CHAPTER FOUR

      THAT NIGHT, DELSEY had gone up to bed when Ren came in with a bag of partridges. He put them in the kitchen sink.

      “Just leave them there,” he said when he noticed Merrie watching television in the living room. “Delsey can deal with them in the morning. Good night.”

      “Good night,” she called after him.

      Well, at least he was speaking to her, Merrie thought wistfully. She finished watching her program, then turned the television off.

      She was about to switch the light off in the kitchen when she remembered the partridges in the sink. It would be a shame to leave them there all night and expect poor Delsey to dress them even before she could start breakfast the next morning.

      She pulled up a trash can and went to work. It didn’t take long. She had them dressed and in baggies in the fridge. She dealt with the refuse, taking it outside to the garbage can, so the men could haul it off to the county landfill. They took a load most days.

      She went to bed, feeling a sense of accomplishment. It was a rare feeling for a woman who’d hardly ever lived, except in the shadow of a tyrant.

      * * *

      SHE WENT DOWNSTAIRS to breakfast. Voices came up the staircase.

      “I left them right there in the damned sink!” Ren growled. “I can’t think what became of them.”

      “They’re in the fridge,” Merrie said.

      He glared at her. “You don’t put dead birds...”

      “Ren?” Delsey held up the Ziplock bags with the dressed partridges in them.

      He frowned. His eyes snapped back to Merrie with a question in them.

      “Mandy taught me how,” she said simply. “She’s our housekeeper, back home, although she’s more like a mother. She thought we needed to know how to do more than just cook. She even taught us how to dress chickens.”

      Ren was fascinated. She didn’t seem the sort of woman who’d take to such a basic sort of occupation. She looked fragile, citified, as if she’d faint at the sight of blood. But Grandy’s wound hadn’t sent her swooning. She’d watched tapes of branding without flinching. Now, here she was field dressing game. He wasn’t sure he’d ever known a woman besides Delsey who could do that. He tried to picture Angie, in her Paris gowns, soiling her hands with bird feathers in a sink.

      “If it bothers you that much, I can glue the feathers back on,” Merrie began outrageously.

      He hid the smile the words engendered. “Full of surprises, aren’t you, Miss Grayling?”

      “Just one or two, Mr. Colter.” She frowned. “Colter. There was a mountain man, Jim Bridger’s protégé, they said, named John Colter. I heard a song about him on an old album my mother had.”

      “Yes. He discovered fumeroles and hot springs on the Shoshone River near Cody, as the story goes,” Ren related as they sat down to breakfast. “They nicknamed it Colter’s Hell, although most people thought he was spinning a tall tale until they actually saw it.”

      “I’ve never been there,” Merrie said.

      “Yellowstone National Park is near there. It’s beautiful,” Delsey remarked. “Pass the strawberry preserves, there’s a dear.”

      Merrie handed them to her. “It’s a place I’d love to see. Yellowstone, and the Little Big Horn Battlefield, and the museum.”

      “More history,” Ren remarked.

      Merrie smiled softly. “I live on YouTube. I’ve been on tours of all those places, but I’d love to see them in person one day. Especially the battlefield. Mama said that one of our relatives actually was in the fight.”

      “In the cavalry?” he asked.

      She cleared her throat. “Not exactly.”

      He paused in the act of lifting the spoon from his coffee cup and stared at her.

      “My great-great-great-grandfather was a full-blooded Oglala Lakota.”

      His eyebrows arched as he studied her closely.

      “I know, I don’t look it. But my mother’s father had black hair and eyes and very dark skin. It was from her father’s side that we got our blood.”

      Ren pursed his lips and chuckled. “One of my ancestors was Northern Cheyenne.”

      “They fought the Lakota,” she mused.

      “Tooth and nail. Well, usually, except at the Little Bighorn, when they joined together to fight Custer and his men.”

      She ate a spoonful of Delsey’s delicious scrambled eggs. “How’s Hurricane?” she asked.

      He gave her a cold glance. It still rankled that she’d been able to do something with a horse that he couldn’t. “Healing,” was all he said.

      She just nodded. He made his antagonism for her so obvious. It was uncomfortable.

      He finished breakfast, threw down the last swallow of his coffee and got to his feet.

      “Wear a muffler,” Delsey said without looking up.

      “Oh, for God’s sake,” he bit off.

      “Wear a muffler,” she repeated. “You’re still not well.”

      He muttered something about overprotective mother hens. But he got a scarf and wrapped it around his neck before he put on his coat and hat.

      Delsey got up and fetched a big thermos. “Hot coffee. It’ll keep your insides warm.”

      “My insides are already warm.” He grimaced, bent and kissed her wrinkled cheek. “Thanks,” he said gruffly.

      Merrie didn’t lift her eyes until he was out the door and gone. She sipped coffee with a wistful glance at Delsey. “I set him off just by being in the house.” She sighed. “He really dislikes me.”

      “It wouldn’t matter who you were, child,” Delsey said with a smile. “That she-cat razed his pride,