by Janet Dailey
“I suppose not.” It was a compromise of sorts. He suddenly felt very old and very tired and very troubled.
21
In the two weeks after Dyson had left, the weather went bad. Everything was thrown at them, from sheeting rain to sleet storms, snow driven by fierce winter winds to subzero temperatures. One system would come through, give them a short breather, and the next one would hit them. There was no holing up and taking shelter until better weather came. It was calving season, a round-the-clock operation in brutal weather that took its toll on man and beast.
After two weeks of eighteen-hour days, Ty was haggard and bone-weary, his nerves frayed. He stared with an absent envy at the closed eyes of the foal, lying in a thick straw bed, its body blanketed. Each breath it drew was a rasping, labored sound. It had entered the world with premature abruptness a week earlier when its mother slipped on some ice and went down, fracturing both front legs. The foal had been taken from her before the mare had been put down.
Since the horse colt was only two weeks early and a supply of mare’s milk was on hand, there was a good chance they could have saved the foal. Then pneumonia had set in, and the chances for its survival were getting worse each hour as the foal’s condition deteriorated at a rapid pace.
While Ty watched, the noise stopped. It was a full minute before his fatigue-dulled senses noticed the silence in the stall, and he realized the foal had died. He lowered his chin to his chest and swore silently and bitterly. The loss of both mare and foal virtually eliminated any chance the breeding operation might have shown its first profit this year.
There was a rustle of straw behind him, and Ty wearily lifted his head, turning it in the direction of the sound. Long hours, with little sleep in between, made his eyes appear more deep-set and hooded, and his hat was pulled low on his forehead, the rolled point of its front brim shading more of his face and adding to the impression.
“How’s the colt?” His father came up to the stall, his breath making small puffs of steam.
“Lost it.” With a slow swing of his body, Ty turned away from the foal and let himself out of the stall to join his father. No comment was necessary or expected. There was too much other work to be done for valuable time to be wasted discussing the death of one foal. “Was there something you wanted?” His father had rarely left the house, directing most of the ranch’s operations from his desk or through instructions to Ty, white he worked on the land-title problem.
“I’m flying to Helena this afternoon. After so many postponements because of bad weather, the meeting with those officials from Washington has finally been scheduled for tomorrow morning,” he stated, then added, “Your mother’s coming with me. We’ll probably be back by the end of the week, weather permitting.”
“Okay.” That meant Tara would be alone in the house. Somehow he’d have to arrange to spend more time there, or at least take his meals there. It was no good to urge her to get out and visit with some of the other wives similarly housebound. Only in desperation would she do it, and she usually returned more discontented than before.
“Where are you heading now?”
Ty paused, gathering the effort to answer. “I’m going to swing past the camp at Juliana and check on things there on my way up to the north camp.”
“To see Jessy Niles?”
Ty’s spine stiffened. He looked hard and direct at his fatter. “Arch has been having problems with the generator. I’ve got a crew up there, repairing it.”
“Then stop by Jessy’s place for coffee on your way home. Isn’t that the routine?” Again that level tone, speaking calmly and saying volumes.
“Since Jessy has pulled the day shift and will be working at the calving sheds when I leave there, I’m not likely to stop by her cabin.” Ty responded indirectly to the implied charge, neither confirming nor denying it.
“You’re very familiar with her hours, aren’t you?” his father challenged, closely observing Ty’s reactions. “I’ve never made it a practice to pry into your personal affairs.”
His temper frayed. “Then butt out of them now!” It exploded from him in a low rush, the anger barely checked.
“This talk about you and Jessy has gone too for when it’s reached me,” his father stated. “There’s never this much smoke without some fire somewhere. You’ve made your bed, Ty. You’re a married man. You’ve made promises to your wife, and you’re going to keep them. I don’t care how much of this is smoke and how much is fire. Just stay away from Jessy Niles. I won’t tolerate any cheating.”
“My God, that’s the pot calling the kettle black!” Rage vibrated inside him at the righteous-sounding order. “Don’t do as I do, do as I say—is that it?”
“You’d better explain yourself,” his father warned.
“I’ll explain myself, all right,” Ty promised in a rough-pitched voice. “In two words—Sally Brogan. Or don’t you recall all those times you spent with her cheating on your wife?”
The backhanded swing of his father’s gloved hand struck him full on the cheek, and Ty staggered backwards to crash against the upright posts of the stall. His hand was at his jaw, working it, while he glared at his father. Anger and resentment smoldered hotly in his blood. It drove him from the stall in a headlong charge that took both of them to the floor of the foaling barn, threshing and scuffling about like two giants locked in mortal combat, one in the prime of his manhood and the other wisened in battle.
Shouts came from some other part of the barn, followed by the thudding of running feet. A pair of hands grabbed at Ty, then two more, pulling and tugging. His blurred vision began to register other forms, stablehands getting into the fray to break it up and forcibly separate the two men.
Sanity returned slowly to him, and with it bitter remorse. His lungs dragged in air as Ty stopped struggling in the grip of the two men who held him. His lip was cut and bleeding slightly. He wiped at it with his glove, licking the inside with his tongue, while he glanced watchfully at his father. The older Calder shrugged off the hands with an impatient lift of his shoulders. He, too, was breathing hard and steadily eyeing his son. Then he looked around at the stablehands.
“Leave us,” he ordered in a rough, winded voice.
There was an uneasy shifting of feet and exchanged glances before the men began a slow exodus from the scene of the fight. They were well away before either man moved or broke the heavy silence.
“Sally Brogan is a friend.” A gloved finger was aimed at Ty to stab home his point. “Don’t ever suggest again that I have been unfaithful to your mother. Sally was a friend when I needed one. And there was never anything more than that.”
“I thought . . .” But it didn’t matter what he thought, so Ty didn’t finish the sentence. Reaching down, he scooped up his hat that had been knocked off in the scuffle and slapped it against his thigh to throw off the wisps of straw it had collected. Then he jammed it low on his head, tilting his head back slightly to meet his father’s look. “I guess I was wrong,” he admitted grudgingly.
“You sure as hell were.” The force remained in his words, but there was a faint gentling of his father’s stern expression. “You don’t handle yourself too bad in a fight.”
The near compliment seemed to break through the constraint. Ty came close to smiling, but the cut on his lip made him wince from the pulling action. “For an old man, you don’t do too badly yourself.” He pressed a finger at the cut, testing the degree of pain it inflicted, and winced again.
There was a slight pause, then: “About Jessy—”
“Don’t ask.” Ty shook his head. Right now, she was a kind of anchor for him, steady and calm, and he needed that.
“You’re not fair to her,” his father said. “You can only afford to have one mistress outside your marriage, ify. And that mistress is the land. She’ll give you all the satisfaction, and heartache, that you can handle.”
They walked from the foaling barn together, long stride matching long stride. The stablehands watched
and nodded approvingly to one another, their own anxieties eased now that the rift had been healed and there was harmony again between the head and heart of the Triple C Ranch.
Outside the barn, they parted to go their separate ways. “Let Tara know I’ll be home tonight in time for dinner,” Ty said and lifted a hand. “Have a good trip.”
The sleek, fast single-engine aircraft made a banking turn and headed west into the gray gloom of a low overcast. The drone of its motor penetrated the walls and windows of the rebuilt house. Culley heard it and paused in the act of slicing a slab of roasted beef to combine a late lunch with an early supper. His keen senses recognized the sound of that motor. Leaving the half-sliced meat, he walked to the back door and stepped outside.
He looked up, searching the iron-gray sky. Finally he spied the plane, its markings barely visible at this distance. It was Calder’s plane, all right. Once he’d sighted the plane, a certain indifference came over him. He turned and walked back into the house.
It wasn’t until he’d set his plate down on the freshly laundered tablecloth that a thought started nagging him. He thrashed on it through the silent meal, cleaned and dried his dishes, then hauled out of the house and caught up a horse from the corral to saddle it.
The repairs on the backup generator were nearly complete. Ty left the two mechanics to finish up while he went by the calving shed to inform Arch Goodman of the work’s status. At least, that was the excuse he used for going there.
Goodman was working right alongside the others, busy birthing a calf. “Help yourself to some coffee from the thermos,” he invited. “Be with you directly.”
A rickety cardboard table served as a coffee bar, stationed in a sheltered corner of the shed. Halfway to it, Ty spotted Jessy leaning upright against a roughed-out interior wall with her legs braced in front of her. He felt a small kick of pleasure.
Her long, slim body looked more rounded and firmly packed with its layer of insulated underwear and two layers of clothes beneath the winter jacket. A gold wool scarf was tied around her head, a dirty brown hat jammed on top of it. She saw him and, despite the tiredness in her expression, gave him the ghosting warmth of a smile. Ty had to stop himself from walking right to her and paused at the coffee urn instead, filling a paper cup.
“You should be sitting down,” he observed over the rim of the cup he lifted to his mouth.
“No.” There was a smile in her voice. “I wouldn’t be able to get up again.”
With the weather and the naturally busy time of year, the demands of work had gone too wild for Ty to see her more than twice since the last time they’d been together, and each of the subsequent times had been during the course of work. The heaviness seemed to leave his mind. There was something about her company that produced a warm ease in him, something solid that gave its own kind of heady glow. So different than anything he’d felt with Tara.
Ty wasn’t conscious of how hard he’d been staring at her until she looked down. “I guess I’m a dirty, smelly sight, aren’t I?” It was admitted with self-deprecating candor that had a rebellious ring to it. It showed clear when her eyes flashed upward at him. “You don’t have to smile like that and make me feel even scroungier,” she said in protest.
“Now I know you’re a woman,” Ty said and wandered closer, a humorous gleam in his eyes. “You’re dead tired and dragging, but you’re still worrying about how you look.”
“I guess it shouldn’t matter. You’ve seen me looking worse than this.” There was a watchful expectancy in her expression, a waiting that always pulled at him like some powerful undertow.
“You look good to me,” he said simply and discovered it was true.
With the scarf wrapped around her head and throttling her throat there was nothing to distract his gaze from the strong, pure lines of her face. Sun wrinkles made smiles at the corners of her clear almond-brown eyes, and the rounded ridges of her cheekbones stood out cleanly. Her wide lips lay comfortably together, warmly drawn and generous. His glance dropped much lower, to the bulky front of her jacket. A sudden wry smile pulled at one corner of his mouth.
“Why is it that every time I look at your mouth, I automatically glance at your breasts?” he mused aloud in a familiarly intimate tone.
“I never caught you looking at them.” She gazed at him anew.
“All men look. They just try not to be seen looking,” Ty murmured, a lazy caress coming into his tone. “You have such little ones—little and so very sensitive.”
As he braced a leather-gloved hand on a rough board near her head, her breath quickened. He began leaning closer, his glance running more and more often to her mouth. She remained poised and motionless, under a spell and afraid to break it.
Someone shouted, and the voice sounded nearby. There was the scuffle and thud of boots climbing a pen fence. In that instant, Ty became conscious of their surroundings and straightened away from her, lifting his coffee cup to take a quick drink.
A heaviness settled onto her as grim knowledge entered her eyes. “Now that begins, doesn’t it?” she said and didn’t wait for him to ask what she meant. She’d seen his darted glance, that over-the-shoulder caution. “The wondering if we’re being seen together? Who might be watching? When you come to my place, you’ll probably have the urge to park behind the cabin where your truck can’t be seen. And I’ll start pulling the window shades. Still, we’ll jump at every sound.”
His tight-pressed mouth told its own story of agreement. “Are you sorry, Jessy?”
She thought about it a moment before she slowly shook her head. “No. Maybe it’s wrong. But I never had even this much before. I’m not complaining, Ty.”
But he was having regrets and misgivings. She could see it. His half-narrowed gaze was skimming the calving shed and its workers. Jessy looked out over the pens, and a small smile touched her mouth. Since Ty had joined her, none of the men had taken a break for coffee and a smoke.
“They all know, Ty,” she said as she continued to look out. “You can’t hide anything that goes on at this ranch from them . . . not for long.”
“Have they said anything to you?”
“No, and they won’t.” Jessy faced him, calm and vaguely tolerant. “You should know that’s not the way of things here. No, they’ll just stand back and let me sort out my own problems. They don’t make judgments as quickly as you might think. They wait and see.”
“Is that why you look at me that way? To wait and see?”
“I know you’re going to make a decision, or you’re not the man I think you are.” Part of her even knew what it was going to be. Tara’s hold on him was strong; and a Calder lived with his mistakes, he didn’t shuck them. Put those two facts together and the outcome was almost a foregone conclusion.
There were some on the ranch who questioned Ty’s ability. He had been raised differently and educated differently. Some said he was too quick to discard the old way things were done in favor of a new one—too willing to accept change. The way he let his wife go off alone on trips had raised many an eyebrow at this example of a modern marriage.
But a lot of people overlooked the two qualities Jessy saw—his aggressiveness and his determination to succeed. They spurred him hard, harder than a lot of people realized. Jessy had glimpsed them beneath that mask of patience. She had yet to see whether these two powerful traits would overshadow his consideration of other people and things.
“It’s time I was getting back to work.” She pushed away from the wall and downed the rest of the now-tepid coffee in her paper cup before tossing it into a five-gallon pail.
“Jessy.” There was a troubled urgency in his voice as a step carried her near to him.
“Yes.” She paused.
A long, searching moment went by, and the intensity of it eddied around her. Finally he shook his head. “Nothing,” Ty said and let her walk away. He wanted to keep her by him, but his father was right: it wasn’t fair.
As Jessy walked away from the corner, Ar
ch Goodman approached as if cued by her departure. No reference was made to Ty’s slight preoccupation. The weight of Jessy’s words were on him. Wait and see. But he was damned if he knew what all of them would eventually see.
The radio sat atop the refrigerator in the kitchen, its volume turned high to cover the silence in the house. Tara hummed the melody while she smoothly rounded the pâté in its serving dish. It was rare when she had the chance to plan the entire evening menu herself. It was hardly a challenge to cook for two, but she consoled herself with a silent promise that the time would come when she would be entertaining important guests at her table, people of position and influence in the furtherance of Ty’s career beyond this ranch.
As she turned to carry the pâté to the refrigerator, she was startled by the sight of a man standing in the kitchen. Tara was shaken by the feeling he had been there for some time, watching her. A thready fear ran through her system even as she recognized the lean, black-eyed man with metal-gray hair. The Homestead sat on a knoll, too far from the other buildings for anyone to hear her cries, especially with the radio so loud. Tara reached up quickly to turn down the volume.
“How long have you been here? What do you want?” she demanded, masking her apprehension with sharpness. O’Rourke had always seemed such a silent and strange man to her. She had never regarded him as threatening, but she’d never been alone with him before. He had appeared so suddenly, so silently, that she felt an eerie chill.
“Where’s Maggie?”
A breath of relief trembled from her as she realized he was looking for his sister. “She went to Helena with Chase. I don’t expect them back until Friday.”
He took a step toward her, his black gaze boring intently on her. There was something almost menacing about his expression. “Did they go by plane?”