Even the Nights are Better. Margot Dalton

hesitation he got briskly to his feet and hurried back to his car, opening the trunk and taking out a battered old plaid blanket that had served many strange purposes over the years. Without pausing to think further, he rolled the little broken body into the soft fabric, set it gently on the seat beside him and pulled through the gates of the Circle T and up the long curving entry road.

      Usually when Vernon Trent drove up this particular road, his heart was in his mouth and he had a hard time breathing normally, beset by all the crazy adolescent reactions that he never seemed to outgrow no matter how old he got. Today, though, wrung with concern for the pitiful little object on the seat beside him, Vernon wasn’t bothered quite as much by his own emotions.

      Still, when a slim woman came out of the barn at his approach and looked curiously over at his car, Vernon’s throat tightened and his heart leaped with excitement, then settled into the old dull ache that had been part of his life for decades now.

      “Hi, Carolyn,” he said casually, getting out of the car and approaching the woman. “Nice morning, isn’t it?”

      “It surely is,” the woman agreed, coming toward him with a smile. “’Specially after that rain last night, Vern. What’re you doing up and about so early?”

      “Just out for a drive, Caro. Scouting property for a client. You know me, I never stop working.”

      Vernon’s voice and manner were casual, but his heart was singing, on fire with love for the woman who stood smiling in front of him.

      Carolyn Randolph Townsend was almost exactly his own age, just a week younger, in fact, and Vernon Trent couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t loved her. Maybe in the years before grade school when he’d only seen her at birthday parties and community picnics… maybe he hadn’t loved her then. He couldn’t remember. But certainly by the time they were both in first grade he had selected Carolyn Randolph as the woman of his dreams, and in the forty years since he’d never really wavered from that choice.

      Carolyn Randolph Townsend, at forty-five, had a figure to put most younger women to shame. Her tall curving body was firm and beautiful and full of promise, even in the old jeans and denim shirt that she wore this morning with her riding boots. Her wide blue-green eyes were vivid, sparkling warmly in her tanned oval face, and her hair, pulled back casually and tied at the nape of her neck with a blue bandanna, was almost the same rich dark gold it had always been. Still, Vernon’s keen loving eyes noticed a few scattered streaks of gray that he’d never seen there before, glistening softly in the early-morning light.

      Poor girl, he thought, gazing at those silvery strands, thinking about all this woman had suffered in the past few years. My poor girl….

      He fought the familiar desire to take her in his arms, to hold her and protect her and shield her from pain.

      Get a grip, fella, he ordered himself sternly. It’s not you she wants to comfort her, and it never has been….

      Maybe things would have been different if he’d had more courage when they were young, if he’d ever told her all the things he was feeling. But she and her older sister, Pauline, had been like princesses, growing up out here on this big sprawling ranch that was one the finest places in the area, second only to the McKinneys’ Double C. He, on the other hand, was just young Vernon Trent, the druggist’s son, living with his parents through most of his boyhood in a little apartment above the drugstore in Crystal Creek.

      And in later years, just when all that ceased to matter quite as much and he was ready to open his heart to her, Vernon was drafted. He left Crystal Creek before he was twenty, and came back when he was twenty-three. By that time, everything had changed in the Randolph family. Pauline, Carolyn’s sister, and J. T. McKinney had a little girl to go along with their two boys. The Randolph girls’ charming dissolute father, Steven, had run off somewhere and dropped out of sight, leaving his wife, Deborah, to run the ranch with the help of Frank Townsend, her young foreman. Pauline Randolph McKinney had a little girl to go with her two young sons. And Carolyn had been married for more than three years to Frank Townsend and was a mother herself.

      “Vern? Is something the matter?”

      Vernon pulled himself back to reality with a visible effort, banishing all those painful twenty-year-old memories and turning with an easy smile to the woman in front of him, who was now frowning anxiously.

      “Not with me, Caro,” he said. “I’m on top of the world. But I’ve got somebody in my car who isn’t, I’m afraid.”

      He opened the passenger door of his car and pointed to the small motionless bundle on the seat.

      “I found him out on the road a few minutes ago,” he said. “Just past your gates. Looks like he…”

      But Carolyn was already leaning into the car, turning back the blanket with gentle hands and gazing in horror at the pitiful little dog curled within the folds.

      Vernon watched as her expressive features registered a whole series of impressions—shock, compassion, tenderness, pain and finally outrage. “God, Vern, this makes me so mad!” Carolyn said, straightening and turning to her old friend, her eyes glittering in the early light.

      “What does, Caro?” he asked gently.

      “This,” she said, waving her hand at the dog and then reaching down to caress one of its ears. “It’s happening more and more these days. Those damn town people, Vern, they just never give a thought to what they do. This little dog is certainly no ranch dog. He belongs to somebody from the city, somebody who’s moving away or doesn’t want to be bothered with him anymore, so they drive forty miles out into the country and dump him off, figuring he’ll just find a happy home at some ranch.”

      She paused for breath, her chest heaving, her delicate features pink with anger. Vernon was silent, watching her.

      “And,” Carolyn went on in a lower tone, touching the little dog’s head again, “it’s just so brutal, Vern. What chance does a little fella like this have out in open country that he doesn’t know a thing about? People who treat animals this way should be shot. They really should.”

      Vernon grinned. “Well, Caro, I can’t say I disagree. But it might take a few months to get legislation like that passed, even in Texas.”

      “Even in Texas,” Carolyn agreed, swallowing her outrage and trying to smile back. “Lift him out, Vern, would you? Be real careful,” she added. “Just carry him into the barn here, and we’ll make him a little nest of straw in one of the mangers.”

      “Look, Carolyn,” Vernon began awkwardly, “I didn’t mean for you to have to do all this. I mean, I don’t want to make a lot of work and trouble for you. It’s just that I thought the little guy needed some help and you were closest….”

      “Be quiet, Vern,” Carolyn said, laying a gentle hand on his cheek and giving him a smile that made his heart stop, then begin thudding like mad. “Just do as you’re told, okay? Bring the little guy in here.”

      Vernon obeyed silently, carrying the dog into the barn and settling it in the upper portion of one of the mangers, a shallow wooden box designed for oats and other grains into which Carolyn was busily arranging a bedding of soft dried alfalfa.

      “This should be nice and cozy for him,” she said, leaning in to study the small dog, examining his injuries with competent tanned hands while the animal shivered beneath her touch.

      “Do you still have that toy car phone of yours?” she asked over her shoulder without turning around.

      “It’s not a toy,” Vernon said with dignity. “It’s a completely viable working tool, Caro. An absolute necessity in the modern business world.”

      “Like hell,” his old friend said cheerfully. “It’s just a toy, Vern, and you know it. I can never get over the way you men love your toys. But I’ll allow that it could be handy at times. Call Manny’s office for me, would you, and see if he could drop by and take a look at this little fella?”

      “Oh, Caro,”