by Penny Jordan
Two voices, one brimful of mischief, the other slightly prim; two identical faces with matching sets of blonde pigtails; two small noses liberally sprinkled with freckles, and two pairs of grey eyes remarkably like those possessed by their uncle.
The girls were twins, and they were studying Natasha with open interest.
‘Is this her, then, Uncle Jay? Gramps’s fancy-piece?’
A muffled giggle from the silent twin belied the innocence shining out of the clean little-girl face.
Although she fought against showing it, Natasha was appalled. Was that how all of Tip’s family thought of her? If so, she would have to disabuse them of their false ideas, right away. She opened her mouth to do so, and would have done, if she hadn’t caught the faint flicker of fear running over the silent twin’s face. She turned her head to see what had frightened her, and realised that Jay was standing behind her, studying the twins with hard implacability.
‘Apologise to Miss Ames, Rosalie,’ he commanded, thin-lipped. ‘That’s not the way to treat our guests.’
A bright flush stained the small face, and Natasha felt her heart go out to the child. She was, after all, only repeating what she must have overheard from adults. She wanted to say as much to Jay Travers, but was surprised to discover that she didn’t have the courage.
‘I’m sorry I was rude, Miss Ames.’
Two pairs of grey eyes watched her uncertainly, and then the irrepressible Cherry burst out, ‘If you’d have married Gramps, would that have made you our grandmother? We’d have liked that, wouldn’t we, Rose? Gramps was always saying that we needed a woman about the place. I ‘spect that’s why he brought you out here…’
Natasha could feel the hairs lifting at the back of her neck, and she knew that the sudden tension filling the small enclosed space did not come from her.
What had Cherry said that made Jay go so instantly tense? Whatever it was, she was not likely to find out. Besides, she had more pressing matters to attend to right now.
‘Cherry, your grandfather and I were friends—nothing more,’ she explained as she leaned towards the little girl. ‘And he didn’t bring me out here, I came because…’
‘Because he’s left you half the ranch. Yes, we know all about that!’
‘Cherry!’
The whip-hard voice cut through the little girl’s revelations.
Natasha spun round, her face suddenly milk-white. It couldn’t be true, Cherry must have misunderstood. She opened her mouth to question Jay, but he was already turning his back on her.
‘Time we were taking off…Cherry, please show Miss Ames how to fasten herself into her seat…’
‘Just a minute…’
It was too late, he was already disappearing into the nose of the aircraft, and as she subsided into her seat alongside the girls she was dimly aware of Cherry saying placatingly, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Ames. Uncle Jay is a real good pilot… You’ll be quite safe.’
She lay back in her seat and closed her eyes, trembling with shock. Tip couldn’t have left her half the ranch; it just wasn’t possible. The twins must have overheard something and misunderstood the situation… She looked covertly at them. They were what…ten? Nine? Old enough and intelligent enough not to make those kind of mistakes… Something twisted painfully deep inside her. She had to have an explanation. She had to get off this plane.
She wasn’t even aware of struggling to sit up until she felt Cherry tugging sympathetically on her arm.
‘It’s all right, Miss Ames, really,’ the little girl reassured her. ‘We’ll be there inside an hour. You’re quite safe… Rosalie used to hate flying too, didn’t you?’
Her sister nodded.
‘And driving—especially after Momma and Poppa were killed.’ She shuddered tensely, her eyes clouding.
‘Gramps told us that your parents died in a car crash just like ours.’ Cherry looked at her uncertainly. ‘Did they?’
‘Yes. Yes, they did. When I was sixteen…’
‘And where did you go? What happened to you?’
‘I went to live with my aunt and uncle.’
‘Just like us with Uncle Jay. He takes care of us now, but he doesn’t have a wife, does he, Rose?’ She looked to her twin for corroboration. ‘Gramps wanted him to get married. He was always going on about it. “The ranch needs sons”—that’s what he used to say…’
‘Did he tell you that our great-grandmother was an Indian?’
So that explained the dark hair and olive skin! Natasha gave Cherry a distracted smile, and was on the point of asking her gently if she really should be telling her so much about her family, when Rosalie added, ‘She was his second wife. He had another one first… She came from New York, and she was very rich, but she died…’
‘Yes, and Gary, her son, quarelled with Gramps because he wanted to sell the ranch, and so Gramps gave him the oil wells. And then he got married again and had another son so that he could leave him the land…’
Tip had mentioned a family feud to her, but she had never pressed him for further details. In Cheshire, people were reticent about their family history. Here in Texas it seemed to be just the opposite.
‘Our mummy went away and left us, but Daddy went to get her back—’
‘That’s when they were killed… They were always fighting, weren’t they, Rose? But we miss them a lot…’
There was no mistaking the emotion in those few pitiful words, and Natasha felt her own eyes fill up with tears.
‘Gramps said that we needed a woman to love us, and that men don’t understand women’s things… We thought he meant that Uncle Jay was going to get married…women flock round him like bees round honey…but he don’t have no truck with them, does he, Rose? Gramps used to say that he was a mis a…’
‘A misogynist,’ Natasha told her wryly.
Their conversation was a blend of naïveté and sophistication: bits of gossip picked up here and there around the ranch no doubt. Even though Tip had not mentioned them to her, she sensed that they had loved him very deeply, and he had obviously cared for them; cared enough, at least, to know that they needed a woman to share their lives.
‘Gramps told us a secret before he died. He made us promise not to tell anyone…’
The grey eyes sparkled, and Natasha knew that she was being begged to question this secret. However, she shook her head; she felt she had already pried far enough into Tip’s family history, albeit innocently.
‘If it’s a secret, that’s the way it must stay… Your grandfather wouldn’t have told it to you if he wasn’t sure you could keep it.’
She felt mean as she watched the excitement die out of their eyes, but she told herself it was for the best. Already in these two girls she sensed a yearning, a reaching out to her, which she suspected stemmed not just from their own need to replace their dead mother, but also from Tip’s careful tutoring.
It was no secret that he had wanted Jay to marry, and what better way to coerce him than to enrol the two little girls on his side? A mother for them, a wife for Jay, and a great-grandson for Tip… Oh, yes! He had been a wily old character, Natasha reflected grimly. But none of that could explain Cherry’s comment about his will.
There was no way that the man she had known in London would have parted with a single inch of his land to someone outside his family. No, the girls must have overheard something and misinterpreted it. To judge from the reception she had received from Jay, she was already marked down as a first cousin to a fortune-hunter, and no doubt the girls had picked up some derogatory remark made about her by their uncle and woven their own reason for it.
It had been dusk when she arrived at Dallas; now it was fully dark. Not the dark of London that she was used to, but the dense blackness of the wide open spaces, illuminated only by the stars, surely far more brilliant here than they had ever seemed at home?
Despite her tiredness, despite the shock of Jay’s hostility and the twins’ revelations, somewhere deep down inside her that tiny
flicker of excitement still burned. Idiotically, since she was in a fully enclosed plane, she felt as though she could almost smell the hot, dry scent of the land, as though its lure and magic were already weaving their spell around her.
She wondered how close to the Rio Grande the ranch actually was. Tip hadn’t said, although he had said that the ranch had survived in the early years because it had its own water supply that didn’t dry out, even in the longest drought.
Suddenly she felt the plane start to drop. At her side, Cherry said reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be long now.’
As she glanced out of the window, Natasha had a confused impression of rows of oil derricks, and flat, sandy earth, illuminated by the huge floodlights on top of the derricks.
‘Those are Uncle Pete’s oil wells,’ Rosalie told her matter-of-factly.
‘They used to be,’ Cherry corrected her. ‘Gramps said that most of ’ em belong to Uncle Sam now.’
Natasha hid a small smile as she heard Rosalie saying curiously, ‘But we don’t have an Uncle Sam…’
‘No! Gramps meant the government—silly!’
The plane banked drunkenly, and ahead of them Natasha could see the long, brightly lit airstrip. And then they were going down, bumping gently on the tarmac, slowing to a halt.
Cherry and Rosalie busied themselves unfastening their seat-belts and collecting their things as matter-of-factly as though they might have got off the tube. But to these children flying was a part of their lives.
Natasha followed them as they moved towards the exit. Jay Travers came to join them, his Stetson still rammed down on his head. Did he always wear it? she wondered. He had struck her as being too cynical and too worldly to constantly parody the cowboy image. She glanced again at his worn jeans and dusty boots. There had been other men wearing Stetsons at the airport, but they had all been dressed in executive suits, or immaculate western outfits…
‘I’m a working rancher, Miss Ames,’ she heard him saying behind her as he reached out to open the door. ‘I’m sorry if my clothes aren’t what you’re used to, but out here time is money…’
‘And I wasn’t worth the time and effort it would have taken you to get changed,’ Natasha said sardonically, holding back any further comment when she saw how intently the girls were listening to them.
Jay, it seemed, had no inhibitions.
‘Gramps was right about one thing,’ he agreed. ‘You sure are quick on the uptake…’
The way he said it, it wasn’t a compliment, and Natasha felt an angry flush sear her skin as she followed the two girls down on to the airstrip.
It was surprisingly cold, and then she remembered that this land came pretty close to desert conditions, and that the temperature would drop dramatically at night.
As the girls raced over to the waiting vehicle, Natasha hesitated. Her cases were still in the plane, and she suspected it would be unwise to rely on Jay’s chivalry to bring them for her. As she paused, a chilly breeze raised goose-bumps on her exposed arms.
‘You’d better go get in the truck. Didn’t Gramps tell you anything about conditions out here? Or were you so eager to come and claim your dues that you forgot?’
Her brief softening toward him, born of his sudden appreciation of her shivers, died as she listened to his sarcastic words.
‘My luggage is still on board the plane,’ she told him, ignoring his taunt.
‘I’ll see to that. Go join the girls.’
Much as she longed to ignore his command, she knew it would be foolish to simply stand around and shiver, while she waited for him to bring her cases.
The vehicle he had described as ‘the truck’ was huge. It was a truck, in that there was an open section at the back, but as Cherry opened the door for her she gasped to see the luxurious interior, with its front and rear bench seats and sophisticated bank of equipment.
‘Some truck,’ she muttered under her breath, causing the girls to giggle.
‘Uncle Jay uses it when he’s driving around the ranch,’ Cherry explained. ‘It has full radio contact with the ranch so that he can keep a check on what’s going on, and these seats make up into a bed in case he has to stay out overnight. It’s real neat, isn’t it?’
Natasha had to agree that it was, although her slightly puritan Cheshire soul protested a little at its opulent luxury. Her father had driven round his farm in a battered old Land Rover, with the hardest bench seats in the world and an antiquated form of heating that constantly belched out putrid and polluted air. It had been practically held together with pieces of string and odd bits of wire! In Cheshire, farmers were a thrifty, frugal lot who did not believe in expending money on new equipment while the old was still in working order.
Luckily the back seat was wide enough for her to be able to wedge herself alongside the girls. There was no way she was going to sit next to Jay and listen to more of his acerbic comments.
It took twenty minutes to drive back to the homestead, along one of the straightest bitumen roads Natasha had ever seen, and at a speed that had her clutching the sides of her seat as she tried to control her start of terror.
‘It’s all right, Uncle Jay isn’t going to hit anything,’ Cherry assured her kindly, calling out, to Natasha’s chagrin, ‘Can’t you slow down some? Natasha is scared…’
‘We used to be scared, too, when our folks were first killed, but Gramps said that the only way to get over falling off a horse was to climb right back on again.’
Yes, she could just hear him saying it too, Natasha thought wryly.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll let you hold my hand. That will make you feel a lot better… Uncle Jay always lets me hold his when I’m scared…’
So the man was human, after all. It came as something of a shock, and she couldn’t resist sneaking a glance at his rigid profile.
In the darkness of the truck she could just about make it out. While she was studying him he turned his head abruptly, as though sensing her scrutiny, and immediately she was aware of his leashed tension and resentment. Surely the fact that she had befriended his grandfather and had been left some small token in remembrance of that friendship could not be responsible for this almost savage sense of hostility she sensed in him?
Uncertainly, like someone probing an aching tooth, she examined her own feelings. It was unheard of for her to react so strongly to a man on such a short acquaintance… What had happened to her notorious coldness, so much bemoaned by other men? What had happened to the cool hauteur behind which she habitually hid her real feelings?
‘We’re almost there now.’ Cherry’s excited comment distracted her and she followed the little girl’s pointing finger. ‘Look, those are the breeding pens and the cattle sheds,’ she announced importantly. ‘Uncle Jay is trying to develop a new strain of Brahmin cattle, that will give leaner meat. He…’
‘I’m sure Miss Ames isn’t interested in any of that, Cherry.’ Jay’s ice-cold voice cut across the little girl’s excited chatter, and Natasha felt her resentment of him harden into something deeper.
If he wasn’t concerned with her feelings, surely he might have considered those of his niece? Or was he like his grandfather…did female members of the human race have no importance at all in his scheme of things?
It was cool, prim Rosalie who put the final seal on what Natasha felt was already promising to become a disastrous decision by saying virtuously, ‘Gramps used to say that Uncle Jay would have been better off breeding sons than wasting his time trying to breed a new type of cattle…’
‘That’s enough!’
Instant silence consumed the interior of the truck. Natasha found she was wishing herself a thousand miles away from Texas, and most especially from the man driving this vehicle. She had come out here with such high hopes, such a feeling of adventure, and within a few short hours he had managed to destroy all of that and replace it with…
With what? Hostility? Fear? Compassion for his two poor nieces—and any other woman unfortunate enoug
h to come within his sphere… Resentment against Tip for putting her in such a position in the first place, and other alien emotions she couldn’t even begin to understand.
There had been that frisson of sensation when he had touched her, for instance. That momentary need to know what he would look like with his mouth softened by passion, his eyes hot instead of cold. That terrifying second when she had looked at him and read bitter loneliness in his eyes and almost ached to reach out and smooth it away…
She was imagining things, she told herself. She was suffering from jet-lag. People did the strangest things under its influence. Yes…yes, that was it. She heaved a faint sigh of relief as the truck suddenly stopped. She had been so deeply engrossed in her worrying thoughts that she hadn’t realised that they had pulled up in front of what must be the main entrance to the house.
As she stared at it, she caught her breath on a sudden surge of pleasure. It had been built in the Spanish style, which she recognised from trips to Andalucia: long and low, with white walls and a veranda, around which was entwined what she very much suspected must be bougainvillaea.
Another veranda ran round the second storey, with shuttered windows obviously opening out on to it.
‘Come on, Miss Ames, we’re here!’ Cherry tugged on her arm. Natasha shook herself free on her sudden and instinctive sense of homecoming and followed the girls outside.
‘Go on into the house. Dolores, our housekeeper, has prepared a room for you, Miss Ames.’
‘Uncle Jay…’
The twins’ protest was ignored as he swung down from the truck and strode away from them.
‘I’ve got work to do, kids, and it’s way past your bedtime… See you in the morning.’
Did that apply to her, too? If so, she ought to be relieved. She was so tired that she could have stretched out on the hard packed earth and dropped straight off to sleep!
‘I suppose he’s going down to the cow barns. Come on, let’s get inside.’
It was Cherry who took charge, pushing open the heavy door and calling out, ‘Dolores, we’re home!’
The Mexican woman who came in answer to her summons was smiling broadly. She hugged both girls and then turned to look at Natasha, her smile fading abruptly, as she said coolly, ‘You’ll be wanting to go to your room, Miss Ames. I’ll have one of the girls bring you a tray up… Jay said to tell you that breakfast will be at eight, and the lawyer will be here at nine. Tomas will see to your bags. If you’ll just come with me.’