by Joan Wolf
She turned large, sympathetic eyes on his face and began to talk. After a few minutes Jay’s immobility drew her attention, and she glanced at the chair in which he was sitting. His posture was relaxed, but Caroline sensed the tension in him. He was looking at his father, and his suntanned face was very bleak.
Caroline finished talking. “It was evidently a very rare bacterium. No one knows where she picked it up. She could have got it just walking down the street, the doctor said. She’d had a nagging cold, so her resistance was probably down.”
“She was only fifty-three,” said Joe.
“I know.” Caroline’s husky voice, with its soft Virginia accent, was very gentle.
Jay still had not moved, and now his silence seemed to attract his father’s attention. “Has Caroline given you the ring?” Joe asked.
“Yes.”
Joe met his son’s eyes. “Let me see it.”
Jay stood up, reached into his back pocket, and brought the ring out. He walked slowly across the floor, followed by his dog, and put it into his father’s outstretched hand. Then he went to stand by the fireplace. His face, when Caroline looked at him, was completely shuttered, the eyes veiled by long thick lashes. Caroline wished, fleetingly, that she were not so aware of him, and then she turned back to Joe.
Nancy’s first husband was regarding the ring soberly. It was a large diamond in an old-fashioned setting, and Caroline had always loved it. “I remember this very well,” Joe said softly. “It was her grandmother’s.” He looked over to his son. Jay lifted his lashes and looked back. Caroline held her breath, aware of the tension in the room. Then Joe held the ring out again. “Put it away,” he said flatly. “Don’t just leave it in your pocket.”
Jay took the ring back, walking in front of Caroline to get it. “Okay,” he said. He held the ring in his hand for a minute. “I’m going to turn in,” he said then. “See you in the morning.” His blue eyes just touched Caroline’s face, and then he was walking up the stairs, moving with the strength and grace of the athlete he was. The dog stayed by the hearth. Caroline looked at Joe.
There was a very long silence. “Do you see what I mean?” the rancher asked finally.
“Yes.”
“I’m glad Nancy left him the ring.”
Caroline regarded him solemnly. He was not at all the kind of man she was accustomed to. “And what did she leave you, Joe?” she asked softly.
He smiled wryly. “She left me a son. And a lot of memories.”
There was another long silence as the man seemed to retreat into himself. Caroline rose to her feet. “Goodnight,” she said and then, impulsively, kissed him on the cheek before she went upstairs.
* * * *
Caroline awoke at six o’clock the following morning. She was not accustomed to going to bed at ten at night, she thought with rueful amusement as she got out of bed and stretched. She was wide awake. The morning air was cool, and she shivered in her thin cotton nightgown. She put on her white terry-cloth robe, thrust her slim feet into matching slippers, and went down the hall to the bathroom. Jay was just coming out, and she stopped abruptly at the sight of him. He wore jeans but no shirt, and she caught herself staring at his chest and shoulders. He was so slim that the strong muscles were a surprise, and he was deeply tanned. She looked up into his face and was immediately conscious of her own long tangled hair and long bare legs. “Are you finished?” she said. There was a small dab of shaving cream along his jaw.
“Yes. The bathroom’s all yours.” He stepped into the hall, very close to her, and she was acutely conscious of his bare brown torso only inches away from her.
“Thanks,” she managed to say. “See you at breakfast.” And she slipped into the bathroom and closed the door firmly behind her.
“What’s in the cards for today?” Joe asked his son at breakfast.
“Frank said there were reports of hunters up near section sixteen. I thought I’d better go check to see if the gates are all closed.”
“Why don’t you take Caroline with you?” Joe said. “Take the horses. Ellen will pack you a lunch.”
Jay looked at Caroline. He didn’t want her along, she thought. “Would you like to come?” he asked with obvious politeness.
“Sure,” she said. “It sounds like fun.”
“Good,” said Joe heartily. “It’ll give you two a chance to get better acquainted.”
From the look on her stepbrother’s face, Caroline deduced that one of the last things in the world he wanted was the chance of becoming better acquainted with her. Well, she thought, like it or not, you’re stuck with me, chum. She gave him one of her sweetest smiles.
It was a beautiful day, and Caroline enjoyed the mountain ride enormously. Being outdoors on a horse was the thing she loved best in the world; she was able to ignore her stepbrother and simply take pleasure in the horse and the spectacular landscape.
“Are you getting tired?” Jay asked after they had been climbing for two hours. It was almost the first thing he had said to her.
She looked surprised. “Why, no. I’m fine, thanks.”
“You surprise me,” he said. “You look as if a strong wind would blow you over.”
She laughed. “I’ve sometimes spent six or seven hours on the hunting field. Now that is work.”
“You like to hunt?” he asked noncommittally.
“I adore it.” He didn’t say anything, and she glanced at him quickly. “Yes, I know it’s the pastime of the decadent rich,” she said. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible, and all that. But the fact remains that there’s nothing else like it in the world.”
Quite suddenly he grinned. “Who said that— ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible’?”
“Oscar Wilde. Hunting wasn’t at all his thing.”
Jay looked sardonic. “No, I don’t suppose it was.”
So he knew who Oscar Wilde was. She patted the gray gelding’s neck. “I shouldn’t be surprised if Dusty wouldn’t make a good hunter. He’s strong and he moves well.”
“He’s not that big.”
“You don’t want a really big horse to hunt,” she replied. “You’d hit your head on too many branches.”
The blue eyes turned momentarily to her face. “I thought you had a job. How do you find the time to hunt?”
“I don’t work weekends. And I have vacations.”
They rode for perhaps ten more minutes in silence and then came to what was clearly a pasture. Jay turned his horse and began to ride along the fence, and Caroline moved abreast of him. “The sky is so blue,” she said, looking up. “It reminds me a little of Ireland.”
“I thought it rained all the time in Ireland.”
“Not all the time. And when the sun comes out the sky is cobalt—-just as it is here.”
“Was your father the ambassador to Ireland?” he asked. He sounded perfectly pleasant but Caroline felt her hackles rise. “No. But I’ve hunted in Ireland.” There was a pause and then she said, she didn’t know why, “In fact, I was once engaged to an Irishman.”
“Oh?” He frowned at a piece of broken fence, pulled up, and got off his horse. Caroline watched as he took a wirecutter from his pocket and proceeded to repair the break. When he was in the saddle again and moving forward, he said, “But you didn’t marry him.”
“No.”
“Why not?” The words were spoken sharply, and she looked at him in surprise.
“I fell in love with the hunting and sort of transferred the feeling to Gerald,” she confessed honestly. “Fortunately, I discovered my mistake before it was too late.”
“And how did Gerald feel?”
She shrugged and looked between her horse’s ears. Gerald had been very upset when she broke their engagement, actually. She still felt guilty about it. “He survived,” she said lightly and turned to encounter a pair of derisive blue eyes.
“Sure,” he said. “And what do you care, anyway?”
“I cared enough not to saddle him with
a wife who didn’t love him,” she retorted sharply. “A lot of girls wouldn’t have been so considerate.”
“I gather Gerald was a prize.” He sounded very cynical.
She put up her chin. “He was the Earl of Clontarf. And rather rich. And very very nice.” She gave him a look loaded with meaning.
His too handsome face was filled with mockery. “Unlike present company?”
“Unlike present company,” she agreed cordially.
“An earl. And rich. And very very nice.” He looked at her speculatively. “What was wrong with him? Did he suffer from Oscar Wilde’s problem?”
“Oh!” Her cheeks flamed with color. “No, he did not! Don’t be disgusting.”
“I have such a plebeian mentality.” The sarcasm was out in the open now.
“You do, unfortunately.” Caroline’s lovely mouth curled in disdain. “I can’t imagine where you got it from. Your parents are first-class.”
“One of my parents,” he corrected her ruthlessly. “The other one was a bitch.” And he put his horse into a gallop, leaving her to follow more slowly, trying to contain her temper.
Chapter Four
He had dismounted and was unpacking the lunch before she caught up to him. Without a word she got off her own horse and walked to the edge of the field to stare at the few cattle she could see grazing in the distance.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he asked behind her back, and she went to sit down on one side of the checkered tablecloth he had spread out. She accepted a sandwich from him and, still not speaking, took a bite. The early-afternoon sun was warm on her back; she had taken off her sweater an hour ago. Jay, she noticed, had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing tanned, muscular forearms. He chewed slowly, squinting up at the sun.
Caroline pushed her long hair back behind her ears and reached for an apple at the same time Jay did. It was the first physical contact between them, and she felt as if a charge of electricity had shot all through her body. She stared for a moment at his hand as it lay on top of hers, and then he removed it and stood up.
“You can have the apple if you like,” she said, her voice a shade huskier than usual. Her hand still felt the touch of his.
“No thanks.” He turned his back on her and went over to the horses. She stayed where she was and bit into the apple. The juice felt good in her suddenly dry throat. The air between them was thick with tension. Caroline finished her apple and began to pack up the remains of the lunch. He turned to watch her but made no move to help.
“If you want to put this in your saddlebag, we can get moving,” she said.
“All right. We still have quite a few gates to check.” Despite his level voice she could see him controlling his breathing. He took the repacked lunch from her, carefully avoiding any physical contact, and put it in his saddlebag. Then he remounted. “Coming?” he asked expressionlessly.
She looked up at him from the ground and felt her stomach muscles knot. God, she thought. I don’t need this. “Yes.” Her voice was as studiously expressionless as his. “I’m ready. Let’s go.” And she swung up into the saddle.
* * * *
Caroline had come close to marrying two men in her life; had in fact been engaged to both of them. The first was Clifford Van Leuven, a law student at the University of Virginia, where Caroline had gotten her undergraduate degree. She had been a junior when she met Cliff, and in her senior year they got engaged and moved in together. He was graduating from law school at the same time she would finish college, and they planned an autumn wedding.
Both Nancy and Ambassador Carruthers had been broad-minded about Caroline’s living arrangements. They liked Cliff, who came from an old and moneyed family.
Caroline had broken their engagement a week before her graduation. It upset everyone: Cliff, his parents, her parents, and not least of all herself. She liked Cliff very much. He was a first-class person, and she knew it. She knew that any girl who landed him could count herself lucky. And he loved her; she knew that as well. She had told herself that her liking was bound to turn into something stronger, that once she went to bed with him the spark that had never quite lit for her would take fire.
It hadn’t. And as time went by she realized that it never would. It just wasn’t there for her, and reluctantly she had come to the conclusion that she would have to break the engagement off.
Deep inside her cool, sophisticated exterior, Caroline was waiting for her prince, for the man who would sweep her off her feet and turn her world upside down. A year ago she had thought she had found him in Gerald FitzMaurice, Earl of Clontarf. She had been on vacation in Ireland staying with some friends of her father’s, and she met him at a hunt meet. She was dazzled by his charm, his aristocratic elegance, his house, his horses, his title, and the fact that he had clearly fallen for her. When he asked her to marry him she said yes, taken up by visions of being Lady Clontarf and enjoying a life of hunting in the beautiful Irish countryside.
But Gerald, the man, failed to sweep her off her feet. As a lover he proved to be skillful, tender, and passionate, but for some reason Caroline felt something lacking. She was furious with herself. What more could she possibly want out of life? she kept asking herself. Half the girls in the British Isles would give their eyeteeth to marry Gerald.
But in the end she had broken their engagement, again upsetting both their families and hurting him deeply. Her father had been extremely annoyed with her. “What on earth’s the matter with you, Caroline?” he had demanded. “If you’re not going to go through with the marriage, will you for God’s sake refrain from getting engaged? Nancy even had invitations printed up this time.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” was all she could say. “I thought I loved him, but I don’t. I’m sorry.”
“What kind of man are you waiting for, anyway?” her father had snapped in irritation. “If Cliff and Clontarf aren’t good enough? A prince?”
She rode alongside her stepbrother through the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming and looked at him through her lashes. He wasn’t remotely like a prince. He was a tough, arrogant man who had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t like her. But the mere touch of his hand on hers had been more erotic than the intimate caresses of her two fiancés. She knew, with all her feminine instincts, that this was the man who could sweep her off her feet. But she liked him as little as he liked her. She bit her lip and stared resolutely ahead. He spelled danger, she thought, and the best defense would be to keep as far away from him as she possibly could. She would go back to Washington.
“And how come you aren’t married?” she asked, her voice cool and husky. “I should think you’d want an army of sons to come after you here.”
The look he gave her was cold and unsmiling. “I’m thinking about it,” he said.
“Oh? In the abstract or the particular?”
“The particular.” His thick hair had fallen forward over his forehead, and he raised a hand and impatiently pushed it back. “She’s not rich,” he said dryly, “but she’s very pretty. And very very nice.”
“Unlike present company,” said Caroline.
He turned his head to look at her, and for some absurd reason Caroline’s spirits lifted. She grinned, and after a minute the corner of his own mouth twitched in response.
“Think it over carefully,” she advised. “I learned the hard way not to let someone rush you into an engagement. I did it twice.”
“Twice?” He began to laugh.
“It wasn’t funny,” she said wryly. “I upset a whole lot of people.”
“You impressed me as a lady who knew her own mind.” He raised an eyebrow. “Evidently I was wrong.”
“Evidently.” She frowned in bewilderment. “It was very distressing,” she confessed. “My father was absolutely furious with me.” The breeze blew her long blond hair back from her face, and she looked up at him out of wide, grave eyes. The bone structure of her face was flawless, her tanned skin the color of pale honey.
All the humor
left his face. “Some women are like that,” he said flatly.
Her eyes narrowed. “Like what?”
“Fickle,” he replied coldly.
“You’re such an expert on women?” she asked sarcastically.
“On that kind I am. I lived with one for ten years, remember. I saw the kind of havoc they can wreak. My father’s never really recovered from it.” His face was set, his eyes a hard, metallic blue. “I’m sorry for your fiancés, but they can count themselves lucky to have escaped the net.”
“You are a narrow-minded, ignorant, arrogant boor.” Her voice was precise as she listed the unflattering adjectives. “And I pity any girl fool enough to marry you.”
They stared at each other in mutual dislike. “Why the hell did you accept my father’s invitation to stay here?” he asked disagreeably. “I thought you were supposed to have a job.”
“I didn’t accept, my father accepted for me.” Temper was making her eyes look very green. “And I’m on an unpaid leave from my job.”
“You’re obviously not very reliable there, either.”
Her back was ramrod-straight, and her horse, sensing her tension, began to fidget. “I work on special projects. I’m between jobs at present.”
“Of course,” he said with lethal courtesy. “You would need time to get away on all those vacations—Ireland, Wyoming ... do you ski in Switzerland in the winter?”
As a matter of fact, she did. “Shut up,” she said between clenched teeth.
“Why don’t you just go home, Caroline? You can probably even fit in a little shopping in New York before you go back to work.”
Half an hour ago she had had every intention of leaving Wyoming. But now she put her chin up and stared at him stonily. “I wouldn’t dream of hurting your father’s feelings,” she said.
