Diamond Spur

“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 Miss English tutor,” he’d laughed coldly, those dark eyes frankly insulting as Gene had tried unsuccessfully to push him back into the study. “Is English all you’re teaching my brother in these cozy afternoon sessions?”

“Come on now, Jay,” Gene had coaxed, half a head shorter and not a fraction as strong as the jean-clad, unshaven man he was trying to budge. “Don’t pick on Kate.”

“I don’t want damned women cluttering up my house! Not even your women!” Jason had stormed, black eyes flashing, his lean sharp face as hard as marble. Stone.

But Kate knew the look of pain. She had an uncanny empathy for people who were hurt; she could see it through anger or bad temper or even drunkenness. Jason’s heart was broken, couldn’t Gene see how much he was hurting? It was like watching a poor, wounded animal trying to escape from a bullet.

Ignoring Gene’s frantic signs to go away, she went right up to Jason and took one of his lean, strong hands in hers. “Come on, Jason,” she said, her voice as soft as it was when she talked to the kittens at home. “You’re tired. You need to lie down.”

Gene’s pale, broad face winced as he waited for Jason to knock her down. But, amazingly, his brother’s sharp features relaxed. Through a haze of alcohol, Jason went with her like a lamb back into his study.

“How about getting Sheila to make a pot of coffee, Gene?” Kate asked him, nodding as her eyes told him to step on it.

“Sure. Right now.”

He was gone and Kate closed the door, coaxing Jason to the long leather lounger. She helped him down and sat beside him, her slender fingers gently stroking back his disheveled hair. He was beautiful, in a rough sort of way, she thought, her eyes going over his chiseled sharp features, the stubborn jutting chin, the beautifully carved mouth. He lay quietly, watching her with eyes that only half saw, black and intent.

“It’s only been a few months since Daddy died,” she said, keeping her voice low and soft. “He was my whole world, the only person who ever cared enough to let me be myself. He didn’t want me to marry money or be famous. He loved me just the way I was. At first,” she continued, because he was really listening, “I thought the pain would never stop. But day by day, little by little, I got through it. You will, too, Jason. One day, you won’t even remember what she looked like.”

He caught the soft fingers stroking his damp brow. “How old are you?” he asked unexpectedly.

She smiled. “Eighteen.”

“A very wise old eighteen, little girl,” he replied. His drawl was a little slurred, but his eyes never wavered from her face. “What the hell do you care if I mourn myself to death?”

“Jason, you’ve been awfully good to Mama and me since Daddy died,” she said gently. “And I guess nobody else looks deep enough to see how bad it’s hurting you....”

“I’m not hurting,” he interrupted curtly. “No damned woman is ever going to hurt me!”

She closed her fingers around his. “Of course not,” she agreed, soothing him back down. “You’re just worked to death. But you need time to get your life back in order. Why don’t you go away for a week or two? Gene says you never rest. A vacation would put the bloom back in your cheeks,” she said with a mischievous smile. “The vinegar back into your black heart....”

“Shut up or I’ll throw you out the front door,” he replied. But there was a faint glimmer in his eyes, and it didn’t sound like any serious threat. “God, you’re brave.”

“Somebody has to save you from yourself,” she sighed. “Alas, I guess I’ve been chosen. Now how about a nice bowl of razor blade soup and an ugly pill?”

He burst out laughing. Gene and Sheila came in the study door together with stunned amusement suddenly claiming their faces. And that had been the beginning of an odd and beautiful relationship. From that day on, Jason became Kate’s responsibility if he got sick, or hurt, or in a fight. He never touched liquor again, but he seemed to have a knack for accidents. Especially the past few months. This was the third time since winter began and ended that Kate had been summoned by someone to look after the big man. And he reciprocated in unexpected, and sometimes unwelcomed, ways.

She became the object of a rough kind of affectionate, almost brotherly overseeing. In fact, Jason had taken on a lot of responsibility that Kate hadn’t appreciated. Like helping Kate and her mother to buy their father’s property while he managed it for them. Like finding Mary, Kate’s mother, a job in the local textile factory. Like checking up on the infrequent dates Kate had and making sure those men didn’t take advantage of her. But Kate had managed to keep her temper, and her sense of humor, as she’d survived his first attempts at affection.

But when, a few months ago, she’d begun to notice Jason in a new way, he backed off, as if he sensed the almost imperceptible shift in her attitude toward him.

Not that it was blatant. Kate hadn’t realized it herself until a month or so ago. But Jason had suddenly left her to run her own life. Actually, he’d given up running it last year, although he’d protested when she wanted to study fashion design. There was a school in Atlanta that she’d favored, and Jason put his foot down hard. Her mother needed her, he said. Atlanta was just too far away. There were home study courses. He’d find her one. He had, despite her objections. Kate was almost through it now, studying at night.

She worked as a serger on the pants line at the manufacturing company where her mother sewed on the shirt line. It was interesting work, and Kate loved anything to do with the construction of clothes. But serging was becoming sporadic, and today there hadn’t been any work for her, so she was sent home by her floor lady.

“Why aren’t you at work?” Jason asked after a minute.

“They ran out of pants for me to serge,” she said. “They’ve got Mama doing repairs that were sent up from that Central American plant they opened last year.”

He glanced at her sideways. “Do you really like that job?”

“I like it.” She smiled at him. “I love the textile business.”

“And you’re still hell-bent on being some famous designer, I gather,” he said tersely.

“Why not? If you’re going to dream, dream big.” She eyed him. “You did.”

“I had more than the usual amount of drive,” he replied. He winced as he brought the cigarette to his mouth with his sore arm. “Damn, this thing hurts!”

“You should have let me drive,” she said.

“I’m not crippled.”

“You’re incorrigible, that’s what you are.”

“So you keep telling me.”

He shifted, and she caught the scents of leather and tobacco that clung to him. He hadn’t taken off his hat, and she noticed how battered the poor old black thing was.

“Don’t you ever buy new hats?” she asked unexpectedly.

“I’ve just gotten this one broken in,” he protested. “It takes years to get a hat just so.”

“You’ve worn that one since I was in grammar school.”

“That’s what I mean. It’s just getting comfortable.”

As the big vehicle rumbled over a country bridge, one of the few wooden ones left, Kate glanced down at the trickle of water below. Any day now, the rains would come and the rivers would fill up, and low places like this would become dangerous. Even the smallest dip could become a river with rain, because there was so little vegetation to contain the water.

“Look here, you aren’t giving Gabe any encouragement, are you?” he asked so suddenly that she jumped.

Her pale eyes fixed on his dark, somber face. “What?”

His eyes held steady on the road as the burly vehicle shot down the long, level stretch of road that led into San Frio. “I don’t like the way he looks at you lately,” he added, glancing at her in a strange, possessive kind of way that even her inexperienced eye recognized. “And I sure as hell don’t like him coming over to the house when your mother isn’t there.”

She didn’t quite know how to handle what he was saying. She watched his averted face nervously, trying to measure the amount of feeling that had been in his terse statement. Her heart was going crazy. “He didn’t even get out of the truck,” she began.

“Gabe likes girls, and you’re filling out.” He didn’t look at her as he said it. He didn’t want her to see how disturbed he was at the thought of Gabe making a pass at her. “Don’t lead him on. He’s a good man and I’d hate to lose him. But, so help me, if he ever touched you, I’d kill him.”

Kate felt the ground go out from under her. She couldn’t even speak for the shock, she just stared at him. There had been a trace of violence in that threat, and the normal drawl had gone into eclipse as he spoke.

“Jason, didn’t you notice that I was riding Kip?” she asked after a minute, and the words came out roughly.

He frowned. “So?”

“Gabe came in the pickup,” she said. “I wouldn’t ride over to Diamond Spur with him. I know he thinks he’s interested in me. He’ll get over it. Last month it was little Betsy Weeks,” she added with a forced smile. “He’s a typical love ’em and leave ’em cowboy. He’s no threat.”

He glanced at her sideways. “Okay.”

“Anyway, I can handle my dates, thank you,” she said.

“I remember the last time you said that,” he replied with a faintly amused smile. “Do you?”

She hated that smile. Of course she remembered the last time, how could she forget? She’d defended to her mother the reputation of a boy she wanted to date, only to have to suffer the embarrassment of calling home from a pay phone in the middle of the night to be rescued. But Jason had come in Mary Whittman’s place, and Kate had never heard the end of it. In addition, Kate’s erstwhile date had sported a black eye for several days thereafter and subsequently joined the Marine Corps. It had all but ruined her social life. Local boys knew Jason, and since the incident, Kate had spent every weekend at home. There was nothing between her and Jason, but his attitude had created that impression. She wondered if he realized how people looked at his possessive attitude, or if he cared.

She glanced at him, frowning. He was possessive, all right. But was it only because they were friends, or was he feeling the same odd longings that were kindling inside her? She looked away nervously.

“Would you like to listen to some music?” she asked, her voice edgy and quick.

He glanced at her and smiled. “Okay, honey. End of discussion. Turn on whatever you like.”

What she liked was country-western, and that seemed to suit him very well. If his arm was hurting, he made sure it didn’t show. Kate sat back against the seat with a sigh, while turbulent sensations came and went in her taut body. She couldn’t even breathe properly. What if he noticed?

Things were getting totally out of hand. She felt almost uncomfortable this close to Jason, but in an exciting kind of way. She shifted, wondering at the remark he’d made about Gabe. Had it been just a joking statement, or had he meant it?

Well, he’d never so much as made a pass at her, and knowing how he felt about women, there was no future in mooning over him. She’d already realized that. But it was easier to tell herself he was off limits than it was to do anything about it. And what good would it do to drive herself crazy with doomed hope? She leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the rhythmic strains of the music as they drove toward town.

CHAPTER TWO

DR. HARRIS WAS a small, stout, bespectacled man in his fifties who knew Jason Donavan all too well. With a resigned smile, he put in fifteen stitches, injected Jason with a tetanus booster, and sent him home. Kate and the doctor exchanged speaking glances behind the tall rancher’s back and Dr. Harris grinned.

“See how easy that was?” Kate said as they reached the Bronco. “A few stitches and you’re back on the job.”

He didn’t bother to answer. He opened her door for her with exaggerated patience, closed it, and paused to light a cigarette on his way around the hood to his own side.

San Frio was a lazy little south Texas town with a pioneering history but not much of a present. It boasted a grocery store, a post office, a small clinic, a pharmacy, a weekly newspaper, a small textile company, a video and appliance sales and service store, and an enormous and prosperous feed store. It seemed to Kate to be more an outgrowth of the ranch than a town, however, since Jason had a resident veterinarian, blacksmith, mechanic, accounting firm, computer specialist, and other assorted employees who could do everything from artificial insemination of cows to complicated laboratory cultures on specimens from the cattle.

Huge oak trees lined the cracked, crumbling sidewalks that supported as many deserted buildings as occupied ones. The drugstore had the same overhead fans that had cooled Texas ranchers sixty years before, and there was a hitching post that Texas rangers had used as long ago as the 1890s.

“It never changes,” Kate said with a smile, watching two old men sit in cane-bottom chairs outside the grocery store, exchanging whittled pieces of wood. “If it lasts a hundred years, San Frio will still look like this.”

Jason closed his door and fastened his seat belt. “Thank God,” he said. “I’d hate like hell to see it turn into a city the size of San Antonio.”

“And what’s wrong with San Antonio?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Not one thing. I just like San Frio better. More elbow room. Fasten your seat belt.”

“We’re only going to the ranch....”

He looped an arm over the back of the seat and stared at her with pursed lips and a do-it-or-I’ll-sit-here-all-day look. After a minute of that stubborn, concentrated scrutiny, Kate reached for her seat belt.

“You intimidate people,” she muttered. “Look at old Mr. Davis watching you.”

He glanced amusedly toward the store where the stooped old man was grinning toward them. Jason raised a hand and so did the old man.

“My grandfather used to pal around with him,” Kate said. “He said Mr. Davis was a hell-raiser in his time. And look at him now, whittling.”

“At least he’s alive to do it,” he replied.

“My grandfather couldn’t whittle, but he used to braid rope out of horsehair,” Kate recalled. “He said it was hard on the hands, but it worked twice as well as that awful Mexican hemp to rope cattle.”

“The best ropes are made of nylon,” Jason replied. He started the jeep and reversed it. “After it’s properly seasoned, you can’t buy a better throwing rope.”

“You ought to know,” she mused. She studied his dark face, her eyes skimming over the sharp features, the straight nose. He had an elegance about him, although she decided he wasn’t handsome at all. In his city clothes, he could compete with the fanciest businessman.

He caught that silent scrutiny and cocked an eyebrow, looking rakish under the brim of his weatherbeaten hat. “Well, are you satisfied, now that I’ve been stitched and cross-stitched?”

“I guess.” She settled back against the seat as Jason roared out of town at his usual breakneck pace, bouncing her from seat to roof and down again. She grimaced. “At least you’ll heal properly now.”

“I’d have healed properly alone, thank you. God knows why everybody on the place thinks I’ll die if they don’t drag you over every time I scratch myself,” he muttered.

“Because to you everything short of disembowelment is a scratch,” she replied. “People do make mistakes from time to time, even you. It’s human.”

“That’s the one thing I’m not, cupcake,” he replied dryly. “Ask any one of my men during roundup, and they’ll tell you the same thing.”

He turned off the city road onto the long, sparsely settled ranch road that led eventually to the Diamond Spur. Clouds were gathering against the horizon, dark blue and threatening as they loomed over the gently rolling landscape.

“Those are rain clouds,” Jason remarked. “The weatherman was predicting some flash flooding this afternoon.” He scowled. “If the Frio runs out of her banks before we finish the bottoms, we may lose some cattle.”

“You and your blessed cattle,” she grumbled. “Don’t you ever think about anything else?”

“I can’t afford to,” he mused. “Ranchers are going bust all over. Don’t you read the market bulletin anymore?”

“Only when I can’t find a fashion magazine,” she returned.

“Speaking of which, how are you doing with that designing course?”

“I’m almost through it, thank you,” she sighed. “Although I still think I’d have done better at a regular design school.” She glared at him. “Thanks to you, I never made it out of Frio County.”

“Atlanta is too far away,” he replied imperturbably. “Besides, you’d get claustrophobia down in Georgia. Too many trees.”

“I like trees. I’d have made friends.”