Passion Flower

She hardly felt the weight of the typewriter on her way back to the agency. She was floating on a cloud.

Miss James gave her a hard look when she came back in. “You’re late,” she said. “We had to refuse a call.”

“I’m sorry. There were several letters...” she began.

“You’ve another assignment. Here’s the address. A politician. Wants several copies of a speech he’s giving, to hand out to the press. You’re to type the speech and get it photostatted for him.”

She took the outstretched address and sighed. “The typewriter...?”

“He has his own, an electric one. Leave that one here, if you please.” Miss James buried her silver head in paperwork. “You may go home when you finish. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.”

“Good night,” Jennifer said quietly, sighing as she went out onto the street. It would be well after quitting time when she finished, and Miss James knew it. But perhaps the politician would be generous enough to tip her. If only the Texas job worked out! Jennifer was a scrapper when she was at her peak, but she was weary and sick and dragged out. It wasn’t a good time to get into an argument with the only employer she’d been able to find. All the other agencies were overstaffed with out-of-work people begging for any kind of job.

The politician was a city councilman, in a good mood and very generous. Jennifer treated herself to three hamburgers and two cups of coffee on the way back to her small apartment. It was in a private home, and dirt cheap. The landlady wasn’t overly friendly, but it was a roof over her head and the price was right.

She slept fitfully, dreaming about the life she’d left behind in New York. It all seemed like something out of a fantasy. The competition for the plum jobs, the cocktail parties to make contacts, the deadlines, the endless fighting to land the best accounts, the agonizing perfecting of color schemes and coordinating pieces to fit fussy tastes... Her nerves had given out, and then her body.

It hadn’t been her choice to go to New York. She’d have been happy in Atlanta. But the best schools were up north, and her parents had insisted. They wanted her to have the finest training available, so she let herself be gently pushed. Two years after she graduated, they were dead. She’d never truly gotten over their deaths in the plane crash. They’d been on their way to a party on Christmas Eve. The plane went down in the dark, in a lake, and it had been hours before they were missed.

In the two years since her graduation, Jennifer had landed a job at one of the top interior-decoration businesses in the city. She’d pushed herself over the limit to get clients, going to impossible lengths to please them. The outcome had been inevitable. Pneumonia landed her in the hospital for several days in March, and she was too drained to go back to work immediately after. An up-and-coming young designer had stepped neatly into her place, and she had found herself suddenly without work.

Everything had to go, of course. The luxury apartment, the furs, the designer clothes. She’d sold them all and headed south. Only to find that the job market was overloaded and she couldn’t find a job that wouldn’t finish killing her. Except at a temporary agency, where she could put her typing skills to work. She started working for Miss James, and trying to recover. But so far she’d failed miserably. And now the only bright spot in her future was Texas.

She prayed as she never had before, struggling from one assignment to the next and hoping beyond hope that the phone call would come. Late one Friday afternoon, it did. And she happened to be in the office when it came.

“Miss King?” Robert Culhane asked on a laugh. “Still want to go to Texas?”

“Oh, yes!” she said fervently, holding tightly to the telephone cord.

“Then pack a bag and be at the ranch bright and early a week from Monday morning. Got a pencil? Okay, here’s how to get there.”

She was so excited she could barely scribble. She got down the directions. “I can’t believe it, it’s like a dream!” she said enthusiastically. “I’ll do a good job, really I will. I won’t be any trouble, and the pay doesn’t matter!”

“I’ll tell Everett,” he chuckled. “Don’t forget. You needn’t call. Just come on out to the ranch. I’ll be there to smooth things over with old Everett, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you!”

“Thank you, Miss King,” he said. “See you a week from Monday.”

“Yes, sir!” She hung up, her face bright with hope. She was actually going to Texas!

“Miss King?” Miss James asked suspiciously.

“Oh! I won’t be back in after today, Miss James,” she said politely. “Thank you for letting me work with you. I’ve enjoyed it very much.”

Miss James looked angry. “You can’t just walk out like this,” she said.

“But I can,” Jennifer said, with some of her old spirit. She picked up her purse. “I didn’t sign a contract, Miss James. And if you were to push the point, I’d tell you that I worked a great deal of overtime for which I wasn’t paid,” she added with a pointed stare. “How would you explain that to the people down at the state labor department?”

Miss James stiffened. “You’re ungrateful.”

“No, I’m not. I’m very grateful. But I’m leaving, all the same. Good day.” She nodded politely just before she went out, and closed the door firmly behind her.

Chapter Two

IT WAS blazing hot for a spring day in Texas. Jennifer stopped in the middle of the ranch road to rest for a minute and set her burdens down on the dusty, graveled ground. She wished for the tenth time in as many minutes that she’d let the cab driver take her all the way to the Culhanes’ front door. But she’d wanted to walk. It hadn’t seemed a long way from the main road. And it was so beautiful, with the wildflowers strewn across the endless meadows toward the flat horizon. Bluebonnets, which she’d only read about until then, and Mexican hat and Indian paintbrush. Even the names of the flowers were poetic. But her enthusiasm had outweighed her common sense. And her strength.

She’d tried to call the ranch from town—apparently Everett and Robert Culhane did have the luxury of a telephone. But it rang and rang with no answer. Well, it was Monday, and she’d been promised a job. She hefted her portable typewriter and her suitcase and started out again.

Her pale eyes lifted to the house in the distance. It was a two-story white frame building, with badly peeling paint and a long front porch. Towering live oaks protected it from the sun, trees bigger than anything Jennifer had seen in Georgia. And the feathery green trees with the crooked trunks had to be mesquite. She’d never seen it, but she’d done her share of reading about it.

On either side of the long, graveled driveway were fences, gray with weathering and strung with rusting barbed wire. Red-coated cattle grazed behind the fences, and her eyes lingered on the wide horizon. She’d always thought Georgia was big—until now. Texas was just unreal. In a separate pasture, a mare and her colt frolicked in the hot sun.

Jennifer pushed back a strand of dull blond hair that had escaped from her bun. In a white shirtwaist dress and high heels, she was a strange sight to be walking up the driveway of a cattle ranch. But she’d wanted to make a good impression.

Her eyes glanced down ruefully at the red dust on the hem of her dress, and the scuff marks on her last good pair of white sling pumps. She could have cried. One of her stockings had run, and she was sweating. She could hardly have looked worse if she’d planned it.

She couldn’t help being a little nervous about the older brother. She had Everett Culhane pictured as a staid old rancher with a mean temper. She’d met businessmen like that before, and dealt with them. She wasn’t afraid of him. But she hoped that he’d be glad of her help. It would make things easier all around.

Her footsteps echoed along the porch as she walked up the worn steps. She would have looked around more carefully weeks ago, but now she was tired and run-down and just too exhausted to care what her new surroundings looked like.

She paused at the screen door, and her slender fingers brushed the dust from her dress. She put the suitcase and the typewriter down, took a steadying breath, and knocked.

There was no sound from inside the house. The wooden door was standing open, and she thought she heard the whir of a fan. She knocked again. Maybe it would be the nice young man she’d met in Atlanta who would answer the door. She only hoped she was welcome.

The sound of quick, hard footsteps made her heart quicken. Someone was home, at least. Maybe she could sit down. She was feeling a little faint.

“Who the hell are you?” came a harsh masculine voice from behind the screen door, and Jennifer looked up into the hardest face and the coldest dark eyes she’d ever seen.

She couldn’t even find her voice. Her immediate reaction was to turn around and run for it. But she’d come too far, and she was too tired.

“I’m Jennifer King,” she said as professionally as she could. “Is Robert Culhane home, please?”

She was aware of the sudden tautening of his big body, a harsh intake of breath, before she looked up and saw the fury in his dark eyes.

“What the hell kind of game are you playing, lady?” he demanded.

She stared at him. It had been a long walk, and now it looked as if she might have made a mistake and come to the wrong ranch. Her usual confidence faltered. “Is this the Circle C Ranch?” she asked.

“Yes, it is.”

He wasn’t forthcoming, and she wondered if he might be one of the hired hands. “Is this where Robert Culhane lives?” she persisted, trying to peek past him—there was a lot of him, all hard muscle and blue denim.

“Bobby was killed in a bus wreck a week ago,” he said harshly.

Jennifer was aware of a numb feeling in her legs. The long trip on the bus, the heavy suitcase, the effects of her recent illness—all of it added up to exhaustion. And those cold words were the final blow. With a pitiful little sound, she sank down onto the porch, her head whirling, nausea running up into her throat like warm water.

The screen door flew open and a pair of hard, impatient arms reached down to lift her. She felt herself effortlessly carried, like a sack of flour, into the cool house. She was unceremoniously dumped down onto a worn brocade sofa and left there while booted feet stomped off into another room. There were muttered words that she was glad she couldn’t understand, and clinking sounds. Then, a minute later, a glass of dark amber liquid was held to her numb lips and a hard hand raised her head.