Callaghan's Bride

Leo paused by the counter and tugged at her apron strings with a mischievous grin.

“Don’t you dare,” she warned him. She smiled, though, before she turned her attention back to the dishes.

“Cag didn’t say a word,” he remarked. “He’s gone off to ride the fence line near the river with Mack before it gets dark.” Mack was the cattle foreman, a man even more silent than Cag. The ranch was so big that there were foremen over every aspect of it: the cattle, the horses, the mechanical crew, the office crew, the salesmen—there was even a veterinarian on retainer. Tess’s father had been the livestock foreman for the brief time he spent at the Hart ranch before his untimely death. Tess’s mother had left them when Tess was still a little girl, sick of the nomadic life that her husband loved. In recent years Tess hadn’t heard a word from her. She was glad. She hoped she never had to see her mother again.

“Oh.” She put a plate in the dishwasher. “Because of me?” she added quietly.

He hesitated. “I don’t know.” He toyed with a knife on the counter. “He hasn’t been himself lately. Well,” he amended with a wry smile, “he has, but he’s been worse than usual.”

“I haven’t done anything, have I?” she asked, and turned worried eyes up to his.

She was so young, he mused, watching all the uncertainties rush across her smooth, lightly freckled face. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t plain, either. She had an inner light that seemed to radiate from her when she was happy. He liked hearing her sing when she mopped and swept, when she went out to feed the few chickens they kept for egg production. Despite the fairly recent tragedy in her life, she was a happy person.

“No,” he said belatedly. “You haven’t done a thing. You’ll get used to Cag’s moods. He doesn’t have them too often. Just at Christmas, his birthday and sometimes in the summer.”

“Why?” she asked.

He hesitated, then shrugged. “He went overseas in Operation Desert Storm,” he said. “He never talks about it. Whatever he did was classified. But he was in some tight corners and he came home wounded. While he was recuperating in West Germany, his fiancée married somebody else. Christmas and July remind him, and he gets broody.”

She grimaced. “He doesn’t seem the sort of man who would ask a woman to marry him unless he was serious.”

“He isn’t. It hurt him, really bad. He hasn’t had much time for women since.” He smiled gently. “It gets sort of funny when we go to conventions. There’s Cag in black tie, standing out like a beacon, and women just follow him around like pet calves. He never seems to notice.”

“I guess he’s still healing,” she said, and relaxed a little. At least it wasn’t just her that set him off.

“I don’t know that he ever will,” he replied. He pursed his lips, watching her work. “You’re very domestic, aren’t you?”

She poured detergent into the dishwasher with a smile and turned it on. “I’ve always had to be. My mother left us when I was little, although she came back to visit just once, when I was sixteen. We never saw her again.” She shivered inwardly at the memory. “Anyway, I learned to cook and clean for Daddy at an early age.”

“No brothers or sisters?”

She shook her head. “Just us. I wanted to get a job or go on to college after high school, to help out. But he needed me, and I just kept putting it off. I’m glad I did, now.” Her eyes clouded a little. “I loved him to death. I kept thinking though, what if we’d known about his heart in time, could anything have been done?”

“You can’t do that to yourself,” he stated. “Things happen. Bad things, sometimes. You have to realize that you can’t control life.”

“That’s a hard lesson.”

He nodded. “But it’s one we all have to learn.” He frowned slightly. “Just how old are you—twenty or so?”

She looked taken aback. “I’m twenty-one. I’ll be twenty-two in March.”

Now he looked taken aback. “You don’t seem that old.”

She chuckled. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

He cocked an amused eyebrow. “I suppose you’ll see it as the latter.”

She wiped an imaginary spot on the counter with a cloth. “Callaghan’s the oldest, isn’t he?”

“Simon,” he corrected. “Cag’s going to be thirty-eight on Saturday.”

She averted her eyes, as if she didn’t want him to see whatever was in them. “He took a long time to get engaged.”

“Herman doesn’t exactly make for lasting relationships,” he told her with a grin.

She understood that. Tess always had Cag put a cover over the albino python’s tank before she cleaned his room. That had been the first of many strikes against her. She had a mortal terror of snakes from childhood, having been almost bitten by rattlesnakes several times before her father realized she couldn’t see three feet in front of her. Glasses had followed, but the minute she was old enough to protest, she insisted on getting contact lenses.

“Love me, love my enormous terrifying snake, hmm?” she commented. “Well, at least he found someone who was willing to, at first.”

“She didn’t like Herman, either,” he replied. “She told Cag that she wasn’t sharing him with a snake. When they got married, he was going to give him to a man who breeds albinos.”

“I see.” It was telling that Cag would give in to a woman. She’d never seen him give in to anyone in the months she and her father had been at the ranch.

“He gives with both hands,” he said quietly. “If he didn’t come across as a holy terror, he wouldn’t have a shirt left. Nobody sees him as the soft touch he really is.”

“He’s the last man in the world I’d think of as a giver.”

“You don’t know him,” Leo said.

“No, of course I don’t,” she returned.

“He’s another generation from you,” he mused, watching her color. “Now, I’m young and handsome and rich and I know how to show a girl a good time without making an issue of it.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You’re modest, too!”

He grinned. “You bet I am! It’s my middle name.” He leaned against the counter, looking rakish. He was really the handsomest of the brothers, tall and big with blond-streaked brown hair and dark eyes. He didn’t date a lot, but there were always hopeful women hanging around. Tess thought privately that he was probably something of a rake. But she was out of the running. Or so she thought. It came as a shock when he added, “So how about dinner and a movie Friday night?”

She didn’t accept at once. She looked worried. “Look, I’m the hired help,” she said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

Both eyebrows went up in an arch. “Are we despots?”

She smiled. “Of course not. I just don’t think it’s a good idea, that’s all.”

“You have your own quarters over the garage,” he said pointedly. “You aren’t living under the roof with us in sin, and nobody’s going to talk if you go out with one of us.”

“I know.”

“But you still don’t want to go.”

She smiled worriedly. “You’re very nice.”

He looked perplexed. “I am?”

“Yes.”

He took a slow breath and smiled wistfully. “Well, I’m glad you think so.” Accepting defeat, he moved away from the counter. “Dinner was excellent, by the way. You’re a terrific cook.”

“Thanks. I enjoy it.”