by Janet Dailey
Immediately her dark eyes were dancing. “Does that mean I’ve been invited back?”
“It’s one of the unwritten rules of the West—never turn a visitor away from your door; you might need the hospitality reciprocated sometime.” He was careful not to make it sound like anything more than courtesy. “I stayed many times in your father’s home. You’re welcome to stay in mine.”
A lone rider approached the camp from the opposite direction of the herd. Range-alert, Ty noticed him and centered his gaze on the rider to identify him. Tara looked in the same direction to see what had distracted him.
“Is something wrong?” The rider looked like just another cowboy to Tara.
“No. Nothing’s wrong.” But Ty wondered what Culley O’Rourke was doing this far into Calder land.
For two months, he’d spent night and day with the man, shared meals and chores, yet there’d never been any sharing of confidences. O’Rourke might have learned to tolerate a Calder, but he hadn’t learned to like one. He kept to himself, on rare instances coming to The Homestead to visit Maggie, but always leaving as soon as Ty or his father arrived. There seemed to be a truce of sorts that existed, or, more accurately, a wary neutrality on both sides.
13
It wasn’t considered polite to ride a horse into camp where it might possibly foul the ground where the crew ate. Instead of leaving his horse tied at the picket line with the other mounts, O’Rourke tied his separately, wrapping the reins around the rear bumper of a truck.
Although it didn’t appear to be deliberately done, O’Rourke approached the open end of the traveling cook kitchen always keeping a vehicle between himself and any onlookers, as if shielding himself from prying eyes. Ty no longer believed it was caused by shyness. It seemed more likely a desire to escape being observed. O’Rourke didn’t like people watching him.
“Hello, Culley,” Ty greeted him when he rounded the cook truck.
“Ty.” He nodded, his eyes shifting curiously to Tara. The outdoors had tanned his skin to a brown shade, making the gray in his hair more pronounced and the blackness of his eyes more compelling. O’Rourke was always careful about his appearance, wearing clean clothes and shaving every day. After two years, Ty was convinced his uncle was a little on the strange side, but harmless.
“What brings you down this way?”
“I got tired of cookin’ for myself and remembered how good Tucker’s food tasted.” He looked at Tara again and briefly gripped the point of his hat brim. “Ma’am.”
With a vague reluctance, Ty made the introduction O’Rourke was so obviously seeking. His stare remained fixed on her, which made Ty uneasy.
“You look a lot like my sister,” he said finally.
At a distance, Ty supposed there was a resemblance between Tara and his mother. Both had dark hair and a small build. He wondered if that hadn’t prompted O’Rourke to ride in, believing he had an ally in camp, only to discover he’d been mistaken.
“Think I’ll find out when Tucker’s going to have lunch ready.” O’Rourke backed away at the first opening and ducked around behind the truck.
“It doesn’t seem possible that man is your uncle,” Tara murmured.
“Culley’s had a hard time of it, one way or another,” was all Ty replied. When he heard footsteps, he wasn’t surprised to see his father coming toward them.
“What’s O’Rourke doing here?”
“According to him, he got hungry for Tucker’s cooking.”
With Tara present, his father didn’t pursue the subject. “The crew’s going to break for the noon meal shortly.” He glanced inquisitively at the girl. “Do you want to stay, or would you rather go back to The Homestead for lunch?”
“I’d rather stay here, if I won’t be in the way.”
“You won’t be,” he assured her but shot a curious look at Ty to see if he was of the same mind. Ty made no sign of objection.
“I’ll let Tucker know we’ll be having company for lunch.” Which was another way of saying his father intended to warn the men to watch their language.
A line had already formed at the washbasins when Jessy answered the cook’s call to eat. Her clothes were stiff with dried mud that broke off in crumbles as she walked. Her leg muscles ached from constantly struggling against the sucking mire. She made a halfhearted stab at wiping the gumbolike accumulation off her boots onto the grass, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. She moved up in line.
“We need some clean water!” A cowboy at the basin impatiently bawled out the request. “Half of Montana’s in this one!”
“Yeah!” the rider behind him echoed. “We already had a damned mud bath oncet.”
The dirty water was thrown out as the rotund cook came huffing and heaving with a fresh pail to fill the basin. He was as round as a potbellied stove, but solid as one, too. His neck was lost in the massive shoulders, and his bald head was small, oddly out of proportion with the rest of his body.
“We got a lady with us, boys, so watch your language, or I’ll be knockin’ some heads together,” Tucker warned.
“D’ya hear that? He called our Jessy a lady!”
“How-de-do, ma’am.” One of the cowboys tipped his hat to her in exaggerated courtesy, and Jessy mockingly curtsied back.
“Tucker ain’t talkin’ about her, ya damned fool!” Sid Ramsey declared and batted at the man’s hat. “The lady is that dark-eyed lovely sittin’ over there with Ty.”
Jessy turned to look in the direction Ramsey had indicated, and stared like all the others. She heard the low, suppressed wolf whistles and the murmured comments of flattery and lust the men exchanged to keep their virile images intact among their peers.
But the sight of the raven-haired girl had the opposite effect on Jessy. It didn’t loosen her tongue. Instead, her silence became deeper and deeper. A lot could be read into the indifference Ty was showing the girl sitting beside him, paying her none of the ardent attention the cowboys around Jessy would so willingly have done. Ty barely looked at her. His expression was all closed up, everything shut in. Jessy could only think of one reason why Ty wasn’t smiling and talking freely with a girl as lovely as this one. He’d been hurt by her in the past.
While the others were speculating about the girl’s identity, Jessy was wondering why the girl was here. Behind all that beauty, there was a clever mind. There was a motive for her being here, and it wasn’t a friendly social call. Jessy stepped up to the basin and dunked her hands into the murky gray water, scrubbing with the rough bar of Lava.
When it came time to eat, instead of loosely scattering around the camp, the hands began clustering in the center with the girl’s campstool as the focal point. Nearly every one of them nodded to her, preening a little under the small smile she gave each of them. A couple of them nudged Ty, trying to prod him into an introduction. He was vaguely irritated by the stir she was creating among the men, even though he’d seen her cause the same kind of sensation many times before. She had the kind of beauty that made a man forget he had good sense. And he was angered at the way the men sniffed around her like a pack of fools, because he saw their weakness in himself.
An introduction couldn’t be avoided, but Ty waited until the last man had left the grub line and found himself a place to sit. There wasn’t any need to call attention to himself to begin, since all of them were waiting expectantly for him to do it.
“All you boys know E. J. Dyson. This is his daughter, Tara Lee.” Ty omitted any reference to his past engagement to her. The regular riders would make the connection anyway. He glanced briefly at Tara. “I won’t bother to tell you the names of this sorry lot of so-called cowboys. All of them think they’re big, bad men, but there’s a couple I oughta warn you about.”
He looked around the suddenly downturned faces, agitation spraying through the ranks at the kind of outrageous remark he might be intending to make about them to this vision of beauty. There was a dead silence.
“Tiny Yates, the guilty-looking one
over there.” Ty pointed him out to her. “He’s a married man, but a lot of the boys claim that he keeps getting their wives mixed up with his.” Notoriously tongue-tied around women, Tiny Yates went red from his neck up. “And Billy Bob Martin beats his dog every time he gets drunk. Liquor makes him downright mean.” Someone choked on his coffee at that accusation. Billy Bob avoided drink like the plague. It only took a couple of beers to have him blubbering like a baby. Crying was a bigger sin than sobriety. “Ramsey struts around like he’s cock of the walk. He’s always crowing the minute the sun peeks up in the morning.”
No one budged, afraid of drawing Ty’s attention. The embarrassed and uneasy silence lay heavily in the air. Tara realized none of the things Ty had said were true, but she couldn’t fathom his reason for making everyone so uncomfortable.
No one lingered over his food. They all ate quickly and began spilling away to dump their dirty dishes in the wreck pan. Ty observed their hasty departures with a faint grin of satisfaction.
“Why did you do that?” Tara murmured.
“It’s taken me a long time to get even with that bunch,” he replied and swilled his coffee.
“Get even for what?” She didn’t know about the merciless hazings he’d endured at the hands of those same men.
“Nothing.” Ty drained the cup. “It was just a joke among friends.”
“Some joke.” Tara thought he’d been unreasonably harsh on them. She’d never seen this side of him and didn’t quite know how to take it.
“It’s a rough brand of humor up here.” He shrugged but didn’t attempt to explain that none of the men bore him any ill will because of the things he’d said about them. Nothing personal had been intended, and they knew it. There was a slow ebb of men back to their horses. Ty flattened a hand on his knee and pushed himself upright against the desire that tugged at him to stay by her side. “Time I was getting back to work.”
“Ty.” She was on her feet, laying a hand on his arm to detain him a minute longer. As he looked down at her, she moved closer. He breathed in the clean scent of her body, its sweetness a soft contrast to the rankness of his own.
“Careful. You’ll get dirty,” he warned to push her away before temptation overwhelmed him.
“Do you think I care?” She laughed but took a step backwards. “Do you mind if I stay and watch the branding this afternoon?”
“Do as you please, Tara. You always have.” Ty was curt, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference if she stayed here or returned to The Homestead. She’d still be on his mind.
“Then I’ll stay.” Shrewdly she had observed the emotion that had sharpened his voice when he’d struggled to contain it.
“A piece of advice. Stay well back and upwind. It’s a dirty, smelly business.”
The afternoon’s work had barely started when Sid Ramsey got two fingers fouled in the rope as he made his dally on a calf and broke both of them, clean as dry twigs snapping. A torrent of blue language rushed from him, a combination of pain and anger at making a fool’s mistake like that.
It took a couple of minutes to get enough slack in the rope to unwind the wrap pinning his fingers to the saddle horn. Hunched over the saddle, Ramsey cradled his hand against his body and rode to the chuck wagon. A roper short, Art Trumbo yanked Jessy off the ground crew and ordered her into a saddle to fill the position.
Shaking out a loop, she adjusted her grip on the rope and walked her horse toward the herd to pick out an unbranded calf. Another horse and rider came alongside her. She glanced sideways at Ty and saw him looking toward the chuck wagon. She knew what drew his attention that way, and it wasn’t Ramsey.
“She’s the one who jilted you, isn’t she?” Jessy looked straight ahead and said what others dared only to think. His mouth tightened, offering no reply. “I expect she wants to patch things up. Are you going to take her back?” She was very cool and very calm, but he gave no sign of having heard her question. “You’re a fool, Ty Calder,” she said and jabbed a spur into her horse, sending it after a calf.
Ramsey rode up to the chuck wagon and swung down. “Hey, Tuck!” he bellowed for the cook. “Bring your black bag! I broke my damned fingers.” He sallied around Tara, an arm hunched against his belly. “Beg pardon, ma’am.”
A witness to his calamity, Tara followed after him, drawn by that curious fascination humans have for one of their kind in pain, attracted and repelled by it at the same time. She stood to one side and watched him gingerly pull off the leather glove, sucking in his breath with a hissing sound.
The forefinger and middle finger were both discolored and starting to swell. Tara drew back slightly, grimacing at the sight. When she glanced at his face, the skin was stretched tautly across his bones, ridging it white.
“You need to go to the hospital and have that X-rayed,” she murmured.
“X-rayed? Hell, I already know it’s broke.” He tossed her a tight grin, scoffing at her suggestion.
“But they need to be set,” Tara insisted.
“I don’t need no doctor to do that. Ya just got to pop them back together and wrap them up with some tape.” After thus assuring her of the simpleness of the matter, he turned to the ageless cook. “Ya got some of those ice-cream sticks in there?”
In horrified fascination, Tara watched the pudgy hands of the cook sandwich the broken appendages between a pair of short, narrow splints. Then Ramsey nodded to him. She heard the sickening snap of bones popping into place. Ramsey grunted, beads of sweat popping out all over his suddenly white face. Tara felt nauseated and weak. She swayed a little until the cook gripped her elbow.
“You okay?” The small eyes studied her closely.
“I’m fine.” She stiffened determinedly and turned away, not staying around to watch the splints being taped into position.
The primitiveness of the incident had shaken her. She’d been raised in the conventional world where professional help was sought for the most minor medical problem. It was unthinkable to her that bones would be set without the aid of a doctor. For an instant she was assailed by doubts about being in such uncivilized country.
But she had only to look at Ty to have her decision reinforced. Even though she had been raised in surroundings where she had been kept safe and protected, it didn’t mean she couldn’t be daring when the occasion demanded it. And she had dared to come to the ranch for the sole purpose of persuading Ty to take her back, although she was determined to conceal it behind a lightness of mood.
Her reasons for changing her mind about marrying him were nebulous, and Tara regarded them as immaterial, so she avoided analyzing them to find the truth. The decision was made. All her attention was now focused on making it come to pass. She intended to have him, even if it meant surrendering everything.
A slim, long-haired rider approached the herd alongside Ty. Tara didn’t realize the rider was female until the face turned and she had a clear view of the classically refined cheekbone and jaw, smooth as honey. For the first time, she considered the possibility of local competition.
All morning the crew had worked in mire up to a horse’s hock. By late afternoon, the sun and an incessant wind had dried it to a cementlike hardness, creating ruts and ridges to trip and stumble over. The hard, punishing ground used up a lot of horses; riders changed frequently to keep their mounts from becoming sore-legged.
Taking his saddle and pad from one horse, Ty threw it onto a buckskin and pulled the surcingle through the cinch ring. Saddle leather groaned behind him. He threw a look over his shoulder and noted his father, mounted on an iron-gray gelding only a couple of feet away.
“Want something?” Ty asked and ran the cinch up tight.
“Tara will only be here a couple more days. It’s up to you whether you want to come home tonight or stay here with the crew.”
“Okay.” Reaching under the horse’s belly, he buckled the back cinch.
His father chirruped to the gray and reined it in a half-circle. Metal shoes clanked as the horse wa
s lifted into a canter. Unobserved, Ty paused in his saddling to consider the option his father had given him—to be with Tara or not.
The things he’d told her today were true. The wanting hadn’t stopped, but the bleeding had. For a change, she was doing the pursuing instead of the other way around. Ty took perverse satisfaction in that. Jessy had called him a fool, but how could a man want something for so long and not take it when it was finally offered to him?
The sound of her laughter drifted into the dining room, reminding Ty of the soft tinkle of bells. He wondered what his young sister had said to make Tara laugh. With an effort, he pulled his gaze from the doorway where she had gone, carrying dinner dishes to the kitchen.
All through dinner, the conversation had been lively and animated, his mother and Tara comparing impressions of European countries both had visited and enthralling Cathleen with reminiscences of their adventures. The three had behaved more like sisters. When it came time to clear the table, it seemed perfectly natural that Tara help, although Ty couldn’t recall ever seeing her do domestic chores before.
He rubbed a hand across his mouth in a gesture that was both thoughtful and troubled. The blue smoke of a cigar drifted lazily above the linen-covered table. Glancing to the head of the table, Ty saw his father watching him.
“Don’t make a rash decision, Ty.”
The line of his mouth turned grim. “I think FU go outside and get some air.” He pushed his chair away from the table and rose. The house was too small with Tara in it to hold them both without something rash happening.
On the wide veranda, Ty paused to light a cigarette, then wandered to the edge and leaned against a tall white pillar. The black sky was alive with stars; one fell, making a white scratch. Overhead, a full moon gleamed with the luster of a giant pearl set among the diamond stars.
Dark and vibrant as the sky, soft and tantalizing as a breeze, Tara was a nightsong, full of all its mystery and elusive beauty. She was the essence of a man’s dreams, feminine and alluring, as seductive as the night.