sucker for helpless things, for little things, but he’d been brutal to this child and he didn’t know why.
“Can I get by, please?” she asked through stiff lips.
He scowled. A muscle jumped beside his mouth. He moved closer, smiling coldly with self-contempt when she backed up. He pushed the door shut.
She backed up again, her eyes widening at the unexpected action, but he didn’t come any closer.
“When I was six,” he said with cold black eyes, “I wanted a birthday cake like the other kids had. A cake and a party. Simon had gone to town with Dad and Corrigan. It was before Rey was born. Leo was asleep and my mother and I were in the kitchen alone. She made some pert remark about spoiled brats thinking they deserved treats when they were nothing but nuisances. She had a cake on the counter, one that a neighbor had sent home with Dad. She smashed the cake into my face,” he recalled, his eyes darker than ever, “and started hitting me. I don’t think she would have stopped, except that Leo woke up and started squalling. She sent me to my room and locked me in. I don’t know what she told my father, but I got a hell of a spanking from him.” He searched her shocked eyes. “I never asked for another cake.”
She put the suitcases down slowly and shocked him by walking right up to him and touching him lightly on the chest with a shy, nervous little hand. It didn’t occur to him that he’d never confessed that particular incident to anyone, not even his brothers. She seemed to know it, just the same.
“My father couldn’t cook. He opened cans,” she said quietly. “I learned to cook when I was eleven, in self-defense. My mother wouldn’t have baked me a cake, either, even if she’d stayed with us. She didn’t want me, but Dad did, and he put her into a position where she had to marry him. She never forgave either of us for it. She left before I started school.”
“Where is she now?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
His chest rose and fell roughly. She made him uncomfortable. He moved back, so that her disturbing hand fell away from his chest.
She didn’t question why he didn’t like her to touch him. It had been an impulse and now she knew not to do it again. She lifted her face and searched his dark eyes. “I know you don’t like me,” she said. “It’s better if I get a job somewhere else. I’m almost twenty-two. I can take care of myself.”
His eyes averted to the window. “Wait until spring,” he said stiffly. “You’ll have an easier time finding work then.”
She hesitated. She didn’t really want to go, but she couldn’t stay here with such unbridled resentment as he felt for her.
He glanced down at her with something odd glittering in his black eyes. “My brothers will drown me if I let you walk out that door,” he said curtly. “Neither of them is speaking to me.”
They both knew that he didn’t care in the least what his brothers thought of him. It was a peace initiative.
She moved restlessly. “Dorie’s had the baby. She can make biscuits again.”
“She won’t,” he said curtly. “She’s too busy worshiping the baby.”
Her gaze dropped to the floor. “It’s a sweet baby.”
A wave of heat ran through his body. He turned and started back toward the door. “Do what you please,” he said.
She still hesitated.
He opened the door and turned before he went through it, looking dark as thunder and almost as intimidating. “Too afraid of me to stay?” he drawled, hitting her right in her pride with deadly accuracy.
She drew herself up with smoldering fury. “I am not afraid of you!”
His eyebrows arched. “Sure you are. That’s why you’re running away like a scared kid.”
“I wasn’t running! I’m not a scared kid, either!”
That was more like it. He could manage if she fought back. He couldn’t live with the image of her white and shaking and backing away from him. It had hurt like the very devil.
He pulled his Stetson low over his eyes. “Suit yourself. But if you stay, you’d damned sure better not lose the apple butter again,” he said with biting sarcasm.
“Next time, you’ll get it right between the eyes,” she muttered to herself.
“I heard that.”
She glared at him. “And if you ever, ever, throw another cake at me…!”
“I didn’t throw it at you,” he said pointedly. “I threw it at the wall.”
Her face was growing redder by the second. “I spent two hours making the damned thing!”
“Lost apple butter, cursed cake, damned women…” He was still muttering as he stomped off down the hall with the faint, musical jingle of spurs following him.
Tess stood unsteadily by the bed for several seconds before she snapped out of her trance and put her suitcases back on the bed to unpack them. She needed her head read for agreeing to stay, but she didn’t really have anywhere else to go. And what he’d told her reached that part of her that was unbearably touched by small, wounded things.
She could see a little Cag with his face covered in cake, being brutally hit by an uncaring woman, trying not to cry. Amazingly it excused every harsh word, every violent action. She wondered how many other childhood scars were hiding behind that hard, expressionless face.
Cag was coldly formal with her after that, as if he regretted having shared one of his deeper secrets with her. But there weren’t any more violent outbursts. He kept out of her way and she kept out of his. The winter months passed into a routine sameness. Without the rush and excitement of the holidays, Tess found herself with plenty of time on her hands when she was finished with her chores. The brothers worked all hours, even when they weren’t bothered with birthing cattle and roundup, as they were in the warmer months of spring.
But there were fences to mend, outbuildings to repair, upkeep on the machinery that was used to process feed. There were sick animals to treat and corrals to build and vehicles to overhaul. It never seemed to end. And in between all that, there were conferences and conventions and business trips.
It was rare, Tess found, to have all three bachelor brothers at the table at the same time. More often than not, she set places only for Rey and Leo, because Cag spent more and more time away. They assured her that she wasn’t to blame, that it was just pressing business, but she wondered just the same. She knew that Cag only tolerated her for the sake of her domestic skills, that he hated the very sight of her. But the other brothers were so kind that it almost made up for Cag. And the ever-present Mrs. Lewis, doing the rough chores, was a fountain of information about the history of the Hart ranch and the surrounding area. Tess, a history buff, learned a lot about the wild old days and stored the information away almost greedily. The lazy, pleasant days indoors seemed to drag and she was grateful for any interesting tidbits that Mrs. Lewis sent her way.
Then spring arrived and the ranch became a madhouse. Tess had to learn to answer the extension phone in the living room while the two secretaries
