by Karen Rock
“That’s selfish.”
“It’s honest.” A lock of Jewel’s hair swung forward with the force of her answer, and he couldn’t resist slipping it back behind her ear, his fingers lingering on the silky tress. “You have to chase your dreams.” Her voice trembled slightly.
If only it were that easy. He lost himself in Jewel’s eyes for a moment, glimpsing another path, other dreams, then yanked his thoughts to a halt. If he kept going, who knew where he or Jewel would end up? He respected her too much to lead her astray. “Okay. My turn.”
“Huh?”
“To ask you anything.”
She sucked on her bottom lip. “I don’t know about anything.”
“That was the deal.”
She drew in a deep breath, and he held his. “Okay. Fine.”
“Back when we were ten, at the 4-H exhibit, why were you crying?”
A log popped in the silence while bullfrogs in the brush called to one another. Jewel didn’t speak, but a tortured, pinched look crept across her face.
“It had something to do with your father,” Heath prompted.
She turned away and spoke to the mountainside. “He didn’t congratulate me on my blue ribbon.”
“Maybe he was busy. Didn’t notice.”
“That’s the point. He never noticed me.” Her hair slid over her cheeks as she angled her head his way again and large eyes were as dark as the sky...darker as they lacked the glimmering stars. “All he cared about were his sons. No matter how well I rode or roped or shot, he never saw me. Growing up, I kept thinking if I could be as big and tall and tough as them, then my father would love me like he did my brothers...but no matter how hard I tried, I was like the shrub in the forest—he couldn’t see me for the trees.”
A band tightened around Heath’s chest as understanding dawned. “So that’s why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you pretend you don’t care what others think.”
“I’m not pretending!”
“Yes, you are, because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be trying to prove you’re as good as or better than everyone all the time—to me, to your brothers, maybe even to a father who’s passed on...but what about living life as if you’ve got nothing to prove except to yourself?”
“I am.” Her half shout startled a pair of doves from some nearby brush. They winged to a nearby tree in a panicked flap.
“You’re not. Are you acting like you don’t care what others think because you’re independent? Or are you wanting to be independent because of what others made you believe about yourself?”
“I’m the only one I can depend on,” she said, speaking the words so quietly he wasn’t sure she’d said them at first.
“Why’s that?”
There was another long stretch of silence, and then she said, “I won’t be weak. My father hated weak people.”
“Depending on others isn’t a weakness.” He cupped her shoulders, then slid his hands down the length of her arms, stopping to twine his fingers in hers. “I wish you’d trust me—depend on me—more.”
She jerked back. “Why should I? You’re about to marry Kelsey.”
“Even though I haven’t settled things with Kelsey, you and I can still be friends.” “
Her eyes rounded, brightening slightly. “Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
“Either way—” she lay down and stared skyward “—I’ll never rely on anyone.”
“Because they’ll let you down like your father?”
She squeezed her eyes shut, and her chest stilled as if she held her breath.
“I’m sure he loved you.”
“The day he died, he asked to speak to each of his children.” Her voice was soft, almost inaudible.
“What did he say to you?”
“Nothing.” Tears seeped from beneath her lashes, and he ached, knowing how much those tears, her confessions, cost her.
“Were you too late?”
“No.” When she opened her glittering eyes, they swam with pain. “He never asked for me. Even then, I didn’t matter.”
“Jewel.” Heath’s heart turned over heavily for the forsaken daughter, the girl who’d fought and failed to win her father’s affection. He set down his guitar, stretched out beside her and pressed his forehead to hers.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She started to look away, but he placed his fingers on her cheeks, stopping her. “It matters. You felt rejected.”
“Don’t tell me how I felt.”
He lifted his hand and pushed her long hair away from her face so he could see her better. “Then tell me how you felt.”
“I felt unworthy. Unlovable!” she cried, and he gathered her close, pressing her cheek to his thudding heart.
“You’re anything but unlovable.” He moved his hand to her chin and gently raised her head to kiss her forehead. Never had he spoken truer words. They poured from his heart without filter. Like a tornado, Jewel uprooted his life and twisted his emotions, sending him in a disorienting spiral.
He was falling for Jewel. Did he love her?
“The only person who ever really loved me was Jesse.” Her body tensed up and a sad quietness overcame her, thick like fog.
He moved one hand to the back of her head, guiding her face to his chest, and wrapped his other around her hand. “He was the closest to you in age?”
“Justin was three minutes older than Jesse, but age didn’t have much to do with it. Jesse was like me...an outsider. He wasn’t much for cowboying, though, so Pa didn’t pay him much mind, either. He was my best friend.” Her voice caught, and he brushed the damp from her cheek. “After he died, I was lost. Once I heard you singing, my heart beat again.”
Heath’s arms tightened around Jewel. Her words struck him like the first press of a finger to a keyboard, sending a pulse, a vibration, through him.
“That’s why you shouldn’t give up singing.” She leaned her forehead against him for a moment and then looked up again. “You touch people’s lives...like mine.”
“I learned that young. Playing music with my mother kept her calm.” His heart tossed in his chest, caught in the storm of his emotions. “She had mental health and addiction issues. I was the only one who could distract her.”
“You were her favorite.”
“It wasn’t a good thing.” Heath’s cheek slid over the side of Jewel’s head as he inhaled the faint remnants of her shampoo. “My childhood was all about keeping the peace. Soothing her, catering to her.”
“No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
“You never learned it’s okay to put yourself first sometimes.”
“I did once. At Cole’s sixteenth birthday. He asked Ma to stay away because he was afraid she’d embarrass him in front of his friends. It set her off. I’d never seen her so bad. Crying, ranting, then she got quiet. Too quiet. She just lay down and looked up at the ceiling. She wouldn’t talk to me. Look at me.” He paused as the words, the memory, echoed in his mind. They bounced off his brain before falling down the hole into his heart to slowly leak into his gut, eating at him. “I should have stayed with her, but I really wanted to go to the party.”
“I don’t blame you.” Jewel pulled back and peered up at him. “You were a kid.”
“While I was having fun at the bonfire, she left her room and walked to the pool.” His throat felt as if it was closing off. “And drowned herself.”
Jewel’s hand lifted, and her fingers sifted through his hair. “That’s horrible.”
Not trusting himself to speak again, he nodded. His head swam, and dark spots clouded his vision. In the distance, a lone coyote yipped while the cattle rustled through the tall grass, seeking a resting spot.
“It was horrible of me,” he whispered, then leaned his cheek into
her palm, comforted, somehow, by the strength of her hands, the calluses that bore witness to a hard life, one tested like his. “I could have prevented it.”
“Maybe you could have stopped her that time...but she wanted to kill herself.” Jewel’s lashes fluttered shut briefly, then reopened. “If not that night, then another. You can’t blame yourself for someone else’s actions.”
“Putting myself first led to tragedy.” He exhaled deeply, rubbing a hand along his jaw.
“That was a fluke.”
“It was confirmation.” His voice cracked. “Always put others’ needs ahead of my own.”
“That’s crazy.” She thumped him hard in the chest, as if performing CPR. Was she trying to save his life? “You love music. If you only did it for your mother, you would have stopped playing long ago.”
“After her suicide, music was how I coped. It held me together when my family fell apart.” His eyes drifted from hers to stare into the gloom. “When I sing it sends every trouble and worry I have to the wind.”
“Which is why you can’t just give it up to please Kelsey or anyone else.” She turned her hand under his, so their palms touched, and their eyes shifted from their joined hands to slowly meeting each other in the dim light. “In the end, you only regret the chances you didn’t take. Someone wise told me to live my life as if I only had to prove it to myself.”
“Wise, huh?” One side of his mouth lifted as he considered the advice he’d given her.
“Very wise,” she said through a yawn.
In the silence, her body gradually relaxed against his, her breathing growing regular. In a moment, he’d let her go, but not yet. Not when it felt too good, too right, to keep her close.
He rested his chin atop her head, feeling as though he held the most precious thing in the world. A truth-speaking, tough-talking cowgirl with a heart as big as Mount Sopris. It shone right out of her like a spotlight.
Jewel.
He couldn’t deny the bond between them anymore. Unlike Kelsey, who’d always shut down his music ambitions, Jewel had taken a keen interest from the start. She stopped chattering when he played, listened closely, her eyes glistening, her tough outer shell gone. She was the first person in his life to see how much music really meant to him.
Should he consider her advice and travel to Nashville when things quieted down on the ranch? If he did, that’d mean postponing setting the wedding date and planning it as Kelsey expected, and delay starting the secure, lucrative job that’d also save his family’s ranch. It’d also mean leaving Jewel, a complicated woman he had no right to care about. If they got together, it’d throw everyone’s life in disarray, upsetting Kelsey, his family and her family.
The advice Jewel had thrown back in his face, to live his life for himself, returned to him. She had a point...
And possibly, his heart.
Did his life belong to him or was it a selfish thought destined to lead down another dark road?
You only regret the chances you didn’t take, Jewel had said.
Was Jewel a chance he’d regret not taking?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“SILENCE!” THUNDERED THE ARBITRATOR, Wilhelmina Gaynor, momentarily quieting the rising Loveland and Cade voices for the third time in twenty minutes.
Jewel lifted her hair from her neck in the humid conference room and shot Heath a quick look across the table. He shrugged his broad shoulders, as if to say this is pointless. They should be herding cattle to another water source this morning, not wasting time trying to budge each other on century-old positions. Their parents had demanded this last-ditch effort to settle the water access rights before next week’s trial, though, leaving everyone with no choice but to attend.
Pointless indeed.
They’d begun quarrelling from the moment they sat in rigid molded plastic chairs that didn’t fit Jewel’s body shape in any way. In fact, the divide only seemed to widen. She shifted to ease her stiff back.
“We must proceed in an orderly fashion,” decreed Mrs. Gaynor with a pompous air. She was eccentric-looking, with too-short bangs and frizzy gray hair that puffed over her ears. Yet she also had a stately, delicate face, and implacable gray eyes that could look right through you or pin you to a wall as she was doing. Her gaze swiveled between the Lovelands, clumped on one side of the table, and the Cades, on the other. “I believe James Cade was speaking last.”
James lifted his chin. “Thank you, Mrs. Gaynor. As I was saying, no proof exists that our ancestor’s brother, the judge who rescinded the Lovelands’ easement to the Crystal River, acted with corrupt or malicious intent.”
“Bank records show a ten-thousand-dollar deposit in his account a week after the trial,” drawled Maverick, who’d withdrawn from a major rodeo event to attend today.
“Could be for anything.” Jared tore the plastic lid off a creamer and dumped its contents into his coffee cup. “Besides, he was our relative. Why would we need to bribe him? Makes no sense.”
“Or it was a thank-you to him for giving our family payback since they blamed us for Cora’s Tear’s disappearance,” Sierra countered. “And Maggie Cade’s death.”
“Our family had good reason for those beliefs.” James leaned forward and flattened his palms on the table. The skin around his knuckles blanched. “Everett Loveland was found beside Maggie’s body. No one knew of their secret love or the baby on the way. Since my family assumed Maggie was happily betrothed to Clyde, and her brooch was gone, it seemed likely Everett, who’d left his railroad job without explanation, had come upon her and murdered her for Cora’s Tear.”
“What you believe is different from what you know, and what you know is different from what you can prove.” Travis straightened one of the stars on his county sheriff’s uniform collar. “Your ancestors strung up Everett Loveland even though he didn’t have the jewel on him. No questions. No trial. Vigilante justice at its worst. We ought to demand restitution for his cold-blooded murder, too.”
The noise in the room swelled again in a swift crescendo, all shouting a chorus of—
“Hotheaded Cades.”
“Stubborn Lovelands.”
The adjudicator pounded on the table. “Name-calling gets us nowhere. Katlynn Brennan and her team on her show Scandalous History proved Maggie buried Cora’s Tear on Loveland property and was murdered by her betrothed, Clyde Farthington. The unwarranted hanging of Everett Loveland is certainly worth our consideration.”
“Not to mention the Cades broke their family members out of jail before they could be tried for Everett’s killing.” Travis’s heavy boots stomped across the floor as he headed for a water cooler, grabbed a paper cup and filled it. “The pair became outlaws, harassing our ranch, vandalizing it for decades, and never faced punishment for their crimes.”
“Indeed.” Mrs. Gaynor eyed the Cades long and hard while Jewel mulled Travis’s points.
She’d always believed her family was wronged by the Lovelands. Seeing it from their perspective, though, shifted the balance of blame and challenged her loyalty. Their family had suffered as much as her own. While she wasn’t the make-peace-not-war type like Heath, the time had come to lay down their arms. The Lovelands weren’t their enemies, especially Heath.
Her heart stumbled as she pictured his fervent expression when he’d confessed he cared about her. Did he mean it romantically or in a more general way, like a stepbrother?
And how did this factor into his relationship with Kelsey? He’d sworn nothing was settled between them.
“Did these offenses enter into your restitution calculations?” Mrs. Gaynor asked the Lovelands. “Or should more damages be added?”
“Five million is already too much.” James’s foot began to tap a swift staccato on the floor. “It’s based on unreliable profit projections. And we don’t have that much fluid equity. We’d have to sell off our land.”
“Cora’s Tear belongs to Jewel!” Justin rose slightly in his seat, knuckles planted on the table. “It’s her to use and pass down to her daughter.”
“Jewel told me she’s never marrying.” Travis crumpled his empty paper cup, paced to the trash bin and chucked it inside.
She flushed as Heath’s deep blue eyes probed hers, the same eyes she’d woken to on the range. He’d been lying on his side, up on an elbow staring down at her, his chagrined smile when she’d caught him endearing.
She’d stare at him all day herself if he weren’t already bound to Kelsey. If he was bound to Kelsey...
Did she dare let go of her independence and become more vulnerable, show her softer side, to be with him?
“A lady has a right to change her mind,” Heath said, his gaze locked with hers.
“Who’s a lady?” snorted Jared, earning him a hard elbow to his side. He doubled over with an “oof” then gasped, “See!”
“Mess with the bull...” Jewel curled in all but her index and pinkie fingers to form horns, waved them at him, then shoved her hand below the table when she caught Heath’s mouth drop. Shoot. She no longer wanted to be just a rough-riding cowgirl, but a woman who could act like a lady, too. If only it weren’t so darn hard...
“Cora’s Tear would still be lost if Katie-Lynn and I hadn’t found it,” Cole asserted, using Katlynn’s original name before she’d changed it as part of her transformation from country mouse to Hollywood star. The sadness accompanying any mention of his ex tugged down the corners of his mouth. “We deserve a finders’ fee.”
“I can agree to that.” James nodded stiffly.
The arbitrator’s sudden smile revealed child-sized teeth. “What do you believe is a fair amount?”
James reached in his pocket, then tossed a dollar bill at Cole. “How’s that?”