The Cattleman (Sons of Texas Book 2) (30 page)

“Really?...But he must love you. He doesn’t see anyone else, does he? And you spend days at a time together. And he’s given you wonderful gifts.”

Now Amanda was close to bawling. She fought back an urge to fidget. Or race out of the room, dive into the pool and swim a hundred laps, swim until she was so exhausted she sank to the bottom of the pool and never came up. She shook her head. “Don’t read anything into any of that,” she said.

They finished their burgers with talk about the coming school year and other topics. Amanda sped away from the Dairy Queen, her thoughts roiling. Gail Carson was going to marry Mike Norton. She hadn’t said so, but it was going to happen. Mike might or might not go back to school, might or might not work as a cowhand for the Double-Barrel Ranch for the rest of his life, but whatever he did, Gail was going to be deliriously happy, probably give birth to two or three kids and live a frugal, but satisfying life from now on. Envy oozed through Amanda.

Springing into her head, clanging like a bell, was that tired old cliché:
Why take the cow when he can get the milk for free?

…But he must love you. He doesn’t see anyone else, does he? And you spend days at a time together. And he’s given you wonderful gifts….

By the time Amanda reached home, she was in a state of agitation. Chris, who had followed her home, approached her. “Ma’am, I’d like to caution you about speeding.”

Oh, dear God
. Now they were telling her how to drive? Never in her wildest imagination had she pictured herself with a security detail monitoring her every move. “What?” she snapped.

“Speeding on city streets is dangerous. Being stopped by local police as you travel from Point A to Point B can be a trick to instigate an incident.”

Stunned to silence, Amanda stared at him. As always, his eyes were covered by mirrored sunglasses, making it impossible to read his face. She blinked and shook her head, then dropped her chin and rubbed her forehead with her fingers. “Look, Chris, I appreciate what you’re doing, but this is Drinkwell, Texas, forgodsake. No one is going to grab me and hold me for ransom.”

“We don’t know that, ma’am,” he said solemnly.

From his perspective, perhaps she was no different than Shannon. This was what her association with one of the wealthiest families in Texas wrought. After a few seconds, she said, “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry for biting your head off.”

“That’s all right, ma’am. Not many people understand what we do.”

Rattled, she entered her house. Was she in some kind of danger? Seriously?

She didn’t clear out her gym bag and hang
up her suit and towels to dry. She began to pace the house. The conversation with Gail, as unsettling as it had been, had not deterred her thoughts from what was going on with her and Pic. She had to come to terms with it, had to face reality.

The truth
sat deeper than hatred from his mother. She believed him to be faithful, but that was a moral obligation, especially with him. And with the life he now led, more convenient than being out on the social scene dating and pursuing women. He sometimes showed possessiveness when some other guy flirted with her and paid attention to her, but that was a primal male thing, not love.

The
deeper truth was, Pic might care about her a little, but he didn’t need her.

In fact, h
e didn’t need much, period. She had never met anyone so comfortable in his own skin. He paid little attention to trappings. He could afford to buy anything he wanted, but he bought most of his clothes at Walmart. The only things on which he spent extravagantly were boots, hats and guns. Male stuff. He didn’t lust after fancy cars like Drake always had. He was kind of into art, but then, all of the Lockharts were into investment art. Even Kate.

He doesn’t pay much attention to relationships either
, a voice in her head told her.

She had to agree. For him, relationships were either there or they weren’t. And in most instances, either way was okay with him. For companionship, he had
his old buddies in town—some from all the way back in high school—and his family, especially his older brother. He had Johnnie Sue to cook and keep the house and do his laundry.

And he had Amanda
Jane Breckenridge for sex whenever he got around to it. Hot, raw, sometimes athletic, sometimes wild and crazy sex.

What was going on between them was a big fat nothing except mind-numbing hours in bed. Sex. And if he didn’t get that from her, he could easily get it from someone else. If he put himself back on the market, no doubt dozens of women would come out of the woodwork.
The very thought of him sharing with another woman what he had shared with her made her crazy.

And that’s where her head was when her doorbell chimed.

Chapter 1
9

By late morning, Pic had returned to the kitchen. The earlier conflict between him and Johnnie Sue appeared to have melted away. She had baked two loaves of banana nut bread. He begged a warm slice to have with his coffee while he waited for Zochi. The temperature had already climbed into the high nineties. If she didn’t arrive soon, it would be time for lunch.

He no sooner had that thought than the front doorbell chimed. He went to the door and there she stood, wearing the white top that looked like a bathing suit top and cut-off jeans that hung low on her hips, showing plenty of belly and the shiny object in her navel. She had on the same big hat and sunglasses she had worn every day. Island princess half- naked.

Despite Pic’s determination to keep his libido in check, the sleeping dragon in his shorts perked up. He forced his eyes away from her. “Uh, come on in.” He led her to the kitchen, talking as they walked. “Johnnie Sue’s just getting a lunch together. She made some chicken salad sandwiches for lunch. That okay?”

“I don’t know. Maybe, if it’s all white meat.
Does it have mayonnaise in it?”

Pic made a mental headshake.

When they reached the kitchen, the housekeeper, in the middle of putting some slices of chocolate cake into a plastic container, looked up. She stared a few beats at Zochi, but to Pic’s relief, said only, “I’m packing some slices of the chocolate cake we had last night.”

“I don’t eat sweets,” Zochi said.

“You ate cake last night,” Johnnie Sue said sharply.

Pic suppressed a groan.
The last thing he wanted was another flap with Johnnie Sue. “That’s okay,” he said to Zochi. “I didn’t get any cake after supper. I’ll eat your share.”

Anything to reduce the disapproval bristling off
the housekeeper.

With her watching him and Zochi both with an eagle eye, he made a deliberate effort not to look at Zochi and busied himself with filling a thermos jug with ice and water. “Did you get some breakfast?” he asked her.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Let’s hit the road then.” He grabbed the lunch box and water jug. He could hardly wait to get out of the kitchen and away from the housekeeper’s scrutiny.

Earlier, he had brought his gun belt holding his .22 pistol out of the gun safe and hung it on the steer horns by the back door. He set the lunch box and water jug on the counter, picked the gun belt off the steer horns and strapped it on. He never went to the old homeplace without a weapon. If any place existed on the whole ranch where he would be most likely to run into a snake or other varmints, an area near the river would be it. Every living thing needed water. He would like to take his BAR and maybe get a shot at a hog, but a rifle would be pushing things.

Zochi gave the gun belt a pointed look, but to his relief, said nothing.

They took a dirt road starting behind the big hay barn. After a long bumpy ride, they reached a barbed wire fence and a cowboy gate. He got out of the jeep, opened the gate, drove through, then got out again and closed it.

“Why do you have a fence in the middle of nothing?” she asked.

“Range management,” he answered shortly, hoping she didn’t ask any more questions. He was in no mood for a longwinded conversation trying to make her understand the necessity for conserving grazing by separating locations of cattle.

H
e turned right and followed a rough two-track road downhill toward the river.

Nearly an hour and a rough ride later, the original Double-Barrel ranch house came into view. Nestled among a mixed copse of giant old live oaks, cedar and huge draping mesquite trees,
the structure consisted of two parallel rectangles made of thick limestone with a wide stone breezeway lying between them. A peaked metal roof connected them and created shade for the breezeway.

“What a weird house,” Zochi said. “It looks like two boxcars.”

“It’s a dog-run house,” Pic replied. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Not really.”

She was being contrary again. Pictures and writing about dog-run houses cropped up frequently in Texas history. Surely anybody who had gone to college and studied history, even political history, had some knowledge of them. Pic gave her a look. “Sure, you do. This kind of house was built not just in Texas, but all over the South. The breezeway faces the direction of the prevailing summer winds. It’s supposed to help keep the place cool.”

“How can it be cool? It has no windows.”

“There’s windows. They and the doors to the rooms open out onto the breeze way and catch the draft.”

“Oh. Well…I was expecting a log cabin.”

Was she yanking his chain? He couldn’t tell. “Not enough trees for logs around here. And I doubt if there was back when this was built either. But there’s lots of rock, which is probably the reason why any part of this structure is still here.”

He brought the Jeep to a stop at the gate of a rusting wrought-iron fence made of vertical bars shoulder-high.
When Mom had decided to fix the place up for use, the fence had been built to protect it from wandering cattle and marauding varmints.

From what he could see, things looked no different from the last time he was here. A few more weeds maybe, wild grasses and grassburrs, a few more baby mesquite
trees. Evidence hogs had rooted around the outside of the fence, but the old thing was hell-for-stout, the supporting posts deeply buried and set into the rock in concrete. The hogs hadn’t been able to breach it.

He made a mental note to get a couple of hands
down to police the place up. When Mom lived at the ranch, she herself had come here and cleaned and worked on the yard. She had even planted flowers. They were now long gone except for a thicket of bright orange lantana that refused to give up at one corner of the house. As far as Pic could recall, Mom hadn’t been here for any reason since she left the ranch more than seven years ago. The old place showed her lack of attention.

As they scooted out, a hot breeze from the south brushed his face. As it always did, the silence that surrounded them left him awestruck. Not a sound could be heard except the chattering of birds. Every time he came here, he tried to visualize a man or a couple or a family living out their lives in this much solitude—eating, sleeping, working, giving birth, surviving, all without the sound of other human beings.

“This is eerie,” Zochi said. “Are there wild animals?”

“If they’re here, you probably won’t see ’em.”

Her head jerked in his direction. “What do you mean?”

“No,” Pic said quickly. “There’s no wild animals.” He unlocked the gate, swung it open on screeking hinges and stepped back for her to pass through.

“It’s almost like it’s haunted,” Zochi said, looking around. “Who built it? And why would they build it here?”

Pic re-locked the gate.
“The founding Lockhart built it. He was a Scots-Irish immigrant. He probably put it here because it’s close to the river.”

As they walked up the stone pathway toward the breezeway, Pic glanced left and right, looking for scorpions, or God forbid, a snake. The last thing he wanted to contend with was Zochi running into a scorpion or something wild.

“My father’s Irish,” Zochi said. “He and my mother have been to Ireland a few times.”

Surprised they had common ancestry, Pic grinned. “Half-Irish, huh? What’s the other half?”

“Italian. My mother’s parents and her brothers and sisters live in New York, but some cousins still live in Italy.” She looked up at the steep metal roof. “That’s a steep roof. How did someone build it all alone?”

Pic studied the roof, too. It had almost a 12/12 pitch. “I don’t know, but my grandpa said that was what happened. It would’ve been a big job. No one knows if Lockhart lived here alone or with a wife and kids, but Grandpa believed he started his family here.”

She continued to look all around her. “Hunh. How old is it?”

“Don’t know exactly.
The original Lockhart came to Texas in 1850, but there’s a concrete slab at the base of the cistern that says 1888. We assume someone lived here then. Since the river is the only other source of water, they probably would have dug the cistern as soon as they got the roof on the house or even before. That, too, would have been a big job. The topsoil here is shallow and underneath it are layers and layers of slab limestone.”