This Calder Sky (Calder Saga 3)

The boy looked surprised, then scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “Why does he hate me?”

“He doesn’t know you, so it isn’t you he hates—it’s what you represent.” It had been difficult for him to accept when he was young. It wouldn’t be easier for Ty. “You are a Calder.”

“Why should he hate a Calder?” The answer didn’t make sense to him. His frown deepened as he watched his father lean down and pick up a handful of gravel, sifting through it.

“If a man is walking along and falls down, he automatically looks to see what caused him to fall.” Chase reached down again and picked up a large chunk of gravel. “Will he blame this big rock—or this small pebble?” He showed his son the two different-sized stones in the leather-covered palm of his hand.

“The rock.” It was obvious.

“Because it’s the biggest. So it always gets blamed. But who is to say that this small pebble wasn’t under the rock, and when it moved, it forced the rock to move?”

“I guess

it could,” Ty admitted.

“When things go wrong for some men in this area of the state, they look around for someone to blame. There sit all those square miles of the Triple C, so much bigger than anything else around it. We get blamed. Maybe cattle prices go down. All the other little ranchers point at us because we glutted the market, they claim.” He observed his son’s frown turn to thoughtfulness. “When you are big and prosperous, there are always some who want to cut you down. They move … and the rock moves. Sometimes, the rock falls on the pebble. That’s when resentment can turn to hate.”

“What happened to make my uncle hate us?” Ty looked up from the stones Chase held and searched his face.

“It’s a collection of things, Ty. Some of it goes back to his father and mine, and to your mother. After I took over the ranch, Culley and I had a run-in. It’s a very long story, but he believes that he has a good reason to hate the Calders. And there are some who would agree with him,” Chase added with a slight lift of one shoulder. “The thing for you to remember, Ty, is that when somebody hates you, don’t take it personally. It isn’t a condemnation of you as an individual, so don’t go around thinking there is something wrong with you. Just do what you believe is right and fair, and let the others look at it as they will.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, a grim resignation stealing across his expression. Chase closed his gloved hand around the two stones, then tossed them to the ground.

“Don’t you think you’d better get to work?” he suggested.

“Right.” Ty pulled a grin across his mouth and turned to the wheelbarrow. Chase watched him for a second before his own duties called him.

Maggie was surprised at how quickly she settled back into the routine of ranch life. Within two short weeks, it was as if she had been away only a few short months, instead of sixteen years. She rose with the sun and had breakfast on the table when Ty and Chase came down. Ruth had gladly relinquished the kitchen chores to Maggie, although she still helped with the house-cleaning.

But it was more than just cooking meals and keeping house, something that had been Pamela’s responsibility to supervise when Maggie had been married to Phillip. The ranch terminology and Western lingo all came back to her, slipping naturally into her talk. Within two afternoon rides, she had adjusted from English riding to the less-structured Western style. There were brief moments when she was out riding that she actually forgot she hadn’t always lived amidst this vast openness. During her rides, she gradually noticed less of the raw beauty and paid more attention to down-to-earth matters like the condition of the grass or fences, and the amount of water around. These observations she would absently pass along to Chase in the course of a meal’s conversation.

Three times she had ridden to her brother’s without finding him home. These, she didn’t mention to Chase. It was difficult to describe her relationship with Chase. She rarely saw him, except at mealtimes. He spent the evenings in the den with an endless array of paperwork that couldn’t be handled by his accounting help, since it required his personal attention. On the whole, they were civilized, with brief moments when they actually relaxed in each other’s company, and other times when their conversations were stilted and forced. The latter occurred when Maggie couldn’t pretend that he didn’t exist and she wasn’t wearing his wedding band. Invariably, it coincided with the times when she yearned to be held and touched—and the natural, biological urges of her body were going unsatisfied. It wasn’t easy to look at him then and not remember other days when he had taken care of those needs so thoroughly. To make matters worse, Chase was so damned attractive in that raw, range-toughened way of a Calder.

Seeing him every day and watching him with Ty, it was getting harder and harder to summon her old dislike and have it come with the fierce intensity of before. On the nights she couldn’t sleep, she would lie in bed and deliberately compare Chase to Phillip: Phillip, with his fine manners, impeccable dress, and courtly charm, versus Chase, with his blunt authority, rough clothes, and raw earthiness. With Phillip, she had been emotionally safe. With Chase, she wasn’t.

The long horseback rides in the afternoons functioned to fill time and get away from the Calder influence of the house. She never admitted it was hard exercise she sought so she would be tired enough in the evenings to fall asleep. Dressing every night for dinner was an attempt to keep alive the link to her past marriage, when it was the custom, not a desire to impress Chase.

Rain threatened off and on all day, keeping her in the house. So Maggie concentrated her efforts on fixing a special dinner that evening. She had sought out Tucker at the cook-shack and asked him to slice a prime-rib roast from one of the carcasses kept in the big cooler for ranch consumption. All the accompanying dishes she chose had been favorites of Phillip’s—from the broiled grapefruit appetizer to the baby peas and pearl onions in a light cream sauce. Even the dress she wore had been one he had particularly liked, a silk dress of a bold peacock-blue with a green-colored design.

At the end of a day’s work, Chase always showered before sitting down to dinner. As a concession to her habit of dressing for the evening meal, he usually wore a white shirt, but it was open at the throat and the cuffs were rolled back to reveal flat, wide wrists and hair-roughened forearms. Ty copied him.

It was the same that evening when the pair entered the dining room. Chase barely glanced at her as he noticed the table, set with good china, wine goblets, and the heavy silver candleholders. He moved to the chair at the head of the table, raising a questioning eyebrow in her direction.

“What’s the occasion?” he asked.

“No occasion,” she insisted coolly, then went to the kitchen to bring out the grapefruit appetizer.

Maggie was fully aware that while Ruth Haskell had been a very good cook, she was unimaginative. Her meals had always been variations of the same thing: soup, beef, potatoes, vegetables, and dessert. So when Maggie set the broiled grapefruit half in front of Chase, she observed the faint surprised lift of his eyebrow, but he made no comment about the change in fare. He didn’t even say whether he liked it or not, which vaguely irritated her. Nor did he remark on the salad, made with fresh spinach she had picked from Ruth’s garden. The dressing was made from a recipe Maggie had gotten from Phillip’s cook. No appreciation was expressed for the variety she had managed to inject into their diet, or her cooking skills.

The prime rib had turned out perfectly—juicy, rare, and tender. When she served Chase his main course, he stared at it. “This meat isn’t done.”

“Of course it is. Prime rib is supposed to be served rare.” She glanced at her son. “Would you pass the horseradish sauce, please?”

As Ty started to reach for the silver sauceboat, Chase stated, “I prefer my meat well done. Would you take it back into the kitchen and finish cooking it?” The question was an order.

“I will not!” She refused sharply because she had gone to such effort to have everything turn out perfectly, including the prime rib.

Folding his napkin beside his plate, Chase pushed his chair away from the table and stood. Maggie frowned at him. “What are you doing?”