Heartless

Gracie was thoughtful as she sipped coffee. “He bought it the year before his father died,” she recalled.

“Yes.” Mrs. Harcourt’s soft voice had a sudden edge.

“Mr. Pendleton didn’t move with the times, did he?” she asked as she put down her coffee cup. “He hated the ranch and Jason working on it. He said it was beneath a Pendleton to do manual labor.”

“Oh, he was a stickler for class and position,” the older woman said bitterly. “He refused to let Jason’s first ranch foreman in the front door. He told him that servants went to the back.”

“How ridiculous,” Gracie huffed.

“He and Jason had a terrible row about it later. Jason won.” The older woman chuckled. “Whatever his faults, and he doesn’t have that many, Jason is no snob.”

“Did he love his father?” Gracie laughed self-consciously. “What a silly question. Of course he did. The day we went to the reading of his father’s will is one I’ll never forget. There were grants to Glory and me, but the lawyer went behind closed doors to discuss the rest with Jason. Afterward, he got drunk, remember?” she sighed. “In all the time I’ve known Jason, I’ve never even seen him tipsy. He never cried at the old man’s funeral, but he went wild after he saw the will. I guess it took a few days to hit him. The loss, I mean. With his mother long dead, his last parent was gone forever…Mrs. Harcourt! Are you all right?”

The elderly woman had toppled the coffeepot, right on her hand. Gracie jumped up, all but dragging the woman into the kitchen to the sink. “You hold that right there,” she instructed, putting the burned hand under running cold water. She went to the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet to get what she needed. She walked briskly back to the kitchen and put the supplies down by the sink.

“Miss Gracie, I can do that,” she fussed. “It isn’t right, you waiting on me.”

“Don’t you start,” Gracie muttered. “We don’t do the master-and-servant thing in this house. You and Dilly and John are family,” she said firmly. “We all look out for each other.”

Tears misted the older woman’s eyes. Gracie couldn’t tell if emotion or pain caused it, but she smiled gently as she treated the burn. “Honestly, I don’t know what in the world we’d do without you.”

“That’s so kind of you, Miss Gracie.”

“Gracie,” she corrected. “You don’t call Jason ‘Mr. Jason,’” she pointed out.

“I do when he’s around,” the housekeeper corrected.

“And you get fussed at. He doesn’t like it when you treat him like the boss.” She hesitated as she fastened the bandage in place. “He’s…very strange lately,” she said softly. “I don’t understand him.”

Mrs. Harcourt looked as if she’d smother trying not to speak. Finally she said, “He just has a lot on his mind. There’s that computer company in Germany that’s bothering him because it competes with his own new line. It could hurt him in the market. He said he hopes he won’t have to go over there, but the owners are dragging their feet about selling.”

“God help them if he does go over there.” Gracie chuckled. “Jason is like a bulldozer when he wants something.”

“He is,” Mrs. Harcourt agreed. “Thanks for patching me up.”

“Oh, I have an ulterior motive,” Gracie told her. “I need your help to smuggle in some more Christmas decorations. You have to help me get the boxes into the attic so Jason won’t see them if he’s around when they arrive.”

The older woman hesitated, clearly disturbed.

“He just grumbles,” Gracie reminded her. “He doesn’t say I can’t put up trees and wreaths and holly garlands.” She frowned. “Why does he hate Christmas?” she wondered, and not for the first time. But she’d never asked Mrs. Harcourt about it before.

Mrs. Harcourt grimaced. “His father didn’t mind a tree, but he never bought presents. He said the holiday was nothing more than an excuse for commerce. He was never here at Christmas, anyway, not once during Jason’s whole life,” she added bitterly. “I bought little gifts for him, or knitted him caps and scarves or made afghans for his bed,” she said softly. “Dilly and John and I tried to make it up to him. He was a lonely child.”

“How terrible,” Gracie murmured.

“Why do you love it so much?” the older woman asked.

“I was never allowed to celebrate Christmas,” she blurted out. “Not even with a tree.” Her face flamed. She hadn’t meant to give that away.

The older woman was clearly shocked. “But you go to church with Jason. And you decorate everything—even Baker, once, with fake antlers…!”

“My father was…an atheist,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t let us go to church or celebrate Christmas.”

“Oh, my dear.” Mrs. Harcourt hugged her close and held her. Gracie sobbed. Except for this warm, matronly woman, Gracie hadn’t known real affection since her mother’s death. Myron Pendleton had been kind, in an impersonal way, but he wasn’t the hugging sort. Really, neither was Jason.

“You won’t tell him?” Gracie asked, finally moving away, to dab at her eyes with a tissue Mrs. Harcourt pressed into her hand.

“No. I’m good at keeping secrets,” she added with a smile that looked oddly cynical. “But why don’t you want him to know?”

“My mother taught me never to talk about my childhood. Especially after we came here.”

Mrs. Harcourt sensed that there was a lot this young woman had never shared with anyone. “Come on and finish your breakfast,” she coaxed. “I’ll make you a lovely chocolate cake later.”

Gracie laughed self-consciously. “You spoil me, Mrs. Harcourt. Me and Glory, too. You always did.”

“I missed having girls of my own,” she said. “My husband was sterile.”

“I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry.”

She smiled sadly. “I loved him, but he was a hard man to live with. He broke horses for Jason. He was kicked in the head by a mustang and died right there in the corral. I had no place else to go, no family, so I stayed here.”

“I’m glad you did,” Gracie said. “You made this place a home. You still do.”

Mrs. Harcourt beamed. “For that, you can have a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.”

“My favorite!”

The older woman chuckled. “I know. Now that I’m patched up, I’ll get started on that cake. You finish your breakfast.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gracie went back to the table. Life was hard on everybody. Poor Mrs. Harcourt, a widow without even a child to comfort her in her old age.

IT WAS A SLOW LUNCH day for Barbara’s Café. The owner sat at a booth with Gracie, nibbling on a salad. She was twelve years older than Gracie, with thick blond hair and pretty eyes. Everybody knew her locally and loved her. She’d been a widow for a long time, but she did have family. She’d adopted Rick Marquez, the San Antonio homicide detective, when he was in his teens. Now he was the joy of her life.

“Why don’t you set your sights on Rick?” Barbara teased. “He’s young and single and incredibly handsome, even if I do say so.”

“He carries a gun around,” Gracie pointed out.

“So does your stepbrother,” the older woman replied.

“Yes, when he’s on the ranch, but Jason doesn’t spend his life around dead bodies,” she added.

“Having seen a couple of his cowboys from the Rocking Spur eating lunch over here last week, I could debate that. They said they’d just come in from pulling cattle out of mud, and they looked like death warmed over.”

“So does Jason, when he’s helping with roundup or rescuing mired cattle,” Gracie said.

“A multimillionaire, out working cattle,” the older woman sighed, shaking her head.

“It’s where he’d rather be all the time, if he could.”

Barbara smiled. “I remember when he took over that ranch. He looked as if he’d won the lottery.”

“I’ll bet he had to pay a lot for it,” Gracie mused. “It’s huge.”

“Actually I heard that he inherited it,” Barbara said.

Gracie laughed. “Not likely. It belonged to some of Mrs. Harcourt’s family. They sold it to him.”

Barbara shrugged. “I must have misunderstood. Speaking of the devil, how is Jason?”

Gracie shifted in her chair. “I don’t know.”

Something in the tone of her voice made Barbara tense. “Why don’t you know?”

“I haven’t seen him for days, or even heard from him,” she said. “I planned a dinner party for two of our friends who are getting married. He hasn’t said if he’s coming over for it or not.”

Barbara was surprised. “Have you quarreled? But you and Jason never argue, even about those hundreds of Christmas decorations you stick everywhere starting at Thanksgiving that drive him nuts…”

“We just had a misunderstanding.” Gracie couldn’t bear to talk about what had really happened. “He left without a goodbye when he came down here.”

Barbara slid a hand over the other woman’s where it rested on the table. “You should go over to the ranch and talk to him,” she said. “He’s awkward with people sometimes, like most loners are. Maybe he wants to make up and just doesn’t know how.”

Gracie brightened a little. “You’re perceptive,” she said. “Yes, he is awkward with people. He doesn’t ever come right out and apologize, but he works it around so that you understand what he means. He holds things inside.” She sighed. “My stepsister, Glory, used to say that Jason got his feelings hurt more often than any of us realized, but he never showed it. She said he thought of it as a kind of weakness.”

“That was his father’s doing,” Barbara said coolly. “The old man loved women, plural, but he was never much good at commitment. He only married women he couldn’t get into bed any other way—out of desire, never love. He never loved any of them. He taught Jason that love was a weakness. He said women used sex as a weapon to extort money from men.”

“Good Lord!” Gracie exclaimed. “How do you know that?”

“One of my cousins used to work for Myron Pendleton. He overheard him talking to Jason about women one day. He was absolutely disgusted. In fact, he quit the job. He said he wasn’t working for a man who had no respect for his womenfolk.”

Gracie shook her head. “I’ve lived with him all these years and I didn’t know that.”

“You’ve lived under his protection, honey, not under his roof,” Barbara said drily. “You and Glory were away at school, but when you came home, Jason lived down here and left the two of you up in San Antonio with Harcourt and the others. Didn’t you notice?”

Gracie hadn’t. It was only just dawning on her that Jason, while spoiling and protecting them, had kept them apart from him at the same time.

“Don’t you really know what’s wrong with Jason?” Barbara asked in a peculiar tone.

Gracie gave her a blank look. “What do you mean?”

Barbara let go of her hand and avoided her eyes. “Nothing. I was just thinking out loud. It’s probably something to do with business that’s got him grumpy, don’t you imagine?”

Gracie relaxed. “Yes. I imagine it is.” She sipped coffee. “You know, I think I will stop by the ranch on my way home. He can’t miss this party.”

“That’s the spirit.” Barbara glanced out the window and winced. “Bad weather coming again. Probably that tropical storm headed our way. Look at those dark clouds!”

“I’d better get moving,” Gracie replied. “It’s getting dark, too.”

“You don’t want to be on the roads at night when it’s raining,” Barbara said worriedly. “The road up to the ranch isn’t paved. You’ll go into the ditch for sure. It’s not safe. There have been some kidnappers around here lately, and you would be a good catch for those horrible criminals.”

“I drive a VW,” Gracie said with easy confidence. “I’m not sliding into any ditches! As for kidnappers—this is Jacobsville. Nothing happens around here.”

THIRTY MINUTES LATER, sitting on the side of the road in the dark with rain pounding on the roof and the car at a drunken angle in a ditch, she ate those words. She called the ranch on her cell phone. Grange, Jason’s foreman, answered.

“Grange, can you tell Jason I’m stuck in the ditch on the side road from the ranch?” she asked plaintively. “I lost control of the car.”

“Sure I can. Want me to come out with the truck and get you?” he asked.

She hesitated. Once she would have said yes. Now, with Jason acting so strangely, she didn’t want to put Grange in any awkward situations. “Better call Jason this time, I guess,” she replied.

“No problem,” he said gently. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll get him. He’s out with the boys checking for mired cattle, so it may be a few minutes. Sit tight.”

“Sure thing. Thanks.” She ended the call. Oh, boy. If Jason was in the middle of something, she was going to catch hell. She’d only wanted to make up with him. Now, things were worse.

Time seemed to drag while she clutched her purse in her lap and tried not to slide into the passenger window of the little car, sitting at an odd angle in the ditch. It had been an impulsive decision to drive out here. She should have waited.

Gracie looked out the windshield at the rushing water that came up to the hood of her little car and hoped that Jason would hurry. Then she felt guilty that he was going to have to come out and rescue her again. She was such a klutz, she moaned silently. Nothing she did ever ended well. She was disaster on two legs. If only she wasn’t such a scatterbrain. If only…

She heard the roar of a pickup truck and looked ahead to see one of the big, double-cabbed black ranch trucks speeding toward her. He always drove too fast. The dirt road was muddy and flooded, too, and she had visions of disaster if he braked too hard. She could feel his temper in the way he swung the truck to the side of the road and stopped it. He didn’t slide. He was always so much in control of himself, even when he was raging mad.

She drew in a shaky sigh. She would be all right. Jason was always there to save her from herself. Even if he didn’t like having to do it.

Another truck, a wrecker, pulled up behind his truck. He slammed out of the driver’s seat and spoke to the driver of the wrecker. Then he came toward Gracie with long, angry strides, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, his yellow slicker raincoat flapping over his boots.

The car was lying at an angle. Gracie was sitting at a forty-five-degree angle, sideways. Jason jerked the door open and glared down at her with compressed lips.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, holding out both hands.

She hesitated. He couldn’t possibly know why she resisted being lifted in a man’s arms, even if he was used to her idiosyncracies.

“Come on,” he said again, gentler this time. “Gracie, I know you don’t like being carried, but there’s no other way unless you want us to pull the car out of the ditch with you in it. The damned thing could roll.”

She bit her lower lip. That was even more terrifying. “O…okay.”

She lifted both her arms, clenching her jaw. Jason caught them and pulled her up, effortlessly, until he could pick her up. He swung her free of the car. She wasn’t wearing a raincoat—another stupid oversight—and she was quickly soaked as he carried her toward his truck.

He stuck her in the passenger seat, after sludging through an inch or more of thick red mud. “Fasten your seat belt,” he said curtly and slammed her door.

He spoke to the wrecker man and pointed down the road, toward the highway, not the ranch. Obviously he was showing the man that he wanted her car taken to the house in San Antonio. He didn’t want Gracie at the ranch. That hurt.

He got back in beside her, still wet, still mad, still uncommunicative. He fastened his own seat belt, made sure she’d done the same, started the engine and gunned the truck as he pulled back onto the highway and started toward San Antonio.

“The ranch is that way,” she said in a small voice, pointing behind them.

“I’m taking you home to San Antonio,” he said shortly. “You’re not staying down here overnight.”

She didn’t dare ask why. She averted her eyes to the road and wished things were the way they had been, before he’d said things neither of them would ever forget.

“What the hell were you doing on the ranch road in the rain?” he asked shortly.

She moved her purse in her hands. “Hoping we could make up.”

“Oh.”

She glanced at his taut profile. He wasn’t giving away anything with that expression. He was simply unresponsive. “Okay, I know,” she said with a long, wistful sigh. “I screwed up again. I should have waited for a sunny day. Maybe there’s a market for women who can’t do one single thing right. I might go into theater.”

He made a rough, amused sound deep in his throat. “I remember your one time on the stage.”

She grimaced. Yes. In tenth grade. She was in a play, with a minor role. She’d tripped walking to her mark, bounded into another actor and they’d ended up in a tangle on the stage floor. The audience had roared. Sadly the play had been a tragedy, and she had a monologue—left unspoken—about death. She’d left the stage in tears, without speaking her lines, and had been kicked out of the play the same night by a furious director. Jason had gone to see the man, who put Gracie right back in the play and even apologized. She never had the nerve to ask why.

She looked down at her lap. “Maybe I could get work as a mannequin,” she suggested. “You know—stand upright in a boutique and wear different things every day.”

He glanced at her. “Maybe you could take karate lessons.”

“Karate? Me?”

“They teach self-confidence.” He smiled faintly. “You could use a little.”

“I’d aim a karate chop at somebody, hit a vital spot and end up in federal prison for murder.” She sighed.

He glanced at her, but without answering. He turned on the radio. “I want to listen to the market report. Do you mind?”

“Of course not.” She did, but she couldn’t force him to talk if he didn’t want to. So they listened to stock prices until he turned into the driveway of the mansion in San Antonio and pulled up at the steps. He cut off the engine, went around the truck and opened her door. The rain had followed them. It was pouring down, and the driveway was almost underwater.

“I can walk,” she said quickly.

He raised an eyebrow and glanced pointedly at the several inches of water pooled on the driveway.

She was wet, but she didn’t want to ruin her new shoes. She bit her lip hard.

He gave her a quizzical look. “Some women are aroused by being carried,” he said in a worldly way. “You act as if I’m carting you off to a guillotine every time I have to do it.”

She swallowed uncomfortably. “It’s just…it reminds me of something bad. Most especially when it storms.”

“What?”

Her face tightened. “Just…something. A long time ago.”

He studied her, while rain bounced off his hat and raincoat, and he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about Gracie’s life before her mother married his father. He remembered having to lure Gracie out of her room with chocolates, because she’d been so frightened of him at the age of fourteen. It had taken him months to win her trust. He scowled. His father had never discussed her with Jason, except to tell the young man that Gracie would always need someone to look out for her, to protect her. That hadn’t really made much sense at the time.

“You keep secrets, Graciela,” he said deeply, using her full name, as he rarely did.

The sound of her name on his lips was sexy. Sweet. It made her hum with sensations she didn’t want to feel. She had nothing to give, and he didn’t know it. She could never let anything…romantic…develop between them. Never. Even if she wanted to. And she did. Desperately. Especially since he’d whispered those exciting, sensually charged remarks to her at the party.

She managed a smile. “Don’t you keep secrets, too?”

He shrugged. “Only about my breeding program,” he said drily, mentioning the genetic witchery and technological skills he practiced to produce better and leaner purebred herd bulls.

About women, too, she was about to say, but she didn’t dare trespass into his private life.

“Some secrets are better kept,” she said.

“Suit yourself.” His eyes twinkled. “You work for the CIA, do you?”

It was the first olive branch he’d extended. She laughed with pure delight. “Sure. I have a trenchcoat, a blindfold, a cyanide pill and the telephone number of a Russian KGB agent in my purse.” She gasped. “Jason, my car!”

“The wrecker will be right behind us. It’s going slower than we were. I told him to tow it up here and bill the ranch. Come on, baby. I’ve got more work to do before I can call it a night.” He sighed. “I was out looking for mired cattle, supervising two new cowboys who don’t know a bull from a steer, when a fence went down under a wash in the rain, and cattle scattered to hell and gone. I’ve got a full crew out trying to round them all back up. But the new hands need watching.”

“You hire men to work cattle and then you get out and do it yourself.”

He shrugged. “I’m not a desk sort of man.”

“I noticed.”

He reached in and slid his arms under her knees and her back and swung her out of the truck as if she was light as a feather. “You’re such a cat, Gracie,” he mused. “All sleek lines and light weight. You don’t eat enough.”

“I’m never hungry.”

“You run it all off.” He turned toward the house.

A huge flash of jagged lightning split the rainy, dark sky, startling Gracie, who suddenly clung to him and hid her face in his throat, shivering. “Oh, I hate lightning!” she moaned as the thunder rolled and rumbled around them. Her face moved again, just as his head turned, and her mouth brushed over his with the action. It was so perfectly synchronized that it seemed as if she’d timed the turning of her own head, to produce that sweet little caress to tempt him.

Jason’s tall, fit body contracted violently and he stopped in his tracks. He didn’t say a word, but Gracie could feel his breathing quicken. The soft contact had flamed through her young body. She wondered if it affected him the same way.

It became quickly apparent that it had. In the light of the wide porch, he looked down at her with pure heat in his black eyes. They narrowed as they fell to her mouth.

The lightning came again, and the thunder, but Gracie didn’t see it. She only saw Jason’s face as he stared at her with growing intensity. She could feel his broad chest against her breasts, moving roughly, as if he had trouble keeping his breath steady. Her heart ran away. The silken touch of her mouth on his had acted as a spark to dry wood.

“Jason?” she whispered, disconcerted by the harsh look on his face. He seemed angry out of all proportion to what had happened. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

“Didn’t you?” he asked through his teeth as he stared right into her eyes.

His arms, steely and warm, contracted fiercely around her body. His teeth clenched as his gaze fell to her soft mouth. He hesitated, as if he were fighting a battle with his own instincts. But he lost it. Gracie saw with dawning shock the aching hunger in the black eyes that began to narrow and glitter as the storm broke around them.

“What the hell,” he muttered as he suddenly bent his head. “I’m already damned, anyway!” His mouth suddenly ground down into hers, parting her lips, as urgent as the lightning, as frightening as the storm as he gave in to a surge of desire so hot that he couldn’t breathe through it. His arms contracted hungrily, grinding Gracie’s slight breasts into the firm, muscular wall of his chest. He groaned against her lips and crushed her even closer, his brows drawn together in an agony of visible need as his mouth moved insistently on her lips, parting them.

She couldn’t believe it was happening. She loved Jason. She’d always loved him. But this was a side of him that she’d never seen before. The passion and expertise of the kiss were worlds away from her mother’s frightening lectures about how it was between men and women. Involuntarily her body reacted to the feel of him; her mouth warmed to the furious need in his kisses. She felt a shock of pleasure beyond anything she’d ever known as his mouth grew more demanding.