The sun was shining in all its spring benevolence, but it could not penetrate the cloud of despair that descended upon Cara as she walked with bent head to the garden plot. So, she reasoned with sick bitterness, he wanted to make love to her for the sole purpose of divesting her of Ryan’s share of the land. The sooner she signed, the earlier he could marry. No wonder he had looked less than happy to see her last night. Having just come from the warm arms of his fiancée, he could not relish having hers around him so soon. And to think that she had actually hoped that their lovemaking would resolve their conflicts and lead (Cara could hardly stomach the idea now) to Jeth loving her as—as she did him!
Jeth did not appear in the garden, and Cara worked strenuously in the sun, having long discarded the restricting wraparound. She was bursting with a bitter anguish that released itself in energy, and she pulled weeds and removed rocks on yet another section of land she now proposed planting. In her present state, she felt capable of clearing the entire desert. The garden and Lady, she had already concluded, would be her means of surviving the rest of the year.
He came in the late afternoon, just as Cara had decided to call it a day. Her skin tingled from the sun and shone with a thin film of perspiration. Knees, shorts, and halter top were smeared with dirt. Earlier she had wrapped the long swaths of her hair on top of her head, tucking the ends under in a way that secured them without pins. Brushing at the sand that clung to her golden legs, she did not see Jeth until he straightened up from the fence by which, she realized, he had been watching her for some time. The unexpected pleasure of seeing him momentarily arrested her, and Jeth’s eyes glided over the golden swell of her full breasts to the long, shapely legs that gleamed richly in the sun.
Cara, clamping down hard on the absurd eruption of joy within her, stomped past him without speaking. “Whoa, little hoss—” Jeth gave an uncharacteristic chuckle and caught her upper arm, stopping her in her tracks. “Am I responsible for that long face? I apologize if I am. I couldn’t come this morning. There was a problem in the Santa Cruz division.”
Vaguely, the facts registered that El Patrón of La Tierra Conquistada had not only apologized to her but was also bestowing upon her what amounted to a smile. It affected his entire countenance, making it seem more youthful, less severe. “I wasn’t really expecting you,” she lied. “I know you’re a busy man. However, I’m finished for the day. I’ll show you some other time.”
“Show me now,” Jeth said. He looked at her in puzzlement. “Why so cranky? Maybe a good swim would cool you off. I came out here to ask you to join me for one.”
Cara stared up at him, unsuccessfully willing herself to hate him. He was wearing summer range clothes: cords under chaps, of course, but in addition, a light cotton shirt, cut in the Western style so suited to his broad shoulders and tapering waist. Winter’s black Stetson had been replaced with a soft gray one in lighter-weight felt. As her eyes traveled in longing over the beloved face, she realized she was memorizing its every detail to hold in her heart against the day when she was gone.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly, concern furrowing his brow. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“May I take a rain check on the pool, Mr. Langston? As for the garden, here it is. Unless you know something about flowers, the names of what I’ve planted won’t mean anything to you. In August, I’ll plant cape daisies and calendulas in the area I cleared today. They’re fall flowers and should bloom even past frost. There will be flowers blooming until Christmas if the winter isn’t too severe.”
“You plan to be here then?”
The query came mildly and could have meant anything. In Cara’s frame of mind, she thought she heard a note of chagrin beneath the bland tone. “Yes!” she avowed belligerently. “No matter how hard you try to drive me away!”
He read her intention before she moved, so that when Cara made to march past him, Jeth’s long arm shot out simultaneously to snare her waist and bring her back to him. She pushed at his chest and wriggled pugnaciously, toppling the topknot of hair about her shoulders. Cara heard Jeth’s quick intake of breath, saw a fire ignite in the depths of his gray eyes. “You let me go, you monster!” she demanded indignantly, but Jeth’s fingers interlaced in the platinum-streaked fall of her hair to hold her head still.
“Miss Martin, stop struggling or I will have to kiss you. I’m going to anyway, but first tell me about this burr under your saddle. What’s got your dander up? You’re generally pretty even-tempered.”
Cara’s heart fluttered like a covey of caged birds. In horror she felt her breasts hardening against Jeth’s warm, male chest. She could tell by the amused twist of his lips that he felt them, too. “Mr. Langston, let me go. I’m very tired. I’m also hot and sticky…”
“You feel cool and refreshing, Miss Martin, better than a swim on a hot afternoon.”
Offended, Cara squirmed like a puppy held too tightly. “Take your hands off me! I’m not your afternoon diversion, Mr. Langston. I’m afraid you’ve been entertaining some wild illusions about me.”
“Shh, be quiet, Cara.” Jeth lowered his head and the shadow of the Stetson spilled over her face. His hand under her hair propelled her toward him. “You most certainly are a diversion. Morning, noon, and night, I find myself thinking about the uncommonly beautiful lady in the room only a few doors from me.”
“Even when you’re in Dallas?” she asked contemptuously. Immediately she could have bitten her tongue. She must not let him know that she was aware of his marriage plans. He would then see through her resistance and merely increase his attention. And she would rather die than let him know she cared.
“Especially when I’m in Dallas,” he answered, his voice deep and husky. It stole around Cara’s heart like a warm, fondling hand. “When I’m there, I find that I can’t wait to get back to the ranch and you.”
“To check up on me?” The derisive note she was reaching for failed. Her breathing grew shallow. The sound of her pounding heart filled her ears.
“No,” Jeth said, “to do this…”
The kiss was like nothing Cara had ever thought to experience. Though she strained briefly against the iron embrace, her resistance capitulated to her need of him, and she let him take her lips any way he chose, first gently, then exploringly, then with a mounting urgency that sent her blood throbbing through her veins with an unleashed passion that cried for him to take her, take her. She pulled him down to her, her arms wrapped around his neck, the hat brim a shelter for the long, fiery intimacy of their kiss. She was standing on tiptoe to better reach him, yielding to the hands that now molded her tight against the hard muscular frame, exulting in the feel of his chest against her, the warmth of his chaps against her bare legs. When Jeth finally lifted his mouth, it was only for a fraction of space, of time, so that he might quiz her with his eyes. Cara’s own fluttered open, very near the intent gaze, and she saw something in it that lust could not corrupt, something like a…shock of rapture. “God, Cara,” Jeth groaned. “You are unbelievable. I must have you. I will have you. You’re like a drug I need to live.”
He brought his mouth down again, this time with a savage hunger that sought to consume and overpower her. But Jeth’s fevered declaration had penetrated the sensual oblivion in which she was lost. Cara’s pride, the legacy of her New England forebears, surged to the fore. She went down off her tiptoes and pushed at the arms engulfing her. What had she been thinking of, melting in his arms like that? She could not let Jeth use her like a common tramp to reunite his beloved La Tierra. He thought her nothing but a fortune hunter, his brother’s whore. Once he got her into his bed, he would have the double satisfaction of kicking her out of it—as well as her signature on the papers in his desk drawer. Once he made love to her, she could not trust herself to deny him the land. And once she signed the release papers, she could not stay at La Tierra Conquistada. Her promise to Ryan would have failed.
There was only one thing to do—she must make him not want her. The idea came to her with the resurgence of her pride. As Jeth’s lips withdrew questioningly from hers, she was already marshalling her tactics and praying for the courage and expertise to use them.
With a slow, triumphant smile, Cara forced herself to meet the stunned query in Jeth’s eyes. Instantly the embrace tightened into a prison. “What the hell are you doing, Cara?” he asked darkly. “You didn’t open that door just to slam it in my face, did you?”
For answer, Cara leaned languidly back in his arms. “That’s one way of putting it,” she purred, her eyes brilliant and gloating from beneath seductively lowered lashes. “I just wanted to get an idea of how much you wanted me.” She sent the pink tip of her tongue on a teasing exploration of her lips, tasting Jeth’s kiss. “Very much, I’d say. But I’ve decided that you’ll just have to wait, cowboy. I never mix business with pleasure. With Ryan I had to, of course, and you are very tempting, and it has been so long…but I think I’ll just stick to my old tried-and-true rule.”
Jeth, his expression registering total shock, released her as if he’d been burned. “You mean that you and Ryan—? You’re saying that story you gave me in the cave was all a lie?”
Cara gave a light, mocking laugh and slid her hands slowly up Jeth’s shirt front, feeling the hard muscles tense, recoil. “Well, now, that’s for me to know and you to find out, cowboy. But not until the estate is settled. Then if you’re still interested, why, you’ll find me more than willing—”
The name he called her resounded in the still afternoon. She stepped back from the explosion of his rage, even her ears burning from the insult of the expletive. “I’d rather snuggle up to a female coyote!” he thundered, wrath cording the muscles in his strong neck. “I wondered when the whore in you would finally surface. Dear God, to think Ryan loved the likes of you!” He took a step toward her, clenched fists held rigidly at his sides, repugnance so distorting the features of his handsome face that Cara had to shut her eyes from the sight. “You just blew it,” Miss Martin,” Jeth said inches from her bowed head, his deadly soft voice flowing over her like a malediction. “I almost fell into the same trap that snared Ryan. Lucky me that your curiosity tripped you up. Unlucky you, lady, that it didn’t.”
Jeth stalked away from her back to the house, and Cara, dejection coursing through her, watched him go. A cool, consoling little breeze played in her hair and along her legs, but Cara was beyond solace. She felt cheapened and debased, but her plan had worked. She was repugnant to Jeth now. Not even the return of the land—his real mistress—was worth the price of seducing her.
But there had been that one, inexplicable moment—so brief that it had flashed like a vein of gold buried deep in a mountain, lost with the blink of an eye—that Jeth’s soul had shone in his eyes. Bewildered, desolate, she began the walk to the house, steeling herself for what was bound to come.
The knock came on her bedroom door at nine o’clock, just as she had toweled herself dry from her bath and slipped on a floor-length robe. Hurriedly, Cara pulled on a pair of briefs as the door began to open. “Señorita!” came Fiona’s harsh whisper, and Cara could have fainted from relief when she saw that it was the housekeeper’s head that poked around the door.
“Oh, Fiona, you scared the liver out of me! I thought that you were—”
“He wants to see you immediately. He’s in the study.” The housekeeper drew into the room, her usually impassive countenance frightened and worried. “Please do not keep him waiting. I have never seen him like this. He is very angry, very dangerous.”
“But I’m not dressed!”
“Señorita—” the brown eyes beseeched her. “I beg you to go to him at once. You would not wish him to come here.”
Cara stared at the grim face of the housekeeper. She would never have expected to hear such words from Fiona. A cold terror began to grip her. “Very well,” Cara said, following Fiona out. “Is he drinking?”
“The devil’s blood from the looks of him, señorita.” At the bottom of the stairs, she regarded Cara levelly. “I will be in the kitchen.”
“Gracias, Fiona,” Cara whispered in understanding.
The owner of La Tierra Conquistada was standing at the mantel of the cold fireplace when she entered his study. He held a glass of bourbon, and she could smell cigar smoke. His narrowed gaze traveled the length of the long terry cloth robe before he spoke. “Did I get you out of your bath?”
“Just nearly,” she answered, her voice cool. “I was through, though. What did you wish to see me about?”
“I wish to see you about you, Miss Martin. No, don’t sit down. I prefer that you stand. However, I will sit down. It’s been a tiresome day.”
Cara’s scalp tingled. Fiona had been right: danger was here. The atmosphere was fraught with it. Jeth finished his drink in a long, deliberate swallow, then reached for his cigar burning nearby. When he turned to her, his eyes were like ice. “I have been lenient with you for my brother’s sake, Miss Martin, because he cared so deeply for you. However, even he must by now be aware of what you are, so I see no further reason to show you consideration on his behalf.”
“You have shown me consideration?” Cara queried, her brows raised faintly, but in the pockets of the robe her hands clenched.
Jeth’s lips twisted in a cold, distorted smile. “I believe you will think so, Miss Martin, when you hear how you’re to pay for your room and board the remainder of your stay here.” He drew on the cigar, watching her, reading her immediate thought. He laughed without mirth. “Relax, Miss Martin, you are safe from me. I’ve never been one for whores, not even Ryan’s. No, I have better uses for that capable little body of yours. Tomorrow morning at seven, you will report to the tack room. The stable manager is Homer Pritchard. He will give you the equipment you will need to clean the stalls of the quarter horse stables daily. There will be other tasks involved, of course. Homer will explain. You’re to work there until noon, and then you may have your lunch. Where, is up to you. At one o’clock, you will present yourself to Pepe Martinez, who is in charge of La Tierra’s vegetable fields and orchard. He has an office of sorts about a mile from the stables. Homer will drive you out there tomorrow to show you where it is, but after that you’ll have to get out there the best way you can. You will follow Pepe’s orders concerning your chores. This will be your daily routine until something more…suitable turns up that I feel requires your time.” The rancher studied her long and hard. “Miss Martin, you did hear what I just said?”
“Very clearly.”
“Excellent. Of course”—he tapped a red coil of ash into the fireplace—“you can always exercise your option to leave, although I’m hoping you won’t. I rather look forward to making your stay with us as memorable as possible.”
“I’m sure you will, Mr. Langston, and be assured I’ve no intention of leaving. Is there anything else?”
“Yes. In regard to the piano. You have my permission to play it. It’s an instrument that should be played. However”—his look was grazing—“as much as I am sure I would enjoy your artistry, I don’t want you at that piano while I am in this house. My mother was a lady. I don’t think I could stomach hearing her piano played by a woman who so obviously is not.” He took a long draw on the cigar while Cara remained silent.
After exhaling a spiraling stream of smoke, Jeth went on. “And one other thing, Miss Martin. You have committed a piece of my land to a flower garden. Make sure it produces. I do not tolerate waste on La Tierra, certainly not the waste of water or time on dabbling efforts at an unproductive diversion. Is all of that very clear?”
“As crystal,” Cara replied. “Will that be all? As you say, it’s been a tiresome day.”
Her composure proved her undoing. “No, by God, that will not be all!” Jeth threw the cigar into the yawning fireplace and reached Cara before she could take two steps toward escape, at the same time dexterously yanking at the belt that cinched her robe. “Now,” he said grimly as the belt fell away, “I think I’ll satisfy my curiosity and see what I’ll be turning down when our business is finished—”
To her horror, Jeth wrenched the robe back from her shoulders, pinioning it in such a way that made her arms helpless to ward off his next intent. She tried to scream, but only a strangled whimper made it past the terror in her throat. Ruthlessly, his face a mask of scorn, Jeth commenced his slow, degrading inspection, unhurriedly traveling to explore, inch by inch, the lovely privacies of her body. Cold and numb, knowing better than to struggle, Cara closed her eyes in an agony of shame to wait for the long, painful seconds to crawl by.
At last she felt the robe jerked back over her shoulders. Jeth’s voice, incisive, final, ordered, “Fix your robe, Miss Martin, and get out of here. But before you go, here’s another collector’s item for your vanity. You are every inch as desirable as I knew you would be. For that reason, I can forgive my brother for being besotted enough with you to divide our land. But you, Miss Martin, I will never forgive. You are going to find that regrettable while you’re on La Tierra.”
After she had gone to bed, Cara lay a long time in the darkness waiting to hear the rancher go past her door. Long after midnight, she heard the firm tread of his boots on the tiled corridor, and her breath held in fear. She thought he paused at her door, and she strained to see if the door handle was turning. He had not. Her imagination and her sense of hearing were both playing tricks on her.
The next morning Cara went to the huge stable complex that housed the quarter horses used by the ranch hands between roundups. Jeth’s big stallion and Lady were stalled in the smaller stable closer to the big house, and Cara was relieved that she would not have to see Jeth each day when he came to saddle Dancer, his bay. With a quick glance around as she entered the stable yard, Cara estimated there must be nearly one hundred stalls built around the well-kept compound. She wondered if she was to be responsible for cleaning them all.
Homer Pritchard was an unsmiling, tobacco-chewing string-bean of a man who let her know immediately that he disapproved of the presence of women in his domain. “But the boss’s orders is the boss’s orders,” he grumbled, handing Cara a pitchfork and indicating that she follow him. He led her to a stall in which a quarter horse eyed her curiously. “Scared of horses?” Homer asked belligerently. Cara shook her head. “Well, that’s a plus anyway. Ever clean a stall?” When Cara replied yes, Homer spit tobacco juice emphatically into one of the many brass receptacles for that purpose attached to the bridling posts. Cara shuddered inwardly. Surely her job would not entail cleaning those. “That’s another plus,” Homer said, his voice holding doubt. “These thirty stalls are yours. This is your wheelbarrow. The dumpsters are behind the stable. We try to be through with the stall cleaning by noon. That’s when the truck comes by to unload the dumpsters and take the manure out to the fields. You’ll probably need a few days to get the hang of it around here, miss, but after that, the boss wants you to pull your own weight.”
Cara’s lip curled. “You may tell Mr. Langston that he need have no fear of that!” she assured Homer curtly.
At noon Cara rode out to the vegetable fields in the cab of the dumpster truck with an untalkative driver who kept his eyes on the road. She had not had time to eat the sack lunch Fiona had thoughtfully prepared for her that morning, and now she discovered she had left it at the stable. Well, she thought with a sigh, I’m too tired to chew anyway and the day’s only half over.
Pepe Martinez was a man of short stature, as plump and friendly as Homer was thin and hostile. The Mexican overseer of La Tierra’s vegetable acreage looked her over sympathetically and gave an eloquent shrug when she introduced herself. “I am sorry, señorita, but I have my orders.” He handed her a long instrument with two sharp prongs at one end. “For weeds,” he explained, apologetically gesturing toward the countless rows of young beans among which she recognized blades of Johnson grass waving in the sun. His meaning was at once clear, and Cara swallowed.
“All of them?”
“Si, señorita.”
As the days passed, it became apparent to Cara that in her new duties she was not to know the camaraderie that she had enjoyed on the roundup. Jeth Langston’s orders concerning her were clearly expressed in the way both ranch hands and fieldworkers shunned and ignored her, leaving her to struggle with her chores on her own. Ranch vehicles, driven by men who had laughed with her on the roundup, passed her on the long trudges to and from her labors without stopping to offer a ride. She was not invited to join the coffee klatch of ranch hands who met each morning in the stable office, nor at lunch to eat her sandwich with the other workers gathered around the picnic tables beneath the yellow-trimmed gray canopy near Pepe Martinez’s office trailer.
Cara learned that Bill, whom she missed, had been sent as foreman to run a subsidiary ranch in another county. Happy for the young cowboy, she could not help but wonder if the sudden promotion had not been designed to sever their friendly ties. Cara was confident that Bill would have remained friendly toward her in spite of his loyalty to Jeth. She rarely saw Leon, busy in the Feedtrough these days with the extra duties of butchering calves and preparing the daily bounty of fresh vegetables for La Tierra’s freezers. Jim Foster alone remained accessible, but his commiserative manner made Cara uncomfortable. It suggested they shared a mutual alliance against Jeth Langston, an attitude that forced her to avoid the foreman whenever possible.
June passed into July and there were days when Cara did not hear the sound of her own voice. August came, and La Tierra baked under the hottest, driest sun that she had ever known. She worked steadily and hard, determined not to give Homer or Pepe reason to criticize her to their employer. She grew accustomed to her solitude and the loneliness of her days. The sun deepened her tan and lightened her hair to purest platinum. In her garden, the flowers broke through the caliche-stressed soil and bloomed, and in delight she cupped their colorful heads in her work-roughened hands, thrilling at their beauty and abundance. Great bouquets began to appear on gleaming tabletops in the house and before the headstones of the Langston graves.
Cara discovered that Jeth had not forgotten her garden. One evening when she went to tend it, she found a man-sized pair of bootprints embedded in the moist sand where someone had stood to survey her handiwork. Jeth! she thought, and her heart had held in her throat.
Since the evening in the study, Cara had been able to avoid a face-to-face meeting with the owner of La Tierra. She knew his routine by now and was able to circumvent his comings and goings in the big house. At her request, Lady had been moved to one of the thirty stalls she had been assigned to maintain. When Cara’s day was over, just as Jeth was finishing his end-of-the-day swim to change for dinner, she was saddling Lady for a ride in the long summer twilight. Afterward, while she was on the dusty trek to the house, Jeth, she knew, would have finished dinner and gone to his study for the evening. It was then, after a visit to her garden, that she would climb the stairs to her room and eat in solitude the dinner that Fiona had left her.
On the rare occasions when Jeth was away from the ranch, Cara spent her evenings before the Steinway, expressing her pain in selections written for the kind of deep despair she felt. Sometimes Fiona, who had come to have a grudging affection and sympathy for her, would come to lean in the doorway of the living room to hear her, her ever-busy hands motionless around the dish she meant to dry while she listened. One evening when Jeth was gone Cara sat down before the keyboard. Her fingers drifted into the haunting bars of “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. The piece suited her mood somehow. That afternoon she had ridden Lady into the foothills and had come across Devil’s Own again. In majestic splendor, the black horse had gazed down at them from the crest of a mountain, and Cara’s flesh had prickled with a sudden portentous chill as she returned the stallion’s stare. The message in the dark, equine eyes seemed quite plain: You wear the brand of La Tierra Conquistada. You will never be the same again. You will never be free.
So now she released into the music the sudden grief that had made her turn Lady sharply and knee the horse into a fast gallop back to the ranch. It was only as she was stroking off the last chords that Cara became aware of a familiar scent in the room—the aroma of Jeth Langston’s cigar. Startled, she wheeled around on the piano bench to find the room empty. Afraid that her imagination was assuming dangerous proportions, Cara rose and walked slowly over to the large formal chair near the study door. Several coils of cigar ash smoldered in the ashtray. Jeth was home. He had been listening to her play the Second Piano Concerto.
In late August the knees of her jeans gave out. Cara trimmed the legs off above the knee, and while she was at it, decided to cut off the long sleeves of all her shirts. They had been fine when the weather was cool, but now they were confining and hot. She hemmed the edges as best she could, but her skill with sewing was limited, as the shirt hems testified.
“Fiona,” she asked shortly thereafter, “will you cut my hair for me?”
Fiona’s impassive face gave way to one of its rare moments of expression. “Cut your hair, señorita?” The housekeeper was dumbfounded. “But your hair is beautiful. It is like white gold!”
“It is unbearably hot, and I can’t keep it out of my way. I can’t wash it as often as I would like because it takes too long to dry.”
“Very well, señorita,” Fiona agreed reluctantly, “but it is a pity.”
And so one hot Saturday afternoon after her chores in the stables were completed (like La Tierra’s other employees, she was free until Monday morning), Cara sat in the kitchen on a stool, a towel draped around her, and submitted herself to Fiona’s scissors. Snip! snip! went the scissors. Down, down fell the hair.
“What the hell are you doing!” demanded a voice from the doorway, and the razor-sharp, pointed scissors arrested dangerously close to Cara’s eyes as Fiona stammered, “I—I am cutting Señorita Martin’s hair, Patrón. She asked me to.”
“Stop it!” he ordered, but it was too late. A heap of hair lay on the floor, soft as silk, as shining as the most precious of metals.
Cara sat in total silence, staring straight ahead, as Jeth came to stand in front of her, his expression one of horrified surprise. “My God…” He let out a deep breath, and Cara wondered what in the world she must look like. Like a waif, she decided, feeling the blunt ends of her hair. Fiona had simply begun at one ear and cut around to the other. The towel did not cover the cutoff jeans, the flannel shirt with its amateurishly hemmed sleeves. “Your hair, your hair—” Jeth spoke almost in anguish.
It will grow again, she thought. It will darken by wintertime. A Texas sun will never again bleach it platinum. The thought made her heart close like a shamrock at dusk. Defiantly, her voice cold, Cara spoke for the first time. “My hair interfered with my work. It was hot and annoying.”
“Yes,” Jeth conceded. “I suppose so.” With a swift movement he reached for one of her hands and inspected it critically. Cara flushed and snatched it away in embarrassment, hiding it under the towel. Her hands were rough and red, the nails broken and unkempt. She had once taken such care of her hands. “Don’t you wear gloves anymore?” the rancher demanded. “What happened to the rubber gloves I bought you?”
“They were used up long ago. I don’t need them now.”
The look he gave her made Cara want to curl up and die. It held a mixture of pity and disgust. She was sure that Sonya Jeffers’s hands were as soft as kitten fur and that she would never have worn cutoff jeans and a tattered shirt.
Jeth left the kitchen, and the housekeeper and Cara stared at each other.