Taming The Lone Wolf. Joan Johnston
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still pinned against the wall. “You’ve been mauling this lady for a year?” He gathered up a bigger handful of Bud’s T-shirt.
“Wasn’t doin’ nothin’ she didn’t want,” Bud said. “Widow-woman needs a man more’n most.”
“A widow?” Stony’s glance darted to Tess.
“My husband was killed a year ago,” Tess said in response to his cocked brow.
He saw from the flash of pain in her eyes that it was still a raw wound. Her boss hadn’t done anything to help it heal. Far from it. Stony resisted the urge to slam Bud against the wall again. He forced himself to let go of Bud’s T-shirt and take a step back, afraid he would hurt the man if he held on to him much longer.
Stony wasn’t sure he had solved anything. Maybe he had made matters worse. He refused to ask Bud to keep the woman on, when it was clear if he did that Bud would continue to press unwanted attentions on his waitress. But Tess apparently wanted—maybe needed?—the job.
“What will you do now?” he asked Tess.
“Get my job back, if I can,” she answered with asperity. She walked over and straightened Bud’s rumpled T-shirt. “Come on, Bud. What do you say?”
She managed a crooked smile, but Stony saw her chin was trembling.
Bud shot a malicious look at Stony, then said to Tess, “You’re fired, honey. You can pick up your check at the end of the week.”
“But, Bud—”
Bud jerked his thumb toward the door. “Out.” Bud turned to Stony and said, “Now get out from behind my counter.”
Stony went back over the counter the way he had come. He glanced at the woman from the corner of his eye as he made his way back to his booth and sat down. He picked up his hamburger and took a bite, but it was cold, and he had trouble swallowing it.
He watched Tess argue in whispers with Bud and saw Bud vehemently shake his head. He watched her take off her apron and drape it over the counter before she headed for the kitchen. He waited for her to reappear. He wanted a chance to talk to her, to make sure she was going to be all right, to see if there was anything he could do to help. Although, with the kind of help he had offered so far, he wouldn’t be surprised if she turned him down.
He waited maybe two minutes. When Tess didn’t return, he threw some money on the table to cover his check, grabbed his shearling coat and Stetson off the antler coatrack and hurried outside to the snow-covered sidewalk to see if he could find her.
Stony wasn’t thinking about his vow to stay away from pretty women. He wasn’t thinking about anything except his need to make sure Tess would be able to make ends meet until she got another job. That should have been his first warning. Not that he would have paid attention to it. Stony was the kind of man who would stand bare-assed in a nest of rattlers just for the fun of it.
He stopped dead once he was outside and looked both ways. The snow was still coming down in large, windblown flakes that made it difficult to see very far. She was nearly to the end of Main Street, which was only one block long in the tiny town of Pinedale, walking with her head bent against the wind and her winter parka pulled tight around her.
“Hey!” he called. “Wait for me!”
She took one look at him and started to run.
* * *
TESS WAS TRYING HARD not to cry. For the past year she had been deflecting Bud’s attentions with flip humor. Only, last night her three-year-old daughter, Rose, had been sick, and Tess hadn’t slept much. When Bud had approached her, nothing witty had come to her tired mind. Then that awful man had interfered and made everything worse!
She had been fired.
The desperate nature of her situation was just now sinking in. She had no savings. She had no job. In a town this small in the middle of the off-season there wasn’t much likelihood of finding another. Especially if Bud kept his promise to make sure none of his friends in the restaurant business hired her. She didn’t even have the money for a bus ticket to somewhere else.
Damn you, Charlie Lowell! How could you lie to me? How could you be a thief when you knew what would happen to us if you got caught? How could you go and get yourself killed like that? And for rustling cattle! I hate you, Charlie! I hate you for dying and leaving me alone.
She should have taken one of the marriage offers she had gotten over the past year from the cowboys who came into the Buttermilk Café. Or the Pinedale police chief, Harry DuBois, who had proposed to her for the second time only last week. At least then she and Rose would have been sure of having a roof over their heads.
She liked Harry, and he was good-looking in a rugged Harrison Ford sort of way, but she hadn’t been able to feel anything—let alone love—for any man since Charlie had died. Besides, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be married again, not after what had happened with Charlie. She had been deliriously in love when she had married at sixteen. She was barely twenty, but she felt much older and wiser. She no longer gave her trust so freely or completely.
But if she wasn’t going to let a husband support her, she had to do a better job of it herself. She had barely been able to cope with her disillusionment and grief over Charlie’s death during the past year. She hadn’t done much planning for the future.
It seemed the moment was upon her. She was going to have to make some plans, and fast, or she and Rose were going to find themselves out on the street in the middle of a Wyoming winter.
“Hey! Wait for me!”
Tess glanced over her shoulder and saw it was that man from the café. He was coming after her! She wasn’t sure what his intentions were, but she didn’t plan to stick around and find out. She took off at a run, headed for Harry’s office. He would protect her from the madman following behind.
Maybe she would have made it if the sidewalk hadn’t been covered with a fresh dusting of snow that concealed the treacherous ice below. Or if she had been wearing a decent pair of snow boots instead of the cheap, leather-soled shoes she wore for work. Tess hadn’t taken three steps when her feet skidded out from under her. She flailed her arms in a vain attempt to catch her balance and reached out with a hand to break her fall on the cement walk. It turned out to be a fatal error.
Tess heard the bone in her wrist crack as soon as her weight came down on her arm. She cried out in agony as her body settled on the cold, hard ground.
The interfering stranger was beside her a moment later, down on one knee, his dark brown eyes filled with concern.
“Now look what you did!” she accused.
“What I did?”
“If you hadn’t been chasing me—”
“I wasn’t chasing you. I was coming after you to—”
“This is all your fault!” she cried, hysterical with the realization that with a broken wrist she wouldn’t be able to work for weeks. Not to mention the fact that she had no health insurance and no idea how she was going to pay a doctor to fix her up.
The tears she had so ably kept under control through her most recent disaster could no longer be contained. She fought the sob that threatened, but it broke free with a horrible wrenching sound. Then she was crying in earnest.
She felt the stranger pick her up, being very careful of her wrist, which he settled in her lap, and stand, cuddling her against his chest.
“It’s all right, Tess. You’re going to be fine. I’m going to take care of you.”
She should have resisted. She should have told him in no uncertain terms that she could take very good care of herself. Instead she turned her face to his chest and surrendered to his strength, thinking how good it felt to give her burdens over to someone else, even if it was only for a few moments.
“I’m taking you to my Jeep,” he explained