LITMIR.BIZ

       Three

      IT WAS stormy and rain peppered the windscreen of the small jet as Dawson piloted it into his private airstrip at Sheridan. He never flinched nor seemed the least bit agitated at the violent storm they’d flown through just before he set the plane down. He was as controlled in the cockpit as he was behind the wheel of a car and everywhere else. When he’d been fighting the storm, Barrie had seen him smile.

      “No butterflies in your stomach?” he taunted when he’d taken off his seat belt.

      She shook her head. “You never put a foot wrong when the chips are down,” she remarked, without realizing that it might sound like praise.

      His pale green eyes searched her face. She looked tired and worried. He wanted to touch her cheek, to bring the color back into her face, the light back into her eyes. But it might frighten her if he reached toward her now. He might have waited too late to build bridges. It was a sobering thought. So much had changed in his life in just the past two weeks, and all because of a chance meeting with an old buddy at a reunion and a leisurely discussion about Tucson, where the friend, a practicing physician, had worked five years earlier in a hospital emergency room.

      Barrie noticed his scrutiny and frowned. “Is something wrong?”

      “Just about everything, if you want to know,” he remarked absently, searching her eyes. “Life teaches hard lessons, little one.”

      He hadn’t called her that, ever. She’d never heard him use such endearments to anyone in normal conversation. There was a new tenderness in the way he treated her, a poignant difference in his whole manner.

      She didn’t understand it, and she didn’t trust it.

      A movement caught his eye. “Here comes Rodge,” he murmured, nodding toward the ranch road, where a station wagon was hurtling toward the airstrip. “Ten to one he’s got Corlie with him.”

      She smiled. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them.”

      “Not since my father’s funeral,” he agreed curtly. He left the cockpit and lowered the steps. He went down them first and waited to see if she needed help. But she’d worn sneakers and jeans, not high heels. She went down as if she were a mountain goat. She’d barely gotten onto the tarmac when the station wagon stopped and both doors opened. Corlie, small and wiry and gray-haired, held her arms out. Barrie ran into them, hungry for the older woman’s warm affection.

      Beside her, Rodge shook Dawson’s hand and then waited his turn to give Barrie a hug. He was at least ten years older than Corlie, and still dark-headed with a few silver streaks. He was dark-eyed and lean. When he wasn’t managing the ranch in Dawson’s absence, he kept busy as Dawson’s secretary, making appointments and handling minor business problems.

      The two of them had been with the Rutherfords for so long that they were more like family than paid help. Barrie clung to Corlie. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the woman.

      “Child, you’ve lost weight,” Corlie accused. “Too many missed meals and too much fast food.”

      “You can feed me while I’m here,” she said.

      “How long are you staying?” Corlie wanted to know.

      Before Barrie could answer her and spill the beans, Dawson caught her left hand and held it under Corlie’s nose. “This is the main reason she came back,” he said. “We’re engaged.”

      “Oh, my goodness,” Corlie exclaimed before a shocked Barrie could utter a single word. The older woman’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s what Mr. Rutherford always prayed would happen, and me and Rodge, too,” she added, hugging Barrie all over again. “I can’t tell you how happy I am. Now maybe he’ll stop brooding so much and smile once in a while,” she added with a grimace at Dawson.

      Barrie didn’t know what to say. She got lost in the enthusiasm of Rodge’s congratulations and Dawson’s intimidating presence. He must have had a reason for telling them about the false engagement, perhaps to set the stage for Mrs. Holton’s arrival. She could ask him later.

      Meanwhile, it was exciting to look around and enjoy being back in Sheridan. The ranch wasn’t in town, of course, it was several miles outside the city limits. But it had been Dawson’s home when she came here, and she loved it because he did. So many memories had hurt her here. She wondered why it was so dear to her in spite of them.

      She found herself installed in the backseat of the station wagon with Corlie while Dawson got in under the wheel and talked business with Rodge all the way up to the house.

      The Rutherford home was Victorian. This house had been built at the turn of the century, and it replaced a much earlier structure that Dawson’s great-grandfather had built. There had been Rutherfords in Sheridan for three generations.

      Barrie often wished that she knew as much about her own background as she knew about Dawson’s. Her father had died when she was ten, too young to be very curious about heritage. Then when her mother married George Rutherford, who had been widowed since Dawson was very young, she was so much in love with him that she had no time for her daughter. Dawson had been in the same boat. She’d learned a bit at a time that he and his father had a respectful but very strained relationship. George had expected a lot from his son, and affection was something he never gave to Dawson; at least, not visibly. It was as if there was a barrier between them. Her mother had caused the final rift, just by marrying George. Barrie had been caught in the middle and she became Dawson’s scapegoat for the new chaos of his life. George’s remarriage had shut Dawson out of his father’s life for good.

      Barrie had tried to talk to Dawson about his mother once, but he’d verbally slapped her down, hard. After that, she’d made sure personal questions were kept out of their conversation. Even today, he didn’t like them. He was private, secretive, mysterious.

      Rodge took her bags up to her old room on the second floor, and she looked around the hall, past the sliding doors that led to the living room on one side and the study on the other, down to the winding, carpeted staircase. Suspended above the hall was a huge crystal chandelier, its light reflected from a neat black-and-white tile floor. The interior of the house was elegant and faintly unexpected on a ranch.

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