Calder Pride (11 page)

Reaching past her, he switched off the lamp on the bedside table, then gathered her to him. In the shadows and darkness, he made love to her again.

Cat rolled over and slung a leg out. The ache of a dozen muscles registered a sharp and instant protest to the movement, pricking her awake. Sleepily she opened her eyes. Nothing looked familiar. For a disoriented moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. Then it all came back to her—the last night on the town with her friends, the margaritas she had drunk, the silly manhunt game they played for laughs, and the man she had found, the strength of his arms, the headiness of his kisses, and—

Her eyes snapped open. She remembered it all, every lusty, guilty minute of it.

Wide awake, she sat up. The sudden movement touched off an immediate pounding in her head. She pressed a hand to it. It was the tequila; it always gave her a wretched headache the morning after. For a brief moment, Cat tried to convince herself that she had been too drunk last night to know what she was doing. But she knew better. The alcohol may have clouded her judgment, but it hadn’t directed her actions. He hadn’t done one single thing that she hadn’t wanted him to do. Not one single thing.

There was a stir of movement beside her. Cat froze, every muscle tensing, every nerve end tingling. She stole a wary glance at the man lying next to her. The sheet was down around his hips, baring his torso. She watched his chest rise and fall in a slow, steady rhythm, silent confirmation that he hadn’t wakened.

Even in sleep, there was little softness in his face. Every line of his triangular jaw was strongly chiseled, from the high ridge of his cheekbone to the thrust of his chin. Only the thick black lashes and the wayward lock of black hair that strayed onto his forehead gave hints of the boy he had once been.

Cat jerked her gaze from him, furious with her
self for even thinking about him as a boy. He was a stranger. A total stranger.

And she was determined to keep it that way. She wanted to know nothing else about him.

And he knew nothing about her—not her name, not where she lived, nothing. Cat drew immediate comfort from that. She had gotten herself into this mess; now she had to get herself out of it, with as few scars as possible.

Impulse pushed her off the bed, the same rash impulse that had caused her to seek him out. With a stealth acquired from all the times she had snuck out as a teenager to meet Repp, she searched out her clothes in the dark, stuffed her socks and underclothes in her boots, dragged on her jeans, and slipped into her blouse, hastily buttoning it.

Carrying her boots, she crossed to the door, carefully turned the knob and opened the door just wide enough to step through, then closed it just as quietly. She never saw the gray eyes that opened to watch her. The hallway was empty and silent. Cat hurried to the staircase and paused long enough to hook her fingers through the bootstraps and adopt a confident stance, then started down the stairs, swinging her boots with forced nonchalance.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw she had no audience. There was no one in the lobby or at the registration counter. In a half dozen strides, Cat was out the door and hurrying across the bricked street to her Blazer. She dug the keys out of her jeans pocket, unlocked the driver’s door and scrambled behind the wheel. She didn’t draw an easy breath until she was on the interstate headed north.

On the outskirts of Fort Worth, Cat stopped at the first motel she found, checked into a room and took a long, hot shower. But no amount of soap and
water could wash away the guilt she felt. To conceal it, Cat lifted her head higher and climbed back in the Blazer.

Fifteen hundred miles and two days of hard driving later, she turned off the highway and drove through the east gate onto Calder land. Tears welled in her eyes at the sight of the vast, rolling prairie. She pulled to the side of the road and stepped out to gaze at the leagues of endless, bending grass. The wind carried the scent of sun-baked earth, summer-cured grass, and the wildness of the land to her. She drank in a deep breath, filling her lungs with the familiar smells.

She was home. Texas was far behind her—Texas and the memory of a night she was determined to forget. She had made a mistake, but it was a mistake she would never repeat. It was a vow Cat swore to herself, and to Repp’s memory.

The unwanted image of level gray eyes flashed in her mind.

Suddenly it hit her—what if she was pregnant? Cat grabbed hold of the driver’s door and hung on.

W
hat did you say?” The question was riddled with disbelief. Anger would soon follow; of that, Cat was certain.

“You heard me right the first time, Dad.” Cat didn’t turn from the window. Without looking, she knew the shock that would be in her father’s eyes, the same shock that had momentarily robbed his voice of its usual strength. Instead, she kept her gaze fixed on the bare branches of the cottonwood trees along the riverbank, shorn of their leaves by a brisk October wind. “I honestly don’t think you want me to say it again.”

“What the hell do you mean—you’re pregnant?” he demanded with gathering force.

“Exactly what I said.”

“Damn it, look at me when I’m talking to you!” He slammed a fist on the desk and came out of his chair. The sound cracked through the room like the explosive
pop
of a whip. Her body jerked a little at the loudness of it. Then Cat pivoted from the window. If there had been a convenient hole in the study, she would gladly have crawled into it. But there was none,
so she faced him squarely, never flinching from the hard gaze of his eyes. “You can’t walk in here and calmly announce you’re going to have a baby without offering some explanations, Cat.”

“You aren’t going to like them.” Her chin came up a fraction of an inch.

Chase probed her cool composure with narrowed eyes. Beneath it lay a crackling tension and a well-contained anxiety. It had him hauling in his temper.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” he said. “I know how much you and Repp—”

“Do your math, Dad,” she cut impatiently across his words. “Repp isn’t the father. If he was, I would be showing already.”

His gaze raked the slimness of her waist and belly, a quick calculation confirming her words and hardening his expression. “Then, just who the hell is?”

Cat showed the first trace of unease. “I don’t know.”

“What?” The clipped quiet of his voice had an ominous ring.

“I said, I don’t know.” Cat felt her own anger rising to meet his and fought to quell it as she crossed the room. “He was some guy I met in a bar.”

“
In a bar
?” Chase thundered and swung away to face the wall and the framed map that hung on it, dragging a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.” He turned back to confront her. “For God’s sake, you’re my daughter.”

“So it would seem.” Fire flashed in her green eyes. “I’ve been told you were about my age when you got my mother pregnant with Ty.”

“Don’t go changing the subject, Cat.” His expression darkened in warning. “We’re talking about a man you picked up in a bar. I presume he had a name.”

“I’m sure he did, but we didn’t exchange names.
I don’t know who he is, where he lives, or what he does. And he knows nothing about me.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “There are few places that a Calder isn’t known on sight.”

“I didn’t meet him here.”

An eyebrow went up. “Then where? When?”

“Last August in Fort Worth. I stopped there on my way back from Austin to meet some of the girls from my sorority. A kind of impromptu farewell party.”

“Was he a friend of theirs?”

“No. I told you he was some cowboy I met in a bar,” Cat repeated with growing exasperation.

“He’s a cowboy?”

“Yes—no,” she hastily corrected herself. “He said he had cowboyed before and that he might go back to it someday. But it was obvious that it wasn’t what he did now.”

“Why was it obvious?” Chase came around the desk and leaned against the front of it, folding his arms across his middle.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged in vague confusion. “It was this air of authority he had—confident and self-assured.”

That troubled her. Endless times in the last two months Cat had searched her memory for something about the man to dislike—for any detail, no matter how trivial, that would allow her to despise him instead of herself. She hadn’t succeeded.

“What did he look like?”

She laughed a little bitterly. “Oh, he was the requisite tall, dark, and handsome.”

“Like Repp.” It was said calmly, and with certainty.

Her glance cut to him in surprise. “Yes.” Honesty forced Cat to add, “Except he had gray eyes.”

Chase was pleased with the frankness of her
answer and the strength of character it revealed. Although the opportunity had been there, she had made no excuses for her actions. On the contrary, she had subtly assumed full responsibility for them.

“What else did you talk about?”

“We didn’t do that much talking, Dad.” A little edge of self-disgust crept into her voice.

“You said you met him at a bar in Fort Worth. Which one? Billy Bob’s?”

“Why? What difference could it possibly make?” The instant Cat asked the question, a cold shaft of suspicion pierced her. “You’re going to hire someone to look for him, aren’t you?”

He didn’t deny it. “Your child should have a name.”

“My child will be a Calder,” she flared. “I can’t think of a better name than that.”

Chase straightened from the desk and walked around it to once again take his seat. Only then did his level gaze return to her. “Being a Calder is difficult enough without being born a bastard, father unknown.”

From the entryway came the sound of the front door closing, followed by the approaching footsteps and the rattling
chink
of spurs. Deaf to all of it, Cat stepped up to the desk, her body rigid with anger.

“Don’t you dare look for him, Father.” Her voice vibrated with barely contained fury. “If you do, I swear I’ll walk out of this house and I won’t come back. You’ll never see your grandchild. Do you hear? Never!”

Ty paused in the doorway, his glance running from one to the other with a puzzled look. “What are you talking about, Cat? What grandchild?”

She swung half around, throwing him a white-hot glare. “The one I’m having,” she snapped. “Father can give you all the sordid details. I’m not up to another inquisition.”

She delivered the last as she swept past him out the door, the heels of her boots striking the floor in hard, quick taps. Ty’s gaze followed her, then swung back to examine the grim set of his father’s features. Frowning, he took off his hat and ventured into the study as the slamming of the front door resounded through the house.

“What Cat just said—” Ty began warily, sensing trouble.

“It’s true.” A long, disgruntled sigh whispered from him. With a wave of his hand, Chase motioned Ty into a leather-covered chair and related the situation. Ty listened, breaking in now and then with a sharp question of his own. The answers didn’t please him any more than they had Chase.

Disturbed and irritated, Ty rubbed a hand over his face and through his hair and sank against the tall chair back. “Damn her,” he muttered in a windy rush. “What the hell was going through her mind? Didn’t she consider the consequences—” He stopped and shook his head, releasing a humorless laugh. “Cat never considers the consequences, only what she wants at the moment. When the hell is she going to grow up?”

“Give her some slack, Ty,” Chase replied in mild censure. “Youth is a time for making mistakes. We’ve all made our share—and, hopefully, learned from them.”

The memories of a few of his own flashed through Ty’s mind and took away some of the heat toward his sister. “What are you going to do now?”

“See if I can’t find out who the father is. Discreetly, of course,” he added when Ty’s eyebrows shot up.

“As stubborn as Cat is, if she finds out you’re looking for him, she’s likely to do what she threatened and walk out.”

“She might,” Chase agreed with a nod. “Which means I’ll have to take steps to make certain she doesn’t.”

“It won’t be easy, unless…” Ty paused, a sudden thought occurring to him. “Are you planning to send Cat away to have the baby? If she was gone long enough, you might be able to pass the baby off as Repp’s. People around here would accept that and not be so quick to condemn her.”

“That’s a choice Cat will have to make.” Lying went against the grain. As much as Chase wanted to protect his daughter, that was an option he would never suggest to her. “Where’s Jessy?”

“They drove the horses out to winter pasture.” Ty glanced at the wall clock. “She should be back any time now.”

“Let her know what’s happened,” Chase told him. “I have a feeling Cat could use a woman to talk to now.” He paused, his mouth quirking. “Ironic, isn’t it? I always thought you and Jessy would give me my first grandchild. Instead, it’s Cat.”

The sharpness of the wind stung Cat’s cheeks as she crossed the ranch yard. The coldness of its breath warned of winter’s fast approach and took much of the heat from her anger. Slowing her steps, Cat turned up the collar of her coat and glanced at the leaden clouds overhead. The threat of snow was in them. She wasn’t surprised. Winter came early and stayed late in the northern plains. This year she had the feeling it would be the longest winter in her life. Despair came crowding in. Cat pushed it back and struck out for the long building and its attendant small paddocks that doubled as both a first-aid center for the workers and an animal hospital.

A stocky, wide-hipped cowboy sat atop the fence rail of an outside pen at the hospital barn. Recognizing Wyatt Yates, the manager of the horse-breeding operation, Cat angled away from the barn’s entrance toward the pen.

“How is Sandstone?” she asked without preamble and stepped onto the bottom rail to look inside the pen. The pregnant sorrel mare stood in the far corner, her head drooping in a dull and listless pose, the injured back leg lifted off the ground.

“No better. Her temperature’s higher than it was this morning.” Wyatt raised a cigarette to his mouth, his hand cupping it to protect the burning tip from the wind.

“The infection has spread through her system, then,” Cat murmured more to herself than to Wyatt. She glanced at the swollen area near the mare’s hock, the site of the small cut that had initially seemed so harmless.

Wyatt nodded once, somewhat grimly. “Doc Rivers is coming out to look at her. There isn’t going to be any choice, though. We’ll have to start pumping some heavy doses of antibiotics into her.”

“She could lose the foal.” For the first time Cat thought about the new life growing inside her own body.

“More than likely,” Wyatt agreed.

At that instant, the instinct surfaced to place a protective hand over her stomach. Cat knew then, with total and absolute certainty, that she wanted to have this baby—not because of any personal moral beliefs, but because she wanted it. In the face of that revelation, all the problems and ensuing scandal of her decision seemed suddenly unimportant.

The veterinarian arrived at the same time that the crew returned from moving the horse herd to its winter pasture. Ty waited at the stables to help
unload the half dozen stock horses that would be kept at headquarters through the winter. Cat noticed him, but her attention was quickly claimed by the vet, Andy Rivers. The instant he saw the mare, he skipped the usual pleasantries and went directly into the pen. Cat held the mare’s headstall while he examined the horse, plying both Cat and Wyatt Yates with questions. As expected, he administered a large dose of antibiotic, advised them to closely monitor the mare and notify him immediately of any change in her condition, then checked on a calf they were treating for pneumonia.

After he left, Cat tended to the other patients in the hospital. It was nearly suppertime when she finished with the last one. She stopped to look in on the mare, then lingered, postponing the moment when she would have to face her father again.

Jessy joined her, echoing the question Cat had asked earlier, “How is Sandstone?”

“Doc Rivers thinks she’ll pull out of it, but she’ll probably lose her foal. Even if she carries it to term, as high as her fever has been, he thinks it will be stillborn.”

“I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” Jessy murmured, detecting something more than simple regret in Cat’s voice. If Ty hadn’t talked to her, she might not have noticed it. “Cat,” she began and saw her stiffen, instantly on guard and defensive.

“Ty told you about me, didn’t he?” she stated, her eyes never leaving the mare.

“Yes.”

Turning, Cat looked but found neither pity nor censure in Jessy’s expression. It lessened some of her tension, but she remained wary. “Let me guess—Dad and Ty are hoping you’ll be able to pump more information from me about the baby’s father.”

“They love you. Did you really expect them to
react any other way?” Jessy reasoned gently.

The question surprised a dry laugh from Cat. “Not really, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let them take over and start deciding what’s best for me. It’s my life and they have no business running it.”

“I agree, but you’ll never convince them of that.”

The unshakable truth of Jessy’s statement brought a reluctant smile to Cat’s lips. “Probably not,” she said on a suddenly weary note. “It was all such a crazy mistake, Jessy. I missed Repp. I wanted to recapture the way it felt when we were together. I wanted to feel the way it should have been for us. I thought I could find Repp in another man’s arms. Instead, I lost him. Now, every time I summon Repp’s image, I see gray eyes.”

The pain of regret was in her voice. Jessy reached out and laid a comforting hand across the back of Cat’s glove.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” Cat managed a wan smile and turned from the fence.

“What will you do now?”

“Do?” Cat didn’t follow the question.

“Ty thought you might want to go away for a while—until after the baby is born.”

“I considered it, but it felt too much like cowardice. Besides,” Cat paused and lifted her gaze to the sweep of rolling plains beyond the ranch buildings, a warmth entering her eyes, “I want my child to be born here.”

“It won’t be easy,” Jessy warned. “There will be a lot of talk, some of it ugly. Not so much because you’re having a child out of wedlock, but because you’re a Calder.”

Cat smiled wryly. “Calders have always given people a reason to talk—Ty, my father and my grand
father before that, maybe even Benteen Calder for all I know. I’m just carrying on the tradition.”