“Are you hungry, Ruth?” he asked.
Ruth shook her head. “They served lunch on the plane, and it was really good. Besides, the lady in the next seat gave me all her peanuts.”
Tyler nodded, moving slowly around to let her in the car. Ruth glanced up at him. “You seem thoughtful,” she said. “Is something the matter?”
“I’m not supposed to take you home yet,” Tyler confessed, pausing with his hand on the passenger door. “The women said they’d kill me if we arrived before four o’clock.”
“Kill you? That seems a little harsh.”
Tyler grinned. “Yeah, well, they’re a harsh bunch, those women.”
“But I don’t understand. Why can’t you go home?”
“They’re doing a whole lot of renovations out at the house. It’s a real mess these days, and they don’t want you to get there till they’ve had time to tidy away some of the painting stuff.”
Ruth smiled. “I see. Lucky the plane was late.” She glanced at her watch. “How long does it take to get to Crystal Creek, Tyler?”
Tyler grinned back at her. “Depends who’s driving. For my brother, Cal, about half an hour. For most everybody else in the world, forty-five minutes or so.”
“Well, it’s just after two o’clock now,” Ruth said. “How about if we drive out there and have a cup of coffee somewhere in Crystal Creek before we go to the house? Is there a restaurant in the town?”
“You bet. It’s called the Longhorn, and it hasn’t changed one bit the past half century. Its owner, Dottie, serves the best doughnuts in Texas.”
“Great.” Ruth smiled up at him, then drew back in surprise as his hand brushed her shoulder.
“What’s this?” Tyler asked, holding up a bit of rusty fluff.
Ruth peered at his tanned fingers, then smiled awkwardly. “It’s cat hair,” she confessed. “I hugged my cat this morning when I said goodbye, and that’s how he rewards me.”
Tyler let the bit of silky fluff drift away on the afternoon breeze and found himself envying the damned cat who had so recently been in her arms. “You like your cat?” he asked, holding the door open and helping her inside, then leaning in to look down at her.
“I love him,” Ruth said, smiling and gazing up with wide brown eyes dazzled by the sunlight. “I miss him already.”
She waited silently in the car as Tyler came around and unlocked the driver’s door. He folded his long body behind the wheel and turned to smile at her, feeling almost weak with pleasure at her nearness, the delicate fragrance of her perfume and the sweetness of her face, enclosed next to him within the intimate luxury of the big car.
“You know, I’m really worried about him,” Ruth said in an abstracted tone, gazing out at the crowded parking lot.
Tyler turned the key in the ignition, puzzling briefly over this statement until he realized that she was still talking about her cat. “Why?” he asked, resting an arm along the back of the seat and backing expertly into the slow-moving lines of traffic.
“Our housekeeper is just so awful,” Ruth said. “She’s always threatening poor Hagar with all kinds of horrible things, like putting him in the clothes dryer and turning it on. I don’t what she’ll do to him when I’m not there to protect him.”
“She sounds pretty awful, all right,” Tyler said, fascinated by a vivid image of the cat in the dryer.
Ruth told him about Mrs. Ward, with her bossy forcefulness and grumbling accusations, her motorcycle and her knitting and the mysterious little man she lived with.
By the time she finished he was shouting with laughter. Ruth, too, had begun to smile again, her worries apparently forgotten for the moment as they left the city behind them and the quiet Texas countryside began spinning past the windows.
RUTH GRIPPED her hands tightly in her lap and looked out at the rolling hills and valleys dotted with grazing livestock, brightened by the occasional glimpse of a deer flashing though the brush.
“What kind of trees are those?” she asked.
“Mesquite. Probably the most genuine native vegetation we have around here. It grows a long pod that fills up with beans, and the cattle love ’em. The branches get big enough that the wood’s sometimes used for furniture, and old-timers say the roots can grow sixty feet long, looking for water. It’s a great wood for barbecues, too.”
Fascinated, Ruth peered out at the tangled thickets. “I think there’s mesquite in Southern California,” she said. “But I don’t recall any of it growing up where we live. Of course, the land is pretty thoroughly cultivated.”
They fell silent again, and Ruth stole a cautious glance at her escort.
She didn’t really know what to think about Tyler McKinney. He was certainly as handsome as she remembered, with all of his father’s easy cowboy charm and sculpted good looks. But she noticed something else about this man. There was a hard, modern edge to J.T.’s elder son, a firm set to his jaw and a crisp look about him that spoke of a cool-headed businessman, somebody who certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly.
Normally, Ruth wasn’t attracted at all by that kind of man, the type who exuded power and confidence and an easy arrogant control of all situations. But Tyler McKinney seemed different somehow, hard to put a label on.
Just when Ruth thought she had him figured out and was ready to dismiss him, she’d catch a disturbing sparkle deep in his brown eyes, a flash of gentleness and winsome humor that was both surprising and unsettling. And when he threw back his head and gave one of those hearty, infectious laughs, Ruth found herself smiling all over in response, as warmed and delighted by his company as any fluttery, teenage girl.
“Well, how do you like it so far?” he asked cheerfully when she turned to gaze out the window again. “Is it like you remembered?”
“I really don’t remember much of anything from that visit,” Ruth confessed, “except you and Mimsy playing all day in the pool, and Cal bringing a live rattlesnake into the house.”
Tyler roared with laughter. “God, I’d forgotten that snake. Didn’t my mama have fits? I thought she’d die on the spot.”
When he realized what he’d said, Tyler fell abruptly silent. His face paled beneath the tan and he gripped the wheel silently, his jaw knotted with anguish.
Ruth reached over and touched his arm gently. “We were so sorry when we heard about your mother, Tyler,” she said in a soft voice. “I know that it was terribly hard for all of you.”
Especially Tyler, she recalled. Don Holden had confided to his daughter that in his opinion, Tyler had suffered more than any of the McKinney children from the loss of his mother, though he seemed least able to express his pain.
Tyler turned to his passenger and tried to smile. “It was all a long time ago,” he said lightly. “And now there’s a new woman redecorating my mama’s house. Life goes on, I guess.”
“It must feel so strange,” Ruth commented shyly.
“What’s that?”
“Having a stepmother close to your own age. Isn’t it hard to adjust to?”
“Lots of things are hard to adjust to,” Tyler said with his eyes fixed on the winding road ahead of him. “But that’s part of life, too, isn’t it? When you come right down to it, life is just a long series of adjustments.”
“I guess so.” Disturbed by the air of tension in the car, Ruth steered the conversation back into safer channels. “You know,” she commented, “I think this