Heartless

“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 thing. Thanks.” She ended the call. Oh, boy. If Jason was in the middle of something, she was going to catch hell. She’d only wanted to make up with him. Now, things were worse.

Time seemed to drag while she clutched her purse in her lap and tried not to slide into the passenger window of the little car, sitting at an odd angle in the ditch. It had been an impulsive decision to drive out here. She should have waited.

Gracie looked out the windshield at the rushing water that came up to the hood of her little car and hoped that Jason would hurry. Then she felt guilty that he was going to have to come out and rescue her again. She was such a klutz, she moaned silently. Nothing she did ever ended well. She was disaster on two legs. If only she wasn’t such a scatterbrain. If only…

She heard the roar of a pickup truck and looked ahead to see one of the big, double-cabbed black ranch trucks speeding toward her. He always drove too fast. The dirt road was muddy and flooded, too, and she had visions of disaster if he braked too hard. She could feel his temper in the way he swung the truck to the side of the road and stopped it. He didn’t slide. He was always so much in control of himself, even when he was raging mad.

She drew in a shaky sigh. She would be all right. Jason was always there to save her from herself. Even if he didn’t like having to do it.

Another truck, a wrecker, pulled up behind his truck. He slammed out of the driver’s seat and spoke to the driver of the wrecker. Then he came toward Gracie with long, angry strides, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes, his yellow slicker raincoat flapping over his boots.

The car was lying at an angle. Gracie was sitting at a forty-five-degree angle, sideways. Jason jerked the door open and glared down at her with compressed lips.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, holding out both hands.

She hesitated. He couldn’t possibly know why she resisted being lifted in a man’s arms, even if he was used to her idiosyncracies.

“Come on,” he said again, gentler this time. “Gracie, I know you don’t like being carried, but there’s no other way unless you want us to pull the car out of the ditch with you in it. The damned thing could roll.”

She bit her lower lip. That was even more terrifying. “O…okay.”

She lifted both her arms, clenching her jaw. Jason caught them and pulled her up, effortlessly, until he could pick her up. He swung her free of the car. She wasn’t wearing a raincoat—another stupid oversight—and she was quickly soaked as he carried her toward his truck.

He stuck her in the passenger seat, after sludging through an inch or more of thick red mud. “Fasten your seat belt,” he said curtly and slammed her door.

He spoke to the wrecker man and pointed down the road, toward the highway, not the ranch. Obviously he was showing the man that he wanted her car taken to the house in San Antonio. He didn’t want Gracie at the ranch. That hurt.