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“Where’s Tate?” Garth asked as he sat down at the head of the table.
“Ain’t seen her,” Charlie said.
Garth grimaced. “I suppose she’s sulking in her room.”
“You drink your coffee, and I’ll go upstairs and check on her,” Faron offered.
A moment later Faron came bounding into the kitchen. “She’s not there! She’s gone!”
Garth sprang up from his chair so fast it fell over backward. “What? Gone where?”
Faron grabbed Garth by the shoulders and said in a fierce voice, “She’s not in her room. Her bed hasn’t been slept in!”
Garth freed himself and took the stairs two at a time to see for himself. Sure enough, the antique brass double bed was made up with its nubby-weave spread. That alone was an ominous sign. Tate wasn’t known for her neatness, and if she had made up the bed, she had done it to make a statement.
Garth headed for the closet, his heart in his throat. He heaved a sigh of relief when he saw Tate’s few dresses still hanging there. Surely she wouldn’t have left Hawk’s Way for good without them.
Garth turned and found Faron standing in the doorway to Tate’s room. “She probably spent the night sleeping out somewhere on the ranch. She’ll turn up when she gets hungry.”
“I’m going looking for her,” Faron said.
Garth shoved a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “Hell and the devil! I guess there’ll be no peace around here until we find her. When I get hold of her, I’ll—”
“When we find her, I’ll do the talking,” Faron said. “You’ve caused enough trouble.”
“Me? This isn’t my fault!”
“Like hell! You’re the one who told her to go to her room and stay there.”
“Looks like she didn’t pay a whole helluva lot of attention to me, did she?” Garth retorted.
At that moment Charlie arrived, puffing from exertion, and said, “You two gonna go look for that girl, or stand here arguin’?”
Faron and Garth glared at each other for another moment before Faron turned and pressed his way past Charlie and down the stairs.
Charlie put a hand out to stop Garth. “Don’t think you’re gonna find her, boy. Knew this was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“What do you mean, old man?”
“Knew you had too tight a rein on that little filly. Figured she had too much spirit to stay in them fences you set up to hold her in.”
“It was for her own good!”
Charlie shook his head. “Did it as much for yourself as for her. Knowin’ your ma like you did, it’s no wonder you’d want to keep your sister close. Prob’ly fearful she’d take after your ma, steppin’ out on your pa like she did and—”
“Leave Mother out of this. What she did has nothing to do with the way I’ve treated Tate.”
Charlie tightened the beaded rawhide thong that held one of his long braids, but said nothing.
Garth scowled. “I can see there’s no sense arguing with a stone wall. I’m going after Tate, and I’m going to bring her back. This time she’ll stay put!”
Garth and Faron searched canyons and mesas, ridges and gullies on their northwest Texas ranch, but not a sign did they find of their sister on Hawk’s Way.
It was Charlie One Horse who discovered that the old ’51 Chevy pickup, the one with the rusty radiator and the skipping carburetor, was missing from the barn where it was stored.
Another check of Tate’s room revealed that her underwear drawer was empty, that her brush and comb and toothpaste were gone, and that several of her favorite T-shirts and jeans had also been packed.
By sunset, the truth could not be denied. At the age of twenty-three, Tate Whitelaw had run away from home.
Chapter 2
ADAM PHILIPS NORMALLY DIDN’T stop to pick up hitchhikers. But there was no way he could drive past the woman sitting on the front fender of a ’51 Chevy pickup, its hood raised and its radiator steaming, her thumb outstretched to bum a ride. He pulled his late-model truck up behind her and put on his Stetson as he stepped out into the heat of a south Texas midsummer afternoon.
She was wearing form-fitting jeans and an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that exposed a lush female figure. But the heart-shaped face, with its huge hazel eyes and wide mouth framed by breeze-ruffled, short-cropped black hair, was innocence itself. He was stunned by her beauty and appalled at her youth. What was this female doing all alone on an isolated stretch of southwest Texas highway in an old rattletrap truck?
She beamed a trusting smile at him, and he felt his heart do a flipflop. She slipped off the rusty fender and lazily sauntered toward him. He felt his groin tighten with desire and scowled. She stopped in her tracks. About time she thought to be wary! Adam was all too conscious of the dangers a stranger presented to a young woman alone. Grim-lipped, he strode the short distance between the two vehicles.
Tate had been so relieved to see someone show up on the deserted rural route that the danger of the situation didn’t immediately occur to her. She got only a glimpse of wavy blond hair and striking blue eyes before her rescuer had slipped on a Stetson that put his face in shadow.
He was broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, with a stride that ate up the distance between the two trucks. It was a fair assumption, from his dusty boots, worn jeans and sweat-stained Western shirt, that he was a working cowboy. Tate saw no reason to suspect he meant her any harm.
But instead of a pleasant “May I help you?” the first words out of his mouth were, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Tate was alarmed by the animosity in the stranger’s voice and frightened by the intensity of his stare. But his attitude was so similar to what she had recently gone through with her brothers that she lifted her chin and retorted, “Hitching a ride back to the nearest gas station. In case you hadn’t noticed, my truck’s broken down.”
The scowl deepened but he said, “Get in my pickup.”
Tate had only taken two steps when the tall cowboy grabbed her arm and pulled her up short.
“Aren’t you going to ask anything about me? Don’t you want to know who I am?”
By now Tate was more irritated than frightened. “A Good Samaritan with a bad temper!” she retorted. “Do I need to know more?”
Adam opened his mouth to make a retort, took one look at the mutinous expression on the young woman’s face, and shut it again. Instead he dragged her unceremoniously to the passenger’s side of his long-bed pickup, opened the door, shoved her inside, and slammed it closed after her.
“My bag! It’s in the back end of the Chevy,” Tate yelped.
Adam stalked back to the rattletrap Chevy, snagged the duffel bag from the rusted-out truck bed and slung it into the back of his pickup.
Woman was too damned trusting for her own good! he thought. Her acid tongue wouldn’t have been much help to her if he had been the kind of villain who preyed on stranded women. Which he wasn’t. Lucky for her!
Tate didn’t consider herself at all lucky. She recognized the flat-lipped expression on her Good Samaritan’s face. He might have rescued her, all right, but he wasn’t happy about it. The deep crevices formed around his mouth by his frown and the webbed lines at the edges of his eyes had her guessing his age at thirty-five or thirty-six—the same as her eldest brother Garth. The last thing she needed was another keeper!
She sat back with her arms crossed and stared out the window as they drove past rolling prairie. She thought back to the night two weeks ago when she had decided to leave Hawk’s Way.
Her escape from her brothers, while apparently sudden, hadn’t been completely without direction. She had taken several ranch journals containing advertisements from outfits all over Texas looking for expert help and headed south. However, Tate soon discovered that not one rancher was interested in hiring a woman, especially one without references, as either foreman or ranch manager.
To confound her problems, the ancient pickup she had taken from the barn was in worse shape than she had thought. It had left her stranded miles from the Lazy S—the last ranch on her list and her last hope for a job in ranch management.
“Do you know where the Lazy S is?” she asked.
Adam started at the sound of her voice. “I expect I could find it. Why?”
“I understand they’re looking for a ranch manager. I intend to apply for the job.”
“You’re just a kid!”
The cowboy could have said nothing more likely to raise Tate’s neck hairs. “For your information, I’m twenty-three and a fully grown woman!”
Adam couldn’t argue with that. He had a pretty good view of the creamy rise of her breasts at the frilly gathered edge of her blouse. “What do you know about ranching?” he asked.
“I was raised on a ranch, Hawk’s Way, and—” She stopped abruptly, realizing that she had revealed more than she had intended to this stranger. Tate hadn’t used her own last name to apply for any jobs, knowing that if she did her brothers would be able to hunt her down and drag her back home. “I hope you’ll keep that to yourself,” she said.
Adam raised an inquiring brow that met such a gamine smile that his heart did that disturbing flipflop again.
“You see,” Tate said, “the truth is, I’ve run away from home.”
Adam snorted. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
Tate’s lips curled ruefully. “I suppose so. But my brothers just wouldn’t let me live! I mean, they watched every breath in and out of my body.”
Adam found the thought rather intriguing himself.
“My brothers are a little overprotective, you see. I had to run away if I was ever going to meet the right man and fall in love and have children.”
“Sounds like you could do that better at home than traipsing around the countryside,” Adam observed.
“You don’t know my older brothers! They want to wrap me in cotton batting and keep me safe. Safe, ha! What they mean is, they want to keep me a virgin forever.”
Adam choked at this unbelievable revelation and coughed to clear his throat.
“It’s true! They’ve chased away every single beau I’ve ever had. Which is only a waste of time and energy because, you know, a man who’s born to drown can manage to drown in a desert.”
Adam eyed her askance.
“I mean, if something is destined to happen, it’ll happen no matter what.”
Tate waited for Adam to say something, but when he remained silent, she continued, “My older brother, Jesse, left home, too, when I was just eight. It was right after my father died. We haven’t seen him for years and years. I don’t plan to stay away for years, of course, but then, who knows how long it will take to find my Prince Charming. Not that I have to marry a prince of a man.”
Tate grinned and shrugged. “But it would be nice, you know, to just once kiss a man good night, without having my brothers send him packing because he’s not good enough for me.”
Tate realized she was talking to fill the silence and forced herself to shut up.
Behind the young woman’s bravado Adam saw the desperation that had sent her fleeing from the safe haven her brothers had provided for her. He felt sick inside. Was this the way his younger sister had felt? Had Melanie seen him as an oppressive tyrant, the same way this young woman perceived her brothers?
Tate held her breath as the stranger looked into her eyes. There was an awful sadness there she felt constrained to dispel. So she began talking again.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for a job,” she said. “I must have been to fifteen different spreads in the past two weeks. But I haven’t had so much as a nibble of interest.
“What I find so frustrating is the fact that most owners don’t treat me seriously. I mean, I know I’m young, but there isn’t anything I don’t know about running a ranch.”
“Do you know how to figure the amount of feed you need for each head of stock?” Adam asked.
“Depends on whether you plan to keep the stock penned or let it graze,” Tate said. “Now if it’s penned—”
Adam interrupted with, “Give me some symptoms of colic.”
“A horse might have colic if he won’t eat, or if he starts pawing, or gets up and down a lot. Generally an animal that can’t get comfortable has a problem.”
“Can you keep books on a computer?”
Tate snorted inelegantly. “Boy can I ever! I got stuck with all the bookkeeping at Hawk’s Way. So, if you were hiring at the Lazy S, would I get the job?”
“What will you do if you don’t get the job?” Adam asked instead.
Tate shrugged, not realizing how revealing the gesture was of the fact she wasn’t the least bit nonchalant about that distressing possibility. “I don’t know. I only know I won’t go back home.”
“And if your brothers find you?”
Her chin took on a mulish tilt. “I’ll just run away again.”
Adam wondered if his sister was so forthright and disarmingly honest with the man who had picked her up the night she ran away from home. Had that stranger known all about the young woman he had raped and murdered and left lying in a ditch on the side of the road?
Adam’s teeth clenched in determination. If he had anything to say about it, the innocent young woman in his pickup would not become another such statistic. And he, of all people, was in a perfect position to help her. Because he owned the Lazy S Ranch.
However, in the months since Adam had put his advertisement in the ranch journal, he had changed his mind about needing a foreman. He had decided to place his country medical practice on hold and put the Lazy S Ranch back in the black himself.
But if he told this young woman he had no job for her, where would she go? What would she do? And how would he feel if he sent her away and she ended up dead somewhere on the side of the road?
“Say, there’s the Lazy S Ranch!” Tate pointed at a wrought-iron sign that bridged a dirt road off the main thoroughfare. To her surprise, the cowboy turned and drove across a cattle guard onto the Lazy S.
“I thought you were going to take me into town!” she said.
“I thought you wanted to interview for a job!” he retorted.
Tate eyed the cowboy. She was perplexed. Many western men were the strong, silent type, but the stranger who had picked her up was something more. Aloof. The more distant he was, the more intrigued she became. It was a surprise to find out he had been kind enough to take her directly to the Lazy S.
She could have kicked herself for telling him so much personal information without finding out anything about him—not even his name. When he dropped her off, she might never see him again. Tate suddenly realized she wanted to see him again. Very much.
As the cowboy stopped his pickup in front of an impressive adobe ranch house, she said, “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your giving me a ride here. I’d like to thank you, but I don’t even know your name!”
Adam turned to look at her and felt a tightening in his gut as she smiled up at him. Well, it was now or never. “My name is Adam Philips,” he said. “I own the Lazy S. Come on inside, and you can interview for that job.”
Chapter 3
TATE WAS STUNNED when the mysterious cowboy revealed his identity, but buoyant with hope, as well. She scrambled out of the pickup after Adam, certain that he wouldn’t have bothered bringing her here if he didn’t intend to at least consider her for the job of ranch foreman.
“Follow me,” he said, heading into the house.
