Page 83 of The Honorable Texan
“I feel better, except for the headache.”He gave her a long look.“You aren’t in very good shape yourself.Face hurt?”
“Yes.I guess we’re both like walking wounded, huh?”she asked with a grin as she leaned back into the warm leather seat.
“Maybe we should take a nurse with us,” Rey muttered as he got in and started the car.
Meredith cleared her throat, but before she could speak, Leo turned to his brother.“I don’t need nursing, thank you very much!”Leo said curtly.
“Neither do I!”Meredith agreed.
Rey glanced at them as he pulled out into the street.“I’ve seen accident victims who looked better than the two of you.”
“Don’t let him insult you, Meredith,” Leo told her.“I’ll tell you all about his weak spots so that you can deal with him.”
She wouldn’t have expected Rey to have any of those, but she was keeping her mouth shut and her options open for the time being.Her new boss lookedformidable, and even Leo seemed curious about his lack of warmth.
“Are you all from Jacobsville originally?”Meredith changed the subject.
“No, we’re from San Antonio,” Leo said.“We inherited the Jacobsville property and it needed a lot of work, so we made it our headquarters.It’s convenient to Houston and San Antonio, and frankly, it’s isolated and gives us some privacy.We don’t like cities as a rule.”
“Neither do I,” she said, recalling her grandmother’s beautiful flower garden at the old place near Fort Worth.She smiled.“I wish Dad hadn’t taken the job in Houston in the first place.”
“What does he do?”Leo asked.
“He’s retired,” she said, not wanting to go into specifics.It hurt to talk about her family.Her father was a sore spot just now, anyway.
“Simon talked to the authorities,” Rey interrupted.“They’re going to make sure he gets counseling and he won’t be released until he’s kicked the alcohol habit.”He glanced over the seat at her, his dark eyes intent.“They think it will be better if you don’t have any contact with him for a few weeks, until he’s through the worst of the withdrawal symptoms.”
“I know about withdrawal,” she replied, absently smoothing her hand over her jeans.“Bad habits are hard to break, even new ones.”
“You two must read a lot,” Rey replied.“I never saw so many books in one place as I did at your house.Even our library isn’t that stuffed, and we all read.”
“I love reading,” she agreed.“We have a television, but neither of us had much time to watch it.Until recently,” she added reluctantly, and winced at thethoughts that went through her mind.“I hope they get those men who mugged you, Mr.Hart,” she told Leo fervently.
“Leo,” he corrected.“It’s really Leopold, but nobody calls me that,” he added with a grin.“We’re pretty informal with our employees.”
“Do you have a lot?”she asked curiously.
“A good many in Jacobsville,” he replied.“Although we don’t have a full-time vet, we do have several accountants, livestock managers, computer programmers, salesmen…you name it, we’ve got one.It’s big business these days to run cattle.We even have a man who does nothing but keep up with legislation that may impact us.”
“Do you have dogs and cats?”she asked.
“Always,” Rey replied.“We have border collies that help us herd cattle, and we keep cats in the barn to help handle the rats.”
“We had a cat in the house,” Leo added, “but it was Cag and Tess’s, and they took it with them when they moved into their new house.At least she won’t have to cope with Herman,” he told his brother, and laughed.
Rey smiled involuntarily.“You might not have wanted to work for us if we still had Herman.”
“Who’s Herman?”she wanted to know.
“He was Cag’s albino python,” he told her.“He weighed a hundred and ten pounds and lived in a cage in Cag’s bedroom.He gave Herman up when he married Tess.He said it would be crazy to keep an animal that big and dangerous around their son.They’re still over the moon about that little boy.”
“Yes, but there are people who don’t even consider things like that,” Meredith murmured absently.“Iremember a little girl who had to have plastic surgery because she was bitten in the face by her father’s pet boa constrictor.”
“Herman didn’t bite, but Tess almost had a heart attack when she first came to work for us and found him in the washing machine.”
“I can sympathize with her,” Meredith said.“I haven’t come across many snakes.I’m not sure I want to.”
“We have rattlers and water moccasins around the place,” Rey told her.“You have to watch where you walk, but we’ve only had one person bitten in recent years.Snakes are always going to be a hazard in open country.You can’t be careless.”
