LITMIR.BIZ

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was afraid.

      She went in and produced the document. The attorney took his time looking it over. He was bilingual, so the wording that had sent Pepi crazy trying to decipher with the help of a Spanish-English dictionary made perfect sense to him.

      “It’s legal, I assure you,” he mused, handing it back. “Congratulations,” he added with a smile.

      “He doesn’t know we’re married.” She groaned. She told him the particulars. “Doesn’t that mean anything, that he was intoxicated?”

      “If he was sober enough to agree to be married, to initiate the ceremony and to sign his name to a legal certificate of marriage,” he said, “I’m afraid it is binding.”

      “Then I’ll just have to get an annulment,” she said heavily.

      “No problem,” he said, smiling again. “Just have him come in and sign—”

      “He has to know about it!” she exclaimed, horrified.

      “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Even if he did apparently get married without realizing it, there’s just no way the marriage can be dissolved without his consent.”

      Pepi buried her face in her hands. “I can’t tell him. I just can’t!”

      “You really have to,” he said. “There are all kinds of legal complications that this could create. If he’s a reasonable man, surely he’ll understand.”

      “Oh, no, he won’t,” she said on a miserable sigh. “But you’re right. I do have to tell him. And I will,” she added, rising to shake his hand. She didn’t say when.

      Pepi mentally flayed herself for not telling C.C. the truth when he’d demanded it. She’d only wanted to spare him embarrassment, and she hadn’t thought any damage would be done. Besides that, the thought of being his wife, just for a little while, was so sweet a temptation that she hadn’t been able to resist. Now she was stuck with the reality of her irresponsibility, and she didn’t know what she was going to do.

      For a start, she avoided C.C. With roundup in full swing, and the men working from dawn until long after dark, that wasn’t too hard. She spent her own free time with Brandon, wishing secretly that she could feel for him what she felt for C.C. Brandon was so much fun, and they were compatible. It was just that there was no spark of awareness between them.

      “I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time with Hale,” her father said at supper one night near the end of the massive roundup, during one of his rare evenings at home.

      “There, there, you’re just jealous because he’s getting all your apple pies while you’re out working,” she teased.

      He sighed. “No, it’s not that at all. I want to see you in a happy marriage, girl. The kind your mother and I had. Hale’s a fine young man, but he’s too biddable. You’d be leading him around by the nose by the end of your first year together. You’re feisty, like your mother. You need a man who can stand up to you, a man you can’t dominate.”

      Only one man came immediately to mind and she flushed, averting her eyes. “The one you’re thinking of is already spoken for,” she said tersely.

      His eyes, so much like her own, searched her face. “Pepi, you’re old enough now to understand why men see women like Edie. He’s a man. He has…a man’s needs.”

      She picked up her fork and looked at it, trying not to feel any more uncomfortable than she already did. “Edie is his business, as he once told me. We have no right to interfere in his private life.”

      “She’s an odd choice for a ranch foreman, isn’t she?” he mused, still watching her like a hawk. “A city sophisticate, a divorcée, a woman used to wealth and position. Don’t you find it unexpected that she likes C.C.?”

      “Not really. He’s quite sophisticated himself,” she reminded him. “He seems to fit in anywhere. Even at business conferences,” she added, recalling a conference the three of them had attended two years ago. She and her father had both been surprised at the sight of C.C. in a dinner jacket talking stocks and bonds and investments with a rancher over cocktails. It had been an eye-opening experience for Pepi.

      “Yes, I remember,” her father agreed. “A mysterious man, C.C. He came out of nowhere, literally. I’ve never been able to find out anything about his background. But from time to time, things slip out. He’s not a man unused to wealth and position, and at times he makes me feel like a rank beginner in business. He can manipulate stocks with the best of them. It was his expertise that helped me put the ranch into the black. Not to mention those new techniques in cattle management that he bulldozed me into trying. Embryo transplants, artificial insemination, hormone implants…although he and I mutually decided to stop the hormone implants. There’s been a lot of negative talk about it among consumers.”

      “Negative talk never stopped C.C.,” she said, chuckling.

      “True enough, but he thinks like I do about it. If implants cut back beef consumption because people are afraid of the hormones, that cuts our profits.”

      “I give up,” she said, holding up both hands. “Put away your shooting irons.”

      “Sorry,” he murmured, and smiled back.

      “Actually I agree with you,” she confessed. “I just like to hear you hold forth. I’m going dancing with Brandon on Friday night. Okay?”

      He looked reluctant, but he didn’t argue. “Okay, as long as you remember that my birthday’s Saturday night and you’re going out with me.”

      “Yes, sir. As if I could forget. Thirty-nine, isn’t it…?”

      “Shut up and carve that apple pie,” he said, gesturing toward it.

      “Whatever you say.”

      She tried not to think about C.C. for the rest of the week, but it was impossible not to catch an occasional glimpse of him in the saddle, going from one corral to the next. He let the herd representatives ride in the Jeep—representatives from other ranches in the area checking brands to make sure that none of their cattle had crossed into Mathews territory. It was a common courtesy locally, because of the vast territory the ranches in south Texas covered. Her father ran over two thousand head of cattle, and when they threw calves, it took some effort to get them all branded, tattooed, ear-tagged and vaccinated each spring and fall. It was a dirty, hot, thankless chore that caused occasional would-be cowboys to quit and go back to working in textile plants and furniture shops. Cowboying, while romantic and glamorous to the unknowing, was low paying, backbreaking and prematurely aging as a profession. It meant living with the smell of cow chips, burning hide, leather and dirt—long hours in the saddle, long hours of fixing machinery and water pumps and vehicles and doctoring sick cattle. There was a television in the bunkhouse, but hardly ever any time to watch it except late on summer evenings. Ranch work was year-round with few lazy periods, because there was always something that needed doing.

      The advantages of the job were freedom, freedom, and freedom. A man lived close to the earth. He had time to watch the skies and feel the urgent rhythm of life all around him. He lived as man perhaps was meant to live, without technology strangling his mind, without the smells and pressures of civilization to cripple his spirit. He was one with nature, with life itself. He didn’t answer to an alarm clock or some corporation’s image of what a businessman should be. He might not make a lot of money, he might risk life and limb daily, but he was as free as a modern man could get. If he did his job well and carefully, he had job security for all his life.

      Pepi thought about that, and decided that it might not be such a bad thing after all, being a cowboy. But the title and job description, while it might fit C.C., sat oddly on his broad shoulders. He was much too sophisticated to look at home in dirty denims. It was easier now to picture him in a dinner jacket. All the same, he did look fantastic in the saddle, riding a horse as easily as if he’d been born on one. He was long and lean and graceful, even in a full gallop, and she’d seen him break a horse to saddle more

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