Gena Dalton - Midnight Faith

Her eyes looked like black velvet—like her skirt.

Finally they rested on him. Just for an instant.

“Cait, honey, you know the Carmacks, don’t you?” Bobbie Ann said, and she and Lorena began the introductions all over again.

Cait spoke to everyone in the group except him. No one else noticed. Two of the young men in the group—he thought they were Carmack grandsons—monopolized her as soon as they could.

And then she was gone, drifting away with those boys after a pat on the arm from Bobbie Ann, who was shepherding the Carmack group toward the tables full of food.

Clint just stood there for a long minute, looking after her. Then, mercifully, Aunt Faylene came to claim him.

It was the novelty of it, he decided as he danced with Faylene. Simple novelty was the reason she was getting so much attention from everyone.

Why, he, himself couldn’t help but watch Cait in spite of a firm resolution not to give her so much as a glance more than the cool one she’d given him.

No one at the party had ever seen her in a dress before. Few of them, if any, had ever seen her at a social function.

It was the men, as always, who were most fascinated.

Those two young Carmack kids were sticking with her, but several others had joined them, vying for her attention to their jokes and stories. Clint set his jaw and guided Faylene in the opposite direction.

“That Cait’s a knockout, isn’t she?” his aunt said.

Faylene was nearly as good as Bobbie Ann in reading a man’s mind in a New York minute.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Half the men here can’t see anything but her and the other half are the old codgers with failing eyesight.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

His lack of response didn’t discourage her one bit.

“She’s exotic, that’s one reason,” she said, “besides being so drop-dead striking in every way. You know what I think makes her so interesting?”

That brought his gaze straight to her sharp blue one, so like his mother’s. Faylene indulged herself in one gleam of triumph before she answered the question in his look.

“She’s different from other women because she gives no quarter.”

He looked at her.

“Like the old Texas Rangers?”

“Exactly.”

“She’s from Chicago, Faylie.”

She ignored his little sally.

“Everything about Cait proclaims it,” she said seriously. “The look in her eye, the way she walks, the way she keeps her head in her business all the time. No man can resist a challenge like that.”

“Hmpf.”

Faylene went right on.

“A man gets one chance with Cait,” she said. “One.”

A strange, sharp feeling, like a warning, pierced him.

“One’s enough when he gets the rough side of her tongue.”

“Cait’s a direct-talking woman,” she said. “Y’all are just used to us Texas women sugarcoating everything for you.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You and Bobbie Ann are the champion sugarcoaters of all time. Steel magnolias is more like it.”

“Well, we all have our own styles,” his diminutive aunt said sweetly as she looked up at him with a beatific smile. “I, for one, admire a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. Cait’s bound to be a world-class horsewoman and she will be.”

“What’ve you heard about that?”

Maybe Bobbie Ann had talked to her sister about Cait’s silly riding school. Maybe he could get some ammunition here to stop it.

But no. Faylene had her own ideas about what was important information.

“You can see she’s Black Irish,” she said in a reproving tone. “Same as your great-grandpa Murphy—except his eyes were blue. But his hair was midnight-black, just like Cait’s.”

“So, Jackson must look like him,” Clint said, hoping to get her off the subject of Cait.

At least until this endless waltz could be over. Didn’t Delia’s arms ever get tired of that fiddle?

“You look like your great-grandpa, too,” Faylene said. “Tall and black-haired and handsome as can be. Your eyes are different, though—gray as mist instead of blue.” She smiled as if he needed comfort. “That’s why I used Jackson for an example instead of you.” He returned her smile. She was his favorite aunt. “Ooh,” she said, “I can’t wait until Jackson and Darcy get here! I still could just spank them for having that tiny wedding in the old chapel instead of letting us throw them a great big one. There’s five hundred people with their feelings hurt….”

But he couldn’t let well enough be. He’d distracted her and now he had to bring her back.

One of the young men appeared to be asking Cait to dance. She was shaking her head and smiling a refusal.

“What does being Black Irish have to do with being a world-class horsewoman?”

Faylene flashed him an incredulous look.

“The Irish have an affinity for horses, you know that. Their emotions and their spirits run deep and they have a strong connection with things unseen.”

Clint had to grin at her seriousness.

“The Comanches had a connection with horses,” he said.

“Same with them,” Faylene said promptly. “Close to the earth—the Comanches and the Irish.”

“Giving no quarter, like the Texas Rangers.”

“Right!”

She beamed at him.

He laughed and hugged her as Delia’s fiddle finally sang out the last note.

“Thanks for the dance and the information, too, Auntie Fay,” he said.

“Any time, lovey.”

Then the question on his mind came off his tongue of its own accord.

“Why do you think she married John?”

Faylene narrowed her blue eyes and stared up at him.

“Nobody but Cait knows that, sugar,” she said. “Whatever I’d say about it would only be speculation.”

Clint grinned.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to push you into speculation,” he said dryly, “since everything else you’ve told me tonight has been ironclad fact.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said, twinkling at him.

Then she patted him on the arm and hurried off, waving at Jim Prescott. Suddenly she stopped and looked back.

“Sometime she might tell you herself, sweetie,” she said.

Oh, sure. Sometime when he and Cait became best buddies.

Immediately, without so much as a glance toward Cait and her admirers, he started looking for Larry. The reason Cait had married John was totally immaterial to him and he had no idea why he’d asked that question out loud.

He didn’t even want to know. All he wanted was to make the Rocking M the premier breeding station in the reining-horse industry, and in the meantime come up with new stallions to take over the cutting-and pleasure-horse market, too.

And he also wanted to make some waves with his cattle. Might as well dream big. He was the oldest brother, and he’d always been the most responsible one, so perhaps the whole ranch was meant to fall on his shoulders. Jackson was the next oldest, and he was here on the Rocking M and, in time, might come to share the burden.

Monte, the third one born, had always been the wildest, and John, the baby brother, had always been the gentlest, the kindest, the best. Maybe it was true that the good die young.

Maybe it was true that even if both of them were still here, neither would want to make the ranch his main concern for all his life. He, Clint, would just have to accept life the way it was.

Maybe if he made his challenges big enough, and took big enough risks to try to meet them, he’d forget all about this lonely funk he was in, and the ridiculous riding school, too.

The whole time he was visiting with Larry, though, he couldn’t keep from glancing around for Cait from time to time. Just out of curiosity as to how she was handling herself. She did finally escape from the younger men but, just as she tried to slip out into the kitchen, his grandfather’s old friend Mac Torrance caught up with her. Clearly he was asking her to dance but she refused him, too.