B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK

by Jeffrey, Anna

  All of that was superfluous fluff. His life had followed more diverse paths than most young men's, but in the bone-deep part of him, he had always known what he wanted most of all—security and a decent home. A house that wasn't overcrowded with too many dwellers or that was never clean because everybody who lived in it worked at menial jobs from sunup to sundown just to eat and had no time or energy left for housekeeping. He wanted a loving woman who cared about him in a way he had rarely seen in real life, a woman who was glad to see him come home at night. He took pride in being a caretaker, but he wanted somebody in his life who was eager to be his helpmate. He wanted a woman who was faithful.

  Unbidden, his thoughts turned to Jude Strayhorn. Why couldn't he get her, a woman who met none of his criteria out of his mind? Was it because he couldn't figure her out? For sure, she'd had him scratching his head from the first minute she showed up in his driveway. She had come on to him like any number of barroom babes he had run across in his life, then showed herself to be less experienced with men than today's teenagers. Then after he had followed her into a petty deception against her family and endangered his own plans, she had brushed him off like lint on her shoulder.

  As if all of that hadn't left him confused enough, just when he had almost concluded that the weekend in Stephenville had been a figment of his imagination, she had showed up at his house looking sexy and smelling like flowers and offering to ride his horses and lease his land.

  Yet, despite the confusion, he instinctively knew why she appealed to him. She was a fierce warrior. Though she'd had every material advantage life could offer, she was a lonely heart struggling to find a place to belong. Like him, she was a loner. She had the same deep yearning as he. And the fact that she was rich and he wasn't had nothing to do with it.

  Brady had learned a lot about the Strayhorn father and son in the short time he had spent with J.D. Jude might think she had traditional relationships with them, but that wasn’t true. They treated her like a possession, like one of their prized horses or cows. J.D. loved her all right, but from a distance, as if he feared reaching to her across his desk might arouse an emotion he couldn't handle.

  Jake Strayhorn had the same quality about him. In all the years Brady had known him, he had never seen him express anything other than a short, surface emotion.

  Such was the shroud that hung over the whole Strayhorn family. The darkness of its past. The Campbell Curse.

  A low grumble escaped Brady's throat, the sound of him chastising himself for letting his mind wander from the question at hand. He straightened in his chair, picked up his glass and finished off the milk. Now he had a decision to make. To sell or not to sell.

  Before daylight the next morning, Jude's father left for Lubbock where he would board the family plane and fly off to an AQHA conference in Amarillo.

  After they said good-bye to each other, Jude left for the Dickerson ranch, southeast of Waco, to pick up a pair of prizewinning Hereford bulls. She had already named them Spike and Charlie Brown. It was the wrong time of year to be bringing in new bulls, but these two had qualities she liked and she hadn't wanted to miss the opportunity to acquire them.

  She had intended to leave the Circle C hours earlier, but after so much tension between her and her father the past few weeks and him flying off in one direction and her driving in another, she had delayed her departure so she could say a cordial good-bye.

  Early afternoon found her standing in the Dickersons' driveway, her double-axle trailer loaded with three thousand pounds of beef on the hoof and her readying to head back to the Circle C. She had a six-hour drive ahead of her.

  “Looks like a bad cloud building up,” Mr. Dickerson said, tilting his head toward the west. “Don’t think you’ll get back to Willard County before you run into it.”

  The storm rolling out of the Rockies was forecast to be vicious. She had intended to leave Dickersons’ ranch in time to be back in Willard County before bad weather arrived, but Mr. Dickerson had insisted on giving her a tour of his ranch, which had used up time. Then he and his wife wanted her to stay for dinner and since the Dickersons were Daddy’s friends, she couldn’t tell them no.

  Hauling her live cargo through a West Texas thunderstorm would be a challenge, but a Strayhorn daughter would never let a little thing like weather prevent her doing what she had to.

  She merged onto the interstate at two o'clock in the afternoon, headed northwest. In Fort Worth, she stopped and gassed up and checked on the bulls. A deep purple cloudbank, massive and ominous, spanned the western sky for as far as the eye could see. Heavy air pressed down on her shoulders. On the last day of July, the day should be bright with sunshine, but the sky had already turned to greenish purple and the storm had chased away the light. Now she wished she’d had the bulls shipped.

  On the outskirts of Wichita Falls, the wind picked up, buffeting her one-ton pickup and the loaded trailer behind it as if they weighed no more than a compact car.

  A few more minutes and the first fat raindrops splattered against the windshield. An earth-shaking clap of thunder exploded directly overhead, the heavens opened and great sheets of water poured from the sky, pounding on her pickup roof, beating against the sides in a roar and erasing visibility. Her windshield wipers whipped and thumped, but barely cleared a fan large enough for her to see a foot or two ahead of her. Adrenaline surged, her heartbeat escalated. She leaned forward, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, her eyes plastered to the dim images in front of her.

  Her cell phone broke into the Aggie War Hymn, but she didn't dare grab for it.

  Thunderclaps cracked and boomed like cannons. Jagged streaks of lightning bored into the pastures all around her. The hair rose on her arms as one zigzag struck with a crack near the pickup. Terrified, Spike and Charlie Brown constantly shifted, rocking the trailer. “Dear God, please. Don’t let them unbalance us,” she mumbled. She gripped the steering wheel tightly and slowed her speed combat the swaying trailer.

  Then, as if the Good Lord had heard her prayer, the sky lightened, the wind relented and the storm diminished to a steady, drenching rain. She relaxed her white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. She found a country-music station on the radio and settled in for a long, slow drive. She began to think about all that had happened to her in the past two months.

  No question that Brady Fallon's presence at the Circle C had changed her life. An interesting part of her day had been eliminated because she no longer felt she could move freely around the veterinary clinic for fear of running into him. For the same reason, she no longer helped Doc Barrett with breeding the mares. Doc had noticed her absence and asked her where she was keeping herself. She had told him she had to prepare for the beginning of school.

  Since she had stopped joining Daddy for a drink prior to supper, now it was Brady who shared cocktail hour with her father. Jude could live without the liquor, but she missed her daily get-together with her father. In the past, that brief time had too often been the only chance she had to talk to him during the day.

  Her only ally in the house was Grandpa, and lately, he wasn’t feeling well. A part of her worried about that.

  When she rode Patch or Sal, she often found Brady with his arms hooked over the fence rail watching her, which made her so uneasy she usually stopped the workout early. Everything about him affected her—the way his body moved; the way he slouched against a doorjamb, his hip cocked, his thumb hooked in his jeans pocket; the way he peered intently at something that interested him; the crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled.

  Maybe what affected her most was knowing he had seen her without her clothes on. And she had seen him. And they had touched each other in the most intimate of ways.

  Then there was his supposed courtship of Joyce Harrison that needled her incessantly. Jude was going to the school daily now and she heard the stories. One of her peers at school was Joyce's cousin, who talked endlessly about what a quiet, gentle man Brady was, how good he was wi
th Joyce's son, how crazy Joyce was about him, how lucky for Joyce that she had met him. Hearing it was almost more than Jude could stand.

  Even when Brady wasn't in her sight around the Circle C or being discussed at school, he was in her head, especially at night. She revisited that one conversation in his pickup at least once every night.

  …I'm not necessarily looking for a, uh, boyfriend....I've never even dated one of the ranch hands….

  And every time she thought of those words, she wished she had never said them.

  All at once, thunder rumbled across the sky like a wagonload of rocks, yanking her thoughts back to the present. Rain suddenly bulleted down. Spike and Charlie Brown began shifting in the trailer again.

  Thunder became a rumble so constant it echoed in her very body. Sheet lightning lit the air like camera flashes. The radio had become useless white noise. It didn't matter, anyway. She dared not divert her attention from driving long enough to search for a broadcast.

  With night coming on, she began to look for a service station to pull into, but visibility was so poor, she could scarcely read the highway signs.

  She slowed her speed to a crawl and stuck with the far-right lane. Cars and trucks passed her, the force of their massive moving weight rocking her, their giant tires spewing rooster tails of water onto her windshield and into the trailer. The trailer had a roof, but the sides were open steel rails, so the bulls were being deluged by every passing truck. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and prayed to be able to stay on the paved surface. She had no idea what might await her if she veered off the highway onto the shoulder.

  An hour and a half later, she had driven deeper into the mouth of the beast and conditions had only worsened. Rain continued to pour without letup. A tight knot had formed between her shoulder blades.

  Then, she recognized signs that she was nearing the small town of Vernon. By a miracle and because she was moving at a snail's pace, she spotted the exit that would take her to Lockett and the Circle C. A hundred more miles more and she would be home. "Yes," she cried and made the turn.

  Now that she was heading west, the wind blasts blew full force against the pickup and trailer. Keeping the pickup on the road took all of her strength. She couldn't clearly see familiar territory, but she sensed it and her heartbeat slowed. She passed through Lockett and felt her shoulders and neck relax a little for the first time in hours.

  Only a few more miles before she reached the Circle C's gate. Without warning, a monstrous gust blasted the side of the trailer and pickup. She felt herself moving to the right, toward a deep barrow ditch she knew ran alongside the highway. Frantically she yanked the steering wheel to the left, but to no avail. The road's soft shoulder grabbed her tires, pulled her even farther right and the pickup's forward motion stopped with a ka-whump! As the rig tipped to the right, her body slammed against her seat belt. Everything stopped but the engine, the headlights and the rain. Like a million silver needles, rain drove horizontally through the headlights' blaze. She couldn't see the horizon, but she knew the pickup was lying on its side in the ditch.

  And so was the trailer.

  The bulls!

  She grabbed the door latch and pushed against the door, but the wind defied her strength. She waited for a lull between gusts and pushed again, succeeded in opening the door only partway. She was trapped. She buzzed down the window and looked out. Cold rain pricked her face.

  As nearly as she could tell, the pickup lay at a forty-five-degree angle against the side of the ditch, and the driver’s side of the pickup was five feet off the ground. She killed the headlights and switched off the engine, then squirmed in the driver's bucket seat until she had the window to her back. She climbed out, one leg at a time, hanging on to the windowsill and sliding down the wet door until her feet hit the ground.

  Even above the roar of the wind and rain, she heard the anxious bellows of both bulls, heard their bodies thumping and bumping inside the trailer. With the trailer laid on its right side, she couldn't see into it from where she stood, so she forced her way against the gale to the trailer's backend.

  She peered through the double gate, but in the pitch-black of the stormy night and the blinding rain, she couldn't see the bulls. She could only smell them and hear them bawling.

  She had to get them out. Their feet and legs could be caught in the trailer's side rails. They could be injured. Or if not, in their fear, they could injure themselves.

  She needed help. Spike and Charlie Brown needed help. Her cell phone was inside the cab. No way would she ever be able to get to it. She cursed herself for not having the forethought to grab it before she climbed out of the truck.

  She looked around, seeking her bearings, searching through the rain for any sign of a landmark. Then she figured out where she was. She was no more than a mile from the 6-0 Ranch and Brady Fallon's house.

  Chapter 22

  Brady had been sleeping so soundly, he thought the knocking on his front door was a dream. When it continued even after he was awake, he opened his eyes. Then he realized the noise wasn't merely knocking; it was pounding. And a hellacious storm raged outside. He roused himself and sat up. He pulled on jeans, padded barefoot to the front door, switched on the porch light and opened the door.

  "Jude!"

  She was soaked to the skin, her hair plastered to her scalp. She was shaking like a cold dog. Her arms were folded over her chest and she clutched her elbows. He pulled her into the house. "Jesus, you're freezing."

  "I n-need h-help," she said through chattering teeth.

  She couldn’t have been wetter if she had just climbed out of a swimming pool. Water poured off her. Her hair hung in dripping clumps. She had gone to pick up bulls. How had she gotten from that to this?

  "Come on." Still gripping her arm, he dragged her to the bathroom and grabbed a handful of bath towels out of the cabinet over the toilet. He handed them to her, then took one himself and began roughly scrubbing her bare arms dry. "What the hell happened?"

  "I t-turned over," she said, her voice weak and broken, her whole body quaking. She looked up at him wild-eyed and bedraggled. Dark smears of eye makeup circled her eyes. "I've g-got the bulls. I've g-got to g-get them out. Ph-phone."

  "Where are they?"

  "In t-the t-trailer. In the d-ditch."

  A sick fear surged in Brady's gut. "Are they hurt?"

  "I d-don't know. I c-can't tell."

  Even if they weren't hurt, they must be trapped. They had to be freed ASAP. "Let me get some clothes on."

  Still shaking and babbling about leaving too late and her pickup sliding off the road, she followed him into the bedroom as if she had been in it a dozen times, her wet boots and jeans leaving a trail of water behind her.

  Only half listening, he dug toward the back of his closet and came up with the only bathrobe he owned, a thick thing that looked like a horse blanket. "Get those wet clothes off," he said, handing her the robe. "Hell, woman, you'll end up with hypothermia. Or pneumonia."

  He pawed through his dresser drawers and came up with socks and a sweatshirt, then dropped to the edge of the mattress and quickly pulled on the socks and his boots.

  "What're y-you g-going to do?"

  "Saddle Tuffy and get 'em out of there." Managing two massive already panicked by a wreck and a roaring thunderstorm would be impossible on foot. It could end with a bad outcome even from horseback.

  “I’ll sh-show you—”

  "You stay here and warm up." He pulled a sweatshirt over his head.

  "No. It's too hard for one p-person. I'll go help."

  "You're freezing. Do what I tell you. Get those wet clothes off."

  "No. You don't know where the truck is. I'm going."

  She left the room, her boots squishing. He sighed and shook his head. If the past two months had taught him anything, it was that Jude was not a woman easily thwarted. He turned back to the dresser and found another sweatshirt.

  Before leaving the bedroom, he dug in th
e back of his closet again where he kept a gun safe and brought out his holstered .45 pistol and fastened it on his belt. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot an expensive bull, but worst-case scenario, those bulls would have to be put down.

  He caught up with Jude in the kitchen. "At least put on a dry shirt," he said, shoving the fleece sweatshirt into her hands.

  Her gaze zeroed in on the pistol. She looked up at him, her brow tented with anguish.

  "Just in case," he said quietly. “This is the only gun I’ve got other than my hunting rifles.”

  Her chin dropped to her chest. She was a rancher's daughter. She knew what he knew.

  She tried to unbutton her shirt, but her hands were shaking so, she couldn't. He unbuttoned it for her and helped her peel it and her wet bra off. Hardly noticing her nakedness, he pulled the sweatshirt over her head, then plucked his hat off the coat rack by the back door and crammed it over her wet hair. "Okay, let's go."

  Wind whipped and rain pelted as they dashed to the barn. In a matter of minutes they had the two geldings saddled. Jude had to be in misery, but she voiced not a word of complaint. He said nothing, either. He had already made the point and didn't intend to belabor it in the middle of the night with two of the Circle C's bulls in trouble.

  A well-used slicker hung in the tack room. He grabbed it and tossed it to her. "If you've just got to go, put this on."

  "But what about you? What'll you wear?"

  He shrugged into his old barn coat and crushed his old felt barn hat onto his head. "I haven't been out in the weather yet. I’m not soaked."

  She mounted the gelding. He picked up a flashlight, lifted two extra lariats off a wall peg and hooked them over his saddle horn. "Let's go." He shoved his boot into a stirrup and swung into the saddle. "Lead the way."