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Maddie grimaced. A big black ranch truck turned off the highway and came careening down the road toward the house. It was obviously being driven by a maniac.
The truck screeched to a stop at the front porch, sending chickens running for cover in the hen yard because of the noise.
“Great,” Maddie muttered. “Now they’ll stop laying for two days because he’s terrified them!”
“Better worry about yourself,” Great-Aunt Sadie said. “Hello, Cort! Nice to see you,” she added with a wave and ran back into the house, almost at a run.
Maddie bit off what she was going to say about traitors. She braced herself as a tall, lean, furious cowboy in jeans, boots, a chambray shirt and a black Stetson cocked over one eye came straight toward her. She knew what the set of that hat meant. He was out for blood.
“I’m sorry!” she said at once, raising her hands, palms out. “I’ll do something about him, I promise!”
“Andy landed in a cow patty,” he raged in his deep voice. “That’s nothing compared to what happened to the others while we were chasing him. I went headfirst into the dipping tray!”
She wouldn’t laugh, she wouldn’t laugh, she wouldn’t…
“Oh, hell, stop that!” he raged while she bent over double at the mental image of big, handsome Cort lying facedown in the stinky stuff they dipped cattle in to prevent disease.
“I’m sorry. Really!” She forced herself to stop laughing. She wiped her wet eyes and tried to look serious. “Go ahead, keep yelling at me. Really. It’s okay.”
“Your stupid rooster is going to feed my ranch hands if you don’t keep him at home!” he said angrily.
“Oh, my, chance would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it?” she asked wistfully. “I mean, I guess I could hire an off-duty army unit to come out here and spend the next week trying to run him down.” She gave him a droll look. “If you and your men can’t catch him, how do you expect me to catch him?”
“I caught him the first day he was here,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but that was three months ago,” she pointed out. “And he’d just arrived. Now he’s learned evasion techniques.” She frowned. “I wonder if they’ve ever thought of using roosters as attack animals for the military? I should suggest it to someone.”
“I’d suggest you find some way to keep him at home before I resort to the courts.”
“You’d sue me over a chicken?” she exclaimed. “Wow, what a headline that would be. Rich, Successful Rancher Sues Starving, Female Small-Rancher for Rooster Attack. Wouldn’t your dad love reading that headline in the local paper?” she asked with a bland smile.
His expression was growing so hard that his high cheekbones stood out. “One more flying red feather attack and I’ll risk it. I’m not kidding.”
“Oh, me, neither.” She crossed her heart. “I’ll have the vet prescribe some tranquilizers for Pumpkin to calm him down,” she said facetiously. She frowned. “Ever thought about asking your family doctor for some? You look very stressed.”
“I’m stressed because your damned rooster keeps attacking me! On my own damned ranch!” he raged.
“Well, I can see that it’s a stressful situation to be in,” she sympathized. “With him attacking you, and all.” She knew it would make him furious, but she had to know. “I hear Odalie Everett went to Italy.”
The anger grew. Now it was cold and threatening. “Since when is Odalie of interest to you?”
“Just passing on the latest gossip.” She peered at him through her lashes. “Maybe you should study opera…”
“You venomous little snake,” he said furiously. “As if you could sing a note that wasn’t flat!”
She colored. “I could sing if I wanted to!”
He looked her up and down. “Sure. And get suddenly beautiful with it?”
The color left her face.
“You’re too thin, too flat-chested, too plain and too untalented to ever appeal to me, just in case you wondered,” he added with unconcealed distaste.
She drew herself up to her full height, which only brought the top of her head to his chin, and stared at him with ragged dignity. “Thank you. I was wondering why men don’t come around. It’s nice to know the reason.”
Her damaged pride hit him soundly, and he felt small. He shifted from one big booted foot to the other. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said after a minute.
She turned away. She wasn’t going to cry in front of him.
Her sudden vulnerability hurt him. He started after her. “Listen, Madeline,” he began.
She whirled on her booted heel. Her pale eyes shot fire at him. Her exquisite complexion went ruddy. Beside her thighs, her hands were clenched. “You think you’re God’s gift to women, don’t you? Well, let me tell you a thing or two! You’ve traded on your good looks for years to get you what you want, but it didn’t get you Odalie, did it?”
His face went stony. “Odalie is none of your damned business,” he said in a soft, dangerous tone.
“Looks like she’s none of yours, either,” she said spitefully. “Or she’d never have left you.”
He turned around and stomped back to his truck.
“And don’t you dare roar out of my driveway and scare my hens again!”
He slammed the door, started the truck and deliberately gunned the engine as he roared out toward the main highway.
“Three days they won’t lay, now,” Maddie said to herself. She turned, miserable, and went up the porch steps. Her pride was never going to heal from that attack. She’d had secret feelings for Cort since she was sixteen. He’d never noticed her, of course, not even to tease her as men sometimes did. He simply ignored her existence most of the time, when her rooster wasn’t attacking him. Now she knew why. Now she knew what he really thought of her.
Great-Aunt Sadie was waiting by the porch screen door. She was frowning. “No call for him to say that about you,” she muttered. “Conceited man!”
Maddie fought tears and lost.
Great-Aunt Sadie wrapped her up tight and hugged her. “Don’t you believe what he said. He was just mad and looking for a way to hurt you because you mentioned his precious Odalie. She’s too good for any cowboy. At least, she thinks she is.”
“She’s beautiful and rich and talented. But so is Cort,” Maddie choked out. “It really would have been a good match, to pair the Everett’s Big Spur ranch with Skylance, the Brannt ranch. What a merger that would be.”
“Except that Odalie doesn’t love Cort and she probably never will.”
“She may come home with changed feelings,” Maddie replied, drawing away. “She might have a change of heart. He’s always been around, sending her flowers, calling her. All that romantic stuff. The sudden stop might open her eyes to what a catch he is.”
“You either love somebody or you don’t,” the older woman said quietly.
“You think?”
“I’ll make you a nice pound cake. That will cheer you up.”
“Thanks. That’s sweet of you.” She wiped her eyes. “Well, at least I’ve lost all my illusions. Now I can just deal with my ranch and stop mooning over a man who thinks he’s too good for me.”
“No man is too good for you, sweetheart,” Great-Aunt Sadie said gently. “You’re pure gold. Don’t you ever let anyone tell you different.”
She smiled.
When she went out late in the afternoon to put her hens in their henhouse to protect them from overnight predators, Pumpkin was right where he should be—back in the yard.
“You’re going to get me sued, you red-feathered problem child,” she muttered. She was carrying a small tree branch and a metal garbage can lid as she herded her hens into the large chicken house. Pumpkin lowered his head and charged her, but he bounced off the lid.
“Get in there, you fowl assassin,” she said, evading and turning on him.
He ran into the henhouse. She closed the door behind him and latched it, leaned back against it with a sigh.
“Need to get rid of that rooster, Miss Maddie,” Ben murmured as he walked by. “Be delicious with some dumplings.”
“I’m not eating Pumpkin!”
He shrugged. “That’s okay. I’ll eat him for you.”
“I’m not feeding him to you, either, Ben.”
He made a face and kept walking.
She went inside to wash her hands and put antibiotic cream on the places where her knuckles were scraped from using the garbage can lid. She looked at her hands under the running water. They weren’t elegant hands. They had short nails and they were functional, not pretty. She remembered Odalie Everett’s long, beautiful white fingers on the keyboard at church, because Odalie could play as well as she sang. The woman was gorgeous, except for her snobbish attitude. No wonder Cort was in love with her.
Maddie looked in the mirror on the medicine cabinet above the sink and winced. She really was plain, she thought. Of course, she never used makeup or perfume, because she worked from dawn to dusk on the ranch. Not that makeup would make her beautiful, or give her bigger breasts or anything like that. She was basically just pleasant to look at, and Cort wanted beauty, brains and talent.
“I guess you’ll end up an old spinster with a rooster who terrorizes the countryside.”
The thought made her laugh. She thought of photographing Pumpkin and making a giant Wanted poster, with the legend, Wanted: Dead or Alive. She could hardly contain herself at the image that presented itself if she offered some outlandish reward. Men would wander the land with shotguns, looking for a small red rooster.
“Now you’re getting silly,” she told her image, and went back to work.
Cort Brannt slammed out of his pickup truck and into the ranch house, flushed with anger and self-contempt.
His mother, beautiful Shelby Brannt, glanced up as he passed the living room.
“Wow,” she murmured. “Cloudy and looking like rain.”
He paused and glanced at her. He grimaced, retraced his steps, tossed his hat onto the sofa and sat down beside her. “Yeah.”
“That rooster again, huh?” she teased.
His dark eyes widened. “How did you guess?”
She tried to suppress laughter and lost. “Your father came in here bent over double, laughing his head off. He said half the cowboys were ready to load rifles and go rooster-hunting about the time you drove off. He wondered if we might need to find legal representation for you…?”
“I didn’t shoot her,” he said. He shrugged his powerful shoulders and let out a long sigh, his hands dangling between his splayed legs as he stared at the carpet. “But I said some really terrible things to her.”
Shelby put down the European fashion magazine she’d been reading. In her younger days, she had been a world-class model before she married King Brannt. “Want to talk about it, Matt?” she asked gently.
“Cort,” he corrected with a grin.
She sighed. “Cort. Listen, your dad and I were calling you Matt until you were teenager, so it’s hard…”
“Yes, well, you were calling Morie ‘Dana,’ too, weren’t you?”
Shelby laughed. “It was an inside-joke. I’ll tell it to you one day.” She smiled. “Come on. Talk to me.”
His mother could always take the weight off his shoulders. He’d never been able to speak so comfortably about personal things to his father, although he loved the older man dearly. He and his mother were on the same wavelength. She could almost read his mind.
“I was pretty mad,” he confessed. “And she was cracking jokes about that stupid rooster. Then she made a crack about Odalie and I just, well, I just lost it.”
Odalie, she knew, was a sore spot with her son. “I’m sorry about the way things worked out, Cort,” she said gently. “But there’s always hope. Never lose sight of that.”
“I sent her roses. Serenaded her. Called her just to talk. Listened to her problems.” He looked up. “None of that mattered. That Italian voice trainer gave her an invitation and she got on the next plane to Rome.”
“She wants to sing. You know that. You’ve always known it. Her mother has the voice of an angel, too.”
“Yes, but Heather never wanted fame. She wanted Cole Everett,” he pointed out with a faint smile.
“That was one hard case of a man,” Shelby pointed out. “Like your father.” She shook her head. “We had a very, very rocky road to the altar. And so did Heather and Cole.”
She continued pensively. “You and Odalie’s brother, John Everett, were good friends for a while. What happened there?”
“His sister happened,” Cort replied. “She got tired of having me at their place all the time playing video games with John and was very vocal about it, so he stopped inviting me over. I invited him here, but he got into rodeo and then I never saw him much. We’re still friends, in spite of everything.”
“He’s a good fellow.”
“Yeah.”
Shelby got up, ruffled his hair and grinned. “You’re a good fellow, too.”
He laughed softly. “Thanks.”
“Try not to dwell so much on things,” she advised. “Sit back and just let life happen for a while. You’re so intense, Cort. Like your dad,” she said affectionately, her dark eyes soft on his face. “One day Odalie may discover that you’re the sun in her sky and come home. But you have to let her try her wings. She’s traveled, but only with her parents. This is her first real taste of freedom. Let her enjoy it.”
“Even if she messes up her life with that Italian guy?”
“Even then. It’s her life,” she reminded him gently. “You don’t like people telling you what to do, even if it’s for your own good, right?”
He glowered at her. “If you’re going to mention that time you told me not to climb up the barn roof and I didn’t listen…”
“Your first broken arm,” she recalled, and pursed her lips. “And I didn’t even say I told you so,” she reminded him.
“No. You didn’t.” He stared at his linked fingers. “Maddie Lane sets me off. But I should never have said she was ugly and no man would want her.”
“You said that?” she exclaimed, wincing. “Cort…!”
“I know.” He sighed. “Not my finest moment. She’s not a bad person. It’s just she gets these goofy notions about animals. That rooster is going to hurt somebody bad one day, maybe put an eye out, and she thinks it’s funny.”
“She doesn’t realize he’s dangerous,” she replied.
“She doesn’t want to realize it. She’s in over her head with these expansion projects. Cage-free eggs. She hasn’t got the capital to go into that sort of operation, and she’s probably already breaking half a dozen laws by selling them to restaurants.”
