Midnight Faith. Gena Dalton
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had dropped into her new boots. Was that the only reason Bobbie Ann wanted her there? Did she not love her for herself at all?
Clint stood in front of the fireplace talking to Pete Kirkland—well, listening to him would be more like it—and wondering how soon he could get away to circulate among the other guests. Delia’s band was playing, a lot of people were dancing and he needed to dance with Aunt Faylene because that had been their own private Christmas Eve ritual since he was ten years old.
He also needed to be sure he had a good visit with Larry Matheson, because he was talking about breeding a couple of his best champion mares to the Rocking M’s new young cutting stallion, Trader Doc Bar. Larry was nothing if not stylish and a leader in the industry, and his enthusiastic support of the stallion could fill the stud’s book for next year and mark him as the up-and-coming best in the business. It was worth far more than any paid advertising ever could be.
One thing he did not need to do was apologize to Cait. That would only encourage her to settle in here with her horses.
He tried to covertly glance at his watch. It already felt as if this evening had lasted a year.
Fortunately, just when he thought he couldn’t stay in one spot any longer, the doorbell rang and he excused himself from Pete to go to answer it. His parents’ lifetime friends, the Carmacks, and the twenty-two guests they were having for Christmas this year poured in through the door.
Lorena Carmack laughed as she kissed Clint’s cheek.
“They swarmed on us this time,” she said. “Aren’t you glad this tradition is only bring all your own guests for appetizers and drinks and not for dinner, too?”
“Ma’s made enough chili for everybody in Texas,” Clint said hospitably. “Y’all should stay.”
“Truly spoken like a man,” she said. “We can tell you’re not the one arranging the place settings, Clint dear.”
He ushered them into the already-crowded great room and was in the middle of introductions all around when Bobbie Ann called to him. He looked up…and saw Cait.
All the music and the talk faded away beneath the roaring of his own blood in his head.
Cait was beautiful. He had been wrong about that.
He had never seen her in a skirt, and this one fell over her body like a sunrise coming over the land, touching here and there and then sliding away. She was all softness, all creamy skin and white silk and black velvet. She didn’t seem like Cait at all.
She seemed like a stranger.
Except for her unmistakable presence, the way she held herself and the way she moved that drew the eye of everyone in the room. She still had that distinctive, long-strided walk that said, I know where I’m going and nobody’d better get in my way.
The eternal challenge of her was the same. Except for an added one—the tumbled mass of black curls piled high on top of her head made a man want to take out the pins and run his hands through her hair.
Her eyes looked like black velvet—like her skirt.
Finally they rested on him. Just for an instant.
“Cait, honey, you know the Carmacks, don’t you?” Bobbie Ann said, and she and Lorena began the introductions all over again.
Cait spoke to everyone in the group except him. No one else noticed. Two of the young men in the group—he thought they were Carmack grandsons—monopolized her as soon as they could.
And then she was gone, drifting away with those boys after a pat on the arm from Bobbie Ann, who was shepherding the Carmack group toward the tables full of food.
Clint just stood there for a long minute, looking after her. Then, mercifully, Aunt Faylene came to claim him.
It was the novelty of it, he decided as he danced with Faylene. Simple novelty was the reason she was getting so much attention from everyone.
Why, he, himself couldn’t help but watch Cait in spite of a firm resolution not to give her so much as a glance more than the cool one she’d given him.
No one at the party had ever seen her in a dress before. Few of them, if any, had ever seen her at a social function.
It was the men, as always, who were most fascinated.
Those two young Carmack kids were sticking with her, but several others had joined them, vying for her attention to their jokes and stories. Clint set his jaw and guided Faylene in the opposite direction.
“That Cait’s a knockout, isn’t she?” his aunt said.
Faylene was nearly as good as Bobbie Ann in reading a man’s mind in a New York minute.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Half the men here can’t see anything but her and the other half are the old codgers with failing eyesight.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
His lack of response didn’t discourage her one bit.
“She’s exotic, that’s one reason,” she said, “besides being so drop-dead striking in every way. You know what I think makes her so interesting?”
That brought his gaze straight to her sharp blue one, so like his mother’s. Faylene indulged herself in one gleam of triumph before she answered the question in his look.
“She’s different from other women because she gives no quarter.”
He looked at her.
“Like the old Texas Rangers?”
“Exactly.”
“She’s from Chicago, Faylie.”
She ignored his little sally.
“Everything about Cait proclaims it,” she said seriously. “The look in her eye, the way she walks, the way she keeps her head in her business all the time. No man can resist a challenge like that.”
“Hmpf.”
Faylene went right on.
“A man gets one chance with Cait,” she said. “One.”
A strange, sharp feeling, like a warning, pierced him.
“One’s enough when he gets the rough side of her tongue.”
“Cait’s a direct-talking woman,” she said. “Y’all are just used to us Texas women sugarcoating everything for you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “You and Bobbie Ann are the champion sugarcoaters of all time. Steel magnolias is more like it.”
“Well, we all have our own styles,” his diminutive aunt said sweetly as she looked up at him with a beatific smile. “I, for one, admire a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. Cait’s bound to be a world-class horsewoman and she will be.”
“What’ve you heard about that?”
Maybe Bobbie Ann had talked to her sister about Cait’s silly riding school. Maybe he could get some ammunition here to stop it.
But no. Faylene had her own ideas about what was important information.
“You can see she’s Black Irish,” she said in a reproving tone. “Same as your great-grandpa Murphy—except his eyes were blue. But his hair was midnight-black, just like Cait’s.”
“So, Jackson must look like him,” Clint said, hoping to get her off the subject of Cait.
At least until this endless waltz could be over. Didn’t Delia’s arms ever get tired of that fiddle?
“You look like your great-grandpa, too,” Faylene said. “Tall and black-haired and handsome as can be. Your eyes are different, though—gray as mist instead of blue.” She smiled as if he needed comfort. “That’s why I used Jackson for an example instead of you.”