Page 33 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

They had argued about old man Barrancas before Ty left for Mexico.

Robert didn’t want Marguarita caught between her husband and her father.

He wanted to end hostilities that had existed for twenty-five years.

Ty strongly disagreed. Too much water had flowed beneath this particular bridge.

There were too many stolen cattle, too many property skirmishes, too many wounded men and harsh exchanges on both sides of an ongoing dispute.

Ty wasn’t willing to forgive and forget, and he didn’t understand how Robert could even consider it.

Jenny drew back and her eyes narrowed. “You’re really something. You must have been dancing in your boots when you learned that Marguarita Barrancas was dead.”

“I wasn’t happy to hear that she’d died,” he said after a minute.

“But I wasn’t sorry either. She tore our family apart.

” Anger tightened his jaw. “My father was never the same after Robert married a Barrancas. From then on he treated Robert with the same contempt as he treated me. He started drinking, letting the land and the ranch go to hell. Robert spent the next six years hating himself for not having the guts to defy the old man. My mother was caught in the middle of it.”

“It was Robert who caused the trouble in your family, not Marguarita.” Jenny sneered.

“If Robert had kept his parts in his pants, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

” Leaning forward again, she jabbed a finger against his chest. “I’ll bet there wasn’t a night went by during the six years Marguarita waited that she didn’t wish she’d said no when your brother mentioned he had a hankering. Huh! That’s not going to happen to me.”

Stretching out, she settled her head on the saddle, then flounced onto her side, presenting her back to him. “I’m through talking. I’m going to get some sleep.”

If that wasn’t just like a woman, Ty thought, angrily staring down at her. She had to have the last damned word. Lying back down, he crossed his arms on his chest and glared up at the horse blanket.

After a time, he concluded they had made some progress. The obstacle preventing a mutual hankering from ending satisfactorily had been defined. Now a solution could be considered. Meanwhile, he would begin the wooing process. That decision made him think of Mrs. McGowan, and he smiled.

Mrs. McGowan had taken him into her bed when he was sixteen and randy as a stallion.

The farrier’s wife had taught him wondrous things, things his feverish young imagination hadn’t yet dared to dream.

In retrospect, everything he knew about pleasing a woman had come from Alice McGowan, and she had given him some of the best advice he’d ever received.

“Treat all women like they was fine ladies,” Alice had advised before he dragged her down between the sheets. “Treat every woman like she was the last woman on earth and you was one of the million men trying to get her.”

Considering the state he’d been in at the time, it was nothing short of miraculous that he remembered her advice. But he did, and he’d put it to good use over the years.

Yessir, Jenny Jones didn’t know it yet, but she was going to surrender. Idly, he wondered if she knew the word capitulate.

All her life Jenny had wanted things she didn’t or couldn’t have. Usually she shrugged and got past the wanting. But this time fate was playing the trickster.

Destiny had thrown her together with a hard-eyed, hard-muscled, good-looking cowboy, the very sight of whom tied her innards in hot knots. If that wasn’t enough torture, fortune’s imps had given him a powerful hankering for her, then upped the ante by inflicting her with a mighty hankering for him.

The mutual hankering secretly thrilled her and pissed her off at the same time because she couldn’t follow through on it.

She’d have to have grits for brains to risk a pregnancy by a man who announced first off that he was a user.

It wasn’t that she was angling for marriage.

Hell, she was no more marriage material than he was.

No way would she ever expect or even hope that the son of a prosperous rancher would choose an uneducated, crude, and rude mule skinner for a wife. That wasn’t the problem.

She would have dropped her trousers in an eye blink if she could have known for absolute positive certain that she wouldn’t turn up pregnant.

Worrying how she was going to support and raise Graciela was enough to keep her awake nights. Adding another kid would finish her. And before the three of them starved or froze to death, Jenny would have fallen through all the stages of degradation that it was possible for a woman to experience.

She didn’t deserve that, and she didn’t want Graciela and a new kid to witness it happening to her.

Thinking about the horror and misery of watching two kids starve because she couldn’t find work made her so mad that she rolled over and kicked Ty.

Instantly he came out of a doze and glared at her. “What the hell was that for?” Leaning forward, he rubbed his shin.

“I keep telling everybody that I’m not the mother type!

But you all seem to think I can work miracles and pull food out of the fricking thin air!

Well, I’m not going to be used, and I’m not going to prostitute myself or beg in the streets.

And no kid of mine is going to starve in front of my eyes.

Do you hear me?” She made a fist and hit him on the shoulder. “I don’t even like you.”

If she’d had the full use of both arms, she would have built another lean-to and moved her saddle. The heat squashed any idea of giving it a try. The best she could do was lie back down and move as far from him as she could.

A minute passed, then she heard him stretch out again.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have beautiful eyes?”

“Shut up!” She stared at the saddle horn. “Why the hell did you say that?”

“Well, it’s true,” he said in a lazy voice. “I’m just making an observation. You have beautiful eyes, beautiful breasts, beautiful hips.”

Oh God. The hankering feeling came over her strong. No man had ever said such words to her. And she had a weakness for pretty words. The feverish heat curling in her stomach suggested she also had a weakness for handsome cowboys. Crud on a crust.

“Wake me when it’s time for supper,” she said, in a strange husky voice.

To warn off the hankering, she tried to imagine herself holding a squalling infant with her red hair and the cowboy’s blue-green eyes. The image was amusing, horrifying, frightening, and… something else that made her stomach roll over and dissolve into mush.

Groaning in disgust, she turned her face into the crook of her arm. If Graciela didn’t get her killed or ruin her life, Ty Sanders would.