by Madelynne Ellis, Fleur T. Reid, Nan Comargue, Shannon Peters, Morticia Knight, Jordyn Mckenzie
Stepping into the sharp sunlight outside, she blinked rapidly and fumbled for her sunglasses. She glanced at them before she put them on, involuntarily remembering that they were part of a matching pair. Jason still had the other set. Those, at least, he’d remembered to take with him when he’d packed his overnight bag and exited her life for good. He might as well have packed her heart up and taken that with him, too.
She glanced up one last time at the building behind her, tall and impressive in the bright sunlight. That was it—the apartment she’d come to with big hopes and tremulous laughter. She was leaving in defeat, and near tears. Her experiment with city life was done.
An oversized black pickup was parked in front of the building. All of her worldly possessions were piled into the back and the two men she’d vowed four years ago never to lean on again were sitting in the front seat, wearing identical frowns.
As she approached the truck, the dark-haired man in the passenger seat jumped out and opened the back door for her, where a second set of seats was squeezed in. He towered over her, even with the inch of extra height her sandals gave her small frame.
“Such manners,” Isabel marvelled as she slid inside the vehicle.
Dex was blushing as he slammed the door behind her and took up his seat again, next to his brother.
Dexter Armstrong was attractive, with his rough-hewn features and quick smile—nowhere in evidence today—but it was his older brother, sitting tall beside him, who took women’s breath away.
From her spot in the middle of the bench-like back seat, Isabel could only catch a glimpse of Cary’s silver-grey gaze. His face and expression were hidden by his black Stetson.
The drive to Riding was nearly two hours long and there would be no rest stops. It would feel even longer unless she could think of something to say above the mournful country twang of the radio.
The pickup eased through the city traffic, passing dozens of its own kind. But there was a difference between this truck and the carefully washed and preserved versions they passed—this was a working vehicle, more accustomed to driving the worn paths of the Double-A Ranch than making its way across hot asphalt.
“How’s everyone back home?” Isabel asked, feeling the last word drop like a weight from her tongue. “Mary Jo? The McIntyre twins? Do they fight as much as they used to?”
Silence. In the background, Kenny Chesney sang about tequila.
The truck cleared the highway and made the turn-off out of the city and onto the long lonely roads of their shared childhood.
With a sidelong look at his brother, Dex finally answered her, many minutes later.
“The McIntyre girls got themselves married. Becky to the Willsons’ eldest and Bonny to a city man she at in college. She went to live with him up in Dallas. The wedding was two years ago, at least.”
“You’re kidding!” Isabel had to force the note of cheerfulness into her voice. That last comment stung, as it was no doubt meant to. “Both of them, huh? And they were my age.”
“Some women aren’t against marriage,” Cary commented from the driver’s seat.
He hadn’t said anything to her yet that morning, and his voice, just as deep as Dex’s, but slightly more raspy, sent shivers down her spine. It was a voice made for lovemaking.
“Who said I was against marriage?” Isabel demanded, annoyed by the fact that her words quivered.
“Why else would you be shacked up with that city man for the last year?” was the cool reply.
“Eight months,” she corrected. “And don’t call it shacking up. Everyone does it nowadays.”
A glimmer of silver flashed at her in the rear-view mirror. “Maybe in the city they do, but not in Riding.”
“Not in Riding,” Isabel mimicked savagely, feeling once again like a little girl lashing out at the grown-ups and knowing that both men in the front of the truck would see her as exactly that.
Who cared? She’d spent most of her childhood hearing about what they didn’t do in Riding—anything fun, really—and she was heartily tired of it. The question was, what did they do in Riding, besides work, drive around in pickups listening to country music, and breed more of their own?
Speaking of which, why hadn’t these men made any progress on the last score? The Armstrong brothers had always been the most eligible bachelors in town, yet after four years there was still nary a gold band on either of their left hands. Becky McIntyre may have landed Jeff Willson, but she had always had an eye for Cary. As if she’d stood a chance. No woman in Riding had—except for Yvonne. And Yvonne wasn’t someone you talked about at the Double-A, at least not in Cary’s hearing.
“Time you thought about settling down,” Cary told her, as if she hadn’t spoken. “There aren’t any old maids in our family.”
It didn’t seem to occur to him that all of the last few generations of Armstrongs were males, eliminating the possibility of old maids completely.
“I’m not a member of your family,” Isabel said stonily. “Remember? I’m a Morgan, not an Armstrong.”
“Your mother was an Armstrong.”
“Only because she married your father! Big mistake.”
“Was it?” Cary’s voice was suddenly soft. It was a dangerous sound.
Dex shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Isabel saw him give his older brother a light tap on his arm. “Let it go,” he whispered.
“Let what go?” Cary asked, his voice still quiet. His silvery-grey eyes sought out Isabel’s big brown ones in the mirror. “Maybe she needs reminding of the fact that we’re down here bailing her ass out of trouble, just like our dad bailed out her ma.”
“My mom didn’t need bailing out,” Isabel protested from the back seat.
“Sure. Single mother, alone by herself in the big bad city of Houston. She later told our dad that she was just a few weeks away from being homeless. Dad offered her a job on the ranch and the rest, as they say, is history.”
She’d known it was the truth from the moment the words left his mouth. Cary didn’t lie. That was one of the many mantras around the ranch.
But knowing it was the truth didn’t take the sting out of it.
“So marrying my mother was an act of charity from your father?”
“I didn’t say that. He loved her all right.”
“Everyone did,” Dex added.
Thinking about her mother, who was lying under the stone monument next to Carter Armstrong senior, made Isabel blink again behind her sunglasses. This time, she didn’t even have the sun as an excuse.
It was her mother’s death that had precipitated her leaving Riding. After a long battle with cancer, a battle Isabel had seen her through, to the detriment of her college acceptance and future prospects, her mother had succumbed to the disease on the eve of Isabel’s twentieth birthday. The day after the funeral, she’d telephoned the college to cancel the deferment she’d requested more than two years earlier and told them that she’d see them for the winter semester. The day after that, she’d packed up her possessions and left at daybreak.
Cary and Dex had come after her, of course, ready to cajole, bribe and finally browbeat her into returning home. She’d told them that she didn’t have a home anymore. And for four more years, that had been the truth. No matter where she’d lived, it had not been a home. Until Jason had moved into her apartment and made it one.
Dex, eyeing her in the mirror he’d pulled down from his visor, smiled tenderly. “Go ahead and cry, darlin’. We’d understand.”
But his brother’s snort of derision kept her clear-eyed. Crying over a man! How that would make Cary howl with mocking laughter. No Armstrong man would ever cry over a woman.
But, Isabel told herself for the thousandth time, I’m not an Armstrong—I’m a Morgan! And Morgans cried aplenty.
“I’ll pass,” she said, earning a grin from Dex and the slightest nod of approval from Cary.
God, she’d forgotten how easy it was to live her life under their thumbs, to be ecstatic when s
he earned their respect and crushed when they disapproved of her behaviour. It was a pattern as old as the hills they were passing. Somehow, she would have to break it. Someday she would have to stand on her own two legs again. Someday soon.
Very little had changed in the youthful bedroom where Isabel had spent her childhood and adolescence. The same ruffled bedspread was laid out over the narrow twin bed and the same celebrities glowered from the peach-tinted walls. The same paints sat dried out in the same battered tubes on the desk. Even the ornaments were untouched—the faded photographs still strung up around the mirror, the blue-and-white china animals sitting on their special shelf by the wardrobe. Her amateur paintings decorated the walls; each one had been long oohed and aahed over by her mother and stepfather.
The bedroom looked like an alien landscape now, the ornaments she had once prized like remnants of a lost civilisation.
Dropping her handbag on the floor, Isabel lay down on top of the ruffles and sighed. All she remembered now were the seething emotions that had swirled within her as she’d waited for her mother to triumph over her cancer, only for it to beat her in the end. Waiting for life to start.
Now that she’d hit her first roadblock, she’d come running right back. With her job, her success as a designer, she’d had more options. She could have stayed in the city. Certainly, she could have afforded another apartment, a place that was just hers, not hers and Jason’s. But instead, her first instinct had been to run back to the Armstrongs, trailing defeat behind her like a sharp stink.
With a flush, she remembered what else she’d been waiting on back then. Waiting for Cary and Dex to take notice of her, to suddenly realise that she was a woman and not a little girl anymore. For them to do more than lecture—that was Cary—and commiserate—that was Dex.
One day, from her sick bed downstairs, her mother had smiled with painful effort and told her to get her head out of the clouds. But her mother had said it gently, the way she always did.
“Who are you dreaming about, girl?” her mother had asked in her thin, worn-out voice. “Is it Cary or is it Dex?”
Isabel had been unable to answer the question. Instead, she’d ducked her head and giggled uncertainly.
Cary or Dex? Dex or Cary?
She was still trying to figure out the answer to the riddle her mother had posed more than four years ago.
Isabel was afraid that the answer she’d come up with was completely unacceptable. She was in love with both of them.
Chapter Two
Dinner was an exercise in self-control. Cary maintained silence in the face of her attempts at conversation, polishing off his plate of fried chicken with grim determination.
Dex followed his example, offering only the shortest responses to her outright questions and letting her comments about the food, the house and the weather fall flat onto the table.
Only the housekeeper, Mary Jo, bustling around the dining room with her characteristic energy, kept the room from feeling completely like a mausoleum. She brought dishes of steaming hot mashed potatoes, golden with melted butter, and crisp green beans picked that morning from the ranch’s gardens, cleared away the empty plates, refilled the glasses with ice-cold water and sweet tea, and put out dishes of peach pie topped with dollops of whipped cream. For a big woman, she barely seemed to move, yet every task was done at high speed.
Only the older woman answered Isabel’s chatter. Yes, the stables had been expanded. They had about a dozen new horses since she’d left. Yes, that was a new outbuilding she’d spotted close behind the house. It was an office for the Armstrongs to transact their business affairs in away from the main house. Yes, mercy, the house could use a new coat of paint. How was it that they’d all missed that?
Just as Isabel suspected, Mary Jo’s answers told her that the ranch had prospered, to the detriment of the house. When her mother had been alive, both had merited equal attention. ‘Folks don’t just work to eat’—this used to be one of her mother’s favourite sayings—‘but also to make merry’. Her mother, by all accounts, had made merry whenever she’d had the time. Carter Armstrong senior had never had cause to complain about his younger second wife.
Cary’s chair scraped the floor loudly. Both Isabel and Dex looked up from their slices of pie.
“I’m going round back.”
In the house, this had always been code for having work to do. Not the ranch work that occupied so much of the men’s lives, but the phone and now computer work of checking on and shifting around the millions of dollars in investments that made up the Armstrongs’ real wealth.
When he was gone, Dex turned to Isabel with a smile. “How would you like to take a walk?”
She threw down her napkin. “I would love to.”
The land seemed bigger and wider than ever, the sun more blistering, the sky more magnificently blue. Beside her, Dex trudged along the path, leading them further and further from the house. The ranch workers had gone for the day so they were the only ones on the land now, with the path to themselves.
“Phew, it’s hot.”
Dex lifted his dark head. “Is it?”
Isabel stopped walking. “Dex, what is it?”
He kicked his boot along the hard-packed ground. “I wasn’t going to get into it. Not on your first night back. But with Car acting the way he is…”
His words trailed off, but she got the gist of what he was trying to say.
“What’s going on with Cary?”
Dex jerked his head in the direction of the house. “You saw the way he was today.”
Isabel shrugged. “He was the way he always was—only more so. I guess that happens when you get older.”
“He’s turning into Dad.”
Taking another few steps, she stepped off the path and sat down on a crumbling fence.
“Your father wasn’t a hard man,” she protested softly.
Memories of being lifted up into a pair of strong arms came flooding back to her. Carter Armstrong had never pretended to be her real father, but he’d certainly eased the ache the loss of her father had caused within her.
“He was,” Dex immediately contradicted. He came to stand next to her, propping one boot against a low wooden rail. “Before your mother came, there was hardly anything that could make him laugh or even smile. He lived for his work, both on the ranch and off it. And he made Cary and I do the same. Any minute we spent that wasn’t in making money was a wasted minute, in his opinion. You see, our ma was big on money. She liked the good life.”
Isabel’s ears perked up. No one ever said much about the first Mrs Armstrong, Cary and Dex’s mother.
“She was beautiful and kind,” he went on, a faraway look stealing into his blue eyes. “Not that Dad would admit any of it once she was gone. But she was a good mother, just discontented. It wasn’t enough for her for us to have the best ranch in the county, she wanted it to be the best in the state. It wasn’t enough for Dad to invest the money he got from his dad wisely, she wanted the money to roll in. That’s why he first started trading in stocks and bonds. Money came in then, but even that wasn’t good enough for her. Suddenly she didn’t want to be stuck out on a ranch anymore at all. She wanted to live in the city. That was the one thing Dad could never understand—or forgive.”
“What happened to her?”
“One day she just left. Took her clothes, emptied the chequing account, and wrote a short note to Dad. Nothing for Cary and me. Not even a goodbye.”
“Oh, Dex!” Isabel reached out a hand and it was quickly enveloped in his keen grasp.
“We were little, barely teenagers, and it hurt. It hurt like hell. People in these parts just don’t do that kind of thing.”
“No,” Isabel said slowly, “there are a lot of things that they will accept, but abandoning your family is not one of them.”
“Exactly. But, year by year, it started to hurt less. Then, one year, just a few months before our dad brought your ma home, we heard that our ma had died in a car cra
sh. It had happened years ago, but no one knew to contact us. Her friends in the city didn’t even know she had a family.”
“Wow.”
He smiled down at her, a tender smile that reminded her of the way his father had often looked at her mother. His hand chafed hers gently.
“Yes, darlin’. Wow.” Dex paused. “It explains a lot about my big brother, doesn’t it? Obviously, being older, he was more bonded with our ma and he took it harder when she left. When you and your ma came to live here, too. It took him longer than me to adjust.”
Isabel thought about this. “He doesn’t like change, does he?”
His blue eyes were suddenly serious. “He doesn’t like the people he loves leaving. Surely you can understand that.”
“Yvonne.” She breathed the name like a curse.
“And you.”
Isabel stared up at his face. “Me?”
“He was devastated when you left, especially so soon after your mother’s death. It felt like you were rejecting us.”
“And you felt the same way, Dex?”
His dismissive shrug couldn’t hide his expression. “I felt the same way. Abandoned. Just like before.”
She stood up, taking the half-step that brought her closer to him. “Oh, Dex! I’m so sorry. I never knew about your mother.”
Her hand fell onto his forearm where the sleeve of his shirt had been rolled up to display lean brown muscle. This close, she could see the curve of his dark lashes resting against his tanned cheek. Sweat glistened on his forehead, on the sharp curve of his upper lip, in the hollow at the base of his throat. Perspiration broke out along the back of her neck, under the heavy curtain of her hair.
It had been so long since she’d been this close to a man and so vibrantly aware of his masculinity.
Was it just her imagination or were his jeans suddenly tighter, his thighs flexed beneath the smoothly faded denim?
“Dex.” Isabel said his name quietly, wonderingly. Could this be real? “I never meant to hurt you.”
A dark flush crept over his face beneath his tan. He lowered his head, his breath fanning out over her upturned face.