He clasped her thigh and pulled it next to his, letting his hand linger between her legs. He just wanted to touch her. “What I came to say, Jude, is this. If we’re gonna continue to spend time together, I think we need to come clean with J.D. We need to stop all this sneaking around and lying to him. I don’t want to have to hide.”
“Are we going to keep seeing each other?”
He smiled. “Jude. We’ve slept together, darlin’. And it was pretty damn good for both of us. You think we just ignore that like it never happened?”
She leaned forward, too. “I don’t know. You slept with Ginger, too. Apparently for a long time. She had your things. Your friends thought you were together.”
Uh-oh. This might be harder than he had hoped. He stopped and swirled the liquid in his mug. How could he explain Ginger without sounding like an asshole? “She was, uh—”
“A convenience? Is that the word you’re looking for?”
“We were convenient for each other,” he said, throwing the remainder of his coffee onto the grass. “Life’s like that.”
“Not my life. . . . You and I have never exactly talked about anything serious.”
“You don’t think Tuesday night was serious?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“As far as I’m concerned, that was about as serious as I get. I care about you, Jude. And you care, too. I think we’ve got a chance. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, maybe ever. This is why I say we tell your dad, so we can be open and up front. Then you and I can talk about anything you want to, for as long as you want to. I don’t like lying.”
Coming from him, all of that was an oration. A plain-spoken sonnet without rhyme. Her chest filled with emotion, more than she had ever had to deal with so quickly. Now she was the one who was speechless, a handicap she had rarely suffered. She swallowed, waiting for her voice. “You’re the one with something at risk if we tell Daddy.”
“I’m willing to take a chance. When we went to Stephenville together, if I had known your dad like I know him now, I wouldn’t have asked you to keep the trip a secret. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be upset over your going with me. I believe he’s a reasonable man.”
“Hmm. He has selective reasonableness.” She set her mug on the tabletop and laced her fingers. “You have to understand that for my entire life growing up, I was told by him and Grandpa and Grammy Pen to stay away from the ranch hands.”
“I can see why they’d say that, Jude. This is a world of men around here, some of them unruly. If I had a young daughter growing up in this environment, I’d do the same thing.”
“It’s a moot point now. I’m friends with most of the hands. I’ve taught their kids. They respect me. Let’s say I agree with you about telling Daddy. I don’t like lying, either. But now that we’ve come this far, how do you think we should go about informing him?”
“You can leave it to me. I’ll take care of it.”
“No. It’s really been bothering me to keep something like this from him. I should be the one to tell him. In fact, I’ll do it today. He’s due back from Amarillo this afternoon. I’ll make it a point to have a drink with him before supper. I need to discuss Spike and Charlie Brown with him, anyway.”
“Who?”
“The bulls.”
Brady studied her a few seconds, then chuckled, remembering that J.D. had told him Jude called all the bulls something other than their registered names. “I forgot their names. They’re okay, by the way. I sent one of the hands over to my house to pick them up. Doc looked them over.”
“I heard.”
He looked at her across his shoulder and grinned. “So now that we’ve settled on telling your dad, there’s something else I want you to know. I’m heading down to Abilene. I’m meeting my ex-wife. I’m hoping she’s gonna let my boy live with me.”
She looked at him, and he couldn’t read her expression. Finally she said, “Well, that’ll be nice. Then what happens to us?”
“You don’t have any objections to kids, do you?”
She gave him one of those are-you-crazy? expressions. “Of course not. I teach kids.”
“Then we don’t have a problem. Hell. We might even have one or two of our own someday.” He draped his arm around her, pulled her close and planted a kiss on her lips. If Windy was spying, so be it.
“Stop that,” she said, pushing against him with her elbow. “Windy’s probably looking.”
Brady got to his feet and stepped off the concrete bench. “I gotta go. I’ll be in touch soon as I get back.”
Jude was in such a good mood, she marched into the kitchen and began making a sack lunch. Windy was peeling potatoes and whistling, and she just knew he had seen Brady kiss her out on the terrace. For now, she wouldn’t worry about it. Daddy wouldn’t even be home until late afternoon. She grabbed a bottle of water out of the pantry, then took her lunch with her to the tack room and saddled Patch. She hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention to him recently.
She rode through the barn lots and corrals until she reached the vast range that butted up to the back of the ranch compound. She rode through thick, sunbaked grass, taking in all there was around her, all that she adored. She loved the endless expanse of the rolling plain that stretched until it collided with the brilliant blue sky. So much unobstructed space represented a special kind of freedom only a chosen few ever saw for themselves. That fact was never lost on Jude.
A flock of quail burst into flight in her path. Patch shied, but she controlled him and kissed to him and assured him he was okay.
She rode past the old rock fences—layers of flat limestone pieces stacked without mortar. They had been built at the very beginning of the Circle C, before barbed wire. She reined Patch into the depths of Rimrock Canyon, where layers of prehistoric strata looked as if someone had painted stripes on the canyon walls. The canyon’s sandy floor was still damp from the rain. She rode to where she knew a pool of rainwater would be standing and saw deer tracks in the soft soil that surrounded it. She stopped for Patch to rest, loosened his cinch and let him drink. There, on a flat outcropping of red limestone, she ate her lunch.
On the high canyon’s rim stood the deteriorating walls of an old rock house that had been built before Grandpa was born. The roof had been gone for years. It had been a dwelling for an outpost cowboy who kept an eye on the fences and the cattle herd. The Crowell house, it was called, after its occupant. These days, with pickup trucks and four-wheel drive, there was no need for someone to live this far away from the ranch for that sole purpose.
Rested, Patch easily carried her out of the canyon on a steep trail. At the old rock house she tied him in the shade of an ancient chinaberry tree growing at a corner of the walls and walked inside the rock shell.
She had been here many times. Once, when she came here with Daddy, he had killed a rattlesnake in the tall grass near the front stoop.
Weeds and grass had taken over the floor. Little mounds of sand lay where the floors joined the walls that faced west, deposited there by the ceaseless wind. There had been three rooms, delineated by rock walls. Other than erosion, the walls showed little sign of weakness. They had defied all that nature could throw at them. To Jude, they were a symbol of strength and endurance.
She tried to imagine how it must have been to live here a hundred years ago. How had a lone cowboy stayed warm when a blue norther swept across the plains in January? What did he do when a wicked tornado blasted through in the spring? Or when the relentless August sun seared everything under its canopy?
She had to bring Brady here, to show him what it meant to be Alister Campbell’s descendant.
25
Jude returned to the ranch late in the afternoon and saw her father’s pickup parked in its usual place in front of the garage doors. She could hardly wait to see him. He wasn’t often gone for four days. At the same time, though she was glad he was back, she dreaded having to tell him about her and Brady.
She unsaddled and b
rushed Patch, thinking through what she would say first. She tried several opening sentences on Patch, but he only snorted and kept eating. If only she could get the same reaction from Daddy.
She entered the house through the back door as she usually did. The housekeeper, Lola Mendez, intercepted her, obviously nervous. “Su padre. Está waiting en he oficina.”
“Thanks, Lola.” Jude hurried toward Daddy’s office, wondering what had the housekeeper in a dither. She found her father standing behind his desk reading a document. He looked up when she stepped in. The tension in the air was palpable. Lola had been right. He was uptight about something. “Hey, Daddy. Good trip?”
“Come in.” He turned to face her, dropping the document onto the desk. He leaned forward, pressing his fingertips against the desktop. “Please tell me, Judith Ann, that you don’t really have something going on with Brady Fallon.”
He hadn’t even said hello. Though she was standing and the wide desk separated them, Jude had the distinct impression he loomed over her. She held his gaze but didn’t answer right away.
“Do you?” he shouted, and she jumped.
He never yelled at her. She had hardly heard him raise his voice to anyone, ever. His aggressive attitude was as painful as a slap. Reflexively, she shouted back. “Yes!”
Seconds passed. Unmoving, he glared at her, his face redder than she had ever seen it. “Sit down,” he said sharply but more calmly. He gestured toward the leather wing chair in front of his desk. She dropped into it, still stunned by his outburst. He took his seat behind his desk. “My God, Jude,” he said quietly, as if shouting at her had shocked him, too. “You know the rules. Why would you take up with him, of all people?”
She set her jaw. This was not how, or when, she had expected this conversation to occur, but here it was. Time to fish or cut bait, as she had heard Jake say. “Because I care about him,” she said firmly.
Her father drew a deep breath. His head shook. “Jude, we’ve entrusted him with the management of this place. And it looked like it was going to work out. Do you think I can have you playing . . . playing whatever the hell you’re playing at in front of the men? In front of their families?”
Jude had already anticipated those words—not precisely, but close. “No one knows. We haven’t—”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
Still flustered after having been caught off guard, she couldn’t decide how much to tell him. She didn’t answer.
His head shook again as if he were still working his way through his shock. “My God. That’s what all of this horse riding and training has been about, isn’t it?”
Jude winced. “I was trying to help him. I thought he needed help.”
More silence. Then, “Are you sleeping with him?”
She almost shouted “none of your business,” but faced the fact that her lies had finally caught up with her. More silence passed. She inhaled deeply, shoring herself up to deliver the final blow. “Yes,” she admitted softly.
Her father sat back in his chair and turned his face away. After another even louder silence, he heaved a sigh and leaned forward, placed his forearms on his desk and laced his fingers. “How do you think I should deal with this? What do you think I should do about him?”
“What do you mean? He’s a grown man. There’s nothing you can do about him.” She, too, shook her head. “I mean, you can fire him, but . . .” A frown tugged at her brow. “Why—why do you have to do anything? Why can’t you just let things be?”
“Because things, Jude, are not that simple. He needs to have the respect of the hands and their families to do the job we’ve given him, not to mention the people who live in Lockett and Willard County. The man we put in charge of all this”—he made a sweeping gesture with his arm—“needs to have enough self-discipline to keep his nose clean and his pants zipped. Do you think the hands and their families won’t have fun at our expense behind our backs? Especially yours, Jude.”
“I don’t know what they’ll do,” she snapped. But she did know. They would do exactly what Daddy said. Gossip was a pastime in Willard County, and the Strayhorns had always been prime targets. How did she think her father should deal with this? She had no idea. She stood, turning her back to him, grasping her chair back with a white-knuckle grip.
“I don’t know how I can keep him in the job I’ve given him,” Daddy said matter-of-factly. “I don’t have to tell you that this ranch is one of the most important agribusinesses in West Texas. It’s an entity crucial to the economy of this whole area. To be perfectly blunt, Jude, the hands, their families, the whole county, will assume I’ve turned management of it over to a man whose only qualification is he’s . . . he’s having sex with my daughter. I don’t know if I can even keep him on as a hand. Is he prepared for that? Are you?”
She flinched inside. He was right. If his reasons, other than love for her, for trying to run her life had been in doubt, they now became painfully clear. As for Brady, he hadn’t said he had considered the consequences, and she didn’t want him to have to. She turned back with a direct look into her father’s troubled eyes. “Daddy, please don’t fire him. I won’t see him anymore. Just don’t fire him.”
Her father shook his head again. “I swear I don’t understand you, Jude. You were engaged to two fine young men from good families. You found something wrong with both of them and went off half-cocked and broke those alliances.”
She gave an audible sigh. “Alliances? Maybe that was the problem, Daddy. They were alliances.”
“Then you take up with a—a damn saddle tramp who works for the ranch,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her.
“Don’t say that about Brady. If you thought he was a saddle tramp, why did you hire him to run the place? Especially when you knew I wanted to?”
His head cocked and his eyes narrowed. “Is that what this is about? Are you trying to come in through the back door with this guy? Is this a mutiny?”
“A mutiny?” she cried. “Forgodsake, please spare me the melodrama.” She willed herself to stay calm. “Why can’t you just accept that he’s someone I like? Someone I picked out?”
“So how serious is this? You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No, I’m not pregnant. But what if I were? You and Grandpa are always yammering about me having kids.”
“Kids with fathers, Jude. Kids with legitimate fathers. Do I have to say it again? This family sets an example in this county.”
“Oh, really? We should talk about that. What kind of example, Daddy? The whole state of Texas gossips about this family’s scandals. They even write books about them. My uncle Ike and my stepmother. My uncle Ben—”
Her father sprang to his feet and stabbed the desktop with his finger. “Ben Strayhorn died a hero. Don’t you dare disrespect him.”
“I was going to say my uncle Ben’s wife, Daddy,” Jude said as calmly as she could, though her stomach was shaking. “She could hardly be called a hero, could she?”
Ben Strayhorn’s wife, Cynthia, had passed from a cocaine overdose soon after Ben’s death in combat in Vietnam, leaving their infant son, Cable, an orphan. More of the Campbell Curse, Grammy Pen had said. Daddy and Grandpa had raised Cable, too.
Her father came around the desk and draped an arm around her shoulder. “Look, let’s calm down. Let’s not fight, Daughter. Listen to me, now. Let’s think through this and make the right decision. I’ll speak to Brady. I’ll—”
“Daddy, no!” Jude shook her head fiercely. “I don’t want you to speak to him. Can’t you understand? I’m not a kid. And I care about him. And I think . . . no, I know he cares about me. Not the money, not the ranch.” She stabbed her breastbone with her thumb. “Me.”
“All right, Jude.” He closed his eyes and raised his palms. “We’ll let this all rest for now. We’ll talk again when I’m less upset. After I’ve had some time to think.”
She studied him. As surely as she knew her name, she knew he would confront Brady. Bec
ause that was the way he was. Nothing she could say would change that. The only thing she didn’t know was when. But she no longer believed he would arbitrarily fire him, either. “Could I ask you something, Daddy?”
“What?”
“Was it Windy who told you?”
“Windy’s a friend of mind. Has been since I was sixteen years old.”
Jude had no one to blame but herself. She had known better than to sit on the terrace and let Brady kiss her. And she had known better than to get involved with a ranch employee in the first place. “I intended to tell you myself. It would have been nice if I’d had that chance.” With nothing left to say, she started to leave.
As she put her hand on the doorknob, he said, “Jude.”
She looked back at him. He adjusted his glasses and gave her a long, solemn look. “Here’s something for you to consider while you’re caring about Brady Fallon. Your grandfather still wants that 6-0 land. And I’ll tell you right now, he intends to get it. When he finds out about this, I don’t know what he’ll do.”
She couldn’t resist a sardonic smile. “Looks like the easiest way for him to get what he wants would be for you two to figure out a way to marry me off to Brady. Why not? You’ve tried to marry me off to everyone else.”
Jude found Suzanne at home. Barefoot, red faced and sweating, she was just standing a dingy string mop to dry against the wall on the back porch. “Thank God you showed up,” she said. “Now I can sit down and have a glass of tea.”
“What’re you doing?” Jude asked, taking in the oversize chambray shirt that hung to her girlfriend’s thighs.
“Mopping the kitchen. Dad’s due in tomorrow night. He’s on the road so much, I want the house to look like a home when he gets here.”
Jude knew Suzanne worried about her father while he trucked across the country—the places he slept, the food he ate. One of the bonds she and Suzanne had was that they both had only fathers. Suzanne’s mother hadn’t been absent in body in her daughter’s youth, but she might as well have been.
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