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November, and that shaky border before winter didn’t last long. Right now the sun was shining over Three Rocks like an angel. Horses were cropping in the near pasture, and the men were going about their duties in shirtsleeves. But drift fences needed to be checked, small grains harvested. The cattle that weren’t to be wintered over had to be culled out and shipped.
    But his gaze skimmed over paddocks and pastures to the rise, toward Mercy land. He imagined Willa Mercy had more than work on her mind this morning. “Nothing against your lawyering skills, Nate, but that legal bullshit isn’t going to hold up, is it?”
    “The terms of the will are clear, and very precise.”
    “It’s still lawyer crap.”
    They’d known each other too long for Nate to take offense. “She can fight it, but it’ll be uphill and rough all the way.”
    Ben looked southwest again, pictured Willa Mercy, shook his head. He sat as comfortably in the saddle as another man would in an easy chair. After thirty years of ranch life, it was more his natural milieu. He didn’t have Nate’s height, but stood a level six feet, his wiry build ropey with muscle. His hair was a golden brown, gilded by hours in the sun and left long enough to tease the collar of his chambray shirt. His eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s and often just as cold in a face that had the weathered, craggy good looks of a man comfortable in the out-of-doors. A horizontal scar marred his chin, a souvenir of his youth and a slip of the hand when he’d been playing mumblety-peg with his brother.
    Ben ran his hand over the scar now, an absentminded, habitual gesture. He’d been amused when Nate had first informed him of the will. Now that it was coming into effect, it didn’t seem quite so funny.
    “How’s she taking it?”
    “Hard.”
    “Shit. I’m sorry for that. She loved that old bastard, Christ knows why.” He took off his hat, raked his fingers through his hair, adjusted it again. “And it’s got to stick in her craw that it’s me.”
    Nate grinned. “Well, yeah, but I think it’d sit about the same with anybody.”
    No, Ben mused, not quite. He wondered if Willa knew that her father had once offered him ten thousand acres of prime bottomland to marry his daughter. Like some sort of fucking king, Ben thought now, trying to merge kingdoms.
    Mercy would give it away, he thought, squinting into the sun. He’d give it away rather than ease his hold on the reins.
    “She doesn’t need either one of us to run Mercy,” Ben said. “But I’ll do what it says to do. And hell . . .” His grin spread slow, arrogant, and shifted the planes on his face. “It’ll be entertaining to have her butting heads with me every five minutes. What are the other two like?”
    “Different.” Thoughtful, Nate leaned back on the fender of his Range Rover. “The middle one—that’s Lily—she spooks easy. Looks like she’d jump out of her skin if you made a quick move. Her face was all bruised up.”
    “She have an accident?”
    “Looked like she’d accidentally run into somebody’s fists. She’s got an ex-husband. And she’s got a restraining order on him. He’s been yanked in a few times for wife battering.”
    “Fucker.” If there was one thing worse than a man who abused his horse, it was a man who abused a woman.
    “She jumped on staying,” Nate continued, and in his quiet, methodical way began to roll a cigarette. “I have to figure she’s looking at it as a good place to hide out. The older one, she’s slicker. Hails out of LA, Italian suit, gold watch.” He slipped the pouch of Drum back in his pocket, struck a match. “She writes movies and is royally pissed at the idea of being stuck out in the wilderness for a year. But she wants the money it’ll bring her. She’s on her way back to California to pack up.”
    “She and Will ought to get along like a couple of she-cats.”
    “They’ve already been at each other.” Nate blew out smoke