by Diana Palmer
Jason was leaning against the chute, tall and powerful and darkly elegant in his unconscious pose, one worn boot hooked on the lowest board of the chute while he watched big blond Gabe drive a calf up it to be worked. But before Kate was halfway to him, his dark eyes had found her. He always seemed to see her before anyone else did.
She could see that he was favoring his right arm, resting it on his propped-up leg. He looked good in Western clothing. Faded jeans and a worn black Stetson, leather boots curled up and matted with dirt from long use and a dusty chambray shirt made him look like a handsome desperado.
He was handsome to Kate, anyway—even if his high-cheekboned face had overly craggy features and he wasn’t shy about speaking his mind. He was dark-eyed, dark-skinned, with a deceptively lithe build. Tall and powerfully muscled, Jason had one of those physiques seen so frequently on the screen and so rarely in real life. With the misshappen black Stetson pulled low over his eyes, he had that dangerous look. Kate came closer.
“I wondered why Gabe vanished all of a sudden,” he mused in a deep, south Texas drawl. His dark eyes cut upward to where his forearm was trying to look invisible. “My God, are we so hard up for help that we’re kidnapping seamstresses?”
“I’m a designer, not a seamstress,” Kate pointed out pleasantly, smiling up at the tall man. “And if you don’t think I can throw a calf, stand back and watch me. My daddy was foreman of this outfit before Gabe was, and he taught me all I know.”
Jason’s dark eyes softened as they searched her creamy complexion, lingering on her thick, dark eyelashes. “I guess he did, but most of these calves outweigh you, honey,” he murmured dryly.
His casual endearment made her heart dance, but she kept Jason from seeing it. “Your arm’s bleeding,” she remarked, nodding toward the bloodstained sleeve.
“NO!” he exclaimed in mock surprise.
“You need to see a doctor,” she continued, unabashed.
“It would be too embarrassing for both of us if I bothered Dr. Harris over a little scratch like this,” he said reasonably.
“If you don’t, I’ll stand here all day and get heat stroke,” she sighed. “But just go ahead and step over me while you work. If you don’t bleed to death first,” she added darkly.
Gene would have laughed at that, but Jason didn’t crack a smile. Jason’s younger brother, Gene, was a live wire, ever since his marriage to Cherry Mather. But Jason had always been the quiet one, the deep one. He hardly ever smiled, except when Kate was around.
“I don’t have time,” he muttered.
“Yes, you do,” she said stubbornly. She put her hands on her hips and moved closer, staring doggedly up at him.
At close quarters, the effect he had on her nerves was dynamite. She’d always had a kind of crush on him, but suddenly it was being translated into something new and deliciously physical that attracted her and frightened her, all at once.
She didn’t know that her proximity was giving him some problems as well. Little Kate who’d always been like a little sister was beginning to make him nervous and irritable. He’d avoided her lately for that reason. Now here she was, getting on his nerves again, when he needed it least.
“I told you, my arm’s all right,” he said curtly, his voice more cutting than he meant it to be, because her unconscious posture was bothering him. Her firm young breasts were all too visible under the thin fabric of her shirt, and the tight belt she wore with those tailored jeans brought his dark eyes down over her tiny waist and full hips and long, graceful legs. That made him madder and he forced his eyes back up to hers.
But she wasn’t looking. She’d taken possession of his arm while his attention was diverted.
She unfastened the cuff and began to roll the sleeve up. “Go ahead and growl, I don’t mind.” Touching him even in this casual way made her tingle all over, so she resorted to humor to hide her reaction. Her green eyes danced up to his. “I’ll give you a peppermint stick if you let me drive you to the doctor, Jason.”
As usual, her light teasing knocked the fire off his temper. He gave in, chuckling in spite of himself as he watched her dark head bend. She was so full of fun, so unlike him. She bubbled through life, always finding the bright spots, while he brooded in the shadows. She’d always been able to make him laugh. Nobody else did, God knew. If he had a surefire weakness, Kate was it.
She drew the fabric carefully up his arm, noting first the terribly complicated black watch strapped in the dark hairs on his wrist, then his muscles as she uncovered a blood-soaked white handkerchief; linen, too, with the initials JED in one corner, for Jason Everett Donavan.
“If this is a little cut, I’m George Washington,” she muttered, grimacing as she moved the bandage aside to view the deep gash above his elbow. She looked up, searching his eyes. They were very Spanish, like part of his ancestry, and he had a way of looking at her that made her knees go weak.
“My, my, how you’ve changed, George,” he mused.
“It needs stitches,” she said. “It’s too deep to bandage.”
“It isn’t. But I’ll let you patch it up,” he sighed irritably.
“We’d have to go back to the house. And Sheila’s there,” she added, smiling mischievously. “Waiting, with a bottle of nasty antiseptic and just bristling with evil intent. Dr. Harris, on the other hand, is a kind man who wouldn’t hurt you. He’s the lesser of the two evils.”
“Damn it, a little blood won’t hurt me,” he countered, his dark eyes daring his very interested cowhands to say a word.
“Will gangrene hurt you?” she challenged, losing her patience as she was losing the argument. He could be so bullheaded! “Do you want to lose your arm because you’re too pigheaded to see a doctor?”
“You tell him, Miss Kate,” Red Barton agreed from his perch atop the fence. He was just out of his teens, a good cowboy with a tendency toward alcohol that would probably have kept him off any other ranch. But he’d saved Jason from a diamondback the same week he’d signed on at Diamond Spur, and he’d be there for life, if Kate knew her taciturn neighbor. Jason never forgot a favor.
“Gangrene’s a turrrrrible thing,” Barton continued. “First she gets red stripes running down, then green, then the whole thing starts to rot off…” He shuddered as his pale eyes widened and his hands gestured theatrically.
“Oh, shut up, Barton!” Jason shot at him. “I don’t need any advice from a man who almost lost his own damned foot to a mesquite thorn!”
Barton lifted his chin, “Well, at least I finally did go to a doctor, didn’t I, boss man?” he challenged.
“Sure,” Jason agreed. “Feet first, in an ambulance.”
“No need to rub it in,” the cowboy replied with a grin.
“All the more reason for you to go willingly, now,” Kate told Jason. “Think,” she said conspiratorially, “how your men would gloat if you had to be carried away.”
Jason looked quietly furious. In fact, he looked hunted. He glared at Barton, who looked like a cheshire cat, and then back at Kate, who stood just looking at him, her arms folded.
“I give up,” he said heavily.
“Don’t worry, boss, they’ll give you a bullet to bite on,” Barton called after him.
“Save one for yourself, and a gun to use it in, if that lot of calves isn’t done when I get back,” Jason snapped back. “Hey, Gabe!” he yelled to his foreman.
The big blond man turned with a hand to his ear.
“I’ll remember this!” Jason told him.
Gabe made him a bow guaranteed to incite any half-enraged man to violence. Jason’s eyes flashed and he took a step forward.
“He’s young, Jason.” Kate got between him and his quarry. “They’re all young.”
He looked down at her with smoldering eyes under his jutting, scowling brow. “So are you, cupcake,” he said.
“That’s right, old man,” she returned. Then she frowned a little. “Well, not too old,” she amended. “You’re just thirty. I
guess you’ve got a few good years left.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “My God. Look who’s talking about age—a child of twenty.”
She glared at him. “Almost twenty-one,” she amended. “The same age as Gene.”
“Yes, Gene.” He spared his branding operation another wistful glance. “They’ll never get it done alone,” he muttered. “If only I could get Gene to hold up his end, I could show a profit. Damn it, why does he want to fool around with painting? He’s chasing rainbows, and on my time!”
“Gene isn’t a boy anymore, Jason,” she reminded him as they walked toward his big black Ford Bronco. “He’s a grown man, with a wife.”
“Some wife,” he said harshly. “Cherry couldn’t boil water, and her idea of married life is to watch soap operas and walk around with her hair in curlers.”
“She’s just eighteen,” she said.
“I tried so damned hard to get them to wait.” He opened the passenger door and helped her up into the high cab with a steely hand and closed it. Before she could get him to listen to her protests, he was under the wheel, managing very well with his right arm. With the bucket seats so close together, she was almost touching it, too. Kate was fascinated by the inside of this vehicle. It had power windows and cruise control, a stereo radio, tape deck, and two gearshifts—one for automatic drive and one for four-wheel drive. The old Ford that Kate shared with her mother was a straight shift with no frills, and by comparison, the Bronco was sheer luxury, right down to the comfortable fabric-covered seats.
“You aren’t fit to drive,” she complained.
“Nobody’s driving me anywhere, unless it’s to the cemetery one day,” he returned. He fumbled for a cigarette, but he couldn’t manage the wheel with his injured arm. “Damn.”
“I thought you’d quit,” she mused. She took the cigarette, lit it, and handed it to him, making a face at the tangy, unpleasant tobacco taste.
“I did,” he agreed with a faint grin. “I quit for a week, in fact. And I quit last month, too. I quit religiously about every third week.”
“Your ashtray looks like it,” she observed, watching him thump ashes over a pile of finished butts the size of a teacup upended. “How can you stand that mess?”
“If I clean it out, it will depress people who ride with me.”
She stared at him. “Come again?”
“Most of my men aren’t neat. If I start cleaning out ashtrays, they’ll think they have to do it, too. They’ll feel threatened and they’ll all quit, and I’ll have to handle roundup all by myself.”
He had a dry wit that few people ever experienced. Kate, sitting contentedly beside him, felt constant amazement that of all the people he knew, she was the only one who ever got this close. He seemed never to see her as a threat, which was more irritating to Kate the older she got. She was becoming a woman, and he didn’t even seem to notice.
Well, he did hate women, she had to admit. He didn’t date, or he hadn’t in the past few years. Not since that Eastern tenderfoot had come out to visit a neighbor and Jason had fallen head over heels in love with her. He’d been all set to propose, with the ring bought and everything, when she suddenly announced that she was off to Hollywood where she’d been offered a movie career. Jason had tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t be budged. Men were a dime a dozen, she’d laughed at him. Movie contracts were thin on the ground. Sorry, sucker, in other words. And Jason had gone on a three-day drunk that had become legendary in local circles, all the more shocking because he never touched liquor in any form. That prejudice was a holdover from his childhood because J.B. Donavan’s drinking had brought violence down on his sons’ heads.
Although Kate had grown up next door, and her father had worked for the Donavans, Jason was so much older that she’d had very little contact with him. But Gene and Kate had gone to school together, and she often helped him with his grammar. He’d talked occasionally about their upbringing, and it had softened her toward Jason who one afternoon just after his almost-fiancée’s defection, had chanced to come growling out of his study, dead drunk. Jason’s unexpected appearance had first disturbed, then shocked Kate. She’d never seen him anything except cold sober and in complete control of himself. Until then.
“Little Miss English tutor,” he’d laughed coldly, those dark eyes frankly insulting as Gene had tried unsuccessfully to push him back into the study. “Is English all you’re teaching my brother in these cozy afternoon sessions?”
“Come on now, Jay,” Gene had coaxed, half a head shorter and not a fraction as strong as the jean-clad, unshaven man he was trying to budge. “Don’t pick on Kate.”
“I don’t want damned women cluttering up my house! Not even your women!” Jason had stormed, black eyes flashing, his lean sharp face as hard as marble. Stone.
But Kate knew the look of pain. She had an uncanny empathy for people who were hurt; she could see it through anger or bad temper or even drunkenness. Jason’s heart was broken, couldn’t Gene see how much he was hurting? It was like watching a poor, wounded animal trying to escape from a bullet.
Ignoring Gene’s frantic signs to go away, she went right up to Jason and took one of his lean, strong hands in hers, “Come on, Jason,” she said, her voice as soft as it was when she talked to the kittens at home. “You’re tired. You need to lie down.”
Gene’s pale, broad face winced as he waited for Jason to knock her down. But, amazingly, his brother’s sharp features relaxed. Through a haze of alcohol, Jason went with her like a lamb back into his study.
“How about getting Sheila to make a pot of coffee, Gene?” Kate asked him, nodding as her eyes told him to step on it.
“Sure. Right now.”
He was gone and Kate closed the door, coaxing Jason to the long leather lounger. She helped him down and sat beside him, her slender fingers gently stroking back his disheveled hair. He was beautiful, in a rough sort of way, she thought, her eyes going over his chiseled sharp features, the stubborn jutting chin, the beautifully carved mouth. He lay quietly, watching her with eyes that only half saw, black and intent.
“It’s only been a few months since Daddy died,” she said, keeping her voice low and soft. “He was my whole world, the only person who ever cared enough to let me be myself. He didn’t want me to marry money or be famous. He loved me just the way I was. At first,” she continued, because he was really listening, “I thought the pain would never stop. But day by day, little by little, I got through it. You will, too, Jason. One day, you won’t even remember what she looked like.”
He caught the soft fingers stroking his damp brow. “How old are you?” he asked unexpectedly.
She smiled. “Eighteen.”
“A very wise old eighteen, little girl,” he replied. His drawl was a little slurred, but his eyes never wavered from her face. “What the hell do you care if I mourn myself to death?”
“Jason, you’ve been awfully good to Mama and me since Daddy died,” she said gently. “And I guess nobody else looks deep enough to see how bad it’s hurting you….”
“I’m not hurting,” he interrupted curtly. “No damned woman is ever going to hurt me!”
She closed her fingers around his. “Of course not,” she agreed, soothing him back down. “You’re just worked to death. But you need time to get your life back in order. Why don’t you go away for a week or two? Gene says you never rest. A vacation would put the bloom back in your cheeks,” she said with a mischievous smile. “The vinegar back into your black heart….”
“Shut up or I’ll throw you out the front door,” he replied. But there was a faint glimmer in his eyes, and it didn’t sound like any serious threat. “God, you’re brave.”
“Somebody has to save you from yourself,” she sighed. “Alas, I guess I’ve been chosen. Now how about a nice bowl of razor blade soup and an ugly pill?”
He burst out laughing. Gene and Sheila came in the study door together with stunned amusement suddenly claiming their faces. And that h
ad been the beginning of an odd and beautiful relationship. From that day on, Jason became Kate’s responsibility if he got sick, or hurt, or in a fight. He never touched liquor again, but he seemed to have a knack for accidents. Especially the past few months. This was the third time since winter began and ended that Kate had been summoned by someone to look after the big man. And he reciprocated in unexpected, and sometimes unwelcomed, ways.
She became the object of a rough kind of affectionate, almost brotherly overseeing. In fact, Jason had taken on a lot of responsibility that Kate hadn’t appreciated. Like helping Kate and her mother to buy their father’s property while he managed it for them. Like finding Mary, Kate’s mother, a job in the local textile factory. Like checking up on the infrequent dates Kate had and making sure those men didn’t take advantage of her. But Kate had managed to keep her temper, and her sense of humor, as she’d survived his first attempts at affection.
But when, a few months ago, she’d begun to notice Jason in a new way, he backed off, as if he sensed the almost imperceptible shift in her attitude toward him.
Not that it was blatant. Kate hadn’t realized it herself until a month or so ago. But Jason had suddenly left her to run her own life. Actually, he’d given up running it last year, although he’d protested when she wanted to study fashion design. There was a school in Atlanta that she’d favored, and Jason put his foot down hard. Her mother needed her, he said. Atlanta was just too far away. There were home study courses. He’d find her one. He had, despite her objections. Kate was almost through it now, studying at night.
She worked as a serger on the pants line at the manufacturing company where her mother sewed on the shirt line. It was interesting work, and Kate loved anything to do with the construction of clothes. But serging was becoming sporadic, and today there hadn’t been any work for her, so she was sent home by her floor lady.
