Montana Wrangler
By Charlotte Carter
Chapter One
Tears blurred Paige Barclay’s vision as she stood on the wide plank porch of her grandpa Henry’s house in the high country of western Montana not far from Glacier National Park.
She hadn’t cried at her sister’s funeral that morning. Their mother had always said crying was a waste of time and energy. Now, alone with her thoughts and her sense of guilt and regret, Paige’s tears were hard to hold back.
Paige eyed the horses shifting around in the nearby corral—her grandfather’s stable of horses used in his Bear Lake Outfitters operation. Their tails flashed as they flicked flies away. They stomped their feet. Occasionally they snorted or tossed their heads from side to side as though warning Paige to keep her distance.
Even from several hundred feet, she caught the earthy animal scent, which almost overwhelmed the more pleasant perfume of pine trees.
She wrinkled her nose. Did everyone in Montana have to own a horse?
She’d been terrified of horses almost as long as she could remember. Their size. Their big teeth. And that she’d been dumped from the saddle when she was five years old. A memory she couldn’t forget and one that still gave her nightmares. A broken leg. Pain. Surgery that left a scar she could still see.
Her mother upset and angry because she had to stay home to take care of Paige instead of working at the family’s hardware store.
Everything about Bear Lake and the outfitting business was entirely different from Paige’s life and her career in Seattle. In the same way, Paige and her younger sister Krissy had had little in common.
Krissy had loved horses, loved riding them, the faster the better. Four days ago, not far from here, riding a horse too fast, jumping the horse too far, had killed Krissy.
Growing up, everyone had said Krissy was the pretty sister. The fun-loving sister. Paige was the good sister. The plain sister.
Being pretty hadn’t done Krissy much good.
“My sister shouldn’t have died so young,” she said aloud, as though accusing the horses in the corral.
“If she hadn’t been riding so recklessly,” a smooth baritone voice announced, “Krissy wouldn’t have died, and I wouldn’t have had to put a good horse down.”
Thinking that she’d been alone, she started. Turning, she discovered Jay Red Elk had walked silently up onto the porch and was now looming over her. Considering she was a good five foot seven or eight, depending on which pair of high heels she wore, that was quite a feat.
Of course, her grandfather’s wrangler and trail guide stood well over six feet. His unreadable expression and more than a hint of his Blackfoot heritage in his chiseled cheekbones made him an intimidating figure. Not that she had any intention of backing down to him.
She realized during her occasional visits to Montana in the past few years she hadn’t paid much attention to Jay and had purposefully kept her distance from him and his horses. Mostly his horses, she realized.
Now she took a closer look at his hard, potently masculine physique, his closed expression and felt a shiver of awareness scurry down her spine.
“Krissy was reckless from the day she was born,” Paige admitted, her throat tight with the tears she hadn’t shed. The wildness and rebellion ingrained in Krissy’s personality had culminated in her pregnancy at age fifteen. Their parents had sent her here to live with their grandparents and to raise her son, Bryan. Apparently the change of scenery hadn’t tamed her spirit.
