“You’ve always done for yourself, Faith. You’re the most stubborn gal I ever met. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
Fire darted out of those dark brown eyes and was quickly extinguished. She primly folded her hands in her lap. “Go on then.”
He didn’t argue further, didn’t want to take time for it, but simply snatched up the reins, slapped them against the rumps of the two horses, and felt the tension ease a little as they got under way. “I’m anxious to get to the ranch. How bad is Dallas really?”
“Why won’t you call him Pa?”
Because the man he’d known as Pa when he was a boy had been a mean, vindictive son of a bitch who had taken advantage of his mother, abducting her from the Shawnee people and getting a child on her that he hadn’t wanted. Even after all these years, even knowing the man was dead, Rawley would still recoil and feel sick to his stomach when memories of him and that time in his life surfaced. Dallas might have raised him, but Dallas wasn’t his pa. In Rawley’s eyes he’d always been too big, too bold, as majestic as the land. Rawley had never felt worthy of acknowledging the man as his father. “He’s not my pa,” he said simply.
“But you call our mother Ma.”
For the longest he’d simply known her as the pretty lady. When she’d opened her arms and heart to him, he’d gone to her with all that he was, desperate to fill the ache that lingered after his own mother—a kind, gentle soul who had loved him—died. “That’s different.”
“Care to explain how?”
“Not really. How bad off is Dallas?” he asked again.
She sighed heavily, obviously not pleased with his response or dogged determination to get back on topic, and he almost smiled because she’d always had far less patience with him than he’d had with her.
“Mostly he’s just ornery because the doc doesn’t want him doing anything strenuous. You know Pa. I don’t think he’s ever sat still for a moment in his life.”
Except for the time when he’d almost died, but that was before Faith had come along.
“Is he sitting still?”
“Mostly he’s wandering through the house, but at least he’s not riding the range. He was by himself when he toppled from his horse. We don’t know how long it was before someone ran across him.”
Once more his gut tightened. He didn’t want to think about Dallas passing over to the great beyond. As though sensing the direction of his thoughts, Faith patted his knee. “He claimed it was just the heat and maybe it was. To look at him, you wouldn’t know anything had happened.”
But somethinghadhappened, and Rawley hadn’t been there—because of the woman sitting beside him, someone for whom inappropriate thoughts and feelings had blossomed, and he hadn’t been sure he could keep them in check. When she’d challenged him one night, he’d realized his restraint was thinly tethered and could easily snap. Where would they be then?
He’d grown up in the bosom of her family, knew himself not to be worthy of her. So he’d left. To protect her, to protect himself. Yet he couldn’t tell her all that. Instead, he settled into mentally berating and beating himself up for making himself even more unworthy by not staying and being the man he needed to be, the man Dallas Leigh had raised him to be.
Glancing over at her, he was struck by how much he’d missed her, how very little he knew about what had transpired with her since he’d left. It seemed no matter how far or fast he traveled, she was always there. During the years he’d been gone, he’d only ever written letters to Ma, received news from her. Whenever he arrived at the next town, he’d send her a telegram to let her know he was doing all right and a postcard to give her a sense of his surroundings. It became easier three years ago, when Congress authorized using half of the back of the postcard for scrawling notes. He no longer had to sit down and write out a lengthy letter to her. A few lines, short and sweet, was all he needed to keep her apprised of his situation.
“What are you doing these days, Faith? Your oil wells come in?” After Spindletop, she’d been optimistic they might find oil on some of the Leigh spread and had begun working with oilmen who had the skills to help her locate it.
“They never amounted to much,” she said. “I lost interest in them. These days I’m mostly just looking after the ranch.”
He wasn’t surprised she was in charge of the spread. She was the logical choice, would inherit all of it someday. “How’s that going?”
She latched on to the opportunity to talk about something other than themselves, to wax on about the cattle, the goings-on with the men, the ones who had passed, the ones who had retired. Listening with interest, absorbing the sound of her voice, warmed him in ways nothing else did.
The road from town hadn’t changed much. Barbed wire lined both sides of it, wire he’d restrung and repaired countless times, wire that had changed the cattle industry. The days of the long cattle drives were behind them. They just had to get the cattle to a train. He wondered if a time would come when there wouldn’t be any cowboys at all. Sometimes he felt like a dying breed.
He turned the horses from the road onto a narrower path that passed beneath an archway bearing the two D’s that marked the brand Dallas had begun using when he’d married Cordelia McQueen, known as Dee among her family and friends. Not that Rawley had ever called her that. From the moment she’d made him hers, she’d been Ma.
Eventually the house came into view. “Just as hideous as I remember,” he said with fondness. It was a monstrosity, had the look of a castle on the prairie. Dallas had built the massive structure more than thirty years earlier in anticipation of the arrival of his mail-order bride. Only destiny had found Amelia Carson falling in love with Houston Leigh when he’d been sent to Fort Worth to fetch her on Dallas’s behalf.
“When I was younger, I always felt like a princess living there,” Faith said quietly.
“Dallas sure spoiled you like you were one.”
“You did your fair share of spoiling. It’s a wonder I learned to walk the way you carried me everywhere.”
Surprised, he glanced over at her. “You remember that?”
She shook her head. “No, but Ma told me often enough. ‘That Rawley Cooper would never let you out of his sight.’ Apparently I ensured it by constantly holding my arms up to you.”
