Shannon started to shake her head, but—as she was fast becoming accustomed to—Mae Parker interrupted her yet again.
“Think about it,” she directed. “You can do what you want when you want for as long as you want, and no one will bother you. You’ll stay in the main house with me. Marie, my housekeeper, will feed you good food, you can take walks in the fresh air, ride a horse, get some pink back in your cheeks. I’ll stop by tomorrow about this same time. The lieutenant governor has some kind of a do planned for tonight that I’m invited to, and since I’m in town I’ll go shopping in the morning. Then we’ll see about getting your course set.”
The whirlwind disappeared as suddenly as she’d materialized. She hadn’t waited for Shannon’s reply, but then, Mae Parker didn’t seem the type to wait for much of anything. Shannon remembered her father’s comments about the woman: strong-willed, cantankerous, highly opinionated. But he’d always said it with a twinkle in his eye, because he loved nothing better than a good fight, and Mae Parker was always willing to give him one.
Shannon sank back against the pillows and pressed her hand to the ache that again pulsed dully in her skull. A concussion, the doctor had said. The reason her memory was so lacking. The reason she remembered everyone alive and the next moment…they were dead.
She closed her eyes to block out the pain. But since the source of her suffering sprang from within, it didn’t respond to mental directives.
Where was she going to go when she left here? Home? Her father’s house, which she’d returned to after her mother’s death, was now little more than an empty shell. Julia had asked her to stay with her. Six or seven other people had issued invitations, as well.
Shannon fumbled in the top drawer of the bedside table until she found the envelope she wanted. It had a postmark from a small town in West Texas. She read it once again: a formal request that she come to the Parker Ranch to recuperate. In turn, Shannon had mailed back a politely worded refusal. Then last week the telephone call had reached her. The conversation had been a bit stilted, and she’d gotten the impression that Mae Parker didn’t care much for telephones. Once again Shannon had refused. Now a personal visit. The woman was very determined.
Tomorrow, though, Shannon would be ready for her. She could see no reason to go to the Parker Ranch. She didn’t know them and they didn’t know her. A meeting between Mae Parker and herself when she was a child didn’t count. She would refuse one final time, and Mae Parker would have to accept it.
~*~
Shannon had another of her bad dreams that night. She was at an amusement park, twirling gently around in small circles on a child’s ride of oversize teacups and saucers. There were other people on the ride as well, happy and laughing, enjoying the experience. Then suddenly one of the teacups jerked away from the track. It made several giant loops high in the air before leveling out. The people inside hung over the sides to wave enthusiastically at the earthbound riders below. Shannon lifted her hand to respond, but before she could return the salute, the hovering teacup zoomed into another wide loop. Only this time when it should have leveled out, it didn’t. It plunged straight to the ground, and no one but her seemed to hear the terrified screams that ended abruptly in silence. A second teacup left the track. Again, Shannon watched as it flew into the sky, executed a series of rolls and turns and smashed to the ground. When the cup next to her launched itself, she started to struggle with the strap holding her in place. She had to get free. She had to warn the people on the other side of her, because they’d yet to notice what was happening. But she couldn’t make the strap release! No matter which button she pressed or which clasp she pulled against, it wouldn’t budge. If anything, her actions seemed to make it draw tighter. When the third teacup crashed, she felt her own cup assume a life of its own. She knew the exact moment when the metal wheels left the track and the weightlessness of flight began. She heard herself cry out, the terrified sound soon turning into a full-throated scream...
She awakened with a violent start, gasping, perspiration covering her body. In the twilight world before full consciousness, she thought herself still hurtling through space, unable to halt what would happen next.
Her hands gripped the soft mattress tightly, not relaxing until her heart rate slowed and reason returned.
A nurse leaned into the room. “Did you call?” she asked.
Visible in the soft light filtering from the hallway, Shannon shook her head. The nurse gave her a skeptical look. It was well-known among the staff that she continued to suffer from unsettling dreams.
“I’m fine,” Shannon managed. Her voice must have given her away completely, but the nurse, after another moment, decided not to press the issue.
“Well, that’s good then,” she said. And in the next second she was gone.
Shannon lay very still, her gazed fixed on the darkened ceiling. Before the accident she’d seldom remembered any of her dreams. Afterward, they played at will on both her conscious and subconscious mind. The subject matter varied, but she always awakened, gasping and sweating, on the verge of a scream.
It didn’t take a genius to deduce the cause. She was suffering the aftereffects of the plane crash, re-creating again and again the anguished helplessness she’d felt at finding her father and James—everyone!—dead. Pills helped, but Shannon didn’t like to take them. Her father had always told her it was best to face a situation straight on. But had he ever imagined a situation like this?
Her father... Shannon turned away from her contemplation of the ceiling, curling on her side with her knees drawn up toward her chin. She squeezed her eyes shut and let the ache in her heart have free rein. She would never see him again, never hear his voice. She was alone now, an orphan. And it didn’t seem to matter that she was twenty-seven. Did a child ever grow up enough not to feel the devastating loss of one or both parents?
And James. For years he’d been on her father’s staff, and she’d never tumbled to the fact that he was special. She knew him of course, had talked with him numerous times. He’d been to dinner at their home, assisted where he could through her mother’s short fatal illness, helped her father afterward. Helped her. It had just been in the past year that things had started to change between them—a surprised recognition, a glance that lingered, a special smile. They’d been planning to announce their engagement at Christmas, but until then they were keeping it a secret. Her father’s campaign was in full swing and had kept them both busy. So no ring had been picked out yet. It was to have come at Christmas, too, after the election.
The nakedness of her left hand was almost too much for Shannon. She felt a huge ball of emotion lodge in her throat. She wanted to cry out her pain, her rage. Why? Why had such a terrible thing had to have happened to them? James had never purposely hurt anyone in his life. Neither had she! Neither had her father!
Shannon remained very still as she waited for the onslaught to pass. She forced herself to think of other things. She thought of the bird that had landed on the window ledge the previous afternoon. Some people hated sparrows, saw them as terrible invaders. If a person tried to attract migrating birds by building feeders or special homes, sparrows could always be counted on to get there first, leaving little or no room for the desired guests. But Shannon had loved the small brown birds since she was a child. Their determination and resiliency had always fascinated her. Her father had built birdhouses, and as soon as he’d run the pesky little creatures out of one dwelling, they’d taken over another. Finally—to Shannon’s great joy—he’d given up and let them have the run of the backyard. She’d spent hours watching them, making sure there was always plenty of food in the feeder and water in the birdbath. Enough time that her father had come to call her “my little sparrow.”
Tears pricked Shannon’s eyes and she forced herself to another subject. Something safe. Mae Parker. Did the woman truly want her help to write a book, or was it merely an excuse? But why bother? They didn’t know each other well enough to need to hide be
hind fabrication. Possibly Mae truly did want help, yet didn’t know how to go about getting it. But why ask her? She had an English degree, that was true, but so did thousands of others. Or did Mae feel she owed Shannon’s father something, and this was her way of paying the debt? But as the woman had said, the two of them had been adversaries. What could one adversary possibly owe another?
Shannon tussled with the conflicting thoughts before dropping into a deep dreamless sleep. Her last conscious act was to practice the refusal she planned to give Mae Parker.
Chapter Two
“You doin’ all right?” Gib Parker asked. For a disconcertingly long time, he kept his gaze on Shannon, not on the thin strip of two-lane highway that stretched ahead of them.
In the day and a half the two of them had been traveling, Shannon had yet to adjust to his frequent lapses of attention to the road. If he wasn’t fiddling with the radio, he was searching for a disk in the console storage box or ripping open a chewing-gum pack and popping a fresh stick into his mouth. All done while driving at an alarming rate of speed.
“I’m askin’ because I just had an idea,” Gib continued, his eyes at last returning to the highway. “How’d you like to stop by the pens and see the cattle the boys have rounded up to sell? They were due in the evening after I left, so they should be in full swing by now. What do you say?”
Gib Parker was a friendly man with a nice smile and an easy manner. In his late fifties, his thick salt-and-pepper hair grew away from his forehead and ended in a ragged line just above his shirt collar. At nearly six feet tall, he was well made, if a little fleshy.
“Boys been busy collecting ’em out of the mountains for the past month.”
A frown touched Shannon’s brow. “Did coming to get me make you leave early? I could’ve come at another time. It didn’t have to be now.”
Gib gave a self-deprecating smile. “I never was much good on a horse. Not for working cattle. Not for much of anything really. Besides, Aunt Mae would have a fit if you didn’t get here when you were supposed to.”
Aunt Mae. It had been at Mae Parker’s direction that they’d taken two days to make the four-hundred-mile trip from Austin, stopping frequently to rest and spending last night in rooms Mae had booked. Though Shannon had found the first leg of the journey wearing, when she’d suggested that they continue on to finish it in one day, Gib Parker had refused to even consider it. “Aunt Mae wouldn’t like that,” he’d murmured, shaking his head.
Not for the first time since she’d gone back on her resolve and agreed to be a guest at the Parker Ranch, Shannon wondered if she’d done the right thing. Mae Parker liked to rule those around her with an iron hand, and Shannon wondered just how far the woman would try to rule her.
Her change of plan hadn’t been thought out. But by the time Mae returned the afternoon following her visit, Shannon had had all she could take of family and friends. After a morning of delicate eggshell-walking by several nervous callers, Mae’s brusqueness had come as a refreshing change. So, instead of refusing the invitation, Shannon had made the spur-of-the-moment decision to accept. Instinctively she’d realized that she had to get away from the hovering solicitude.
She took a bracing breath. At the moment, all she wanted to do was lie down in a quiet dark room and rest. She was tired of motion, of the vast sameness of the scenery—mile after mile of sunbaked terrain, mostly treeless, mostly the same dusty beige with wave after wave of pyramid-shaped hills filling the horizon while giving glimpses of the jagged mountains beyond. Yet as tired as she was, she was in no hurry to bring forward her reunion with Mae Parker. “Won’t we be in the way at the pens?” she asked.
“Not a bit. We’ll stay far enough back where you can see, but where we won’t be underfoot.” He grinned broadly. “It’s a sight to behold, let me tell you.”
“All right then,” Shannon said. “Let’s do it.”
A short time later the big black Cadillac turned off the narrow highway onto an even narrower road, along which Gib continued at breakneck speed.
“At least we know they made it in,” Gib informed her, pointing to a large double-decker tractor-trailer truck filled with cattle lumbering toward them over a hill.
Shannon wondered if there’d be room for the two vehicles to pass. But since Gib didn’t seem concerned, she tried not to be, either. “How many cattle do you normally sell?”
“Depends. This time last year we sold all together about six thousand calves and steers, but this year it’s been pretty dry. The number could be lower. If you’re interested, my nephew Rafe’s the one you need to talk to.”
Rafe. That name had come up more than once over the past two days. Rafe seemed to be the man in charge at the ranch. But how he fitted in with Mae, who also seemed to be in charge, was an interesting puzzle—if she’d been interested enough to pursue an answer, which she wasn’t. For much of the time while Gib had been talking, she’d been dozing. She’d missed a lot of what he’d said, particularly as he didn’t seem to care whether she made a reply or not.
The car slowed, and Shannon had her first glimpse of the Parker Ranch. Nestled near the middle of an immense valley, the treed complex of houses, outbuildings and corrals looked like an oasis in an otherwise hostile land, offering shade and water and the comforts of civilization. As far as the eye could see, from horizon to horizon, the only other diversion was stunted mesquite bushes, silvery sagebrush and the ever-present backdrop of hills and mountains.
To the left of the houses stood a barn and several long low buildings. Beyond them and to their left stood a weathered collection of corrals, chutes and pens. It was there—at a distance of about a half mile from the houses—that all the activity was taking place. Numerous cars and pickup trucks were parked haphazardly about, as well as several stock trailers and two more double-decker cattle haulers. A cloud of dust swirled high in the air.
As they drew closer Shannon could see that the dust was caused by the cattle and the men who dashed around inside the pens yelling at the bawling steers as they moved them down narrow alleyways and chutes. A smaller collection of men perched atop the rails, one or two occasionally jumping down to help with a difficult animal.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Shannon heard someone call, and then the crack of a whip cut through the air.
Gib’s face was alive with excitement as he stopped the car and took in the scene. “They’re driving them to the scales. See that covered area down the way? That’s where they’re weighed before they go up the chute into the truck.”
The acrid smell was so strong it invaded the car’s closed interior.
“Can you see well enough?” Gib asked. “Would you like to get closer?”
Shannon had been born and bred in Texas, but like so many of her fellow citizens of the Lone Star State, she’d never been witness to the day-to-day operation of a working ranch, especially a large one. She wasn’t sure if she was fascinated or repelled. Austin, where she’d grown up, was a far cry from this!
Gib didn’t wait for her reply. He opened his door, letting the sounds and smells hit her with even greater force. He stepped outside, and after a moment, Shannon did the same. She came around to the front of the Cadillac, easing past one of the ragtag pickups.
A new group of cattle were being driven into the pens. Men on horses whooped and waved coiled ropes. Men on the ground, directing cows and calves into separate compartments, poked at them with sticks if they balked. Several enraged cows wheeled and kicked and tried to hook the nearest person with their horns. The din grew louder, and Shannon covered her mouth and nose to shield herself from the onslaught of dust.
The men who worked the cattle were in a terrible state. Hollywood had never shown the “knights of the range” in such a light. Their clothing was filthy, their faces streaked, their boots caked with mud and manure. Shirts were torn, buttons missing. Hats soaked with perspiration worn long past retaining their original shape and color. In spite of this, the man nearest Shannon—in his early twent
ies with a baby face and the palest of blue eyes—blinked when he saw her, then grinned.
A telepathic message seemed to pass to all the other men, and slowly the frenzy lessened as one after another turned toward the new arrivals. Cows darted past previously watchful eyes, returning to claim their calves. Others were allowed to bunch at the gates.
The relative stillness lasted for only seconds, until a sharp voice offered stinging rebuke. Reminded of the dangers of their task, the men resumed their work, but not before the baby-faced cowboy gave Shannon a wink and a tip of his dingy black hat.
Shannon didn’t quite understand why, but Gib seemed to have changed his mind. He grabbed her arm and had started to pull her back to the car when the same sharp voice ordered them to stop.
Gib muttered something beneath his breath at the same instant as Shannon turned to see a man striding purposefully toward them. Though he looked much the same as the other men—badly scuffed boots, worn buckskin chaps, low-slung dirty jeans, a bandanna rolled loosely around his neck—she could tell by the way he carried himself that this was the man in charge.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded of Gib as soon as he drew close enough not to have to shout. “Bringing her here! You know better than that. What’s wrong with you, man?”
Color stained her companion’s cheeks. “I didn’t think it’d hurt, Rafe.”
Rafe’s eyes, black as night and smoldering with anger, swept over Shannon before moving back to Gib. “She’s a woman, isn’t she? You know how the men are at this stage. I’m doing my damnedest to keep ’em in line and you bring ’em something they can fight over! Hell, man, somebody could’ve been killed just now.”
“I’m sorry, Rafe, I didn’t mean...I just didn’t think.”
Rafe pulled his grimy beige hat from his head and slapped it against his leg. Then, as if still in need of some kind of physical release, he dragged a hand through the thick black strings of his hair before settling the hat back in place.
West Texas Match (The West Texans Series #1) Page 2
