Chapter 6

      “So tell us what brings a pretty California beach girl like yourself to our desolate Wyoming wilderness.”

      Matt sat forward so he could hear Ellie’s answer across the table. If he had asked that question, he grumped to himself, she probably would have snapped at him to mind his own business. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all that his brother wanted to nose around through her past.

      Instead, she smiled at Jesse, seated to her left. “I’m afraid there weren’t too many beaches around Bakersfield.”

      “Bakersfield? Is that where you’re from?” Cassie asked.

      If he hadn’t been watching her so intently, Matt would have missed the way her smile slid away and the barest shadow of old pain flickered in her green eyes for just a moment before she shifted her gaze to the full plate in front of her. “Until I was seven. After that, I moved around a lot.”

      What happened when she was seven? He wondered. And why did she phrase it that way? I moved around a lot, not My family moved around a lot?

      Before he could ask, Jesse spoke. “Even if you’re not a beach girl, you’re still the best-looking thing to share our Thanksgiving dinner since I can remember.”

      She laughed, rolling her eyes a little at the compliment, while Matt battled a powerful urge to casually reach over and shove his brother’s face into his mashed potatoes.

      He didn’t want to admit it bugged the hell out of him the way Jesse flirted with her all through dinner, hanging on her every word and making sure her glass was always full.

      Ellie didn’t seem to mind. She teased him right back, smiling and laughing at him like she’d never done with Matt.

      Not that he cared. He was just worried about her getting a broken heart, that’s all. Maybe somebody ought to warn her about Jesse. His little brother wasn’t a bad sort. Not really. In fact, for being such a wild, out-of-control son of a gun after their parents died, Jess turned out pretty okay.

      Matt would be the first one to admit the kid did a fine job protecting the good people of Salt River as the chief of police, a whole hell of a lot better than the last chief, who’d spent more time lining his own pockets than he did fighting crime.

      But Jess still had a well-earned reputation with the ladies as a love ’em and leave ’em type. He rarely dated a woman longer than a few weeks, and when he did, she was usually the kind of girl their mother would have described as “faster than she ought to be.”

      ’Course, it was none of his business if Ellie Webster wanted to make a fool of herself over a charmer like Jesse James Harte, he reminded himself.

      “So what brought you out here?” the charmer in question asked her again.

      “My mom always wanted to move to the mountains and be a cowgirl,” Ellie’s daughter offered, helping herself to more candied yams.

      A delicate pink tinged the doc’s cheeks. “Thanks for sharing that, sweetheart.”

      “What?” Dylan asked, all innocence. “That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

      She laughed ruefully. “You’re right. I did. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to live and work in the Rockies. I met Ben Nichols when I was giving a lecture a few years ago. Afterward, when he told me about Star Valley and his practice here, I told him how much I envied him and casually mentioned I had always dreamed of living out here. I never imagined he would offer to sell his practice to me when he retired.”

      So that explained what brought her to Wyoming. What interested him was why a tiny little thing like her would choose such a physically demanding job as a large-animal vet in the first place. If she wanted to be a vet, she would have been better off with little things like dogs and cats instead of having to muscle a half-ton of steer into a chute.

      He didn’t think she’d appreciate the question, so he asked another one. “Where were you working before?”

      She shifted her gaze across the table to him as if she’d forgotten he was sitting there. “I worked at a clinic in the Monterey area. That’s on the central coast of California—so I guess you were right, Jesse. Technically I suppose you could call me a beach girl, although I rarely had a chance to see it.”

      “I’ve heard that’s a beautiful area,” Cassie said.

      “It is. Pebble Beach is just south of it, and Carmel-by-the-Sea.”

      “How many cattle operations did you find in the middle of all those golf courses and tourist traps?” he asked abruptly, earning a curious look from Cassie.

      “Not many, although there are a few farther inland. My clients were mostly horses—thoroughbreds and jumpers and pleasure horses.”

      The conversation turned then to the physical differences between working horses and riding horses and then, with much prompting by Dylan, onto the best choice for a pleasure horse for a nine-year-old girl. Matt contented himself listening to the conversation and watching Ellie interact with his family.

      Even after three years of marriage, Melanie had never fit in half as well. He felt vaguely guilty for the thought, but it was nothing less than the truth. She and Cassie had fought like cats and dogs from the beginning, and Jess had despised her.

      So much for his grand plan to give his younger siblings more of a stable home environment by bringing home a wife.

      He should have known from the first night he brought her home after their whirlwind courtship and marriage at the national stock show in Denver that he had made a disastrous mistake. She spent the entire evening bickering with Cassie and completely ignoring Jess.

      But by then it was too late, they were already married. It took him three more years of the situation going from bad to worse for him to admit to himself how very stupid he had been.

      He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

      He hated thinking about it, about what a fool he had been, so he yanked his mind off the topic. “Everything tastes great, as usual,” he said instead to Cassie.

      She grinned suddenly. “Remember that first year after Mom and Daddy died when you tried to cook Thanksgiving dinner?”

      Jess turned his attention long enough from Ellie to shudder and add his own jab. “I remember it. My stomach still hasn’t forgiven me. The turkey was tougher than roasted armadillo.”

      “And the yams could have been used to tar the barn roof.”

      He rolled his eyes as the girls giggled. Jess and Cassie teased him mercilessly about that dinner. Usually it didn’t bother him—but then again, usually he didn’t have Ellie Webster sitting across from him listening to the conversation with