Page 44 of Wyoming Heart

“And how would you know that?” he asked sarcastically.

She averted her eyes. “I was in love once, when I was sixteen,” she said quietly. “I would have died for him.” She wrapped another piecrust in plastic wrap. “My mother noticed how crazy I was about him and she seduced him. Then she came home and told me about it, and she laughed. He was so ashamed that he couldn’t even talk to me anymore.”

Anger flashed in his pale brown eyes. “What a hell of a thing to do.”

“That was my mother,” she said simply. “Anything I cared about was fair game. I wouldn’t even pet a stray cat, because I knew if I did, she’d kill it or have one of her lovers carry it off.”

He winced. “Why?” he asked.

She sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that for years and years,” she confessed. “I don’t know.”

“Was she like that, before your father left?”

She thought back to her childhood. She remembered her mother hitting her, slapping her, when she was just starting in grammar school. She remembered being cursed and belittled, anytime she was alone with her mother.

“Yes,” she said. “All my life.”

He frowned. It didn’t make sense that a parent would be that cruel to a helpless child. He wondered what she looked like when she was small. He could almost picture her in a frilly dress, with her long hair down around her shoulders and a bow holding it out of her eyes. She would have been a precious child. Odd, how that thought made him wish he had a little girl of his own...

“Your mother cared about you, didn’t she?” she asked as she finished the last piecrust.

“She loved all of us,” he said, remembering with sadness those last days she was in the hospital before she died. Cash had stayed with her. Cort had been too young. He sighed. “One of my older brothers was with her in the hospital. Dad couldn’t stand to watch it. He’d gone off with the model he later married. It sounds heartless—maybe it was. But he loved our mother. I always thought it was a defensive thing, hiding his head in the sand with another woman to keep the pain from killing him.”

“If I had a spouse that I loved in the hospital, that’s where I’d be, right until the bitter end,” she said, her dark eyes catching his.

“So would I,” he said softly. “My father isn’t like the rest of us. He doesn’t feel things as deeply as we do.” He sighed. “He was never around when we were kids.” He stopped himself just in time from telling her about the yacht races his father loved, the sporting events he haunted, the jet-setting reputation his father had.

“I wish my mother had never been around,” she said with a whimsical smile. “My life would have been easier if I’d been an orphan, I think.”

“You love cattle, don’t you?”

She smiled. “Yes, I do. Cattle and horses, dogs and cats. It’s so nice, being able to have them and not worrying about something happening to them.” She glanced at him. “Cousin Rogan told my mother that if any of the cattle or horses had ‘accidents,’ he’d make sure the proper authorities were contacted, and she’d read about herself in the tabloids. It was the only time I ever really saw her frightened.”

“Your cousin is a card,” he mused, and could have bitten his tongue for making that slip. He wasn’t supposed to know the man.

But it went right by her. “He is,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t even have had the ranch if he hadn’t intervened.”

“He and McGuire are partners in that Australian cattle station, aren’t they?”

She nodded. “Cousin Rogan hates snow. The station is near the desert, always hot,” she said on a laugh.

“I like snow,” he mused. “We don’t get a lot back home in my part of Texas.”

“I like it until I have to drive in it,” she sighed. “I’ve been stuck in ditches too many times in my life because I never learned how to drive properly.”

“Was there a reason for that?”

She nodded. “My mother couldn’t drive at all, and I’d have walked two miles to town before I’d have asked any of her lovers to teach me—especially Henry.”

“I thought they had classes in high school.”

“Not here, they didn’t. Budget issues,” she added. She put the piecrusts aside and started to pick up the basket of apples.

“Here. Let me do that,” he said softly. He lifted it up onto the table for her and set it down.

“Thanks,” she said huskily. “I didn’t realize how heavy it was.”

He smiled. “It’s only heavy to shrimps like you,” he said on a grin.

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