B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK

by Jeffrey, Anna

  Under three hundred thousand acres of land in the West Texas Panhandle, fossil fuel had to be somewhere, but Grandpa had said he wasn't pouring any more money into holes in the ground. And that had been the end of it. If she were managing the ranch, she would reopen those doors. The market had changed and so had the public need. She shook her head and drew a deep sniff, trying to arrest the tears that kept sneaking up her throat. "Grandpa's never been willing to—"

  "He knows he's aging. He's more inclined now to give up some control."

  "But not necessarily to me."

  "He knows you're smart. He's not excited about your bringing in Angus bulls and he doesn't understand the new demand for grass-fed beef, but he's impressed with the way you handle yourself. And he likes those big checks after we ship calves." He gave her shoulder a little shake. "If you offer to help him, he won't turn you down."

  "I don't know." She shook her head. "Maybe."

  Daddy gave her shoulder a squeeze. "That's my girl." He stood and pulled her up with him. "You're a bright spot in my life, Jude. Ever since your mother left, all I've wanted is for you to be happy. I want you to find someone to share your life with."

  My mother. Hah! "Why? You've never found anyone."

  "See, Jude, this is what I've been trying to tell you all along about this place using up your whole life. My mother died soon after Ike and Karen—"

  He stopped, removed his glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. Jude stared up at him in awe. She couldn't remember the last time she had heard him say the names of his deceased brother or wife. Or if she had ever seen him on the verge of tears.

  He cleared his throat and repositioned his glasses. "Grandpa, uh, needed a lot of support back…”—He drew an audible breath—“After that car wreck. I lost my brother and my wife, but Dad lost his son, his daughter-in-law and his own wife all in the same year. And I lost my mother, too. And because of what happened, we...he...lost Jake, too. Dad wasn't able to do much around the ranch for a long time. Depression, they called it."

  Jude had never heard that her grandfather had suffered from depression. No one would have dared say it, not even Grammy Pen. Just the word would have been an indication of weakness. She had assumed her grandfather was made of iron, as all the Strayhorn men before him had been.

  Depression was not what Grammy Pen had called all that had happened those twenty-four years ago. She had called it the Campbell Curse.

  "Helping him through that took a lot," Daddy continued. "I never had a chance to do much grieving myself. While all of that was going on, somebody still had to take care of the Circle C. So you see, there's really been no chance for anyone or anything else in my life.

  “But as I said, I'm not complaining or making excuses. I'm trying to help you understand that sometimes life throws detours in your path that you can't get around. I'm trying to give you a better chance at happiness than I had."

  Now the tears had sneaked in again, but she sniffed them away. She had never been a crier and wouldn't be one now. "I'm sorry, Daddy. I don't mean to be hateful. I'm just disappointed."

  He looped his arm around her shoulders again, and this time she didn't pull away. "Don't be, Daughter. The day will come when you'll own this place, along with all of the joy and pain and responsibility that goes with being its shepherd. And God willing, your children will own it after you. That's why Dad and I harp at you all the time about getting married and having a family. Have you ever considered what would happen to this ranch if you had no children? Just think about that.

  "You must never forget your roots. Alister Campbell lost a daughter coming to Texas to start a new life. In memory of her, you carry her name. Eventually, with all the hardship, the work, the war and the uncertainty of frontier life, old Alister lost his wife to madness. But he never lost sight of his goals. Five generations have worked at preserving his legacy. We can't let him down."

  Indeed, the family legend had it that Alister Campbell's wife never recovered from her three-year-old daughter's drowning in the Red River and was haunted by the small body never being found. Just a year later, at twenty-one years old, Mary Ellen Roslyn Campbell had hanged herself. Jude sniffed again. "I know, Daddy."

  "Tell you what. Let's ride this week. My sorrel isn't getting nearly the exercise he needs. The weaning's all done. Hopefully I'll be able to get away for a few hours. You could take Brady's mare and we could ride over and look at the Spring Creek pasture. The mesquites over there damn near got the jump on us. I've been wanting to check on the job the brush-removal crew has been doing."

  Daddy could drive to the Spring Creek pasture in his pickup in less than half the time it took to ride a horse to it. Riding the pasture with her father had always been a bonding experience and normally something Jude loved doing. But today she didn't want to ride horseback to look at mesquite trees at Spring Creek. What difference would it make if she saw them? They were Brady Fallon's problem now.

  She would never cease loving her father or her grandfather, but her heart had been severely wounded, her emotions brutally battered. And Daddy and Grandpa were responsible.

  "I don’t have time to ride," she said. "I'm back to working every day at the school."

  Chapter 18

  The next morning, after a fitful night, Jude came to consciousness slowly. Her eyes resisted opening. Instead of bounding out of bed with her typical enthusiasm for meeting the day, she lay in her bed replaying last night's conversation and the latest affront to her dignity and intelligence by those who were supposed to love her.

  She searched her mind for words to describe what they had done to her.

  Betrayal? That word didn't fit. She had to admit that nothing had ever been promised to her. Not really. Implied, but not promised.

  Misunderstanding? Understatement of the year. Her father and grandfather had never understood her. All of her adult life, a disconnect had existed between her and them. Was it as simple as the fact that they were male and she wasn't? Daddy had sometimes tried to span the gap through the years, but Grandpa hadn't even made an attempt. The outdated belief—and they had never tried to hide it—that a woman couldn't function by herself in a man's world was so deeply ingrained in both of them, it was an insurmountable wall. She should have faced that long ago.

  She called back various points in her life when they had maneuvered her to do their will and how she had tried to be a good daughter and granddaughter by doing what they expected of her. She had gone to college, been a diligent student and earned three degrees. She had shunned many of the pitfalls of college life, such as drugs, alcohol and having fun instead of studying.

  She had even been engaged to marry two men—well, boys, really—who Daddy and Grandpa chose. Both of those engagements had been efforts on her part to conform to Daddy's and Grandpa's wishes.

  Her mind traveled back to her first year of college, when Daddy had arranged for her to meet Webb Henderson, the son of one of his and Grandpa's political friends in Austin. Though she had never had a boyfriend, she allowed herself to become engaged at eighteen.

  Webb had been so eager for sex, he almost forced himself on her. She was a virgin and couldn't have been more naive. She knew plenty about animal sex, but she hadn't known what to expect from a boy.

  She hadn't figured out Webb immediately, had been too dumb to realize the prize he and his father had their eyes on was not her, but the Circle C. When it dawned on her that Webb and his parents would like nothing more than for her to get pregnant and be forced into a shotgun wedding, she marched to a doctor in Bryan and obtained a prescription for birth control pills.

  She broke the engagement several times, but Webb hadn't bowed out gracefully. He stalked her and caused havoc in her life and she always made up with him. Eight stressful months passed before the final breakup came, when she called the police and they arrested him for domestic abuse.

  His enraged father contacted hers and Daddy personally came to Bryan and hauled her back to the ranch where a three
-day verbal assault ensued. But she had stood her ground and returned to school unengaged, determined that college was for education, not socializing. Daddy had asked, but she had never revealed most of what had happened between her and Webb. Better to let sleeping dogs lie, as Grammy Pen always said.

  Seven years later, after she had earned her master’s, she allowed herself to become engaged to Jason Weatherby. Daddy had done business with Jason's father and the two parents had gone out of their way to force a relationship between their children.

  Though she went through the prenuptial motions, she couldn't imagine spending a lifetime with Jason. From the beginning, she believed him to be spoiled, selfish and snobbish, all traits she couldn't tolerate. And he would have never tolerated her Willard County friends. She couldn't even imagine him in Suzanne's company.

  Fortunately, she had been able to undo that preposterous match in a mere three months, before Strayhorn Corp's lawyers and the Weatherby's lawyers had even had time to accrue billable hours hashing out the prenuptial agreement. But Daddy still had a ridiculous, even laughable, idea that she and Jason might renew their engagement. He was blinded by his and Grandpa's ideal for her to marry someone who would become part of the ranch operation, at which point she would be set aside as the baby maker, like all the Strayhorn women before her.

  Of course Daddy and Grandpa had always meant well. If she hadn't believed that, she couldn't have lived here and had an affectionate relationship with them.

  But this time, they had committed the ultimate offense and she could no longer excuse them as having "meant well." Passing over her and hiring a general manager was not a short-term decision.

  You can't manage the hands. It would just be too hard for a woman.

  That statement was the bottom line. If Brady hadn't agreed to take the job, though she had never heard her father say so, she suspected he would find some other outsider. Then the Circle C would go the direction of most other dynastic spreads around Texas—run by outsiders while the owners found other things to do or even lived in faraway places. The realization had broken something that would never be mended within Jude. She no longer felt herself a part of the ranch's inner circle. In a matter of hours, she had become a different person.

  Her next thought was of Brady Fallon, the man who had usurped her place in the universe. But her good sense kicked in and wouldn't allow her to go there. Brady hadn't taken anything away from her. He had simply been standing behind the door when her own father closed it on her hopes.

  She forced herself out of bed and stood in front of the vanity mirror. Her eyes were swollen from crying half the night. She hated crying. She had grown up in a world of men who didn't cry. Trying to show them she was as stalwart as they, she had learned as a child to quash her female expressions of emotion. All night she had fought the sobs that built in her chest, but she had finally given in to them in the wee hours.

  She had also spent part of the restless night recalling her plan to buy the 6-0 ranch with money from her trust fund. After Brady appeared on the scene, she had abandoned the idea, but now she could think of no reason not to return to it. And she could do it now without so much as a pang of conscience.

  She showered and dressed, leaving the house without eating breakfast, her raw, pitiful-looking eyes hidden by dark sunglasses. She headed for the 6-0.

  Brady was already outside when she arrived. She knew because she could hear Toby Keith singing about his "Whiskey Girl" at high decibels from behind the house.

  Her feet weighed a hundred pounds as she walked past the house toward the barn. He was standing on an upper rung of a tall ladder braced against the barn wall. He was beautiful. So strong and lean. That quickening of her heartbeat that always came when she saw him rushed through her. The arcane feeling was even more powerful than what had happened at home or what she had come here for.

  He had a hammer in his hand. When he saw her, he looked at her for a few beats before starting down the ladder with graceful masculine agility. By the time she reached him, he had stepped off the bottom rung. He smelled of clean sweat and that Sea Breeze body wash. He had a wariness about him. He probably feared she might break into a tantrum and take off a strip of his hide or something worse. She shoved her hands in her back pockets. "You got a minute?"

  "Sure." He dropped his hammer into a toolbox on the ground, then tugged off his leather gloves and stuffed them into his back pocket.

  He had on faded Wranglers and a faded gray T-shirt, the arm holes ragged where the sleeves had been ripped out. He squatted and latched the box, his tanned defined biceps rippling with his movement. Sweat had made a damp wedge down the middle of the back of his shirt. His blatant masculinity threatened to overwhelm her. The fact that they'd had sex she would never forget just six weeks ago leaped into her head and an arcane longing gripped her.

  "You riding the horses this morning?" he asked stiffly, looking up at her.

  She shook her head. "I rode Thursday. I was planning to work with Sal this weekend."

  He nodded and got to his feet.

  She willed her thoughts to her purpose for being here. "I want to make you a deal," she said.

  "What kind of deal?" he asked warily.

  He lifted off his cap and wiped his forehead with his forearm, thick dark underarm hair showing when he raised his arm. A visual of him lying in bed against brown plaid sheets with his arm cocked behind his head came to her and she almost shuddered.

  "I understand that starting Monday, you'll be dedicating your life and your future to the Circle C, so—"

  "Jude, I didn't...I tried to tell J.D. you'd be—"

  "Disappointed? Disillusioned? Let down?" She twisted her mouth into a horseshoe scowl and raised a dismissive palm. "Nah, not me. I'm Judith Ann, the model child. I'm used to being shunted aside for what someone thinks is best for the Circle C."

  She wished she could quell the sarcasm, but today it wasn't possible.

  Concern showed in his eyes. He reset his cap. "I was going to try to talk to you."

  "It isn't your place to talk to me. Look, I've got a question for you. My daddy, the man you'll be trying to replace—which I assure you will be no easy task—works twenty-four-seven. How do you figure you'll have any time to give to the 6-0?"

  "I'm still thinking about it. No firm decisions have been made."

  "Oh, Daddy's determined. I saw it in his eye. Believe me, he's made firm decisions even if you haven't. Here's an idea. While you're thinking about running the Circle C, maybe you can think about this, too. You need money. I need land. I've got one, you've got the other. Somewhere in that scenario, there's a place for us to meet. I want to move forward with some of my ideas."

  "Jude, I'm not interested in selling—"

  "I'm not talking about selling. Do you want to chat out here in the sun or can we find some shade?"

  He drew in a breath and gestured toward the barn. They walked inside the wooden building together, into the dim murk that felt almost cool without the press of the direct sun. He pushed back the bill of his cap and leaned his backside against a stack of hay bales. He crossed his ankles and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. "What's on your mind?"

  The casual pose in his tight jeans made her eyes drift down his body and for some reason, she thought of Joyce Harrison. She quickly jerked her thoughts back on track and her eyes up to his face.

  "Can you take off those sunglasses?" he said. "I like seeing your eyes."

  She hesitated, then yanked off the sunglasses. His mouth tightened as if he were surprised by her appearance. She must look even more awful than she thought.

  "Grandpa expects you to fail here, you know. And after you do, he expects you to come to him, hat in hand, begging him to buy you out. Then he expects you to sell to him at a rock-bottom price."

  Saying those words felt strange. Twenty-four hours ago, she wouldn't have dreamed of spouting something Grandpa had told her in confidence.

  Brady's shoulders lifted in a shrug. "So? Nothi
ng new about that. He tried to buy the place even before Aunt Margie died."

  "And you're still willing to work for him as a manager knowing what I just told you?"

  "What do I care what he expects? Just because a man expects something doesn't mean he gets it, even if he's Jeff Strayhorn."

  "Well, you obviously don't know my grandfather."

  "Look, Jude. This is a good opportunity for me. A job I can do. Something I believe I'll like. That doesn't mean the job or your family will own me. Besides, it might not work out. It's a trial at first."

  "Oh, you'll work out, Brady. I might not know you that well, but I can see you'll work out."

  "Jude, I don't blame you for being upset. If I were in your shoes—"

  She raised her hand again and stopped his words. "Don't say that. You can't possibly know anything about being in my shoes."

  He straightened to his full height, propping his hands on his hips and looking down at her with those laser eyes. "Then let me put it this way, Jude. I’m not going to stand here and be your whipping boy. If I thought your family was really going to give you what you want, I wouldn't even think about taking the job. I damn near turned J.D. down on the spot until he told me he would hire somebody from the outside if I didn't take his offer. And I think he was as serious as a man can be. You need to believe me on that. I guess you could look at it as better me than a total stranger."

  Hearing her suspicions confirmed was the final twist of the knife. She did believe him. Her father, for all his gentleness at times, was capable of being as ruthless as he felt he had to be. A bittersweet smile crept to the corner of her mouth and she fastened her eyes on his. "And you think you're not a stranger?"

  His hand rose as if he might touch her, but then it quickly fell. Instead, he touched her with his eyes. "No. To some people I'm a stranger, but not to you. How could you say that after…?” His words trailed off, his eyes holding hers. “You've already trusted me with...Well, you know you can trust me."