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Cat glanced after the cowboy. “You can’t fire a man for thinking the way he did about me, Ty. If you did, you might find yourself without anybody on the payroll.”
“I’m glad you realize that.” Her father wore a quietly pleased look.
“I do.” She realized that and much more.
With his words alone, her father had totally changed the way others would remember the incident. If they talked about it at all, it would be to discuss his clear and simple statement of the treatment he expected women to be accorded in order for their opposite number to be regarded as a man. It was a measure of the respect his men had for their boss that it was important to them to be seen as such by him.
Noble had always seemed a pretentious word to Cat, certainly not one to be applied to her father. He was strong, quietly confident, hard at times and loving at others, a leader of men definitely, but more than that, a man of the land who lived by old codes. Nobler codes.
For the first time in her life, Cat took pride in that. Her uncle Culley had been right—she would do well to emulate her father. In some corner of her mind, she understood that it was the only way to regain the respect she had lost.
She saw that it wasn’t enough to simply be a Calder; she would have to act like one. Which meant she would have to work longer and harder than anyone else, without complaint—woman or not, pregnant or not; that her conduct would have to be above reproach at all times; and that she would have to curb her emotions, especially her lightning-quick temper, and use her head, as her father had done only moments ago.
But knowing what to do and doing it were two very different things. Very little had ever been demanded of her. When Cat considered what she was demanding of herself, the enormity of the task before her was almost overwhelming. She immediately blocked it from her mind before it paralyzed her.
That evening, after the Christmas party had wound down to a close, instead of returning to The Homestead and leaving the cleanup to others, Cat remained behind and helped. The following morning, she was the first one at the barn. By the time the others arrived, she had already begun removing the ornaments from the tree and storing them in their boxes.
It was a small thing, insignificant in many ways. But it was a first step.
The second week of January, the winter’s first blizzard buried the Triple C under eighteen inches of snow. Howling winds piled it into man-sized drifts, obliterating the landscape and creating a wild, storm-tossed ocean of towering white waves that, in places, curled back on themselves. Snow-blocked roads, downed utility lines, frozen water pipes, stranded livestock—emergency situations came at them from every direction.
Cat pitched in wherever she could help, doing whatever needed to be done. When the backup gasoline-driven generator at the South Branch camp went out, she hauled a new one to them, following behind Jim Trumbo on the ranch’s road grader, one of several pieces of heavy equipment used to maintain the miles of roads that interlaced the Triple C. On her return trip to headquarters, she carried spools of electric cable for the ranch’s full-time electrician Mike Garvey and his assistant. As soon as the weather cleared sufficiently to take to the sky, she climbed into one of the single-engine Cessnas and took part in the air search to locate the scattered pockets of stranded livestock. Later, she made endless trips on the tractor, hauling bales from the hay shed to the airstrip, where others waited to load them in planes. When she wasn’t doing that, Cat was at the first-aid center, working with Art Trumbo’s wife, Amy, a registered nurse, treating everything from frostbite and muscle sprains to the not-so-uncommon cold. In addition, she did stints at the cookhouse, serving coffee and late meals to the road and utility crews as well as the working ranch hands. With everyone working equally long hours, no one noticed the amount of time Cat put
in, and she did nothing to draw attention to it.
When calving season arrived, it was a time of round-the-clock work in invariably miserable conditions. Cat spent her share of hours in the calving sheds, tramping through the muck and the mire, making sure there was always fresh coffee for the men, now and then pitching in to pull a calf, and taking over the care of the orphaned ones.
Through it all, Cat used her spare time to turn a corner of her bedroom into a nursery. Her old baby crib and changing table were hauled down from the attic. With each trip to town, she brought home a few more items for the baby until she had a supply of little undershirts, socks, sleepsuits, and newborn outfits along with the requisite bibs, rattles, teething rings, baby powder, diapers, and assorted baby items, all of it augmented by purchases Jessy had made.
Morning after morning Cat examined her relatively small melon-sized belly in the mirror and worried when it failed to reach the elephantine girth she thought it should have. Dr. Dan assured her that she was simply one of those rare women who didn’t get big, and for her not to worry, both she and the baby were fine. Then he encouraged her again to get plenty of exercise.
April rolled around, that changeable time of year when the seasons mixed, with winter’s snow one day and spring’s sunny warmth the next—-the month when the horses were traditionally brought in from winter range. When her father objected to Cat going on the gather, she reminded him of the doctor’s advice to exercise. In the end, he relented, and Cat went along, although she found herself assigned mainly to pasture gates.
But her father wasn’t so easily persuaded when spring roundup time came. The temper Cat had struggled to contain over these last months threatened to erupt in the face of his calm adamancy that she wasn’t going. It glittered in her eyes as she came to an abrupt stop and swung to face him, her gloved hands clenched in rigid fists at her sides.
“Dad, you are being ridiculous.” Her voice vibrated with the effort to keep her anger in check. She waved an impatient hand at Jessy, busy scraping her boots across the mud brush by the front door. “Would you forbid Jessy to go if she was the one who was pregnant?”
“No, her father replied evenly. “I would expect Ty to do that.”
Cat turned on her brother when he joined them on the porch. “I suppose you agree with him.”
He hesitated, his gaze traveling past her to their father, then back to her. “You shouldn’t be taking unnecessary risks, Cat.”
She propped her hands on her hips and looked from one to the other. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Jessy, talk to them,” she appealed to her sister-in-law. “Explain that I’m not some fragile thing that needs to be wrapped in cotton.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t do any good, Cat.” Amusement gleamed in her hazel eyes. “Men don’t want to believe that.”
“This is positively archaic,” Cat muttered and took her turn at the cast-iron boot scraper when Jessy finished. “I have been riding all along. The exercise is good for me. Dr. Dan—”
“You’ve used that argument before,” her father broke in smoothly. “It won’t work this time. You are too close to term.”
“My due date is almost two weeks away.” Which was stretching the truth a bit. It was more like nine days. “Practically every woman on this ranch has told me the first baby usually comes late. I am not about to sit around twiddling my thumbs for the next two weeks—or more. I’ll go crazy.”
“Just the same, you need to start taking it easy,” her father stated.
“Wait a minute—this is my body and my child. I think I know better than you what I am capable of doing,” Cat declared, angry now and not trying to hide it. “I am not going to do anything that would endanger me or my baby. I have no intention of tearing off across the countryside after some steer. And I am not about to work the branding fires where I might get kicked—”
“That’s right, you won’t. Because you are staying home,” Chase stated.
