Texas Homecoming (8 page)

“That’s disgraceful. If we were in Spain, he would be whipped.”

“What are you doing out of your room?” Pilar was so shocked, she momentarily forgot Cade’s bare chest. Her grandmother had been adamant that she wouldn’t leave her room as long as strangers were about.

“You haven’t been in the house all day,” her grandmother said, the disapproval in her voice nearly as heavy as that in her expression. “I’ve been worried what those men might do to you.”

“I took them coffee and heated their bathwater.”

“You should have let them get their own coffee.”

“Everybody was busy. It didn’t seem right that I should sit back and do nothing.” Pilar headed toward the stove to light her fire and begin preparations for dinner.

“Do you call cooking and cleaning for all those men
nothing
?”

“I don’t clean for them. We’re the only ones staying in the house. You could come out any time you want.”

“I don’t
want
to come out.”

Pilar didn’t bother interrupting as her grandmother ran through her litany. She had learned that the best thing to do was to let her finish.

Pilar tried to forget that Cade and the others were taking baths, that they were naked in the ranch yard, but she couldn’t. Despite her determination to stay away from the window, she couldn’t resist taking a look. She got a brief
glance of Cade’s bare shoulders above the rim of the bath before someone blocked her view.

“Stay away from that window!” her grandmother ordered. “Earl Wheeler is the lowest and most vile of God’s creatures, but I didn’t think even he would allow his grandson to bathe in full view of a lady so far above him.”

“I don’t think Cade and his grandfather consider us above them,” Pilar said as she sliced a ham. “I think they believe they’re as good as anybody else.”

“Which shows how ignorant and uncivilized they are. Even wild animals recognize their leaders.”

“Cade’s been a leader since he was a boy. You used to say it was a shame how every boy in the county followed him wherever he went.”

“I also said he would come to a sad end.”

“We’re the ones who’ve come to a sad end. The only way we’ll get back any of our money is if Cade sells his cows.”

“Laveau will return soon. Everything will be as it was.”

“Maybe,” Pilar said, unwilling to argue. “But until then we’re dependent on Cade and his grandfather.”

“I do not like all those strange men. Maybe we should go into San Antonio.”

“Maybe a few people have stopped hating us for being Spanish, but now a lot more will hate us because Laveau’s a traitor.”

“Laveau is not—”

A burst of laughter from the yard caused her grandmother to stop, glance through the window, swell with indignation. “I would not have believed it, not even of the Wheelers. They are chasing one of the men half naked around the yard.”

“It has to be Owen,” Pilar said without pausing in her
work. “He’s probably hoping I’ll see him and be impressed.”

But Pilar’s thoughts were on Laveau.

Her brother was handsome, charming, aristocratic, everything her grandmother wanted in a grandson. He could preside over a wealthy estate with style and grace, but austerity wasn’t in his temperament.

Nor was it in her grandmother’s. She had been unable to understand that figures in a ledger could actually represent the money they did—or didn’t—have. She could only understand what she saw, and many servants, the best food, and premium wine indicated they had money. Pilar feared Laveau would be the same.

Cade was different. He understood what represented real wealth. He understood what it took to get and keep it. She had learned a lot about how to run a ranch, but she didn’t know as much as she needed to help Laveau restore their fortune. She knew only one person who could help her learn.

Cade.

“What do you think of Cade?” she asked her grandmother.

“He’s as bad as his grandfather.”

“I mean as a businessman.”

“He’s nothing but a cowhand.”

“That’s exactly what Laveau will be when he comes home.”

“How can you compare that man to your brother?”

“I wasn’t comparing them. I was asking what you thought of Cade.”

Her grandmother launched into another tirade about the injustices of a world that allowed people like the Wheelers to rise above the level of peasants. But Pilar had learned that being aristocratic had not endowed her family with
business sense. She had also learned that even a family used to wealth and position could lose everything overnight. A patrician birth guaranteed nothing. If they were to regain their wealth, they’d have to work for it.

She had also learned that intelligence, skill, character, even physical beauty, could come from humble sources. As Cade had said, at one time her ancestors were probably exactly like the Wheelers. Talent and ambition, combined with luck, had enabled them to rise above their station. The Wheelers had used luck and skill to acquire their land. It looked like Cade had the talent and ambition to turn it into an empire.

“I think we ought to ask Cade to help us.”

“Help us!” her grandmother said, her voice rising nearly two octaves from her normal contralto. “No diViere needs the help of a Wheeler!” She pronounced the name as through it were unclean. “Earl Wheeler stole his first land from us nearly thirty years ago, and he is still poor. I am in disbelief that you would think he has anything to teach us.”

“I said Cade.”

“He knows nothing.”

“He’s got plans. I heard him explain them to his grandfather. They’re good.”

“I doubt it, and I forbid you to speak to him about it. Even if he were one of our class, it is not a suitable topic for a lady.”

The shattering of Pilar’s lifelong habit of obedience was almost audible.

Tired of being told what she couldn’t do, angry at having her accomplishments dismissed and Laveau’s shortcomings ignored, sick of her grandmother’s refusal to realize that her aristocratic heritage wouldn’t put food in their mouths
or a roof over their heads, she was beyond weary of stepping back, dutifully waiting for some man to make all the decisions that affected her life.

“Being poor and having to cook for half a dozen men isn’t suitable for a lady, either. I mean to ask Cade to teach me how to run a ranch. I mean to ask him as soon as he gets out of that bathtub.”

Chapter Eight

“Are you sure you want the men to give you their dirty clothes?” Cade asked, sticking his head into the kitchen. The first to finish his bath, he felt a thousand times better. Even his bruises didn’t hurt as much, but the mounting pile of clothes bothered him.

“They won’t get clean unless the men put them in the wash pot,” Pilar answered without turning away from her work.

“You’re talking about clothes for seven men.”

Pilar turned to face him. “Do you want to wash them?”

“No.”

She turned back to the pot she was stirring. “Then you’d better leave them to me. How much longer before the men will be ready to eat?”

“We’ll eat when you’re ready.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Twenty minutes. I’ll help.”

“You don’t have to.”

“And you don’t have to wash our clothes.”

“I’d rather you didn’t smell like a barnyard when you came to the table.”

She turned, and her smile sent nearly every thought except one catapulting from his brain. He’d never realized what a truly beautiful woman she was, never been able to see past the hacienda, the money, the diViere name. It had been like looking at a portrait.

But the woman standing across the room from him now was wonderfully real. In a plain dress, her raven hair caught under a kerchief, her skin moist with perspiration, she looked very human. Very reachable. Very touchable. And Cade realized he very much wanted to touch her.

A small part of his brain screamed this wasn’t part of the plan. He was to show interest, not
be
interested. That way lay frustration, trouble, disaster. He forced himself to retrieve the threads of their conversation.

“Do we really smell that bad?” His grandfather had told him to get downwind on occasion, but that had never been accompanied by an order to take a bath.

Baths had been impossible during the war. The men would sometimes go weeks without changing their underwear, but that didn’t matter when they slept outdoors in camps that were stink holes at best, cesspools when the rain turned everything to mud that caught and held all the waste of the human and animal population. He had forgotten how ordinary human beings lived. He’d never known how people like Pilar lived. She must think him akin to a barnyard animal.

“I guess we did,” he said, not waiting for her answer.

“You can set the plates out, if you want to help.”

He felt like an idiot, standing immobile by the door, drinking in her beauty, feeling unworthy of being in the
same room with her. The change staggered him. He’d never felt like this before, but there was a quality about Pilar he’d seen in only two women during the war.

The first woman had been the mistress of a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley. She had a large family to care for, but she hadn’t hesitated to give the soldiers all the food she had. She turned her family out of doors so the soldiers could sleep in beds. Her ancestors came from nearly every great family in Virginia, but she and her daughters had waited on the soldiers themselves.

Another woman had been the mistress of a huge plantation before the war, but her house had been burned, her crops destroyed during the Battle of Fredericksburg. The woman and her family had been reduced to living in a modest house given to them by one of their relatives. The woman had never lost her graciousness, nor did she complain about what she had lost. She had set to work acquiring skills she’d never needed before, doing everything necessary to take care of her family.

Their circumstances had changed, but these women hadn’t. That was how Cade felt about Pilar, which made him feel even worse about using her to get to Laveau. But he only had to think of the wives, parents, and children deprived of loved ones forever, and his resolution hardened.

“Was that your grandmother I saw at the window?” Cade asked as he crossed to the cabinet and began taking out plates. “I thought she never left her room.”

“Your friends upset her. She wants to leave.”

“Where would you go?”

“We have nowhere to go until Laveau comes home.” She set ham and butter on the table.

“Have you heard from him again?”

“No. Move those cups so I can set this bowl down. It’s hot.”

He watched her closely. She didn’t appear to be lying. She’d probably never had to learn to lie. But then neither had Laveau, and he’d fooled everybody.

“I would have thought he’d have written at least.”

“So would I, but he hasn’t.” She was busy at the stove again. “My grandmother is getting very anxious about him.”

“Aren’t you?”

She turned toward him. “It doesn’t do any good to worry when I don’t know what to worry about. I’m more worried about our ranch.”

She checked the biscuits. He finished with the plates and cups and started on the silverware. Tinware, he ought to say.

“I thought you said Laveau would come home and magically put everything back the way it was.” He couldn’t keep the sarcasm from his voice, but she didn’t appear to resent his tone.

“He’ll get rid of the squatters, but I’m worried about the rest. Laveau isn’t good at thinking through a problem or sticking to a plan.”

Her candid evaluation surprised him. Even in San Antonio where the diVieres were still distrusted and disliked because of their opposition in both the Texas wars, women thought Laveau could do no wrong. Which went to show what looks, money, charm, and a long pedigree could do.

“You need to tell him to come home soon. All over Texas, men will soon be rounding up and branding cattle that are running loose. If he doesn’t get his brand on his cows soon, somebody else will.”

“Why can’t I do it?”

Good thing Cade had finished with the cups and plates. He dropped the knife he was about to put beside his grandfather’s plate.

“You don’t have to be so shocked. How do you think Texas got along during the war if it wasn’t for the women taking over where the men left off?”

Cade bent down to pick up the knife. “I thought women in your family left everything up to the men.”

Pilar wiped her hands on her apron and turned toward the window, away from Cade’s gaze. “My grandmother wanted me to do that, but it didn’t take me long to realize we were deeply in debt. I think the old manager took what little money we had.”

“You could prosecute him.”

She shook her head. “What matters is I was able to put the ranch back on a solid footing in two years.” She turned to look at him. “Laveau doesn’t know how to run the ranch. I want you to teach me everything you know, so I can help him.” She heaved a sigh, as though having rid herself of a great burden. “There, I’ve admitted the Wheelers can do something better than the diVieres. That ought to make you happy.”

It did, but not in the way she intended, or in the way he wanted. It excited him that she would turn to him, but he wasn’t thinking about revenge. He was thinking about Pilar, about her beautiful hair, skin as fair as her hair was dark, a body that had just reached the full ripeness of womanhood. He was thinking like a man who’d been without a woman for so long he’d forgotten what it was like.

He was thinking like a man who realized he’d discovered a treasure and wanted her for himself.

He told himself he was crazy, that he was letting lust cloud his thinking. Her family had hated his family her
whole life. She would marry a goat farmer before she’d marry him. If he hanged her brother, there wouldn’t be enough money in the world to induce her to speak to him. He had to proceed with his original plan, not let physical desires get in his way.

“What do you want to know?” He looked out the window. Holt and Broc were emptying the water out of the bathtub. They would be ready to eat soon.

“How do I go about hiring men?”

Good. She’d hit a roadblock with her first question. “You can’t.”

“As long as I have the money—”

“It’s not a matter of money. Texas men won’t work for a woman, especially
vaqueros
.”

“Why not?”

“Such a man couldn’t call himself a man. He wouldn’t be respected by other men.”

“But men
do
work for women. My grandmother told me—”

“Maybe in other places, but not in Texas.”

“So what am I to do?”

“Get a man to do the hiring for you.”

“But wouldn’t I have to hire him first?”

“You could get someone to take the job if you gave him complete control.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then you’ll have to wait for Laveau.”

“Would you hire them for me?”

Cade had considered the possibility that Pilar might want him to drive off her squatters, but not that she would want him to hire her crew. “It wouldn’t do any good. The men wouldn’t take orders from you.”

“I could give them to you, and you could give them to the men.”

It was time he brought this conversation to a close. “I’ve got my own ranch to run. I can’t be here and at your place at the same time.”

“But I need someone to run my ranch for me,” she said as the first of the men entered the kitchen.

“How about me?” Owen said with one of his brightest smiles.

Cade couldn’t think of anyone he less wanted close to Pilar. Owen wouldn’t deviate from their plan to hang Laveau, but he would think nothing of seducing Pilar in the process. Cade didn’t have many scruples in a situation like this, but he balked at ravishing virgins. Lost innocence was gone forever. “Fortunately, she doesn’t have a ranch for you to run.”

“I doubt Pilar considers that fortunate.”

“She would if she had to put up with you for long.” When it came to women, there was some demon inside Owen that seemed to goad him.

“Sit down before the food gets cold,” Pilar said. “You can argue after the blessing.”

“Are you looking for a foreman?” Broc asked Pilar after they had said the blessing and taken the edge off their appetites.

“I thought squatters had taken over your ranch,” Holt said.

“I was thinking ahead to when my brother comes home.”

“I expect he’ll do the hiring,” Broc said. “I can’t imagine any man letting a woman do something like that.”

“I know a woman who runs a farm back in Vermont,” Holt said.

“There’s no accounting for Yankees,” Earl said. “They’re nothing but a bunch of heathens.”

Cade nearly choked on his food. As far as he could remember, his grandfather saw every Christian virtue as a weakness to be exploited. Fortunately for the peace of the meal, Holt didn’t feel impelled to defend the honor of his home state.

“Women don’t do that in Tennessee,” Broc said. “Their menfolk won’t let them. What about where you come from?” he asked Rafe.

Rafe forked a piece of ham into his mouth, answered by shaking his head.

“There you have it,” Earl said, giving Pilar a satisfied smile. “It ain’t fittin’ for a woman to do any such thing.”

“It
ain’t fittin’
for women to starve or be forced to marry men who beat them, but it happens all the same.”

“A man’s got a right to beat his wife if she needs it,” Earl insisted.

“Is that why your wife left you?” Pilar asked.

“She was a weak woman,” Earl said, anger turning his cheeks a mottled red. “She couldn’t stand up to the work.”

“Not every woman is as strong as a plowhorse,” Pilar said.

“You sure as hell look a lot better than any horse I ever saw,” Owen said.

“If that’s your idea of a compliment,” Cade said, “maybe you should be quiet.”

“I didn’t hear you saying anything.”

“I don’t need compliments from Wheelers,” Pilar said.

“Maybe you don’t want any, but I don’t mind saying this is a fine meal,” Cade said. “I don’t know where you learned to cook, but you were taught well.”

“I taught myself,” Pilar said.

“She learned on Jessie and me,” Earl said. “Nearly died a couple of times.”

“That didn’t stop you from eating enough for two people,” Pilar said.

“A man’s got to eat to stay alive.”

“There’s no law saying you have to stay alive.”

Cade wondered if they had been going at each other like this for the last two years.

“What is your ranch like?” Broc asked Pilar.

“She doesn’t have a ranch,” Earl said spitefully.

Broc rephrased his question. “What was it like before the squatters took it?”

“We lived in a big hacienda built by my great-grandfather,” Pilar said. “My grandmother’s father. We had a land grant given to us by the Spanish king.”

“Not that anybody in your family was able to hold on to it.”

“We held on to it until you came along.”

She sounded more tired than angry. Cade supposed she’d faced that particular truth too often for it to generate great anger.

“Our house was filled with beautiful things collected through several generations. We had wines from Spain and Italy, laces from Brussels, silver serving dishes from Germany and England. We had servants, and guests came to stay for days at a time.”

“They were a useless, spoiled lot,” Earl said, “incapable of doing anything except eating too much and spending too much money.”

“It must have been hard to lose all that,” Broc said.

“I was bored a lot of the time,” Pilar said. “I hated having nothing to do, being told a proper lady didn’t
want
to do anything with her time. But while I would be lying if I
didn’t say I still miss my old life very much, I don’t mind working. I actually enjoyed running the ranch after my brother left.”

“We’ll get it back for you,” Owen said.

Everyone looked at him in surprise.

“Laveau will do that,” Pilar said. “I’ve had enough of being made to feel like a leech.” She got up from the table. “The second pan of biscuits should be about ready.”

Cade didn’t know why he hadn’t offered to run off the squatters. Having them that close was bound to be a source of trouble.

But his first responsibility was to his own ranch, to the men he’d promised a grubstake. It would take every bit of their time and energy to round up his cows, brand them, and take the steers to market. With only five able-bodied men—he didn’t count his grandfather and uncle—they might have to hire help. Next spring, or maybe during the winter after he’d sold the herd, he might see what he could do.