The Rawhide Man

“You’ll be around. Now shut up,” he added, glaring her way. “I don’t like conversation when I’m flying this thing. You wouldn’t want to crash, would you?”

“The airplane wouldn’t dare,” she muttered angrily, glancing at him. “Like most everything else around you, it’s too intimidated to take the chance!”

Surprisingly, he laughed. But it was brief, and then his face was the familiar hard one she was accustomed to.

They landed at the San Antonio airport late that night, and Bess was exhausted. She barely noticed her surroundings until they were heading toward the exit and she got a good look at the walls. They were hung with paintings, all for sale, all exquisite, and most of Western subject matter.

“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.

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