here and there around the ranch no doubt. Even though Tip had not mentioned them to her, she sensed that they had loved him very deeply, and he had obviously cared for them; cared enough, at least, to know that they needed a woman to share their lives.
‘Gramps told us a secret before he died. He made us promise not to tell anyone …’
The grey eyes sparkled, and Natasha knew that she was being begged to question this secret. However, she shook her head; she felt she had already pried far enough into Tip’s family history, albeit innocently.
‘If it’s a secret, that’s the way it must stay … Your grandfather wouldn’t have told it to you if he wasn’t sure you could keep it.’
She felt mean as she watched the excitement die out of their eyes, but she told herself it was for the best. Already in these two girls she sensed a yearning, a reaching out to her, which she suspected stemmed not just from their own need to replace their dead mother, but also from Tip’s careful tutoring.
It was no secret that he had wanted Jay to marry, and what better way to coerce him than to enrol the two little girls on his side? A mother for them, a wife for Jay, and a great-grandson for Tip … Oh, yes! He had been a wily old character, Natasha reflected grimly. But none of that could explain Cherry’s comment about his will.
There was no way that the man she had known in London would have parted with a single inch of his land to someone outside his family. No, the girls must have overheard something and misinterpreted it. To judge from the reception she had received from Jay, she was already marked down as a first cousin to a fortune-hunter, and no doubt the girls had picked up some derogatory remark made about her by their uncle and woven their own reason for it.
It had been dusk when she arrived at Dallas; now it was fully dark. Not the dark of London that she was used to, but the dense blackness of the wide open spaces, illuminated only by the stars, surely far more brilliant here than they had ever seemed at home?
Despite her tiredness, despite the shock of Jay’s hostility and the twins’ revelations, somewhere deep down inside her that tiny flicker of excitement still burned. Idiotically, since she was in a fully enclosed plane, she felt as though she could almost smell the hot, dry scent of the land, as though its lure and magic were already weaving their spell around her.
She wondered how close to the Rio Grande the ranch actually was. Tip hadn’t said, although he had said that the ranch had survived in the early years because it had its own water supply that didn’t dry out, even in the longest drought.
Suddenly she felt the plane start to drop. At her side, Cherry said reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be long now.’
As she glanced out of the window, Natasha had a confused impression of rows of oil derricks, and flat, sandy earth, illuminated by the huge floodlights on top of the derricks.
‘Those are Uncle Pete’s oil wells,’ Rosalie told her matter-of-factly.
‘They used to be,’ Cherry corrected her. ‘Gramps said that most of ‘em belong to Uncle Sam now.’
Natasha hid a small smile as she heard Rosalie saying curiously, ‘But we don’t have an Uncle Sam …’
‘No! Gramps meant the government—silly!’
The plane banked drunkenly, and ahead of them Natasha could see the long, brightly lit airstrip. And then they were going down, bumping gently on the tarmac, slowing to a halt.
Cherry and Rosalie busied themselves unfastening their seat-belts and collecting their things as matter-of-factly as though they might have got off the tube. But to these children flying was a part of their lives.
Natasha followed them as they moved towards the exit. Jay Travers came to join them, his Stetson still rammed down on his head. Did he always wear it? she wondered. He had struck her as being too cynical and too worldly to constantly parody the cowboy image. She glanced again at his worn jeans and dusty boots. There had been other men wearing Stetsons at the airport, but they had all been dressed in executive suits, or immaculate western outfits …
‘I’m a working rancher, Miss Ames,’ she heard him saying behind her as he reached out to open the door. ‘I’m sorry if my clothes aren’t what you’re used to, but out here time is money …’
‘And I wasn’t worth the time and effort it would have taken you to get changed,’ Natasha said sardonically, holding back any further comment when she saw how intently the girls were listening to them.
Jay, it seemed, had no inhibitions.
‘Gramps was right about one thing,’ he agreed. ‘You sure are quick on the uptake …’
The way he said it, it wasn’t a compliment, and Natasha felt an angry flush sear her skin as she followed the two girls down on to the airstrip.
It was surprisingly cold, and then she remembered that this land came pretty close to desert conditions, and that the temperature would drop dramatically at night.
As the girls raced over to the waiting vehicle, Natasha hesitated. Her cases were still in the plane, and she suspected it would be unwise to rely on Jay’s chivalry to bring them for her. As she paused, a chilly breeze raised goose-bumps on her exposed arms.
‘You’d better go get in the truck. Didn’t Gramps tell you anything about conditions out here? Or were you so eager to come and claim your dues that you forgot?’
Her brief softening toward him, born of his sudden appreciation of her shivers, died as she listened to his sarcastic words.
‘My luggage is still on board the plane,’ she told him, ignoring his taunt.
‘I’ll see to that. Go join the girls.’
Much as she longed to ignore his command, she knew it would be foolish to simply stand around and shiver, while she waited for him to bring her cases.
The vehicle he had described as ‘the truck’ was huge. It was a truck, in that there was an open section at the back, but as Cherry opened the door for her she gasped to see the luxurious interior, with its front and rear bench seats and sophisticated bank of equipment.
‘Some truck,’ she muttered under her breath, causing the girls to giggle.
‘Uncle Jay uses it when he’s driving around the ranch,’ Cherry explained. ‘It has full radio contact with the ranch so that he can keep a check on what’s going on, and these seats make up into a bed in case he has to stay out overnight. It’s real neat, isn’t it?’
Natasha had to agree that it was, although her slightly puritan Cheshire soul protested a little at its opulent luxury. Her father had driven round his farm in a battered old Land Rover, with the hardest bench seats in the world and an antiquated form of heating that constantly belched out putrid and polluted air. It had been practically held together with pieces of string and odd bits of wire! In Cheshire, farmers were a thrifty, frugal lot who did not believe in expending money on new equipment while the old was still in working order.
Luckily the back seat was wide enough for her to be able to wedge herself alongside the girls. There was no way she was going to sit next to Jay and listen to more of his acerbic comments.
It took twenty minutes to drive back to the homestead, along one of the straightest
