The Rawhide Man

“Oh, how beautiful!” she exclaimed over one, which showed a ranch house and a windmill overlooking a vast expanse of desert land. It looked like West Texas might have looked a hundred years ago, and she was instantly in love with it.

“Come on, for God’s sake,” Jude muttered, dragging her away with a steely hand on her arm. The touch went through her like fire.

“Could you stop grumbling for one minute?” she asked him, glaring up, and it was a long way despite her two-inch heels and her five feet, seven inches of height. “And glaring and scowling….”

He lifted an eyebrow and looked down his nose at her. “Why don’t you stop criticizing everybody around you and take a look at yourself, society girl?” he taunted. “What makes you think you’re perfect?”

She knew she wasn’t, but it hurt, coming from him. “I won’t marry you,” she said with controlled ferocity. “Not if you kill me first.”

“If I killed you first, there wouldn’t be much point in marrying you,” he said conversationally. He pulled her along with him. “And you might as well stop arguing. You’re going to marry me and that’s the end of it.”

They stepped out into the nippy air and she tugged her coat closer. It wasn’t raining here, but it was cold all the same. The palm trees looked chilly, and the mesquite and oak trees they drove past in Jude’s black Mercedes had no leaves on them. They looked as stark as the pecan trees back home.

Pecans reminded her of food, which reminded her that she hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, and then she remembered what he’d said about turning off the power.

“My gosh, you idiot!” she burst out, turning in the seat. “You cut off the power to the refrigerator!”

He glanced at her. “Don’t start name-calling. I’ve got an edge on you in that department. So what if it spoils? You won’t be there to eat it.”

“It will smell up the whole house!”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said calmly. “You can give me the name of a realtor.”

“You can’t order me to sell Oakgrove!” she burst out irrationally, though earlier she’d made up her mind to do just that. “It’s been in my family for over a hundred years!”

“You’ll sell it if I say so,” he returned, giving her a hard glare. “Shades of Scarlett O’Hara. It’s just a piece of land and an old house.”

She thought back to all the family picnics, the rides through the woods, the beautiful springs and summers and the loving care that each generation had lavished on the estate. Suddenly it was clear to her that she wouldn’t sell it, after all. “No,” she said. “It’s a legacy. If land is so unimportant, why do you hold on to Big Mesquite?”

“That’s different,” he said. “It’s mine.”

“Oakgrove is mine.”

“God, you’re stubborn,” he growled, glaring across the passenger seat at her. “What do you want the place for?”

“It’s my home,” she told him. “When you come to your senses, I’m going back there to live.” And I’ll figure out some way to maintain it, she added to herself.

He turned his attention back to the road. “I need those damned shares. Your mother,” he added curtly, “has very nearly cost me the corporation I’ve worked all my life to build up. By denying me the shares that were rightfully mine, she’s tied me up in a proxy fight that I’ve almost lost.”

“A proxy fight?” she asked dully.

“I have an enemy on my board of directors,” he said shortly, as if it irritated him to have to tell her even that much. “He’s shrewd and cunning, and he can sway votes. We’re almost even right now. I’ve got to have that block of shares you own or I’ll lose control of the corporation.”

“Can’t you find some other way to get them?” she asked bitterly.

He sighed. “I’ve got my attorneys working on it right now, going over your mother’s will with a fine-tooth comb. But they aren’t optimistic, and neither am I. She’s made sure that I can’t buy those shares from you. Under the terms of the will, you can’t give them to me, either. It looks as if the only way I can control them is to marry you.” He glanced sideways, his eyes hot and angry. “It would almost be worth losing the corporation,” he muttered, “to send you home.”

She drew in a weary breath. “The corporation is your problem. If you can find a way to get the stocks, well and good, but I’m not marrying you. I’d rather starve.”

“The feeling is mutual, but neither of us may have any choice.”

“I have,” she returned.

“Not with me,” he replied calmly. “Not a chance in hell. If it takes marriage, you’ll marry me.”

“I hate you!” she burst out, remembering graphically the humiliation she’d suffered from him. “Give me one good reason why I should even consider being tied to you?”

“Katy,” he said simply.

She leaned back against the seat, feeling utterly defeated, and closed her eyes. “You don’t want me around Katy, you’ve said so often enough. I’ll corrupt her.”

He lit a cigarette as he drove, staring ahead at the streetlit expanse of the sprawling city of San Antonio. “She needs a mother,” he said finally. “I’ve done some thinking about what you said at that reunion. I’m not agreeing that you were right,” he added with a glare. “But I’m willing to concede that you weren’t totally off base. She’s growing up tough. Maybe too tough. A softening influence wouldn’t be such a bad idea. And she likes you,” he growled, as if that was totally incomprehensible.

“I like her, too,” she said quietly, and let him chew on that. “But what are you offering me? You’d be getting control of my shares and a mother for Katy, but what would I get?”

His eyebrows went up. “What do you want? To sleep with me?” He let his eyes wander over her wildly flushed face. “I suppose I could force myself….”

“Damn you!” she burst out, hurt by the sarcastic way he’d said it.

He turned his attention back to the road. “Come on, wildcat, tell me what you want.”

She shifted restlessly. “Not to be forced into marrying you.”

“That’s a foregone conclusion.” He puffed away on his cigarette. “Tell you what, society girl. If worse comes to worst and we have to go through with it, I’ll maintain that antebellum disaster for you, and you and Katy can spend summers there.”

She turned her head and studied his unyielding profile. “You would?”

“I would.” And he meant it, she knew. When he gave his word, he kept it.

She pursed her lips. “We couldn’t just have a quick marriage and a quicker annulment? To satisfy the terms of the will?”

“What would that do to Katy?” he asked suddenly.

She drew in a slow breath and let it out. “Oh.”

“Yes, oh. She’s so damned excited about having you here, she’s half crazy,” he said. “I told her,” he added with a cold stare, “that you were coming out here so that we could decide whether or not we wanted to get married.”

“She’ll never believe you want to marry me,” she replied tersely.

“Won’t she?” A mocking smile curled his lips. “I told her I was nursing a secret passion for you and hoped to win you over.”

“You bas—!”

“Uh, uh, uh,” he cautioned. “None of those unladylike words, if you please. You’ll embarrass me.”

“Satan himself couldn’t do that,” she shot back. “Oh, Jude, let me go home,” she moaned. “I can’t fight you. I’m too tired.”

“Then stop trying. You won’t win.”

She laughed bitterly. “Don’t I know it?” She turned away and looked out the window at the flat horizon as they headed south out of San Antonio. Tears pricked at her eyes as she thought how far away from home she was. From her mother. A sob caught in her throat and tears burst from her eyes as the control she’d maintained so valiantly slipped and broke.

“My God, you don’t even cry like a normal woman,” he ground out. “Stop that!”

She shook her head and dabbed at the tears. “I loved her,” she managed shakily. “It’s only been two days, for God’s sake, Jude…!”

“Well, all the tears in the world won’t bring her back, will they?” he asked irritably. “And in the shape she was in, would you really want to?”

She shifted on the seat. He couldn’t understand grief, she supposed, never having felt it. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father had never been demonstrative. He had been even more unapproachable than Jude, worlds harder. Which was saying a lot, because the Rawhide Man was like steel.

She dashed the tears away and took a deep breath. “I don’t want to live with a coldhearted statue like you,” she said. “You’re…you’re like rawhide.”

“But you’ll do it, if it comes to that. You’ll do it for Katy’s sake.” He turned onto the long road that led to the ranch.

“I’ll run away!” she said dramatically.

“I’ll come after you and bring you back,” he said carelessly.

“Jude!” she ground out, exasperated.

“Remember that summer when you were fifteen?” he recalled with a chuckle. “You went out into the brush with Jess Bowman, and I rode all night to find you. You were huddled up in his coat with a twisted ankle, and he was walking down the road trying to flag down a car.”

“I remember,” she said, shuddering. “You broke his nose.”

“I hit when I get mad,” he said. “He riled me plenty, leaving you out there alone at night with rattlers crawling and cougars on the loose.”

“He couldn’t have carried me,” she protested.

“I did,” he reminded her. “And I wasn’t as heavy in those days as I am now.”

No, he’d filled out and firmed up and he was devastating. All man. She remembered that brief walk in his hard arms, the strength and power of his frame as he strode along. It was the safest she’d ever felt in her life—and the most afraid.

“That was the summer after Elise died, before I got Katy away from her stepfather. The last summer, too, that you ever spent any length of time at the ranch,” he recalled. “That was when you started avoiding me.”

She felt her cheeks go hot at the memory. She’d felt something that long-ago night that had haunted her ever since. And because it had frightened her, she’d avoided the ranch whenever possible, except for flying visits to see Katy. And the family reunions, of course, which came frequently during the year. Not that they were really family, but because of the partnership of her father and his, she was always included and expected to take part.

“Why did you stay away?” he asked quietly. “We’ve had our disagreements over the years, God knows, but I’ve never hurt you.”

That was true enough. She stared down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I don’t know,” she lied.

He lifted a careless eyebrow. “Were you afraid I’d make a pass?”

She flushed, and he threw back his head and laughed deeply.

“You were fifteen,” he reminded her with a chuckle. “And you had even less to draw a man’s eye than you do now.” His eyes were on her small breasts, and she wanted to dive through the window.

Defensively she folded her arms over her chest and lowered her eye to the floorboard, so embarrassed that she wanted to cry.

“For God’s sake, stop that,” he growled. “You’d appeal to some men, I suppose. You just don’t appeal to me.”

Was that conscience, she wondered numbly? If it was, it didn’t console her much.

“I’ll get down on my knees and give thanks for that small blessing,” she said coldly.

“You’re the one with the small blessings, all right,” he murmured wickedly.

She half turned in the seat to glare at him, and he chuckled at her fury.

“God, you’re something when you get mad,” he said with rare mischief. “All dark eyes and wild hair and teeth and claws. It sure as hell beats that so-elegant coolness you wear around you most of the time.”

She regained her composure with an effort and stared at him calmly. “My mother raised me to be a lady,” she told him.

“You’re that,” he agreed coldly. “But you’d be a hell of a lot more exciting if she’d raised you to be a woman, instead.”

There was no reply to a blatant remark like that, so she turned her attention back to the darkened landscape and ignored him. Which seemed to be exactly what he wanted.

Chapter Three

Aggie Lopez, Jude’s housekeeper, met them in her dressing gown, yawning.

“Is Bess’s room ready?” Jude asked curtly.

“Yes, Señor Langston,” Aggie said agreeably, giving Bess a brief but thorough appraisal. Then she grinned. “You need some feeding up, señorita. A few weeks of refritos and enchiladas and my good Texas chili will put meat on those bones, I promise you. Come, I will take you up to your room and then I’ll bring you some food. The little one has only just gone to sleep. She was so excited…!”

“But it’s after midnight,” Bess exclaimed.

“Go ahead,” Jude growled, glaring at her with piercing green eyes, “say something about her bedtime hour. You’ve managed to disapprove of every other damned thing, why not that as well?”

She glared back at him, her chin lifted. “Children need their rest just like adults do,” she threw at him. “And speaking of rest, look at you!”

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked pugnaciously.

“Oh, Lord, just give me a full day with no interruptions and I’ll be glad to give you an itemized list!”

Aggie was staring at them with her jaw in a slightly drooping posture, her small, plump figure glued to the banister of the long staircase that ran up to the second story.

Jude glanced at Aggie. “Well, what the hell are you gaping at? Are you going to show her upstairs or not?”

“You are…really getting married?” the older woman asked, lifting her eyebrows until they almost touched the salt-and-pepper hair that was drawn into a tight bun.

“It’s a love match, too,” Bess assured her with a tight smile at Jude. “He loves my stocks and I love his daughter.”

Jude said something rude under his breath and turned on his heel to stomp off into his study. He slammed the door with hurricane force behind him.

Aggie flinched. “Someday he will break all the windows,” she said, sighing. “Ay, ay, life is so exciting since I came to work here.” She eyed Bess. “It is none of my affair, you understand, but you are not the picture of a happy bride.”

“I don’t want to be a bride,” she muttered. “He’s trying to make me.”

“As I thought,” Aggie said. She shook her head. “I will not ask why you do not refuse him. Six months I have worked for Mr. Langston. In that time, I have never known him not to get his own way. Have you known him long, señorita?”

“I’ve known him most of my life,” Bess grumbled as she followed the older woman up the staircase.

“Then I do not need to tell you anything about him,” Aggie said quietly. She glanced at Bess as she stopped in front of the room where Bess always stayed when she visited the ranch. “He said that you have lost your mother. I am very sorry.”

Tears welled up in Bess’s eyes and her lower lip trembled precariously. “Yes.”

Impulsively, Aggie put an arm around her. “Señorita, grief passes. I, too, lost my mother many years ago. I do not forget the hurt, but time is kind.”

Bess nodded jerkily and tried to smile.

“Here, now. Katy insisted on redecorating the room when she heard you were coming.” Aggie led Bess into the spacious room, which boasted a new bedspread and matching curtains of cream with beige and blue flowers, a deep blue carpet and elegant wallpaper. There were fresh flowers, mums, in a vase on the chest of drawers.

“It’s beautiful!” Bess burst out.

“Oh, I hoped you’d like it!” came a joyous voice from the connecting door across the room.

Bess’s eyes lit up. “Katy!” she exclaimed, and held out her arms.

Katy ran into them, laughing. She was the image of her father—pale green eyes framed by black hair and a stubborn square jaw. She was going to be tall, too. She already came up almost to Bess’s shoulders.

“You smell nice,” Katy remarked as she drew back to look at the older woman. “Like flowers. You always smell so good, Bess!”

“I’m glad you think so,” Bess said with a grin.

“How’s school?”

Katy made a face. “I hate math and English grammar. But band is great. I play the flute! And I like chorus pretty well, and art class is neat.”

“I’d love to hear you play,” Bess said. She ruffled the short dark hair. “You’re the nicest welcome I’ve had so far.”

“Been at it with Dad again, huh?” Katy murmured with a wicked smile. “I heard,” she confessed.

Bess colored delicately. “We, uh, had a slight disagreement.”

“They have slight disagreements over the color of the sky,” Katy told Aggie without blinking an eye, and she laughed. “Dad likes to give orders and Bess doesn’t like to take them.”

“Now, Katy…” Bess began.

“I know. ‘Now, Katy, mind your own business.’“ Katy sighed. She arched her eyebrows. “But you’re going to be my mom, so it is kind of my business, isn’t it?”

At the sound of the word, Bess’s eyes glittered again with unshed tears. She was going to have to stop this!

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Katy said quickly, after a speaking glare from Aggie. “I’m very sorry, I forgot!”

“It’s all right,” Bess said, brushing away the tears. “It’s just so fresh, you know. I loved her very much.”

“I never knew my mother,” Katy said, “but Dad said she was a first-class bit—”

“No!” Aggie burst out, horrified. “You must not say such things!”

Katy’s lips pouted. “Dad does.”

“Yes, but you shouldn’t speak that way of your mother,” Bess said gently. “Besides, ladies don’t use language like that.”

Katy just stared at her blankly. “Huh?”

“You’ll have to show me around the ranch tomorrow,” Bess said quickly, deciding to let it drop for the time being. “It’s more than a year since I visited. I’m sure there are a lot of changes.”

That brought the smile back to Katy’s young face. “You bet! Unless…you wouldn’t rather Dad showed you around?” she asked with a calculating look, and Bess knew she was thinking about that dreadful lie Jude had told her.

“He can show me around later,” Bess promised the young girl. “Now, how about bed? I’m so sleepy I can hardly stand up.”

“Where are your things, señorita, and I will unpack,” Aggie volunteered.

“I’m wearing them,” Bess said gaily, opening her coat to disclose the dress underneath. “Jude decided that I could do without clothes, makeup and all those other frivolous things.”

Aggie scowled. “I will lend you one of my gowns,” she said. “Men, they never think about these things,” she muttered as she went out the door.

Katy was watching her closely. “Why didn’t you pack a suitcase?” she asked slowly.

“Because your father picked me up in what I have on and carried me bodily out the door, that’s why,” she said.

Katy tried to stifle a laugh, but it burst out anyway. “Good night, Bess!” she said, and beat a hasty retreat back to her own room, closing the door quickly. Behind it, there was hysterical laughter.

* * *

Bess had forgotten just how big Big Mesquite really was until she walked around the grounds with Katy the next day. The house, which she’d always loved, was very old and very Victorian, with a turret and exquisite gingerbread woodwork. Jude had obviously had it painted not too many months ago, because it was blistering white.

“I remember summers long ago when I used to swing in that front porch swing,” Bess recalled dreamily, hanging on to a small mimosa tree in the front yard as she stared toward the house. “And your grandmother would make iced tea and big, thick tomato sandwiches and I’d swing and munch.”

“Did you and Dad used to play together?” Katy asked, all eyes.

“No, darling,” Bess said, laughing. “Your father was already a grown man when I was barely in my teens. I hardly ever saw him in those days. He was away at college, and then in Vietnam.”

“Oh, yes, I know all about the war,” Katy said seriously. “Dad’s got an awful—”

“Katy!” Aggie called out the door. “Deanne wants to talk to you on the telephone!”

“Okay, Aggie!” Katy moved away from the tree. “Deanne’s my best friend,” she explained. “I won’t be long.”

“Don’t hurry on my account,” Bess told her. “I’ll just ramble around and look at the stock.”

“Don’t go close to the corral. Dad’s got Blanket in there,” the young girl cautioned.

“What a name. Does it belong to a bull?”

“No, a horse.” Katy laughed. “They call her that because she likes to fall on people—like a blanket.”

“I’ll watch my step,” Bess promised.

Katy ran into the house and Bess wandered quietly around the yard in the same jersey dress she’d worn the day before. She had one of Jude’s Windbreakers wrapped around herself to keep out the cold, and she hated the pleasure it gave her to wear something of his. She was really going to have to stop feeling that way. If he ever found out how he affected her, it could be a disaster, in more ways than one.

As she was thinking about him, he came out of the barn with a halter in his hand, heading straight for Blanket.

Bess climbed up on the fence and leaned her arms over the top rail. “Going to bounce around a little?” she asked. “Don’t fall off, now.”

“No, I’m not going to bounce around,” he said curtly. “I’m going to put her on a halter so Bandy can work her.”

She watched him approach the horse, talking softly and gently to it in a tone she’d never heard him use except, infrequently, with Katy. He moved closer inch by inch, soothing the horse, until he was near enough to ease the halter over the jet black muzzle and lock it in place. He continued to stroke the silky black mane while the horse trembled in the chill air, not from cold but from nervousness.

Bess didn’t speak. She didn’t dare. Jude would climb all over her if she spooked the horse. But he glanced at her warily when the little bowlegged cowboy named Bandy came out of the barn with a lunging rein to attach to the halter.

Jude said something to the cowboy and then climbed over the fence, perching himself on the top rail near Bess. He was wearing denims and the old battered gray Stetson he used on the rare occasions when he was around the ranch. He looked good in denim. He looked good in anything, that long, muscular body sheer elegance when he moved.

“Don’t trust her too far, Bandy,” Jude said as he lit a cigarette. He glanced at Bess. “She’s a lot like some women. All long legs and nerves.”

Her chin lifted. She’d put up her hair to keep it out of her face, and she looked chic and elegant even in his leather jacket.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, indicating the jacket.

“Aggie got it out for me,” she said defensively. “You wouldn’t let me pack,” she reminded him.

“It doesn’t do much for you,” he remarked derisively. “It keeps me warm,” she returned. “But if you want it back…”

“Oh, hell, stop playing Joan of Arc,” he growled, his green eyes glittering at her over a wisp of cigarette smoke. “It’s an old jacket. I had it when I was in Vietnam.”

And probably it brought back memories he’d rather not dredge up, she thought, feeling guilty. She averted her eyes to the cowboy working the young filly on the leading rein in a long, wide circle.

“You didn’t hit the floor screaming bloody murder this morning,” he remarked. “Does that mean you’ve stopped fighting the idea of marriage?”

She drew one long, polished fingernail across the top rail of the fence and watched it scar the old wood. “Katy was so excited,” she said quietly.

“Yes, I told you that.”

Her dark eyes pinned him. “I don’t like you very much, Judah Barnett Langston,” she said.

He took a long draw from the cigarette and pursed his chiseled lips. “What a disappointment,” he said after a minute, and his eyes were mocking. “I thought you might be harboring a secret passion for me.”

“Sorry to dash your dreams,” she replied. “I’d rather lust after a rattlesnake.”

He chuckled softly, and his cold green eyes wandered over her slimness slowly. “You’d have better luck there, all right,” he remarked. “Hell, you’re too fragile for sex.”