Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  Jude barely halted a catch in her breath and willed her eyes not to bug. Nooooo, she wanted to scream, but she said, “What do you mean?”

  He lifted his cap and reset it, revealing golden brown hair, bleached by the sun and darkened by sweat. “They never had any kids to leave it to. They sort of favored me.”

  How could she not have heard about this? Jude wondered. She hadn’t known Marjorie Wallace personally, but everyone in Willard County knew that a few weeks before her death, she had suddenly sold her cattle herd and taken up residence in the town of Lockett’s only nursing home. Only then did she reveal she had terminal cancer. Jude had assumed the 6-0 would be put on the market when its owner passed away.

  Jude rarely found herself at a loss for words, but this unexpected news left her scrambling for what to say next. She gave the deceased woman’s nephew a nervous titter. “Want to sell it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m making this my home.”

  Now her heartbeat became a bass drum in her ears. She glanced at the furniture in the Silverado’s bed, then the house, then him. “Margie Wallace didn’t have any money to leave anybody, unless she kept some buried in the backyard. You rich?”

  Frowning, he tucked back his chin. “That’s no business of yours.”

  “Mister, I’m just saying, it’s going to take a bunch of money to make this place even a little bit livable. I’d be surprised if the water well’s even any good.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug and opened her palms in a show of feigned indifference. “But, hey. Like you say, it’s none of my business.”

  She turned and started to her pickup again, drawing measured breaths to calm herself. She needed this land, had been planning to buy it for weeks. Owning her own place would give her a chance to try her ideas in cattle breeding without Daddy and Grandpa criticizing her every move and belly-aching about why she didn’t just get married. And now the best chance she had run across lately to prove the points she constantly argued with her father had been snatched from her by some damn . . . heir.

  The only thing that kept her from breaking down and bawling was that Jude Strayhorn didn’t cry.

  What the hell was that about? Brady wondered. He watched his visitor walk back to her shiny black truck, his eyes on her butt, which was molded into skintight denim. With tomboy agility, she climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. A one-ton was a big rig for a woman to be driving, but it was one good-looking truck. And she was one good-looking woman, like something out of a magazine, all neat and polished and gleaming. Hell, her boots could make his next month’s child-support payment. The price of those big-ass sunglasses would buy his groceries for the week. He knew plenty about the cost of women’s fashion. He had learned it in a hard lesson from his ex-wife.

  Jude Strayhorn. Judith Ann, all grown up and curved in all the right places. He knew her. Sort of. She was a cousin to one of his best friends growing up, Jake Strayhorn. Brady had spent part of his youth hanging out with Jake and another of Jude’s cousins, Cable Strayhorn. In those days Judith Ann had been a little kid, always throwing fits and getting in their way.

  Without giving him another look, the full-grown woman fired the engine, expertly backed in an arc and turned the big shiny truck around in the narrow driveway. He noticed a fifth-wheel hookup in the bed. A horse-hauling rig. God knew he had seen enough of those. North central Texas, where he had come from, was known for being competitive cutting-horse country. There, half the pickup trucks on the road pulled luxurious horse trailers filled with high-value horseflesh.

  The daughter of one of the wealthiest ranching families in Texas was a woman who just might own both of those things, the last woman a man of modest means should ever give a second glance. Rich and spoiled. He knew her type too well, had married it and paid the price. And because he had paid dearly, no woman would ever grip him by the balls again.

  Even with that dismal reminder and resolution, he watched until she reached the highway, made a right turn and disappeared. She had affected him in an unexpected way. The image of her athletic body and storm of hair whipping around in the wind lingered in his mind. He had always liked the look of long, lean women with thick, luxurious hair. It made him think of something wild and primitive.

  Common sense told him to forget it. She was further out of his league than the queen of England. He knew the Strayhorn family owned most of Willard County and had probably lost count of all the cows, horses and oil wells they possessed. Besides that, there were too many close connections from years back. For once, he listened to that voice of caution—something he hadn’t always done when it came to the fairer sex—and forced her out of his mind. He had more important things to think about anyhow.

  He returned to his inspection, now starting to wonder if his inheritance was a boon or a boondoggle. He ambled back toward the outbuildings, which were surrounded by tall grass and assorted weeds. Grass burrs stuck on his jeans like miniature cacti. Before going into the big barn, he stopped and picked the prickly little bastards off, then dug a heavy key ring from his pocket and unlocked the padlock on the barn’s double doors.

  Inside the barn’s silent murk, slivers of sunlight seeped through cracks in the weathered wood siding and lay in stripes on the dirt floor. Dust motes floated in the narrow sunbeams. Brady stood in the center of the huge room and turned in a circle, remembering the day his uncle Harry had given him his first saddle on this very spot. He had been around eight years old. His uncle had known that in the Fallon household, there was no extra money to spend on something as extravagant as a saddle. Brady’s throat tightened with emotion.

  For several years, he had spent summers here at the 6-0 ranch. Back then he hadn’t questioned why his aunt and uncle had taken to him in a way they had not taken to his younger sisters and brother. Not that they had been unkind to his siblings, but they had treated Brady as if he were their own kid. Later, after he was grown, his mother had told him that Margie and Harry had been unable to have children. They had always wanted a son. Thus, they had formed a special attachment to Brady from the day he was born.

  Seeing the condition of the buildings reminded him that he had been negligent in regards to his benefactor in recent years. After his marriage, he had been caught up with his own life—becoming a father and building his business. A few years later his uncle died from a stroke. By then Brady had become preoccupied with his crumbling marriage, his bitter divorce, the nasty custody battle for his son and finally the altogether collapse and liquidation of his business.

  After his uncle Harry’s death, Brady hadn’t kept in touch with his aunt as he should have. He hadn’t visited her, hadn’t even known of her declining health and desperate circumstances until her last days. For that matter, his mother, Aunt Margie’s own sister, hadn’t known, either. Aunt Margie had always been an independent and private person. When he heard she had left him everything she owned, a nagging guilt had settled within him, and it hadn’t gone away yet.

  He forced his mind back to the barn, studying it, applying a professional eye to the buckled walls, the sagging roof supports, the collapsed stalls. The building was older than he was. Back when Uncle Harry had given him that saddle, the barn had been hell-for-stout and whitewashed. It had withstood decades of extreme West Texas weather. Now it was rickety and the paint had weathered away. But having been in the construction business for years and knowing a little about building things, Brady had already determined that all the outbuildings could be saved, including this big old barn.

  He moved on to the outside. Attached to the barn were corrals of rusting steel-pipe fencing. Salvable, too, he judged. They needed only some cleaning, some antirust treatment and some new paint. The other outbuildings, mostly all metal, needed the same.

  And all he needed was money.

  And therein lay his biggest problem today.

  He turned his attention to the barbed-wire fencing that stretched as far as his eye could see. Tumbleweeds filled the space between the strands o
f wire. The pesky thistles might have been accumulating for years. Mounds of tan sand had formed a berm against them. Clearing all of that could be a huge, if not impossible, task.

  He scanned the expanse of pasture searing in silence in the blistering sun, its wild grass pushed east by blusters of westerly breeze. It was a landscape raw and treeless except for new junipers and burgeoning mesquite trees threatening to overpower the grass. In an unirrigated pasture in a part of the world where rainwater was scant, those parasites competed with grass for every drop of moisture. The mesquite thorns scratched livestock, leaving wounds that were open invitations to blowflies, and thus worms. The thick brush gave the pests and predators a place to hide. The brush and mesquites would have to be poisoned or dug out by the roots and burned. Or all of that.

  A blossom of gloom opened in Brady’s chest, threatening the optimism he usually felt. He had just come from the courthouse, where he had spent damn near his last spare dime catching up the taxes on the place. The lawyer who had called and informed him of his inheritance had said his aunt had sold everything not nailed down to pay off debt against the land and pay for her last days in the Lockett nursing home. Almost as an afterthought, the guy had added that there had been no surplus funds for paying the taxes.

  After filling his truck’s gasoline tank, Brady still had a few hundred dollars in his pocket. He had some money, hard earned, in a bank in Stephenville. Most of it was earmarked for child-support payments that automatically went to his ex-wife every month. And that was as it had to be. If so much as a hiccup occurred in the timely arrival of those checks in her mailbox, Brady Fallon would find his ass in jail. His former spouse came from a wealthy family, but she exacted penance from Brady every chance she could find.

  The child-support payments were more than a stay-out-of-jail card, though. They were his ticket to seeing his nine-year-old son, Andy, two weekends of every month. The restricted access was as painful as a slash from one of those mesquite thorns.

  As for his need for money in the long term, he felt confident that even with the scars his divorce and the liquidation of his company had left on his credit, he could take his deed for the 6-0 to the bank and borrow against it. He might have to do just that at some point if he intended to get this place in shape, but he would let bankers touch his property only if and when he had to. He’d had some experience with bankers. Big-time. He was well aware of the pitfalls of thinking a banker was a buddy, especially if the banker was better buddies with somebody more powerful than Brady.

  No, he didn’t need a banker at the moment. What he needed was a job, and he needed it in a hurry. A way to earn a living until he thought through his options and made decisions. But all wasn’t lost. The guy at the service station had told him the Circle C ranch, a place he had known in his childhood, was hiring ranch hands. That had to be an omen. But was it good or bad?

  2

  On the road again, Jude couldn’t keep from chastising herself for how clumsily she had handled the encounter with Margie Wallace’s nephew. She just wasn’t good in situations that called for finesse. She functioned better in an environment where everything was open and up front, where she could freely speak her mind.

  An heir to the 6-0 ranch popping out of the woodwork meant Jude would no longer be making an offer to buy the old place with money from her trust fund. Her intended trip to Abilene was no longer necessary. She now had nowhere to go. Still off balance and disappointed, she picked up her cell phone and keyed in the number to the direct line of Bob Anderson, the Abilene banker who managed her trust fund. The Strayhorn family had had a relationship with the Mercantile National Bank in Abilene for decades before Jude was born. When the banker, a man approximately the age of her father, came on the line, she told him she no longer planned to make a real estate purchase and to halt the transfer of money from her trust fund. She heard relief in his tone as he replied that he was happy to comply with her request.

  Mr. Anderson was glad to see her abandon the liquidation of trust fund assets because he knew she intended to use the money to buy Willard County land in her own name. He had told her all along he thought it a foolhardy idea for her to purchase grazing land separate and apart from Strayhorn Corp, the entity that owned the Circle C ranch. In fact, he had almost forbidden it, until she reminded him that he wasn’t her father.

  Jude knew she had put him in a delicate position. She only hoped he would be discreet enough never to tell Daddy or Grandpa of her intent. Ethically, he shouldn’t, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. Mr. Anderson, her daddy and her grandpa were well acquainted, having done business together for years.

  She had kept her activity with the bank a secret because Daddy and Grandpa would be hurt that she hadn’t, at the very least, discussed her plans with them. They would never understand—or accept—that she couldn’t discuss anything with them that wasn’t something they wanted her to do. Since both of them were clueless about their own autocratic attitudes toward her, she had seen no point in stirring up a hornet’s nest by even bringing up the subject of the purchase of land that would be hers alone.

  She spent the rest of the trip to Lockett stewing over whom she should visit first—her cousin Jake, who, with his finger on the pulse of the county, might be able to tell her what was going on with the 6-0 ranch and Mr. Brady Fallon, or her best friend, Suzanne, on whose shoulder she could cry. Not exactly cry real tears, for to do such a thing would be out of character for a Strayhorn. Jude could think of no time when she hadn’t dealt with her emotional setbacks on her own, though this one might be harder than any she had faced since leaving college. She chose to see her cousin first and made her way to the sheriff’s office.

  Among the many things Willard County’s two-man sheriff’s office did not have was a marble monument to law enforcement. The entire department was housed in a low-slung frame building, the sheriff’s residence on one end and the jail on the other, with the office sandwiched between the two. Attached to the jail, enclosed by a tall chain-link fence, was an exercise yard a quarter the size of a basketball court. A coil of concertina wire spiraled along the top of it as if it had been added as an afterthought, which, in fact, it had. The whole setup looked so flimsy, Jude suspected a determined criminal would have little trouble fleeing the jail or the exercise yard.

  Bars on the windows and razor wire on top of the fence were not the most effective security measures in place at the Willard County jail. The deterrent against prisoner escape was the sheriff himself. Jude was as sure as sunrise that if the .45 attached to Jake Strayhorn’s belt didn’t cause a criminal to think twice before attempting to run, one look into Jake’s eyes did. He had been an MP in the army, then a Dallas cop. He had seen and handled everything and anything that might be required of a keeper of the peace. Nowadays, as the sheriff of virtually crime-free Willard County, he was as good as retired.

  She found her cousin in his office, engrossed in paperwork. Ever the gentleman, he rose when she entered and propped his hands on his belt. People often commented on how much alike Jude and he were in appearance. He was tall and lanky, but solid of body. He had thick reddish brown hair, similar in color to hers, but his had a few strands of gray. Instead of brown eyes like hers, though, his eyes were distinctly green and as clear as bottle glass. And she had yet to see them give away so much as a scintilla of his deeper thoughts.

  He dressed in the manner of many county sheriffs in rural Texas—jeans and a starched, long-sleeve white shirt that contrasted with his suntanned skin. He wore his gold badge hooked in his left breast pocket, but more than the badge bespoke his authority. The man had a presence that filled a room. He was tough, independent and canny, a package of strong Scots-Irish genes, the stuff pioneer West Texans were made of. He was one of the few people who could intimidate Jude Strayhorn if he chose to. The fact that he had never chosen to was, in Jude’s opinion, a mark of his character.

  “Jude. How are you, girl?”

  He always had time for her, no matter
how busy he might be. He always asked about her welfare, but he never asked about the Circle C or anyone else associated with it. Jacob Campbell Strayhorn was the son of Jude’s father’s brother and, like most of the Strayhorns, a namesake of the original founder of the Circle C ranching empire. By blood, he was as much a part of the family as Jude, but he had distanced himself from all of them except for her and their cousin Cable.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “You?”

  He invited her to sit and offered her coffee. She declined the coffee. She had never understood why people had hot drinks when the thermometer registered a hundred degrees, but Jake seemed to thrive on coffee. It was a cop thing, she assumed. “A hot drink raises the body temperature,” she told him with a laugh as she took the seat he offered.

  “Something’s on your mind,” he said, sinking into his own chair behind his desk.

  Remembering that he was as good as John Edward at reading minds, she managed a laugh, intending to put him off his game. “Why would you think something’s on my mind? I just stopped by to say hello.”

  He grinned. “Jude, honey, if I ever decide to take up poker playing, I hope you’re my first opponent.”

  Okay, so she was a little obvious. She sighed. “It’s disconcerting having a conversation with someone who sees right through you. But honest, Jake. Nothing’s on my mind. I’m on my way to Suzanne’s and I just stopped by. No kidding.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jake said.

  Dammit, he didn’t believe her. And he knew her too well. She raised her palms in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’m being nosy. I just met the new owner of the 6-0.”

  Jake leaned forward in his seat and rested his forearms on his desk blotter. “Brady Fallon? Where’d you run into him?”

  Brady Fallon. The name still sounded as if it should mean something to her. “At the 6-0. Why didn’t you tell me Mrs. Wallace had left her place to her nephew?”