Diamond Spur

“You need to see a doctor,” she continued, unabashed.

“It would be too embarrassing for both of us if I bothered Dr. Harris over a little scratch like this,” he said reasonably.

“If you don’t, I’ll stand here all day and get heat stroke,” she sighed. “But just go ahead and step over me while you work. If you don’t bleed to death first,” she added darkly.

Gene would have laughed at that, but Jason didn’t crack a smile. Jason’s younger brother, Gene, was a live wire, ever since his marriage to Cherry Mather. But Jason had always been the quiet one, the deep one. He hardly ever smiled, except when Kate was around.

“I don’t have time,” he muttered.

“Yes, you do,” she said stubbornly. She put her hands on her hips and moved closer, staring doggedly up at him.

At close quarters, the effect he had on her nerves was dynamite. She’d always had a kind of crush on him, but suddenly it was being translated into something new and deliciously physical that attracted her and frightened her, all at once.

She didn’t know that her proximity was giving him some problems as well. Little Kate who’d always been like a little sister was beginning to make him nervous and irritable. He’d avoided her lately for that reason. Now here she was, getting on his nerves again, when he needed it least.

“I told you, my arm’s all right,” he said curtly, his voice more cutting than he meant it to be, because her unconscious posture was bothering him. Her firm young breasts were all too visible under the thin fabric of her shirt, and the tight belt she wore with those tailored jeans brought his dark eyes down over her tiny waist and full hips and long, graceful legs. That made him madder and he forced his eyes back up to hers.

But she wasn’t looking. She’d taken possession of his arm while his attention was diverted.

She unfastened the cuff and began to roll the sleeve up. “Go ahead and growl, I don’t mind.” Touching him even in this casual way made her tingle all over, so she resorted to humor to hide her reaction. Her green eyes danced up to his. “I’ll give you a peppermint stick if you let me drive you to the doctor, Jason.”

As usual, her light teasing knocked the fire off his temper. He gave in, chuckling in spite of himself as he watched her dark head bend. She was so full of fun, so unlike him. She bubbled through life, always finding the bright spots, while he brooded in the shadows. She’d always been able to make him laugh. Nobody else did, God knew. If he had a surefire weakness, Kate was it.

She drew the fabric carefully up his arm, noting first the terribly complicated black watch strapped in the dark hairs on his wrist, then his muscles as she uncovered a blood-soaked white handkerchief; linen, too, with the initials JED in one corner, for Jason Everett Donavan.

“If this is a little cut, I’m George Washington,” she muttered, grimacing as she moved the bandage aside to view the deep gash above his elbow. She looked up, searching his eyes. They were very Spanish, like part of his ancestry, and he had a way of looking at her that made her knees go weak.

“My, my, how you’ve changed, George,” he mused.

“It needs stitches,” she said. “It’s too deep to bandage.”

“It isn’t. But I’ll let you patch it up,” he sighed irritably.

“We’d have to go back to the house. And Sheila’s there,” she added, smiling mischievously. “Waiting, with a bottle of nasty antiseptic and just bristling with evil intent. Dr. Harris, on the other hand, is a kind man who wouldn’t hurt you. He’s the lesser of the two evils.”

“Damn it, a little blood won’t hurt me,” he countered, his dark eyes daring his very interested cowhands to say a word.

“Will gangrene hurt you?” she challenged, losing her patience as she was losing the argument. He could be so bullheaded! “Do you want to lose your arm because you’re too pigheaded to see a doctor?”

“You tell him, Miss Kate,” Red Barton agreed from his perch atop the fence. He was just out of his teens, a good cowboy with a tendency toward alcohol that would probably have kept him off any other ranch. But he’d saved Jason from a diamondback the same week he’d signed on at Diamond Spur, and he’d be there for life, if Kate knew her taciturn neighbor. Jason never forgot a favor.

“Gangrene’s a turrrrrible thing,” Barton continued. “First she gets red stripes running down, then green, then the whole thing starts to rot off...” He shuddered as his pale eyes widened and his hands gestured theatrically.

“Oh, shut up, Barton!” Jason shot at him. “I don’t need any advice from a man who almost lost his own damned foot to a mesquite thorn!”

Barton lifted his chin, “Well, at least I finally did go to a doctor, didn’t I, boss man?” he challenged.

“Sure,” Jason agreed. “Feet first, in an ambulance.”

“No need to rub it in,” the cowboy replied with a grin.

“All the more reason for you to go willingly, now,” Kate told Jason. “Think,” she said conspiratorially, “how your men would gloat if you had to be carried away.”

Jason looked quietly furious. In fact, he looked hunted. He glared at Barton, who looked like a cheshire cat, and then back at Kate, who stood just looking at him, her arms folded.

“I give up,” he said heavily.

“Don’t worry, boss, they’ll give you a bullet to bite on,” Barton called after him.

“Save one for yourself, and a gun to use it in, if that lot of calves isn’t done when I get back,” Jason snapped back. “Hey, Gabe!” he yelled to his foreman.

The big blond man turned with a hand to his ear.

“I’ll remember this!” Jason told him.

Gabe made him a bow guaranteed to incite any half-enraged man to violence. Jason’s eyes flashed and he took a step forward.

“He’s young, Jason.” Kate got between him and his quarry. “They’re all young.”

He looked down at her with smoldering eyes under his jutting, scowling brow. “So are you, cupcake,” he said.

“That’s right, old man,” she returned. Then she frowned a little. “Well, not too old,” she amended. “You’re just thirty. I guess you’ve got a few good years left.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “My God. Look who’s talking about age—a child of twenty.”

She glared at him. “Almost twenty-one,” she amended. “The same age as Gene.”

“Yes, Gene.” He spared his branding operation another wistful glance. “They’ll never get it done alone,” he muttered. “If only I could get Gene to hold up his end, I could show a profit. Damn it, why does he want to fool around with painting? He’s chasing rainbows, and on my time!”

“Gene isn’t a boy anymore, Jason,” she reminded him as they walked toward his big black Ford Bronco. “He’s a grown man, with a wife.”

“Some wife,” he said harshly. “Cherry couldn’t boil water, and her idea of married life is to watch soap operas and walk around with her hair in curlers.”

“She’s just eighteen,” she said.

“I tried so damned hard to get them to wait.” He opened the passenger door and helped her up into the high cab with a steely hand and closed it. Before she could get him to listen to her protests, he was under the wheel, managing very well with his right arm. With the bucket seats so close together, she was almost touching it, too. Kate was fascinated by the inside of this vehicle. It had power windows and cruise control, a stereo radio, tape deck, and two gearshifts—one for automatic drive and one for four-wheel drive. The old Ford that Kate shared with her mother was a straight shift with no frills, and by comparison, the Bronco was sheer luxury, right down to the comfortable fabric-covered seats.

“You aren’t fit to drive,” she complained.

“Nobody’s driving me anywhere, unless it’s to the cemetery one day,” he returned. He fumbled for a cigarette, but he couldn’t manage the wheel with his injured arm. “Damn.”

“I thought you’d quit,” she mused. She took the cigarette, lit it, and handed it to him, making a face at the tangy, unpleasant tobacco taste.

“I did,” he agreed with a faint grin. “I quit for a week, in fact. And I quit last month, too. I quit religiously about every third week.”

“Your ashtray looks like it,” she observed, watching him thump ashes over a pile of finished butts the size of a teacup upended. “How can you stand that mess?”

“If I clean it out, it will depress people who ride with me.”