“My, my, how you’ve changed, George,” he mused.
“It needs stitches,” she said. “It’s too deep to bandage.”
“It isn’t. But I’ll let you patch it up,” he sighed irritably.
“We’d have to go back to the house. And Sheila’s there,” she added, smiling mischievously. “Waiting, with a bottle of nasty antiseptic and just bristling with evil intent. Dr. Harris, on the other hand, is a kind man who wouldn’t hurt you. He’s the lesser of the two evils.”
“Damn it, a little blood won’t hurt me,” he countered, his dark eyes daring his very interested cowhands to say a word.
“Will gangrene hurt you?” she challenged, losing her patience as she was losing the argument. He could be so bullheaded! “Do you want to lose your arm because you’re too pigheaded to see a doctor?”
“You tell him, Miss Kate,” Red Barton agreed from his perch atop the fence. He was just out of his teens, a good cowboy with a tendency toward alcohol that would probably have kept him off any other ranch. But he’d saved Jason from a diamondback the same week he’d signed on at Diamond Spur, and he’d be there for life, if Kate knew her taciturn neighbor. Jason never forgot a favor.
“Gangrene’s a turrrrrible thing,” Barton continued. “First she gets red stripes running down, then green, then the whole thing starts to rot off...” He shuddered as his pale eyes widened and his hands gestured theatrically.
“Oh, shut up, Barton!” Jason shot at him. “I don’t need any advice from a man who almost lost his own damned foot to a mesquite thorn!”
Barton lifted his chin, “Well, at least I finally did go to a doctor, didn’t I, boss man?” he challenged.
“Sure,” Jason agreed. “Feet first, in an ambulance.”
“No need to rub it in,” the cowboy replied with a grin.
“All the more reason for you to go willingly, now,” Kate told Jason. “Think,” she said conspiratorially, “how your men would gloat if you had to be carried away.”
Jason looked quietly furious. In fact, he looked hunted. He glared at Barton, who looked like a cheshire cat, and then back at Kate, who stood just looking at him, her arms folded.
“I give up,” he said heavily.
“Don’t worry, boss, they’ll give you a bullet to bite on,” Barton called after him.
“Save one for yourself, and a gun to use it in, if that lot of calves isn’t done when I get back,” Jason snapped back. “Hey, Gabe!” he yelled to his foreman.
The big blond man turned with a hand to his ear.
“I’ll remember this!” Jason told him.
Gabe made him a bow guaranteed to incite any half-enraged man to violence. Jason’s eyes flashed and he took a step forward.
“He’s young, Jason.” Kate got between him and his quarry. “They’re all young.”
He looked down at her with smoldering eyes under his jutting, scowling brow. “So are you, cupcake,” he said.
“That’s right, old man,” she returned. Then she frowned a little. “Well, not too old,” she amended. “You’re just thirty. I guess you’ve got a few good years left.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “My God. Look who’s talking about age—a child of twenty.”
She glared at him. “Almost twenty-one,” she amended. “The same age as Gene.”
“Yes, Gene.” He spared his branding operation another wistful glance. “They’ll never get it done alone,” he muttered. “If only I could get Gene to hold up his end, I could show a profit. Damn it, why does he want to fool around with painting? He’s chasing rainbows, and on my time!”
“Gene isn’t a boy anymore, Jason,” she reminded him as they walked toward his big black Ford Bronco. “He’s a grown man, with a wife.”
“Some wife,” he said harshly. “Cherry couldn’t boil water, and her idea of married life is to watch soap operas and walk around with her hair in curlers.”
“She’s just eighteen,” she said.
“I tried so damned hard to get them to wait.” He opened the passenger door and helped her up into the high cab with a steely hand and closed it. Before she could get him to listen to her protests, he was under the wheel, managing very well with his right arm. With the bucket seats so close together, she was almost touching it, too. Kate was fascinated by the inside of this vehicle. It had power windows and cruise control, a stereo radio, tape deck, and two gearshifts—one for automatic drive and one for four-wheel drive. The old Ford that Kate shared with her mother was a straight shift with no frills, and by comparison, the Bronco was sheer luxury, right down to the comfortable fabric-covered seats.
“You aren’t fit to drive,” she complained.
“Nobody’s driving me anywhere, unless it’s to the cemetery one day,” he returned. He fumbled for a cigarette, but he couldn’t manage the wheel with his injured arm. “Damn.”
“I thought you’d quit,” she mused. She took the cigarette, lit it, and handed it to him, making a face at the tangy, unpleasant tobacco taste.
“I did,” he agreed with a faint grin. “I quit for a week, in fact. And I quit last month, too. I quit religiously about every third week.”
“Your ashtray looks like it,” she observed, watching him thump ashes over a pile of finished butts the size of a teacup upended. “How can you stand that mess?”
“If I clean it out, it will depress people who ride with me.”
She stared at him. “Come again?”
“Most of my men aren’t neat. If I start cleaning out ashtrays, they’ll think they have to do it, too. They’ll feel threatened and they’ll all quit, and I’ll have to handle roundup all by myself.”
He had a dry wit that few people ever experienced. Kate, sitting contentedly beside him, felt constant amazement that of all the people he knew, she was the only one who ever got this close. He seemed never to see her as a threat, which was more irritating to Kate the older she got. She was becoming a woman, and he didn’t even seem to notice.
Well, he did hate women, she had to admit. He didn’t date, or he hadn’t in the past few years. Not since that Eastern tenderfoot had come out to visit a neighbor and Jason had fallen head over heels in love with her. He’d been all set to propose, with the ring bought and everything, when she suddenly announced that she was off to Hollywood where she’d been offered a movie career. Jason had tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t be budged. Men were a dime a dozen, she’d laughed at him. Movie contracts were thin on the ground. Sorry, sucker, in other words. And Jason had gone on a three-day drunk that had become legendary in local circles, all the more shocking because he never touched liquor in any form. That prejudice was a holdover from his childhood because J.B. Donavan’s drinking had brought violence down on his sons’ heads.
Although Kate had grown up next door, and her father had worked for the Donavans, Jason was so much older that she’d had very little contact with him. But Gene and Kate had gone to school together, and she often helped him with his grammar. He’d talked occasionally about their upbringing, and it had softened her toward Jason who one afternoon just after his almost-fiancée’s defection, had chanced to come growling out of his study, dead drunk. Jason’s unexpected appearance had first disturbed, then shocked Kate. She’d never seen him anything except cold sober and in complete control of himself. Until then.
“Little