by Diana Palmer
“What’s wrong?” she asked perceptively.
He shifted from one big, booted foot to the other. “I just had a stray thought,” he told her. He glanced at Selene. “You’ve got a lot of responsibilities for a woman your age,” he added quietly.
She laughed softly. “Don’t I know it!”
His eyes narrowed. “I guess it cramps your social life. With men, I mean,” he added, hating himself because he was curious about the men in her life.
She laughed. “There are only a couple of men around town who don’t have wives or girlfriends, and I turn them off. One of them came right out and said I had too much baggage, even for a date.”
His eyebrows arched. “And what did you say to that?”
“That I loved my mother and Selene and any man who got interested in me would have to take them on as well. That didn’t go over big,” she added with twinkling eyes. “So I’ve decided that I’m going to be like the Lone Ranger.”
He blinked. “Masked and mysterious?”
“No!” she chuckled. “I mean, just me. Well, just me and my so-called dependents.” She glanced toward Selene, who was quietly matching up seed packages from a box that had just arrived. Her eyes softened. “She’s very smart. I can never sort things the way she can. She’s patient and quiet, she never makes a fuss. I think she might grow up to be a scientist. She already has that sort of introspective personality, and she’s careful in what she does.”
“She thinks before she acts,” he translated.
“Exactly. I tend to go rushing in without thinking about the consequences,” she added with a laugh. “Not Selene. She’s more analytical.”
“Being impulsive isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he remarked.
“It can be,” she said. “But I’m working on that. Maybe in a few years, I’ll learn to look before I leap.” She glanced up at him. “How are things going out at the Bradbury place?”
“We’ve got the barn well underway already,” he said. “The framework’s done. Now we’re up to our ears in roofers and plumbers and electricians.”
“We only have a couple of each of those here in town,” she pointed out, “and they’re generally booked a week or two ahead except for emergencies.”
He smiled. “We had to import some construction people from Billings,” he told her. “It’s a big job. Simultaneously, they’re trying to make improvements to the house and plan a stable. We’ve got fencing to replace, wells to bore, agricultural equipment to buy…it’s a monumental job.”
“Your boss,” she said slowly, “must be filthy rich, if he can afford to do all that right now when we’ve got gas prices through the roof!”
“He is,” he confided. “But the ranch will be self-sufficient when we’re through. We’re using solar panels and windmills for part of our power generation.”
“We had a city lawyer buy land here about six years ago,” she recalled. “He put in solar panels to heat his house and all sorts of fancy, energy-saving devices.” She winced. “Poor guy.”
“Poor guy?” he prompted when she didn’t continue.
“He saw all these nature specials and thought grizzly bears were cute and cuddly,” she said. “One came up into his backyard and he went out with a bag full of bread to feed to it.”
“Oh, boy,” he said slowly.
She nodded. “The bear ate all the bread and when he ran out, it started eating him. He did manage to get away finally by playing dead, but he lost the use of an arm and one eye.” She shook her head. “He was a sad sight.”
“Don’t tell me,” he said. “He was from back East.”
She nodded. “Some big city. He’d never seen a real bear before, except in zoos and nature specials. He saw an old documentary on this guy who lived with bears and he thought anybody could make friends with them.”
“Reminds me of a story I heard about a lady from D.C. who moved to Arizona. She saw a rattlesnake crawling across the road, so the story goes, and thought it was fascinating. She got out of her car and walked over to pet it.”
“What happened to her?”
“An uncountable number of shots of antivenin,” he said, “and two weeks in the hospital.”
“Ouch.”
“You know all those warning labels they have on food these days? They ought to put warning labels on animals.” He held both hands up, as if holding a sign. “Warning: Most wild reptiles are not cute and cuddly and they will bite and can kill you. Or, Grizzly bears will eat bread, fruit, and some people.”
She laughed at his expression. “I ran from a grizzly bear once and managed to get away.”
“Fast, are you?”
“He was old and slow, and I was close to town. But I had great incentive,” she agreed.
“I’ve never had to outrun anything,” he recalled. “I did once pet a moose who came up to serenade one of our milk cows. He was friendly.”
“Isn’t that unusual?”
“It is. Most wild animals that will let you close enough to pet them are rabid. But this moose wasn’t sick. He just had no fear of humans. I think maybe he was raised as a pet by people who were smart enough not to tell anybody.”
“Because…?” she prompted.
“Well, it’s against the law to make a pet of a wild animal in most places in the country,” he explained. He smiled. “That moose loved corn.”
“What happened to him?”
“He started charging other cattle to keep his favorite cow to himself, so we had to move him up farther into the mountains. He hasn’t come back so far.”
She grinned. “What if he does? Will you let him stay?”
He pursed his lips. “Sure! I plan to spray-paint him red, cut off his antlers, and tell people he’s a French bull.”
She burst out laughing at the absurd comment.
Selene came running up with a pad and pencil. “’Scuse me,” she said politely to John. She turned to her sister. “There’s a man on the telephone who wants you to order something for him.”
Sassy chuckled. “I’ll go right now and take it down. Selene, this is John Taggert. He’s a ranch foreman.”
Selene looked up at him and grinned. She was missing one front tooth, but she was cute. “When I grow up, I’m going to be a fighter pilot!”
His eyebrows arched. “You are?”
“Yup! This lady came by to see my mama. She’s a nurse. Her daughter was a fighter pilot and now she flies big airplanes overseas!”
“Some role model,” John remarked to Sassy, awed.
She laughed. “It’s a brave new world.”
“It is.” He went down on one knee in front of Selene, so that her eyes could look into his. “And what sort of plane would you like to fly?” he teased, not taking her seriously.
She put a small hand on his broad shoulder. Her blue eyes were very wide and intent. “I like those F-22 Raptors,” she said breathlessly. “Did you know they can actually stand still in the sky?”
He was fascinated. He wasn’t sure he even knew what sort of military airplane that was. His breath exhaled. “No,” he confessed. “I didn’t.”
“There was this program on TV about how they’re built. And they were in a new movie about robots that come to our planet and pretend to be cars. I think Raptors are just beautiful,” she said with a dreamy expression.
“I hope you get to fly one,” he told her.
She smiled. “I got to grow up, first, though,” she told him. She gasped. “Sassy!” she exclaimed. “That man’s still on the phone!”
Sassy made a face. “I’m going, I’m going!”
“You coming back to see us again?” Selene asked John when he stood up.
He chuckled. “Thought I might.”
“Okay!” She grinned and ran back to the counter, where Sassy was just picking up the phone.
John went to find Buck. It was a new world, indeed.
Tarleton was taken before the circuit judge for his arraignment and formally charged with the assault on S
assy. He pleaded not guilty. He had a city lawyer who gave the local district attorney a haughty glance and requested that his client, who was blameless, be let out on his own recognizance in lieu of bail. The prosecutor argued that Tarleton was a flight risk.
The judge, after reviewing the charges, did agree to set bail. But he set it at fifty thousand dollars, drawing furious protests from the attorney and his client. With no ability to raise such an amount, even using a bail bondsman, Tarleton would have to wait it out in the county detention facility. It wasn’t a prospect he viewed with pleasure.
Sassy heard about it and felt guilty. Mr. Tarleton, for all his flaws, had a wife who was surely not guilty of anything more than bad judgment in her choice of a husband. It seemed unfair that she would have to suffer along with the defendant.
She said so, to John, when he turned up at the store the end of the next week.
“His poor wife,” she sighed. “It’s so unkind to make her go through it with him.”
“Would you rather let him walk?” he asked quietly. “Set him free, so that he could do it to another young woman—perhaps with more tragic results?”
She flushed. “No. Of course not.”
He reached out and touched her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “You have a big heart, Sassy,” he said, his voice very deep and soft. “Plenty of other people don’t, and they will use your own compassion against you.”
She looked up curiously, tingling and breathless from just the faint contact of his fingers with her skin. “I guess some people are like that,” she conceded. “But most people are kind and don’t want to hurt others.”
He laughed coldly. “Do you think so?”
His expression was saying things that she could read quite accurately. “Somebody hurt you,” she guessed. Her eyes held his. They had an odd, blank look in them.
“A woman. It was a long time ago. You never talk about it. But you hold it inside, deep inside, and use it to keep the world at a distance.”
He scowled. “You don’t know me,” he said, defensive.
“I shouldn’t,” she agreed. Her green eyes seemed darker, more piercing. “But I do.”
“Don’t tell me,” he murmured with faint sarcasm, “you can read minds.”
She shook her head. “I can read wrinkles.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your frown lines are deeper than your smile lines,” she told him, not wanting to confess that her family had the “second sight,” in case he thought she was peculiar. “It’s a public smile. You leave it at the front door when you go home.”
His eyes narrowed on her face. He didn’t speak. She was incredibly perceptive for a woman her age.
She drew in a long breath. “Go ahead, say it. I need to mind my own business. I do try to, but it bothers me to see other people so unhappy.”
“I am not unhappy,” he said belligerently. “I’m very happy!”
“If you say so.”
He glowered at her. “Just because a woman threw me over, I’m not damaged goods.”
“How did she throw you over?”
He hadn’t talked about it for years, not even to Gil. In one sense he resented this young woman, this stranger, prying into his life. In another, it made him want to talk about it, to stop the festering wound of it from growing even larger inside him.
“She got engaged to me while she was living with a man down in Colorado.”
She didn’t speak. She just watched him, like a curious little cat, waiting.
He grimaced. “I was so crazy about her that I never suspected a thing. She’d go away for weekends with her girlfriend and I’d watch movies and do book work at home while she was away. One weekend I had nothing to do, so I drove over to Red Lodge, where she’d said she was checked into a motel so that she could go fly-fishing with her girlfriend.” He sighed. “Red Lodge isn’t so big that you can’t find people in it, and it does a big business in tourism. Turned out, her friend was male, filthy rich, and they had a room together. She had the most surprised look on her face when they came downstairs and found me sitting in the lobby.”
“What did she say?” she asked.
“Nothing. Not one thing. She bit her lip and pretended that she didn’t know the man. He was furious, and I felt like a fool. I went back home. She called and tried to talk to me, but I hung up on her. Some things don’t take a lot of explaining.”
He didn’t add that he’d also hired a private detective, much too late, to find out what he could about the woman. It hadn’t been the first time she’d kept a string of wealthy admirers, and she’d taken one man for a quarter of a million dollars before he found her out. She’d been after John’s money, all along; not himself. He wasn’t as forthcoming as the millionaire she’d gone fly-fishing with, so she’d been working on the millionaire while she left John simmering on a back burner. As a result, she’d lost both men, which did serve her right. But the experience had made him bitter and suspicious of all women. He still thought they only wanted him for his money.
“The other guy, was he rich?” Sassy asked.
John’s lips made a thin line. “Filthy rich.”
She touched the front of his shirt with a shy, hesitant little hand. “I’m sorry about that,” she told him. “But in a way, you’re lucky that you aren’t rich,” she added.
“Why?”
“Well, you never have to worry if women like you for yourself or your wallet,” she said innocently.
“There isn’t much to like,” he said absently, concentrating on the way she was touching him. She didn’t even seem to be aware of it, but his body was rippling inside with the pleasure it gave him.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked. Her eyes laughed up into his. “You’re very handsome. You stand up for people who can’t take care of themselves. You like children. And dogs like you,” she added mischievously, recalling one of his earlier quips. “Besides that, you must like animals, since you work around cattle.”
While she was talking, the hand on his chest had been joined by her other one, and they were flat on the broad, hard muscles, idly caressing. His body was beginning to respond to her touch in a profound way. His blue eyes became glittery with suppressed desire.
He caught her hands abruptly and moved them. “Don’t do that,” he said curtly, without thinking how it was going to affect her. He was in danger of losing control of himself. He wanted to reach for her, slam her against him all the way up and down, and kiss that pretty mouth until he made it swell and moan under his lips.
She jerked back, appalled at her own boldness. “I’m sorry,” she said at once, flushing. “I really am. I’m not used to men. I mean, I’ve never done that…excuse me!”
She turned and all but ran back down the aisle to the counter. When she got there, she jerked up the phone and called a customer to tell him his order was in. She’d already phoned him, and he hadn’t answered, so she called again. It gave her something to do, so that John thought she was getting busy.
He muttered under his breath. Now he’d done it. He hadn’t meant to make her feel brassy with that comment, but she was starting to get to him. He wanted her. She had warmth and compassion and an exciting little body, and she was getting under his skin. He needed a break.
He turned on his heel and walked out of the store. He should have gone back and apologized for being so abrupt, but he knew he’d never be able to explain himself without telling her the truth. He couldn’t do that. She was years too young for him. He had to get out of town for a while.
He left Bradbury’s former ranch foreman, Carl Baker, in charge of the place while he packed and went home to Medicine Ridge for the weekend.
It was a warm, happy homecoming. His big brother, Gil, met him at the door with a bear hug.
“Come on in,” he said, chuckling. “We’ve missed you.”
“Uncle John!”
Bess and Jenny, Gil’s daughters by his first wife, came running down the hall to be picked up and cuddled
and kissed.
“Oh, Uncle John, we missed you so much!” Bess, the eldest, cried, hugging him tightly around the neck.
“Yes, we did,” Jenny seconded, kissing his bronzed cheek. “You can’t stay away so long!”
“Did you bring us a present?” Bess asked.
He grinned. “Don’t I always?” he laughed. “In the bag, next to my suitcase,” he said, putting them down.
They ran to the bag, found the wrapped presents and literally tore the ribbons off to delve inside. There were two stuffed animals with bar codes that led children to Web sites where they could dress their pets and have adventures with them online in a safe environment.
“Web puppies!” Bess exclaimed, clutching a black Labrador.
Jenny had a Collie. She cuddled it close. “We seen these on TV!”
“Can we use the computer, Daddy?” Bess pleaded. “Please?”
“Use the computer?” Kasie, Gil’s new wife, asked, grinning. “What are you babies up to, now?” she added, pausing to hug John before she pressed against Gil’s side with warm affection.
“It’s a Web puppy, Kasie!” Bess exclaimed, showing hers. “Uncle John bought them for us.”
“I got a Collie, just like Lassie,” Jenny beamed.
“We got to use the computer,” Bess insisted.
Kasie chuckled. “I’ll go start it up, then. Come on, babies. You staying for a while?” she asked John.
“For the weekend,” John replied, smiling at the girls. “I needed a break.”
“I guess you did,” Gil replied. “You’ve taken on a big task up there. Sure you don’t need more help? We could spare Green.”
“I’m doing fine. Just a little complication.”
Kasie led the girls off into Gil’s office, where the computer lived. When they were out of earshot, Gil turned to John.
“What sort of complication?” he asked his younger brother.
John sighed. “There’s a girl.”
Gil’s pale eyes sparkled. “It’s about time.”
John shook his head. “You don’t understand. She’s nineteen.”
Gil only smiled. “Kasie was twenty-one. Barely. And I’m older than you are. Age doesn’t have a lot to do with it.”