The Rancher's Request. Stella Bagwell

Gracia exclaimed as she jumped to her feet and stared at him in horrified embarrassment. “What are you doing? Juliet is my friend and—”

      Stepping forward, he placed a hand on his daughter’s slender shoulder. “Juliet is not your friend. You don’t even know the woman.”

      The girl shot Juliet a wounded look, then stabbed her father with a tearful gaze.

      “Juliet is my friend,” she practically shouted. “And you’re being mean and bossy! You never want me to have any friends. Never!”

      Jerking away from her father, the girl took off in an awkward run toward the house. It was all Juliet could do not to race after her. The child needed comfort and understanding; two things that she obviously wasn’t going to get from this man. But it wasn’t her place to give his child solace and he’d be the first one to point that out.

      “Feel good now?” Juliet quipped. “Now that you’ve gotten her away from the evil reporter?”

      Matt jerked his gaze off his daughter’s retreating back to scowl at Juliet. “Damn it! See what you’ve done! It’s time for pictures and now her face is going to be all red. You’re a real piece of work,” he gritted.

      Forgetting what happened the last time she got close to him, Juliet stepped right in his face. “Your daughter and I were doing just fine until you butted in. But you were so dead set on insulting me that you didn’t care whether you hurt and embarrassed her. God, what a cretin you are!”

      “If I knew what that meant—”

      “It means you have the mental equivalency of an idiot!” she interrupted hotly. “If you haven’t looked lately, your daughter is hurting. You ought to focus a little of your time on her instead of worrying about your family’s past skeletons!”

      Once she’d blasted the words at him, she turned on her heel and began to march in the direction of her car.

      Behind her, Matt yelled, “My family doesn’t have any skeletons!”

      Juliet paused long enough to glance back at him. “Everyone has skeletons, Mr. Sanchez. Even you.”

      Chapter Two

      “I tried, Mr. Gilbert, but Mr. Sanchez practically booted me off the ranch. He made it clear in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t want any such stories in the paper about his family. And frankly, sir, I think you’d have a lawsuit on your hands if you did print anything containing the legend of the buried money or the old man’s murder.” Juliet tried to reason with her boss.

      It was Monday morning, two days after the Sandbur wedding, and the editor of the Fannin Review was pacing around Juliet’s small office like a man possessed. He wasn’t happy about her failure to dig up personal information on the ranch’s old matriarch and the money she’d supposedly buried to keep from her husband. But then David Gilbert was never happy. Heading toward his sixtieth birthday, he was a frail man with thinning brown hair and a perpetual frown. He’d taken over the reins of the weekly newspaper from his father, who’d died unexpectedly only a few short weeks after he’d retired. From what Juliet could see, he was a man who privately wished he were anywhere but at his job.

      “Let him try. Just because that family is probably the richest in Goliad County doesn’t mean he can keep the press from public information.”

      Dear Lord, the man sounded as if he was running some newspaper on Capitol Hill in Washington, instead of a weekly review of small town Texas life, Juliet thought.

      Sitting comfortably behind her desk, she tried not to groan out loud with disbelief. “I’m not sure his family’s money is public information, Mr. Gilbert. They just might take you to task.”

      The older man stopped to toss a challenging look her way. “Just let them. I’ll be ready. In the meantime, I want you to see what else you can find about the matter. Dig through our old archives, I’m sure there will be something on Nate Ketchum’s death. Look through some of the neighboring papers, too. The murder had to have been big news back then.”

      Any other time, Juliet would have been excited to be working on such a story: love, marriage, money, murder and one of the richest families in the area. Readers loved such things. But in spite of her squaring off with Matt, she’d come away from Raine Ketchum’s marriage with the impression that the Saddler and Sanchez families, co-owners of the Sandbur, were nice, genuine people. She didn’t want to hurt or anger any of them.

      “I’m not sure—”

      “You’d better be sure, Madsen. Our distribution numbers have been down this last quarter. We need something to grab people’s attention. So I’m giving you two weeks to get something together on this.”

      “Two weeks!”

      Her outcry had him walking over to her desk to stare menacingly down at her. “You don’t sound too eager about this, Madsen.”

      Eager? The whole idea was making her ill. Maybe if this puny little man had to face Matt Sanchez head-on, then he wouldn’t be so quick to bark. “Well, I’m just not sure that it’s the right thing to do.”

      His eyebrows shot up as though he couldn’t believe she was defying him. “Look, Madsen, you’re frankly overqualified for this job. I don’t need to pay you a journalist’s salary when I could get by with anyone with enough education to structure good sentences. If you don’t want to earn your paycheck, then you’d better head on back to the Dallas Morning News.”

      And face Michael again? Never, Juliet thought. The man had been a cheating lout. He’d broken her heart. She couldn’t work in the same room with him. And she couldn’t go back and let him tempt her back into his arms. He was no good. Just like the boyfriend she’d had before him. The two guys were a big reason she’d taken this small-time job in an out-of-the-way little town. She wanted to forget all her horrid affairs of the heart.

      Glancing away so that he couldn’t guess that her teeth were grinding together, she said, “I can do the job, Mr. Gilbert. I’ll have something on your desk in two weeks.”

      “Good. I’ll be watching for it.”

      The editor abruptly left the room and once he was out of sight, Juliet got up and firmly shut the door behind him. Damn man, she silently cursed, he knew as much about running a newspaper as she did about changing the oil in her car, which was practically nothing. The only reason he owned the paper was because he’d been an only child and his father had no one else to leave the business to. Too bad the old man hadn’t sold it, Juliet thought grimly.

      Well, it wasn’t as if she couldn’t pick up her belongings and move to some other town and some other job, she told herself. But she didn’t want to. These past few months she’d been making friends and settling into a neat little house that she loved. The people were friendly—except for Matt Sanchez—and she liked the slower movement of the small town after rushing around in Dallas all her life. Besides, there was no one who was giving her a reason to live elsewhere. Her father was still in Dallas, but she got more warmth from a stranger on the street than she did from him. Her mother’s relatives were scattered throughout the northern states, but she rarely saw or spoke to them. No, she was more or less on her own and she had a right to live where she wanted. And damn Gilbert for threatening her.

      Picking up her notes on the Sandbur wedding, Juliet tried to push the whole male race from her mind as she went to work at her computer.

      Three hours later, when she broke for lunch, the social piece was finished, all but a few final touches, and she left the building to walk to her favorite restaurant.

      The Cattle Call Café was only three blocks away. The red brick building had been built back in the eighteen sixties and was located on the main drag. On the days the livestock auction was being held on the outskirts of town, the café was always jammed with ranchers who’d come to buy or sell cattle and horses. Today the long room, filled with round wooden tables, was only moderately busy with regular townsfolk.