In Caroline’s experience, custody was not something in which children had a say. “But he was only ten years old,” she said incredulously.
“Even at ten years old, when Jay made up his mind about something a stampeding herd of cattle couldn’t get him to change it. He was a Hamilton and a rancher and he wasn’t leaving Wyoming, and that was that.” Joe shrugged a little. “Nancy knew all along she’d have to leave Jay if she left me. There was never any question of that.” The big man looked at Caroline’s reserved face. “I don’t want him to be so bitter against his mother, Caroline. I must admit that’s one of the reasons I asked you to stay. I was hoping that by meeting a girl like you, a girl very different from the other girls he knows, he might be able to understand his mother better. And to understand is to forgive.”
“He’s twenty-seven years old, isn’t he?” Caroline asked. “Hasn’t he grown up yet?”
There was a flash of amusement in Joe’s eyes and he turned and started up the car once more. “Oh, yes,” he said as he put the car into gear, “Jay has most certainly grown up.”
Jay Hamilton rode up to the ranch house later that night. He was tired and dirty and bloody from a day of branding and castrating and dehorning and inoculating cattle, but they had finished the job and he felt good. He was unsaddling his horse when Hank Rogers, foreman of one of the cowboy crews who worked on the Double Diamond, appeared. “Got it all done, Jay?” he asked laconically.
“Yeah.” Jay finished unbuckling the girth. “Did you get the horses out to pasture today?”
“Yep.” Hank leaned his shoulders comfortably against the barn. “That’s a mighty fine-looking filly your dad’s got visiting,” he offered.
Jay put the girth on top of the saddle and turned to look at his foreman. Hank was thirty-five, married, and the father of four. “So she came,” Jay said flatly.
“Yes sir, she did. Looks like one of them models you see in the magazines-all long legs and long blond hair.”
“Great,” Jay said disgustedly. “That’s all we need around here.” He lifted his saddle off the gelding’s back and took it into the barn. There, reposing innocently among the huge western saddles, was a tiny postage stamp of leather. “What’s that?” he asked in astonishment.
“That’s her saddle.” Hank had followed him in the door.
“You call that a saddle?”
“They do back East. It’s what they use to go out chasing after little foxes—you know, all dressed up in them red coats and all. I heard her telling your dad.”
Jay looked nauseated. “God help us,” he muttered. He took his time rubbing down his horse and started slowly, reluctantly, toward the house.
* * * *
Caroline didn’t normally sleep well her first night in a strange bed, but the old double bed in the guestroom of the Double Diamond ranch house proved to be an exception. She slept deeply and dreamlessly and woke at about seven-thirty in the morning. There were four bedrooms on the second floor of the house, but only one bath, so Caroline peeked cautiously into the hallway before she slipped out in her terry-cloth robe to see if the bath was free. It was, and apparently everyone else was up, as all the bedroom doors were standing open. Caroline quickly showered, dressed in jeans, a green Izod shirt, and rubber-soled oxfords, and went downstairs to the kitchen.
She was greeted by Ellen Mahoney, the woman who had been the Hamiltons’ housekeeper ever since Nancy left seventeen years ago. Ellen would be seventy this year, Joe had told Caroline, but she was still as feisty as ever. She lived in the large sitting room—bedroom addition that Joe had built for her off the kitchen. She greeted Caroline now with a cheery good morning and asked what she would like for breakfast.
“Whatever you’ve got, Ellen,” Caroline responded agreeably. She seated herself at the big kitchen table and asked, “Where is everyone?”
“Out organizing the day’s work,” Ellen replied, laying bacon on the grill. “Joe said they’d be back by nine to take you on a tour.”
Caroline was just finishing her breakfast, a much larger breakfast than she was accustomed to eating, when the kitchen door opened and a young man came in. Caroline put down her coffee cup and looked at him. She knew, instantly, that this was her stepbrother.
He was not as tall as his father and not as massively built. But he looked lean and hard and he had the darkest blue eyes Caroline had seen in her life. It was astonishing, really, she found herself thinking, that anything that dark could be that blue. His thick hair was medium brown, with the silky sheen of a child’s, but the deeply tanned face was unmistakably male.
Jay stared at Caroline as appraisingly as she at him. What he saw confirmed all his expectations. She would look great on the cover of a magazine, he thought, but she’d be perfectly useless on a ranch. “I’m Jay Hamilton,” he said abruptly. “You must be Caroline.”
His blue eyes held none of the admiration Caroline was accustomed to see in the eyes of the men who looked at her. “Yes, I’m Caroline Carruthers,” she answered coolly. “How do you do, Jay.”
He was surprised, as people always were, by her curiously deep voice.
She stood up. He was probably six feet, she thought as she looked up at him. “Are you going to show me around?” she asked.
“Yes. Dad got tied up.” He looked at her measuringly. “I thought perhaps you might like to take a ride.”
She smiled for the first time. “I’d love to,” she answered quickly.
“Good.” He looked at her feet. “Do you have boots?”
“Yes, but I ride in these shoes all the time. They have heels, see?” She raised her foot a little and turned her ankle.
His face was expressionless and he didn’t say anything for a minute. Then, “Well, if you’ve finished eating we can get started.”
“I do have a pair of chaps with me,” she said. “If you’ll just wait a minute, I’ll go and get them.”
He was standing at the bottom of the stairs when she came running lightly down holding her chaps over her arm. “Come on, then,” he said.
She walked beside him, her own stride as lithe and effortless as his, while inside she seethed. I don’t like you either, Mr. Jay Hamilton, she was saying to herself, so don’t think all this laconic hostility can intimidate me. I’m every bit as tough a nut as you are.
They reached the barn, and a weathered-looking man of about fifty appeared. “Morning, Jay,” he said.
“Morning,” her stepbrother replied. “Caroline, this is Frank Adams, one of our hands. Miss Carruthers, Frank, from Virginia.”
There was just the faintest emphasis on “Virginia,” and Caroline turned and looked at him speculatively. He looked back, his expression altering not one iota at the sight of her immense gray-green eyes, perfectly straight nose, and lovely full mouth.
“How well do you ride?’ Jay asked.
“Well enough,” she replied levelly, “if you don’t give me a bucking bronco.”
His blue stare became mocking. “I have a quiet old guy here we’re thinking of retiring.”
“No, thank you,” she replied in a clipped tone. Her palm itched to smash into his arrogant-looking suntanned face. “I’ve hunted regularly for the last few years. I think I can manage a decent horse.”
After a moment Jay’s mocking gaze left her face and went to the cowboy. “Give her Dusty, Frank.”
The man looked surprised but obediently went into the barn and came back with a very good-looking gray gelding. He tied the horse to the fence and went to the tackroom for her saddle. When he came back with it he had a very dubious look on his weathered face. “You sure you want to ride this, miss? Dusty’s used to more weight on his back.”
“Yes,” said Caroline shortly, “I’m sure.” She finished zipping on her chaps, which bore all the signs of hard use, took the saddle, and proceeded to tack the horse up herself. Jay finished first and watched as she expertly put the bit into the gelding’s mouth and buckled the chin strap.
“Ready?” he asked pleasantly. Too pleasantly. Caroline wondered what was wrong with the horse.
She gave him a long stare, put her foot into the stirrup, and swung with easy grace into the saddle. Jay followed her and said crisply, “Let’s go.”
The gray was full of life and pranced under her restlessly. Caroline kept a snug hold on the reins and sat calmly, ignoring his fidgets. Jay’s big bay was walking quietly beside her, and she said conversationally, “It’s a beautiful day. Do you always have such gorgeous weather in Wyoming?”
“Summer yes, winter no,” he answered.
“Do you get a lot of snow?”
“Plenty. Wyoming is the second-highest state in the country,” he told her. “We get snow October through April.”
“Heavens,” said Caroline. The gray suddenly pulled hard on the reins and tried to bolt. As Jay watched with interest, Caroline’s long legs closed like iron around his sides and she pulled him up. “Walk!” she commanded severely. “Sounds even worse than Maine,” she said pleasantly to Jay. “That’s where my mother was from.”
He raised a dark eyebrow and looked at her for a moment in silence. “Would you like to top off the horses?” he asked.
“If that means shake off some of this excess energy, then yes I would,” she replied vigorously. And in a second they were both galloping along the dirt road together, Jay sitting deep in his saddle looking as comfortable as if he’d been born there and Caroline standing a little in her stirrups, lightly poised, her hands moving easily with the rhythm of the horse’s neck.
“He’s beautifully smooth,” she said when they pulled up. She patted the dappled neck, and the horse relaxed into a walk.
“He’s still green, but he’s going to be one of my best horses.”
She grinned. “You didn’t think I could handle him, did you?”
His reserved face did not soften in response. He shrugged. “You said you could ride a decent horse, so I gave you one.”
And the hell with you, too, Caroline thought and turned her attention to the scenery.
It was well worth looking at. Towering all around them were the magnificent peaks of the Bighorn Mountains, and once they had left the ranch house behind there was only the sound of their horses’ hooves and the calls of birds to disturb the silence.
“We’ve just finished pushing the cattle into summer pastures,” Jay said, finally breaking the silence.
“What do you mean by summer pasture?” Caroline asked curiously.
“Mountain pastures. The grass is best in July and August. In the fall we move them back down again. That’s when we ship the steers to market, after they’ve been fattened on summer grass. Then we wean the yearling heifers, pick the best ones to replace our own ten-year-old cows, and send the rest to market.”
“I see,” said Caroline. “Is there enough grass for them in the winter?”
“We have to supplement. We still use horse-drawn sleds to get food into the remoter areas of the ranch.” He was looking straight ahead as he talked, not at her. “In the summer we become a farming operation. We cultivate twenty-five hundred acres of hay and grain just to supplement the winter range diet.”
Caroline was interested despite her irritation at his rudeness. “What else has to be done, once you’ve gotten the herds to the proper pasture?”
“Well, there are two hundred and twenty-five miles of fence to be kept up. We have men on camp in the various areas, and it’s their job to see to the fences and keep an eye on the cattle. It’s difficult to keep an exact inventory, so ranchers are always vulnerable to theft.”
“Rustlers,” Caroline said melodramatically.
“Precisely.” He gave her a quick, ironic look. “The newer method is simply to load a bunch of cattle into a semi and head east into areas where there’s no brand inspection.”
“Oh,” said Caroline disappointedly.
“The thieves usually depend on an inside man to feed them information about the ranch’s operation and to let them know where the cattle will be,” he went on, ignoring her brief comment. “One of my jobs is to check out the background of the new men hired. Since we’ve been doing that, our losses have dropped considerably.”
They had been climbing pretty steadily, and now he stopped his horse and turned to her. “Come on,” he said, “and I’ll give you an overall view.”
He dismounted and tied his horse to a tree, and Caroline did likewise. He then began to walk down the steep side of the trail, through the trees, and silently Caroline followed. After about ten minutes they came out on a ridge, and there below them stretched the panorama of the valley. “There’s the ranch house,” he said, gesturing. “The farm, the feedlot, the calving sheds.”
Her eyes followed his pointing finger, and quite suddenly she felt dizzy. She blinked, blinked again, and then abruptly sat down.
He watched her for a moment in silence. “It’s the altitude,” he said then. “It takes a while to adjust.”
Her head cleared, and she looked up and met his dark blue eyes. Her heart thumped once, loudly, and then began to race. But I don’t even like him, she thought to herself in bewilderment. She cleared her throat. “You’re probably right,” she said nervously. “We walked down that hill pretty quickly.”
His eyes remained on her face, and there was a distinctly grim look about his mouth. He doesn’t like it either, she thought suddenly. He feels it too and he doesn’t like it.
“Are you all right now?” he asked a little harshly.
“Yes, I’m fine.” She started to get up, and slowly, with obvious reluctance, he extended his hand. She stared at it for a brief second. It was a beautiful hand, with slim hard fingers and strong muscles. Like his face, it was deeply tanned. She got to her feet without touching him. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Shall we start back then?” Without further comment he turned and plunged into the trees. Caroline followed, acutely and angrily aware of his strong back and narrow hips in front of her. Hell and damnation, she thought in dismay as she scrambled up the steep hill behind him. She was under no illusions about what she was feeling for her obnoxious stepbrother, and she didn’t like it one little bit.
“I suppose your father told you I have a ring for you,” Caroline said when they were in the saddle and heading back to the ranch house.