“I wasn’t running! I’m not a scared kid, either!”
That was more like it. He could manage if she fought back. He couldn’t live with the image of her white and shaking and backing away from him. It had hurt like the very devil.
He pulled his Stetson low over his eyes. “Suit yourself. But if you stay, you’d damned sure better not lose the apple butter again,” he said with biting sarcasm.
“Next time, you’ll get it right between the eyes,” she muttered to herself.
“I heard that.”
She glared at him. “And if you ever, ever, throw another cake at me…!”
“I didn’t throw it at you,” he said pointedly. “I threw it at the wall.”
Her face was growing redder by the second. “I spent two hours making the damned thing!”
“Lost apple butter, cursed cake, damned women…” He was still muttering as he stomped off down the hall with the faint, musical jingle of spurs following him.
Tess stood unsteadily by the bed for several seconds before she snapped out of her trance and put her suitcases back on the bed to unpack them. She needed her head read for agreeing to stay, but she didn’t really have anywhere else to go. And what he’d told her reached that part of her that was unbearably touched by small, wounded things.
She could see a little Cag with his face covered in cake, being brutally hit by an uncaring woman, trying not to cry. Amazingly it excused every harsh word, every violent action. She wondered how many other childhood scars were hiding behind that hard, expressionless face.
Cag was coldly formal with her after that, as if he regretted having shared one of his deeper secrets with her. But there weren’t any more violent outbursts. He kept out of her way and she kept out of his. The winter months passed into a routine sameness. Without the rush and excitement of the holidays, Tess found herself with plenty of time on her hands when she was finished with her chores. The brothers worked all hours, even when they weren’t bothered with birthing cattle and roundup, as they were in the warmer months of spring.
But there were fences to mend, outbuildings to repair, upkeep on the machinery that was used to process feed. There were sick animals to treat and corrals to build and vehicles to overhaul. It never seemed to end. And in between all that, there were conferences and conventions and business trips.
It was rare, Tess found, to have all three bachelor brothers at the table at the same time. More often than not, she set places only for Rey and Leo, because Cag spent more and more time away. They assured her that she wasn’t to blame, that it was just pressing business, but she wondered just the same. She knew that Cag only tolerated her for the sake of her domestic skills, that he hated the very sight of her. But the other brothers were so kind that it almost made up for Cag. And the ever-present Mrs. Lewis, doing the rough chores, was a fountain of information about the history of the Hart ranch and the surrounding area. Tess, a history buff, learned a lot about the wild old days and stored the information away almost greedily. The lazy, pleasant days indoors seemed to drag and she was grateful for any interesting tidbits that Mrs. Lewis sent her way.
Then spring arrived and the ranch became a madhouse. Tess had to learn to answer the extension phone in the living room while the two secretaries in the separate office complex started processing calving information into the brothers’ huge mainframe computer. The sheer volume of it was shocking to Tess, who’d spent her whole life on ranches.
The only modern idea, besides the computers, that the brothers had adapted to their operation was the implantation of computer chips under the skin of the individual cattle. This was not only to identify them with a handheld computer, but also to tag them in case of rustling—a sad practice that had continued unabashed into the computer age.
On the Hart ranch, there were no hormone implants, no artificial insemination, no unnecessary antibiotics or pesticides. The brothers didn’t even use pesticides on their crops, having found ways to encourage the development of superior strains of forage and the survival of good insects that kept away the bad ones. It was all very ecological and fascinating, and it was even profitable. One of the local ranchers, J. D. Langley, worked hand in glove with them on these renegade methods. They shared ideas and investment strategies and went together as a solid front to cattlemen’s meetings. Tess found J. D. “Donavan” Langley intimidating, but his wife and nephew had softened him, or so people said. She shuddered to think how he’d been before he mellowed.
The volume of business the brothers did was overwhelming. The telephone rang constantly. So did the fax machine. Tess was press-ganged into learning how to operate that, and the computer, so that she could help send and receive urgent e-mail messages to various beef producers and feedlots and buyers.
“But I’m not trained!” she wailed to Leo and Rey.
They only grinned. “There, there, you’re doing a fine job,” Leo told her encouragingly.
“But I won’t have time to cook proper meals,” she continued.
“As long as we have enough biscuits and strawberry preserves and apple butter, that’s no problem at all,” Rey assured her. “And if things get too hectic, we’ll order out.”
They did, frequently, in the coming weeks. One night two pizza delivery trucks drove up and unloaded enough pizzas for the entire secretarial and sales staff and the cowboys, not to mention the brothers. They worked long hours and they were demanding bosses, but they never forgot the loyalty and sacrifice of the people who worked for them. They paid good wages, too.
“Why don’t you ever spend any money on yourself?” Leo asked Tess one night when, bleary-eyed from the computer, she was ready to go to bed.
“What?”
“You’re wearing the same clothes you had last year,” he said pointedly. “Don’t you want some new jeans, at least, and some new tops?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” she confessed. “I’ve just been putting my wages into the bank and forgetting about them. I suppose I should go shopping.”
“Yes, you should.” He leaned down toward her. “The very minute we get caught up!”
She groaned. “We’ll never get caught up! I heard old Fred saying that he’d had to learn how to use a handheld computer so he could scan the cattle in the low pasture, and he was almost in tears.”
“We hired more help,” he stated.
“Yes, but there was more work after that! It’s never going to end,” she wailed. “If those stupid cows don’t stop having calves…!”
“Bite your tongue, woman, that’s profit you’re scoffing at!”
“I know, but—”
“We’re all tired,” he assured her. “And any day now, it’s going to slack off. We’re doing compilation figures for five ranches, you know,” he added. “It isn’t just this one. We have to record each new calf along with its history, we have to revise lists for cattle that have died or been culled, cattle that we traded, new cattle that we’ve bought. Besides that, we have to have birth weights, weight gain ratios, average daily weight gain and feeding data. All that information has to be kept current or it’s no use to us.”
“I know. But we’ll all get sick of pizzas and I’ll forget how to make biscuits!”
“God forbid,” he said, taking off his hat and holding it to his heart.
She was too tired to laugh, but she did smile. She worked her way down the long hall toward her room over the garage, feeling as drained as she looked.
She met Cag coming from the general direction of the garage, dressed in a neat gray suit with a subdued burgundy tie and a cream-colored Stetson. He was just back from a trustee meeting in Dallas, and he looked expensive and sophisticated and unapproachable.