Free Calder Storm by Janet Dailey Page B

later.”
    â€œI have a feeling a certain blue-eyed brunette might be the reason.” When Jessy looked at him in surprise, Laredo added, “He saw her last night at the street dance, and I suspect he had breakfast with her this morning.”
    The significance of that wasn’t lost on Jessy. Having grown up in a man’s world, working cattle side by side with men her entire life, she had few romantic illusions about them. In her experience, rare was the man who cared to see the same woman in the morning that he’d been with the night before. Her own son was no different. Obviously, this woman was.
    â€œWho is she? What’s her name?” She was immediately curious.
    With a shake of his head, Laredo signaled his ignorance. “That’s something you’ll have to ask Trey.”
    Common sense overruled her maternal curiosity, and she said, “If it’s serious, I’ll find out soon enough. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter who she is.”
    Laredo couldn’t argue with that logic. And since Jessy hadn’t asked his opinion, he kept it to himself.

Chapter Five
    T he breeze channeled itself through the alleyway behind the chutes, kicking up little eddies of dust and swirling them along it. Trey took little notice of that as he dawdled at the entrance, one shoulder propped negligently against a post. The whole of his attention was focused on Sloan, some twenty feet away.
    Again she was wearing that bulky vest, its many pockets bulging with assorted rolls of film, a light meter, and camera attachments. To anyone passing by, it appeared that she was chatting with one of the save men, still in his clown makeup, and every now and then idly snapping a picture of him.
    But Trey had been watching her all afternoon, long enough to realize there was nothing idle or casual about anything she did. Even now, while she was engaging in idle chitchat to keep her subject relaxed, she kept constant track of the sun’s angle and adjusted her position to compensate for any change in it.
    She was all business, to the exclusion of everything else, including Trey. And it had been that way ever since he’d arrived at the rodeo grounds. After scouring the arena fence and chutes, he had finally located her in the rear area, busy taking pictures of a pen of bucking horses.
    His greeting had barely gained him a glance before she was once again studying the scene through the camera’s viewfinder. “Sorry. This light isn’t going to last,” she had told him in a distracted murmur.
    Personally, Trey hadn’t seen anything particularly unusual about the light or the pen of horses, but he had waited until she finished. Yet, almost the moment she moved away from the pen, her eyes had begun a search for her next subject. They had quickly fastened on an injured cowboy being helped to the first-aid station. She had immediately set off in the same direction, talking and smiling at Trey, yet he had sensed that her mind was elsewhere.
    After the injured cowboy, she had focused on another cowboy, this one making a careful inspection of his saddle cinch. Then she had gravitated to the action in the arena.
    And Trey had followed—until he started feeling like a damned puppy dog, panting at her heels, waiting for her to remember he was there. Pride wouldn’t let him dog her any more, but he continued to keep her within sight.
    Logic told him that Sloan was here to do a job. Yet he found her single-minded devotion to it frustrating and irksome. There was little solace in remembering that Sloan had told him that photography was her passion. At the time Trey hadn’t thought she meant it literally. Now he was beginning to wonder.
    Watching her, his anger and impatience growing by the minute, Trey struggled to accept the notion that he was jealous of a camera. Yet it was true. The time she spent with it, the care she took of it, and the undivided energy she gave to it—he