Out of the Dark

by Justine Davis

“How? Don’t tell me you want the Flying Clown, too?”

  Lennox laughed. “That little place? Hardly. I had my eye on much bigger game. Much, much bigger, my dear.”

  Tory looked utterly perplexed now. But Cole felt a sudden sinking in his gut that had little to do with what they’d learned, and everything to do with what he was very much afraid was about to land on them.

  “Bigger? I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because you’re hopelessly naive and can’t see past those damned nags of yours.”

  “Tory,” Cole interrupted, “I think that’s enough. It’s over. Let’s get out of here.”

  Lennox looked at him with interest. “Well, well, cowboy. Are you guessing, or are you smarter than I gave you credit for?”

  “Let’s just say I know about that little trip you took three months ago.”

  Lennox’s gaze flicked to Tory. “And you haven’t...shared that information?”

  “There’s no point to this, Lennox.”

  “Oh, yes, there is. I’m not taking the fall for this alone.”

  “Fine. But not now.”

  “Protecting her? How gallant. But she’s going to find out, anyway.”

  Tory looked from Lennox to Cole and back. “What are you talking about?”

  “I suggest,” Lennox drawled, “that you ask your father.”

  Chapter 18

  “You didn’t have to come.”

  Cole gave her a sideways look. “Would you rather I hadn’t?”

  Tory turned her gaze back to the bank of buttons on the elevator-control panel. Her fingers tightened on the file folder she held. “I didn’t say that.”

  “It was me or Hobie.”

  “Concussion or not, Hobie would have killed him.”

  “What makes you think I won’t?” he asked wryly.

  “Because,” she retorted in the same tone when the doors slid open, “I may do it first.” She started out the doors, then turned back to look at him. She held up the folder. “Thank you for this.”

  He shrugged. “It didn’t take long, once they knew what to look for.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Besides, you already thanked me.”

  Yes, she had. Fervently. Physically. Last night. And she had done it knowing that if things went as planned today, it would be the last time.

  She couldn’t think about that, couldn’t deal with the idea of Cole walking out of her life, not now. The doors began to slide closed, and she reached out to stop them. She walked out of the elevator and turned right.

  “You sure you don’t want me to go in with you?”

  “Afraid I really will kill him?”

  “No. But I’m afraid you’ll want to, and that’s not a pleasant feeling.”

  “I just want him out of my life. Forever. And I need to face him alone.” She stopped walking. He came to a halt beside her. She looked at him. “But thank you.”

  He shrugged, as if it were nothing. And perhaps, to him, it was, she thought sadly. She started walking again. She was still feeling sticky. In five years she’d gotten used to the dry heat of California. The sweltering humidity of Houston’s summer made her feel like she was trying to breathe underwater.

  Yes, it had been years, but she remembered as if it were yesterday. The walls were still an elegantly muted gray, the carpet a matching gray trimmed with a pale mauve. A strip of dark-oak baseboard, trimmed with brass ran along every wall. And an elegant brass plate proclaimed this as Flynn Financial Associates.

  “Nice,” Cole muttered.

  “My father knows the value of the perfect facade.”

  Cole gave her another sideways look. “Speaking of facades, does all this—” he gestured at the perfectly appointed offices “—have anything to do with the way we’re dressed?”

  “Everything,” she said, not even caring that he’d seen through her decision to wear her most faded jeans and T-shirt, her work boots, and one of her old baseball caps with her hair pulled up through the back. She looked like she’d just walked off the ranch instead of an airplane. So did Cole, having obligingly followed her lead. He hadn’t shaved, and he’d worn his battered straw hat, pulled down low over his eyes. “I gave up playing my father’s game years ago.”

  She pushed open the double-glass doors of her father’s reception area.

  “Yes, may I help—Miss Flynn? Is that you?”

  “Don’t bother to announce me, Gladys. I’ll just go in.”

  “But—”

  Tory walked past the polished, normally poised woman who now wore an expression of amazement.

  “I wouldn’t try to stop her just now,” Cole advised the woman.

  Tory smothered a wry laugh as her father’s imperturbable secretary gaped at Cole. Dress clothes or tight jeans, the man had the impact of a racing train. She shoved open the doors marked Private with the inevitable brass plaque.

  The man behind the desk was talking on the phone, and leaning back in a large, expensive-looking chair that matched the tone of the rest of the office. Everything was rich, deep-toned and reeked of success. When the door slammed shut behind her, he spun the chair around in annoyance.

  “Gladys, I told—” He broke off, staring. “I’ll get back to you,” her father said into the phone, then stood up.

  He was still drop-dead attractive, the gray at his temples only accenting his looks. His face was chiseled and tanned, and still looked as if he should be charming millions on a movie screen. Instead, she thought grimly, he charmed thousands in person, into doing just about anything.

  “Victoria! What a surprise.” He looked like he meant it.

  “It shouldn’t be.”

  She saw the change come over him, saw the practiced facade slide into place, hiding his surprise at her sudden appearance with a veneer of charm.

  “Well, then.” Jack Flynn smiled that charming smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “It’s not a pleasure visit.”

  “Now, look, baby,” he said soothingly, “I know we said some things we didn’t mean when we spoke last, but—”

  “It’s over, Daddy.”

  “Why, Victoria, darlin’, what are you talking about?”

  “I know why you wanted me home so badly.”

  He managed to look hurt. “You’re my little girl. Of course I wanted you home, where you belong.”

  “You’ve never wanted anything that didn’t directly benefit you.”

  “Now, that’s no way to talk—”

  “If you’ll drop the act, Daddy, we’ll get this over a lot sooner.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “John Lennox.”

  For the first time, her father faltered. But he recovered quickly. “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t you? You don’t remember meeting him that day you came to the ranch to try and coerce me into coming home?”

  “Now, baby, I wasn’t coercing—”

  “And you don’t recall him flying here to Houston three months ago, to present his little plan that would help both of you?”

  For the first time in her life, she saw her father look nervous. And she knew Cole had been right that day, when he’d said that if they could only combine a couple of those motives, they’d have one strong enough.

  “Now, Tory,” he began, and then she knew how nervous he was. He never used that name.

  “He gets his insurance money, and what he thinks is a foot in the door here. In return for you bankrolling the murder of my horses, he promises...what?”

  “Baby, you know I would never—”

  “Could it have something to do with this?” She tossed the file folder down on his desk. “It’s a copy of mother’s will. Funny how I never knew what was in it.”

  Her father stared at the folder on the desk as if he thought she was bluffing. She had to give him credit; he took it smoothly.

  “I only wanted to spare you pain, baby. Besides, you got all her things.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I? Including her in
terest in this firm. Odd how I never knew about it.”

  “You were so upset when she died, baby. It went into a trust, anyway—”

  “Until I was of legal age,” she said flatly. “And you administered it, didn’t you? You and some lawyer you had in your pocket. So how is it that I never knew that I’ve had the right to vote with those shares since I was eighteen?”

  “It’s business, baby. I knew you weren’t interested—”

  “Maybe not. But don’t you think I would have been interested to know mother had left me enough that you can’t make a move without it?”

  “Your mother—”

  “It was really her business, wasn’t it? It was her father’s, he built it, and when he died he left it to her. Is that why you married her, Daddy? For the business? How long did it take you to charm her into putting you in charge? About as long as it took for you to put your name on it?”

  “You don’t understand, baby. I—”

  “I understand that she didn’t give you a controlling interest. She held enough back so you couldn’t do anything alone, even though she went along with you on everything. But then she left it to me.”

  “You have it all wrong, Victoria.”

  “Do I? Maybe you should know I had a long talk with John Lennox. You’re birds of a feather, aren’t you? He was looking at me like you must have looked at mother. What did he promise you? To deliver my real proxy? My signature on a permanent power of attorney for those shares? By romancing your naive little girl?”

  “This is—”

  “The truth, Daddy. For once. I know about the merger with Bowman and Carter. Afraid they’ll look too closely? Afraid they’ll find out what you’ve been up to all this time, voting shares you had no right to? Afraid I’d find out about those papers that I never signed? The ones you forged when I turned eighteen?”

  Flynn sat down abruptly.

  “Did you really think I’d come back? Even if you’d succeeded in putting us out of business, did you really think I’d come back and just be your little girl again, doing everything you told me? Maybe sign over my shares to you without thinking twice?”

  Her father’s expression was so openly calculating she wondered that she had ever been fooled by him. He looked like a little boy trying to judge exactly how much he could get away with. And in that moment, she knew Cole had also been right in the guess he’d made after he’d read all the information his staff had compiled in the past three days.

  “I’d say,” Cole had told her, “that in five years, he’s realized you’re not the girl who left him, and never will be again. That you aren’t ever coming back. So he had to try something else. Something he knew would get to you. So he hit you where he knew it would hurt the most. The horses.”

  Just thinking of Cole now, as she stood here facing her father, the difference between them was so clear to Tory she shook her head at her own blindness. Next to her father, Cole stood out like a thoroughbred beside a flashy show horse without a trace of heart.

  “So that was it,” Tory said. “You figured if Hobie and I got in enough financial trouble, I’d come to you for help. And you’d...what? Magnanimously offer to buy my shares? Or were you even going to be that honest? Maybe you’d just offer me a loan, only it wouldn’t be loan papers I’d be signing?”

  Something in her father’s eyes flickered, and she knew he’d even considered that, an outright fraud perpetrated on his only daughter. Pain flared within her, but not for herself. She’d been numb to her father’s maneuverings for a long time.

  “They were just horses, Daddy,” she said. “Just innocent, dumb animals. Not very important compared to all this.” She gestured at his opulent office. “I guess that makes it all right. The means to an end.”

  Maybe she wasn’t as immune as she thought, because her next words escaped against her will.

  “Why, Daddy? Why didn’t you just ask me to sign everything over to you?”

  “Ask?” he said, in astonished tones. “Nobody signs over a fortune like that just for the asking.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Daddy. Where you’ve always been wrong. I would have given it to you. I already have all I ever wanted.”

  The intercom on his desk squawked. “Mr. Flynn? There’s a Detective Munoz here to see you.”

  “Detective?”

  Tory took some small amount of satisfaction in the look on her father’s face.

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s very interested in the connection between you and one Al Patterson. And I think you’ll find some investigators from assorted insurance companies hot on his heels.”

  Flynn sank back in his chair looking thoroughly deflated. The door to the luxurious office swung open and three men stepped inside. When they started toward her father, Tory turned her back on the man at the desk and started walking away. Cole would be outside, she told herself. In seconds she would be with him, and he would hold her, at least for now, letting her lean on his strength. She needed it; she felt utterly drained.

  “Victoria!”

  She stopped.

  “It’s all a misunderstanding, you know. You’ll see. Everything will be fine. After all, no one really got hurt.”

  No one really got hurt.

  She thought of Hobie, still woozy from a blow that could easily have killed him. She thought of her own moments of terror, when she’d been certain the man she’d interrupted was going to kill her. She thought of Cole, fighting his own demons to try and keep her father from succeeding. Then she thought of John’s Prize. Firefly. Arthur. And even Mac.

  She kept on walking, never looking back.

  * * *

  “You’re going to be a wealthy young lady, with your share from the sale of the company,” Hobie said as he sipped at his morning coffee. They’d taken to having it outside on the porch, savoring the coolness before the summer heat set in for the day.

  “All I want is enough to buy Mac.” Tory meant it. She wanted nothing to do with whatever money came out of the sale of Flynn Financial, except for whatever it took to make the liver chestnut—who had so narrowly escaped death—hers. “If you want it, you’re welcome to it.”

  “Well,” Hobie drawled, “I might think on takin’ enough to pay Cole. Now that we can, I mean.”

  It was the first time Cole’s name had been mentioned since the day two weeks ago when he’d loaded up his truck and driven out. He’d said very little after the confrontation with her father, to anyone. He’d been there for her, he’d propped her up and brought her home. But then he’d disappeared, and it had been Tory who had been left to explain the extent of her father’s perfidy to Hobie. And only when she’d gone to investigate Rocky’s unusually loud yowling, did she find that Cole had been packing to leave.

  “I have some things I have to take care of” was all he’d said. “Things that have waited too long already.”

  She’d watched him, wondering if he’d even meant to say goodbye, or had he just planned to slide out when she wasn’t looking. What did you expect? she had chided herself. A change of heart, a declaration of love? Don’t be more of a fool than you’ve already been.

  In the end, she’d said the only thing she could.

  “I hope someday you find what you need to heal, Cole.”

  Hobie’s voice drew her out of the painful memory. “What do you think, Tory? He did this on his own time, you know.”

  Yes, she did know. Now. The first vacation time he’d taken in five years. Since little Timmy’s funeral.

  “Fine,” she said. “Send him a check as soon as the money comes in.”

  She was proud of the steadiness of her tone. She wasn’t so proud of the ineffectiveness of her efforts to keep her heart intact. She’d told him she couldn’t heal him. She hadn’t realized she was going to be wishing for the talent to heal herself.

  “I’m sorry about your dad, honey.”

  Honey. Instantly she was back to that day Cole had called her that, and the look on his face that had told her h
e hadn’t meant to say it at all. It had given her so much hope, that slip of tongue. Hope that had obviously been unfounded.

  “He was your brother, too,” she said, pushing away the memory.

  Hobie chuckled ruefully. “That’s something I tried to forget a long time ago.”

  There was a long silence. Tory set the porch swing moving again; she seemed to have a need lately for the comforting monotony of the movement.

  “You know,” Hobie said at last, in that tone that told her his words were going to seem simple, but really wouldn’t be at all, “It’s hard, losing your trust in somebody. But it’s harder to lose your trust in yourself. It takes a man time to put that right.”

  She lifted her eyes, not to Hobie’s face, but to the spot on the porch railing where Rocky had always been. She even missed the raggedy-eared cat. She’d never found her bandanna. She wondered idly if Rocky still had it.

  “I told him he’d never lost his nerve. Just his way.”

  Her gaze shot to Hobie’s face. It was unlike him to be so direct, and this obvious reference to Cole startled her. When she saw the warm concern, and the touch of sadness there, she knew she hadn’t hidden a thing from him.

  “I guess it was only to be expected,” she said ruefully. “Silly little country girl, and the big, high, wide and handsome cowboy. Like mother like—”

  “Stop it, Tory. You’re not like that. You know you’re not. And Cole isn’t like your father.”

  “No. No, he’s not. I’m just not sure what he is.” She set down her cup. “I’m going to go check on that steer that got caught in the wire last week. That cut may need some attention.”

  As she rode out, she tried to concentrate on the good things. Hobie was healthy again, nearly back to full strength. She had the small, sad comfort of knowing that John’s Prize and Firefly hadn’t really suffered through a deadly bout of agonizing colic, but had gone quickly, with little pain. They still had the ranch, and the news about what had really happened had, fortunately, traveled almost as quickly as the bad news had. She still had Mac, and soon he would be hers for keeps.

  And she would probably never see Cole again in her life.

  She wasn’t quite sure how that could be a good thing, except that perhaps it would make it easier to get over him. And since it was her own fault that she was in this mess, she supposed she should count herself lucky. It wasn’t as if he’d lied to her. He’d always said he’d be leaving. He’d never made her any promises. Except one—he’d promised her raw, hot, out-of-control sex. And he’d certainly delivered on that one, she thought ruefully. Beyond her wildest dreams, he’d delivered.