream of outrage that burned in her throat. That she could feel like screaming shocked her, she who had never worn her emotions for all to see. Sometimes it felt as if she had lost more than her leg in the accident. She had also lost control, lost her famed composure, lost her spirit. These losses frightened her despite knowing that she deserved whatever punishment she suffered.

  “Are you warm enough?”

  Raising her head abruptly, she watched Les step into the light falling across the porch steps. “The house seemed stuffy tonight,” she said. “I wanted a breath of air.”

  “Usually, it isn’t so cold this time of year.” Les sat in one of the porch chairs. “I don’t know why Pa liked these chairs. I’ve yet to find one that’s comfortable.”

  It hadn’t been enough for Joe to surround himself with cattle on the range. He had to bring them to the house as well, in the form of furniture fashioned out of horns. The ugly chairs and tables made Alex long for her tastefully appointed home
in Boston. But unless she won her share of her father’s estate, her home would be the next item to be sold. It was the only thing left.

  “I’m waiting for Ward,” Les said, squinting through the darkness at the road. When Alex didn’t comment, Les squared her shoulders. “Ward isn’t handsome and polished like Payton was, or worldly, but he has his good qualities.”

  “I’m sure he does.” Until now Alex had forgotten that Les had accompanied her to the lecture in New Orleans where she first met Payton Mills. Slowly twisting her wedding ring around her finger, she remembered that night in New Orleans a lifetime ago. She had been well on her way toward spinsterhood, and beginning to accept that she would never find a man she wanted to marry. Then she had listened to Payton’s cultured voice and gazed into his fine dark eyes, and decided she could love him

  “I’m twenty-five,” Les said in a low voice. “If I don’t marry Ward, I’ll end up a spinster.”

  “You’ve had suitors,” Alex said uncomfortably.

  Les fixed her gaze on the dark road. “They were Pa’s choices, not mine.” She fell silent for several minutes. “I thought Pa needed me.”

  “I’m sure he did,” Alex murmured tactfully.

  “Then why did he marry Lola?” Les asked angrily. “Why did he bring her here? Do you know what it was like living with her? She didn’t care about Pa.” Her face twisted, her outrage still fresh. “She slept through breakfast and often through lunch, and some days she didn’t even get dressed. Other days she went to town and didn’t come home until late. It wasn’t a month before everyone was talking about her. Pa didn’t need her! All she did was humiliate him.”

  “Les… Father liked women. In his own way, he even liked us. There was a long gap between the death of your mother and Father’s marriage to Lola. He must have gotten lonely.”

  “He had me!”

  “He wanted a wife.” There was much about her father that Alex didn’t understand, but she did understand that Joe Roark had respected marriage and had genuinely grieved the loss of his three wives. That he had chosen to marry a fourth time hadn’t surprised her, only his choice did.