by Diana Palmer
“Sure we could!” Luke said at once. “Kells, suppose you take the boys along to the pasture and explain why we like to keep Holsteins for milk cows?”
The youth beamed. “I’d be tickled, Mr. Craig! Come on, guys. I know my way around here now!”
The group, impressed, followed Kells.
“Why can’t I go, too?” Belinda asked.
“Because I have plans for you, Miss Jessup,” he drawled. He caught her hand in his and led her toward the white frame house.
“What sort of plans?” she asked suspiciously.
He paused with a secretive grin. “What do you think?” He leaned closer, threatening her mouth with his, so that when he spoke she felt his clean, minty breath on her lips. “Well, I could be thinking about how big and soft the sofa in the living room is,” he murmured. “And how well two people would fit on it.”
She could barely breathe. Her heart was thumping madly against her rib cage.
“Or,” he added, lifting his head, “I might have something purely innocent in mind. Why not come with me and find out?”
He tugged at her hand and she fell into step beside him, just when she’d told herself she wasn’t about to do that.
He led her up the steps and into the house. It was cool and airy, with light colored furniture and sedate throw rugs. There were plain white priscilla curtains at the windows, and the kitchen was spacious and furnished in white and yellow.
“It’s very nice,” she said involuntarily, turning around to look at her surroundings.
“Can you cook?” he asked.
“A few things,” she replied. “I’m not really good at sweets, but I can make rolls and biscuits from scratch.”
“So can I, when I set my mind to it,” he told her. He sat down at the kitchen table and crossed his legs across one of the other chairs. “Can you make coffee?”
“The best,” she returned, smiling.
“Let’s see.”
He pointed her toward the cabinet where the coffee, filters and drip coffeemaker were located, and sat back to watch her work.
“There’s a chocolate pound cake in the cake keeper, there,” he indicated a huge rubbery container. “If you like it. My sister brought it over yesterday. She always bribes me when she wants something,” he added on a chuckle.
“What did she want?”
“A babysitter,” he replied. “I get to keep her son and daughter when she and Tom go to the opera at the Met in New York City. It’s an overnight trip.”
“You really must like kids,” she observed.
“I like them more as I get older,” he said. “I find I think more about having some of my own. After all, the ranch has to have somebody to inherit it after I’m gone.”
“What if your children don’t like ranching?”
He grimaced. “Horrid thought.”
“Some people don’t like animals. I’ve actually met a few.”
“So have I. Not many.”
“It could happen, though. Then what would become of your plans for a dynasty?”
“I suppose they’d go up in smoke.” He dropped his hat on the floor beside his chair and stared at her until it became uncomfortable. The sound of the coffee dripping grew louder and louder in the tense silence. “Come here.”
She just stood and stared at him, confused.
His blue eyes were glittery. There was a look on his face that made her knees weak. He was hypnotizing her.
“I said, come here,” he repeated softly, his voice almost a sensual purr.
She walked to him, feeling every step all the way to her heart. This was stupid. She could get in over her head. She didn’t really know him at all. She was letting herself be drawn in….
He reached up and pulled her down onto his lap. Before she could utter the confused thoughts rattling around in her mind, he had her head back against his shoulder and he was kissing her as if his life depended on it.
She gave in to the inevitable. He was strong and warm, and everything female in her responded to him. She hadn’t realized how close two people could become in a relatively short period of time.
His arms contracted. Then, all at once, he let her go and stood up. His face was harder than she’d ever seen it. He held her tight by the upper arms, staring down into her green eyes with a curious expression.
“I think we should give the coffee time to finish,” he said huskily. “Let’s go find the boys.”
“Okay.”
She followed him back out the door, noticing the economy of his movements as he scooped up his hat and put it back on his head. He went a little ahead of her, keeping some distance between them. She felt uneasy, and she wondered if she’d been too acquiescent to suit him. Perhaps she should have hit him or protested or something. Obviously she’d done something wrong.
He opened the screen door and she started through it, only to be encased by his long arm as it shot out in front of her, blocking her way.
“I loved it,” he said gruffly. “But we have to go slow. I don’t do one-night stands any more than you do.”
“Oh.” She seemed to have developed a one-syllable vocabulary in the time she’d known him. She kept her eyes on his arm, instead of his face.
He tilted her face up to his. “If I wanted to give you the brush-off, I’d come right out and say so,” he remarked. He bent and brushed his mouth gently over hers. “You don’t gulp down an exotic dessert,” he whispered. “You take your time and savor it, draw it out, make it last.” He nibbled her lower lip gently before he lifted his head. “Suppose I come up to Houston after you get through with summer camp? We could go to the theater and the ballet, even a rodeo if you like. I’m pretty flexible in my entertainment, I like everything.”
“So do I,” she said, sounding breathless. “I love opera.”
“Another plus,” he mused, grinning. “We’ll fly up to New York with Tom and Elysia one day and go to the Met.”
“I’ve only been there once,” she told him. “I loved it.”
“It’s unforgettable,” he agreed. “The settings and special effects are every bit as enjoyable as the opera itself.”
She shyly traced a pattern on his shirt. “I’d like to go out with you.”
“Then it’s a date.” He glanced past her at the boys in the distance, standing in a group as if they were being lectured. Probably they were, he thought, because Kells was a quick study and he’d learned a lot in the past few days. “It wouldn’t be very easy to go out even to a movie with that bunch in tow,” he added with a chuckle. “They’d hog the popcorn.”
“I suppose they would.” She touched his arm where the muscle was thickest and enjoyed its strength. She liked the way it felt to be close to him. “You’ve been good to them, especially to Kells.”
“He’s had a raw deal. I guess they all have, but it shows more on him. Do you know, the guys in the bunkhouse took to him right away. One of them told me that it was flattering to have a teenager ask for information instead of trying to give it. He made them feel important by asking them things.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if he realizes what a gift he has for making people like him? Even Cy Parks, who hates just about everybody.”
“He’s learning that he has traits he can exploit, I think. But I don’t know that he would have arrived at this point so soon if you hadn’t intervened. Thank you.”
He shrugged off her gratitude. “Like I said, I’ll benefit from all his enthusiasm. He really loves cattle.”
She searched his lean face. “So do you, I think.”
He grinned. “There was never anything I wanted to be more than a cowboy when I was a kid. One of our wranglers had been a rodeo star. I used to sit and listen to him by the hour.”
“We had one of those, too, on my brother’s ranch,” she replied. “Ward and I liked him a lot, until he had an affair with our mother.”
He frowned. “What?”
She sighed. “You might as well know. Our mother was very promiscuous. Anyth
ing in pants would do. She finally ran off with one of her conquests and we had to stay and live down her reputation. Ravine is about the size of Jacobsville, so you can imagine the gossip. It was harder on Ward than on me.”
“There are a lot of miserable kids in the world,” he remarked.
“I noticed.”
“Is that why you don’t spend much time at your brother’s ranch?”
She chuckled. “No. It’s because of his house-keeper—excuse me, now his aunt-in-law. Lillian is a matchmaker. She brought her niece Marianne out to Texas from Georgia on some gosh-awful pretext and Ward fell in love with her. He didn’t want to, so things got bad before he admitted he couldn’t live without her. She’s changed him. He isn’t the same hard-hearted, ruthless man he used to be since he married Marianne. So Lillian had that great success and now she’s got her eye on me.” She smiled. “I don’t like her choice of suitors, so I keep well clear of the ranch.”
“What sort does she toss your way?”
“Big, husky mechanics and any delivery boy who comes within half a mile of the house.”
His eyebrows arched. “You’re not that desperate.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “How about writing and telling her so?”
He grinned. “Give me time. I’ll take care of that problem for you, in the most natural sort of way.”
She wondered what he meant, but she wasn’t confident enough to ask. She smiled and went past him out the door.
* * *
In the days that followed, Luke was almost a constant visitor to the camp. Sometimes he brought Kells, sometimes he came alone. He taught the boys how to make a fire from scratch, how to trap game, how to live off the land.
“They say these are outdated skills,” he told the group after he’d started a small fire. “But what if the oil suddenly gives out and everything electronic or electrical goes dead one day? Frozen food would spoil. Computers wouldn’t work. Since most telephone exchanges are computerized, communications would be out. Cars wouldn’t go far, houses wouldn’t have heat, air-conditioning wouldn’t work. If all the old skills of survival are lost, one day the only humans who live may be the ones who can live off the land—assuming there’s any land left after the developers get through.”
The Native American boy, Juanito, touched a tiny bunch of twigs that Luke had bunched to use on the tiny fire. “My great-uncle says the same thing,” he volunteered. “But he can trap game and find water in places where it usually isn’t. He knows which cactus plants can give water or be eaten, and he knows how to make smokeless fires. His grandfather rode with Geronimo.”
The other boys were impressed. “But even if you can do those things, what good are they in the city?” one of the other boys asked. “What are you going to trap in Houston?”
“Girls,” one of the older boys said with a wicked grin.
“He’s got a point,” Luke said, nodding toward the boy who’d asked about country skills in the city. “People who live in cities are going to be the hardest hit if we ever have a major energy crisis. Look what happened during the last big power outage in the west.”
“They had a movie about that. It was scary,” another boy said.
“Well, we’ve got lots of dead dinosaurs lying around yet to be discovered, so I don’t think it’s going to be an immediate problem,” Belinda mused.
That led to the obvious question of what did dead dinosaurs have to do with energy, and for several minutes she traced the evolution of petroleum products for the boys while Luke watched and listened attentively.
Later, when the boys were in for the night and he was ready to go back to his ranch, he paused with her in the shadows, beside the pickup truck.
“You make a good lecturer,” he commented.
“Thanks,” she said, surprised. “Some would say I have a big mouth and can’t keep it shut.”
He took her hand and drew it to his chest. “I like the way you treat the boys,” he said quietly. “You never talk down to them or make them feel stupid when they ask questions.”
“I try not to,” she agreed. “I’ve had it done to me in school, and I didn’t like it.”
“Neither did I.” He smoothed his thumb over her short, neat fingernails. “You have nice hands.”
“So do you.” She liked the strength of them, the way her heart jumped when they touched her own hands. She looked up at him through the darkness, trying to see his face in the dim light from the cabin behind her.
He chuckled. “I was just thinking how strange life is,” he told her. “I was hopping mad when I found out some lunatic was going to open a summer camp for delinquent boys right on my boundary line.”
“I remember,” she chuckled.
“It was a surprising day all around, especially that Kells.” He shook his head. “What a treasure he turned out to be. And your guy Juanito, whose grandfather rode with Geronimo. These boys are interesting, and they aren’t at all what I pictured them as.”
“These are unique,” she said. “But for every success, I’ve had three failures,” she added sadly. “When I started working in the public defender’s office, I had the idea that all these boys were in trouble because of their home lives. It was a mistake. Any number of them had loving parents and an extended family that really cared about them, but they could never see anything criminal about stealing and lying and hurting people. One of my charges actually wrestled me down in my office and tried to rape me.”
She felt him stiffen. “What did you do?”
“Oh, I’m an old hand at self-defense,” she said, making light of the terror she’d felt. “I got an opening and almost made a eunuch of him. It taught me a lesson. Some of the juveniles can’t be turned around, no matter how dedicated you are to saving them. There’s always going to be a percentage who feel comfortable with making a living outside the law.”
“I don’t like the idea that you might be attacked,” he said.
She smiled. “I’m glad. But I’m not as naïve as I was. I never have closed-door sessions with any of my clients anymore. I have a good secretary and she’s always there when I need her.” She sighed. “But there are times when I feel so useless. Like with Kells in the chief of police’s office. I really don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been able to get through to Mr. Parks.”
“Cy’s not so bad,” he said. “You just have to stand up to him. He’s the sort of man who’ll be hell on anybody who’s afraid of him.”
“You weren’t.”
He shrugged. “I grew up swinging,” he mused. “I learned early that fear is the worst enemy. Once I got past that, I wasn’t afraid of much.”
“I noticed.” She leaned close and laid her cheek against his chest, feeling his arms come around her with a sense of wonder. She closed her eyes and let him hold her, drinking in the sounds of the night and the warm, safe strength of his body. “I only have a week left here.”
She felt him stiffen. His hands stilled on her back. “A week?”
“Yes. I have cases waiting and my vacation’s almost over.”
“I didn’t realize it was that close.”
Her eyes opened and she saw the faint light of the horizon far away. Crickets were chirping madly in the night. “I’ve been enjoying this so much that I didn’t want to spoil it,” she confessed.
His arms tightened around her. “So have I. But I’ve already told you that Houston isn’t that far away.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
They both knew it wasn’t quite true. It was a great distance, and Luke couldn’t leave his ranch to run itself. A long-distance romance was going to be difficult, even though they both knew it was what they were leading up to.
“I don’t suppose you might like to come and work in Jacobsville?” he asked.
She hesitated. “That would be nice,” she said. She wondered why the thought made her so uncomfortable. He was asking for more than a move on her part, and it frightened her. He was thinking about a future t
hat included both of them, but all she could think about was the disaster of her parents’ marriage. Ward had made it work with his Marianne, but Belinda had been on her own for a long time. She wasn’t ready to think about spending her life with anyone.
“We have a juvenile court system here,” he continued. “It’s on a circuit, and we may not have the caseload you do in Houston, but you’d stay busy. We’ve got local kids who could use a good attorney.”
“There are kids everywhere like that,” she said tightly. “But Houston is home to me now. It’s where my job is. I wouldn’t feel comfortable starting all over again in a new town, especially a small town.”
He was still for a moment and then he eased her away and stepped back. “The job is that important to you, is it?”
She felt a coolness in him that hadn’t been there before. But she wasn’t backing down now. She was fighting for her independence. “Well…yes, it is. I feel that I’m beginning to do some good.”
“Is your job more important than marriage would be?”
She wouldn’t think that far ahead. “I haven’t thought much about marriage. Or if I have, it’s a long way in the future. I don’t want to be tied down just yet.”
He studied her with pursed lips and a calculating stare. “Then you might be in the market for an affair.”
It was like a stone between the eyes. She couldn’t even find the words to express what she was feeling.
“No, I…I don’t want an affair,” she stammered. “I don’t have time for that sort of thing. I have a caseload that’s more than enough for three people, but there’s only me to do it.”
He let go of her completely and stood away, leaning against the hood of the truck to study her. “One thing I learned early is that jobs don’t matter as much as people,” he said coolly. “I’ve never put work before my family.”
“Ward always did,” she replied.
“You’re not your brother. And you said he’d changed since his marriage.”
“Yes, but I grew up learning that you gave everything in you to whatever job you were doing. My father hammered the work ethic into both of us from childhood.”
“You don’t think you could change?”