She stared at him. “What the hell are you— “
“You used me, Tessa.” He laughed harshly.
“Jed, please!”
“It’s not all your fault. I just wasn’t listening carefully enough about how you suddenly realized Garland’s not a kid anymore, and discovered that Scott Shelby no longer finds his exciting, gorgeous Wild Westerns girl ‘interesting.’
“Hold on there, you thought. There must be somebody out there who still thinks of me that way . . . somebody to give my ego a boost. Hey! What about good old Jed?”
Tessa’s eyes still sparkled, but with tears now, not excitement. “Oh, Jed.”
“You made your bed a long time ago, Tessa. I should have let you lie in it.”
Tessa flinched at his words. She stared at her toes for a moment, then her chin came up. “I wasn’t looking to you to fill my bed, just warm it a little. If it’s any comfort, you scored pretty high . . . maybe eight on a scale of ten. After the first few crazy months, Barry never made it much beyond four.” She cocked her head. “Come to think of it, you always were a good kisser.”
Jed’s eyes darkened. “Go to hell, Tessa!” He jammed his hat on his head and strode past her, his heels rapping across the kitchen’s plank floor like a tattoo on a kettle drum.
The glass in the kitchen door rattled as he slammed it shut behind him. Tessa’s tears spilled over. Snuffling, she groped in her pocket for a tissue and ended up wiping her sleeve across her nose. Outside, Jed’s truck roared into life. She ran to the door, pulled it open, and stumbled out barefoot into the cloud of his departing dust.
“You can go to hell, too!” she shouted after him. Then, she started to cry again. That, she realized, made three times in one day.
“It’s too much, damn it,” she muttered, rubbing the heel of her hand across her eyes. Her tears mingled with the dust, giving her the look of a pale raccoon. Just too goddamn much.
Tessa decided to save the beef and kidney stew for Garland’s return the following day. After searching the refrigerator in vain for tomatoes, onions, and peppers, she fixed herself a plain omelet. After sliding it onto a plate, she regarded the pale half-moon of coagulated egg with distaste, thinking it looked more like a penance than a meal.
“So what if it does,” she muttered. “I never claimed to be a saint.” She poured herself a generous glass of jug white, carried a tray into the living room, settled into her favorite chair, and aimed the remote at the TV.
The atmosphere of near-hysteria that prevailed on the game show that flashed on to the screen contrasted stunningly with the blandness of her austere supper. Contestants dressed in blindingly bright clothes leapt about as if they had been basted with hot pepper sauce. Her omelet, which could have used some, tasted like the kind of food hospitals offer surgical patients just taken off a liquid diet.
A scream issuing from the TV speaker pulled her attention back. It had sounded like terror, but the emotion distorting the features of the plump female contestant being awarded a matched set of luggage in a hideous shade of pink was obviously meant to be an expression of joy. Tessa tapped the volume button down. It didn’t help. If anything, the gestures and postures looked even loonier without sound than with it. If that was body language, Tessa thought, the woman was overdue for a stay in a mental hospital.
She irritably zapped the TV off, put the plate with the half-eaten omelet on the table beside her chair, then leaned back and closed her eyes. A moment later she heard Plume’s claws clicking in from the kitchen. He paused to give her plate a surreptitious snuffle, followed by a couple of cautious slurps. Better you than me, she thought.
There had been no mistaking Jed’s body language either.
His body was, she admitted to herself, a lot better than she had expected. A hell of a lot better. Barry had been well-muscled, too, but in a different way. He’d been more compact. More . . . meaty, like a prime feed-lot steer. Jed had the rangy, long-legged look of a maverick. He could use a few extra pounds, but no one would ever mistake that taut hide for youthful sleekness. It took years of hard physical labor to produce corded arms like his, and the hat brim stripe across his forehead, its pallor startling against the walnut-brown of the rest of his face, told of long hours exposed to the elements.
Her father, Tessa reflected as she drained her wineglass, used to describe him as a long drink of water.
Well, she’d been thirsty and she’d drunk her fill of him. Her wry smile held little amusement. She knew Jed hadn’t really minded her seducing him; she also knew he didn’t give a damn about not being thanked for obliging her— if anything that would have embarrassed him all too hell. No, what had galled him was her avoidance of a repeat performance. If not later this evening, then tomorrow ... or maybe the day after. Soon. Someday. It hadn’t been her intention to treat him like a one-night stand. She wasn’t really sure what her intention had been. It had all just sort of ... happened.
Tessa got to her feet with a sigh and carried the plate Plume had obligingly cleaned out to the kitchen. He whined at the door, shifting from one paw to the other. She let him out, then contemplated the pot of coffee left standing since morning. The wine, drier than she liked, had left a sour taste in her mouth; the strong dark acidic brew would only make it worse. She poured it down the drain, then washed her few dishes, grateful Garland wasn’t there to ask unsettling questions, or, even worse, contemplate her sorrowfully with those big golden eyes of hers. Anything or anyone that hurt her Uncle Jed, hurt her.
Tessa slammed the washed pot down on the stove, rattling the dishes in the drain rack. “What about my hurts and my needs?” she demanded of the empty room. “Doesn’t anybody but me give a damn about them?”
Suddenly the house seemed hot and close. She grabbed a flannel work shirt off the rack on the back of the kitchen door and strode out into the night.
It was very clear. The winking lights of a jet crossing far above stitched a precise diagonal line across a darkening sky speckled irregularly with star shine. She heard the shriek of a rabbit.
Prey and predator. The natural order of things, she assured herself.
Could have been an owl, she thought. Or maybe the bobcats Miguel had reported seeing: one at dusk about ten days ago and a larger, darker one last weekend, both carrying prey. Probably taking food back to a hillside den, he said, to feed kits born of their late winter mating. She wondered if they mated for life, or if the torn would go his separate way as soon as the kits were able to fend for themselves.
“And if he does,” she asked herself in a jeering whisper, “will a loyal and doting uncle bobcat rally round to fill the emotional gap?” Not very damn likely.
From the shelter of the sunflowers ringing the old water trough near the kitchen door, a single cricket chirped tentatively. It was too cool for a chorus. Tessa shivered and pulled the flannel shirt close around her. If I’d asked Jed to stay, I wouldn’t be out here freezing my tail off.
Plume trotted out of the darkness, nuzzled his cool wet nose into the palm of her hand, and nudged her towards the house. She opened the door, intending to follow his waving tail in, then, at the last minute, pulled it shut behind him.
Not quite sure of her intention, she turned and walked, hands plunged deep in her pockets, towards the bam. A horse whinnied from the corral. It was Turnip’s call: nervy and demanding. She quickened her pace, trotted into the barn, grabbed a bridle off the rack, and before Turnip knew what was up, she had eased it over his head, shoved the bit in his mouth, and fastened the throat latch. He allowed himself to be led the short distance to a mounting block— he was too tall for her to scramble on bareback— and grudgingly obeyed her murmured “Whoa, there!” as she leaned to open the well-oiled gate latch.
Tessa waited to hear it click shut behind them before pummeling his ribs with her bare heels. Turnip grunted. His ears came back and he plunged forward, yanking the reins through her fingers. Tessa recovered her balance, collected the reins before he could capture the bit
between his large, yellow teeth, then leaned forward to give him his head, this time on her terms. The big horse’s stride steadied, lengthened, then flattened into a gallop.
Tessa didn’t see the light flash on in Miguel’s quarters; if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. The heady sensation of speed and the jarring impact of Turnip’s pounding hoofs drove every consideration from her head.
Tessa sent a whoop echoing into the foothills. One of Turnip’s ears flicked back; his stride faltered. She gave his flank a resounding slap with the flat of her hand.
“Go, you ugly bastard, go!”
He snorted, jounced up, skittered sideways. Then, with his ungainly head lowered, a blunt-ended arrow pointing the way, he hurtled down the ranch lane towards the forest service road, swung onto its roughly graveled surface, and up into the fast-approaching night.
Chapter Twenty
When Tessa returned home, she found Miguel waiting for her, pacing in front of the barn, muttering in Spanish under his breath.
“Madre de Dios!” he exclaimed as she slid off Turnip. “Where you been? When you go, it not yet dark; you come home, it past midnight. I think maybe, the way you leave, you run this horse to death.”
Turnip nudged impatiently at Tessa’s shoulder, smearing it with greenish slobber. “Don’t you wish,” she said, knowing Miguel shared Jed’s distaste for the horse. “We left in a hurry, sure, but we slowed down when we got into the hills— lot of gopher holes up there. Then, after we topped the rise on Hayden’s Bald, we headed for that little grassy mound about halfway along the fence on the Hatton side.” She shrugged. “Once we got there, I kind of leaned back, doing nothing, while Turnip grazed. I just plain lost track of time.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done something like that, Miguel,” she added, looking embarrassed. “It was real nice . . . the stars got so bright I almost needed— “ She laughed. “Do you suppose there’s such a thing as star glasses?”
Miguel’s lips compressed. He looked very stern.
“I’m sorry I woke you,” she said.
He stiffly waved her apology away. “I was muy preocupado, Miz Wagner.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, too, but there was no need to worry. I’m a big girl; I can take care of myself.” Miguel rolled his eyes at Turnip. “He’s not so bad, Miguel . . . and he sure can run,” she added with a cocky grin.
Too tired to shower, Tessa dropped her chinos and slobbered-on shirt in the hamper and plopped herself into bed. She slept soundly and dreamlessly. Upon waking at seven, however, she felt as if she hadn’t slept at all.
After a late breakfast, she worked the bay colt, but was too distracted to get the best out of him. Miguel didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. When Garland returned that evening, she answered Tessa’s provocative questions politely, but as briefly as possible.
“So how’s the campaign going?”
Garland regarded her mother warily. “What campaign is that?”
“Scott. You know, getting something for nothing.”
Garland looked away. “Not exactly nothing,” she muttered.
Tessa cupped her ear. “I can’t hear you,” she singsonged.
“I said,” Garland said with exaggerated distinctness, “he’s not into giving free gifts.”
“I could have told you that,” Tessa said. “He’s not a bank, after all, and banks haven’t done it since . . . God, it must be the mid-eighties. That’s how I got the microwave, you know, just by opening a second account up in Montrose. Closed it again as soon as I could get away with it.”
“That’s cheating,” Garland said.
“Lighten up, Garland.”
The two women glared at each other. Then, unsettled by this flare of hostility, they turned away and became busily engaged: Tessa in cooking supper; Garland in setting the table.
After about five minutes of working in silence—it seemed a lot longer, she thought--Tessa slowed her stirring of the warming beef and kidneys to look over her shoulder. “He came on to you?” Seen through the steam from the boiling pot of noodles. Garland looked wraithlike and vulnerable.
“Yeah.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“I ... I don’t think so. Mom. We don’t see Scott the same way.”
“That doesn’t mean I like the idea of him trying to seduce my daughter.”
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
“With me, you mean. Well, it won’t take me long to get supper on the table; afterwards, you can go cry on your Uncle Jed’s shoulder.”
“Please, Mom.”
Just then the telephone rang. “Will you answer it please?” Tessa asked. “If it’s Jed, take a message.”
“The table’s set, I can stir the—”
“Just say I’m unavailable, okay?” Garland hesitated; the phone shrilled on. “Garland, answer the damn phone.”
Garland grabbed the receiver off the hook. “Yes?” she demanded. “Oh. Look, I--” Out of the corner of her eye Tessa watched her pace back and forth in front of the wall fixture, one hand twisting the cord, the other raking her loose blond hair. “Rick, I can’t ... I ...”
Sensing her mother’s covert scrutiny, she retreated into the living room, the long cord snaking behind her. “What? No. I’ve already told you ...” Her voice lowered to an urgent whisper, the words undecipherable.
Rick Chavez.
Most women would find him impossible to resist. Tessa wasn’t sorry Garland could, but the reason she gave for it, putting her career goals first, seemed mighty peculiar. Well, maybe not peculiar exactly, maybe more like taking practical logic a little far. If I want to do this, I can’t do that . . .
That seemed like something Jed would come up with, Tessa mused. The adult version of not being able to have your cake and eat it, too.
The noodles bubbled louder. She stared at the pot. God. She hadn’t the vaguest idea how long it had been on the boil. Fifteen minutes, maybe. It’ll taste like mush.
Tessa upturned the pot over a colander, gasping as the steam rose scorching into her face. She grabbed the smallest of the wooden salad bowls from the shelf above the fridge and, as the pasta drained, tore lettuce into bite-sized bits, shook in a generous helping of garlic and cheese croutons, and laced the mixture with the olive oil and vinegar dressing she’d made for the dinner Garland had missed.
Tessa paused, the uncapped dressing bottle held tilted in her hand. If Garland had come home, then Jed and I . . .
Oil oozed between her fingers and dribbled onto the floor.
Garland returned to find her on her hands and knees furiously swiping a paper towel across the floor.
“Accident?” she inquired, as she replaced the receiver on the hook.
“Thanks to you!” Tessa snapped.
Garland, bewildered, threw up her hands. “Mom, I don’t know what I’ve done, but whatever it is, I’m sorry.”
Tessa sighed and stood up. “No, I’m sorry.” She didn’t say why; she wasn’t sure she knew all the reasons. “Supper’s ready . . . what do you say we sit down and give thanks for the good Lord’s bounty?”
Garland’s eyebrows shot up. Except for major holiday meals, her mother was not given to the saying of grace.
“That’s a novel way of changing the subject,” she commented lightly.
“No, I mean it,” Tessa said soberly, deciding she did. “I sometimes think we take the good things of life too much for granted.”
They ate in silence, but this time it was more like the beginning of peace than a temporary cessation of hostilities.
“Rick’s coming to see me,” Garland blurted.
Unprepared for this announcement, Tessa’s eyes widened. Her fork tilted; the stew-laden noodles slid into her lap, offering a welcome distraction.
As she mopped the gravy from her pants, Tessa sorted through the responses that sprang to mind and as quickly discarded them, settling for a simple, “When?”
“I thought this weekend ... I mean,
he was so insistent.” Her choice of words expressed harassment; her expression didn’t. If anything, she looked quite pleased with herself.
“Where will he be staying?” Tessa asked.
“A hotel in Telluride. He’s offered to take us out for dinner Saturday. I’ll pick something really nice and expensive. Campagna, maybe . . . he can afford it.”
“Isn’t that the restaurant Scott took you toi?”
Garland nodded. “I have to be in town all day Saturday, seeing as how I’m practically Scott’s production manager for the festival. I thought you and Rick could come and watch it with me.”
“This is the Bluegrass Festival you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. You got a problem with that?”
“Me?” Tessa said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Instead of going out after supper. Garland decided to stay home to watch the old Western Tessa had chosen from that evening’s TV line-up. If Garland was curious about why, if Jed had been the caller instead of Rick, her mother hadn’t wanted to speak to him, she didn’t ask.
They exchanged amused remarks about the parade of cowboy clichés, wincing when the hero jumped from the roof of the saloon into the saddle.
“If I were that horse, I’d’ve bucked him clear up again,” Tessa growled.
“Not me,” Garland said. “Too much effort. I would have just shifted one step sideways.”
“Ouch!” Tessa said. “What a wicked girl you are.”
“Not wicked. Mom, just practical.”
Tessa had cause to recall Garland’s statement the next day. She was working the bay colt—
Back, back, back . . . that’s a good boy—when she became suddenly aware of Scott Shelby watching her across the cradle of his arms resting on the corral’s top rail.
She walked Resha over to him and gazed down at him.
“Did I know you were coming?” she asked.
He lifted his gold head and turned the full force of his intense hazel-eyed regard on her. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” he said. “Don’t stop on my account. I like seeing you work.”
Colorado High Page 22
