The Rancher's Wedding - Diana Palmer Page 0,5
career. Gone now. It was gone, like the life she’d had.
He wondered why she looked so stricken. “Newspaper jobs must be thin on the ground these days,” he remarked. “Almost everything is digital now. I get my news fix on the Internet.”
She smiled. “So do I. But the local paper is very nice. I like the features about old-fashioned ranch work, and the recipe page.”
He smiled back. “Do you cook?”
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I’m partial to French cuisine, because of the sauces, but I like Tex-Mex, too. Anything spicy.” She sighed. “I used to have a gourmet herb patch that I babied all year. I had raised beds, so I had herbs at Christmas to add to my recipes.” Her face was sad as she recalled the past. Those had been good days, when her mother was still alive. Before the fame and then the tragedy that had taken her mother’s life and sent Cassie and her father running far away from the notoriety.
“I have an herb patch of my own, but it’s in a glassed greenhouse,” he remarked. “Hard to keep little things alive out here in the winter. It can be brutal in the mountains.”
“I’ve heard that,” she replied. “They said one year you had a foot of snow.”
He chuckled. “Most years we have a foot of snow,” he mused. “Sometimes six feet.”
She gasped. “But how do you drive in that?”
“You don’t,” he said. “Not until the snowplows come, at least. On the ranch, we have heavy equipment that we can use to clear a path to the road.” He shook his head. “It’s hard on the cattle. It’s a lot of work to keep them alive. We have lean-tos in the pastures and a big barn and corrals where we can bring the pregnant cows and heifers up to get out of the worst of the weather.”
She liked that. She smiled. “I never thought of ranchers being kind to cattle,” she said. “I mean, we hear about slaughterhouses and—”
“We don’t eat purebreds,” he interrupted, and his eyes twinkled. “Too expensive.”
She laughed. “I guess so.” She searched his face. “Do you have pets?”
He sighed. “Too many,” he replied. “We have cattle dogs—border collies—that help with roundup. They’re not really pets, but I keep a couple of Siberian huskies and we have cats in the barn. They keep the rodent population down.”
“The cats, you mean?”
He grinned. “The huskies, mostly,” he corrected. “Best mousers on the place. The cats, I’m told, are jealous of that ability.”
“You talk to cats,” she teased.
“All the time. I talk to myself, mostly,” he added with a chuckle. “Bad habit.”
“Only if you answer yourself,” she replied.
He sighed and leaned back in the chair with his coffee cup. “I was engaged,” he said after a minute. “Until someone overheard her bragging to her friends about how she’d marry me and then go live in a city and get away from this run-down wreck of a ranch.”
She winced. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “That must have hurt your pride.”
He was surprised at her compassion. He was also suspicious. Marge had been very sympathetic at first, too, but it was all an act. A means to an end. He was warier now than he’d been before.
“It is a little run-down, I guess,” he conceded after a minute. He grimaced. “I’ve spent a lot of time drinking. Too much.” He didn’t add why. He also didn’t add that he’d let the ranch and the business slide while he got over the tragedies in his life that had dumped him in Marge’s lap. Marge had been a newer, worse tragedy, if that was even possible. He was usually a better judge of character, but he’d been lonely and Marge had played him. That was on Cary, whose sense of mischief was getting old. He’d introduced JL to Marge, and the mutual attraction had been immediate. He’d missed Marge. It took a lot of getting over, and not only because she’d left him.
“My dad drank for a while,” she said unexpectedly, staring into her coffee cup. “It was hard to convince him to stop.”
He frowned. “Why did he drink?” he asked bluntly.
She sighed. “My mother died,” she said, wrapping up an anguished time into three quiet words.
“I see. Had they been married long?”
“Thirty years,” she replied. “They’d given up hope that they’d have kids when I came along,” she added with a sad smile. “I wasn’t born until five years after they married.”
“Marriage.” He made a face. “Not a future I’ve