Diana Palmer - Christmas On The Range - Winter Roses

It took Ivy a minute to answer. She knew more about corporal punishment than she was ever going to admit, even to Merrie. “I always liked Dallas. Hayes is hard-going sometimes. What did your father say to that?” she asked.

“He didn’t say anything. He got Stuart in the car and drove him to football practice. Five minutes after he left, Stuart hitched a ride to the Jacobsville rodeo arena and borrowed a horse for the junior bulldogging competition. He and his best friend, Martin, came in second place. Dad was livid. When Stuart put his trophy on the mantel, Dad smashed it with a fire poker. He never took the belt to Stuart again, but he browbeat him and demeaned him every chance he got. It wasn’t until Stuart went away to college that I stopped dreading the times we were home from school.”

Involuntarily, Ivy’s eyes went to the painting of Merrie and Stuart’s father that hung over the fireplace. Stuart resembled Jake York, but the older man had a stubborn jaw and a cruel glimmer in his pale blue eyes. Like Stuart, he’d been a tall man, lean and muscular. The children had been without a mother, who died giving birth to Merrie. Their mother’s sister had stayed with the family and cared for Merrie until she was in grammar school. She and the elder York had argued about his treatment of Stuart, which had ended in her departure. After that, tenderness and unconditional love were things the York kids read about. They learned nothing of them from their taciturn, demanding father. Stuart’s defiance only made him more bitter and ruthless.

“But your father built this ranch,” Ivy said. “Surely he had to like cattle.”

“He did. It was just that football was his whole life,” Merrie replied. “You might have noticed that you don’t ever see football games here. Stuart cuts off the television at the first mention of it.”

“I can see why.”

“Dad spent the time between football games running the ranch and his real estate company. He died of a heart attack when I was thirteen, sitting at the boardroom table. He had a violent argument with one of his directors about some proposed expansions that would have placed the company dangerously close to bankruptcy. He was a gambler. Stuart isn’t. He always calculates the odds before he makes any decision. He never has arguments with the board of directors.” She frowned. “Well, there was one. They insisted that he hire a pilot to fly him to business meetings.”

“Why?”

Merrie chuckled. “To stop him from driving himself to them. Didn’t I mention that this is his second new XJ in six months?”

Ivy lifted her eyebrows. “What happened to the first one?”

“Slow traffic.”

“Come again?”

“He was in a hurry to a called meeting of the board of directors,” Merrie said. “There was a little old man driving a motor home about twenty miles an hour up a hill on a blind curve. Stuart tried to pass him. He almost made it, too,” she added. “Except that Hayes Carson was coming down the hill on the other side of the road in his squad car.”

“What happened?” Ivy prompted when Merrie sat silently.

“Stuart really is a good driver,” his sister asserted, “even if he makes insane decisions about where to pass. He spun the car around and stopped it neatly on the shoulder before Hayes got anywhere near him. But Hayes said he could have killed somebody and he wasn’t getting out of a ticket. The only way he got his license back was that he promised to go to traffic school and do public service.”

“That doesn’t sound like your brother.”

Merrie shrugged. “He did go to traffic school twice, and then he went to the sheriff’s department and showed Hayes Carson how to reorganize his department so that it operated more efficiently.”

“Did Hayes actually ask him to do that?”

“No. But Stuart argued that reorganizing the chaos in the sheriff’s department was a public service. Hayes didn’t agree. He went and talked to Judge Meacham himself. They gave Stuart his license back.”

“You said he didn’t hit anything with the car.”

“He didn’t. But while it was sitting on the side of the road, a cattle truck—one of his own, in fact—took the curve too fast and sideswiped it off the shoulder down a ten-foot ravine.”

“I don’t guess the driver works for you anymore,” Ivy mused.

“He does, but not as a driver,” Merrie said, laughing. “Considering how things could have gone, it was a lucky escape for everyone. It was a sturdy, well-built car, but those cattle trucks are heavy. It was a total loss.”

“Even if I could afford a car, I don’t think I want to learn how to drive,” Ivy commented. “It seems safer not to be on the highway when Stuart’s driving.”

“It is.”

They snacked on cheese and crackers and finger sandwiches and cookies, and sipped coffee in perfect peace for several minutes.

“Ivy, are you sure you’re cut out to be a public accountant?” Merrie asked after a minute.

Ivy laughed. “What brought that on?”

“I was just thinking about when we were still in high school,” she replied. “You had your heart set on singing opera.”

“And chance would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it?” Ivy asked with a patient smile. “The thing is, even if I had the money to study in New York, I don’t want to leave Jacobsville. So that sort of limits my options. Singing in the church choir does give me a chance to do what I love most.”

Merrie had to agree that this was true. “What you should really do is get married and have kids, and teach them how to sing,” she replied with a grin. “You’d be a natural. Little kids flock around you everywhere we go.”

“What a lovely idea,” she enthused. “Tell you what, you gather up about ten or twelve eligible bachelors, and I’ll pick out one I like.”

That set Merrie to laughing uproariously. “If we could do it that way, I might get married myself,” she confessed. “But I’d have to have a man who wasn’t afraid of Stuart. Talk about limited options...!”

“Hayes Carson isn’t scared of him,” Ivy pointed out. “You could marry him.”

“Hayes doesn’t want to get married. He says he likes his life uncluttered by emotional complications.”

“Lily-livered coward,” Ivy enunciated. “No guts.”

“Oh, he’s got guts. He just doesn’t think marriage works. His parents fought like tigers. His younger brother, Bobby, couldn’t take it, and he turned to drugs and overdosed. It had to affect Hayes, losing his only sibling like that.”

“He might fall in love one day.”

“So might my brother,” Merrie mused, “but if I were a betting woman, I wouldn’t bet on that any time soon.”

“Love is the great equalizer.”

“Love is a chemical reaction,” Merrie, the nursing student, said dryly. “It’s nothing more than a physical response to a sensory stimulus designed to encourage us to replicate our genes.”

“Oh, yuuuck!” Ivy groaned. “Merrie, that’s just gross!”

“It’s true—ask my anatomy professor,” Merrie defended.

“No, thank you. I’ll take my own warped view of it as a miracle, thanks.”

Merrie laughed, then she frowned. “Ivy, what are you eating?” she asked abruptly.

“This?” She held up a cookie from the huge snack platter that contained crackers, cheese, cakes, little finger sandwiches and cookies. Mrs. Rhodes loved to make hors d’oeuvres. “It’s a cookie.”

Merrie looked worried. “Ivy, it’s a chocolate cookie,” came the reply. “You know you’ll get a migraine if you eat them.”

“It’s only one cookie,” she defended herself.

“ And there’s a low pressure weather system dumping rain on us, and you’ve had the stress of Rachel worrying you to death since your father’s funeral,” she replied. “Not to mention that your father’s only been dead for a few weeks. There’s always more than one trigger that sets off a migraine, even if you don’t realize what they are. Stuart gets them, too, you know, but it’s red wine or aged cheese that causes his.”