Danielle Steel - The Ranch

“Did he care?”

She tried to sound cool about it, but the others didn't believe her. “Why would he?”

“Because I don't think he's interested in offering you a secretarial position,” Tanya explained as though she were retarded. “The guy likes you.”

“We'll see what happens,” Mary Stuart said calmly, and couldn't help noticing Benjamin in his red cowboy hat staring at her.

“You look kind of like my mom,” he said, looking at her, “and my Aunt Mary.”

“My name is Mary too,” she said to make conversation, “Mary Stuart. That's kind of weird, isn't it? Stuart was my daddy's name, and he wanted me to be a boy, so that's what they named me.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. And then, “Do you have any children?” He was far more interested in her than the others, it was as though he sensed something different about her.

“Yes, I have a daughter, but she's very big now. She's twenty.”

“Do you have boys too?” he asked, munching on a Danish Zoe gave him.

“No, I don't,” Mary Stuart answered, and the child was too young to understand the tears in her eyes as she said it.

“I like boys better,” he said matter-of-factly. “I hope my mom doesn't have a girl when the baby comes. I don't like girls. They're stupid.”

“Some of them are okay,” Mary Stuart explained, and he shrugged, unconvinced in his prejudice about females.

“They cry too much when you push them,” he said, by way of an explanation, and Zoe and Tanya exchanged a smile as they listened. Maybe it was good for her to have to talk to him, they wondered silently. Like kind of a vaccination.

“Some girls are pretty brave,” Mary Stuart said in defense of her sex, but he lost interest in the subject and ate a piece of bacon, and a little while later he wandered off again when he saw his father. His mother came into the dining room a little while later too, and Mary Stuart noticed that she was hugely pregnant. Her husband had explained to Zoe earlier that the altitude was making her feel wretched.

“I hope you don't wind up delivering a baby,” Mary Stuart said in an undertone. “She looks like she's having triplets.”

“God, no. There's a hospital here. I don't carry forceps with me. And I haven't delivered a baby since I was an intern. It scared the hell out of me. Delivering babies is a lot scarier than what I do. Too much can go wrong, too many split-second decisions, too many elements you can't control, and I hate dealing with people in that much pain. I'd rather do dermatology than obstetrics,” Zoe said with feeling. Mary Stuart said she thought it would be fun, and a really cheerful job, since most of the time it had a happy outcome. Tanya said then that she wondered what it was like having a baby. She had wanted lots of them when she was young, but as her life had unfolded, the opportunity had never happened. And it intrigued Mary Stuart to realize that of all of them, she was the only one who had ever borne children.

“Maybe it was something subliminal they told us at Berkeley,” Zoe said, smiling at them. She was happy she had adopted.

“I would have loved to have kids,” Tanya said, “I loved having Tony's kids around, they were great children.” She wondered if she'd ever see them again, for more than a few minutes. It was all so unkind, losing them, losing him, and when all was said and done, he could just take them and leave her. It made her think that somewhere along the way she should have had her own kids, then no one could have taken them away, and she'd have had them forever, or maybe not, she realized, as she thought of Mary Stuart.

They finished breakfast just in time, and hurried down to the corral. Hartley was already down there, and he looked pleased to see Mary Stuart. Their eyes met and held for a long time, and he stood very close to her as they waited to mount their horses. The doctors from Chicago were back again, and the same groups formed as the day before. Zoe rode with them, and Hartley rode alongside Mary Stuart, which left Tanya and the wrangler to ride ahead again, and this time he tried to make more of an effort.

“You look very nice today,” he said, looking straight ahead, and sounding like a robot, and she could see there was a faint flush on his cheekbones as he said it. He was really embarrassed, and she tried to put him at ease as they rode along, but it took a while to do it. After a while, he asked her a few questions about Hollywood, the people she'd met. He asked if she'd ever met Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner or Cher, and he told her he'd seen Harrison Ford in Jackson Hole that summer. She said she'd met them all, and she and Cher had been in a movie together.

“It's funny,” he said, looking at her with narrowed eyes, “looking at you, you don't look like that kind of person.”

“What does that mean?” He confused her.

“I mean, you're like someone real, not like some movie star or big singer or something. You're just like a regular woman. You ride, you talk a lot, you laugh, you've got a pretty good sense of humor.” He glanced over at her with the beginnings of a smile, and this time without blushing. “It's hard to remember after a while that you're the one on the CD's and in the movies.”

“If that's a compliment, thank you. If you're telling me I'm a disappointment to you, that's okay too. The bottom line is I'm just a girl from Texas.” She was smiling at him, as he admired the pink T-shirt.

“No.” He shook his head, glancing at her appraisingly with wise eyes. There was a lot more to Gordon than met the eye on first impression. “There's a lot more to you than that. And you know that. It's just that you're not phony, the way they are.”

“The way who is?”

“Other movie stars I've met. They don't even ride when they come here. We've had them all. Politicians, movie stars, even a couple of singers. They just show off a lot, and expect a whole lot of special treatment.”

“I asked for a lot of towels, and a coffeepot,” she confessed, and he laughed. “Besides, I put on the card that I hate horses.”

“I don't believe you,” he said, looking more relaxed with her than he had the previous morning. He had hardly dared to speak to her for most of the day before. This was a lot better. While he chatted with her, he was fun to ride with. “You're from Texas,” he said approvingly. It said something about her, as far as he was concerned. People from Texas didn't hate horses. “And you're just a regular woman.” The funny thing was that she was just that, and he knew it. It was what she had been with Bobby Joe, and Hollywood had screwed it all up, and it was what she had tried to be with Tony. But Tony had wanted a movie star, with none of the problems that went with it. He wanted something that, even with the best of intentions, she just couldn't give him.

“I am a regular woman, but the world I live in doesn't give me much chance to be. I don't have much of a life, to tell you the truth, and I never will now. I hate that, but that's the way it is. The press will never let me have a real life. And even the people who meet me won't. They want you to be what they think you are, and then when they get close to you, they want to hurt you.” Even talking about it, it sounded crazy.

“It sounds awful,” he said, watching her with interest. He was surprised at how much he liked her. He hadn't wanted to, but she was completely different than he'd expected. He had done everything he could not to be her wrangler, and now he was glad Liz hadn't listened to him. She was actually pleasant to be with.

“It is awful,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think it'll kill me. Maybe it will one day, or a fan will.” She said it so sadly that he shook his head as he listened.

“How can you live like that? I don't care what they pay you, it's not worth it,” he said, as their horses began loping.