Radclyffe - Homestead

“Sure there were. I wasn’t in hiding, just pretending I was,” Clay said bitterly. “Easy enough to read about the Sutter heir if anybody really wanted to look, and I guess maybe he did.”

“What did he do?” Tess said, ice freezing around her heart.

Clay looked directly into Tess’s eyes. Hers were dark as the storm sky outside. “He contacted my father and threatened to sell a story to the tabloids about us. He claimed I seduced you, took advantage of you.”

The air punched from Tess’s lungs and for a second she couldn’t breathe. “What? How could he—that’s ridiculous!”

“You were right about the newspaper articles about me and my family—my father is a very powerful man with a lot of enemies. We make good gossip, and the tabloids love stories about sexual indiscretions.”

“But I would’ve denied it, of course. I would’ve told everyone—” She stopped, stared at Clay. “I would have told everyone I was with you because I loved you.”

“That wouldn’t have changed anything. If Ray had gone through with it and the story got out, the press would have had a field day, my father would have set his lawyers on both of you and torn you to shreds,” Clay said softly. “But not before everyone in this county would have heard from my father’s spin doctors how you seduced me and your father tried to blackmail mine. You would have been front-page news, Tess. Your life would have been the topic of gossip in the diner and the Grange and every other place, forever.”

“So you decided the best thing for me was for you to disappear? To keep me in the dark about Ray? Your silence let me go on trusting him, and look what he did—he went right on stealing my life.” Hands trembling, Tess ordered her shaking limbs not to sway. “Damn it, Clay, why didn’t you trust me? Weren’t we worth believing in?”

Clay clasped her shoulder. “I know it looks that way, Tess, but—”

“I’ll tell you how it looks.” Tess jerked away. “It looks as if you took the easy way out. The way that wouldn’t embarrass your father or your family name with a scandal. I suppose I even understand that.”

“That’s not true. I thought I was doing the right thing for you.”

“Maybe I didn’t want you to decide that, Clay, but you never asked. You were right when you said it was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter now. It’s over. It’s been over for a long time, I just didn’t know it.” Tess walked to the bedroom door, questioning herself and everything she’d ever known. Ray had manipulated her life for years and she’d never known. She would never let herself be that vulnerable again. She looked back at Clay, afraid she’d made a huge mistake. Clay touched the heart of her so easily and so deeply she couldn’t think rationally about anything. “Now you’re back, and I’ve got another decision to make. At least this time, I’ll be responsible for what happens to me.”

“Can we at least—”

“I don’t know.” Tess laughed humorlessly. “The only thing I know for sure is I can’t decide anything with you in my bed.”

Clay nodded. “I’ll clear out.”

Tess’s vision swam with confusion and regret, unable to trust anything she felt. Only the pain was real. “Good-bye, Clay.”

Tess stepped out into a morning as dark as night. As she left the porch, the rain started, slanting sheets of needle-sharp pellets, ominously cold. She squinted into the murky haze. Not rain, hail.

“Oh Lord,” she muttered, dashing to her truck. A hailstorm could strip the shoots from the cornstalks, shear the hay off at the ground, and strip fledgling leaves from the soybean plants. A storm like this could take all the crops with it. Tearing down the drive, she bumped off the gravel surface and onto the dirt tractor path skirting the largest of her fields. Straight ahead, the square windows in the cow barn glowed like unblinking yellow eyes in a curtain of black. She pulled up as close to the door as she could and jumped out. Tomas was inside, seeing to the morning milking. The bulk of the herd was under cover, leaving only the heifers, who wouldn’t give milk until they’d calved, and the dry cows out in the pastures. She rotated the milk cows over her fourteen pastures every twelve hours, but the non-milkers were scattered in half a dozen different pastures.

“Is Jimmy here?” Tess called. “Looks like we’re going to get worse weather before this ends, and we need to bring the rest in.”

“He just went out,” Tomas said, adroitly removing the suction tubes from one cow and moving the milking machine to the next cow in line. He washed down the udders of the cow he’d just finished milking, swabbed the next one, and set up the suction lines.

“I’ll go help him,” Tess said. Tomas didn’t need her help—he could do the whole barn almost as fast as the two of them together.

“Why don’t you let me do it, Tess. No sense you getting soaked out there.”

“That’s all right. I need to check on the heifers anyhow.” Tess grabbed a rain slicker from a hook next to the door and a feed bucket from a nearby shelf. Right about now a little ugly weather suited her mood just fine. Maybe the icy rain would cool her off enough that she could think straight. “You take care of this. I’ll be back after I give Jimmy a hand.”

“All right, but watch for trees. After all this drought, the roots are going to be loose. More than a few will be coming down.”

“I will. Thanks.”

She ventured out into the storm, and the ferocity of it took her breath away. The wind howled, and bullets of hail the size of marbles pummeled her back and shoulders. She tied the slicker hood tightly under her chin and raced toward the pasture where the dry cows had been left to forage. As she came closer to the big metal pasture fence, she caught flashes of red and finally made out Jimmy, bending into the wind to keep his footing on the slick, muddy ground, coming from the other direction. What had been a dry gulch the day before was now a slippery slope.

“I’ll get the gate,” she yelled, cupping her hands around her mouth when she was close enough to be heard. “Let’s get them in the small barn.”

Looking white-faced and ghostly in the unnatural gloom, Jimmy shouted, “The storm’s got them all riled up. I’m afraid they’ll scatter if we let them out of here.”

“Chance we’ll have to take.” Tess released the chain on the gate. “Hopefully they’d rather be dry and safe than running around out here in this mess.”

Tess opened the gate, pulled it wide, and swung the feed bucket in a big arc, hoping to catch the attention of the closest cows. When they focused on the familiar object, she started leading them to the barn while Jimmy herded the wanderers back into line. The jostling animals, agitated and frightened, ambled past her in an uneasy clump. The barn meant food, water, and warmth, and fortunately, that was enough to keep them all moving steadily toward safety.

Inside the L extension off the main milking barn, two long rows of open stalls stretched the length of the building. Tess and Jimmy tied the cows up to the big rings mounted on the walls, forked straw for bedding, and shoveled feed into buckets. As they worked, the uneven drumbeat of hail on the roof continued.

“If the rain keeps up like this,” Tess said, “it’s going to be more damaging than the heat.”

“Sure hope not,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got enough trouble to worry about with the oil people. Don’t need more weather problems too.”

The vehemence in his tone was surprising, but probably he was echoing the sentiment of a lot of the locals. Before long, Clay and NorthAm would be getting blamed for everything that went awry in the whole county. She squelched her immediate desire to defend Clay.

“Hopefully this will let up soon,” Tess said. Be careful what you wish for. That seemed to be the message of the day, possibly for her whole life. She had wished for a love of her own, a romance to last a lifetime, and when she’d met Clay, she’d thought she had it. She’d spun visions of the future for the two of them that included everything she’d ever wanted—the farm, the challenge of going organic, a life of her making, all wrapped inside an envelope of love and passion. And now she was faced with the reality that her stepfather, a man she’d never deeply loved but had depended upon and trusted as a parent, had used that dream and her very real love for Clay to manipulate her life. And continued to betray her long afterward.

Tess cut the baling twine on the last bundle of straw and slid her utility knife back into the pocket of her jeans. She tossed handfuls of straw into the last stall, thinking about Ray and what he’d done.

Why? What had he really gained by keeping her and Clay apart? He got her to come home where she provided free labor, but she would have done that anyhow if he’d told her he couldn’t run the farm without her. She would have come home—she would have sacrificed her plans to go to college for however long it took to get the farm on solid footing, but he hadn’t said that. He hadn’t told her much of anything. So why—

Tess shivered in her rain-soaked shirt and pants. She was cold, but the chill that overtook her had nothing to do with the weather. What had Clay said? That everyone in the county would’ve heard that she had seduced Clay and her father had blackmailed Clay’s. No, that just couldn’t be true, could it? Ray wouldn’t have done that.

“Can you handle things, Jimmy?”

“Sure, Tess.” Jimmy straightened, his face eager. “Anything you need. Anytime.”

“Thanks for getting over here early today—you were a big help.” Tess hurried to the far corner of the barn where she usually had good luck getting a cell signal and pulled out Clay’s card—the one she’d picked up at the Grange and tucked into her wallet—and punched in Clay’s number. The call went right to voice mail. She disconnected the call without leaving a message. This wasn’t something she wanted to discuss on the phone.