This Calder Sky (43 page)

“I missed you, too, Culley.” Emotion choked her voice, as well, and she blinked to keep her own tears at bay. She saw Chase watching them with a tight-lipped grimness and slowly untangled herself from Culley's clinging hold.

“You did it.” Culley ran wondering fingers along the side of her face, touching her in a kind of adoring awe. “You are a beautiful lady.” She caught his thin hand and kissed it, pity and guilt cutting into her for the misery he'd known while she had been surrounded by everything a woman could desire. Then his fingers closed fiercely around her hand. “I got Tucker's message that you were here and that Calder was making you stay.” He looked up, a wildness possessing him when he saw Chase and, off to one side, Buck Haskell and two other cowboys stationed in the room in case there was trouble. “Come on. I'm taking you with me, Maggie, and they can't stop me.” He started to rise from the couch, gripping her hand to pull her with him.

“Culley, no.” Her resistance baffled him, and it showed. “Listen to me, please. There is something I have to explain.” She was already searching for the
words to make him understand, knowing there weren't any.

“What?” He eyed her narrowly.

“This is where I live now. We are married.” She spoke calmly and concisely, trying not to let the words carry too much import, but she saw the shock and anger registering in his features. “Chase is my husband.”

There was a wild, unstable light in his eyes. “Have you forgotten what he did?”

She laid her fingers against his mouth to silence him, her eyes quietly pleading with him to say no more. “There's someone I want you to meet.” She sought to distract him and turned to motion for Ty. Rising from her seat on the very edge of the couch, she moved to reach out for her son's hand and draw him closer. He was wearing a wary and bewildered frown, made uncomfortable by the peculiar attitude and behavior of the man who was his uncle. Culley swung uncertainly to his feet, his gaze suspicious of the boy with his sister. “This is my son, Ty.” She introduced Ty and prodded him with a speaking smile. “This is your Uncle Culley.”

“How do you do, sir.” Ty stiffly extended his hand, but Culley didn't notice it as he inspected him with a probing stare that increased her son's unease—and Maggie's.

“Culley?” She nervously prompted him to say something, a little frightened of his long silence.

“Come away from him, Maggie,” Culley ordered and held out his hand to take hers, not letting his gaze leave the tall boy. She hesitated, then placed her hand in his to let him pull her away. “Look at him,” her brother insisted with burning eyes. “Can't you see it? He's a Calder!”

She felt the rapid beating of her pulse and tried to sway Culley from his condemnation with the cool, reasonable tone of her voice. “He is my son.”

He pulled her around and grabbed her by the shoulders to hold her still. “It's
his
son! Can't you see it?” The words carried him on. “Why did you bring him back? Why didn't you get rid of him? Don't you see, Maggie? Now there are two of them! They are just as strong as they were before! You've got to come away with me tonight, Maggie! You've got to help me get back at them for what they did! You finally came back to help me, didn't you? We've got to get even with them for what they did!”

Her eyes stung with tears as she saw how hatred had destroyed her brother, blinding him to everything but his obsession for getting revenge on the Calders. He fed on it instead of food, slept with it instead of rest, breathed it like poisoned air. He had never let the wound heal, and now it had infected his soul.

“Oh, Culley,” she whispered brokenly. “Why didn't you come to California with me?”

Maggie was unaware that behind her, Chase had nodded to one of his men, indicating he wanted Ty escorted from the house before his presence precipitated a violent incident. She gazed at the fine glimmer of sweat on Culley's forehead, a glimpse of the hell living inside him.

“I had to stay!” His voice lifted to a breaking pitch in answer to her question. “You've got to come with me, Maggie! I need help!”

She groaned, because he did. His hands squeezed her shoulders together. The pain it caused gave her a hint of the forces pressing and pulling at him. She sank her teeth into her lower lip to keep from crying out a protest at the way he was hurting her. Then it wasn't needed, as Buck and the other cowboy came up behind him, taking him firmly by the arms and forcing him to release her. It was a second before Culley realized what was happening and began struggling to get loose. She took an instinctive step toward him, wanting to help
him in some way, but a pair of hands closed on the curved points of her shoulders. Chase was behind her.

As his image appeared to stand beside Maggie, Culley began shouting. “You let her go! You aren't going to keep her here! I'll get her away from you and send her far away from here, like I did before! You can't keep her! Do you hear me, Calder?!!”

“No. You hear me, Culley.” His hard voice was clear and strong. “I can't stop Maggie from visiting her brother, but don't you ever set foot on Calder land again.” There was an ominous ring to the cold warning. Then Chase was addressing his friend and foreman. “Buck, escort him off the property and don't leave him until he's off the Triple C.”

Twisting Culley's arms high in the middle of his back, the two men frog-marched him out of the house to his truck. “I'll ride with O'Rourke and make sure he doesn't get any funny ideas between here and the main gate,” Buck said. “You follow us, Dave.”

“Right.”

Maggie didn't resist the pressure from the hands that turned her away from the front door. She looked up to the grim male countenance.

“I meant it. I don't ever want him on Calder land again,” Chase repeated.

“He's my brother.”

“That's why he
walked
out of here.” His hands tightened, as if he wanted to shake her into realizing the restraint that had been exercised. Control came to the front again, running a muscle along his jawline. “I can't stop you from seeing him outside this ranch. I don't think he'd ever hurt you, but I saw the way he looked at Ty.”

Fear choked her for an instant because she had seen it, too, and it had frightened her. “He needs help.”

The mute appeal in her green eyes reached out to
Chase. “I know.” He gathered her gently into his arms, letting her head rest against his chest. His jaw brushed the sleek curls along the side of her hair. “But there is nothing you can do for him, Maggie. It's professional help he needs.” He rubbed his hand over her back. His intent was to comfort and reassure her, but he was also feeling the womanly contours of her slender shape. It stirred the desires that had slept within him. As if she sensed the change, she moved out of his arms, and Chase let her go. “I'll go see Doc Barlow tomorrow and ask him to stop out one evening to talk to Culley. Maybe your brother will listen to him,” he suggested, noticing that she was avoiding his eyes.

“Yes.” It was a level agreement, without feeling or speculation. She moved toward the staircase. “Good night.” That was flat, too, drained of emotion.

“Maggie?” The low urgency of his voice brought her head up sharply. She looked fragile and breakable. “Are you all right?”

She wavered, then nodded coolly, “Yes.”

When she had disappeared up the staircase, Chase let himself silently out of the house and stood on the porch, where the coolness of the night air washed over him.

It was mid-morning before Chase was able to squeeze some free time out of his schedule. The honking of a truck horn stopped him near the commissary. He turned, impatient with the delay, and saw Nate behind the wheel of a pickup, his head sticking out the window.

“The kid is cleaning out the stud barns this morning!” he called.

A smile slanted his mouth as he sketched the old foreman a salute. That old man had a way of reading his mind. He altered his course for the isolated stable where the ranch stallions were kept separate from the
other horses. Ty was leaning against a sturdy fence, a boot resting on the lowest board and his arms crossed on the top rail. A wheelbarrow full of manure and straw was beside him. Chase slowed his steps to study the confused and faintly dejected profile of his son. When he came up beside him, he deliberately fixed his gaze on the claybank horse inside the corral, as if it really was the object of Ty's thoughts.

“The stallion is quite an animal, isn't he?” Chase remarked, aware of Ty's guilty start at being caught loafing on the job.

“Yes, sir.”

“Cougar was my father's personal mount, and probably the best cutting horse we have on the place. He passes that cow sense onto his get. That's what makes him such a good breeding stallion.” He studied the whitening muzzle of the heavy-jawed stallion.

“Does anybody ever ride him anymore?” Ty asked with only an idle interest.

“No. I retired him to stud when my father died and left the ranch to me.” Chase paused and continued in the same conversational tone. “It's natural to be upset and confused about what happened last night, Ty.”

The boy looked surprised, then scuffed the toe of his boot in the dirt. “Why does he hate me?”

“He doesn't know you, so it isn't you he hates—it's what you represent.” It had been difficult for him to accept when he was young. It wouldn't be easier for Ty. “You are a Calder.”

“Why should he hate a Calder?” The answer didn't make sense to him. His frown deepened as he watched his father lean down and pick up a handful of gravel, sifting through it.

“If a man is walking along and falls down, he automatically looks to see what caused him to fall.” Chase reached down again and picked up a large chunk of gravel. “Will he blame this big rock—or this small
pebble?” He showed his son the two different-sized stones in the leather-covered palm of his hand.

“The rock.” It was obvious.

“Because it's the biggest. So it always gets blamed. But who is to say that this small pebble wasn't under the rock, and when it moved, it forced the rock to move?”

“I guess it could,” Ty admitted.

“When things go wrong for some men in this area of the state, they look around for someone to blame. There sit all those square miles of the Triple C, so much bigger than anything else around it. We get blamed. Maybe cattle prices go down. All the other little ranchers point at us because we glutted the market, they claim.” He observed his son's frown turn to thoughtfulness. “When you are big and prosperous, there are always some who want to cut you down. They move … and the rock moves. Sometimes, the rock falls on the pebble. That's when resentment can turn to hate.”

“What happened to make my uncle hate us?” Ty looked up from the stones Chase held and searched his face.

“It's a collection of things, Ty. Some of it goes back to his father and mine, and to your mother. After I took over the ranch, Culley and I had a run-in. It's a very long story, but he believes that he has a good reason to hate the Calders. And there are some who would agree with him,” Chase added with a slight lift of one shoulder. “The thing for you to remember, Ty, is that when somebody hates you, don't take it personally. It isn't a condemnation of you as an individual, so don't go around thinking there is something wrong with you. Just do what you believe is right and fair, and let the others look at it as they will.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, a grim resignation stealing across
his expression. Chase closed his gloved hand around the two stones, then tossed them to the ground.

“Don't you think you'd better get to work?” he suggested.

“Right.” Ty pulled a grin across his mouth and turned to the wheelbarrow. Chase watched him for a second before his own duties called him.

Maggie was surprised at how quickly she settled back into the routine of ranch life. Within two short weeks, it was as if she had been away only a few short months, instead of sixteen years. She rose with the sun and had breakfast on the table when Ty and Chase came down. Ruth had gladly relinquished the kitchen chores to Maggie, although she still helped with the house-cleaning.

But it was more than just cooking meals and keeping house, something that had been Pamela's responsibility to supervise when Maggie had been married to Phillip. The ranch terminology and Western lingo all came back to her, slipping naturally into her talk. Within two afternoon rides, she had adjusted from English riding to the less-structured Western style. There were brief moments when she was out riding that she actually forgot she hadn't always lived amidst this vast openness. During her rides, she gradually noticed less of the raw beauty and paid more attention to down-to-earth matters like the condition of the grass or fences, and the amount of water around. These observations she would absently pass along to Chase in the course of a meal's conversation.

Three times she had ridden to her brother's without finding him home. These, she didn't mention to Chase. It was difficult to describe her relationship with Chase. She rarely saw him, except at mealtimes. He spent the evenings in the den with an endless array of paperwork
that couldn't be handled by his accounting help, since it required his personal attention. On the whole, they were civilized, with brief moments when they actually relaxed in each other's company, and other times when their conversations were stilted and forced. The latter occurred when Maggie couldn't pretend that he didn't exist and she wasn't wearing his wedding band. Invariably, it coincided with the times when she yearned to be held and touched—and the natural, biological urges of her body were going unsatisfied. It wasn't easy to look at him then and not remember other days when he had taken care of those needs so thoroughly. To make matters worse, Chase was so damned attractive in that raw, range-toughened way of a Calder.