A Long Tall Texan Summer Read online

  Nurse Turner hesitated. “Aren’t you going to tell him goodbye?” she asked, nodding toward the back of the office.

  Kitty hesitated, but only for a minute. “No,” she said rawly. She left the office without another word.

  Two weeks later, she was enjoying a snatched cup of coffee when her new boss, Matt Caldwell, peered around the door.

  “Got that disk copied yet?” he asked.

  She grinned and held it up, in its jacket.

  “Good thing for me you were tired of being a receptionist just when my secretary went into labor. You’ve saved my life. These are herd records for that group I’ve got at the Ballenger’s feedlot. I want to show the birth weight ratios to a prospective buyer.” He stuck the computer disk in its case into his pocket. “You’re a jewel, girl. Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  She chuckled. “I doubt that. Probably half the women in Jacobsville would have come running if you’d advertised.”

  “That’s why I didn’t,” he murmured. “I’m quite a catch, didn’t you know? Handsome, rich, sophisticated and charming, and modest to a fault.” He took a bow.

  She burst out laughing. “I noticed the modesty right away.”

  He opened the door. “Go home early if you like. I’ll be out for the rest of the day.”

  “I’ll stick around to answer the phone.”

  “Where do you go from here?” he asked, scowling. “I could make a job for you quite easily…”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got two interviews in Victoria.”

  He grimaced. “Listen, child, you don’t have to leave the county just because Drew Morris can’t live in the present.”

  “Yes, I do,” she replied firmly. “I’m not going to sit around here eating my heart out every time I see him. I’ll be happy in Victoria. I’ll find another man and marry him and have five kids.”

  “You could marry me,” Matt suggested. “I’m not interested in anyone seriously these days. And at least I’d be sure you weren’t marrying me for my money.”

  She smiled warmly. “Thanks, Matt, but I don’t think either of us could settle for a loveless marriage.”

  He shrugged and sighed. “I could.”

  She knew his past, and she doubted it, but she didn’t say so. “I appreciate the offer,” she told him sincerely. “I’ll remember it and gloat every time a local belle swoons over you.”

  He threw her a wicked glance. “Likely story.”

  After he left, she organized the filing and then just sat staring at the blank computer monitor. She was totally miserable. She hadn’t really expected Drew to call, and he hadn’t, but she’d hoped that he might miss her. That was wishful thinking, nothing else. He was probably happy that he didn’t have her to divert him from his memories.

  She was briefly ashamed of herself for being like that, when he’d loved his wife so much. She’d never be loved as Eve had, despite the feelings she harbored for Drew. Love that was unreturned was a bitter thing indeed.

  As she filed the new jackets, she wondered how she’d ever come to this incredible low in her life. Not even the loss of her father had left her so depressed and miserable. If only she could work up just a spark of enthusiasm for a new job. Perhaps she’d find something in Victoria that would heal her wounds.

  The worst thing about being in Jacobsville was that from time to time, she ran into Drew. It wasn’t a tiny little town, but there were only two banks, and she and Drew both banked at the same one. She saw him there soon after she’d quit working for him. He was polite, but he acted as if he barely knew her. The next time they met, in the grocery store, he pretended not to see her. Her heart was breaking in two. The only thing for it was to get out of town as soon as possible, no matter what sort of work she got to do.

  She couldn’t find a single secretarial or receptionist job going spare in Victoria, but there was an opening at a nice-looking local café. In desperation, Kitty applied for it and was hired on the spot.

  She didn’t tell Matt what sort of job she had, just that she had one. She thanked him kindly for his temporary employment and packed her bags.

  It was inevitable that Matt would run into Drew one day.

  “You look like hell,” Matt remarked bluntly when he saw the drawn, irritable-looking physician.

  “I’ve been up all night with a patient,” Drew muttered. He studied the other man. “I know Kitty’s working for you. Are you making sure she uses her medicines? The pollen count’s going to be out of sight this week, with no rain.”

  “Kitty’s not here,” Matt replied, faintly surprised. “She got a job in Victoria last week and moved there.”

  “What?”

  The other man’s shocked expression said a lot. “I only needed temporary help,” Matt explained. “I have to have someone permanent, and Kitty didn’t want to stay in Jacobsville.”

  “Why not?” Drew asked belligerently. “She was born here.”

  “Beats me. She couldn’t wait to leave,” Matt said with a shrewd idea of why Drew looked so bad. “She’s a nice girl. I asked her to marry me.”

  Drew lost color again. His eyes widened, darkened. “What did she say?” he asked, well aware of Matt’s worth on the matrimonial market.

  “She said no,” Matt mused. “I guess I’m not as hot a marriage prospect as I thought.”

  Drew relaxed visibly. He stuck his hands into his pockets. “She doesn’t know anyone in Victoria, does she? No family there, certainly.”

  “She didn’t say,” Matt said honestly. His eyes narrowed as he summed up the expression on Drew’s face. “She’s the kind of girl who’s going to be snapped up soon, by some lucky man. She’ll make a wonderful wife and a great mother. I’m sorry it won’t be me.”

  Drew didn’t look at him. He was so jealous he could hardly bear it. The last weeks had been endless, a nightmare of tortured thoughts and misery. Everywhere he looked there were memories of Kitty. He couldn’t even bear to speak to her in the grocery store when he’d seen her there, for fear of choking up, of showing how much he missed her.

  “For God’s sake, are you going to let her go?” Matt demanded belligerently.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” came the terse reply.

  “Because you love her,” Matt replied with dead certainty.

  Drew didn’t seem to breathe for a minute. He searched Matt’s eyes as if he sought answers he didn’t have.

  “Didn’t you know?” Matt persisted gently.

  Drew didn’t speak. He turned on his heel and walked away in a daze. Loved her. He…loved her. His eyes closed as he reached his car. Good God, of course he loved her! Why else would he worry himself sick over her, making sure she used her medicines, wore warm things in winter, kept dry in the rain. He leaned against the hood of the car. He’d loved her for a long time, but he couldn’t admit it, because it was disloyal to Eve. He’d loved Eve, too.

  But she was dead. And it occurred to him that she’d never have wanted him to end up like this, alone and bitter, living in the past, in a world that didn’t exist anymore.

  Eve had been tenderhearted, compassionate. She’d never have asked him to be faithful unto death. But he’d tried. He lifted his head and looked around him. Children were playing in the park across the street. He watched them hungrily. He remembered Kitty with his little patients on her lap, remembered her face as she looked at them. Kitty loved children.

  He smoothed his hand over a spot on his hood. Kitty loved him, too. He’d seen it, felt it, knew it right inside his soul. But he didn’t want to know, so he’d pretended not to see it. Now, it mattered more than anything else ever had. Kitty loved him. He loved her.

  Then what in God’s name was he doing standing here?

  He got into the car and paused just long enough to phone his office and tell his new receptionist that he had an emergency out of town and wouldn’t be back that day. She’d have to make new appointments for everyone, it couldn’t be helped. He hung up and turned the car toward Victoria.<
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  It took him several hours to track her down. Victoria was a good-sized little city and it had a surprising number of job agencies, none of whom had Kitty on their books. He found her accidentally, when his tired feet forced him into a café for a cup of coffee.

  The first thing he saw was Kitty, standing at a table with a platter of chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy in her hands.

  Without missing a step, Drew went right to her, and got down on one knee right there.

  He took her hand in his and looked up into her stunned face. “Kitty Carson, will you marry me?” he asked loudly.

  What happened next was, sadly, predictable. Kitty dropped the platter and his spotless silk jacket was anointed with the thickest, greasiest gravy in east Texas.

  “Oh, Drew,” she whispered, and got on her knees, too, in the gravy and mashed potatoes, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him until she had to stop for breath.

  “You look tired. Are you using your medicines?” he asked worriedly. “Are you eating enough? You’ve gotten very thin.”

  “So have you,” she whispered brokenly. “And you look so tired, Drew. Oh, darling, you look as if you haven’t slept—”

  He kissed her again, hungrily. “I haven’t slept since you left. I need you. I love you. I want you for my wife. I want to have children with you…”

  His mouth crushed against hers. They held each other hungrily, oblivious to the ruin in the middle of the floor, to the amused glances of the patron and the owner of the café. It was at least a break in the boring routine of the day.

  At last, Drew managed to get up and draw a flushed, radiant Kitty up with him. He glanced at the proprietor with a sheepish grin.

  “Sorry about the mess. I almost let her get away.”

  “Shame on you,” said Kitty’s boss, and chuckled. “Get out of here, both of you, and best wishes! I hope you have ten kids.”

  “Oh, so do I,” Kitty said fervently, and watched her prospective husband flush with fascinated interest.

  Everybody in Jacobsville turned out for the wedding. It was the major social event of the summer. The bride was radiant in a delicate white lace dress. Drew wore a morning coat and beamed with pride as they exchanged rings and vows.

  Later, as Drew carried his new bride across the threshold, she noticed that the photo of Eve that had always stood on the mantel was gone.

  Drew looked down into Kitty’s soft eyes and kissed her. “I won’t ever forget the past,” he said gently. “But I promise you that I’m not going to live in it ever again. We start together, here, now. You’re my wife, and I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Kitty whispered tearfully. She grinned even through the tears. “And now that we’ve made that clear, would you like to show me how much you love me?”

  He chuckled as he picked her up, gorgeous gown and all, and carried her toward the bedroom. “I hope you ate a lot of cake,” he said with a rakish grin. “Because this is going to take a very long time.”

  And it did.

  Jobe Dodd

  “’Tis the last rose of summer,

  Left blooming alone;

  All her lovely companions

  Are faded and gone.”

  —Thomas Moore

  Irish Melodies (1807–1834)

  The Last Rose of Sum

  Chapter 1

  Sandy noticed that he looked absolutely disgusted. It was hard to get Jobe Dodd to stand still long enough to listen to anything she said. But when she was trying to get him to listen to her about computers, she might as well have saved her breath.

  “It’s my brother’s ranch,” Sandy Regan said hotly, glaring at the tall blond ranch foreman. “He says you’re going to modernize the record-keeping, so you’re damned well going to modernize it!”

  Narrow gray eyes glittered down at her from an impossible height. Lean hands on lean hips made a visual statement about his opinion of her and her infernal machines without his saying a single word.

  He might not have a college degree, but he had arrogance down to a science.

  “Did you hear what I said? Ted said we’re doing it!” she persisted, pushing back a strand of unruly dark hair. She was recovering at the ranch from a rough bout of influenza, where Ted’s wife and Sandy’s best friend, Coreen, had been nursing her. She was better. Or she had been, until now.

  “Ted still owns that ranch in Victoria,” Jobe said pointedly in his deep, curt drawl, alluding to the ranch where he’d worked before Ted and Sandy had moved back to the old homeplace in Jacobsville. “No reason I couldn’t go work up there.”

  “Great idea. You can work there until Ted has me convert those records to computer files, too!”

  He gave her a level look guaranteed to provoke a saint. “I’ll tell Ted you recommended it.”

  Her lips made a thin line. She was furious. It was her long-standing reaction to this man, who had been her nemesis since her fifteenth birthday. He’d started working for Ted just before she went away to college, and the more she studied, the more he provoked her. He had a good sound high school education, followed by some vocational training in animal husbandry, but he knew next to nothing about electronic equipment. She did, and he resented her expertise. Not that he’d have admitted it.

  “You just can’t stand it that I have a college degree, can you?” she raged. “It goes right through you that a mere woman understands something you don’t!”

  “I don’t need to understand computers,” he said smugly. “Not as long as you can’t understand genetics. I guess your next step will be to stuff cows into that damned thing.” He nodded toward the computer system she’d set up in the ranch office.

  “As a matter of fact, I was coming to that,” she said with a cold smile. “I want to use computer chip implants in the hides of the cattle—”

  “Over my dead body,” came the short reply.

  “So that we can scan the cattle and get their records simultaneously. It will save a lot of time and trouble with his breeding program, and hours of paperwork.”

  “I oversee the breeding program.”

  “You can do it better with a computer.”

  “And I’ll tell you exactly what you can do with yours,” he said in a deceptively pleasant tone, “and how far.”

  She sighed angrily. Her hand went to her forehead. She was still feeling rocky from the flu, and arguing with Jobe always gave her a headache. She tried to think of him as an occupational hazard, but it made the time she spent at home fraught with difficulties.

  In the past few months, she’d found excuses not to visit Ted and Coreen because it put her in such close contact with him. Then flu had struck, and she’d had no place else to go. Grown she might be, but Ted looked after his own.

  Sadly he considered Jobe family, too, because he and Jobe’s father had once been in the cattle business together. Sandy’s antagonism for his ranch manager didn’t bother Ted one bit. He knew that both of them were professional enough to overlook their small personality conflicts. From Sandy’s point of view, that was going to take a lot of overlooking.

  “You need to get some more meat on those little bones before you start arguing with me,” he murmured, and his voice gentled. “You’re frail.”

  “Hand me a stick and I’ll show you how frail I am.” Eyes almost as blue as her brother’s blasted him.

  “Did Ted tell you that you were going to have to learn how to use the computer and input records?”

  He looked shell-shocked. “What?”

  “I won’t be here to program the computer,” she continued. “You’ll have to learn how to use it so that you can input herd records and breeding records and any other little thing you want access to.”

  He glared at her. “Like hell I’m going to learn to use a computer. If God had wanted men to use computers, we’d have been born with keyboards!”

  She grinned at him. “Do tell?” She could imagine steam coming out of his ears. It made her feel superior, which was a rare sensation i
ndeed when she was around him. “Well, Ted said you’d have to learn.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “I’ll learn to program computers when you learn to cook, cupcake,” he offered.

  Her pale blue eyes flashed fire. “I can cook!”

  “Ha!” He was enjoying himself now. He had her on the run. “I still remember the last time you helped us with a company barbecue,” he recalled, tongue-in-cheek. “First time in my life I ever saw cattlemen eat fish. I fried that, if you recall.”

  “The cowards,” she remarked. “It was good barbecue. It had a crust. Good barbecue always has a crust!”

  “Not black and halfway through the meat,” he replied easily.

  “I can cook when I feel like it!” she raised her voice.

  There was a muffled laugh from behind them. She turned in time to see her brother, Ted, come in from the backyard. His prematurely silver hair gleamed in the light.

  He glanced from Jobe’s amused expression to his sister’s outraged one and sighed.

  “I fought in Vietnam,” he recalled. “Amazing how much home reminds me of it lately.”

  Sandy flushed, but her glittering eyes didn’t yield an inch. “He says he wants to work at the ranch in Victoria so he won’t have to learn anything about computers!” she snarled.

  Jobe didn’t say a word, which somehow made it even worse.

  Ted glanced at her and then back at his foreman. “We have to move into the twentieth century,” he told the other man. “God knows, I resisted until the very last minute. But even the Ballengers yielded to the inevitable, and they did it some years ago.”

  “It’s all those kids,” Jobe mused. “They don’t want their sons knowing how to do something they can’t do.”

  “That’s possible,” Ted said knowingly, and grinned. “Our boy’s barely a year old now and he’s got a little computer of his very own.”

  “Indeed he does,” Sandy chuckled, because she’d given little Pryce Regan that beginner storybook computer for his first birthday.