She gave him an angry look of wounded betrayal. He’d forgotten how sensitive he’d been to thoughtless actions of others at that age. No matter how self-contained and confident Jessy appeared, she did have feelings that could be hurt.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he offered.
Her angry look hardened. “I’m not a kid,” she declared in a clipped voice and laid the reins alongside the grulla’s neck to turn it. Vaguely irritated by her failure to accept his apology, Ty let go of the bridle. No one had ever apologized to him, so maybe he should have just kept his mouth shut.
Jessy walked the mouse-gray horse away from the fence gate while the others swung loosely in behind her. She wasn’t hot all over anymore, and for that she was grateful, but she was shaking inside. The sensation of his warm mouth on her lips continued to linger, along with the feel of his arms around her.
She wanted to touch her mouth, but she didn’t dare raise her hand. They might think she was crying, and she’d die before she’d have them think that. It was bad enough that all had seen how embarrassed she’d been—embarrassed and hotly disturbed.
It had been her first kiss, and she’d always dreamed that Ty would be the one to give it to her. That dream had come true, but bitterly so. He had kissed her, all right, but only as a joke. And it had hurt to think Ty did it only to make fun of her . . . and in front of Buzz Taylor and Bill Summers to boot. By tomorrow, it would be all over the ranch and everyone would be laughing about it.
Jessy held her head a little higher as the four riders traveled in a loose group toward the South Branch camp. The conversation was minimal, but gradually Jessy took part in it. On the surface, everything seemed to be back to normal by the time they arrived at the camp, but it wasn’t.
7
With a heaving toss, Jessy threw the large suitcase in the back end of the pickup truck, then shut the tailgate. The smell of snow was in the air; solid cloud cover hung low in the sky. She shoved her bare hands into the lined pockets of her new parka and trotted around the truck to the front porch of the big log house. She had one foot on the first step when the front door opened.
“Hi, Mr. Grayson,” she said to the forty-year-old geologist. He was bundled in a pile-lined coat with a wool scarf wrapped around his cap and neck and fur-lined gloves on his hands. By contrast, Jessy had no gloves or scarf, and the top buttons of her parka were unfastened. She was wearing her good black Stetson—she always wore a hat. “I was just coming in to see if you were ready to go.”
“I’m ready.” He paused at the top of the steps to rub his gloved hands together and study the gloomy gray late-October sky. “It’s a cold one today.” Anything below forty was cold to the Texas native, and the morning temperature was hovering around that mark. “I put my suitcase on the porch earlier.” Leo Grayson swung his head in search of it, peering through his wire-rimmed glasses.
“I’ve already loaded it in the trunk,” Jessy informed him. “Did you have anything else?”
“No.” He glanced expectantly toward the barn. “Is your father ready to leave?”
“Dad got detained at the last minute. I’ve been deputized to drive you over to The Homestead so you can catch your plane.” She pulled her foot off the step and turned around to walk to the driver’s side of the pickup cab.
“Shouldn’t you be in school today?” There was a faint smile on his face as he followed her to the truck. In the short time he had stayed at this southern outpost of the Triple C Ranch, he’d learned that Jessy Niles had her own opinion on the relative importance of certain things.
“Not really.” She shrugged indifferently, hopped into the truck, and slid behind the wheel, all in one fluid, effortless movement. She waited until he had climbed into the passenger side and shut the door before she elaborated. “There wasn’t anything special going on in school today, no tests or anything. I can call Betty Trumbo tonight and find out what the assignments are. But I didn’t see any point in going and maybe getting snowbound in town.”
The truck rumbled to life under the turn of the ignition key and the pumping of her foot on the gas pedal. Her last comment drew a curious look from Leo Grayson. “The weather forecast said there was only a chance of flurries today.”
“According to Abe Garvey, we’re in for the first snow-storm of the season. He was born and raised here on the ranch, nearly seventy years ago. I’d take his word before I’d listen to some meteorologist who doesn’t understand the peculiarities of this climate. Abe’s hardly ever wrong,” she concluded.
“It looks like I’m getting out of here just in time.” Once Leo Grayson would have scoffed at the less than scientific weather predictions of old-timers in this area who cared not a hoot for the patterns of fronts. But he’d found their predictions just about as accurate as any professional meteorologist’s. If one said snow flurries and the other said snowfall, something was bound to happen.
Once the buildings of the south camp were lost from sight, there was nothing for miles in any direction but the monotonous sweep of rolling grassland, rising on swells of earth and dipping into shallow hollows. Trees were so few and far between they became landmarks, consisting mainly of cotton-woods along some vagrant stream. The raw, gray day made the lonely stretch of country seem bleak and empty. There were wide, open spaces in Texas, but nothing in Grayson’s experience as desolate as this.
Hot air began blowing full force out of the vents as the truck’s engine warmed up enough to release its excess heat. When his glasses steamed over, Leo took them off and wiped them on the inside lining of his coat. Absently he squinted to look out the window, but not even his blurred vision could make the muscular landscape appear more inviting.
“I don’t know how you can stand it out here.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose, then glanced at Jessy.
“Never been anywhere else.” She drove with the relaxed competence of a man, one hand resting on the top arc of the steering wheel and the other gripping it. Leo supposed she had been driving since she was eight or nine. That was about the age most of the ranch kids started, usually rigging up some kind of device so they could reach the brake and still see where they were going.
“I’ll bet you can hardly wait until you’re eighteen so you can leave here and see something more of the world than grass and sky.” The lonely rigors of this kind of life didn’t appeal to him. It was bound to be worse for a girl.
“I’m satisfied with my life here,” Jessy replied, aware she was in a minority, since most of the other girls her age were always complaining about the things they were missing. But those “things” didn’t interest her. “I’ve never had any desire to leave. I know”—she drew her attention away from the road long enough to flash him a smile—“that makes me strange. But I don’t care about movies and parties and all that glamorous stuff. I like riding and roping and being outdoors, even when the work is so hard you get tired to the bone. I’d like to be one of those trees, sink my roots deep into this ground and never leave.”
“You’ll change your mind when you get older.” He had observed she was something of a tomboy during the time he’d spent at the Southern Branch camp.
“So everybody keeps telling me.” But she didn’t see that happening. Most of them claimed it was a phase she was going through, but she truly loved what she was doing, and she didn’t see it changing just because she got older.
Leo Grayson just smiled, the way adults did when she showed resistance to their prediction. “Wait until you discover boys.”
“Where is it written that boys and horses don’t mix?” Jessy countered.
Her one and only crush had been on Ty Calder, now in his third year at college. But it had been too one-sided to survive, especially after that humiliating experience with that kiss this past summer. It still made her cheeks redden when she remembered what a joke it had been to him. All the other boys she chummed around with at school events were just that—boys. None of them worth getting excited about.