The Rancher and His Unexpected Daughter

by Sherryl Woods

  Rosa’s expression was perfectly bland. “But I heard nothing.”

  Harlan sighed. “I’ll bet.”

  Not trusting her one whit, he still dropped the subject and asked Janet what she wanted. When he’d placed the order, he leaned back and focused once more on the woman seated opposite him.

  The color in her cheeks was high. That was probably a sign of guilt, he decided. She’d wound her hair into some sort of prim knot on top of her head, but she’d done it in a way that made a man’s fingers just itch to tug it free. He considered it another contradictory message in a whole sea of them he’d been getting lately.

  As irritated and suspicious as he was, he wanted her with a hunger that stunned him. He’d been comfortable in his marriage with Mary. He’d enjoyed the physical side of their relationship. There’d still been plenty of passion to it. More than a lot of people shared after being together more than thirty-five years, from what he’d heard.

  But these feelings he was experiencing now were a far cry from that. His pulse quickened just at the prospect of seeing Janet. His body responded like some randy adolescent’s at the most innocent touch. A kiss was enough to trigger a desire so thorough and overwhelming, it was a wonder he hadn’t busted the zipper of every pair of jeans he owned.

  None of those reactions had eased just because he now suspected her of trying to cheat him out of his ranch. Was that because on some level he couldn’t believe that’s what she meant to do? Was he thinking with his testosterone and not his head? He wouldn’t be the first man to fall prey to that sort of foolishness.

  He met her gaze and tried to read her intentions in her dark brown eyes, but in the restaurant’s shadows they were more inscrutable than ever.

  “Harlan, what’s really bothering you?” she asked, sounding more worried about him than frightened for herself. She didn’t sound like a woman with secrets she feared might have been uncovered.

  “I told you, I’m trying to get a grasp on what the future holds,” he said, making the response enigmatic enough to cover anything from their relationship to the future of White Pines.

  “Is that something you need to figure out today?” she asked, amusement lurking in her eyes. “Couldn’t you just take it day by day as it comes, the way most of us mortals do?”

  “I’ve never much liked surprises,” he admitted.

  “So it’s true, then,” she teased. “You do like to control everyone and everything around you. Your sons and daughters-in-law were right about that.”

  The truth chafed, especially when it was being used to suit the purposes of someone who didn’t want to reveal her own intentions. “What’s wrong with wanting to shape your life, with wanting to take charge and make it the best it can be?”

  “You miss out on the serendipities,” she observed.

  “Like Jenny stealing my pickup, I suppose.”

  She grinned. “It’s true. If you didn’t make it a habit to leave your keys in plain view, that wouldn’t have happened. Maybe you’re more open to risks than you know.”

  “I don’t mind a few risks, when I’ve had time to weigh the odds,” he countered pointedly. “For forty years those keys had never been a temptation to anyone in Los Piños. Now those are odds worth taking a risk on.”

  He looked her straight in the eye. “You seem like a good risk to me, too.”

  She didn’t seem pleased by the observation. “You make me sound like a filly you might bet on in the fifth race at Belmont.”

  He waved off the comparison. “That’s just money. I’m talking about fate here, Janet. Yours and mine. You’ve been talking a lot about my willingness to take risks. What about you? How do you feel about serendipity?”

  He watched her closely as she seemed to struggle with the question. Whatever internal war she was waging struck him as a pretty good indication that she did have things to hide.

  “I’m all for it,” she said eventually.

  “Oh, really? Then why aren’t you seizing my offer to take you away to some romantic spot for a few days?”

  She scowled at him. “I explained that.”

  “Not to my satisfaction.”

  She stood then and threw down her napkin. “Not everything in this world has to meet your satisfaction, Harlan Adams. You’d do well to remember that.”

  With that she turned and sashayed straight out of Rosa’s, ignoring the gaping expressions of Mule and all the others following her departure. To his everlasting regret, Harlan’s body turned rock-hard just watching her go.

  When she was finally out of sight, he sighed. That woman’s defiant streak was going to be the death of him yet. Worse, he didn’t know a damn bit more about what was going on in her head now than he had before he’d forced this confrontation. Yep, it was just as he’d suspected. He was definitely losing his touch.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Mom, did Mr. Adams seem weird to you today?” Jenny asked as she watched the hamburgers she had frying on the stove for dinner.

  “Weird, how?” Janet replied, even though she thought she knew exactly what Jenny was talking about. He’d struck her as weird, impossible, arrogant and a whole lot more. She was interested, though, in just which vibes Jenny had picked up on.

  “Like he was mad or something. I don’t know. He was just awful quiet, not bossy like he usually is. And he took off in the middle of the morning without giving me anything to do. He said I could just go into his library and read, if I wanted to.”

  “That must have been when he came into town to see me.”

  Jenny put the spatula down, turned and regarded her worriedly. “How come?”

  Janet had been wondering the very same thing ever since he’d appeared on her office doorstep. Their lunch hadn’t really enlightened her. Even though Harlan had plainly stated that he wanted to discuss their future, there had been those odd undercurrents, as if he were really looking for evidence of some treachery. She couldn’t share that with her daughter, so she simply said he’d wanted to talk.

  “About what?” Jenny persisted. “Me?”

  The last was said with a plaintive note that Janet found worrisome. “Why would you think he wanted to talk about you? Have you been making trouble out there?” When Jenny remained silent, Janet’s heart sank. “Okay, what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Jenny?”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t bust a gut. I did make sort of a mess of his toolshed yesterday,” she finally admitted.

  “I see.”

  “But I cleaned it up,” her daughter said in a rush. “I even painted it. Bright yellow, in fact. It’s awesome.”

  Janet couldn’t work up much enthusiasm over the color scheme of the toolshed, especially since Jenny herself seemed to be the reason it had needed painting.

  “Why did you wreck it in the first place?” she asked, even though she thought she already knew from what Harlan had mentioned about Jenny’s questions to him. “Did it have something to do with your being worried that Mr. Adams and I might be sleeping together?”

  Jenny groaned and turned beet red. “He told you, didn’t he? Jeez, Mom, he swore he wasn’t going to blab.”

  “He didn’t blab, at least not the way you mean. It just sort of came out in a conversation we were having.”

  “About the two of you?”

  Janet nodded.

  “So, are you?”

  “Are we what?”

  “Sleeping together,” Jenny said impatiently. “He wouldn’t say exactly.”

  “And neither will I,” Janet said. “That’s not a subject that’s any of your business.”

  “How can you say that? He’s the enemy.”

  Janet grinned at Jenny’s determination to cling to that label. Her daughter was even more stubborn than she was. She’d conceded days ago that Harlan was no more the enemy than some descendant of Custer’s might be.

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” she chided.

  “You’re giving up?” Jenny said, st
aring at her incredulously. “You’re not going to fight him for Lone Wolf’s land?”

  “I’m still researching whether there’s any legal way to get the land. Besides, I told you before that I don’t have evidence that Lone Wolf’s father was ever on Mr. Adams’s land. We may never know for sure. And the way things worked back then, it wasn’t like the Comanches had deeds on file.”

  “But I told him—” Jenny turned pale. “Whoops.”

  Janet felt as if she’d been whacked over the head by a two-by-four. Of course! That explained those odd undercurrents she’d felt with Harlan. With her thoughts in turmoil, the odor of meat burning barely even registered. At the moment the fate of the hamburgers was the last thing on her mind.

  “You told him what?” she asked carefully.

  “Nothing,” Jenny muttered, backing away from the stove and clearly trying to put some distance between herself and her mother at the same time.

  “Jennifer!”

  “Okay, I might have let it slip that his ranch was sitting on Lone Wolf’s land.”

  “You might have?”

  “I did, all right?” she said belligerently. “I don’t know what difference it makes. He was going to find out sooner or later anyway.”

  Janet clung to her temper by a thread. “But it might have been nice if he found out about it from me. Now he must think I’ve just been playing some sort of sick game by hanging around out there. He probably thinks we’re out to betray him.”

  “Aren’t we?” Jenny asked simply. “Isn’t that why we’re in this godawful state, instead of back home in New York, where we belong?”

  With that she whirled and ran from the kitchen, leaving Janet to take the burned hamburgers from the stove. No longer the least bit interested in food, she dumped the frying pan, burgers and all, into the sink, then went out to the front porch to sit in a rocker and think.

  Should she go out to White Pines first thing in the morning and tell Harlan everything? But, if he already knew most of it, why had he been trying to back her into a corner about their future earlier today? Why hadn’t he been blasting her as the deceitful traitor she felt like? Would she ever understand the workings of this man’s mind? Or any man’s, for that matter?

  And why, dear heaven, did it suddenly seem to matter so much to her that Harlan Adams not think ill of her? Was it possible that he had come to mean more to her than that elusive dream she’d formulated as a child and held on to so tightly ever since?

  She could still recall Lone Wolf telling her about the Comanches known as Penateka or Honey-Eaters, who’d occupied a stretch of the Comancheria from Edwards Plateau to Cross Timbers. His telling had been further preservation of the oral history of his forefathers.

  Even now she shook with indignation at his description of the 1840 meeting in San Antonio during which the Comanche leaders who’d come to discuss peace had been slaughtered in what had come to be known as the Council House Massacre. There had been nothing after that to indicate to the tribe that Texans could ever be trusted.

  Slowly but surely settlers had been given more and more of the Comanche lands, until Lone Wolf’s ancestors had been forced from Texas altogether. Could she ever achieve retribution for something that had occurred so long ago and even now seemed so complex? Everything she’d read indicated it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make any legal claim.

  The questions kept her up most of the night. The answers didn’t come at all.

  * * *

  In the morning, she didn’t have a chance to act on any of the myriad possibilities that had occurred to her. When she and Jenny got to White Pines, Harlan was nowhere to be found. It was Cody who waited for them on the front porch.

  “Come on, short stuff,” he said to Jenny, who brightened immediately. “You and I are going out to look for stray calves this morning.”

  “Oh, wow!” Jenny said, clearly pleased to be asked to help her idol with such an important task. It was the first time Janet had seen a smile on her face since their argument the night before.

  “Where’s your father?” Janet asked Cody, hoping that her heart wasn’t sitting in plain view on her sleeve.

  He shrugged. “Beats me. He left me a note to take Jenny with me today. Didn’t say where he was heading or when he’d be back. He took his plane, though. He might have had business over in Dallas or something.”

  “Oh.” Janet fought against the tide of disappointment that washed through her as Cody headed over to the two horses he’d saddled and had tethered to a fence rail. She should have been relieved, but she wasn’t. She brushed a kiss across Jenny’s forehead, ignoring her daughter’s embarrassed protest. “Have a good day, pumpkin. See you tonight.”

  “Yeah, Mom. Bye,” Jenny said, already rushing off to keep up with Cody’s long strides.

  Feeling abandoned on all fronts, Janet stood where she was until Cody and Jenny had ridden off. Only after they’d gone did she admit to herself that she would rather have had Harlan screaming at her than ignoring her this way. There was little doubt in her mind that he’d deliberately made it a point not to be at home this morning.

  Maybe he really had had unexpected business to take care of, just as Cody had suggested, she consoled herself as she drove into town. Right, she scoffed right back. Without telling Cody the details? No way. He was very careful not to step on his son’s managerial toes. No, the truth of it was, he was avoiding her because his discovery of her treachery was eating at him.

  She resigned herself to waiting until Harlan turned up again before settling matters between them. The delay wouldn’t make much difference. She doubted she’d have any clearer an idea how to handle it hours or days from now than she did right this minute.

  * * *

  Harlan had spent half the night after his aborted meeting with Janet reading through every book in his library on the Comanches and their days in the southern Great Plains. Nothing he found there was conclusive proof that Janet’s ancestral claim to his land was solid. In fact, it seemed to him that Lone Wolf’s father had probably been a typical nomadic hunter, before being sent off to the reservation in Oklahoma.

  It had been well into the wee hours of the morning when he’d decided to do a little more investigating by going to Oklahoma to see what he could discover there. His meetings with folks at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and with tribal elders who agreed to see him were inconclusive, as well. He sensed that Janet would never find the proof she sought unless she hoped to stake her claim for all Comanches and not just for her great-grandfather and his descendants.

  Still, the meetings had given him much to think about, a historical perspective on his own family’s actions when they’d moved to Texas to flee the war that had destroyed their home in the South. In seizing an opportunity for themselves, had they stolen it from others? He found he could understand Janet’s actions far more clearly now and he could do so without feeling the rancor of betrayal.

  Perhaps, if Janet ever opened up to him, they could reach some sort of compromise. In the meantime, though, he’d decided that she enriched his life too much for him to walk away without fighting for their future. It was a decision weighed and reached with years of maturity, rather than the angry, instantaneous, hot-blooded reaction he might have had a couple of decades earlier.

  Also, the more he thought about the desperate plea he had made to Janet to run away with him, the more he realized that she had been exactly right to turn him down. The place to court her was right in Los Piños, in plain view. He didn’t ever want a soul to think he was sneaking around with her because he wasn’t proud to be seen with her. There were too many people ready with quick bias for him to be adding to that sort of rotten speculation about her morals or his own.

  As soon as he’d set down his plane at the local airfield, he marched straight down Main Street, walked into her office and hauled her off to have dinner at DiPasquali’s.

  “Harlan,” she protested, even as she hurried to keep pace with him. “What about Je
nny? She’s going to be waiting for me at White Pines. She’ll be worried.”

  “I called Melissa from the airport. Jenny will have dinner with her and Cody. Sharon Lynn and baby Harlan love having her around. You can pick her up there.”

  She halted in her tracks and scowled at him. “Do you always have to manipulate everything to get your own way?”

  He grinned unrepentantly. “Always,” he assured her. “Get used to it.”

  He linked her arm through his and gently, but insistently, escorted her the rest of the way to the restaurant. It seemed to him her footsteps dragged a bit reluctantly, but at least she didn’t bolt on him.

  Inside DiPasquali’s, he directed her to a table right smack in front of the window, in plain view of anybody coming or going inside the restaurant or passing by on the street outside. She regarded him with a curious look, but sat where he’d indicated.

  Gina DiPasquali joined them at once with their menus, winking at Janet as she handed one to her. If he hadn’t already known about their conspiracy over that dinner at Janet’s, he would have wondered what the two of them were up to.

  “Are you thinking of having the lasagna?” Harlan inquired innocently, his gaze fixed on Janet’s face.

  Gina chuckled as Janet’s cheeks turned pink. “Caught you, didn’t he?”

  “Before he’d taken two bites,” Janet admitted. “Then he rubbed it in for the rest of the evening.”

  “I did not,” Harlan protested, feigning indignation. “But I couldn’t very well let you go on thinking you’d put one over on me, though, could I? It would have set a dangerous precedent. I might never have gotten the upper hand again.”

  “Who says you ever had it,” she shot right back. “Besides, no gentleman would have embarrassed a hostess by pointing out what he suspected. You should have been oohing and aahing over my supposed culinary skills.”

  Gina rolled her eyes. “If you were counting on that, I could have told you not to bother. Harlan’s only a gentleman when it suits his purposes.”