What she didn’t adore was Herman. Although she was truly an animal lover, her affection didn’t extend to snakes. The great albino python with his yellow-patterned white skin and red eyes terrified her. He lived in an enormous aquarium against one wall of Cag’s room, and he had a nasty habit of escaping. Tess had found him in a variety of unlikely spots, including the washing machine. He wasn’t dangerous because Cag kept him well-fed, and he was always closely watched for a day or so after he ate—which wasn’t very often. Eventually she learned not to scream. Like measles and colds, Herman was a force of nature that simply had to be accepted. Cag loved the vile reptile. It seemed to be the only thing that he really cared about.
Well, maybe he liked the cat, too. She’d seen him playing with it once, with a long piece of string. He didn’t know that. When he wasn’t aware anyone was watching, he seemed to be a different person. And nobody had forgotten about what happened after he saw what was subsequently referred to as the “pig” movie. Rey had sworn that his older brother was all but in tears during one of the scenes in the touching, funny motion picture. Cag saw it three times in the theater and later bought a copy of his own.
Since the movie, Cag didn’t eat pork anymore, not ham nor sausage nor bacon. And he made everyone who did feel uncomfortable. It was one of many paradoxes about this complicated man. He wasn’t afraid of anything on this earth, but apparently he had a soft heart hidden deep inside. Tess had never been privileged to see it, because Cag didn’t like her. She wished that she wasn’t so uneasy around him. But then, most people were.
Christmas Eve came later in the week, and Tess served an evening meal fit for royalty, complete with all the trimmings. The married Harts were starting their own tradition for Christmas Day, so the family celebration was on Christmas Eve.
Tess ate with them, because all four brothers had looked outraged when she started to set a place for herself in the kitchen with widowed Mrs. Lewis, who came almost every day to do the mopping and waxing and general cleaning that Tess didn’t have time for. It was very democratic of them, she supposed, and it did feel nice to at least appear to be part of a family—even if it wasn’t her own. Mrs. Lewis went home to her visiting children, anyway, so Tess would have been in the kitchen alone.
She was wearing the best dress she had—a nice red plaid one, but it was cheap and it looked it when compared to the dress that Dorie Hart was wearing. They went out of their way to make her feel secure, though, and by the time they started on the pumpkin and pecan pies and the huge dark fruitcake, she wasn’t worried about her dress anymore. Everyone included her in the conversation. Except for Cag’s silence, it would have been perfect. But he didn’t even look at her. She tried not to care.
She got presents, another unexpected treat, in return for her homemade gifts. She’d crocheted elegant trim for two pillowcases that she’d embroidered for the Harts, matching them to the color schemes in their individual bedrooms—something she’d asked Dorie to conspire with her about. She did elegant crochet work. She was making things for Dorie’s baby boy in her spare time, a labor of love.
The gifts she received weren’t handmade, but she loved them just the same. The brothers chipped in to buy her a winter coat. It was a black leather one with big cuffs and a sash. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in all her life, and she cried over it. The women gave her presents, too. She had a delicious floral perfume from Dorie and a designer scarf in just the right shades of blue from Mrs. Lewis. She felt on top of the world as she cleared away the dinner dishes and got to work in the kitchen.
Leo paused by the counter and tugged at her apron strings with a mischievous grin.
“Don’t you dare,” she warned him. She smiled, though, before she turned her attention back to the dishes.
“Cag didn’t say a word,” he remarked. “He’s gone off to ride the fence line near the river with Mack before it gets dark.” Mack was the cattle foreman, a man even more silent than Cag. The ranch was so big that there were foremen over every aspect of it: the cattle, the horses, the mechanical crew, the office crew, the salesmen—there was even a veterinarian on retainer. Tess’s father had been the livestock foreman for the brief time he spent at the Hart ranch before his untimely death. Tess’s mother had left them when Tess was still a little girl, sick of the nomadic life that her husband loved. In recent years Tess hadn’t heard a word from her. She was glad. She hoped she never had to see her mother again.
“Oh.” She put a plate in the dishwasher. “Because of me?” she added quietly.
He hesitated. “I don’t know.” He toyed with a knife on the counter. “He hasn’t been himself lately. Well,” he amended with a wry smile, “he has, but he’s been worse than usual.”
“I haven’t done anything, have I?” she asked, and turned worried eyes up to his.
She was so young, he mused, watching all the uncertainties rush across her smooth, lightly freckled face. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t plain, either. She had an inner light that seemed to radiate from her when she was happy. He liked hearing her sing when she mopped and swept, when she went out to feed the few chickens they kept for egg production. Despite the fairly recent tragedy in her life, she was a happy person.
“No,” he said belatedly. “You haven’t done a thing. You’ll get used to Cag’s moods. He doesn’t have them too often. Just at Christmas, his birthday and sometimes in the summer.”
“Why?” she asked.
He hesitated, then shrugged. “He went overseas in Operation Desert Storm,” he said. “He never talks about it. Whatever he did was classified. But he was in some tight corners and he came home wounded. While he was recuperating in West Germany, his fiancée married somebody else. Christmas and July remind him, and he gets broody.”
She grimaced. “He doesn’t seem the sort of man who would ask a woman to marry him unless he was serious.”
“He isn’t. It hurt him, really bad. He hasn’t had much time for women since.” He smiled gently. “It gets sort of funny when we go to conventions. There’s Cag in black tie, standing out like a beacon, and women just follow him around like pet calves. He never seems to notice.”
“I guess he’s still healing,” she said, and relaxed a little. At least it wasn’t just her that set him off.
“I don’t know that he ever will,” he replied. He pursed his lips, watching her work. “You’re very domestic, aren’t you?”
She poured detergent into the dishwasher with a smile and turned it on. “I’ve always had to be. My mother left us when I was little, although she came back to visit just once, when I was sixteen. We never saw her again.” She shivered inwardly at the memory. “Anyway, I learned to cook and clean for Daddy at an early age.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head. “Just us. I wanted to get a job or go on to college after high school, to help out. But he needed me, and I just kept putting it off. I’m glad I did, now.” Her eyes clouded a little. “I loved him to death. I kept thinking though, what if we’d known about his heart in time, could anything have been done?”
“You can’t do that to yourself,” he stated. “Things happen. Bad things, sometimes. You have to realize that you can’t control life.”
“That’s a hard lesson.”
He nodded. “But it’s one we all have to learn.” He frowned slightly. “Just how old are you—twenty or so?”
She looked taken aback. “I’m twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in March.”
Now