by Diana Palmer
“Nobody ever comes to see you.”
“Visiting cattlemen do. Politicians do. We even have the occasional cookout. People notice these things. And you’ll look neater in new stuff.”
She shrugged and sighed with defeat. “Okay, then. Thanks.”
He didn’t crank the truck. He threw a long arm over the back of the seat and looked at her openly. Her barely contained excitement over the clothes began to make sense to him. “You’ve never had new things,” he said suddenly.
She flushed. “On the rodeo circuit, when you lose, you don’t make much. Dad and I bought most of our stuff from yard sales, or were given hand-me-downs by other rodeo people.” She glanced at him nervously. “I used to compete in barrel racing, and I won third place a few times, but I didn’t have a good enough horse to go higher. We had to sell him just before Dad gave up and came here to work.”
“Why, Tess,” he said softly. “I never knew you could ride at all!”
“I haven’t had much chance to.”
“I’ll take you out with me one morning. Can you ride a quarter horse?”
She smiled. “If he’s well trained, sure I can!”
He chuckled. “We’ll see, after the biggest part of the roundup’s over. We’d never get much done with all the cowboys showing off for you.”
She flushed. “Nobody looks at me. I’m too skinny.”
“But you’re not,” he protested. His eyes narrowed. “You’re slender, but nobody could mistake you for a boy.”
“Thanks.”
He reached out unexpectedly and tugged a short reddish-gold curl, bringing her face around so that he could search it. He wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed as his gaze slid lazily over her eyes, cheekbones and down to her mouth.
“The blue dress suited you,” he said. “How did the black one look?”
She shifted restlessly. “It was too low.”
“Low what?”
She swallowed. “It was cut almost to the waist. I could never wear something like that in public!”
His gaze fell lower, to the quick rise and fall of her small breasts. “A lot of women couldn’t get away with it,” he murmured. “But you could. You’re small enough that you wouldn’t need to wear a bra with it.”
“Mr. Hart!” she exclaimed, jerking back.
His eyebrows arched. “I’ve been Callaghan for months and today I’ve already been Mr. Hart twice. What did I say?”
Her face was a flaming red. “You…you know what you said!”
He did, all at once, and he chuckled helplessly. He shook his head as he reached for the ignition and switched it on. “And I thought Mrs. Lewis was old-fashioned. You make her look like a hippie!”
She wrapped her arms over her chest, still shaken by the remark. “You mustn’t go around saying things like that. It’s indecent!”
He had to force himself not to laugh again. She was serious. He shouldn’t tease her, but it was irresistible. She made him feel warm inside, when he’d been empty for years. He should have realized that he was walking slowly toward an abyss, but he didn’t notice. He enjoyed having her around, spoiling her a little. He glanced sideways at her. “Put your belt on, honey.”
Honey! She fumbled it into the lock at her side, glancing at him uncertainly. He never used endearments and she didn’t like them. But that deep, rough voice made her toes curl. She could almost imagine him whispering that word under his breath as he kissed a woman.
She went scarlet. Why had she thought of that? And if the thought wasn’t bad enough, her eyes went suddenly to his hard mouth and lingered there in spite of her resolve. She wondered if that mouth could wreak the devastation she thought it could. She’d only been kissed a time or two, and never by anybody who knew how. Callaghan would know how, she was sure of it.
He caught her looking at him and one eyebrow went up. “And what sort of scandalous thoughts are going through that prudish mind now?” he taunted.
She caught her breath. “I don’t know what you mean!”
“No?”
“No! And I do not have a prudish mind!”
“You could have fooled me,” he said under his breath, and actually grinned.
“Hold your breath until you get any more apple butter with your biscuits,” she muttered back. “And wait until you get another biscuit, too!”
“You can’t starve me,” he said smugly. “Rey and Leo will protect me.”
“Oh, right, like they protected me! How could you do that? Carrying me out like a package, and them standing there singing like fools. I don’t know why I ever agreed to work for such a loopy family!”
“Loopy? Us?”
“You! You’re all crazy.”
“What does that make you?” he murmured dryly. “You work for us.”
“I need my head read!”
“I’ll get somebody on it first thing.”
She glanced at him sourly. “I thought you wanted me to quit.”
“I already told you, not during roundup!” he reminded her. “Maybe when summer comes, if you’re determined.”
“I’m not determined. You’re determined. You don’t like me.”
He pursed his lips, staring straight ahead. “I don’t, do I?” he said absently. “But you’re a fine housekeeper and a terrific cook. If I fired you, the others would stick me in a horse trough and hold me under.”
“You destroyed the cake I baked for you,” she recalled uneasily. “And you let your snake fall on me.”
“That was Herman’s own idea,” he assured her. His face hardened. “The cake—you know why.”
“I know now.” She relented. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what nice mothers are like, either, because I never had one. But if I had little kids, I’d make their birthdays so special,” she said almost to herself, smiling. “I’d bake cakes and give them parties, and make ice cream. And they’d have lots and lots of presents.” Her hand went involuntarily to the necklace he’d given her.
He saw that, and something warm kindled in his chest. “You like kids?” he asked without wanting to.
“Very much. Do you?”
“I haven’t had much to do with them. I like Mack’s toddler, though,” he added. The foreman had a little boy two years old who always ran to Cag to be picked up. He always took something over for the child when he went to see Mack and his wife. Tess knew, although he never mentioned it.
She looked out the window. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever have kids of my own.”
He scowled. “Why do you say that?”
She wrapped her arms around her chest. “I don’t like…the sort of thing that you have to do to get them.”
He stepped on the brakes so hard that the seat belt jerked tight and he stared at her intently.
She flushed. “Well, some women are cold!”
“How do you know that you are?” he snapped, hating himself for even asking.
She averted her gaze out the window. “I can’t stand to have a man touch me.”
“Really?” he drawled. “Then why did you gasp and stand there with your heartbeat shaking you when I slid my hand over your shoulder in the dress shop?”
Her body jerked. “I never!”
“You most certainly did,” he retorted, and felt a wave of delight wash over him at the memory of her soft skin under his hands. It had flattered him, touched him, that she was vulnerable with him.
“It was…I mean, I was surprised. That’s all!” she added belligerently.
His fingers tapped on the steering wheel as he contemplated her with narrowed eyes. “Something happened to you. What?”
She stared at him, stunned.
“Come on. You know I don’t gossip.”
She did. She moved restlessly against the seat. “One of my mother’s lovers made a heavy pass at me,” she muttered. “I was sixteen and grass green, and he scared me to death.”
“And now you’re twenty-two,” he added. He stared at her even harder. “There aren’t any twenty-two-y
ear-old virgins left in America.”
“Says who?” she shot at him, and then flushed as she felt herself fall right into the trap.
His lips pursed, and he smiled so faintly that she almost missed it.
“That being the case,” he said in a soft, mocking tone, “how do you know that you’re frigid?”
She was going to choke to death trying to answer that. She drew in an exasperated breath. “Can’t we go home?”
She made the word sound soft, mysterious, enticing. He’d lived in houses all his life. She made him want a home. But it wasn’t a thing he was going to admit just yet, even to himself.
“Sure,” he said after a minute. “We can go home.” He took his foot off the brake, put the truck in gear and sent it flying down the road.
It never occurred to him that taking her shopping had been the last thing on his mind this morning, or that his pleasure in her company was unusual. He was reclusive these days, stoic and unapproachable; except when Tess came close. She was vulnerable in so many ways, like the kitten they’d both adopted. Surely it was just her youth that appealed to him. It was like giving treats to a deprived child and enjoying its reactions.
Except that she trembled under his hands and he’d been years on his own. He liked touching her and she liked letting him. It was something he was going to have to watch. The whole situation was explosive. But he was sure he could handle it. She was a sweet kid. It wouldn’t hurt if he spoiled her just a little. Of course it wouldn’t.
Chapter Four
The brothers, like Tess and the rest of the staff, were worn to a frazzle by the time roundup was almost over.
Tess hadn’t thought Cag meant it when he’d invited her to ride with him while he gathered strays, but early one morning after breakfast, he sent her to change into jeans and boots. He was waiting for her at the stable when she joined him there.
“Listen, I’m a little rusty,” Tess began as she stared dubiously toward two saddled horses, one of whom was a sleek black gelding who pranced in place.
“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t put you on Black Diamond even if you asked. He’s mine. This is Whirlwind,” he said, nodding toward a pretty little red mare. “She’s a registered quarter horse and smart as a whip. She’ll take care of you.” He summed her up with a glance, smiling at the blue windbreaker that matched her eyes and the Atlanta Braves baseball cap perched atop her red-gold curls.
“You look about ten,” he mused, determined to put an invisible Off Limits sign on her mentally.
“And you look about—” she began.
He cut her off in midsentence. “Hop aboard and let’s get started.”
She vaulted easily into the saddle and gathered the reins loosely in her hands, smiling at the pleasure of being on a horse again. She hadn’t ridden since her father’s death.
He tilted his tan Stetson over his eyes and turned his mount expertly. “We’ll go out this way,” he directed, taking the lead toward the grassy path that wound toward the line camp in the distance. “Catch up.”
She patted the horse’s neck gently and whispered to her. She trotted up next to Cag’s mount and kept the pace.
“We do most of this with light aircraft, but there are always a few mavericks who aren’t intimidated by flying machines. They get into the brush and hide. So we have to go after those on horseback.” He glanced at her jean-clad legs and frowned. “I should have dug you out some chaps,” he murmured, and she noticed that he was wearing his own—bat-wing chaps with stains and scratches from this sort of work. “Don’t ride into the brush like that,” he added firmly. “You’ll rip your legs open on the thorns.”
“Okay,” she said easily.
He set the pace and she followed, feeling oddly happy and at peace. It was nice riding with him like this across the wide, flat plain. She felt as if they were the only two people on earth. There was a delicious silence out here, broken only by the wind and the soft snorting of the horses and occasionally a distant sound of a car or airplane.
They worked through several acres of scrubland, flushing cows and calves and steers from their hiding places and herding them toward the distant holding pens. The men had erected several stockades in which to place the separated cattle, and they’d brought in a tilt-tray, so that the calves could be branded and ear-tagged.
The cows, identified with the handheld computer by the computer chips embedded in their tough hides, were either culled and placed in a second corral to be shipped out, or driven toward another pasture. The calves would be shipped to auction. The steers, already under contract, would go to their buyers. Even so far away from the ranch, there was tremendous organization in the operation.
Tess took off her Braves cap and wiped her sweating forehead on her sleeve.
Hardy, one of the older hands, grinned as he fetched up beside her on his own horse. “Still betting on them Braves, are you? They lost the pennant again last fall…that’s two years in a row.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, they won it once already,” she reminded him with a smug grin. “Who needs two?”
He chuckled, shook his head and rode off.
“Baseball fanatic,” Cag murmured dryly as he joined her.
“I’ll bet you watched the playoffs last fall, too,” she accused.
He didn’t reply. “Hungry?” he asked. “We can get coffee and some stew over at the chuck wagon.”
“I thought only those big outfits up in the Rockies still packed out a chuck wagon.”
“If we didn’t, we’d all go hungry here,” he told her. “This ranch is a lot bigger than it looks.”
“I saw it on the map in your office,” she replied. “It sure covers a lot of land.”
“You should see our spread in Montana,” he mused. “It’s the biggest of the lot. And the one that kept us all so busy a few weeks ago, trying to get the records on the computer.”
She glanced back to where two of the men were working handheld computers. “Do all your cowboys know how to use those things?” she asked.
“Most of them. You’d be amazed how many college boys we get here between exams and new classes. We had an aeronautical engineer last summer and a professor of archaeology the year before that.”
“Archaeology!”
He grinned. “He spent more time digging than he spent working cattle, but he taught us how to date projectile points and pottery.”
“How interesting.” She stretched her aching back. “I guess you’ve been to college.”
“I got my degree in business from Harvard.”
She glanced at him warily. “And I barely finished high school.”
“You’ve got years left to go to college, if you want to.”
“Slim chance of that,” she said carelessly. “I can’t work and go to school at the same time.”
“You can do what our cowboys do—work a quarter and go to school a quarter.” He fingered the reins gently. “In fact, we could arrange it so that you could do that, if you like. Jacobsville has a community college. You could commute.”
The breath left her in a rush. “You’d let me?” she asked.
“Sure, if you want to.”
“Oh, my goodness.” She thought about it with growing delight. She could study botany. She loved to grow things. She might even learn how to cultivate roses and do grafting. Her eyes sparkled.
“Well?”
“I could study botany,” she said absently. “I could learn to grow roses.”
He frowned. “Horticulture?”
“Yes.” She glanced at him. “Isn’t that what college teaches you?”
“It does, certainly. But if you want horticulture, the vocational school offers a diploma in it.”
Her face became radiant at the thought. “Oh, how wonderful!”
“What an expression,” he mused, surprised at the pleasure it gave him. “Is that what you want to do, learn to grow plants?”
“Not just plants,” she said. “Roses!”
“We’ve got dozen
s of them out back.”
“No, not just old-fashioned roses. Tea roses. I want to do grafts. I want to…to create new hybrids.”
He shook his head. “That’s over my head.”
“It’s over mine, too. That’s why I want to learn it.”
“No ambition to be a professional of some sort?” he persisted. “A teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, a journalist?”
She hesitated, frowning as she studied his hard face. “I like flowers,” she said slowly. “Is there something wrong with that? I mean, should I want to study something else?”
He didn’t know how to answer that. “Most women do, these days.”
“Sure, but most women don’t want jobs working in a kitchen and keeping house and growing flowers, do they?” She bit her lip. “I don’t know that I’d be smart enough to do horticulture…”
“Of course you would, if you want to do it,” he said impatiently. His good humor seemed to evaporate as he stared at her. “Do you want to spend your life working in somebody else’s kitchen?”
She shifted. “I guess I will,” she said. “I don’t want to get married, and I don’t really see myself teaching kids or practicing medicine. I enjoy cooking and keeping house. And I love growing things.” She glanced at him belligerently. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Not a damned thing.”
“Now I’ve made you mad.”
His hand wrapped around the reins. He didn’t look at her as he urged his mount ahead, toward the chuck wagon where several cowboys were holding full plates.
He couldn’t tell her that it wasn’t her lack of ambition that disturbed him. It was the picture he had of her, surrounded by little redheaded kids digging in the rose garden. It upset him, unsettled him. He couldn’t start thinking like that. Tess was just a kid, despite her age, and he’d better keep that in mind. She hadn’t even started to live yet. She’d never known intimacy with a man. She was likely to fall headlong in love with the first man who touched her. He thought about that, about being the first, and it rocked him to the soles of his feet. He had to get his mind on something else!
They had a brief lunch with several of the cowboys. Tess let Cag do most of the talking. She ate her stew with a biscuit, drank a cup of coffee and tried not to notice the speculative glances she was getting. She didn’t know that it was unusual for Cag to be seen in the company of a woman, even the ranch housekeeper. Certainly he’d never brought anyone female out to a roundup before. It aroused the men’s curiosity.