by Diana Palmer
“Yes, but there are people who don’t even consider things like that,” Meredith murmured absently. “I remember a little girl who had to have plastic surgery because she was bitten in the face by her father’s pet boa constrictor.”
“Herman didn’t bite, but Tess almost had a heart attack when she first came to work for us and found him in the washing machine.”
“I can sympathize with her,” Meredith said. “I haven’t come across many snakes. I’m not sure I want to.”
“We have rattlers and water moccasins around the place,” Rey told her. “You have to watch where you walk, but we’ve only had one person bitten in recent years. Snakes are always going to be a hazard in open country. You can’t be careless.”
“I’ll remember.”
“We’ve got a big garage apartment,” Leo told her. “It’s got picture windows and a whirlpool bath. Tess lived there until she and Cag married. I think you’ll like it.”
“I don’t mind where I stay,” she said easily. “I’m grateful to have a job at all. I really couldn’t go to work in Houston looking like this. It would have been embarrassing for my boss.”
“You won’t have people staring at you on the ranch,” Leo assured her. “And it won’t take too long for those bruises to heal.”
“I’ll be fine, but you’ll have to take it easy for a few days still, I’m sure they told you that,” she returned at once. “No violent exertion. Concussion is tricky.”
“I know that,” Leo told her. “We had a man who was kicked in the head by a horse. He dropped dead three days later while he was walking into the corral. It was a hard lesson about head injuries. None of us ever forgot it.”
She averted her eyes. She didn’t like thinking about head injuries just now.
“I’ve got to stop for gas,” Rey said as they reached the outskirts of the city and he pulled into a self-service gas station. “Anybody want something to drink?”
“Coffee for me,” Leo said. “Meredith?”
“I’d like a small coffee, black, please.”
“I’ll go get it after I fill the tank,” Rey said. He got out and started pumping gas.
Leo leaned his arm over the backseat and looked at Meredith openly, his dark eyes quiet and gently affectionate.
“You’re still having a hard time with Rey, aren’t you?” he asked her.
“He doesn’t really like me,” she confessed with a wry smile. “And I have to admit, he puts my back up, too. He seems to want to think the worst of me. He was convinced that I mugged you.”
He chuckled. “You aren’t tall enough to have knocked me out,” he said. “But Rey doesn’t like women much. He had a bad time of it with a young woman who turned out to be a call girl,” he added, noticing absently how stunned Meredith seemed to be at that remark. “He had the ring bought, the honeymoon spot picked out, and then he found out the truth about her. It took him years to get over it. He was crushed.”
“I guess so,” she said heavily. “Good Lord, no wonder he thought the worst when he saw how I was dressed.”
Leo frowned. “I just barely remember the rig you had on. What was it, some sort of costume?”
“I’d been to a wild Halloween party and had just escaped when I saw those men bending over you,” she told him. “I ran at them waving my arms and yelling, and frightened them off.”
“That was taking a hell of a chance!” he exploded.
She shrugged. “I’ve done it before,” she said. “I learned it from my…from my brother’s best friend,” she amended, forcing the words out. It was much too soon to try to talk about her tragedy. “He taught karate in the military. He said that sometimes all it needed was a yell and the element of surprise to spook an attacker and make him run. It works.”
“Not all the time,” Leo said darkly, “and not for women. I’m all for equality, but most men are bigger and stronger than most women, and in hand-to-hand, you’d lose. You can’t count on a man running, loud noise or not.”
“Well, it worked for you,” she amended, and smiled at him. “I’m glad, because I couldn’t have wrestled those guys down.”
He nodded. “See that you remember it,” he told her. “Don’t take chances. Get help.”
“Some help those partygoers would have been,” she scoffed. “Half of them were drunk, and the other half probably wouldn’t have walked across the street to save a grandmother from a mugging!”
“Then why were you at a party with them?” he asked reasonably.
She picked at a fingernail. “A girl I know from work said I needed a night off and insisted that I come. I wore an old costume, the only one I had, and thought I’d enjoy myself. I don’t do drugs or drink, and one of the men made a blatant pass at me.” She wrapped her arms around her body in a defensive posture that betrayed her fear. “I was anxious to get away from the whole mess, luckily for you,” she added with a grin.
“I don’t like parties much, either,” he said. “Getting drunk isn’t my idea of a good time.”
She glanced out the window. Rey had finished pumping gas and was inside the convenience store now. “Does he drink?” she asked.
“Very rarely. I’ve been known to, under provocation, but Rey’s levelheaded and sober. He can be mean, and he’s got the blackest temper of all of us, but he’s a good man to have on your side when the chips are down.”
“He doesn’t like me,” she repeated.
“He’ll come around, give him time,” Leo told her. “Meanwhile, you’ve got a job and a place to stay while your face heals. We all have hard times,” he added gently. “But we get through them, even when we don’t expect to. Give yourself time.”
She smiled. “Thanks,” she said huskily. “You really are a nice man.”
“Nice, clean, sober, modest and incredibly handsome,” he added with a wicked grin. “And I haven’t even gotten to my best points yet!”
“Compared to your brothers,” she began, “you—”
The door opened before she could hang herself, and Rey shoved a cup of coffee at her before he handed the second one to Leo.
“It’s hot,” he told them as he slid in and took the soft drink out of his jacket pocket and put it in the cup holder.
“Cold caffeine,” Leo said, shuddering. “Why can’t you drink coffee like a normal man?”
“I drink coffee at breakfast,” Rey told him haughtily.
“So do I, but you don’t have to have rules on when to drink it!”
Rey started the engine with a speaking glance.
“See that look?” Leo indicated it to Meredith. “When he looks like that, you’ve already lost whatever argument you’re in the middle of. We call it ‘the look.’ I once saw him break up a fistfight with it.”
“I don’t plan to argue,” Meredith promised.
Rey gave her “the look,” and it lingered before his attention turned back to the windshield.
Meredith sat back against the leather seat and wondered suddenly if she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Hart Ranch was almost as Meredith had pictured it, with neat wooden fences concealing electrified fencing, improved pasture land and cattle everywhere. There were also pastures with horses, and there was a barn big enough to store a commercial jet. But she loved the house itself, with its graceful arches reminiscent of Spanish architecture, and the incredible number of small trees and shrubs around it. In the spring, it must be glorious. There were two ponds, a decorative one in the front of the house and a larger one behind the house in which a handful of ducks shivered in the November sun.
“Do you have goldfish in the pond?” she asked excitedly as Rey stopped the car in front of the house on an inlaid stone driveway.
“Goldfish and Koi,” he answered, smiling reluctantly at her excitement. “We have a heater in the pond to keep them comfortable during the winter. There are water lilies in there, too, and a lotus plant.”
“Does the other pond have g
oldfish, too, where the ducks are?” she wondered.
Leo chuckled. “The other one is because of the ducks. We had to net this pond to keep them out of it so we’d have some goldfish. The ducks were eating them.”
“Oh, I see.” She sighed. “It must be beautiful here in the spring,” she said dreamily, noting the gazebo and the rose garden and stone seats and shrubs around the goldfish pond.
“It’s beautiful to us year-round,” Leo told her with lazy affection. “We all love flowers. We’ve got some more roses in a big flower garden around the back of the house, near a stand of pecan trees. Tess is taking courses in horticulture and she works with hybrids.”
“I love roses,” Meredith said softly. “If I had time, I’d live in a flower garden.”
“I suppose cleaning rooms is time-consuming,” Rey murmured sarcastically as he got out of the car and went in the front door of the house.
Leo glanced at her curiously while Rey was out of earshot. “You clean rooms?”
“I don’t,” she told him with a sharp grin. “But I’m living down to your brother’s image of my assets.”
Leo pursed his lips. “Now, that’s interesting. You sound like a woman with secrets.”
“More than you’d guess,” she told him heavily. “But none that I’m ashamed of,” she added quickly, just in case he got the wrong idea.
“Rey doesn’t like you, does he?” he murmured, almost to himself. “I wonder why? It’s not like him to pick on sick people.”
“I’m not sick,” she assured him. “I’m just battered, but I’ll heal.”
“Sure you will,” Leo promised, smiling. “You’ll be safe here. The only real chore you’ll have is baking. By the time you’re completely back on your feet, your father will be sober and in counseling, and your home life will have changed drastically.”
“I hope so,” she said huskily.
He watched her eyes grow tragic and haunted. He frowned. “Meredith,” he said slowly. “If you need to talk, ever, I can listen without making judgments.”
She met his clear dark eyes. “Thanks, Leo,” she said with genuine gratitude. “But talking won’t change a thing. It’s a matter of learning to live with…things.”
“Now I’m intrigued.”
“Don’t push,” she said gently. “I’m not able to talk about my problems yet. They’re too fresh. Too painful.”
“And more than just your father, or I’m a dirt farmer,” he drawled.
She shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“Anyway, just take your time and let the world pass you by. You’re going to love it here. I promise.”
“Am I?” She watched Rey come back out of the house with an elderly lady in tow, wringing her hands on her apron.
“That’s Mrs. Lewis,” Leo told her. “We talked her into coming back to bake biscuits for us, even though she’d retired, but now we’re losing her to arthritis. She’s going to show you the ropes. But not right now,” he added quickly.
“No time like the present,” Meredith disagreed with a smile. “Busy hands make busy minds.”
“I know how that works,” Leo murmured drolly.
Rey opened the back door and helped Meredith out. “Mrs. Lewis, this is Meredith Johns, our new cook. Meredith, Annie Lewis. She’s retiring. Again.” He made it sound like a shooting offense.
“Oh, my, yes, I’m losing the use of my hands, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Lewis said. “Glad to meet you, Miss Johns.”
“Glad to meet you, too, Mrs. Lewis,” Meredith replied.
“I’ll take your bag to your room, while Mrs. Lewis shows you around the house,” Rey added.
“She just got here,” Leo protested.
“And there’s no time like the present to show her the house,” Rey replied.
“That’s just what she said,” Leo sighed.
Rey glanced at Meredith, who gave him a wicked grin and followed along behind Annie Lewis, who was making a valiant effort not to ask about the terrible bruises on Meredith’s face.
“It’s a big, sprawling house, and it takes a lot of cleaning,” Mrs. Lewis said as she led Meredith down the long hall and opened doors to the very masculine bedrooms both with dark, heavy Mediterranean furniture and earth tones in the drapes and carpets. “The men aren’t messy, thank God, but they track in all that mud and dust and animal fur! They had beige carpeting when I came here.” She glanced at Meredith with a shake of her head. “Red mud just won’t come out of beige carpet!”
“Or anything else,” Meredith added on a soft laugh.
“They work hard, and they’re away a lot. But the foreman lives in the bunkhouse with a couple of bachelor cowboys, and they’ll look out for you.”
“I don’t know that I’ll be here very long,” Meredith replied quietly. “They offered me the job so that I can have time for these to heal.” She touched her face, and looked straight at the older woman, who was struggling not to ask the question in her eyes.
“Nobody will hurt you here,” Mrs. Lewis said firmly.
Meredith smiled gently. “My father got drunk and beat me up, Mrs. Lewis,” she explained matter-of-factly. “He’s a good and kind man, but we’ve had a terrible tragedy to work through. He hasn’t been able to cope with it except by losing himself in a bottle, and now he’s gone too far and he’s in jail.” She sighed. “I tried so hard to help him. But I couldn’t.”
Mrs. Lewis didn’t say a word. She put her arms around Meredith and rocked her in them. The shock of it brought the tears that she’d held back for so long. She wept until her body shook with sobs.
Rey, looking for her, stopped dead in the doorway of his bedroom and met Mrs. Lewis’s misty eyes over Meredith’s bowed shoulders. It shocked him to see that feisty, strong woman collapsed in tears. It hurt him.
Mrs. Lewis made a gesture with her eyebrows and a severe look. Rey acknowledged it with a nod and a last glance at the younger woman as he walked back down the hall.
* * *
Supper was riotous. Meredith had made a huge pan of homemade biscuits and ferreted out all sorts of preserves to go with them. For an entrée, she made fajitas with lean beef and sliced vegetables, served with wild rice and a salad. Dessert was fresh fruit and fresh whipped cream, the only concession besides the biscuits that she made to fat calories. She’d also found some light margarine to set out.
“This is good,” Rey commented as he glanced at her. “We usually have broiled or fried steak with lots of potatoes.”
“Not bad once a week or so, but terrible for your cholesterol,” she pointed out with a smile as she finished her salad. “Lean beef is okay for you, but not in massive doses.”
“You sound like a dietician,” Leo chuckled.
“Modern women have to keep up with health issues,” she said evasively. “I’m responsible for your health while I’m working for you. I have to be food-conscious.”
“That’s fine,” Rey told her flatly, “but don’t put tofu and bean sprouts in front of me if you want to stay here.”
Her eyebrows arched. “I hate tofu.”
“Thank God,” Leo sighed as he buttered another biscuit. “I got fed tofu salad the last time I went to Brewster’s for supper,” he added with absolute disgust. “I ate the olives and the cheese and left the rest.”
“I can’t say that I blame you,” Meredith said, laughing because he looked so forlorn.
“Janie Brewster thinks tofu is good for him,” Rey commented. “But she thinks he needs therapy more. He doesn’t like fish. She says that has some sort of connection to his fear of deep water.” He glanced at his brother with wicked affection. “She’s a psychology major. She already has an associate degree from our local junior college.”
“She’s twenty,” Leo said with a twist of his lower lip. “She knows everything.”
“She just got her associate degree this spring,” Rey added.
“Good. Maybe she’ll get a job in New York,” Leo said darkly.
“Why New York?” Meredith a
sked curiously.
“Well, it’s about as far east as she can go and find her sort of work,” Leo muttered. “And she’d be out of my hair!”
Rey gave him a covert glance and finished his fajitas.
Meredith finished her own meal and got up to refill coffee cups. She had a feeling that Leo was more interested in the nebulous Brewster girl than he wanted to admit.
“We need groceries,” she told them when she’d served dessert and they were eating it. “Mrs. Lewis made me a list.”
“You can use one of the ranch trucks to drive to town,” Leo suggested carelessly.
Her fingers toyed with her fork. “I haven’t driven in several months.”
“You don’t drive?” Rey exclaimed, shocked.
She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I take buses.” Cars made her feel guilty. “Why?”
She remembered a day she should have driven. The memories were horrible…
“Meredith, it’s all right,” Leo said gently, sensing something traumatic about her behavior. “I’ll drive you. Okay?”
“You won’t,” Rey replied. “You’re in worse shape than she is. Which brings up another point. You don’t need to be walking around town like that,” he told her.
She wasn’t offended; it was a relief. She even smiled. “No, I don’t guess I do. Will you do the shopping?” she asked him, her wide, soft eyes steady on his.
He felt wild little thrills shooting through his body at the impact. It had been years since he’d been so shaken by eye contact alone. He didn’t move. He just stared at her, his dark eyes unblinking, curious. His body rippled with vague hunger.
Leo, watching the eye contact, tried not to grin. He cleared his throat, and Rey seemed to remember that he had a forkful of fruit halfway to his mouth. He took it the rest of the way and chewed it carefully before he spoke.
“I’ll get the groceries,” Rey volunteered. He glared at both of them, noting the shaved place where Leo had stitches near the back of his head. “Obviously I’m the only one here who can walk around without drawing curious stares from bystanders!”
Leo buttered another biscuit. “That sounds like sour grapes to me. If you want attention, try walking around without your pants.”