‘Because he’s left you half the ranch. Yes, we know all about that!’
‘Cherry!’
The whip-hard voice cut through the little girl’s revelations.
Natasha spun round, her face suddenly milk-white. It couldn’t be true, Cherry must have misunderstood. She opened her mouth to question Jay, but he was already turning his back on her.
‘Time we were taking off … Cherry, please show Miss Ames how to fasten herself into her seat …’
‘Just a minute …’
It was too late, he was already disappearing into the nose of the aircraft, and as she subsided into her seat alongside the girls she was dimly aware of Cherry saying placatingly, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Ames. Uncle Jay is a real good pilot … You’ll be quite safe.’
She lay back in her seat and closed her eyes, trembling with shock. Tip couldn’t have left her half the ranch; it just wasn’t possible. The twins must have overheard something and misunderstood the situation … She looked covertly at them. They were what … ten? Nine? Old enough and intelligent enough not to make those kind of mistakes … Something twisted painfully deep inside her. She had to have an explanation. She had to get off this plane.
She wasn’t even aware of struggling to sit up until she felt Cherry tugging sympathetically on her arm.
‘It’s all right, Miss Ames, really,’ the little girl reassured her. ‘We’ll be there inside an hour. You’re quite safe … Rosalie used to hate flying too, didn’t you?’
Her sister nodded.
‘And driving—especially after Momma and Poppa were killed.’ She shuddered tensely, her eyes clouding.
‘Gramps told us that your parents died in a car crash just like ours.’ Cherry looked at her uncertainly. ‘Did they?’
‘Yes. Yes, they did. When I was sixteen …’
‘And where did you go? What happened to you?’
‘I went to live with my aunt and uncle.’
‘Just like us with Uncle Jay. He takes care of us now, but he doesn’t have a wife, does he, Rose?’ She looked to her twin for corroboration. ‘Gramps wanted him to get married. He was always going on about it. ‘‘The ranch needs sons’’—that’s what he used to say …’
‘Did he tell you that our great-grandmother was an Indian?’
So that explained the dark hair and olive skin! Natasha gave Cherry a distracted smile, and was on the point of asking her gently if she really should be telling her so much about her family, when Rosalie added, ‘She was his second wife. He had another one first … She came from New York, and she was very rich, but she died …’
‘Yes, and Gary, her son, quarelled with Gramps because he wanted to sell the ranch, and so Gramps gave him the oil wells. And then he got married again and had another son so that he could leave him the land …’
Tip had mentioned a family feud to her, but she had never pressed him for further details. In Cheshire, people were reticent about their family history. Here in Texas it seemed to be just the opposite.
‘Our mummy went away and left us, but Daddy went to get her back—’
‘That’s when they were killed … They were always fighting, weren’t they, Rose? But we miss them a lot …’
There was no mistaking the emotion in those few pitiful words, and Natasha felt her own eyes fill up with tears.
‘Gramps said that we needed a woman to love us, and that men don’t understand women’s things … We thought he meant that Uncle Jay was going to get married … women flock round him like bees round honey … but he don’t have no truck with them, does he, Rose? Gramps used to say that he was a mis a …’
‘A misogynist,’ Natasha told her wryly.
Their conversation was a blend of naëveté and sophistication: bits of gossip picked up here and there around the ranch no doubt. Even though Tip had not mentioned them to her, she sensed that they had loved him very deeply, and he had obviously cared for them; cared enough, at least, to know that they needed a woman to share their lives.
‘Gramps told us a secret before he died. He made us promise not to tell anyone …’
The grey eyes sparkled, and Natasha knew that she was being begged to question this secret. However, she shook her head; she felt she had already pried far enough into Tip’s family history, albeit innocently.
‘If it’s a secret, that’s the way it must stay … Your grandfather wouldn’t have told it to you if he wasn’t sure you could keep it.’
She felt mean as she watched the excitement die out of their eyes, but she told herself it was for the best. Already in these two girls she sensed a yearning, a reaching out to her, which she suspected stemmed not just from their own need to replace their dead mother, but also from Tip’s careful tutoring.
It was no secret that he had wanted Jay to marry, and what better way to coerce him than to enrol the two little girls on his side? A mother for them, a wife for Jay, and a great-grandson for Tip … Oh, yes! He had been a wily old character, Natasha reflected grimly. But none of that could explain Cherry’s comment about his will.
There was no way that the man she had known in London would have parted with a single inch of his land to someone outside his family. No, the girls must have overheard something and misinterpreted it. To judge from the reception she had received from Jay, she was already marked down as a first cousin to a fortune-hunter, and no doubt the girls had picked up some derogatory remark made about her by their uncle and woven their own reason for it.
It had been dusk when she arrived at Dallas; now it was fully dark. Not the dark of London that she was used to, but the dense blackness of the wide open spaces, illuminated only by the stars, surely far more brilliant here than they had ever seemed at home?
Despite her tiredness, despite the shock of Jay’s hostility and the twins’ revelations, somewhere deep down inside her that tiny flicker of excitement still burned. Idiotically, since she was in a fully enclosed plane, she felt as though she could almost smell the hot, dry scent of the land, as though its lure and magic were already weaving their spell around her.
She wondered how close to the Rio Grande the ranch actually was. Tip hadn’t said, although he had said that the ranch had survived in the early years because it had its own water supply that didn’t dry out, even in the longest drought.
Suddenly she felt the plane start to drop. At her side, Cherry said reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be long now.’
As she glanced out of the window, Natasha had a confused impression of rows of oil derricks, and flat, sandy earth, illuminated by the huge floodlights on top of the derricks.
‘Those are Uncle Pete’s oil wells,’ Rosalie told her matter-of-factly.
‘They used to be,’ Cherry corrected her. ‘Gramps said that most of ‘em belong to Uncle Sam now.’
Natasha hid a small smile as she heard Rosalie saying curiously, ‘But we don’t have an Uncle Sam …’
‘No! Gramps meant the government—silly!’
The plane banked drunkenly, and ahead of them Natasha could see the long, brightly lit airstrip. And then they were going down, bumping gently on the tarmac, slowing to a halt.
Cherry and Rosalie busied themselves unfastening their seat-belts and collecting their things as matter-of-factly as though they might have got off the tube. But to these children flying was a part of their lives.
Natasha followed them as they