by Janet Dailey
“I already know which gown I’m going to take.” She was busy planning. “Where’s Stricklin? I’ll need to let him know I’ll be coming with them.”
“I haven’t seen him since breakfast this morning.” He should have guessed Strickiin would be attending the dinner. Dyson never went anywhere without his second pair of ears.
“He might be in his room, working on those reports for Daddy.” Tara headed for the door, belatedly blowing Ty a kiss. “See you tomorrow, Ty darling.”
Ty was slower to leave the room.
The drone of an airplane broke the afternoon quiet. Ty reined his horse in atop a rise and looked up to see Dyson’s twin-engine aircraft making its swing west with Tara aboard. There was a knotting of his muscles, a fine-honed tension that sharpened his nerves.
He’d finished his inspection of the site on the north range. It appeared to be the most promising of all, with an ample supply of water, good natural drainage, and only a short distance from one of the main ranch roads and the north camp bossed by Arch Goodman.
The plane grew steadily smaller. Ty soon lost it in the glare of the low-hanging sun. He sat a second longer on his horse, then lifted the reins to head for the north camp, where he’d left his truck and horse van.
As he started to send his horse down the slope, he spotted a rider leading a sore-footed horse along the shallow pocket. It was Jessy Niles who had been forced afoot. Ty rode down. Cowboy boots were not conducive to walking long distances. When she heard the drum of hooves, she stopped and extended the shade of her hat brim with her hand to block out the sun’s glaring angle and identify the approaching rider.
“Trouble?” His dryly amused glance ran over her dusty face.
“Threw a shoe about six miles back,” she answered ruefully. “Wouldn’t ya know I’d get nearly home before someone comes along.”
Ty chuckled and took his boot out of the left stirrup. “Climb aboard.”
Jessy passed him the reins to her horse, then stuck a toe in the empty stirrup and grabbed his saddle horn to swing up behind him. There was never any ease within her when she was around him. She didn’t have it now as she had to grip the solid trunk of his waist to steady herself while she shifted into a comfortable position on the saddle skirt. Underneath all that casualness, she was as taut as a bowstring.
“Ready?” Ty wrapped her horse’s reins around the saddle horn to eliminate the drag.
“Yeah.” She took her hands off him and rested them on her thighs, balancing easily at the slow walk necessitated by her tender-footed horse. His shoulders were broad and well muscled. He smelled of horses and tobacco smoke. It was a full minute before Jessy realized he had turned off the path she’d been on. “Where are you going?”
“To the camp.” He turned his head, giving her a view of his jutting profile, bronzed and sun-lined at the corner of his eyes. “Why?”
“If you angle to the north, it’ll shortcut you to the edge of camp,” Jessy said, knowing the area like the back of her hand. “I’ve got a cabin there, stuck in the woods.”
“The old Stanton place?” Ty asked, neck-reining his mount in a northerly direction.
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were still living with your folks,” he remarked idly.
“I was up until last fall. I usually moved in with the Goodmans over the winter ’cause it’s too hard trying to get from one end of the ranch to the other when the weather’s bad. Old Abe Garvey had been living in the Stanton cabin. When he died last September, I decided to just move up here permanently so I wouldn’t have to keep making that long drive back and forth,” she explained matter-of-factly.
“You’re completely independent now.” It was an observation that said she had always been independent by nature, but cutting loose from her home made it total.
“My folks have the place to themselves now that Ben and Mike have both gone to work on other parts of the ranch. They used to complain it was too noisy in the house. Now they’re saying it’s too quiet,” she said, smiling faintly and swaying with the rhythm of the walking horse. “I keep telling them they should be glad to get a twenty-four-year-old daughter off their hands.”
“You’re getting to be an old maid, Jessy.” There was a smile in his voice.
“There’s the cabin.” She pointed over his shoulder at the low roofline in the shadows of the cottonwoods rising along the riverbanks.
When he reached the small log structure, he reined in the horse and Jessy pushed backwards to slide off its rump to the ground. Ty unwrapped the reins to her horse and stepped down.
“If you’re not in a hurry, I can make some coffee,” Jessy offered to return the favor that had saved her from walking the last half mile.
Ty hesitated only briefly. He had no reason to hurry back to The Homestead. “It sounds good,” he accepted. “I’ll give you a hand with the horse.”
In short order, the horse was unsaddled and turned loose in the corral. Jessy entered the cabin ahead of Ty and motioned him to have a chair. It was just three rooms, orderly and simple. The walls were plastered white, and the bright chintz curtains at the windows stirred with the breeze rustling through the trees outside. There was a comfortable, lived-in air about it.
Unbuckling his spurs, Ty sat down in one of the curved-back wooden chairs at the table and hooked another one with his toe to prop his boots on. He leaned back and listened to the sounds coming from the kitchen—water running from the tap, Jessy’s footsteps, cupboard doors opening and closing.
He felt the tension slowly drain from him. A feeling of comfort and quiet calmed him, loosened him. He took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and lit it, inhaling deeply on the smoke and letting it slide out slowly.
Ten minutes later, Jessy came into the room, carrying two cups of freshly brewed coffee, and noticed his relaxed and completely-at-home position. “It’s good to put your feet up at the end of a long day, isn’t it?” She set the cups on the table and pulled out the other two chairs, sitting on one and propping her feet on the other as he had done. “Especially when you’ve walked on them.” She swept off her hat, dropping it on the table, and rumpled the thickness of her butternut hair.
“True.” A smile tugged at his lip corners.
They drank their coffee without talking, without needing to talk. He watched her almost absently. He’d known her such a long time, yet he knew so little about her. Her lips were long and nicely full. He watched them as she drank from the cup.
Jessy rarely talked about herself, never gave anything away. That’s why she was hard to know, Ty realized. She seemed straightforward and direct; yet sometimes when she looked at him with those steady eyes of hers, she seemed to be quietly waiting. It was that stillness which made him suspect there were emotions that ran strong and deep, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t show them.
“You make good coffee, Jessy.” He set the empty cup on the table and reluctantly swung his feet to the floor.
“There’s more in the kitchen.”
“No, thanks.” He shook his head and rose to his feet, drifting toward the door, not really wanting to leave, but he couldn’t find a reason for staying longer either. So he took his time about going. Jessy came after him, just as slowly, her hands stuck in the back pockets of her low-riding jeans. “You’re quite a girl, Jessy.” He eyed her, finding something attractive and strong about her face. “I can’t believe you haven’t had your share of proposals.”
“Oh, I’ve had some proposals, all right,” she admitted with a dry look. “But they weren’t the marrying kind.”
“I suppose you punched them in the nose.” He smiled lazily.
“Actually I aimed lower,” Jessy replied, a wicked gleam in her eye.
Her answer drew a hearty laugh from him, and Ty draped an arm around her shoulders as they went out the door. “There can’t be anyone else on earth like you, Jessy.”
“I guess the next debate is whether that’s good or bad,” she said and looked sideways at him.
Again, he sensed that waiting in her. There was an inner pulling at him, too. He became conscious of the arm he had around her shoulders and the lift of her breasts under the plaid shirt. She unsettled him—but she always had.
“I’d better be going.” He brought his arm away and glided down the steps.
“See ya around,” she said.
17
The feedlot was under construction at the site on the north range. Its grain silos had been erected; much of the conveyor equipment for mechanized feeding was installed. Fences were going up, dividing the cattle yard into lots. The chugging, revving engine of the posthole digger filled the afternoon, forcing men to raise their voices to be heard above it.
Stake trucks lumbered over the ground, loaded with fence-posts that were rolled off the back of the truck at regular intervals. More workers were following behind the posthole digger, righting the poles in the ground and tamping them solid. Adding to the racket was the pounding of hammers, nailing the board rails.
Standing back by the parked vehicles, Chase observed it all. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his open jacket and his head was drawn back in quiet satisfaction. Ty was amongst all those workers, supervising the project he had designed and organized.
“What do you think?” Maggie was at his side.
“I think there’s no set time when a boy becomes a man. Some never do.” He paused. “You know, it’s hard for a father to recognize when that time has come for his son. You get so wrapped up in trying to handle everything for him, thinking you have to carry the whole load ’cause he can’t cope with it, that you don’t see he can.” There was a faintly sad smile on his face when he paused. “Ty isn’t a boy anymore, Maggie. And it’s got nothing to do with age or size.”
“No,” she agreed, feeling a tugging inside at his words when she had expected him to comment on the way the work was progressing on this new operation. But Ty had been Chase’s work—his project—teaching him, training him, trying to instill in him all the values Chase held important.
He put an arm around her shoulders and brought her closer to his side, his voice growing tight. “I always thought he had to do things my way, but he can’t. He’s going to be a better man than I am.”
“Chase.” There was so much she wanted to say, but she couldn’t find the words to describe her feelings. She was proud of him for the man he was, and she felt a deep and abiding love for this proud husband of hers.
“Do you know what people will start saying when I walk down the street now?” He looked down at her, faintly smiling.” ’There goes Ty Calder’s old man.’”
“No, you’ll always be Chase Calder,” she insisted, but there was a part of her that knew he was right. The time would come, but not for a long while yet.
When she looked back to the scene, Ty was coming toward them, moving with that long, easy gait of his. He stopped once to direct a load of fence rails to a particular section of the yard, then came on. Chase let his arm slide off her shoulders and squared around to face his son, for the first time man to man.
“It’s coming right along,” Chase observed.
“Yeah. That load of fenceposts finally arrived.”
Maggie listened to the run of their voices, not paying any real attention to their discussion. Chase’s remarks were making her notice little things that had escaped her before. Ty was browner, leaner, and the mustache she had teased him about growing fitted the rough vigor of his features. When she compared him to Chase, she realized Ty looked stronger, more flatly muscled, and he was a good inch taller than his father.
Then her son’s dark eyes were gazing at her, his features relaxed and at ease. “Has Tara called to say what time her plane would be arriving?”
Maggie hesitated. “She did call ... to say she was going to stay in Dallas a couple more days and do some shopping—replenish her wardrobe.”
Nodding, Ty looked away, a faint grimness underlying his expression. But there was nothing in it when he turned back, his reaction carefully hidden in a crooking smile. “I’ll probably work late tonight, so don’t wait dinner for me. I’11 fix something for myself when I get there,” he said and moved off to check on the workers again.
“She’s too confident of him,” Chase murmured, his gaze thoughtfully narrowed. “Or she wouldn’t be gone so much.”
“They seem happy enough.” Together, they turned to walk to the pickup.
“She’s a hungry girl,” Chase observed grimly and opened the cab door on the passenger side for Maggie. “It doesn’t seem to matter how much she has, there’s always something more she wants.”
“She loves him,” Maggie said.
“In her way, I think she does,” he agreed and helped her into the truck, closing the door.
Long after the workers had quit for the day, Ty stayed at the site, stacking lumber and preparing things for the next day’s work. He needed to exert himself—to sweat and feel the pull of his muscles to rid himself of the bad mood.
It finally became too dark to see and he stopped, leaning against a section of finished fence to light a cigarette. There was a movement in the purpling shadows to his left, a silent stealth in it. Ty jerked his head around, nerves tensing, then easing slightly when he recognized the lean shape of Culley O’Rourke.
“Working late,” Culley observed with a bright-eyed watchfulness, the premature gray of his hair showing almost white in the twilight.
“Just finishing up,” Ty said and dragged on his cigarette, the red tip glowing brighter.
“Your wife’s gone again.” The statement carried a knowing sound that, in some way, suggested Ty wasn’t man enough to keep her home.
“She’s visiting friends in Texas.” That was sufficient as an explanation for Tara’s absence from the ranch, although Ty had trouble swallowing it. She was his wife; she belonged with him. Although he recognized her need for that other life, it wasn’t easy to accept.
“Guess you’ll be stoppin’ by Jessy’s on your way home again tonight,” Culley said.
Ty’s head came up as he tried to measure what lay behind that comment. Since construction had started on the feedlots, he had stopped at Jessy’s cabin a couple of times for coffee and the company. Each time it had been when Tara was away, but it was only a coincidence.
“I might.” He dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel, then looked around. “Did you ride over?” He didn’t see a horse tied anywhere.
“Yeah.” But O’Rourke didn’t volunteer where he’d left his horse.
“You do a lot of riding, Culley. Why?” Ty cocked his head to the side, curious about what went on in the man’s mind.
Too many psychiatrists had asked probing questions about the workings of his mind. Culley didn’t like explaining why he did things anymore, nor did he like revealing what he thought. Now he had his privacy and he guarded it jealously.
“I like it.” He shrugged and edged toward the deepening shadows. “It’s getting late. Better be headin’ that way while the horse can still see the trail.”
“Take care, Culley.” The man was already a dark shape moving silently into the evening. Ty waited, listening, then heard the dull thud of hooves, nearly muffled by the distance. Turning, he walked to the lone pickup at the site and climbed behind the wheel.
The new road took him by Jessy’s cabin, where welcoming lights gleamed from the windows. Ty almost drove past it, then whipped the wheel around at the last second and turned in. His headlight beams revealed another vehicle already parked there. By then, it was too late to change his mind about stopping without it looking odd.
Before he walked into the cabin, he had a look through the glass window in the door. The young cowboy sitting at the table with Jessy was a new rider. The Triple C didn’t hire many outsiders except during the busy times, so Ty was quick to recognize the sandy-haired would-be Romeo with the hat pushed to the back of his head, leaning on the table to avidly study Jessy. He was the man hired two months ago, named
Dick Ballard.
“Ballard.” Ty nodded to the man, who looked anything but pleased to see him walk in. His mouth was pulled up at the corners, but it was only a movement as Ty swung his attention to Jessy, his look long and measuring. “Thought I’d see if you had any of that coffee made. I could use a cup before I make that long drive home.”
“Help yourself.” She waved him to the kitchen.
Ty poured a cup, then brought it back to the front room and sat down at the table. He lit a cigarette and smoked it as if it, and the coffee, were his only interest while he listened to the conversation between the pair. Ballard did most of the talking, and mostly about himself. Ty became impatient with Jessy, wondering why she couldn’t see through the braggart’s talk. The more he heard, the less he liked the man.
The rawness that he’d first tried to sweat out with physical work, then ease with some relaxing over a cup of coffee, was an irritable spur that goaded Ty into thwarting whatever Ballard’s intentions were for the rest of the evening. When he finished one cigarette, he lit another, building up butts in the ashtray and showing no sign of being in a hurry to leave. The trip to the kitchen for his third cup of coffee finally got the message across to the cowboy.
“Guess I’d better hit the road, Jessy. I’ve gotta roll out at the crack of dawn in the morning,” Ballard declared, trying to impress her with the long, hard hours he worked. The chair legs scraped on the floor as he pushed away from the table. “See ya, Mr. Calder.”
“Good night.” Ty returned to his chair while Jessy rose and walked out with Ballard.
Restless and edgy, he got up again. He could hear the low murmur of their voices outside but couldn’t make out what they were saying. The coffee had gone very black and very bitter. He downed half of it and swirled the rest in his cup. He was in the same black and bitter mood as the coffee.
Jessy walked back in as a truck started up outside. Ty glanced at her and drank another swallow of coffee. He couldn’t read her expression, and that made him even more irritable. The light played on her hair, making him notice the tawny streaks that ran through it.