Midnight Faith

It was the novelty of it, he decided as he danced with Faylene. Simple novelty was the reason she was getting so much attention from everyone.

Why, he, himself couldn’t help but watch Cait in spite of a firm resolution not to give her so much as a glance more than the cool one she’d given him.

No one at the party had ever seen her in a dress before. Few of them, if any, had ever seen her at a social function.

It was the men, as always, who were most fascinated.

Those two young Carmack kids were sticking with her, but several others had joined them, vying for her attention to their jokes and stories. Clint set his jaw and guided Faylene in the opposite direction.

“That Cait’s a knockout, isn’t she?” his aunt said.

Faylene was nearly as good as Bobbie Ann in reading a man’s mind in a New York minute.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Half the men here can’t see anything but her and the other half are the old codgers with failing eyesight.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

His lack of response didn’t discourage her one bit.

“She’s exotic, that’s one reason,” she said, “besides being so drop-dead striking in every way. You know what I think makes her so interesting?”

That brought his gaze straight to her sharp blue one, so like his mother’s. Faylene indulged herself in one gleam of triumph before she answered the question in his look.

“She’s different from other women because she gives no quarter.”

He looked at her.

“Like the old Texas Rangers?”

“Exactly.”

“She’s from Chicago, Faylie.”

She ignored his little sally.

“Everything about Cait proclaims it,” she said seriously. “The look in her eye, the way she walks, the way she keeps her head in her business all the time. No man can resist a challenge like that.”

“Hmpf.”

Faylene went right on.

“A man gets one chance with Cait,” she said. “One.”

A strange, sharp feeling, like a warning, pierced him.

“One’s enough when he gets the rough side of her tongue.”

“Cait’s a direct-talking woman,” she said. “Y’all are just used to us Texas women sugarcoating everything for you.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You and Bobbie Ann are the champion sugarcoaters of all time. Steel magnolias is more like it.”

“Well, we all have our own styles,” his diminutive aunt said sweetly as she looked up at him with a beatific smile. “I, for one, admire a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. Cait’s bound to be a world-class horsewoman and she will be.”

“What’ve you heard about that?”

Maybe Bobbie Ann had talked to her sister about Cait’s silly riding school. Maybe he could get some ammunition here to stop it.

But no. Faylene had her own ideas about what was important information.

“You can see she’s Black Irish,” she said in a reproving tone. “Same as your great-grandpa Murphy—except his eyes were blue. But his hair was midnight-black, just like Cait’s.”

“So, Jackson must look like him,” Clint said, hoping to get her off the subject of Cait.

At least until this endless waltz could be over. Didn’t Delia’s arms ever get tired of that fiddle?

“You look like your great-grandpa, too,” Faylene said. “Tall and black-haired and handsome as can be. Your eyes are different, though—gray as mist instead of blue.” She smiled as if he needed comfort. “That’s why I used Jackson for an example instead of you.” He returned her smile. She was his favorite aunt. “Ooh,” she said, “I can’t wait until Jackson and Darcy get here! I still could just spank them for having that tiny wedding in the old chapel instead of letting us throw them a great big one. There’s five hundred people with their feelings hurt….”

But he couldn’t let well enough be. He’d distracted her and now he had to bring her back.

One of the young men appeared to be asking Cait to dance. She was shaking her head and smiling a refusal.

“What does being Black Irish have to do with being a world-class horsewoman?”

Faylene flashed him an incredulous look.

“The Irish have an affinity for horses, you know that. Their emotions and their spirits run deep and they have a strong connection with things unseen.”

Clint had to grin at her seriousness.

“The Comanches had a connection with horses,” he said.

“Same with them,” Faylene said promptly. “Close to the earth—the Comanches and the Irish.”

“Giving no quarter, like the Texas Rangers.”

“Right!”

She beamed at him.

He laughed and hugged her as Delia’s fiddle finally sang out the last note.

“Thanks for the dance and the information, too, Auntie Fay,” he said.

“Any time, lovey.”

Then the question on his mind came off his tongue of its own accord.

“Why do you think she married John?”

Faylene narrowed her blue eyes and stared up at him.

“Nobody but Cait knows that, sugar,” she said. “Whatever I’d say about it would only be speculation.”

Clint grinned.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to push you into speculation,” he said dryly, “since everything else you’ve told me tonight has been ironclad fact.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said, twinkling at him.

Then she patted him on the arm and hurried off, waving at Jim Prescott. Suddenly she stopped and looked back.

“Sometime she might tell you herself, sweetie,” she said.

Oh, sure. Sometime when he and Cait became best buddies.

Immediately, without so much as a glance toward Cait and her admirers, he started looking for Larry. The reason Cait had married John was totally immaterial to him and he had no idea why he’d asked that question out loud.

He didn’t even want to know. All he wanted was to make the Rocking M the premier breeding station in the reining-horse industry, and in the meantime come up with new stallions to take over the cutting-and pleasure-horse market, too.

And he also wanted to make some waves with his cattle. Might as well dream big. He was the oldest brother, and he’d always been the most responsible one, so perhaps the whole ranch was meant to fall on his shoulders. Jackson was the next oldest, and he was here on the Rocking M and, in time, might come to share the burden.

Monte, the third one born, had always been the wildest, and John, the baby brother, had always been the gentlest, the kindest, the best. Maybe it was true that the good die young.

Maybe it was true that even if both of them were still here, neither would want to make the ranch his main concern for all his life. He, Clint, would just have to accept life the way it was.

Maybe if he made his challenges big enough, and took big enough risks to try to meet them, he’d forget all about this lonely funk he was in, and the ridiculous riding school, too.

The whole time he was visiting with Larry, though, he couldn’t keep from glancing around for Cait from time to time. Just out of curiosity as to how she was handling herself. She did finally escape from the younger men but, just as she tried to slip out into the kitchen, his grandfather’s old friend Mac Torrance caught up with her. Clearly he was asking her to dance but she refused him, too.

Finally he and Larry sealed the deal to book his three best mares and Clint moved on to visit with some other guests. The next thing he knew, the band was playing a fast song, LydaAnn and her friend Janie were starting a line dance and Cait had disappeared.

The noise level in the room rose another notch. At least it sounded like a merry Christmas Eve on the Rocking M, in spite of all the sadness of the year just past.

Bobbie Ann came by with a fresh platter of tortilla chips and her famous salsa dip.

“You’d better go get in that line and dance,” she said. “Or your sisters will be on your case.”

“I danced with Faylene. That’s enough dancing for tonight.”

“Delia and LydaAnn are trying so hard to make this be Christmas, Clint,” she said, frowning. “Help ’em out all you can.”

Irritation stabbed through him.

“I’ve been working this crowd like a politician,” he snapped. “What more do they want?”

“How about a smile?” she said. “I’d like to see one of those from you, myself.”

Thoroughly annoyed, he glanced away.

And there was Cait, standing alone in the book-lined alcove that held the Remington sculpture, thumbing through a book she’d opened on the table.

“Now, there’s a family member—according to you, Ma,” he said. “Why don’t you go tell her to do her duty and get out there in line?”

Bobbie Ann gazed at him thoughtfully.

“She even refused to dance with poor old Mac,” Clint groused. “It embarrassed him. And she hasn’t talked to anyone but those kids with the Carmacks.”

“I’m thinking this is all a bit overwhelming for Cait,” his mother said softly. “Don’t you think so? What with her background and all?”

Shame hit him again, like a fist to the gut. When it came to Cait, he was just piling up the guilt.

But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Standing there so still, looking down at that book so intently, she held her head at a vulnerable angle. The soft light limned her beautiful neck and shoulders, shadow fell across her face. She studied that book without moving a muscle.

“She isn’t accustomed to big social gatherings,” Bobbie Ann said softly. “Our Cait is a bit of a loner.”

Our Cait. Clint didn’t even challenge that. He was too busy trying to fend off the unnameable feelings washing through him as he looked at this Cait he’d never seen before.

Finally she felt his gaze. She glanced up and looked straight at him for a fleeting moment, acknowledging his existence with the most noncommittal of looks and for the barest fraction of a heartbeat in time.

Much as she had done when she first came into the room.

This time it stabbed him even deeper.

Then she looked at Bobbie Ann and smiled before she went back to slowly turning the pages.

“Let her be,” Bobbie Ann murmured. “She likes to see the pictures of the family.”

Only then did he notice that the large-paged book was not a picture book of Western art. It was one of the big leather photo albums embossed with the Rocking M brand that held the history of the McMahans.

Cait sat on the floor in the shadow of the huge Christmas tree and reached out to touch the papiermâché cowboy ornament. He was twirling his red rope above his head in a perfect, huge loop. He was so old that the gold thread he was supposed to hang by from the center of his hat had worn in two and he stood bowlegged on a thick branch instead.

“I’ll be very careful not to knock you off balance,” she whispered.

No one was around to hear her, though. Almost all the guests had gone and Delia and her band had finished playing.

It was almost time for the family dinner.

But was she really one of the family? John was gone.

“John was one of the good guys, too,” she told the cowboy. “He was the very best.”

She drew up her knees and wrapped her arms around them while she stared at the tree. Maybe she’d just stay here and not go to dinner. At this moment she had no desire to eat.

The John McMahan Memorial School of Horsemanship.

That would look good over the gate to the arena. Or over the door of the barn.

She had loved John with all her heart. From the very first minute they’d met, two strangers sharing a table to eat pizza from a cart in the trade show at the Quarter Horse Congress, he had treated her as if she were a princess. John had been nicer to her than any other man she’d ever dated.

He’d been nicer to her than any other man she’d ever known.

His blue eyes had twinkled when he talked to her and his brown hair had lifted and fallen in the wind. Gently. John was a gentle man and a gentleman and she had loved him with her heart and soul.

She had never loved a man until she loved John.

But it was his big brother Clint who stirred her blood now.

Cait closed her eyes and pushed the feelings away—the feelings that tried to take her breath every time she even thought of Clint. She didn’t know how to name them and she didn’t even want to try.

All she knew for sure was that John had wanted her here, with his family. In his family.

Clint did not.

But she wouldn’t think about Clint.

She drew in a deep breath of the wonderful, spicy smell of the tree. She looked up. It must be nine feet tall.

A storybook tree. For a storybook Christmas.

“Mer-ry Christ-mas! And to your mama and daddy, too!”

It was Bobbie Ann’s voice, floating in from outside where she was saying goodbye to the last of the guests.

“Tell them we’re so sorry they didn’t feel up to coming with you all. I’ll be over to see them soon.”

John had told her that all the guests on Christmas Eve who came to the Rocking M with their guests were from families who’d been friends with the McMahans since the Comanches had signed a treaty with the first German settlers. The only treaty between Native Americans and Americans that had never been broken.

“Well,” John had said, laughing, “actually it was between Native Americans and Texans. Maybe that’s why.”

She couldn’t even imagine families who had known each other for so many years, for generations. Families who had grown and multiplied and become intertwined with all the others. Families who had lived in one county for a hundred and fifty years.

When her grandparents couldn’t even stay in the same country. When her parents couldn’t even keep the three of them together or stay in the same apartment for half a year.

John was gone.

Clint was here.

And she was here, in his home, with the first horses she had ever owned and the first important job that God had ever given her. The most important dream she’d ever set out to fulfill.

Clint wanted her gone.

Lord? You brought me here, didn’t You? Isn’t this where You meant for me to be? Maybe I was wrong about Clint. But isn’t this where You sent me to make a mark for You?