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His mouth quirked in that hard, familiar way Tara remembered. “Not anymore.”
“No, not anymore.” She ran her glance over the chiseled strength of his features. “This is your element. I realized that the first time I saw you here at the ranch. That was during roundup, too. Remember?”
“I remember.” He nodded. “But that time it was spring roundup.”
“With mud everywhere,” Tara recalled. “I couldn’t put a foot down without sinking up to my ankles in it. At least this time it’s dry.”
“Too dry.” His glance made an assessing sweep of the sky, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight.
Tara glanced up as well, but not for long. The sky was huge, blue, and empty, like all the rest of this land. Suffocatingly so, in her opinion, but she didn’t voice that.
“I know you need rain, but I confess, I greatly appreciate the sunshine this morning.”
“I imagine you do.” His mouth crooked in an absent smile.
The continued briefness of his answers was irritating, indicating, as they did, that she had only half of his attention. The rest was centered on those damned cattle.
Tara let the silence stretch between them for a while, and chose her next subject with care. “This area,” she began on a curious note, “isn’t this part of the land that you’re seeking to gain title to?”
His dark gaze pinned her, sharp and probing. “How did you know that?”
Tara smiled that enigmatic smile he knew so well. “Surely you haven’t forgotten, Ty, that I lived on this ranch for a while, too.”
He relented a little. “You never seemed that interested in the ranch.”
“I was always interested, Ty. Too often, though, that interest ran at cross-purposes with yours—or your father’s.”
There was too much truth in that for Ty to deny—not that he wanted to rehash it all again. Yet he hadn’t expected that kind of an admission from Tara.
He made a slow reassessment of her, but it was hard to see more than her dark, vibrant beauty with its porcelain skin and soft curves. Even in Western garb of black jeans, a cable knit sweater of winter white under a white woolly vest, and a flat-crowned cowboy hat, Tara managed to look the picture of stylish elegance, completely untouched by the dust and the noise and the confusion before her.
“This is the land, isn’t it,” she repeated, but this time it wasn’t so much a question as a statement.
“It is,” he confirmed.
“Have you made any progress in obtaining title?”
“We’re working on it.”
The curve of her lips lengthened. “When a Calder gives you an answer like that, it usually means you are no closer than you were before.” She slanted him a mocking look. “I speak from experience.”
“Truthfully, I couldn’t say one way or the other,” Ty replied smoothly. “Dad’s been handling that end of it. I’ve been too busy with roundup and the plans for the new facility to check on the status of things.”
“Actually I expected Chase to bring us out here this morning. He isn’t as active as he used to be.” Tara hesitated, a flicker of concern clouding her eyes. “Or am I wrong about that?”
“He’s been bothered a bit more by arthritis lately,” Ty admitted. “It goes back to the injuries he suffered in the plane crash. The doctors warned him that he would be troubled by it when he got older. Nowadays, he can’t spend much time in the saddle without a lot of pain.”
“He must hate that.”
“Almost as much as he hates doing paperwork.”
“Then he’s l
eft most of the actual running of the ranch to you.”
“We’ve divvied up the responsibility. Or,” one corner of his mouth lifted in a dry smile, “to put it in your lingo, he’s the chairman of the board and I’m the president.”
“You make a fine president, but I always knew you would.” Tara saw the shutters close, turning his features expressionless. “Don’t go getting all aloof on me,” she chided with playful mockery. “What I said is absolutely true. Maybe we aren’t man and wife anymore, but we made a good team. We still do. This time it just happens to be a business relationship. It’s not without precedent for a Calder, you know.”
