Margot Dalton - Cowboys and Cabernet

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.

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.