“Gee, I guess three’s a crowd,” Cale said and made Kane turn away so Ruth couldn’t see his expression turn to one of rage.
When he’d recovered himself, he walked to the window, hoping Ruth would follow him and when she did, he thought how natural it would be to slip his arm about her waist. She was so like his wife that he knew his arm would fit perfectly, but the presence of the blonde on the other side of Ruth kept him from touching her. He couldn’t be himself around that woman.
Outside the window, Kane could see Sandy coming toward the house, leading two saddled horses.
“Who’s he?” Ruth asked.
“Sandy. Actually, he’s J. Sanderson.” Kane smiled at her, noting the way the evening light touched her hair. “No one knows what the J stands for, so we’ve always called him Sandy. He’s a distant relative of mine.”
Cale peered around Ruth and looked up at Kane. “And which one is your relative? The one with the brown saddle or the one with the black saddle?”
Without thinking what he was doing, Kane went for her. He leaped over a chair back while she, after one gasp of fright, climbed up on the couch, then jumped over the back and headed for the door. Kane caught her just as she ran smack into Sandy as he entered the room. With one bounce, she was behind Sandy, her hands on his hips as she used him as a shield.
Kane was too angry to comprehend what was going on. His one goal in life was to kill this woman. Reaching around Sandy, he made a grab for her, but she evaded him, so he pushed Sandy to one side.
“Kane!” Sandy bellowed in his ear, and it was the voice of a man who had changed Kane’s diapers.
Once again Kane felt as though he were waking from a trance. For a moment he stood there blinking; then he realized what he’d been about to do. The woman, half his size, was smiling at him from behind Sandy, looking like the school tattletale who’d just done her bad deed for the day and was glorying in it. Sandy was disgusted and shocked by him, and Kane didn’t dare look at Ruth. Too mortified with embarrassment to move, Kane just stood there.
With one more look of reproach at Kane, Sandy slipped his arm about the woman’s shoulders and escorted her from the room, and she left with him, her round little tail twitching in triumph as she left the house.
Chapter Four
Sandy had to admit to himself that Kane’s behavior had shaken him. He’d known the man since he was a child, and Kane and his twin brother had always been the kindest, sweetest children, always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone who needed them. They were the children who would sleep in the barn with a sick horse and cry when one of the dogs killed a snake. They were boys who’d rather laugh than anything else, boys who were happy and wanted to share their happiness with others.
So when Sandy had walked into the house and seen Kane threatening the life of one very pretty, very small female, he hadn’t at first known how to react. One thing that had been so stunning to him was the fact that Kane was responding at all. After his wife died five years ago, Kane had seemed to retreat within himself. Except for his sons, nothing seemed to make him angry or sad; nothing seemed to delight him or disappoint him or bore him. In truth, nothing in the world seemed to affect him at all.
When Pat had told Sandy what she was up to with these four women and that she’d even chosen one of them to be her son’s future wife, Sandy hadn’t laughed. He had been hoping that something or someone would bring Kane back to life, and if a widow could do that, then he was for whatever deception had to be perpetrated to make it come about.
But when Sandy walked into the house, Kane hadn’t been mooning over some beautiful widow; he’d been chasing a minx of a girl across the furniture. Sandy had to admit that he was intrigued as much as puzzled by what he’d seen.
“You the one who shot the snake?” Sandy asked the young woman walking silently beside him. She was a pretty little thing, blonde and blue-eyed, and if he hadn’t just seen her in action, he would have thought her rather shy and quiet.
“And went crazy,” she added tightly, and Sandy saw
the very slight movement of her shoulders, as though she were preparing to defend herself against him.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“Not especially,” she answered.
Sandy wanted to hear another side to the story, and he meant to find out what had happened. “Kane says you nearly killed him and afterward you went hysterical. You always get hysterical and use guns?”
Trying his best to keep from smiling, he watched as she took his bait, her pretty little face turning a couple of shades of red, ranging from pink to almost purple, before she erupted in words.
“I saved that ungrateful woman’s life!” she said, then went on to tell Sandy about the suitcase Kane had been holding and how she figured that if she didn’t act quickly the snake might strike at Ruth.
As Sandy listened, the smile left his face. The impression Kane had given him was that the woman was beyond irrational, but her reasons for what she’d done were sound, and it did indeed seem as though she’d saved Ruth’s life. “What about later?” he asked softly. “Did you get scared and a little too excited?” He could understand if she had, but he watched her as she looked away from him, her face again red, but this time from embarrassment rather than rage. He could see her debating whether or not to tell him the truth, so he just stood there and waited patiently while she made up her mind.
After a big sigh, she said, “Well, uh…my old man used to get mad at me and…lay his hands on me, and I guess when your cowboy touched me I sort of did a little time travel.”
After she’d told him, she stood there looking at him belligerently, as though daring him to make any comment. She looked a bit like the local bully who’d just revealed that he wasn’t so tough after all.
Sandy nodded in understanding of what she’d told him, but made no comment. “Do you know anything about horses?”
“I can tell when one’s upside down, but that’s about it.”
He grinned at her. “Why don’t you come help me unsaddle these animals and tell me how you know so much about guns?”