“That’s why I called. Ordinarily, I’d just send it back and get another hay company. We don’t give second chances. But since she’s old Joe’s daughter…”
“Yeah.” Hell’s bells. Chase knew he was without options here. Joe had been ranch manager for two generations of Claytons, and he’d reluctantly retired when Chase’s dad had died five years ago. But the old guy had dropped enough of his sweat on Clayton soil that Chase would always feel beholden. “Okay. Just this one time. She gets a do-over.”
Trent glanced at him, his mouth a one-cornered smile. “Somehow that’s what I thought you’d say.”
Chase smiled, too. Trent wasn’t kidding anybody. This little decision definitely hadn’t required a face-to-face. He’d just been saving Chase’s ass, and Chase appreciated it. Their business was done, but he didn’t move. He didn’t want to go back.
For a couple of minutes, they stood together in silence, watching the leaves of the sweet gum tree carve shapes on the front yard. In some intangible way, the silence wasn’t as companionable as it used to be, before Chase’s engagement.
He wondered if Trent was ready to talk about it. For the past month, they’d both pretty much pretended it wasn’t happening.
Finally, without taking his gaze from the grass, Trent spoke. “So. How’s it going back there? I saw her. She looks happy.”
Chase made a noncommittal sound. This was tricky territory they were stepping over, and he wasn’t sure of his footing. “I guess she is. That ranch means a lot to her. If it meant she could keep it, she probably would have married the devil himself.”
Shit. Two seconds into this conversation, and Chase already had a mouthful of foot. “Hell, Trent. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. She would have married anyone.” Trent straightened up and met Chase’s gaze. He shrugged in that elegant way that drove most women mad. “Anyone but me.”
It was so true, there was no way to contradict it. So Chase didn’t try. Every word he thought of had a “quicksand” warning sign posted all over it. Better, when you didn’t have the gift of gab, to shut the hell up.
He considered laying his hand on Trent’s shoulder, but that seemed patronizing, too.
Apparently Trent agreed. He took a deep breath, then began descending the porch stairs. He paused at the bottom. “You heading back now? You probably should, you know. If your mom was here, she would’ve had a fit if she saw you leave your own party.”
Trent was right there, too. Chase’s mother had come from Virginia, and she’d had very strict ideas about how her son should behave. She didn’t mind his quiet nature, but whenever he was rude she’d always “explained” his mistake to him so gently and sweetly he ended up wanting to shoot himself.
“In a minute,” Chase said. “I need a little time alone. Jenny Wilcox was talking my ear off.”
Finally Trent smiled. “Your mom always said trying to teach a Texan manners was like trying to teach a snake to tap-dance.”
“Yeah. But she never had to talk to Jenny Wilcox.”
Trent chuckled, but still hesitated.
“Look, Trent,” Chase said, feeling oddly defensive. “I don’t plan to saddle up and ride off into the sunset. I’m not going to back out on her. I just want a few minutes alone.”
“Okay,” Trent said. “Just don’t…” He frowned. “Don’t stay out here so long it ends up embarrassing her.”
Chase nodded. “Never,” he said solemnly. He held Trent’s gaze. “That’s a promise.”
After Trent was gone, the minutes stretched out quietly, interrupted only by the carrying-on of the robins and the wind flirting with the sweet gum tree. Chase let his tired gaze rest on the bluebonnets, which were blooming their hearts out today.
They should have held the party out here. Susannah had the terrace decorated like something out of a magazine, lots of cute ribbons and potted plants shaped like illustrations from geometry textbooks. But for his money you couldn’t beat the first big honest splash of spring flowers.
He felt his chest relaxing. His breath came deeper, from the gut, where it was supposed to. After a few more minutes, he was a little sun-stunned, and when he heard a strange noise in the distance he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t dreaming.
But then he transferred his gaze to the road and identified a foreign spot on the horizon. A car. Almost half a mile away, where the straight, tree-lined drive met the public road. He could tell it was coming too fast, but judging the speed of a vehicle moving straight toward you was tricky.
It wasn’t until it was about two hundred yards away that he realized the driver must be drunk…or crazy. Or both.
The guy was going maybe sixty. On a private drive, where kids or horses or tractors or stupid chickens might come darting out any minute, that was criminal. Chase straightened from his comfortable slouch and waved his hands.
“Slow down, you fool,” he called. He took the porch steps quickly and began walking fast down the driveway.
The car veered, from one side to the other, then up onto the slight rise of the thick green spring grass. It barely missed the fence.
“Slow down, damn it!”
He couldn’t see the driver, but he definitely didn’t recognize the automobile. It was small and old and hadn’t cost much even when it was new. It used to be white, but now it needed either a wash or a new paint job or both.
“Goddamn it, what’s wrong with you?”
At the last minute, he had to jump away, because the idiot behind the wheel clearly wasn’t going to turn to avoid a collision. He couldn’t believe it. The car kept coming, finally slowing a little, but it was too late.
Still going about thirty miles an hour, it slammed into the large, white-brick pillar that marked the front boundaries of the house. The pillar wasn’t going to give an inch, so that car had to. The front end folded up like a paper fan.
It seemed to take forever for the car to settle, as if the trauma happened in slow motion, reverberating from the front to the back of the car in ripples of destruction. The front windshield seemed to ice over with lethal bits of glassy frost. Then the side windows exploded.
The front driver’s door wrenched open, as if the car wanted to expel its contents. Metal buckled hideously. Small pieces like hubcaps skipped and ricocheted insanely across the oyster-shell driveway.
Finally, everything was still. Into the silence, a plume of steam shot up like a geyser, smelling of rust and heat. Its snakelike hiss almost smothered the low, agonized moan of the driver.
Chase’s anger had disappeared. He didn’t feel anything but a dull sense of disbelief. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Not in his life. Maybe the sun had actually put him to sleep.
But he was already kneeling beside the car. The driver was a woman. There was no air bag. The frosty glass of the windshield was dotted with small flecks of blood.
