Kate liked her. From a bad beginning, this lady was turning out to be a jewel. "Mrs....Drake, isn't it?..." she asked. "You're very kind. I hope you'll come back to dinner again, and maybe I can be a better hostess." She flushed. "You see, I'm not used to this kind of thing. I worked in a sewing plant before I started designing. In fact, I still work there." She threw up her hands. "Oh, what the devil. I don't know anything about cocktail parties and CDs and sports cars. My gosh, until just recently, the best car I'd ever owned was a twenty-year-old Ford with ninety thousand miles on it!"
Mrs. Drake brightened. "Would you like to learn all about cocktail parties and CDs and sports cars?"
Kate stared at her. "What?"
"My children are grown. I sit around all day long with nothing to do except in the spring, when I get outside and plant flowers until even the bees complain." She grinned. "I'd just love to instruct you in the fine art of being rich. It's fun."
Kate burst out laughing. "You snob, you."
Mrs. Drake did laugh then, her broad face almost young. "You bet, honey. Well?"
"I'd love it," Kate said. "If you won't expect too much. I guess you probably heard what I did to poor Mrs. Halls..."
"...who should have had coffee dumped on her years ago, it might have improved her," Mrs. Drake said pertly. She smiled. "What are you doing Saturday afternoon?"
"Not a thing in this world," Kate replied. "If you're sure."
"I'm sure."
She told Kate how to get to her house before she left, and paused on the way out to remind Gene about her portrait.
"What about my portrait?" Kate asked when the guests had gone.
"Next Monday, for sure," Gene assured her. "I'm just finishing the face now."
"I can hardly wait to see it," Kate sighed. "Did you paint me in blue jeans?"
Gene grinned. "Wait and see."
Jason had already gone into his study, and where the door was open, Kate noticed him hard at work on the books as she went past it. He didn't look up, and she didn't speak. But she noticed that he only had a cup of steaming coffee on the desk beside him—and some homemade cookies. She had a good idea where they came from, too.
"If I dry the dishes for you, can I have a cookie, too?" Kate asked Sheila, peeping her head in while the housekeeper put everything away. Sheila turned from the cabinet, looking sheepish. "I felt sorry for him," she muttered. "I shouldn't ever have said that about his daddy." "He'll get over it," Kate assured her. She smiled impishly. "Especially if you keep pumping
cookies into him."
Sheila grinned back and offered her the platter of freshly baked goodies.
Later, Kate went back by the study on her way to bed, but the door was closed and she heard Jason's deep, curt voice. He was obviously on the phone and it was a business call, she could tell. She almost knocked, but she was still a little shy of him. Well, tomorrow she'd know if it had only been the alcohol that had made him forgiving and approachable and ardent. But she prayed that it wasn't. For the first time in weeks, she felt a glimmer of hope for their marriage.
Chapter Nineteen
Jason was sitting all alone at the breakfast table when Kate went downstairs.
She stopped in the doorway, her eyes quietly hungry on his dark, abstracted face. He was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt, an echo of her own clothes except for the softer cut and decoration of her own. He was hatless, pushing a knife around on the spotless white tablecloth. It was odd to find him there this late, since he was usually up and out at daybreak. There was a production sale underway soon, and he had been pushing things and people trying to prepare for it. He was selling off more stock than he wanted to, Kate knew, in an effort to try and meet at least part of the note hanging over the Spur.
"Good morning," she said softly, more responsive than she'd felt in weeks.
He looked up from his brooding into her freshly scrubbed face. She looked young and pretty and his heart ached for her. He smiled gently.
"Good morning yourself," he replied. His eyes slid down her body to her tight-fitting jeans before he averted them. "Have some breakfast."
Kate sat down next to him, glancing pointedly at the single biscuit, tablespoon of scrambled
eggs, and one link sausage remaining on the platter. "Can you really spare me this much?" she asked teasingly, and lifted the platter to look under it. "Or is there more that you've put in your pocket for later?"
The change in him at that teasing remark was amazing. All the darkness left his eyes, replaced by a faint but steady twinkle.
"I work hard," he pointed out. "I have to have a big breakfast."
"That's right," she agreed as she put what was left onto her own plate. "Yours and mine."
He chuckled softly as he poured himself a second cup of coffee and creamed it. "You're bright this morning. I'll have to hide you under a bushel so the sun won't be ashamed to shine."
"You're brooding. Why?"
He leaned back with his coffee mug in his lean hand and stared at her. In that position, with his shirt pulled tight over his broad chest and his jeans making his flat stomach even flatter Kate was pleasantly reminded of what was under his clothing, at how fit he was, how powerfully muscled. She ate eggs and didn't even taste them.
"I'm worried," he said, telling her the truth. He was going to do a lot of that from now on. It might even improve things. "We're in the hole and going deeper, and I don't like the number of calves I'm having to sell off."
"Wintering them would be expensive," she reminded him.
He smiled ruefully. "I keep forgetting how well you know the cattle business. You charmed those Montana cat-demen, did I ever tell you? I made a sale because my pretty wife complimented their bull's calf-producing ability."
Her eyebrows went up. "My, my. So the little woman does have her uses." He pursed his firm lips. "If you want to pick a fight, go ahead," he said softly. "But things might get physical. You look cute in those tight jeans."
She almost dropped the fork. He'd flinched away from her only the day before, and here he was making suggestive remarks. She stared at him. "Physical, how?" she asked, "Did you plan to hit me with a switch?"
"If you're remembering yesterday, Kate, you might consider that a hungry man can't hide it." He watched her flush with renewed delight. Despite marriage and the intimacy they'd once shared, she was still shy with him. "I see you understand me. I didn't think it was the proper time or place to advertise the effect you had on me, when you'd just accused me of seducing you purely out of desire."
She sat with her fork poised in midair. Her mind just wouldn't work out the implications of what he was saying, or his sudden change from cold tolerance to amused honesty. He had her confused. Good. Throwing her off balance worked nicely into his plans for the future. He finished his coffee and got up, reaching for his hat on the table behind him.
"You don't want me here," she began, fishing.
He picked up his gloves, worn and stained with grease and grass, and flicked them against his muscular thigh. "That's why I've divorced you and thrown you out the door so fast," he agreed pleasantly. This man was some stranger who'd sneaked in the front door. It wasn't Jason Everett Donavan. She leaned her head back to look up at him, her eyes wide and curious.
"You're confusing me," she faltered.
He smiled slowly. "Progress at last," he murmured, and bent
She watched his face come closer with shocked delight. He nudged her mouth with his until her head was at the back of the chair, and then he lazily eased her lips apart and took possession.
But before she had the time or presence of mind to kiss him back, he lifted his head, smiling a little when her mouth tried to follow his.
"If you meant it, about trying that dinner again, how about next week, just after my production sale? A buffet dinner, for a few visiting cattlemen and their guests." His mouth quirked. "Just a small thing. About a hundred and fifty people."
"That's small?" she whispered huskily. It was hard to think after what had just happened. He'd kissed her, voluntarily. He even seemed to like her again.
"This is Texas, baby doll," he reminded her. "I'm going out to check fences down on the Smith Bottoms. You can come with me, if you want to."
She must have a fever. That would explain these delusions.
"Yes or no, honey, but make up your mind quick. I'm in a hurry," he added with the same faint smile as he towered over her. She cleared her throat because part of her mind seemed to be stuck in it. "I guess I can let things slide today," she excused her work. "It's Saturday, after all."
Sitting in the big Bronco beside Jason, Kate felt as if they'd started all over again from scratch. It was like the day she'd made him go to the doctor with his arm. He talked easily about the ranch and the new strain of cattle he wanted to breed with those Indian bulls. He talked about the cash flow and the bad decisions, as casually as if he and Kate had discussed it time and time again. It was husband-wife talk, except that he'd never spoken of it to her in this way. He was treating her as an equal for the first time.
In fact, his whole manner toward her was new and different. It was as if he were trying to make up in some way for his recent treatment of her. Not an apology, exactly, but as close as he'd ever come to one.
"You look thoughtful," he remarked, smoking a cigarette as they bounced over the fields where tall, bare live oaks stood like dark sculptures against the horizon.
She sighed, leaning her head back against the comfortable seat. Her leather jacket and his sheepskin one were tucked away, not needed just yet because the cab was comfortably warm. "I'm not, really. I'm..." She glanced at him shyly and away again, her heart going double time in her chest because she was so close to him. "I'm happy."
He felt those words to his toes. He smiled under his fingers as he put the cigarette to his mouth. "So am I," he said surprisingly. "We always did get along well, Kate." She folded her hands on her jeans, lifting one to touch a ribbon of embroidery she'd put down the outside seam of the legs. "Until we got married."
He hesitated. It was still hard to talk about it. "And stopped talking," he said. He glanced at her, his eyes lingering on her soft mouth and the pretty embroidered chambray shirt that she'd left open and tantalizing at her throat. "You'll never know how hard I fought to keep away from you," he said surprisingly. "You were right when you said I never saw you as a threat. I hadn't. And then I touched you and my life fell apart."
"Yours wasn't the only one," she replied, her tone cool.
He laughed softly. "Don't get your back up, honey, I didn't mean it the way you're taking it. My life fell apart because that's when I realized just how empty it had been. I'd been kidding myself that I could live alone all my life and never mind it." He shrugged. "Then it got to the point where I couldn't sleep without dreaming about you."
She wasn't going to give in, she told herself firmly. She wasn't going to let him rush her. She glanced out the window at the dead grass and the long stretches of pasture where great rolls of fall hay had been put in cattle feeders for the various lots of cows and bulls and steers.
"Neither one of us was very experienced," she explained it, "and you said yourself that you'd been celibate for a long time." He lifted an eyebrow under the shadowy brim of that battered black Stetson he always wore. "And desire was all it was on my part, is that how you see it?"
She shifted restlessly. The conversation was getting all too personal, too soon. She lifted her eyes to his dark face and studied his profile curiously. "I didn't think it could be anything else," she said honestly. "I was just a country girl with a few big dreams, after all. I didn't have poise or culture. I still don't," she added. "We both know if you'd had a choice about who you married, it wouldn't have been me.
He stopped the Bronco in the middle of the pasture and cut off the engine. When he turned toward her, his black eyes were narrow and intent. "Listen here, honey, if I'd had a choice, I'd never have married anybody," he said shortly. "I wanted an heir, but not enough to suffer a woman in my house. Or so I thought."
She felt as if she'd stopped breathing. "You...you wanted our child more than you wanted me."
"I wanted our child," he said slowly, "because he was our child. Not because I wanted someone to inherit the Spur."
"But, you said...!"
He leaned toward her and brushed her soft mouth with his hard one, nuzzling her nose gently. "You stopped looking under the words when we got married, didn't you?" he whispered. "You started taking me at face value. I couldn't bend enough to tell you what I really felt, and you didn't try to find out." He nibbled at her lower lip, liking the way she caught her breath and relaxed to let him do it.
"I thought you hated me," she whispered.
"Your mistake," he breathed as his mouth worked on hers. "Open your mouth a little more."
"Only if you'll put out that cigarette and kiss me properly," she whispered back, shocked at her own boldness.
He chuckled delightedly. "Okay," he murmured. He put it in the ashtray without even looking at it and drew her face up to his with the hand that wasn't cupping the back of her head. "It's been a long, long time since we did this together," he whispered, and his lips eased under hers, pushing them gently apart.