Calhoun - Diana Palmer

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      “She likes people! She’s a socialite!” Abby’s eyes were almost black now as she clenched her fists by her side and glared up at Calhoun.

      “…you just might…” Justin went on.

      “She’s a featherbrained, overstimulated eccentric!” Calhoun retorted.

      “…COME TO AN UNDERSTANDING!” Justin thundered, rising out of his chair with blazing eyes.

      They both froze at the unfamiliar sound of his raised voice. He never shouted, not even when he was at his angriest.

      “Damn, I hurt my ears,” Justin sighed, putting his palm to one while he glared at his brother and Abby. “Now, listen, this isn’t getting you anywhere. Besides that, any minute Maria and Lopez are going to come running in here thinking someone’s been murdered.” Just as he finished speaking, two robed, worried elderly people appeared, wide-eyed and apprehensive, in the doorway. “Now see what you’ve done,” Justin grumbled.

      “What is all this noise about?” Maria asked, pushing back her long salt-and-pepper hair and glancing worriedly around the room. “We thought something terrible had happened.”

      “¡Ay de mí! Another rumble.” Lopez shook his head and grinned at Abby. “What have you done now, niñita?”

      She glared at him. “Nothing,” she said tersely. “Not one thing—”

      “She went to a male strip show,” Calhoun volunteered.

      “I did not!” she protested, red faced.

      “What is the world coming to?” Maria shook her head, put her hands to it and went out mumbling in Spanish, followed by a chuckling Lopez. The couple, married more than thirty years, had been with the family for two generations. They were family, not just cook and former horse wrangler.

      “But, I didn’t!” Abby called after them. She darted a speaking glance at Calhoun, who was perched on a corner of Justin’s desk looking elegant and imperturbable. “Now see what you’ve done!”

      “Me?” Calhoun asked coolly. “Hell, you’re the one with the lurid curiosity.”

      “Lurid?” She gaped at him. “Go ahead, tell me you’ve never been to a female strip show.”

      Calhoun got up, looking uncomfortable. “That’s different.”

      “Oh, sure it is. Women are sex objects but men aren’t, right?”

      “She’s got you there,” Justin said.

      Calhoun glared at both of them, turned on his heel and left the room. Abby gazed after him smugly, feeling as if she’d won at least a minor victory. There was little consolation in her triumph, though. Calhoun had been harder to get along with than a bone-dry snake at a poison water hole lately. She didn’t know how or what, but she was going to have to do something about the situation, and soon.

      Abby arranged to miss breakfast the next morning. Calhoun’s attitude irritated her. He didn’t want her himself, but he was so possessive that she couldn’t get near another man. His attitude was frustrating at best. He had no idea how she felt, of course. She was careful to hide her feelings for him. A man like Calhoun, who was rich and moderately handsome, could have any woman he wanted. He wouldn’t want a plain, unsophisticated woman like Abby. She knew that, and it hurt. It made her rebellious, too. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life grieving for a man she could never have. It was far better to look in other directions. But how could she, when Calhoun refused to let go?

      She drove several miles from the ranch to the office at the mammoth feedlot in the small red British sports car she’d talked Justin into cosigning for when she’d graduated from the local vocational school. Because of the attention Calhoun and Justin paid to hygiene, there wasn’t as much odor as most feedlots generated, which surprised a lot of visiting cattlemen. Abby had once gone with Calhoun to tour some other feedlots and had come out with a new respect for the one back home. The Ballenger brothers’ operation was a little more expensive to run, but there were hardly any cattle deaths here because of disease. And that was a prime consideration. A rancher who contracted with the feedlot to fatten his cattle for slaughter didn’t want to lose the animals to disease.

      Since Abby was early, the office was deserted. There were three other women who worked here, all married, and they helped keep records on the various herds of feeder cattle being fattened for ranches all over the country. There were contracts to sort and file, records on each lot of cattle to keep, and ongoing vaccination and management reports. There was the constant hum of the heavy equipment used to feed the cattle and to remove waste to underground storage to be used later to fertilize pastures where grain was grown. The phones rang constantly and the computers had to be programmed. There was a payroll department, as well as a salesman, a staff veterinarian and a number of cowboys who moved cattle in and out and saw to feeding them and maintaining the machinery that kept it all going. Abby hadn’t realized until she’d come to work here how big the operation was.

      The sheer size of it was staggering, even for Texas. Fenced areas filled with steers stretched to the horizon, and the dust was formidable, as was the smell, which was inevitable even when sanitary management practices were employed.

      The Ballengers didn’t own a packing plant—that wasn’t legal, just as it wasn’t legal for packers to own custom feedlots. But the brothers did own a third of their feeder cattle, and the other two-thirds were custom fed. Abby had grown up hearing terms like profit margin, break-even prices and ration formulation. Now she understood what the words meant.

      She put her purse under her desk and turned on her computer. There were several new contracts waiting to be filled in for new lots of four-footed customers.

      The feedlot took in feeder cattle weighing six hundred to seven hundred pounds and fed them up to their slaughter weight of one thousand to eleven hundred pounds. The Ballengers had a resident nutritionist and an experienced stockman who handled the twice-daily feeding routine with its highly automated machinery. They had the feeding down to such a fine art that the Ballenger operation was included in the top five percent of feedlots nationally. And that was a real honor, considering all the things that could go wrong, from falling cattle prices to unexpected epidemics to drought.

      Abby was fascinated by the workings of it all. There were thousands of bawling steers and heifers out there. There were always big cattle trucks coming and going and men yelling and herding and vaccinating and dehorning, and the noise could get deafening despite the soundproofed office walls. Visiting cattlemen came to see their investments. Those who didn’t come were sent monthly progress reports. Daily records were kept on everything.

      Abby fed the first contract into her electronic typewriter, trying to decipher the spidery scrawl of Caudell Ayker, the feedlot office manager. He was second only to Calhoun in the chain of command, because Calhoun’s name went in as manager. He and Justin owned the feedlot jointly, but Justin held the lion’s share of the stock. Justin preferred money management to meeting with clients, so Calhoun did most of the day-to-day management on the feedlot. That was one reason Abby loved the job. It meant she got to see a lot of Calhoun.

      When Calhoun walked in the door in a dashing pale tan suit, Abby hit the wrong key, covering the contract with a flock of Xs. She grimaced, backspacing to correct her mistake, and then discovered that she couldn’t do it. The correction was too little, too late. Irritated, she ripped the paper out of the machine, put a clean sheet in and started all over again.

      “Having problems this morning, honey?” Calhoun asked with his usual cheerful smile, despite the way they’d parted in anger the night before. He never carried grudges. It was one of his virtues.

      “Just the usual frustrations, boss,” she answered with a blithe smile.

      He searched her eyes. They had such a peculiar light in them lately. He found

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