“There was no one else. Ward, please. Let go of my arm.”
“No one else? Don’t you ever use your head for something better than a hat rack? Your Pa was rich. You could have offered enough money that every trail boss in Texas would line up for this job. For enough money, they wouldn’t have cared if every last hand was a female. Tomorrow tell your sisters to terminate Frisco and spend whatever it takes to hire someone who isn’t going to lose half the goddamned herd while he’s in a drunken stupor!”
Les said something that Alex couldn’t hear, then she heard the crack of flesh hitting flesh. The shock of it made her jump, and her eyes darkened. Her first instinct was to return to the porch and rescue Les, but she paused with her fingers on the wheels of her chair.
She didn’t actually know what she had heard. Had it really been a slap?
In fact, Les was no longer a child but a grown woman, capable of making her own decisions and rescuing herself. If Les felt she needed assistance, all she had to do was cry out.
Her conscience absolved, Alex rolled away from the door, passing the archway that led into the parlor. To her embarrassment, Freddy was sitting on the ugly horsehair sofa, holding what looked like a script in her lap, her head cocked toward the porch window. They looked at each other for a moment, each aware the other had been eavesdropping, then Alex hurried past the archway and entered the hallway.
Inside her bedroom, she removed her shawl and folded it into a bottom bureau drawer. She of all people knew the truth in the old saying: You made your bed, now you must lie in it. Les had chosen Mr. Hamm, and now Les had to deal with the consequences. Alex had problems of her own, which no one was offering to solve for her.
Picking up a cookbook from her bedside table, she placed it on her lap, then rolled to the window and looked out at the land she hated.
Dear God. How was she going to manage on a cattle drive? The coppery taste of panic burned her throat.
Clearly Alex had overheard the same conversation and the same sounds that she had, Freddy realized. Laying aside the script she’d been reading, she leaned closer to the window, but Ward and Les had stepped off the porch and she couldn’t hear more than a murmur of voices.
Frowning, she gazed across the parlor at the low fire burning in the hearth. Her instinct was to charge outside and order Ward Hamm off the ranch. But Alex hadn’t believed it necessary to intervene. That made her wonder if she had actually heard what she had assumed she had. After all, Les had insisted to Alex that Ward didn’t hit her. Maybe the crack of a blow was really just Les or Ward slapping at a bug or a fly. There were plenty of both buzzing around the ranch.
Annoyed at herself, Freddy didn’t know why she was worrying about Les, anyway. If their situations had been reversed, Les certainly wouldn’t have worried about her.
Picking up the script, she tried to concentrate, but her thoughts wandered. It was a pity that you couldn’t choose your relatives. If she and Alex and Les hadn’t shared the same father, very likely they would never have found themselves in the same room. They had nothing in common, seldom liked the same things or the same people. They didn’t even like each other.
Leaning her head against the high back of the sofa, she closed her eyes and wished she had not agreed to move into the ranch house for the duration of the preparation for the stupid cattle drive. It irritated her that Alex had taken the largest bedroom, and that Les continually played hostess, seeing to meals and dealing with the housekeeper and maids, then asking everyone if she had made the correct decisions. Once again Freddy felt invisible, inhabiting an unseen place between Her Majesty, the oldest, and Pa’s favorite, the youngest.
Well, once this outrageous cattle drive was over, there would be no reason to see Alex or Les again, and that was fine with her.
Setting aside the script in her lap, she wandered down the hallway and stepped outside the back door. The cold night air felt good against her cheeks and throat. Walking past Se?ora Calvos’s kitchen garden, she approached the old magnolia tree that she had climbed as a child. Restless, she circled the tree, then meandered toward the fence that set the house apart from the rest of the ranch, wondering if Jack and Lola were together tonight. Probably.