by Janet Dailey
Cat smiled softly in return, instinctively sliding a caressing hand over her belly, conscious of the slight flutter of movement within. “I think about him all the time,” she told Ty, then crossed to the feed room’s inner door that opened onto the barn’s wide alley.
When Cat stepped through the doorway, she found herself in the midst of a dozen cowboys, mostly single men, grouped together. A couple of Repp’s friends nodded to her. Cat smiled in response and cut through their circle in blithe unconcern, intent on locating her father.
An arm snaked out, hooking her waist and swinging her around. Her upraised hands collided with the wide chest of the ranch’s would-be Romeo, Dick Ballard. Her arms stiffened in surprised resistance.
“Hey, fellas, look what I caught me,” he called over his shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you I’d get lucky standing under this mistletoe?”
Cat shot a quick look overhead and saw nothing but the Christmas lights strung across a massive beam. “There isn’t any mistletoe.”
“It’s on my hat, sweetie. It’s on my hat,” he informed her with a cocky grin.
A year ago Cat would have laughed and planted a loud, smacking kiss on his lips, and everyone would have thought her a good sport. In the flash of an instant, Cat knew such an action would be held up to an entirely different light this year.
Thinking fast, she reached up and flipped off his hat. “Sorry, the mistletoe seems to be gone. Nice try, Ballard.”
A few of his friends chuckled in approval, but Ballard wasn’t amused. His expression darkened, a redness creeping under his tan.
His arms immediately tightened around her. “That’s what you think, sweetie,” he muttered and came at her openmouthed.
Cat twisted her head down and away. His mouth landed in her hair as she strained against his hold, struggling to get free. Binding her with one arm, he trapped her chin in his hand and forced her head up. Cat instantly clamped her fingers over his mouth and pushed his face away.
“Let her go, Ballard.” Ty’s barked order had his hand shifting from her chin to her arm.
“Don’t go getting all riled up, Ty. All I want is a little kiss,” he declared, his glance then sliding down to Cat. “And everybody knows she’s free with them.”
“I’m not as free as you think I am,” she snapped in a fury of temper.
Ty took one long stride forward, but before he could intervene, Chase stepped into the circle. An instant hush fell over the barn, electric undercurrents charging the air.
“How long have you been on the Triple C payroll, Ballard?” he asked with an iron coolness, his gaze locking on the cowboy, never once straying to Cat.
“About five years,” he replied with the belligerence of a man convinced he was about to be fired.
“Around here, Ballard,” her father began evenly, “it is always a woman’s prerogative to say no. And it is always a man’s obligation to accept it. It’s time you learned that.”
Without a word of anger or threat, he had switched everyone’s focus from Cat’s conduct to Ballard’s. Sensing the shift in attitude, the cowboy reddened visibly and released Cat, stepping back and bobbing his head in apology. “My mistake,” he said to her.
A moment ago her temper and sense of outrage would have had Cat responding with sharpness. But she knew at once that it wasn’t what her father would do.
Copying the levelness of his tone, she said, “We all make mistakes, Dick. Heaven knows I have.” Reaching down, she picked up his hat and handed it to him, conscious that people had begun turning away, losing interest in them.
Dick fingered the sprig of mistletoe on his hat band. “I guess this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“I wouldn’t blame the mistletoe,” Cat said quietly.
“I guess not.” He looked at her with a new measure of respect, then donned his hat and nodded to her, grinning with a ghost of his former cockiness before moving away to rejoin his compatriots.
When she walked over to her father, Cat saw the approval in his eyes, though he said nothing to her. It was Ty who asked, “Are you okay, Cat?”
“Of course.”
Still grim-lipped, he eyed the cowboy. “I’ve never liked Ballard that well.”
Cat glanced after the cowboy. “You can’t fire a man for thinking the way he did about me, Ty. If you did, you might find yourself without anybody on the payroll.”
“I’m glad you realize that.” Her father wore a quietly pleased look.
“I do.” She realized that and much more.
With his words alone, her father had totally changed the way others would remember the incident. If they talked about it at all, it would be to discuss his clear and simple statement of the treatment he expected women to be accorded in order for their opposite number to be regarded as a man. It was a measure of the respect his men had for their boss that it was important to them to be seen as such by him.
Noble had always seemed a pretentious word to Cat, certainly not one to be applied to her father. He was strong, quietly confident, hard at times and loving at others, a leader of men definitely, but more than that, a man of the land who lived by old codes. Nobler codes.
For the first time in her life, Cat took pride in that. Her uncle Culley had been right—she would do well to emulate her father. In some corner of her mind, she understood that it was the only way to regain the respect she had lost.
She saw that it wasn’t enough to simply be a Calder; she would have to act like one. Which meant she would have to work longer and harder than anyone else, without complaint—woman or not, pregnant or not; that her conduct would have to be above reproach at all times; and that she would have to curb her emotions, especially her lightning-quick temper, and use her head, as her father had done only moments ago.
But knowing what to do and doing it were two very different things. Very little had ever been demanded of her. When Cat considered what she was demanding of herself, the enormity of the task before her was almost overwhelming. She immediately blocked it from her mind before it paralyzed her.
That evening, after the Christmas party had wound down to a close, instead of returning to The Homestead and leaving the cleanup to others, Cat remained behind and helped. The following morning, she was the first one at the barn. By the time the others arrived, she had already begun removing the ornaments from the tree and storing them in their boxes.
It was a small thing, insignificant in many ways. But it was a first step.
The second week of January, the winter’s first blizzard buried the Triple C under eighteen inches of snow. Howling winds piled it into man-sized drifts, obliterating the landscape and creating a wild, storm-tossed ocean of towering white waves that, in places, curled back on themselves. Snow-blocked roads, downed utility lines, frozen water pipes, stranded livestock—emergency situations came at them from every direction.
Cat pitched in wherever she could help, doing whatever needed to be done. When the backup gasoline-driven generator at the South Branch camp went out, she hauled a new one to them, following behind Jim Trumbo on the ranch’s road grader, one of several pieces of heavy equipment used to maintain the miles of roads that interlaced the Triple C. On her return trip to headquarters, she carried spools of electric cable for the ranch’s full-time electrician Mike Garvey and his assistant. As soon as the weather cleared sufficiently to take to the sky, she climbed into one of the single-engine Cessnas and took part in the air search to locate the scattered pockets of stranded livestock. Later, she made endless trips on the tractor, hauling bales from the hay shed to the airstrip, where others waited to load them in planes. When she wasn’t doing that, Cat was at the first-aid center, working with Art Trumbo’s wife, Amy, a registered nurse, treating everything from frostbite and muscle sprains to the not-so-uncommon cold. In addition, she did stints at the cookhouse, serving coffee and late meals to the road and utility crews as well as the working ranch hands. With everyone working equally long hours, no one noticed the amount of time Cat put
in, and she did nothing to draw attention to it.
When calving season arrived, it was a time of round-the-clock work in invariably miserable conditions. Cat spent her share of hours in the calving sheds, tramping through the muck and the mire, making sure there was always fresh coffee for the men, now and then pitching in to pull a calf, and taking over the care of the orphaned ones.
Through it all, Cat used her spare time to turn a corner of her bedroom into a nursery. Her old baby crib and changing table were hauled down from the attic. With each trip to town, she brought home a few more items for the baby until she had a supply of little undershirts, socks, sleepsuits, and newborn outfits along with the requisite bibs, rattles, teething rings, baby powder, diapers, and assorted baby items, all of it augmented by purchases Jessy had made.
Morning after morning Cat examined her relatively small melon-sized belly in the mirror and worried when it failed to reach the elephantine girth she thought it should have. Dr. Dan assured her that she was simply one of those rare women who didn’t get big, and for her not to worry, both she and the baby were fine. Then he encouraged her again to get plenty of exercise.
April rolled around, that changeable time of year when the seasons mixed, with winter’s snow one day and spring’s sunny warmth the next—-the month when the horses were traditionally brought in from winter range. When her father objected to Cat going on the gather, she reminded him of the doctor’s advice to exercise. In the end, he relented, and Cat went along, although she found herself assigned mainly to pasture gates.
But her father wasn’t so easily persuaded when spring roundup time came. The temper Cat had struggled to contain over these last months threatened to erupt in the face of his calm adamancy that she wasn’t going. It glittered in her eyes as she came to an abrupt stop and swung to face him, her gloved hands clenched in rigid fists at her sides.
“Dad, you are being ridiculous.” Her voice vibrated with the effort to keep her anger in check. She waved an impatient hand at Jessy, busy scraping her boots across the mud brush by the front door. “Would you forbid Jessy to go if she was the one who was pregnant?”
“No, her father replied evenly. “I would expect Ty to do that.”
Cat turned on her brother when he joined them on the porch. “I suppose you agree with him.”
He hesitated, his gaze traveling past her to their father, then back to her. “You shouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks, Cat.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked from one to the other. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Jessy, talk to them,” she appealed to her sister-in-law. “Explain that I’m not some fragile thing that needs to be wrapped in cotton.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good, Cat.” Amusement gleamed in her hazel eyes. “Men don’t want to believe that.”
“This is positively archaic,” Cat muttered and took her turn at the cast-iron boot scraper when Jessy finished. “I have been riding all along. The exercise is good for me. Dr. Dan—”
“You’ve used that argument before,” her father broke in smoothly. “It won’t work this time. You are too close to term.”
“My due date is almost two weeks away.” Which was stretching the truth a bit. It was more like nine days. “Practically every woman on this ranch has told me the first baby usually comes late. I am not about to sit around twiddling my thumbs for the next two weeks—or more. I’ll go crazy.”
“Just the same, you need to start taking it easy,” her father stated.
“Wait a minute—this is my body and my child. I think I know better than you what I am capable of doing,” Cat declared, angry now and not trying to hide it. “I am not going to do anything that would endanger me or my baby. I have no intention of tearing off across the countryside after some steer. And I am not about to work the branding fires where I might get kicked—”
“That’s right, you won’t. Because you are staying home,” Chase stated.
Too furious to speak, Cat glared at him, but her anger left no mark on him. She recalled all her fine resolutions to control her feelings as he did. Pride and self-will surfaced, cooling her temper in an instant.
“I have no wish to defy you, Father, but I am going on the roundup,” she informed him, matching his direct tone. “Short of locking me in my room, you can’t stop me. And I wouldn’t advise you to try that, unless you want to see me crawling out of a second-story window.”
The change from blazing anger to cool control was so swift and so complete that it momentarily stunned Chase. But only a flicker of it showed in his eyes. For a long second, he studied this woman before him, clad in boots and hat and a cowboy’s long black duster, splattered with mud. Her dark hair was drawn loosely back from a face devoid of makeup. But her rough man’s clothing couldn’t disguise the womanliness of her or her natural beauty.
In so many ways, Cat was the image of her mother, but not in this. Maggie would have continued to storm and rage at him, and—more than likely—searched for something to throw at him. Now the smoothness of her expression and the steadiness of her gaze showed Chase that Cat was his daughter as well. She was a Calder. This was not a challenge; it was a statement of her intentions, issued as a Calder would do it.
Chase hadn’t thought it possible to love his daughter more than he already did. He saw now, he was wrong. The knowledge of it roughened his voice when he spoke, “If anything happened to you out there, Cat—” He left the rest of it unsaid.
“I understand.” And it showed in the soft curve of her lips and the sudden warmth in her eyes. “But I could as easily fall down the stairs as off a horse.”
There was no more discussion. She was going.
ELEVEN
The bawl of calves and the bellow of cows filled the wide hollow in the plains where encircling riders kept the herd bunched. The cattle were a cross of Hereford and Angus with enough longhorn thrown in to create a colorful patchwork of rust, black, roan, and brindle. At the far end of the hollow, ground crews waited by branding fires while other riders, working in pairs, walked their horses into the herd and separated the unbranded calves, their ropes snaking out swift and sure to ensnare hind legs and drag them gently to the fire.
Roundups on the ranch had been conducted in this manner for more than a hundred years. The cowboys of the Triple C wouldn’t have it any other way, showing the same disdain for holding pens and squeeze chutes that they did for rattlesnakes and politicians, insisting that the old way was faster and less stressful on man and beast. It was the same reason they gave for sleeping on the hard ground under a big, open sky—unless it rained. Then they grumbled, hunched their shoulders, and cursed the mud that sucked at the feet of anything that walked.
But the only clouds visible this morning were puffy white ones—the innocent kind that intensified the turquoise blue of the sky. Chase automatically scanned them and, just as automatically, brought his gaze back to the slight-built rider on the herd’s edge, one of the group that kept the cattle bunched for the roping teams. Cat seemed to be fine. She sat relaxed and easy in the saddle, yet fully balanced, ready to turn back any animal that tried to break from the herd. Her black duster was tied behind the saddle, not needed on this warm spring morning. The flannel shirt she wore, of green and black plaid, hung loose, drawing no attention to the small, round belly it covered.
Reassured once more, Chase shifted his weight in the saddle, seeking a more comfortable position, the leather creaking a little, his teeth clenched against the sharp and almost constant arthritic pain in his back and hips, resulting from the injuries he suffered in the plane crash that had taken Maggie’s life. He knew he was lucky even to be able to sit a horse. But two hours in the saddle and he was more stove up than a man half again his age. Judging by the grinding ache, he had almost reached that limit.
He gathered up the chestnut’s reins, thinking to ride back to the motorized cookshack, have some coffee, and stretch the kinks out of his back and legs. The drowsing chestnut, a veteran
of countless roundups, heaved a weary sigh of resignation and lifted its head, then paused and swiveled its ears in the direction of an approaching rider. Chase saw him as well and let his hands settle back on the saddle horn when he recognized his son. Ty cantered his horse the last few yards up the sloping side of the grassy bowl and reined in alongside Chase.
“How’s Cat?” Ty pushed his hat back and rested a forearm on his saddle horn while his gaze skimmed the other riders, circling the herd until finally locating his sister.
“She seems to be fine.”
Ty watched her a moment. “The boys aren’t too happy about her being here.”
“Neither am I,” Chase replied, then added somewhat grudgingly, “At the same time, I have to admire her for what she’s doing.”
Ty nodded with equal reluctance. “She set out to pull her own weight and prove how tough she is, and she’s certainly doing that. Although why she is, I don’t know.”
“Because toughness is a quality men respect out here, and Cat knows that.”
“Not in women.”
“In women, too,” Chase stated, with a decisive nod. “We just don’t want them to be less of a woman because of it. That makes for a fine line to walk.”
“A very fine line,” Ty agreed dryly.
Chase smiled at that. “We have always expected more from women—set higher standards for them than we ourselves are willing to meet. It isn’t fair, but it’s a fact.”
“I guess you’re right.” A freshly branded calf, sporting a shiny new ear tag, ran toward the herd, bawling for its mother. Idly Ty observed the reunion. “Arch tells me we’ve got about twenty head of Shamrock cattle in our gather.”
“Sounds like O’Rourke is up to his old tricks of wintering his cows on Calder grass,” Chase remarked in a voice arid with disapproval.
“Probably couldn’t afford the hay to feed them,” Ty guessed. “I swear I don’t know how he makes a living off that ranch.”