A Stranger in the Family (Book 1, Bardville, Wyoming Trilogy)

by Patricia McLinn

  She smiled.

  “Angie Lee married Ted, and he adopted me. I’ll always be grateful for that. Because it meant when she took off, nobody could take me away from him. He gave me a name and love and a home and a family.”

  “She left you?”

  “Yeah, she left us. Both of us. Walked out on her husband, leaving a four-year-old for him to raise on his own. She left because she had to find herself, because she was driven to experience life to the fullest and that, of course, required the drama of a big city.”

  “Ted told you that?”

  “No, not in those words. He made it sound much better, but I read between the lines. And there were enough people around here who knew Angie Lee to fill in the gaps.”

  “It must have been tough for you, not having your mother.”

  She turned and faced him, to let him see the truth of what she said. “It really wasn’t. Ted was always wonderful. And when Irene came into our lives...I couldn’t have had a better mother. No one could. She should have had a dozen kids, but nature doesn’t seem to take that into account. I was fourteen when they asked me how I’d feel about having a little brother or sister. And then we had Pete. We might seem an odd patchwork family to some people, with no link of blood among us. But patchworks can be beautiful, and blood doesn’t make a family.”

  She could see things behind his eyes, but couldn’t separate them, distill them into words. It was like trying to make the remembered fragments of a dream fit together into the whole it had been when you slept.

  “Have you seen your mother?”

  “No. I told you, I have all the family I need.”

  “I know, but—”

  “It happened a very long time ago. I’ve never missed her and never wanted any part of her. That’s something I learned a long time ago—the past is over and done with, there’s no going back.”

  “It might be a long time ago, but that doesn’t make it impossible. There are groups you can register with. If she’s been looking for you—”

  “Looking for me? You haven’t been listening, Boone. She knows where I am, because Ted and I are in the same place we were when she left. But that doesn’t make any difference. I don’t want to see her.”

  “You might feel different if you connect again. First, you register with those groups, then you advertise. I’ll put you together with somebody who’s good at finding people. You tell Cully what you remember about your mother, the last address you had for her—”

  She jolted off the step, spinning to face him.

  “Stop it. Right now. Stop trying to arrange my life the way you think it should be. Your high-handedness might be acceptable—barely—when it comes to renovating cabins, but you have no right to apply those tactics to my life.” She was aware of headlights coming up the road, then sweeping across the dark bunkhouse as they turned toward the cabin, but it didn’t slow her any. “If I wanted to find Angie Lee, I would have been perfectly capable of pursuing it myself. But I don’t want to find her. All that woman would do would be to disrupt this family— my family. I won’t let anybody do that. And I sure won’t go looking for it.”

  “You can’t know that’s what would happen. I think if you—”

  “You don’t get it, Boone. I don’t care what you think. Is that clear enough for you? If it’s not, I’ll say it plainer—butt out. I didn’t tell you this because I’m a child looking for you to be the grown-up taking charge and ‘fixing’ things for me. I told you because—because... Come to think of it, I don’t know why the hell I told you.”

  Pete got out of the rental car just in time to watch his sister stalk away without a word.

  He looked at Boone with one raised eyebrow as he came around the front of the car. “What’s the matter with her?”

  Boone didn’t move, and he didn’t answer right away. He’d never had a conversation turn so wrong so fast. Especially not one that had mattered to him so much. Except maybe with his sister Kenzie.

  One minute they’d been talking, easy and friendly, then Cambria had started opening up to him in a way he’d doubted she ever would. And then she was firing up like a quick-fused stick of dynamite.

  Had he really struck the match?

  He hadn’t meant to. He’d wanted to help. He’d wanted to step in between her and the hurt of her past. He’d wanted to make it better.

  Was that so wrong? Was that what Cambria meant when she said he tried to take over? When Kenzie said he tried to run her life?

  He drew in a long breath, then blew it out in a stream of frustration.

  “If you asked her,” he finally said to Pete, still standing a yard and a half away, watching him, “she’d probably say I’m what’s the matter with her.”

  Pete gave Boone a long, level look, obviously assessing whether whatever had irked his sister was something that required a brother taking her side. In the end, he grinned and tossed the keys to Boone, who caught them one-handed. “Nice catch. Females do get strange ideas, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, they do.”

  “I mean, Cam’s great, but there are some things you can’t talk to her about.”

  “True.” More true than Pete knew.

  “Yeah, a lot of things. Like...like the future.”

  He didn’t make the mistake of looking at Pete—that would only make the boy, already shuffling his feet on the packed earth in front of the step, more self-conscious—but Boone did pull some of his thoughts from what had just happened with Cambria.

  “That so?”

  “Yeah. She sees things one way, and she’s full-speed ahead with it. But sometimes other factors mix in. She can get like she’s wearing blinders, seeing only what she’s set her sights on, and going straight toward that.”

  “But you have other ideas?”

  “Sometimes. Take me going to college. Cam thinks I should go right after graduation, and that’s it as far as she’s concerned.”

  “You don’t want to go to college?”

  “Sometimes wanting isn’t the only thing that matters.”

  A wistfulness in Pete’s voice stirred a memory Boone had not thought of for nearly twenty years, of passing the field where the high school team was preparing to play for the district baseball title, wanting with all his heart to be part of it and walking away, heading to his part-time job.

  He didn’t want his son to have a memory of regrets twenty years from now, especially not about something a sight more important than a ball game.

  “It’s not the only thing. But it’s a big thing, Pete. First you decide if you want something, then you can figure ways to get it.”

  “If you’re talking about scholarships, I’ve thought of that. That’s how Cam went through school mostly. But I don’t have the grades she did or the test scores. Maybe something’ll come through with baseball, but I’m not counting on it. I thought maybe the army...” Pete turned earnest eyes on him, yawning, but still with questions. “You were in the army, weren’t you? You got a lot out of it, didn’t you?”

  Another swift kick toward maturity for a kid who’d been born old, that’s what he’d got.

  Boone didn’t want Pete to grow up fast. He wanted him to have challenging professors, mind-boggling libraries, late-night debates on the creation of the universe, Saturday football games and Friday night pizza parties.

  “It didn’t kill me, if that’s what you mean.” With Pete momentarily taken aback, Boone pressed his point. “Going into the army is about preparing to kill and being prepared to die. You can’t go into the army expecting peace. That’s not the bargain you make.”

  “Well, they do have money to help you get through college afterward.”

  “So you want to go to college.”

  “Eventually, sure.”

  Pete’s offhand tone didn’t fool Boone. The boy wanted college, but he wouldn’t let himself set his heart on it because he was worried about his family sacrificing for him.

  “Maybe something’ll come up,” Boone offered, the urg
e to do more, to take care of things for Pete, held in check by the memory of Cambria’s angry accusation minutes before that he was trying to take charge.

  “Yeah, maybe.” Another yawn gave the words even less credence than Pete’s tone. “I’m going to turn in. See you tomorrow, Boone.”

  “Good night, Pete.”

  Boone didn’t move from the step, watching the lanky figure cross to the house where the back porch light had been left burning to welcome him.

  Maybe Cambria was right about his learning to just give love without trying to take over, but this situation surely called for him to do something. His son would have the money for college. He’d see to that.

  As his eyes slid to the cabin tucked deep under the cottonwoods with a faint light showing through the bedroom curtains, Boone rubbed his palms over his bristled chin.

  For them to have a chance at what was brewing between them, he had to be honest with her.

  He’d known from that first day that telling her he was Pete’s father would surely complicate matters between the two of them. Now he feared that telling her he’d come here to find his son might do much worse.

  Cambria Weston would fight like a tiger to protect her family from anything she perceived as a threat to it, including her own mother—and him. And the hell of it was, he was a threat to the family she’d known for sixteen years—because he wanted to claim Pete as his son.

  * * * *

  A dream drove Boone out of bed, out of the cabin, back to his seat on the step under the black, vast, lonely sky.

  In daylight the unending vault of blue sky gave a man a sense of lung-filling space, no boundaries, no limits. But at night it made him long for the thick-hanging branches of the wooded slopes of his native Blue Ridge Mountains. The Wyoming night sky felt like an eternity without refuge. Nowhere to hide from the goblins of dreams.

  One side of his mouth lifted in self-derision. Wouldn’t be so bad if his dream had been about goblins. But it hadn’t been a figment. It had been a memory. Accurate in every last, damning detail.

  Four months ago Hank Morton had stopped by his office; it was a surprise visit from a friend Boone hadn’t seen since high school. A pleasant hour of reminiscences, cut short by one seemingly innocuous comment as they’d caught each other up on their lives of the past sixteen-plus years.

  That first Christmas after graduation, with Marlene finally herself again after having the baby...

  Only it wasn’t innocuous, because Hank’s cousin Marlene had been Boone’s high school girlfriend. And she’d had a baby sometime in the six months between his leaving for the army and the next Christmas.

  If Boone had had any doubt that the baby was his, it ended when horror had spread across Hank’s face as he realized what he’d let slip. The man had scrambled out of the office as if the president of Bodie Smith Enterprises were the devil himself.

  Maybe that’s how he’d looked, too, as he’d tried to grab his old friend by the collar, demanding to know where the baby was, where Marlene was—to know everything. Hank had told him nothing more. When Boone had calmed down, he wasn’t surprised—family loyalty ran strong in their mountains.

  But so did friendship. When he’d called Cully and said he needed to find Marlene, Cully hadn’t hesitated. Three days later he’d called with Marlene’s married name and an address in a comfortable suburb of Memphis.

  Boone had meant to be unemotional. He’d meant to be reasonable. He hadn’t known Marlene wouldn’t want to tell him. He hadn’t known he’d confront her with an anger and hurt that tore at him.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me, Marlene? I would have helped you.”

  She’d sat, tense but composed, in the center of a sofa upholstered in splashes of red flowers. No one else was in her house; she’d seen to that before she’d agreed to see him. “You couldn’t do anything that my family wasn’t doing for me.”

  “I would have—”

  “You would have taken over like you always did, Bodie. You would have insisted we get married and keep the baby. I was a kid, but I knew that would have been a disaster. For me, for the baby. Even for you.”

  “If you hadn’t wanted to marry me, all you would have had to say was no.”

  Marlene’s laugh had held no humor. “If I could have said no to you, I wouldn’t have been in that situation.” Her words had stopped his pacing like a lance through the heart. She’d immediately leaned forward to touch his arm. “No, that’s not fair. I wanted you as much as you wanted me—maybe more. I wanted to know what it was all about. I just got a more complete lesson on the consequences than I’d bargained for.”

  Behind the dry smile, beyond the emotions swirling through him, Boone had glimpsed the recognition that Marlene had become a clear-eyed woman who didn’t flinch from being honest with herself.

  “But I couldn’t have stood up to being married to you, Bodie. Certainly not then, maybe not now—and I wanted our baby to have his own life. A good life.”

  “How about you, Marlene? Have you had a good life?” he’d asked on impulse.

  She’d smiled. “Yes. I have a wonderful husband—and, yes, he does know about what happened—and a terrific family.”

  “How about our baby? Did you know the people who adopted him?”

  “No, but I know they’re good people. He has a good life.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “No. I’ve thought sometimes... But it wouldn’t be fair to try to divide him between two mothers, two lives. All good parents have to let their children go sometime so they can be complete people on their own. I had to let him go—completely—from the start. It wasn’t easy, but I know I did right.”

  “Marlene—”

  “I don’t know where he is. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  In the silence, he’d weighed her dignity, her conviction, and grudgingly accepted them. But that didn’t mean her decision was right for him. He had to make his own destiny.

  Don’t do it, Bodie, her soft plea whispered in his mind, from the past and from the dream. Leave the boy to his own life. The best thing you can do for him is to let him go. Let him go...

  “I can’t,” he said aloud, though only the night heard his harsh whisper. “He’s my son. I have to take care of him. I can’t let him go.”

  Maybe not even to reach for Cambria.

  * * * *

  “Cully? What the—” Boone looked around quickly, relieved to see no one else paid any attention to the stranger standing by the door of his cabin.

  Amid the swirl of activity centered on the barn and main house, maybe one more arrival wouldn’t be noted. At nearly six-foot-four, Cully Grainger’s lanky figure was hard to overlook, but his jeans, plain shirt and running shoes were in keeping with what everyone else wore for the Westons’ annual cookout. And his unobtrusive rental car was lost in a welter of horse trailers, trucks and four-wheel drives littering the grounds.

  Boone ushered his old friend into his cabin and out of sight.

  “Getting ready for a party?” Cully asked.

  “Sort of. What are you doing here?”

  “Glad to see you, too, old buddy,” Cully said wryly.

  “I just don’t want you putting your foot in it.”

  “Me? Known coast to coast for my tact?”

  “Yeah, that’s why you’ve left your bridges in flames on your past two jobs.”

  Cully’s smile tightened into a grimace. “They were jackasses. I just told them so before I left.”

  “Well, I don’t want you telling people here things before you leave.”

  Cully’s eyebrows rose. “You trying to rush me out of here, Boone? What have you been up to?”

  “Things have gotten complicated.”

  “Must have. I thought you’d be back by now. So did some of your associates. Your assistant remembered my visit and got in touch with me. He says he hasn’t heard from you in five days and you missed a deadline for the final okay on an ad layout. He seemed to think death,
amnesia, or kidnapping were the only possible explanations for those lapses.”

  Boone rubbed a finger along his lower lip. “Forgot all about the ad layout. I’ll get in touch with Phil. He and Hannah in advertising should be able to make that decision.”

  Cully gave him a long, considering look, then wandered to the window. He stood angled to one side, so he could see out but wouldn’t be spotted easily from outside. “Sounds as if you’ve dropped a few of those strings you usually insist on holding. Question is if you’ve let loose some of the strings only to pick up new ones?”

  Cully tipped his head to indicate something beyond the window. Boone moved next to him and saw Cambria and Jessa leaving the path from Cambria’s cabin and stopping to look at the activity before them.

  “Some of the new strings complicatin’ your life?” Cully asked.

  Cambria and Jessa both laughed then, and started off on diverging paths—Cambria to the barn, Jessa to the house.

  Cambria waded into a group preparing to unload two horses from a trailer that someone else wanted moved before the unloading. Even from this distance, he saw the disputing parties turn to her, prepared to let her decision stand.

  “So, it’s one string,” Cully said. “A brown-haired string with a stubborn jaw and a great rear end.”

  Boone realized Cully had followed the direction of his gaze, which had automatically gone to Cambria.

  He swore. A single, short, disgusted syllable.

  Cully’s eyebrows rose. “What’s the big complication with that? Females haven’t exactly run from you in horror in the past.”

  “Her name’s Cambria Weston. She’s Pete Weston’s sister.”

  Cully’s eyebrows shot higher. “Holy—” The curse slid into a low whistle. “You pick ‘em, Smith. You sure do pick ‘em.” He leaned a shoulder against the wall and considered Boone. “You told her?”

  “Not yet.”

  ‘“Not yet.’“ Cully repeated the words as if testing their flavor. “The month’s almost up.”

  “I know, dammit. But I want to do it right. If I don’t... It's not just Pete. It’s the whole family.”