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“See you around, Potter.” Chase stayed in the chair when the old man got up to shuffle down to the milling crowd. A lot had been said that warranted some thinking.
“Ty”—Tara leaned against his side—“who’s that tall girl in the flowered sundress? Is she somebody important?”
There was only one tall girl he could see. “That’s Jessy Niles. She works here.”
“What does she do?”
“She works cattle with the men.” He slid his wife an amused look and observed her expression of surprise.
“She isn’t that grubby girl I saw on the roundup?” Tkra frowned, not believing it was possible.
“The same.” Ty studied the girl under discussion with lazy speculation.
Always level and direct, Jessy had eyes that could look right into the heart of a man. She was a serious and silent girl, and Ty was never quite sure what lay behind that solid composure, whether it was indifference or speculation or a more closely guarded feeling. There had been eruptions when she’d come out fighting.
The faint smile on his face began to fade the longer he watched her. For all her slim height, there was nothing angular about her. When sun rays became trapped in the mane of her hair and toasted it gold, Ty noticed the proud way she held her head and the innate strength in her features. Her body was supple-shaped, with a graceful way of stirring when she moved. She was completely woman, a fact he acknowledged with slow surprise. He’d seen her too long in a man’s setting, and he suspected there was more to her that a man might not notice unless he studied her long and hard.
The discovery vaguely unsettled him. Pulling his eyes back, Ty looked sideways at Tara to search her expression. He found her watching him with cool interest. Ty quickly smiled to hide the idle interest that had been sparked.
“How would you like to see your wedding present?” His question banished all else from her mind, and the matter of Jessy Niles was forgotten.
Outside the stable, the wind howled, blowing a late-November snow across the yard. The bay mare in the large box stall nosed at the fresh hay in the manger, her ears swiveling restlessly, picking up every strange and new sound. She kept eyeing the coated man-figures studying her, their smells still new to her. She lipped at the hay.
“She’s settlin’ in,” the wrangler Wyatt Yates predicted.
“We’ll have to keep her in through the winter,” Ty stated. “She’s Texas-bred and not used to this kind of cold.”
The mare was more than just a new horse. She was another addition to the brood-mare herd that Ty was establishing. Good cow horses with savvy and breeding were hard to come by. The Triple C had always done a limited amount of raising its own horses for ranch work, but Ty had convinced his father the operation needed to be expanded and a higher quality of horses bred.
Some of the Cougar-bred mares made good foundation stock. In the last two months, Ty had purchased three more mares, all of which had proved their cow sense as working horses and added their bloodlines to the herd. He was still searching for two top stallions. Until he found what he wanted, he planned to send the mares off the ranch to be bred to a selected group of stallions.
This search had meant a lot of trips, with more to come. Tara always went with him, invariably turning it into a combination of business and pleasure. If Ty was honest, he would admit that he enjoyed showing her off, knowing he was the envy of every man for having such a beautiful and loving wife.
Leaving the new horse in Yates’s care, Ty left the stables and bucked the wind to reach the pickup. It was only a few hundred yards to The Homestead, waiting with lights shining in the gloaming of a winter dusk, but a man never walked when he could ride in this country.
On the porch, Ty stomped the snow off his boots on the bristled mat outside the front doors, then walked in. The house had a silent and empty feel to it. Cat was away at boarding school, which naturally made the house seem quieter than normal. Unbuttoning the sheepskin-lined suede jacket, he made a detour past the study and into the living room without seeing anyone. A glance into the dining room and kitchen found them equally empty, although there was the smell of something cooking.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor with slow deliberation and walked to the private quarters he shared with his wife. The two rooms were slowly being transformed by Tara, the heavier pieces of furniture moved out in favor of daintier ones. The four-poster bed had been replaced by a canopied king-sized one, pleated and draped in gold satin. New drapes at the windows, carpeting—something was always being added or changed. Ty was never sure what to expect when he walked in.
One table lamp was turned on a low setting, barely lighting the sitting room. After coming from the bright hall, it took him a second to adjust to the dim light. As he took off his hat, he noticed the flickering of the candlelight. The small round table, one of the more recent additions to the room, was covered with a damask cloth and set with china and crystal for two, and a pair of red candles in silver holders swirled with yellow flames in the middle.
Thra came from the bedroom, paused in its light when she saw him. As his gaze ran over her, again Ty was stirred by her beauty, clad this night in a gown of burgundy velvet, her ebony hair tumbling in ropy curls, diamond teardrops dangling from the delicate lobes of her ears. She glided across the room to him and he reached for her, so small and beautiful.
But she pressed her hands firmly against his chest and gave him no more than a brief peck on the lips. “You’re all dirty. I have things all laid out for your shower.”
His hands continued to hold her
shoulders, not letting her go but not pressing an embrace, while he breathed in the fragrance of her hair, his attention slipping to her cleavage in the low-cut gown. “What’s this?” Ty meant all of it—the candles, the table set for two, the evening gown.
“Tonight we have the house to ourselves, so I decided to do something different and intimate instead of sitting at that big old dining-room table again.”
“To ourselves, hmm?” There was a darkening of desire in his eyes.
“Your father called around three to say he was going to be late and not to wait dinner. He was going to stop at some place called Sally’s and eat,” she explained, her reddened lips turning up to him provocatively. “When I gave your mother the message, she suggested that you and I might like to have dinner alone for a change.”
“Where did she go?” His hold on her shoulders slackened as a sudden tension rippled through him.
“She said she was going to surprise your father and meet him at Sally’s. She left about twenty minutes ago.” She noticed Ty’s sudden hesitation, the troubled grimness around his mouth. She tipped her head to the side. “Is something wrong?”
