Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  He wasn’t sure he could believe it, either. If the bulls were not relatively tame or used to horses, the whole episode could have had a sorry end. The worst part was over. He grinned, too. “We’ll go up the ditch until we find a place where the bank isn’t so steep, where we can get out without slipping in the mud and grass. When we’re out, you keep to the rear and I’ll ride flank. We’ll drive ’em along the fence and turn ’em into that gate I opened.” He trotted ahead to take the lead, holding his bull close behind him. Jude added enough slack to her rope for the second bull to follow on the tail of the first. They moved single file along the ditch bottom, which had turned into liquid red gumbo.

  A few feet past the 6-0’s driveway, the ditch became shallower and he was able to lead his little column in an angle up onto the highway. They traveled up the wet pavement until they reached the 6-0’s driveway and the barbed-wire fence along the left side. He yelled back at her, “Keep ’em against the fence.”

  They herded the two bulls into the pasture without incident, then released their loops, and Brady closed the gate behind them. “In the morning, I’ll check ’em to see if they’re okay,” he yelled up at her.

  Back inside the barn, he helped her strip off her wet gear. He couldn’t see clearly in the flashlight’s dim glow, but her lips looked as if they had turned blue. He was chilled to the bone himself. “Go inside and get warm. I’ll take care of the horses.” She nodded and started away, but he stopped her. “Hey.” Her head turned in his direction. “You did all right, Jude.”

  Without a word, she left him and dashed through the storm toward his back door.

  In Brady’s house, shivering almost to the point of being in pain, Jude spotted the robe he had offered her earlier. She had thrown it across the back of a chair in the kitchen. Now Jude grabbed it and headed for the bathroom. She stripped to her skin and wrapped herself in the robe’s warmth and Brady’s scent. The thick garment swallowed her. The hem dragged on the floor, and the sleeves hung to her fingertips. As she belted it tightly around her waist, she shuddered from the release of the tension that had held her chilled muscles rigid for so long.

  She carried her wet clothing and a towel back to the kitchen. She was met by a powerful wind gust slamming the old frame house and rattling the kitchen window above the sink. She shivered and hung her wet clothing over the backs of the two chairs at the table.

  The cookstove was gas, so she rolled the robe’s sleeves back and turned on all four burners. It wasn’t enough. She had to have warmth inside. A sparkling-clean coffeepot sat on the kitchen counter. She searched the cabinets for coffee. Finding none, she turned on the hot-water tap and ran it until steam rose up to her face. With shaking hands, she filled a mug with the hot water, but it still wasn’t warm enough. Desperate and still shivering, she rummaged in the cabinets again until she located a pan that would hold at least a quart of water. She filled it from the faucet and set it on a burner to boil. She might not be able to cook, but she could boil water.

  While she waited for the water to heat, she sank into a chair at the table and began to towel dry her hair. Not only was she colder than she had ever been in her life, but every nerve in her body felt as if it had knotted into one giant ball between her shoulder blades. Adrenaline had her jumpy and anxious and full of energy, yet she was exhausted. When the water began to rustle in the pan, she poured herself a mug of boiling water.

  Brady came in the back door, which opened directly into the kitchen from the outside. He was as wet as she had been. He stamped water and mud off his boots onto a mat at the door and pried off his boots. His face was red from the wind and rain. He shivered and rubbed his palms together. “Son of a bitch. I can’t believe it’s this friggin’ cold in July.”

  “Welcome to the Panhandle,” Jude said, managing to laugh.

  He detached his pistol holster and laid it on the table, and she said a prayer of thanksgiving that he hadn’t had to use it. “I’ll light the fire in the living room,” he said.

  Jude hadn’t even noticed a stove in the living room, but of course, this house would have a space heater. In most of the older dwellings in Willard County, space heaters were the only source of heat. “I boiled some water. I saw the coffeepot, but I couldn’t find any coffee.”

  He smiled. “Don’t have any. I rarely drink coffee at home.” He picked up the towel she had used to dry her hair, roughed it over his own wet hair, then dropped the towel back on the table. “I’m gonna get some dry clothes on.” He walked toward the living room and squeezed her shoulder with one hand as he passed her. A frisson of indefinable emotion passed through her chest.

  He was gone a long time. Just as she began to wonder if she should check on him, he came back into the kitchen wearing sweatpants and a long-sleeve snap-button shirt. Pulling a pinch of knit fabric out from his thigh, he smiled almost apologetically. “I don’t have a lot of these jogging kind of clothes. But since I don’t jog, I guess I don’t need them.”

  Jog. From what Jude knew of Brady, a jogger couldn’t keep up with him. She forced a smile, too, thinking how out-of-costume he looked, and studying him as he scuffed about the kitchen in old fabric house shoes. Seeing them aroused a profound sense of intimacy, and she thought about those weeks ago when she had spent the night in bed with this man and she had done things with him she had never before done in her life. They had touched each other everywhere in every way, even shared secrets. Tonight it seemed as if none of that had ever happened. That is, except for the awareness that she was naked under his robe. And from how the soft fabric of the sweatpants clung to his genitals, he, too, appeared to be without underwear. She couldn’t make herself stop looking, as a visual of the poster from that day in Stephenville slid through her memory. “Sweatpants don’t suit you. I see you as a Wranglers kind of man.”

  “I’ve got other clothes besides Wranglers. I just don’t wear them.”

  She looked up and realized he had caught her staring below his waist. Their eyes met, and an edgy silence stretched between them. It was like the unbearable tension that night in the mobile home in Stephenville.

  He broke the spell and went to the cupboard. “How about some hot chocolate?” Before she could answer, he dragged out a box of instant hot chocolate mix and used the hot water remaining in the pan on the stovetop to make two mugs. “You hungry?”

  “Not really. But I’m curious. What did you wear other clothes for?”

  “My other life.”

  “Can I ask you another question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you tell me about your other life?”

  There was a long pause while he stirred the chocolate. “Not much to tell. I was a land developer and home builder. Fallon Ranches. Medium to upscale homes on ten to twenty acres outside the city.” He lifted a fifth of some kind of whiskey from the top shelf of the cupboard and poured a dollop into each mug. “The homesites weren’t really ranches, obviously. More like big lots, but they were what a lot of people wanted. Country living. I was doing pretty well for somebody who started with nothing. Homes sold fast as my crew could build them.” He came to the table and smiled as he handed her a steaming mug.

  The sharp smell of whiskey touched her nostrils. She looked up and their gazes locked again, and that same longing she had felt that night in Stephenville rushed into her. It was stunning, the power he held over her emotions.

  “Thanks,” she said softly, and took the warm mug.

  He sat down adjacent to her, leaving no more than two feet between them. As it had before, that heady current swirled up between them. It felt like the storm she had just driven through, and was just as unnerving.

  Jude suspected he had done better than “pretty well.” “I can’t imagine you not doing well.” She propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her palm, ready to listen all night if he would talk. “I suppose getting a divorce ruined everything.”

  “It was sort of the beginning of the end,” he said in his soft, deep
voice. She loved his voice. He fiddled with his mug handle as he talked. “But there was more to it than that. It took me a while to work my way through it, but living on that hilltop in Stephenville, I finally realized all that went wrong. I was too hungry. Tried to move too fast. I was stretched way too tight and had been for a long time. I owed a lot of money to banks. To keep things on an even keel, I needed to give the business all my attention, all the time.”

  “Then why get a divorce? And I’m not being nosy, Brady, honest. I—I just need to know. I mean, you must’ve known a divorce—”

  “It was Marvalee who pushed for the divorce, Jude.” He paused again, his beautiful blue eyes locked on hers. “If she hadn’t, I probably would’ve just kept fighting the battle. She’d found somebody else and wanted out. I was so wrapped up in the business and in trying to be a good father to our son, I didn’t even know until she told me.”

  “Oh,” Jude almost whispered. A thousand new questions sprang into her head, but she restrained herself from asking them. “That must have been painful.”

  A weak smile tipped one side of his mouth and he shrugged. “Actually, the divorce itself wasn’t a big trauma. Marvalee and I never did have that love story like you see in the movies. I was okay with ending the marriage. But I wasn’t okay with giving up Andy.”

  “Your son?”

  “Yeah. And he’s a pistol. He needs me. Marvalee had already started ignoring him before we ever split up. I figured she wouldn’t be that upset about giving him up, so I asked for full custody. She said no, so I sued. That’s when her dad got involved. You see, he’s a big-time real estate man in Fort Worth, with a lot of money, a lot of influence and a lot of friends. He didn’t spend much time with his grandson, but he didn’t want to let go of him, either.”

  Daddy would be the same way, Jude thought.

  “When her dad entered the picture,” Brady said, “everything went downhill for me in a hurry. Fighting for custody of Andy is what finally broke me. Lawyers cost a lot of money. Lawsuits use up a lot of your mental energy. In plain words, with all that was going on, I took my eye off the ball.” He picked up his mug and sipped, then gave her another long look across his shoulder. “But it isn’t over. I’m looking for things to go in a different direction. That’s why I’m trying to hang on to this place.”

  Jude felt as if a rock had dropped in her stomach. She had to say something. “Brady, I—”

  “Feeling better now?”

  “Yes,” she said and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She was still cold, but she no longer feared she might die from it. And she really didn’t want to say what she had started to.

  “Last I heard, you were planning to get home ahead of the storm,” he said.

  She told him about succumbing to the Dickersons’ hospitality because she didn’t want to be rude to friends of her father. When she stopped talking, except for the wind whistling around the corners of the old house, silence filled the room.

  “This storm’s supposed to be gone by daylight,” Brady said finally.

  “Unusual weather for this time of year,” she said.

  His beautiful mouth widened into a slight smile. “That’s the nature of these tempests that blow in from the mountains.”

  Discussing the weather. God, how lame could we get?

  But discussing the weather was easier than saying what was going on in her head or voicing what she thought she saw in his eyes.

  The warmth of the spiked chocolate began to trickle through her system. And so did her father’s words from the night he had announced he was installing Brady as the ranch’s general manager: Caring for livestock is a physical, outdoor job. The years of hard work in the sun and weather have taken their toll on Louelle. “Brady, I couldn’t have gotten those bulls out of that trailer all by myself.”

  “Luckily, you didn’t have to.”

  “But you could have done it.”

  His shoulder lifted in a careless shrug. “I’m bigger and stronger.”

  “If you hadn’t been here, they might have been injured to the point of uselessness or even died. If—if they’d had to be shot . . .” She looked away, hating to admit she might have difficulty doing what would have had to be done. “Do you know that in all the years I’ve lived at the Circle C, I’ve never put down an animal? When it’s been necessary, it’s always been done by someone else.” For the first time ever, an inkling of the point her father had been trying to make for years trickled into her obstinacy. “When you own animals, the responsibility of caring for them never relents. Never goes away, day or night, rain or shine.”

  “That’s the essence of ranching, Jude. You try to make life as good for the animals as you can.”

  “I know. Of course I know that. I’ve lived with it since the day I was born. I’ve just never thought about it in depth.”

  More of her father’s words came to her. It’s man’s work. And she had always been satisfied to let certain aspects of ranching be man’s work, she realized. But one couldn’t separate it, could one? If you were in charge, you couldn’t pick and choose which tasks you liked and ignore those you found unpleasant. What had ever made her think she was mentally and physically prepared to take on the job that had been given to Brady? So what was left? She could do the job Grandpa did. Just as her father had said.

  She felt a shifting within her, a letting go of some of the anger at her father and indirectly at the man who had just saved two of the ranch’s bulls and maybe even her. And she felt guilt. Since Monday, when Daddy had asked her to give up her office, she had been circling and pacing—the house, the barns, the vet clinic—spoiling for a fight. For a week, everyone but Grandpa had avoided her and spoken to her in mollifying tones, which had only escalated her ire and frustration. Even Windy had given her a wide berth. She had volunteered to haul the bulls to escape the heaviness of her own stew. She couldn’t recall ever behaving so badly.

  She looked into the eyes of the man who had snatched away her plans. It was no wonder her father had put his faith in Brady Fallon. He was much more than a pretty face and magnificent body. He was smart and capable and caring. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t been home tonight.”

  He was looking back at her intently, as if he were studying her. “You would’ve done what you had to. Everybody usually does.”

  “Maybe. But not everyone can.” She closed her eyes and rolled her shoulders against the ache in her back and neck. “People might have good intentions, but they have . . . limitations.”

  The next thing she knew, Brady’s hand had crossed the two feet of distance between them and cupped her nape. He began to rub her neck with his thumb. “I know it was a hard day. It was a bad idea for you to make that trip alone, especially with the weather forecast we had.”

  She let out a great sigh and tilted her head to the side, relishing the gentle massage of his fingers. “I always do things alone. It’s no big deal. I was so scared for a while, though. I know those bulls were, too. I just hope they aren’t hurt.”

  “I didn’t see a limp. But they probably think they’ve been hauled into five kinds of hell. It’ll all be better tomorrow when the sun’s shining.”

  His fingers moved to another tender place, and she tilted her head in the opposite direction, letting her shoulders sag and her hands relax in her lap. It felt wonderful to have someone care that she had been tied in knots all afternoon and evening. “I hate to say this, but I don’t have a way to get home.”

  “Jude,” he said softly. She opened her eyes just in time to see him lean toward her. He placed a kiss at the corner of her mouth. “Unless you want to, you don’t have to go. The fact is, I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Her breath caught and her eyes focused on his mouth. She sat perfectly still, almost not daring to breathe. His hand ran down her arm until it found her hands in her lap. He picked up her hand and rested his elbows on his thighs, his head lowered to where she could see a swirl of wavy caramel-colored hair around
his crown.

  “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that night in Stephenville,” he said softly, fingering her hands. He looked up, his brow arched, his face only inches away. Like blue flames, his eyes burned into hers. “Have you thought about it at all?”

  Only every second of every day and night. “Sometimes.”

  “We’re good together, Jude. I know there would be a lot to deal with. But I think we could handle it.”

  She saw hunger in his eyes, the same as she had seen that night. Her breath suspended as her chest grew heavy and aching and memories bombarded her. She could feel the blood surging through her veins. She could see the stubble of his late-day beard, see a tiny mole near his earlobe, feel his breath on her lips. “But . . . what . . . about . . . Joyce?”

  “Joyce? What about her?”

  “Everyone in town’s talking about her . . . and you. Joyce herself is talking about it.”

  His eyes held hers. His head slowly shook. “There’s no Joyce. Not in the way you’re thinking.”

  Are you sure about that? she was so tempted to say. But she wanted to believe him. And most of all, she didn’t want to go.

  He stood, which placed his genitals at her eye level. He was hard and of course he knew she was staring. She tried to remember how he looked in his masculine glory, but she really hadn’t gotten a thorough look at him aroused that dark night in Stephenville. He offered her his hand. Her heart began to pound as she placed her hand in his and rose to her feet. Then she was in his arms, where she had thought she would never be again. Her head was resting on his shoulder, he was holding her against him and she was no longer cold. She felt lazy and deliciously warm.

  “You feel so good,” he murmured, his hands moving over her back.

  Even through his thick robe, she could feel his erection pressing against her stomach. He caught her hand and moved it between them, placed it against him. He felt hot, even through the fleece cloth. Touching him through the sweatpants’ soft fabric was almost more erotic than having him naked in her hand. As she slowly rubbed the length of him, clasped him as best she could, she rose to her tiptoes and sought his mouth. He kissed her hungrily, his tongue sinking all the way into her mouth. In a quick movement, he dropped his sweatpants, and his hard, velvety, naked penis filled her hand. He felt so much bigger than she remembered. Hanging on to him, she tore her mouth from his and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. “Oh, my gosh,” she whispered.