While she continued to talk, his mind drifted to the days just two short years ago when he'd had several popular subdivisions under development, multiple construction jobs under way and a financial statement any man who had started with nothing would envy. It had been a mistake for him to move to Stephenville and hole up in a singlewide trailer house, working a low-paying job. After his business fell apart, with his education and experience, he could have done a number of things in Fort Worth, and had even turned down some good offers. Marvalee's father hadn't succeeded in totally ruining him. But at the time, Brady had wanted nothing more than to crawl into a hole and lick his wounds. Tonight, revisiting his errors in judgment only worsened his mood.
Jude stopped chattering and eating and looked up at him, no doubt having noticed that his mind had wandered. "Am I boring you?"
"No," he answered quickly. "I've never heard the Circle C's history."
"When I get started on it, I tend to ramble. Because: I love all of it so much, I forget other people might not be interested. I'm a little bit of a nut. I'm so devoted to Daddy and Grandpa and the ranch that I'm unable to leave it for long. People tell me I'd be less frustrated if I’d just move to Fort Worth or Dallas and get some kind of real job where I can use my education and make a true contribution to society. But I know I wouldn't like leaving the ranch. Or Willard County, either."
"Why is contributing to society so important?"
"Because I was born blessed and I know it. I realize it more every day." She set her fork on the empty salad plate and her mouth broke into a smile that lit her whole face. "I'm afraid if I get too full of it, taking advantage of all that I've been given and not giving anything back, lightning might strike me or something."
Before Brady lost himself in admiration for her, the waitress delivered their steaks, sizzling on heavy hot platters, along with huge baked potatoes, sliced open and steaming. He watched Jude heap her potato with a little of everything—salt, pepper, butter, sour cream, grated cheese, chives and bacon bits.
So much for a delicate flower who eats like bird. But he liked that she didn't come up with the tired I-have-to-watch-my-figure cliché. She seemed to dive headlong into everything she did.
He sampled a bite of steak. It was as delicious as it was tender. From the outside, Lupe's Cantina looked like a dive. Inside looked only slightly better. But he wanted Jude to know he had brought her here because he truly thought the food was good.
"How long were you married?" she asked, cutting into her steak.
Brady's fork stopped on the way to his mouth. He wasn't eager to discuss his former marriage, but he didn't want to be rude by saying "none of your business."
"Seven years."
"Hey, you're right. This is good steak.”
“See, I told you. Cooked to perfection”
“I don't know how to cook much myself, but I appreciate good food. I eat a lot, but I usually get a lot of exercise, so I don't get fat. You said your son's nine? So he was seven when you got a divorce?"
How did she know when he got a divorce? "Uh, yeah," he answered.
"Was your ex-wife pregnant when you got married? Or was your son born early?"
Brady stared at her, his fork suspended, flummoxed by her intrusiveness.
"Wait, don't answer that." She put down her fork and raised her palms. Her shoulders heaved in a sigh. Her cleavage rose and fell. "I shouldn't have asked. It's none of my business."
“I don’t intend to answer it.” Brady returned to his meal. Better to concentrate on his plate instead of the soft flesh at her neckline.
"I apologize,” she said, and she sounded sincere. “I'm well-known for talking when I should be listening. It's just that I'm interested in everything." She laughed. "Just tell me when to shut my mouth. Everyone else does."
Brady liked that she was able to laugh at herself. Even with her nosiness, he was enjoying her company too much. And it was beginning to have less and less to do with finding her sexy and alluring. "I wouldn't do that. So why haven't you gotten married?"
"Oh, I'm a failure in that area. Big-time. Daddy and Grandpa would like to marry me off to someone they see as a good match. They’ve picked out a couple of guys from the right families, but I've resisted."
Brady supposed any man marrying into the Strayhorn family would be expected to meet certain requirements. It was sort of like a husband being chosen by a king for his daughter, the princess. There would naturally be scrutiny and prenuptial agreements. He had been asked to sign one when he married Marvalee. Like a damn fool, he had done it, even though Marvalee was already pregnant and Brady had never quite figured out what the prenuptial agreement protected her from. He was the one who had gotten raped financially. "And in your daddy's estimation, who's a good spouse?"
"Someone fertile." She covered her mouth with heir napkin and laughed heartily. "They want me to have kids. Sort of like one of the cows or the broodmares. Sons, preferably. If you ever go into Daddy's study, you'll see pictures of all his favorites on the credenza behind his desk. There I am, alongside his favorite bulls and stallions. If there were an auction where he and Grandpa could go and bid on a husband to mate with the headstrong female member of the family, both of them would have seats on the front row."
Brady stopped cutting his steak and arched an eyebrow. "You're joking, right?"
"Well, yes, but not about them wanting me to get married. Since I'll soon be thirty, they're getting more worried every day."
Brady knew something about Jude's situation. His former father-in-law was not nearly as rich as the Strayhorns, nor was he the overseer of a legend and a dynasty, but he had made it evident at every opportunity that his daughter's husband had to please her father as well as her.
Brady stopped his memory’s trek down that thorny path. "Sounds like getting married and having kids is not something you 're worried about."
"Not really. Although I probably should think about it. I was engaged a couple of times to those guys Daddy and Grandpa picked out. I even slept with them. I wish now that I hadn’t, but at the time, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. In the end, things didn't work out.”
Brady sat back and looked at her. Most women he had known didn’t say outright who they had slept with or readily admit to such bad judgment.
Jude continued as if she hadn’t said something that surprised him. “Daddy and Grandpa would’ve been happy with either one of them, but they weren't the ones who would've had to live with them. But that's all water under the bridge. Really, right now, I'm more interested in changing the way Daddy and Grandpa do some things at the ranch."
Well, that was certainly two different topics in the same breath. While Brady was mildly curious about the changes she might like to implement at the Circle C, at this moment, he found her and her past much more interesting. She seemed awfully nonchalant about two broken engagements. He couldn't relate. Even now, two years later, he was still uncomfortable discussing his former marriage and he wanted to talk about the divorce even less.
"So what was wrong with the guys you were engaged to. You just didn't like them or what?"
"Hm, that’s about the size of it. The first one was sort of a selfish person. It didn’t take long to figure out he cared more about marrying into my family than he cared about marrying me. But his parents were friends of Daddy and Grandpa. Webb's a lawyer. His daddy is the senior partner in one of those silk-stocking firms in Austin. I saved all of us a lot of angst by breaking up with him.
“My second fiancé is a sissy and sort of a mama's boy. His daddy’s a banker. He and Daddy are friends. I didn’t really hate him. He’s a nice enough person, but he’s kind of helpless. I felt a little bit sorry for him. He’s afraid of horses and cows. It would be insane for me to marry someone like that. He doesn’t even like to leave the house and I spend more than half my time outdoors."
Brady had seen men who were afraid of domestic animals. And he had met men who thought walls and a roof would protect them from everything o
utside as well as themselves. He chuckled.
Staring at the lacy black edge of her bra, his thoughts leaped to sex. Jude was a hot number, the picture of health and vitality, with more than her share of spunk and energy and passion. No selfish bastard or no mama's boy would ever be enough for her. He tried not to add "in bed" to that thought, but how could he not when that was where his imagination was taking him?
Sex wasn't everything, but a good time in the bedroom went a long way to gluing a relationship together. If the sex with her fiancés had been all that great, would she have been so easygoing about breaking up the relationships? He doubted it.
"My fiancés are long and boring stories," she went on. "The point is, I do understand why you'd get annoyed by my bringing up your relationship with your ex-wife. Some things are just too private and too much trouble to try to explain to strangers. I've never gone into the gory details of my weird engagements entirely even to Suzanne Breedlove and she's my best friend."
Now Brady was more curious than ever. Sex aside, her former fiancés must have been upset when she bailed, because if a man were seeking to "marry up," Jude Strayhorn was as good as it got. In more ways than not she fit the stereotypical ideal. Besides being rich, she was movie-star good-looking, well-educated, smart and good company. On a scale of one to ten, he might classify her a nine. That is, if he were interested enough to bother with labeling her. Nine was as high as he was willing to rate any woman, come to think of it. He had never met a ten.
The voices in the room suddenly sounded louder and he noticed the music had stopped. He was uncomfortable without the music in the background. "I'm gonna buy some tunes." He got to his feet, strode out of the dining room and added half a dozen quarters to the jukebox.
When he returned, Jude said, "You're really into music, aren't you?"
"Makes a hard job go faster. In the construction business, I got used to having it around. Seemed like every sub on every job had a boom box blasting. I used to wonder if the building industry would collapse if somebody banned R and B or honky-tonk music."
They had finished their meal. She had polished off the good-size strip steak and a baked potato as big as his hand. "Dessert?" he asked.
"No, thanks. I'm full. But I was really hungry. A biscuit and sausage only go so far."
He winced. After their late breakfast at McDonald's, he hadn't even thought of lunch. A fine host he was. And after she had volunteered to help him, too.
The waitress came and cleared the table and a question arose in Brady’s mind. Go or stay and have another drink. He’d had enough to drink himself, but before he broached the subject, she leaned forward, her forearms on the table, her long hair falling over them like shimmering silk. "Listen, do people ever use that dance floor in the other room?"
"Sure. If they want to."
"You know how to dance. Could we, uh...do you think we could we dance?"
"Dance?"
"I don't get to very often. Dancing's like swimming. Unless it's Cable, I don't think anyone in my family knows how. I'm not very good at it, but I'd just like to, you know...dance."
Brady didn't especially enjoy dancing these days, but he didn't mind humoring her. "Okay, sure."
He scooted from his seat, stood and offered her his hand. She scooted out of the booth, too, and he led her to the dance floor. No one else was dancing, so they had plenty of room.
Sliding his arm around her waist, he positioned her in front of him. She stood there rigidly with at least two feet between them, looking up at him expectantly, her whiskey-colored eyes filled with a hundred layers. And for a fleeting moment, he wondered what she truly thought of him as a man.
It doesn't matter what she thinks, a voice told him. There are too many differences between you. And that voice was right.
He glanced down at her left hand lying on his right forearm. "Well, the first thing you need to know about dancing, darlin', is it's a contact activity."
"Oh. Right." She laughed and placed her hand on his shoulder.
He steered them out to the middle of the dance floor and soon discovered that, as she had said, she wasn't very good at it. After she tripped over his feet several times, he stopped. "How many times did you say you've danced?"
She shrugged. "Three or four. I went with Suzanne to a couple of rodeo dances, but I didn't learn much about dancing. At rodeo dances, most people are too drunk to dance. But they aren't too drunk to drive." She laughed again.
"That's a scary thought," Brady muttered. But he liked her offbeat sense of humor. "Okay, just bear with me here. Let’s see what we can do."
He knew not the first thing about teaching a woman to dance, had never even tried to do it, but he placed his right hand on her hip and pulled her against him, at the same time sliding his right knee slightly between her legs. Her eyes flared and he said, "I don't know how to teach dancing, but from this position, I can force your feet to go somewhere."
Her eyes lit up with understanding. "Oh. Okay." She relaxed her shoulders and wiggled her hips a little. "Okay, I'm ready."
God, she was killing him. "Now I'm gonna just sort of move you around the floor a little. You just loosen up and get the feel of moving backward. When you get to relaxing some, we can work on the steps."
He half led, half dragged her through the rest of the song. Another slow tune began and she showed no sign of giving up. She wouldn't. He had already figured out she was no quitter. He gave her a few suggestions about what to do with her feet and they went through the exercise again.
Three songs later, they were laughing and moving together fairly skillfully and he was having fun teasing her. He didn't mind having his arms around her, either. The jukebox finally exhausted his quarters and stopped playing, so he hooked an arm around her shoulder and guided her back toward their booth.
"I've got some quarters in my purse," she said.
"Aren't you tired?"
"I'm just learning. I don't want to give up now." She bent for her purse, dragged it toward the edge of the booth seat and began digging inside.
Yep. He had pegged her personality.
On a sigh, Brady shoved his hand into his pocket and came up with several quarters. "Here," he said. "I've got quarters. If you want to keep at it, I'll play something." Before going to the jukebox to revive the music, he signaled for the waitress to bring them two more drinks.
By the end of a couple more tunes, she was moving with him easily without stepping on his feet. By the end of three more, they were scarcely moving at all and they had stopped laughing. The room seemed to be spinning. Her head was resting on his shoulder and his cheek was pressed against her fragrant hair. Her left arm encircled his waist, their bodies were melded together tighter than a sandwich and he was valiantly fighting to keep from wrapping his own left arm around her.
Lord, she was soft. And warm and that clean smell that was distinctly hers hypnotized him. An erection had swelled in his shorts and he had practically sprained his back trying to maneuver himself so she wouldn't be aware of it. But she had to notice. Yet, she made no attempt to move away. And the fact that she didn't was tearing him up.
At the same time, J. D. Strayhorn's face, with hard brown eyes and a scowling mouth, floated in and out of his mind. On the verge of praying for willpower, Brady gripped her shoulders, set her away from him and looked into her face. "Jude. We need to sit down."
She looked up at him with parted moist lips and dreamy eyes that had gone from amber to dark as coffee. "Okay," she said softly.
A longing profound enough to be mystifying passed through him. Jesus, get me out of this.
But even as he prayed, he wasn't sure he wanted out of whatever he was in.
When they reached the booth, four fresh drinks were sitting on the table. The waitress breezed by and said, "Ace wanted to buy y'all a drink."
"Great. I'm thirsty." Jude slid into the booth and picked up a margarita.
Brady sat down, too, but he was embarrassed to look her in the eye. H
e usually kept his libido under control, especially in a matchup that had absolutely nowhere to go. The alcohol, plus knowing she had seen him bare-assed in those pictures had mixed in with his belief that she knew he had a hard-on. It had all done something to him. In a matter of hours, she had become aware of him more intimately than had most of the people he knew. He had never been more ill at ease.
A few minutes later, after he felt some relief behind his fly, he pushed his drinks to the center of the table. "Look, I've had enough to drink and I've got to drive. Let's go on home. I want to get up early and get on the road."
"Right."
Thank God she doesn't want to dance some more.
He signaled for the waitress to bring them the check. He paid in cash. He hadn't had credit cards for two years. He had discovered life went more smoothly and cheaply without them.
Jude gulped what was left of her drink, got to her feet, took a few seconds to steady herself and picked up her purse.
Oh, hell. Is she drunk?
He, too, stood and urged her ahead of him toward the front door. As they passed through the bar again, Ace sat back on his bar stool and reached out. He clasped Jude's forearm, stopping them. "Guess I'll see ya when I see ya, Brady."
Ace didn't fool Brady. The man's eyes, as well as his hand, were on Jude again. Brady felt a rush of...what? Jealousy? Christ!
No. Not jealousy. Responsibility. She was in his charge. He had to make sure she returned to Lockett no worse off than when they left, which meant keeping her away from the likes of Ace.
He urged her forward again, away from Ace's touch. "I won't be hard to find. Thanks for the drink."
Chapter 12
With Brady behind her, Jude stepped out of the heavy front door of Lupe's Cantina. It banged shut behind them, abruptly arresting the barroom sounds. It also killed the air-conditioning. Enveloped by the day's lingering heat and thick humid air, Jude felt as if she had walked into a steam bath. She reminded herself she was in a lowland part of the state where the nighttime summer temperature didn't drop, nor did a dry, cool evening breeze relieve the heat. And the air had a swampy odor. Stephenville wasn't far from Bryan and Austin. She hadn't enjoyed the climate in those places, either.
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