Cowboys and Cabernet

She went over to punch a disk into her player, and the cool liquid sounds of classical guitar spilled through the quiet rooms. Ruth adjusted the volume, then looked around with a questioning air.

“Hagar,” she called, sinking down to lie full-length on her small couch. “Hagar, where are you? I need you, sweetie.”

Pleasantly muscle-weary from her long day of physical labor in the cold and rain, she propped her moccasined feet on the opposite arm of the couch and adjusted the pillows behind her head, then smiled as a huge orange Persian cat came padding out from the bedroom, yawning voluptuously.

Hagar was a big fluffy Viking of a cat with a wild russet cloud of fur that rayed out all around him in bright splendor. Ruth adored him, loved the regal air and noble carriage that hid an unusually gentle and loving soul.

Mrs. Ward, however, hated Ruth’s cat with cold passion because of the silky orange fur that he deposited everywhere. Frequently the housekeeper muttered dark veiled threats about Hagar’s personal safety, driving Ruth almost wild with protective outrage and causing even more conflict and tension between the two women.

“You know what, Hagar?” Ruth said, smiling down fondly into Hagar’s brilliant green eyes as he sat by the couch. “You really are a Viking, aren’t you? I should make you a little tiny hat with a pair of those Viking horns on it, shouldn’t I? That would really suit you.”

Hagar yawned again and leaped lightly onto Ruth’s stomach, pausing to turn around deliberately a few times and knead Ruth’s shirt with his gentle blunted claws before sinking in a huge orange mass on her abdomen and resting his chin on folded paws.

Ruth sighed in gratitude, stroking the comforting furry warmth of her cat and brooding about the way she felt these days. Even this beautiful suite of rooms, which had always been the place she loved more than anywhere else on earth, didn’t seem able to soothe her anymore. She felt so restless and agitated all the time, full of nagging doubts and strange nameless yearnings.

Partly this was because of the deteriorating relationship with Harlan, followed by its inevitable demise. Not that Ruth really expected to miss Harlan very much, but the breakup still tended to accentuate her solitude, and the terrifying swiftness with which her life was passing by.

Most of Ruth’s college friends already had growing children, mortgages, houses full of furniture and settled suburban lives. Ruth, on the other hand, still lived in the same place she’d spent her whole life, except for the year she’d been in Paris working on her master’s thesis. Her earlier studies had been at Davis University, so close to the Holden winery that she was able to come home every weekend.

She sighed again. Hagar glanced up at her, licked her hand with urgent sympathy and subsided once more, purring like a plump energetic dynamo as if hopeful that the sound might be soothing to his mistress. Ruth stroked his soft fur with a gentle absent hand, gazing at the ceiling and thinking about the McKinneys.

She didn’t really like J.T. McKinney, never had, though she was fair enough to recognize this as a completely unreasonable emotion. When her father’s old friend came to visit, striding through the quiet rooms of their house with his tanned handsome face, his rolling cowboy gait, his beautiful handmade riding boots and jaunty Stetson hat, Ruth always felt a small surge of resentment.

In J.T.’s presence, her own beloved father seemed to shrink mysteriously, to diminish somehow until he looked pallid and small. Ruth, who adored her father, felt a defensive flood of concern for Don whenever his colorful friend came to the West Coast, bringing gifts and laughter and rip-roaring stories of Texas past and present.

And now J.T. was planning to go into the wine-making business, to usurp the one area where her father held undisputed mastery. And with all that family money at his disposal, Ruth thought bitterly, he’d probably make a success of it, too.

She frowned, trying to recall what she knew about J.T.’s son Tyler, who apparently was the driving force behind this winery idea.

Like her, Tyler still lived with his father, fully absorbed in the family business, and Ruth was fairly certain that he’d never married. In fact, none of the McKinney children had managed to find partners yet. J.T. and Don frequently commiserated with each other about their backward offspring.

But Tyler McKinney hadn’t seemed all that backward on the one occasion she could recall meeting him, Ruth thought with a brief wry grin.

That had been about nineteen years ago, the summer she was eleven and Tyler was fifteen. Don Holden had accepted an invitation to spend a two-week summer vacation at the McKinneys’ Texas ranch, and Ruth had been allowed to take along her friend, a precocious thirteen-year-old with the unlikely name of Mimsy Muldoon. Mimsy’s parents operated a small winery just down the valley, and she and Ruth were passionate best friends for several years.

Ruth could still remember the pain of that summer, caused in large part by the burning envy she felt for the McKinney children with their warm happy family, and especially the gentle soft-spoken mother who loved them so much and treated them with such tenderness.

But worst of all had been Tyler’s attitude. A lanky brash adolescent, he’d been obviously charmed by golden-haired Mimsy, who had a ripely mature young body and a flirtatious manner beyond her years. Ruth had spent a lot of miserable afternoons watching the two of them frolic in the family swimming pool.

She remembered her suffering and embarrassment as she hid her own gangly undeveloped body under baggy T-shirts, huddled with her book in a poolside chair while handsome, dark-haired Tyler flirted with her best friend. Grinning boldly, he ducked Mimsy and chased her across the pool and pretended to be terrified of her swimming prowess.

With a sudden blinding flash of total recall, Ruth saw Tyler pulling his muscular young body out onto the concrete ledge, standing arrogantly with feet apart as he laughed down at Mimsy, throwing his dark head back to send sparkling droplets arching into the hot Texas sun in a shower of rainbows.

“Jerk!” Ruth had muttered under her breath, glaring up at him from behind the pages of her book.

Ruth smiled now at the memory and looked down at Hagar, whose emerald eyes were closing in bliss as Ruth stroked his silky ears.

“You know, Tyler McKinney really was a jerk, Hagar,” Ruth told her cat solemnly. “I wonder if he’s changed at all.”

Hagar yawned in drowsy contentment, revealing his sharp white teeth and the pink interior of his mouth. Ruth felt her spirits begin to rise a little. She gazed at her closet doors with thoughtful speculation, wondering what the weather was like in Central Texas these days and how many clothes she should pack.

CHAPTER TWO

WINTER SUNSHINE, as pale and sparkling as good champagne, spilled over the rolling hills and valleys of Central Texas. The cool afternoon light sparkled on the bustling city of Austin, glinted on lines of brisk-moving traffic and brightened the windows of downtown high-rise office buildings.

Inside Austin’s Mueller Airport Tyler McKinney shifted restlessly in a hard vinyl chair and glanced up at the arrivals board, checking on the business shuttle flight from Abilene. The plane was already a half hour late and the arrival time had apparently been shifted back again. Tyler muffled a groan, aching with frustration and impatience.

Of course, he told himself, trying hard to look on the bright side, it was probably better that the flight was delayed. This way, he wouldn’t have to search for ways to entertain the woman until it was safe to take her home.

“Don’t you dare turn up here with her before four o’clock,” Cynthia had warned him darkly, her beautiful face comically stern under the navy-blue bandanna that she’d tied over her hair. “If you do, Tyler McKinney, I swear I’ll skin you and set you out for the coyotes to finish off.”

“My, my! Such gruesome violence,” Tyler had teased her wickedly. “And from a Boston blue-blood, at that.”

“Oh, shut up,” Cynthia muttered, swatting his arm with a wallpaper roll and whirling off down the cluttered hallway.

Tyler grinned, remembering.

All the women were in an uproar over the renovations currently under way at the Double C. And, being women, they wanted to have it all. They wanted the place redecorated, but they also wanted to impress the visitor from California with how elegant and smooth-running the household was.

“But, darling,” J.T. had protested mildly over his breakfast coffee, “it just can’t be helped, can it? She’s bound to notice that things aren’t exactly neat as a pin around here these days.”

“I know that,” Cynthia said. “But if Tyler can hold her off till four o’clock this afternoon, at least the painters will be gone and we can lift some of the drop sheets in the lower rooms, get the paint cans out of the hallway and the ladders put away….”

Tyler grinned again. He couldn’t deny that it was entertaining to see his usually poised stepmother getting a little flustered. For some reason it mattered terribly to Cynthia, this hastily planned visit from Ruth Holden, who was the daughter of one of her husband’s oldest friends. There seemed to be something mysteriously female about Cynthia’s anxiety, some kind of need to prove herself as mistress of the place….

An expressionless, disembodied voice, announcing that the flight from Abilene would be slightly delayed, interrupted Tyler’s thoughts.

He groaned again and shifted his broad shoulders wearily, wondering if the plane had even left Abilene yet. If it hadn’t left, wouldn’t they know? And if it had, shouldn’t they know when it was going to arrive? Abilene, for God’s sake, was only a few minutes away by air.

Maybe the plane had been hijacked. Tyler chuckled suddenly, his quirky imagination supplying him with an image of a hard-bitten Texas farmer, calf halter in one hand and pitchfork in the other, holding the crew at bay and demanding to be flown to Fort Worth for the Fat Stock Show.

When he laughed, his tanned sculpted face lightened and his dark eyes sparkled warmly. Tyler McKinney was a tall man in his midthirties with a lean muscular frame, dressed in jeans, riding boots and tweed sport jacket over a casual open-necked white shirt. His pearl-gray Stetson lay on the seat across from him, and his crisp dark hair kept falling down across his forehead no matter how many times he brushed it back.

A small child wriggled quietly in the seat next to Tyler, a boy about three years old with a manly clipped haircut that was neatly parted and slicked back with a wet comb. The little fellow, waiting with his mother and baby sister in a stroller, was trying hard to be good, but Tyler could see that the long delay was starting to get to him as well.

The child gripped the metal chair arms with his small hands and slid way down on his spine, legs stiffly extended, seeing how low he could go without falling off the chair. His mother, who was busy with the baby, whispered to him sharply and he sat erect, peeking up at Tyler with cautious interest. Tyler grinned down at the child, slipped him a couple of peppermints from a roll in his jacket pocket, then returned to his thoughts.

His face darkened as he brooded over the impending arrival and what his responsibilities were going to be toward this visiting scientist. “You’ll pretty well have to take care of her,” his father had told him casually. “The girls are busy with all this damn decorating, so they won’t have much time to entertain her.”

“Me?” Tyler said blankly. “What am I going to do with her?”

“Well, talk about wine making, of course,” J.T. told his son impatiently. “You’re the one who wants to start this business, aren’t you? And she’s an expert. She’s a qualified chemist with a list of college degrees as long as your arm.”

“Oh, great,” Tyler had muttered rebelliously, feeling about eight years old. “That’s just what I need, to spend a week listening to some California scientist with thick legs and a mustache, lecturing me about temperature variations and pH levels.”

“I haven’t seen Ruth Holden for quite a few years,” J.T. said with an amiable grin. “But near as I recall, she didn’t have thick legs or a mustache.”

“I’ll bet,” Tyler said grimly. “I’ll just bet.”