Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  “Don’t be mad at me, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m trying to do what’s best for everybody. You’ve seen how your grandpa’s slipping. I’m more than a little worried about him. I’m going to have to help him more, which is why I felt a need to bring in another man.”

  At the mention of the word “man,” Jude felt her mouth quirk.

  “You could help Grandpa, too, you know. Learn the ins and outs of the ranch’s finances. That’s important, Jude.”

  Jude knew that. But that facet of the ranch’s operation had always belonged to Grandpa. Sometimes he spent entire days on the phone with bankers and investment types or with the accountant in Abilene. Strayhorn Corp had investments in many venues other than West Texas land and cattle.

  As if he knew what she was thinking, her father added, “You know, we haven’t been as lucky as some of the other West Texas stock growers. Without oil, the management of outside investment is just as important as taking good care of our land and our livestock.”

  Jude was well aware oil hadn’t been discovered on the Circle C land. At one point years ago, a push had been made to find the elusive black gold and thirty wells had been drilled. Thirty dry holes. Nowadays, the science of oil exploration had vastly improved, and wildcatting was not quite such a shot in the dark. Scientists could know what was under the surface and where. But until recently, the oil market had been so stagnant and government regulation so restrictive, no exploration projects had even been considered.

  Under three hundred thousand acres of land in West Texas, 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 settled 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 his deceased brother’s or wife’s names. 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 then. I lost my brother and my wife, but he lost his son, his daughter-in-law and his own wife the same year. And I lost my mother, too. And because of what happened, we . . . he . . . also lost Jake. He wasn’t able to do much around the ranch for a long time. Depression, I think they called it.”

  Jude had never heard that her grandfather had suffered from depression. No one would have dared say it. 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 just 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. And your children after that. 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?

  “You must never forget your roots. In 1861, Alister Campbell lost a daughter on his trip to Texas. 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 battered. And Daddy and Grandpa were responsible.

  “I won’t be able to ride,” she said. “I’m back to working every day at the school.”

  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 there 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, maybe, but not promised.

  Misunderstanding? Understatement of the year. Her father and grandfather had never understood her. A disconnect had always existed between her and them. She had often wondered if it was 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 thought of 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, a
lcohol, having fun instead of studying.

  She had even been engaged to marry two men—well, boys, really—who Daddy and Grandpa chose. She’d had no great affection for either one. 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 men. She didn’t figure out Webb immediately, didn’t realize the prize he and his father had their eyes on was the Circle C. When it dawned on her that Webb and his parents would like nothing more than for her to get pregnant and force 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 didn’t bow out gracefully. He caused havoc in her life and she made up with him. Eight stressful months passed before the final breakup came, when she called the police to have him removed from her house. His enraged father contacted hers, and Daddy sent for her to come back to the ranch, where a three-day verbal assault ensued. But she had stood her ground and returned to school unengaged, determined that school 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.

  After earning her master’s seven years later, she became 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 was able to end that relationship 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.

  Daddy and Grandpa’s ideal was 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.” 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, she suspected Daddy would find some other outsider. Then the Circle C would be going 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 within Jude that would never be mended. 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 expectations.

  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 her trust-fund money. 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 felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds as she walked past the house toward the barn and saw him 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. She sensed 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 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. His tanned, defined biceps rippled as he dropped his hammer into a toolbox on the ground, then squatted and latched the box. Sweat had made a damp wedge down the middle of the back of his shirt. The fact that they’d had sex she would never forget just six weeks ago felt as if it had happened in another life. “You riding this morning?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I rode Thursday. Sal’s still at the Circle C. I was planning to work with her this weekend, so I didn’t bring her back yet.”

  He nodded.

  “I want to make you a deal,” she said.

  “A deal.” 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 found out last night 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 the sake of the Campbell legacy.” 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 hard-and-fast decisions have been made.”

  “Oh, Daddy’s determined. I saw it in his eye. Believe me, he’s made hard-and-fast 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?”<
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  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 toward his fly, and 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.”

  The words felt strange to say. 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? Nothing new about that. Years ago, he tried to buy the place from Aunt Margie.”

  “And you’re 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 it or they 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.”