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“I think so,” Laredo agreed.
She folded the paper and slipped it inside her jeans pocket. “That’s one problem solved,” she murmured.
Laredo cocked his head, sensing a heaviness in her. “Are there more?”
“You.”
“I’ve been called many things, but never a problem.” He felt a need to lighten her mood, lift some of the trouble from her.
“Tara doesn’t remember a Texas rancher named Smith. She finds it hard to believe that Ty never contacted you on any of the trips they took to Fort Worth.” Jessy pulled in a deep breath and let it out in a rush. “And if that isn’t bad enough, she didn’t buy the story I gave O’Rourke about fixing up the Boar’s Nest. If it was a job you needed, Tara couldn’t understand why you didn’t apply for one at Dy-Corps. Apparently they have several openings. She made it sound like I rushed out and leased the feedlot so I could keep you at the ranch.”
“Are you saying that Tara thinks you are interested in me—woman to man?”
Jessy gave him a startled look that made him just a little bit angry. Then she appeared to consider his question. “Probably,” she concluded. “Either that or she thinks you’ve got something on me. What, I don’t know, but it planted a seed in Cat’s mind. To make matters worse, O’Rourke told Cat about me meeting you at the old cemetery.”
Laredo stiffened. “He was there?”
“I don’t think so.” Jessy shook her head. “I did see him shortly afterward. It’s possible he might have backtracked me there.”
“How did you explain that?”
“I didn’t. Basically I denied it and insisted he was mistaken. I didn’t really have any choice.” She leveled a look at him. “I can explain away a lot of things, but you aren’t one of them.”
“Which means I will likely be the weapon Tara will try to use against you,” he murmured thoughtfully. “We’ll have to see what we can do about that.”
“On the phone, you mentioned that you had talked to her in Fort Worth,” Jessy remembered. “What was that about?”
“I bought her a drink in the hotel bar where Chase had stayed. By then I was fairly certain who Chase was, and I wanted to pick up information to fill in some of the blanks for him. It didn’t take me long to figure out I wouldn’t get anything out of Logan, not without answering a lot of questions from him first. But I had no problem getting Tara to talk. Needless to say, your name came up.”
“I don’t need to ask what she had to say. I know it wouldn’t have been anything complimentary.” Jessy tilted her head back, letting it rest against the frame.
“It wasn’t so much what she said as the way she said it when she told me Chase’s death had left you in charge of the ranch. She seemed to think your only qualification for the position was that you were born and raised on the ranch. The envy in her voice made it easy to read between the lines and guess that she felt she was better suited for the position.”
“God help us all if she ever got her hands on the Triple C.” Her face was half in light and half in shadow, a study in strength and composure softened by the honey-dark hair lying loose about her shoulders; but it was the long, full line of her lips that Laredo found himself watching. “In a way, I’m surprised that Tara didn’t play the wronged woman and accuse me of stealing Ty from her.”
“Did you?”
“No. Ty had stopped seeing me well before they parted.”
“Then the two of you had an affair while he was still married to Tara,” Laredo realized and marveled again at her frankness, knowing it was something most women wouldn’t admit.
“You mean you hadn’t heard.” The laugh lines around her almond brown eyes crinkl
ed in a smile. “It’s common knowledge on the ranch. Nothing ever stays secret for long on the Triple C. The range telegraph sees to that.”
“Funny, I never would have thought you were the type to get involved with a married man. It’s notoriously a dead-end relationship.”
“My eyes were wide open when I went into it. I knew Ty would never leave Tara for me. A Calder doesn’t do that, and Ty was a Calder. Life is nothing but a series of good times and bad times. I seized my chance for one of those good ones.”
“You loved him for a long time, didn’t you,” Laredo guessed.
“Since I was a kid.” Her mouth lifted in a smile of remembrance. “Ty even gave me my first kiss. He did it as a joke, right in front of Buzz Taylor and Bill Summers. It was so embarrassing I was furious with him.”
“But you never forgot how it felt.”
She touched her fingertips to her lips in a remembering fashion and shook her head. “No, I never did.”
He sensed a loosening in her. This mental trip back to happier times had relaxed her, lessened some of the strain and tension of the current situation.
