LITMIR.BIZ

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having girls of my own,” she said. “My husband was sterile.”

      “I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry.”

      She smiled sadly. “I loved him, but he was a hard man to live with. He broke horses for Jason. He was kicked in the head by a mustang and died right there in the corral. I had no place else to go, no family, so I stayed here.”

      “I’m glad you did,” Gracie said. “You made this place a home. You still do.”

      Mrs. Harcourt beamed. “For that, you can have a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.”

      “My favorite!”

      The older woman chuckled. “I know. Now that I’m patched up, I’ll get started on that cake. You finish your breakfast.”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      Gracie went back to the table. Life was hard on everybody. Poor Mrs. Harcourt, a widow without even a child to comfort her in her old age.

      

      IT WAS A SLOW LUNCH day for Barbara’s Café. The owner sat at a booth with Gracie, nibbling on a salad. She was twelve years older than Gracie, with thick blond hair and pretty eyes. Everybody knew her locally and loved her. She’d been a widow for a long time, but she did have family. She’d adopted Rick Marquez, the San Antonio homicide detective, when he was in his teens. Now he was the joy of her life.

      “Why don’t you set your sights on Rick?” Barbara teased. “He’s young and single and incredibly handsome, even if I do say so.”

      “He carries a gun around,” Gracie pointed out.

      “So does your stepbrother,” the older woman replied.

      “Yes, when he’s on the ranch, but Jason doesn’t spend his life around dead bodies,” she added.

      “Having seen a couple of his cowboys from the Rocking Spur eating lunch over here last week, I could debate that. They said they’d just come in from pulling cattle out of mud, and they looked like death warmed over.”

      “So does Jason, when he’s helping with roundup or rescuing mired cattle,” Gracie said.

      “A multimillionaire, out working cattle,” the older woman sighed, shaking her head.

      “It’s where he’d rather be all the time, if he could.”

      Barbara smiled. “I remember when he took over that ranch. He looked as if he’d won the lottery.”

      “I’ll bet he had to pay a lot for it,” Gracie mused. “It’s huge.”

      “Actually I heard that he inherited it,” Barbara said.

      Gracie laughed. “Not likely. It belonged to some of Mrs. Harcourt’s family. They sold it to him.”

      Barbara shrugged. “I must have misunderstood. Speaking of the devil, how is Jason?”

      Gracie shifted in her chair. “I don’t know.”

      Something in the tone of her voice made Barbara tense. “Why don’t you know?”

      “I haven’t seen him for days, or even heard from him,” she said. “I planned a dinner party for two of our friends who are getting married. He hasn’t said if he’s coming over for it or not.”

      Barbara was surprised. “Have you quarreled? But you and Jason never argue, even about those hundreds of Christmas decorations you stick everywhere starting at Thanksgiving that drive him nuts…”

      “We just had a misunderstanding.” Gracie couldn’t bear to talk about what had really happened. “He left without a goodbye when he came down here.”

      Barbara slid a hand over the other woman’s where it rested on the table. “You should go over to the ranch and talk to him,” she said. “He’s awkward with people sometimes, like most loners are. Maybe he wants to make up and just doesn’t know how.”

      Gracie brightened a little. “You’re perceptive,” she said. “Yes, he is awkward with people. He doesn’t ever come right out and apologize, but he works it around so that you understand what he means. He holds things inside.” She sighed. “My stepsister, Glory, used to say that Jason got his feelings hurt more often than any of us realized, but he never showed it. She said he thought of it as a kind of weakness.”

      “That was his father’s doing,” Barbara said coolly. “The old man loved women, plural, but he was never much good at commitment. He only married women he couldn’t get into bed any other way—out of desire, never love. He never loved any of them. He taught Jason that love was a weakness. He said women used sex as a weapon to extort money from men.”

      “Good Lord!” Gracie exclaimed. “How do you know that?”

      “One of my cousins used to work for Myron Pendleton. He overheard him talking to Jason about women one day. He was absolutely disgusted. In fact, he quit the job. He said he wasn’t working for a man who had no respect for his womenfolk.”

      Gracie shook her head. “I’ve lived with him all these years and I didn’t know that.”

      “You’ve lived under his protection, honey, not under his roof,” Barbara said drily. “You and Glory were away at school, but when you came home, Jason lived down here and left the two of you up in San Antonio with Harcourt and the others. Didn’t you notice?”

      Gracie hadn’t. It was only just dawning on her that Jason, while spoiling and protecting them, had kept them apart from him at the same time.

      “Don’t you really know what’s wrong with Jason?” Barbara asked in a peculiar tone.

      Gracie gave her a blank look. “What do you mean?”

      Barbara let go of her hand and avoided her eyes. “Nothing. I was just thinking out loud. It’s probably something to do with business that’s got him grumpy, don’t you imagine?”

      Gracie relaxed. “Yes. I imagine it is.” She sipped coffee. “You know, I think I will stop by the ranch on my way home. He can’t miss this party.”

      “That’s the spirit.” Barbara glanced out the window and winced. “Bad weather coming again. Probably that tropical storm headed our way. Look at those dark clouds!”

      “I’d better get moving,” Gracie replied. “It’s getting dark, too.”

      “You don’t want to be on the roads at night when it’s raining,” Barbara said worriedly. “The road up to the ranch isn’t paved. You’ll go into the ditch for sure. It’s not safe. There have been some kidnappers around here lately, and you would be a good catch for those horrible criminals.”

      “I drive a VW,” Gracie said with easy confidence. “I’m not sliding into any ditches! As for kidnappers—this is Jacobsville. Nothing happens around here.”

      

      THIRTY MINUTES LATER, sitting on the side of the road in the dark with rain pounding on the roof and the car at a drunken angle in a ditch, she ate those words. She called the ranch on her cell phone. Grange, Jason’s foreman, answered.

      “Grange, can you tell Jason I’m stuck in the ditch on the side road from the ranch?” she asked plaintively. “I lost control of the car.”

      “Sure I can. Want me to come out with the truck and get you?” he asked.

      She hesitated. Once she would have said yes. Now, with Jason acting so strangely, she didn’t want to put Grange in any awkward situations. “Better call Jason this time, I guess,” she replied.

      “No problem,” he said gently. “You okay?”

      “I’m fine.”

      “I’ll get him. He’s out with the boys checking for mired cattle, so it may be a few minutes. Sit tight.”

      “Sure

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