The Wrangler's Woman. Ruth Jean Dale

this,” she announced, fixing the little culprit with a condemning eye. “Did you do that on purpose, Peter Burke?”

      Petey caught his lower lip between baby teeth and shook his head solemnly. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I just goofed.”

      Muriel’s scowl transformed into an unwilling grin. “I swear, you take after the rest of the men in your family,” she declared, flopping mop strings around in the white mess. “Just get by on charm, which is what all you Burkes do.”

      Grandpa winked at son and grandson. “Charm only gets us so far, right, fellas?”

      Travis shrugged and Jack groaned. His grandfather had been married and divorced three times, and his father twice. One of the main reasons Jack had never taken the marital plunge was because of the rotten family track record where women were concerned.

      When Muriel had withdrawn, Travis returned to the subject at hand without missing a beat. “The thing I don’t get is, what happened to all Miss Elsie’s money and family jewels? Even a fast worker like Wil Keene would have had trouble blowing it all in less than two years. If he was spending big money, it sure wasn’t on anything a man could see, especially not that ranch.”

      “He coulda been a closet gambler,” Austin speculated. “Or maybe he invested in a lot of bad stocks. I seem to recall a certain someone who tried to invest in the awl bidness a buncha years back and got took to the cleaners.”

      Travis lowered his brows in warning; his losses had been so large that the entire family was in an uproar about it for months. Jack had been a kid at the time, but he remembered it well.

      “Whatever,” Travis said. “Keene was stupid not to sell that ranch when he had the chance. It sure woulda spared them women a whole lot of grief.”

      “I don’t know,” Jack said mildly. “They seem awful determined to make a go of it, and I, for one, wish them well.” He was thinking of Dani and the intensity of her determination to make the Bar K a success. Surely anyone who cared that much could make almost anything work. “It may take a miracle but… I think the Keene sisters might be able to make something out of the Bar K again.”

      Austin obviously did not see it that way. “You’re pulling my laig.” He scowled at his grandson. “They couldn’t make a go of it even if they had plenty of money behind them, which they ain’t. Besides which, nobody’s gonna work for them, just for starters. And where, I ask you, are they gonna find dudes? Us, on the other hand…” He puffed out his chest. “We’re turnin’ reservations away.”

      “Maybe we should turn a few of them toward the Bar K.”

      “Not only no, but hell no. Look, you just tend to your own knittin’ and stay away from them girls. Women are nothing but trouble, as ever’ last one of us knows to our sorrow. And them Keene women are bound to be twice as bad.”

      “I don’t happen to agree.”

      Splat! A big glob of gravy struck the rim of Jack’s plate and splattered across the shiny wood beyond the plastic place mat. He looked up sharply to find Petey holding a spoon catapult fashion in his chubby, childish hands.

      His smile was beatific and he said but a single word: “Oops!”