Page 106 of The Honorable Texan
“From Janie Brewster,” he said.
She frowned.“That name sounds familiar.”
“We’ve mentioned her to you.She’s the daughter of a neighboring cattleman,” he related.“She got her associate degree in psychology from our community college, and now she’s studying it in Houston,” he added with a grin.“She’s almost twenty.They let her take college courses while she was still in high school, so she’s ahead.”
“Oh.”
“She’s not hard on the eyes, either,” he murmured, avoiding her eyes.“She and her father live alone.Leo and I have a standing dinner invitation, any time we care to show up.”
She started to say “oh” again, and realized how juvenile she was behaving.She straightened her shoulders against the pillow that was propping her up, and tugged at the hand Rey still held.“Then if she can bake biscuits, you’re saved when I leave, aren’t you?”she asked coolly.
“Well, she can’t exactly bake stuff,” Rey had to admit.
“Why?”
“She has no sense of time.She sets the timer and it goes off, and she never hears it.So the chicken bounces, the heat-and-serve rolls usually come out black, and I won’t even mention what happens to vegetables she tries to cook ontopof the stove.”He gave her a sad look.“She did try to make us a pan of biscuits once.”He actually shuddered.
“Not a successful try?”she fished.
“We had to take the damned things home, or her father would never have let us near the Salers heifershe was offering for sale.”He glanced at her.“Leo just bought us a big Salers bull, and we needed purebred heifers to breed to him.Purebred breeding stock brings a big price, especially if you show cattle and win ribbons.”He shrugged.“So we took the biscuits home.”
“Did you eat them?”she persisted.
He shook his head and he shuddered again.
“Then what did you do with them?”she asked, thinking he probably fed them to the cattle dogs or some livestock.
“Well, actually, we took them out to the skeet field and used them for clay pigeons,” he confessed with a grin.“They were the best damned targets we ever had, but we didn’t dare say where we got them!”
She put her face in her hands and burst out laughing.“Oh, the poor girl!”she chuckled.
“Don’t worry, we’d never tell her,” he promised.“But we did ask her for another pan of biscuits, without telling her why.”He sighed.“That woman has a ready-made profession as a target maker, and we haven’t got the guts to tell her so.Hell of a shame!”
She brushed at her eyes with the hem of her blouse.Poor Janie.And she’d been jealous.
“What does she look like?”she asked, curious.
“She comes up to my shoulder.She’s got light brown hair, longer than yours, and her eyes are green.If she didn’t know everything, and tell you so every time you saw her, she might get married one day.”
“You don’t want to marry her?”she teased.“Not even for an inexhaustible supply of skeet targets?”
“I don’t want to marry anybody,” he said bluntly, and he looked her straight in the eye when he said it.“I love my freedom.”
She sighed and smiled.“So do I,” she confessed.“I don’t think I could ever settle for diapers and dishes.Not with my background.”
“You were a science major, weren’t you?”he asked abruptly.
“Yes.Chemistry and biology, genetics—stuff like that.I made good grades, but it was hard work.Then I went right to work for my boss, straight out of college.I need to be two people, just to catch up.I run my legs off.The stress is pretty bad sometimes.”
“No wonder keeping house and baking biscuits seemed like a holiday to you,” he said to himself.
“It’s been fun,” she agreed.“I love to cook.I do it a lot, at home.I used to when Mama was alive,” she recalled.“She hated housework and cooking.I came home from work and did it all.”
“I’ve read about the sort of work you do,” he commented, recalling articles he’d seen in the daily newspaper.“You’re second only to a physician in authority.The only thing you can’t do is write a prescription without his supervision.”
“That’s true.”She smiled.
He studied her slender body, her exquisite figure nicely outlined by the garments she was wearing.“All those years, nothing but textbooks and exams and, then, a hectic career.No men?”he added, with a calculating stare.
