Heartless

“How did he come into that ranch?” Gracie asked suddenly.

Mrs. Harcourt looked oddly unsettled, but her face quickly lost its confused expression. “He bought it from my family,” she said surprisingly. “It was my grandfather’s place. Not that it was in very good shape,” she added. “I was afraid it would go for subdivisions or a shopping mall.” She smiled. “I’m so glad it didn’t.”

Gracie was thoughtful as she sipped coffee. “He bought it the year before his father died,” she recalled.

“Yes.” Mrs. Harcourt’s soft voice had a sudden edge.

“Mr. Pendleton didn’t move with the times, did he?” she asked as she put down her coffee cup. “He hated the ranch and Jason working on it. He said it was beneath a Pendleton to do manual labor.”

“Oh, he was a stickler for class and position,” the older woman said bitterly. “He refused to let Jason’s first ranch foreman in the front door. He told him that servants went to the back.”

“How ridiculous,” Gracie huffed.

“He and Jason had a terrible row about it later. Jason won.” The older woman chuckled. “Whatever his faults, and he doesn’t have that many, Jason is no snob.”

“Did he love his father?” Gracie laughed self-consciously. “What a silly question. Of course he did. The day we went to the reading of his father’s will is one I’ll never forget. There were grants to Glory and me, but the lawyer went behind closed doors to discuss the rest with Jason. Afterward, he got drunk, remember?” she sighed. “In all the time I’ve known Jason, I’ve never even seen him tipsy. He never cried at the old man’s funeral, but he went wild after he saw the will. I guess it took a few days to hit him. The loss, I mean. With his mother long dead, his last parent was gone forever…Mrs. Harcourt! Are you all right?”

The elderly woman had toppled the coffeepot, right on her hand. Gracie jumped up, all but dragging the woman into the kitchen to the sink. “You hold that right there,” she instructed, putting the burned hand under running cold water. She went to the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet to get what she needed. She walked briskly back to the kitchen and put the supplies down by the sink.

“Miss Gracie, I can do that,” she fussed. “It isn’t right, you waiting on me.”

“Don’t you start,” Gracie muttered. “We don’t do the master-and-servant thing in this house. You and Dilly and John are family,” she said firmly. “We all look out for each other.”

Tears misted the older woman’s eyes. Gracie couldn’t tell if emotion or pain caused it, but she smiled gently as she treated the burn. “Honestly, I don’t know what in the world we’d do without you.”

“That’s so kind of you, Miss Gracie.”

“Gracie,” she corrected. “You don’t call Jason ‘Mr. Jason,’” she pointed out.

“I do when he’s around,” the housekeeper corrected.

“And you get fussed at. He doesn’t like it when you treat him like the boss.” She hesitated as she fastened the bandage in place. “He’s…very strange lately,” she said softly. “I don’t understand him.”

Mrs. Harcourt looked as if she’d smother trying not to speak. Finally she said, “He just has a lot on his mind. There’s that computer company in Germany that’s bothering him because it competes with his own new line. It could hurt him in the market. He said he hopes he won’t have to go over there, but the owners are dragging their feet about selling.”

“God help them if he does go over there.” Gracie chuckled. “Jason is like a bulldozer when he wants something.”

“He is,” Mrs. Harcourt agreed. “Thanks for patching me up.”

“Oh, I have an ulterior motive,” Gracie told her. “I need your help to smuggle in some more Christmas decorations. You have to help me get the boxes into the attic so Jason won’t see them if he’s around when they arrive.”

The older woman hesitated, clearly disturbed.

“He just grumbles,” Gracie reminded her. “He doesn’t say I can’t put up trees and wreaths and holly garlands.” She frowned. “Why does he hate Christmas?” she wondered, and not for the first time. But she’d never asked Mrs. Harcourt about it before.

Mrs. Harcourt grimaced. “His father didn’t mind a tree, but he never bought presents. He said the holiday was nothing more than an excuse for commerce. He was never here at Christmas, anyway, not once during Jason’s whole life,” she added bitterly. “I bought little gifts for him, or knitted him caps and scarves or made afghans for his bed,” she said softly. “Dilly and John and I tried to make it up to him. He was a lonely child.”

“How terrible,” Gracie murmured.

“Why do you love it so much?” the older woman asked.

“I was never allowed to celebrate Christmas,” she blurted out. “Not even with a tree.” Her face flamed. She hadn’t meant to give that away.

The older woman was clearly shocked. “But you go to church with Jason. And you decorate everything—even Baker, once, with fake antlers…!”

“My father was…an atheist,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t let us go to church or celebrate Christmas.”

“Oh, my dear.” Mrs. Harcourt hugged her close and held her. Gracie sobbed. Except for this warm, matronly woman, Gracie hadn’t known real affection since her mother’s death. Myron Pendleton had been kind, in an impersonal way, but he wasn’t the hugging sort. Really, neither was Jason.

“You won’t tell him?” Gracie asked, finally moving away, to dab at her eyes with a tissue Mrs. Harcourt pressed into her hand.

“No. I’m good at keeping secrets,” she added with a smile that looked oddly cynical. “But why don’t you want him to know?”

“My mother taught me never to talk about my childhood. Especially after we came here.”

Mrs. Harcourt sensed that there was a lot this young woman had never shared with anyone. “Come on and finish your breakfast,” she coaxed. “I’ll make you a lovely chocolate cake later.”

Gracie laughed self-consciously. “You spoil me, Mrs. Harcourt. Me and Glory, too. You always did.”

“I missed having girls of my own,” she said. “My husband was sterile.”

“I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry.”

She smiled sadly. “I loved him, but he was a hard man to live with. He broke horses for Jason. He was kicked in the head by a mustang and died right there in the corral. I had no place else to go, no family, so I stayed here.”

“I’m glad you did,” Gracie said. “You made this place a home. You still do.”

Mrs. Harcourt beamed. “For that, you can have a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.”

“My favorite!”

The older woman chuckled. “I know. Now that I’m patched up, I’ll get started on that cake. You finish your breakfast.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Gracie went back to the table. Life was hard on everybody. Poor Mrs. Harcourt, a widow without even a child to comfort her in her old age.

IT WAS A SLOW LUNCH day for Barbara’s Café. The owner sat at a booth with Gracie, nibbling on a salad. She was twelve years older than Gracie, with thick blond hair and pretty eyes. Everybody knew her locally and loved her. She’d been a widow for a long time, but she did have family. She’d adopted Rick Marquez, the San Antonio homicide detective, when he was in his teens. Now he was the joy of her life.

“Why don’t you set your sights on Rick?” Barbara teased. “He’s young and single and incredibly handsome, even if I do say so.”

“He carries a gun around,” Gracie pointed out.

“So does your stepbrother,” the older woman replied.

“Yes, when he’s on the ranch, but Jason doesn’t spend his life around dead bodies,” she added.

“Having seen a couple of his cowboys from the Rocking Spur eating lunch over here last week, I could debate that. They said they’d just come in from pulling cattle out of mud, and they looked like death warmed over.”