San Antonio Rose (16 page)

“I’m going to tell my parents about Tony after I finish in court on Wednesday,” Rafe said. “And as soon as they’ve recovered from the shock, I’m going to call a press conference and publicly acknowledge him as my son.”

Jeannie, feeling choked up, took a deep breath. “That’s wonderful, but …”

“But what?”

“What about your campaign?”

“I figure if I put it behind me now, the furor will have died down by next year’s primary.”

“That way we can concentrate on the real issues, like improving our schools and—”

“Jeannie …”

“What?”

“You’re starting to sound like a politician’s wife.”

“I’m just getting warmed up.”

He pulled her into his arms again. “It’s going to be a tough race trying to beat an incumbent.”

She smiled up at him and said simply, “Run, Rafe, run.”

Outside the barn dawn replaced the indigo darkness with pewter light and suffused the Texas sky with promise. Inside, the parents of a ten-year-old boy greeted the new day with a fervent kiss and fresh commitment to winning the stubborn little turkey over.

Tony couldn’t seem to get the hang of roping the calf.

Rafe, watching him make yet another overhand toss that fell short of the mark, knew what his problem was. What he didn’t know was how to “show him the ropes” without putting him on the defensive … or himself in the painful position of being rejected again.

Shoulders slumping dejectedly, Tony reined in his gray cow pony and started recoiling—too tightly, Rafe noticed—his nylon lariat. As if to add insult to injury, the unfettered calf kicked dust in the boy’s face.

“Here, take over for me.” Rafe handed the branding iron he’d just heated to the cowman who was helping him. Then he headed toward
the camp’s picket line, where his saddled gelding was tethered along with Jeannie’s mare, Rusty’s bay, and several other horses.

There was more than one way to skin a cat, he mused as he mounted. Or, to put it more literally, to snare a calf. And as he took both the reins and the braided rawhide lariat he preferred to the more commonly used nylon in his left hand, he had every intention of catching two slippery critters with one toss.

Without looking back to confirm it, Rafe sensed Jeannie’s smiling endorsement of the action he was taking. She’d drawn the job of vaccinating today, which meant they were working within whispering distance of each other. Even so, they’d exchanged fewer than a dozen words of a personal nature. Their lingering gazes, though, had sizzled with passionate need and pure frustration.

He chirruped to the gelding now and reined it in in a half circle, spurred by a premonition that the future of three people was riding on what he was about to do. If he could rope Tony in, if only for a few minutes, it would go a long way toward removing that last barrier between him and Jeannie.

Rafe could tell by the way Tony straightened his shoulders and sat taller in the saddle that he’d piqued his interest with the rawhide lariat. Still, he pretended not to notice that the boy was watching him work the milling calves. He simply picked out one and moved in on it.

While his gelding kept its eyes glued to the pursued animal, Rafe got ready to drop his dally. He made his preparations in slow, almost exaggerated motions so that Tony, who had kneed his own pony closer to the action, wouldn’t miss a thing.

Monkey see, monkey do, Rafe thought, a surge of love welling up in him when he noticed that Tony had duplicated the hold on his nylon rope right down to his little finger. He noticed, too, the guarded look on the boy’s face and knew the real test was in getting him to catch the calf.

The most common ways of roping were the head and heel catches. Since the former was easier to master than the latter, Rafe opted to go that route. Watching from the corner of his eye to be sure that Tony was following suit, he paid out the loop in his lariat and made an overhand toss.

Right on target, Rafe snared his calf. But the pride he took in his perfect aim paled in comparison to the pure joy he felt when Tony’s nylon rope settled around the neck of the short-horned animal he’d singled out.

It would have been expecting too much to hear the boy
yip
with glee or yell his thanks for the roping lesson. For the man, for now, it was enough that he’d learned it.

Jeannie was standing by the supply trailer when Rafe and Tony rode up with their catches. Her champagne hair flowed past her shoulders. She’d lost her hat when she’d
jumped to her feet and come running to meet the triumphant pair. Her jubilant heart glittered in her gray eyes.

“Nice going,” Rusty said as he reached to take the lariats from father and son and lead the frantically lowing beasts to the branding fire.

That was when everything went wrong.

Maybe he didn’t get a good enough grip on the ropes. After all, his arthritis had been bothering him terribly of late. Or maybe he tripped, further spooking the already frightened calves. No one could say for sure but Rusty. And when the cloven hooves were stilled and the dust began to settle, Rusty wasn’t talking. He was lying on the ground.

For a paralyzed instant Jeannie just stood there, waiting for him to get up. The horrifying realization that he wasn’t going to finally galvanized her into action. After checking to be certain that Tony and Rafe were all right, she ran to Rusty’s side.

“Don’t move him,” she said, somehow managing to remember that that was the cardinal rule of first aid.

The two cowboys who’d been about to lift him onto a hastily unrolled sleeping bag backed off, and she knelt down beside him. Not being a medical expert, she didn’t know how to ease his suffering. But seeing his torn shirt and trampled chest, looking at his blood-speckled lips and into his pain-glazed
eyes, she knew that Rusty Pride had just participated in his last roundup.

“Laurrinda …?” he rasped out into the shocked silence that had fallen shortly after he had.

Hot tears blurred Jeannie’s vision when she realized that, in his delirium, the veteran cowhand had confused her with her mother. She patted his knobby hand consolingly, wondering how to respond. Then, knowing it was the least she could do for him after all he’d done for her, she swallowed past the lump in her throat and leaned down to whisper, “I’m here.”

Rallying ever so slightly, Rusty snagged several strands of her golden hair with his gnarled fingers. The tug at her scalp was nothing compared to the tug at her heartstrings when next he spoke.

“I told you … your hair … would grow back.”

Then the last cowboy let go of Jeannie’s hair and joined the lady he’d worshipped from afar.

The bedroom light shone like a beacon as the woman stepped to the window and watched the taillights of the man’s Studebaker disappear into the night.

Thirteen

A small greenhouse, added on at some unknown point in time to the back of Rusty’s bungalow, answered the question of who had been leaving those beautiful yellow roses on Laurrinda’s grave.

“I told you someone besides Grandpa might be doing it,” Tony said with the slightly superior air of one who’d discovered he was right.

Jeannie smoothed down his cowlick, then hugged him close, saddened to think of all the lonely years poor Rusty had wasted pining for a woman who, more for economic reasons than emotional ones, would never have left her husband had she lived.

“Phew!” Tony pinched his nostrils together and pulled a face. “It smells like a funeral parlor in here.”

While she didn’t agree with him, neither did Jeannie argue. She just inhaled deeply, drawing in the attar of roses and holding its sweetness inside her for a moment. Then she ushered Tony out of the greenhouse and closed the door on Rusty’s monument to unrequited love.

Mother and son had walked the mile from the main house to get the suit, shirt, and tie Rusty would wear for the rest of time. They headed for his bedroom in silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts.

“Are you ready to go?” Jeannie asked a few minutes later as she folded the garments she’d taken out of the closet over her arm. When Tony didn’t answer her, she turned to see what he was doing.

He was sitting on the side of Rusty’s neatly made twin bed, the pocketknife that Big Tom had left him in hand. Its old ivory handle wore a yellowish cast in the morning sunlight coming through the window. And the pull of the past warred with a fear of the future on his little boy’s face.

“Tony?” she prompted softly.

“I forgot to tell him thanks,” he said in a small voice.

She shook her head in confusion. “Tell who thanks, honey?”

“Rafe.” Uncertainly he peered up at her. “For teaching me the head catch yesterday.”

“You can tell him when he comes back,” she said, reaching out to stroke his cheek.

“Don’t you mean
if
he comes back?” he demanded with a touch of his old defiance.

Jeannie thought she understood, at least in part, why he was blowing so hot and cold toward Rafe right now. After all, she’d been something of a basket case herself after that phone call last night.

The three of them had just finished eating dinner and started discussing plans for Rusty’s funeral when Rafe’s secretary called to tell him that a woman he was representing in a bitterly contested divorce had been threatened with physical harm by her husband and was in need of a restraining order to keep him out of the house. Naturally he’d said he would leave immediately for San Antonio. And since he had to be in court on another matter this morning anyway, he’d decided he would stay in town overnight and drive back to the ranch later today.

Not again! Jeannie had wanted to shout when Rafe had hung up the phone and gone to pack. She’d sat there in a complete panic for a moment, fighting all the insecurities that had rushed back with full force. Then she’d jumped up from the table and bolted after him, ready to beg him, if necessary, to let someone else go to the woman’s rescue … ready to remind him, unfair as it sounded,
that he’d said he was tired of protecting other people.

By the time she’d caught up with him at the fourplex, though, she’d calmed down enough to realize that this wasn’t anything like eleven years ago, when he’d seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. She knew where he was going and when he was coming back. And his good-bye kiss, a lusty Valentino job that left her lips throbbing and her body tingling, had told her in no uncertain terms that he’d be returning for the rest.

“He’ll be back,” Jeannie declared in response to Tony’s doubting question.

“Okay.” Still sounding unconvinced, he stood and stuck the knife in his jeans pocket. Then he picked up his blue neon cap and Rusty’s best white shirt, both of which he’d set on the bed.

“Ready?”

He shook his head. “About last night …?”

She nodded encouragingly. “What about it?”

“After Rafe asked you if you minded if he invited his parents to come to Rusty’s funeral …”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“And you said, ‘What a good idea: I’d love to see Maria and …’ ”

Jeannie had never lied to Tony about the circumstances surrounding his birth. When he’d asked her why he didn’t have a father like all the other kids, she’d just answered in the
calmest voice possible that his father couldn’t marry her. And when he’d pestered her for a name, she’d promised to give him one when he was older.

“Yes,” she said, thinking that maybe now was the time to give him that name.

“And
who?
”

“Antonio.”

Tony fidgeted and cleared his throat, as if he were getting ready to comment on the similarity between their first names.

“Anybody home?” Rafe called through Rusty’s open front door.

Jeannie’s mind, already jumping through the blazing hoop of truth, went into a spin at the unexpected interruption.

“We’re in here!” Tony hollered, his voice wavering between “Welcome back” and “Why so early?”

Rafe, seeming to realize an explanation was in order, supplied one as he stepped into the living room and shut the door behind him. “After I got my client’s restraining order last night, I called the judge on my other case at home and requested a continuance for emergency reasons.”

Tony turned to greet his father, then turned back to his mother, obviously bugged by what they’d discovered in the greenhouse. “Why do you think Rusty did it?”

Jeannie heard Rafe’s firm bootsteps coming toward the bedroom and smiled. “Because
sometimes a person’s first love is also their last.”

“Where’s Tony?”

“Sleeping out.”

Rafe frowned. “Do you think that’s a good idea.”

Jeannie shrugged. “He really wanted to do it.”

“What if he gets scared?”

“One of the hands will bring him home.”

“How long have you known these guys?” he asked suspiciously.

She clapped her hand over his mouth.

“You know what you sound like?”

He shook his head.

“A new father.”

“ ’At’s what I am,” he mumbled against her hand.

She burst into laughter and let him go.

They were standing in the entryway, having just escorted Martha to her front door at the fourplex after helping her set the dining room table for tomorrow.