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“Isn’t it?” Jessy grinned, and all three of them laughed like a bunch of girls. A knock at the door interrupted the moment.
“Yes, who is it?” Judy asked.
“Chase,” came the answer. “Reverend Pattersby has arrived. We can begin whenever the bride is ready.”
“I’ll be right down.”
The ceremony took place in the den, in front of the cavernous fireplace with its sweeping set of longhorns mounted above the stone mantelpiece. It wasn’t the painful ordeal that Cat had thought it might be, mostly because she sincerely wanted Ty and Jessy to find the happiness she had been denied.
But there were moments when the tears in her eyes were for herself. Moments that came when Ty slipped a plain gold band on Jessy’s finger, when they fed each other wedding cake and Ty licked the icing from Jessy’s fingers, and when they scrambled to the can-festooned Range Rover amid a pelting shower of rice.
The worst came, however, after Reverend Pattersby and the Niles family left The Homestead, leaving Cat alone in the suddenly quiet house with her father, with too much time on her hands, and too little to do but think and remember.
FOUR
The first gray of dawn was a long brushstroke on the eastern horizon. Standing at the edge of The Homestead’s pillared front porch, Cat watched the sunrise grow and spread. Fully dressed, she had both hands wrapped around a coffee mug, warming herself with the heat from it. Sleep had been elusive, and dream-tortured when it came, finally driving Cat from her bed an hour earlier. She waited now for the sun to rise and listened to the first stirrings of activity in the ranch yard beyond the house.
Sound carried easily in the early morning stillness, bringing to her the murmur of voices, the grating rumble of heavy barn doors sliding open, and the nicker of horses. Here and there, lights came on, drawing her glance to the collection of buildings and the dark figures moving about them. Morning chores had begun. Cat downed the last of her coffee, set the mug on the top step, and struck out across the yard toward the massive barn.
The huge double doors stood open. Light from the overhead fixture in the barn’s long corridor spilled outside onto the packed earth. A buckskin mare poked her head over a stall’s partition and nickered to Cat when she walked in. She paused in the alleyway, the barn’s warmth swirling around her, redolent of sun-cured hay and horse feculence.
Metal pails clattered together in the feed room. Cat turned toward its door as a young, lanky cowboy stepped out, his gloved hands wrapped around the wire handles to five feed buckets. He stopped when he saw her, his head lifting to reveal the freckled face beneath the brim of his cowboy hat and the wheat-colored hair around his ears.
“Good morning, Nick,” she greeted one of Repp’s closest friends.
“Morning.” He bobbed his head, his glance sliding away. “You’re up awful early.”
“So are you.”
“Yeah, well…I didn’t have much choice.” He looked down the alley at the flanking stalls. “It’s a workday.”
“I’ll give you a hand.” She reached for the buckets he carried. After a slight hesitation, he surrendered three of them to her.
Two hours later, her hands gripped a pitchfork instead of grain buckets as Cat scooped soiled straw into a wheelbarrow strategically positioned at the stall door. Intent on her task, she paid no attention to the approaching footsteps until a tall figure paused in the stall’s doorway, partially blocking her light. She glanced over her shoulder and saw her father standing there.
Cat wasn’t the least bit surprised that he had known where to find her. Her presence at the barn so early in the morning was too unusual; word of it would have spread through the ranch grapevine within minutes of her arrival. It was only logical that her father would have been informed about it.
“Good morning.” She picked up a pile of horse manure, balancing it on the fork tines, and carried it to the wheelbarrow, feeling the strain in her arm muscles.
“Good morning.” He stepped to one side, giving her room to dump her load. “Audrey has breakfast ready.”
Food held no appeal to her, but Cat wasn’t about to admit that, not when she could feel the concerned probe of his gaze. “I’ll be up as soon as I finish here.” She knocked the last of the droppings from the pitchfork and turned back to the stall.
“Nick can take care of that,” he countered, an edge of impatience in his voice.
“I know, but I started it, and I’ll finish it.”
“Cat—” he began, no longer trying to mask his impatience.
“Dad, I need to do this. I need to work so I—” She stopped as her voice started to break on the sob that filled her throat. She tightened her grip on the wooden handle, battling to control her emotions, all the while keeping her back to him. “I need to work.”
A long sigh slipped from him, weighted with weariness. “All right,” he said, giving in. “As soon as you get this stall cleaned, come up to the house for breakfast.”
“I will.” The metal tines sliced under another pile of waste.
Unable to dissuade her, Chase walked away, fully aware of the reason for her actions. There was solace to be found in working yourself to the point of exhaustion where you are too tired to think or feel anything. No matter how much he might wish it were otherwise, there was nothing he could say or do to make her pain easier to bear. This was something Cat had to work through herself. He couldn’t help her, which was the hardest thing to accept as a parent, and Chase found it more difficult than most.
Outside the barn, he paused and ran his gaze over the ranch compound, his expression grim and tight. Morning dew clung to a spider’s web spun across a corral rail. The drops sparkled diamond-bright in the angling sunlight, but Chase took no notice of them.
