Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  “Spoken like a true Texan. You are a Texan, right?”

  He wondered why she asked but didn’t pursue the question. He chuckled. “Yes, ma’am. Born in Stephenville.”

  She went on talking between forkfuls of salad and more lip action as she chewed. “In case you’re wondering how the Campbells got into the Strayhorn act, or vice versa, the founder of the Circle C was Alister Campbell. He was a farmer from Missouri and a Southern sympathizer. That’s why all of the men in the family are named after Jefferson Davis. After Alister and his family got burned out by Jayhawkers, they left Missouri forever. Grammy Pen said they thought they would escape the war by coming to Texas.”

  “So why do you want to be like your great-grandma?” Brady asked.

  “Grammy Pen was strong. She was only two years older than I am now when her husband died suddenly. Heart failure, they thought, but they never really knew. There weren’t any doctors close by in those days. Some people say he was so mean and crooked, the devil called him to come and be one of his generals.”

  She sat back, dabbed at her mouth with her napkin and laughed. “You don’t ever want to let Grandpa hear you say anything like that, though. He thinks his father was a good businessman, though most people will tell you the guy was a crooked lawyer.”

  Family lore. Brady had never known his grandparents on his father’s side and had barely known his mother’s parents. “Humph,” he grunted, but he was interested in Jude’s story.

  “Anyway, after he died, Grammy Pen had the whole ranch on her shoulders. That same year, Pearl Harbor was bombed. Most of the men in Willard County left for the military, including Grandpa. He joined the navy.”

  For a man who had spent his life in West Texas, where there were few natural bodies of water, to join the navy struck Brady as curious. “The navy?”

  “That’s funny, isn’t it? Especially since no one in the whole family, including him, can swim. Grammy Pen said he hauled some calves to Abilene and when he passed a recruiter’s office, he stopped and signed up.”

  “Seems like a man would have to be able to swim to be in the navy.”

  “Grandpa was so scared they would kick him out if he couldn’t swim, he tricked them and they never knew the difference.”

  “You can’t swim, either, huh?”

  She laughed. “Where would I have learned? I could have taken swimming at A&M, but I couldn’t see myself in a beginner’s swimming class. I’ll bet you can swim, though, huh?”

  Brady thought again about the sheltered life Jude had led. “Yeah,” he answered.

  “Grandpa was in the navy more than two years, and he never did learn to swim. While he was gone, Grammy Pen worked right alongside the few hands the Circle C had left. She could ride and rope and do all the work. She managed the business end of things, too. And she gardened and cooked and ran the household. She didn’t shirk from anything. A few years after the war, she finally turned management of the ranch over to Grandpa and took up causes.”

  Every big old ranch in West Texas probably had a similar story, including the part about a crooked ancestor. But hearing all that family history only reminded Brady of the vast differences between Jude’s life and his own. Hell. She was Texas aristocracy. A damn princess. He had been a reasonably successful businessman—and had made a lot of money at one point—but compared to her, he was nothing more than a saddle tramp.

  Don’t let her get to you, horse sense told him. After you get her back to Lockett, she’ll disappear behind that wall of family and money and you’ll never see her again.

  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 and multiple construction jobs under way. It had been a mistake for him to move to Stephenville and hole up in a single-wide 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 had 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 for long. People tell me I’d be less frustrated if I 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 his 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, he thought. 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 admired that, too.

  He sampled a bite of steak. It was cooked to perfection, 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 didn’t want to be rude by saying “none of your business.” “Seven years.”

  “Hey, you’re right. This is good steak. 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.”

  Exactly, Brady thought, returning to his meal, glad to concentrate on his plate instead of the soft flesh at her neckline.

  “I apologize. 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. In fact, he was enjoying her company too much. And it was beginning to have less and less to do with finding her sexy and alluring. He chuckled to show her he wasn’t offended. He knew he didn’t have to answer questions if he didn’t want to. “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, but I’ve resisted.”

  Brady supposed any man marrying into the Strayhorn family would be expected to meet certain requirements, like a husband being chosen by a king for his daughter, the princess. There would naturally be scrutiny and p
renuptial 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 her napkin and laughed heartily. “They want me to have kids. Sons, preferably. Sort of like one of the cows or the broodmares. 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 in the front row.”

  Is she serious? Brady wondered. He stopped cutting his steak and arched an eyebrow. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Not entirely. Since I’ll soon be thirty, they’re getting more worried every day.”

  Having been married to the only daughter of a wealthy Fort Worth businessman, Brady knew something about Jude’s situation. Of course 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 from taking him 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. It’s what Daddy and Grandpa want. I was engaged a couple of times, but things didn’t work out. Daddy and Grandpa would have been happy with either one of my fiancés, 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. He couldn’t help wondering what kind of men she had planned to marry. “You didn’t like the men you were engaged to or what?”

  “Not much. The first one was sort of a selfish person. He cared more about marrying into my family than he cared about marrying me. I knew it almost from the beginning, but his parents were friends of Daddy and Grandpa. Webb’s daddy is one of those silk-stocking lawyers in Austin. I saved all of us a lot of angst by breaking up with him. My second fiancé was a sissy and sort of a mama’s boy. His daddy and mine are friends. Nice enough guy, but kind of helpless. It would be insane for me to marry someone who’s afraid of cows and horses.”

  Brady agreed with her. He had seen men who were afraid of animals. He chuckled.

  Staring at the lacy black edge of her bra, his thoughts leaped to sex. Of course she’d had had sex with those two men. He could think of no woman he had ever met who was celibate at twenty-nine years old. 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 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 the direction 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 much trouble to explain to strangers. I’ve never explained my engagements entirely 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, 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 jukebox had stopped. He felt uncomfortable without the music in the background. “I’m gonna buy some tunes.” He got to his feet, strode to the barroom and added half a dozen quarters to the machine.

  When he returned, Jude said, “You’re really into music, aren’t you?”

  “Makes a hard job go faster. I got used to having it around in the construction business. Seemed like every sub on every job had a boom box blasting. I used to wonder if the construction industry would collapse if somebody banned 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 Brady ordered another margarita for her and a whiskey shot for himself. While they waited for them, Jude 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.”

  “Could we, uh . . . 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, but he knew how and 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.

  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 were too many differences between them.

  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, liking her offbeat sense of humor. He didn’t disagree with her assessment of rodeo dances. “Okay, just bear with me here.”

  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 stance, I can forc
e 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 stopped playing, so he hooked an arm around her shoulder and guided her back toward their booth, intent on sitting down and sipping his drink.

  “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.” He picked up his glass and drained it. She did likewise. 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. Her head was resting on his shoulder and his cheek was pressed against her sweet-smelling 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. She was warm and soft, and that clean, flowery smell that was distinctly hers hypnotized him. The room seemed to be spinning. 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 he knew damn well she had to notice. Yet, she had made no attempt to move away. And the fact that she hadn’t was tearing him up.