stopped hoping— I’ll give him that.”
“Dad knows I hate to write letters,” she retorted defensively. But Jess had made his mark, all the same— Libby felt real pain, picturing her father flipping eagerly through the mail and trying to hide his disappointment when there was nothing from his only daughter.
“Funny—that’s not what Stace tells me.”
Libby bridled at this remark, but she kept her composure. Jess was trying to trap her into making some foolish statement about his older brother, no doubt, one that he could twist out of shape and hold over her head. She raised her chin and choked back the indignant diatribe aching in her throat.
The mirrored sunglasses glinted in the sun as Jess turned to look at her. His powerful shoulders were taut beneath the blue cotton fabric of his workshirt, and his jawline was formidably hard.
“Leave Cathy and Stace alone, Libby,” he warned with blunt savagery. “They’ve had a lot of problems lately, and if you do anything to make the situation worse, I’ll see that you regret it. Do I make myself clear?”
Libby would have done almost anything to escape his scrutiny just then, short of thrusting open the door of that small four-passenger Cessna and jumping out, but her choices were undeniably limited. Trembling just a little, she turned away and fixed her attention on the ground again.
Dear heaven, did Jess really think that she would interfere in Cathy’s marriage—or any other, for that matter? Cathy was her cousin—they’d been raised like sisters!
With a sigh, Libby faced the fact that there was every chance that Jess and a lot of other people would believe she had been involved with Stacey Barlowe. There had, after all, been that exchange of correspondence, and Stace had even visited her a few times, in the thick of her traumatic divorce, though in actuality he had been in the city on business.
“Libby?” prodded Jess sharply, when the silence grew too long to suit him.
“I’m not planning to vamp your brother!” she snapped. “Could we just drop this, please?”
To her relief and surprise, Jess turned his concentration on piloting the plane. His suntanned jaw worked with suppressed annoyance, but he didn’t speak again.
The timbered land below began to give way to occasional patches of prairie—cattle country. Soon they would be landing on the small airstrip serving the prosperous 150,000-acre Circle Bar B, owned by Jess’s father and overseen, for the most part, by Libby’s.
Libby had grown up on the Circle Bar B, just as Jess had, and her mother, like his, was buried there. Even though she couldn’t call the ranch home in the legal sense of the word, it was still home to her, and she had every right to go there—especially now, when she needed its beauty and peace and practical routines so desperately.
The airplane began to descend, jolting Libby out of her reflective state. Beside her, Jess guided the craft skillfully toward the paved landing strip stretched out before them.
The landing gear came down with a sharp snap, and Libby drew in her breath in preparation. The wheels of the plane screeched and grabbed as they made contact with the asphalt, and then the Cessna was rolling smoothly along the ground.
When it came to a full stop, Libby wrenched at her seat belt, anxious to put as much distance as possible between herself and Jess Barlowe. But his hand closed over her left wrist in a steel-hard grasp. “Remember, Lib—these people aren’t the sophisticated if-it-feels-good-do-it types you’re used to. No games.”
Games. Games? Hot color surged into Libby’s face and pounded there in rhythm with the furious beat of her heart. “Let go of me, you bastard!” she breathed.
If anything, Jess’s grip tightened. “I’ll be watching you,” he warned, and then he flung Libby’s wrist from his hand and turned away to push open the door on his side and leap nimbly to the ground.
Libby was still tugging impotently at the handle on her own door when her father strode over, climbed deftly onto the wing and opened it for her. She felt such a surge of love and relief at the sight of him that she cried out softly and flung herself into his arms, nearly sending both of them tumbling to the hard ground.
Ken Kincaid hadn’t changed in the years since Libby had seen him last—he was still the same handsome, rangy cowboy that she remembered so well, though his hair, while as thick as ever, was iron-gray now, and the limp he’d acquired in a long-ago rodeo accident was more pronounced.
Once they were clear of the plane, he held his daughter at arm’s length, laughed gruffly, and then pulled her close again. Over his shoulder she saw Jess drag her suitcases and portable drawing board out of the Cessna’s luggage compartment and fling them unceremoniously into the back of a mud-speckled truck.
Nothing if not perceptive, Ken Kincaid turned slightly, assessed Senator Cleave Barlowe’s second son, and grinned. There was mischief in his bright blue eyes when he faced Libby again. “Rough trip?”
Libby’s throat tightened unaccountably, and she wished she could explain how rough. She was still stung by Jess’s insulting opinion of her morality, but how could she tell her father that? “You know that it’s always rough going where Jess and I are concerned,” she said.
Her father’s brows lifted speculatively as Jess got behind the wheel of the truck and sped away without so much as a curt nod or a halfhearted so-long. “You two’d better watch out,” he mused. “If you ever stop butting heads, you might find out you like each other.”
“Now, that,” replied Libby with dispatch, “is a horrid thought if I’ve ever heard one. Tell me, Dad—how have you been?”
He draped one wiry arm over her shoulders and guided her in the direction of a late-model pickup truck. The door on the driver’s side was emblazoned with the words CIRCLE BAR B RANCH, and Yosemite Sam glared from both the mud flaps shielding the rear tires. “Never mind how I’ve been, dumplin’. How’ve you been?”
Libby felt some of the tension drain from her as her father opened the door on the passenger side of the truck and helped her inside. She longed to shed her expensive tailored linen suit for jeans and a T-shirt, and—oh, heaven—her sneakers would be a welcome change from the high heels she was wearing. “I’ll be okay,” she said in tones that were a bit too energetically cheerful.
Ken climbed behind the wheel and tossed one searching, worried look in his daughter’s direction. “Cathy’s waiting over at the house, to help you settle in and all that. I was hoping we could talk….”
Libby reached out and patted her father’s work-worn hand, resting now on the gearshift knob. “We can talk tonight. Anyway, we’ve got lots of time.”
Ken started the truck’s powerful engine, but his wise blue eyes had not strayed from his daughter’s face. “You’ll stay here awhile, then?” he asked hopefully.
Libby nodded, but she suddenly found that she had to look away. “As long as you’ll let me, Dad.”
The truck was moving now, jolting and rattling over the rough ranch roads with a pleasantly familiar vigor. “I expected you before this,” he said. “Lib…”
She turned an imploring look on him. “Later, Dad—okay? Could we please talk about the heavy stuff later?”
Ken swept off his old cowboy hat and ran a practiced arm across his forehead. “Later it is, dumplin’.” Graciously he changed the subject. “Been reading your comic strip in the funny papers, and it seems like every kid in town’s wearing one of those T-shirts you designed.”
Libby smiled; her career as a syndicated cartoonist was certainly safe conversational ground. And it had all started right here, on this ranch, when she’d sent away the coupon printed on a matchbook and begun taking art lessons by mail. After that, she’d won a scholarship to a prestigious college, graduated, and made her mark, not in portraits or commercial design, as some of her friends had, but in cartooning. Her character, Liberated