His sister was probably having kittens in the kitchen at the delay, but Heath wasn’t going to leave five horses cooped up while their friends got to play. And he most certainly wasn’t going to leave Maggie in.
After he got them all out to run, he hung up the last lead and finally went to the office. His father, brother, and brother-in-law stood around the desk, staring down at what passed for one of Wes’s blueprints—an untrained sketch of some kind of machine, made on brown paper. Heath couldn’t make out what it was, but usually Wes’s contraptions were meant to move livestock more rapidly, so he assumed this one was, too.
It didn’t matter. They’d already arrived at their father’s refusal, and as Heath came in, Logan had his hands up between the men, so it had gotten hot. Yep, Sunday breakfast was likely going to be a silent, sulky affair.
They all stopped and stared at Heath when he cleared his throat. “Emma says come eat.”
“Now that sounds like a workable idea,” their father said, smirking. He turned and left the office, and the barn, without another word.
Wes was so red in the face, Heath thought he might be ready to stroke out. Logan put a calming hand on his shoulder, and Wes took a breath. Then he grabbed up his sketch in his fists and tore it into pieces.
“Fuck! Fuck!”
Logan patted Wes’s shoulder. “Easy, man. Don’t bring this to breakfast. Not fair to Emma and the kids.”
“Don’t tell me what’s fair to my wife and my children.” He shoved the destroyed sketch in the waste bin and stalked out. Heath had to swing out of the doorway to avoid a collision.
Logan rolled his eyes at Heath. “You always manage to miss the fun. C’mon, let’s eat.”
They walked together behind their sauntering father, in the lead, and their seething brother-in-law, stomping behind him.
Their father was a good man—he was honest, he was fair in business, he treated his workers and his livestock well, he took his role as a town leader seriously and didn’t let power twist up his head, and his family knew they had his love. More than that, he was capable of real kindness. He was a marshmallow with his grandkids.
Heath and his father had had a fractious relationship from the time Heath was ten and first told his father ‘no.’ He was the family rebel without being the antagonist. He’d simply gone about his life his own way, refusing to be buffeted by his father’s powerful will, and refusing to fight about it. He’d just said no and done what he’d wanted, letting the bluster go on around him. When he truly wanted something, he could not be swayed, not by threat and not by guilt.
Their mother had said while she was alive, and Emma said now, that they fought so often because they were so much alike.
But neither doubted their mutual love. And when Heath had gone through the deepest black of his dark time, a few years back, his father had been downright gentle with him.
So Morgan Cahill was a good man. But he had an old-school frontiersman’s heart, hard and implacable, and he could be a real asshole when his patience ran out.
He had little patience for Wes. He thought his only daughter had married beneath her station, he thought Wes was weak, and it galled him to have the man in a position of any authority at all on his ranch.
Wes did a good job as livestock manager, and some of his ideas probably had real merit, but their father would never see it.
“What was it this time?” Heath asked, his voice low.
Logan shook his head. “Some kind of surveillance setup so we wouldn’t need hands out in the fields with the flock.”
“What? How’s that work?”
“It doesn’t. Not one of his better ones. I think he’s reaching into science fiction territory, trying to find something that’ll capture the old man’s eye. I wish he’d give it up.”
“That won’t happen until Dad gives him some respect for what he can do—or until he breaks him down completely.”
“Wanna bet on which one’ll happen first?”
“No thanks. Sucker bet.”
*****
The climate in the dining room at breakfast was cloudy with a chance of thunderstorms. Their father seemed like he had shrugged off his irritation easily. He joked with the kids and paid lavish compliments to Emma’s cooking. In fact, Heath thought he was going overboard with the good mood—in a calculated move to skewer Wes just a little bit more.
Wes was definitely taking it that way. His fork clattered against his plate each time he picked up more food, and he glowered at the table, not making eye contact with anyone. Eventually, the heat of his temper shut everyone up.
In her usual role as family social director, Emma tried to find a neutral topic. She flipped through all the town news and got mainly grunts from the men. For a minute or two, she gave up and sulked at her plate. But then she perked up and looked right at Heath.
“Oh! I almost forgot! I saw Catherine Spelling at the IGA yesterday. She was holding court, as she does.” Catherine loved gossip, and she usually had bushels of it from the Moondancer. She apparently never named names of guests, but whenever Emma had seen Catherine in town, she was popping with stories about weird rich people.
Some of the stories were pornographic, but if she had one to share at Sunday breakfast, it would be G-rated. Heath smiled and waited to hear what dumb thing some CEO type had done.
“You know that new girl in town? Gabe? Dumb name for a girl if you ask me, but anyway…” Distracted by Anya’s request for more juice, Emma faded out.
She had the full attention of the table, but Heath frowned, feeling defensive for Gabe. Not because of Emma’s critique of her name, which he assumed was a nickname and her prerogative—and he also thought it kind of sexy when women had men’s names—but because he didn’t want her to be the subject of gossip.
Not that what he wanted mattered. Everybody in Jasper Ridge was the subject of gossip. Anyway, he’d barely laid eyes on her in the couple of weeks since he’d taken her up to the Moondancer. He had no business feeling defensive on her behalf.
With Anya’s juice dealt with, Emma picked up her story. “Anyway, she’s working up at the Moondancer, and Catherine did a check on her, you know. It turns out that she has quite a story, poor thing.”
His sister’s little words of sympathy were belied somewhat by her evident enthusiasm for the news she had. She glanced guiltily at her children, and Heath knew that the news wasn’t G-rated after all.
“Cover your ears, kids,” she said.
They did, but Heath noticed with a smirk that Kendall’s hands were cupped. Anya, on the other hand, was mashing hard on the sides of her head.
Once her children were supposedly safe from whatever she had to say, Emma leaned in a bit and scanned the table, meeting the eyes of all the men in her life, ending, and coming to rest, with Heath’s. “It turns out that her father is the Cantina Killer. I didn’t know what that was, but Catherine said, and then I looked it up myself later, and yep. In Santa Fe, about two years ago. He killed her grandparents and her mother, and he tried to kill her. Almost did. In their restaurant. It was a bloody mess. You know that dumb choker she always wears? Catherine hates it, but she won’t take it off. I bet it covers a scar.”
Heath felt rocked. Hard. And furious with his sister in a way unfamiliar to him. He punched the table, and the whole thing rattled. “Jesus, Em. That’s horrific. Do you have to be so fucking excited about it?”
“Don’t you talk like that at your mother’s table, son.”
Everybody at that table knew why Heath might react strongly to a story about someone losing their family in horror, and yet they were all looking at him like he was the one out of line.
At least Emma had the grace to blush. It wasn’t enough, though; Heath’s temper was loose, and he had to get away. He pushed back from the table, dropped his napkin on his plate, and stormed out of the house.
*****
He didn’t go far; he lived on the ranch himself. The whole family lived on a compound here: their fath
er and Logan in the big house; Wes, Emma, and their kids in a house their father had had built for them as a wedding gift; and Heath in a bunkhouse he’d converted himself.
He stalked across the grounds, up the single, low step onto his wooden porch, and went inside and grabbed a beer. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock on Sunday morning, but he didn’t give a flying fuck.
The back of his house bumped up against the main horse pasture, and through the window over his kitchen sink, he saw Maggie grazing not far away. Feeling calmer at once, he whistled, and she brought up her head and looked his way, ears perked forward. When he whistled again, she ambled over.
She put her head through the open window and flopped her lips at him.
“You only love me for my apples, I know.” He chuckled and picked an apple from a wooden bowl on the butcher-block counter. While she talked at him, he quartered it and palmed a piece for her. When she’d had the whole apple, and his hand was sticky with horse slobber and apple juice, he murmured, “Gimme sugar, baby girl,” and she stretched her neck and pursed her lips. He kissed the soft velvet of her nose.
“Good girl. Git on, now.” She nodded her head and backed off, then trotted back to her alfalfa feast.
Heath washed his hands, finished his beer, and got a fresh from the fridge. Then he went to the front room and sat on his sofa. He would have preferred to sit outside—it was a beautiful spring day, and he hated being indoors in general—but his porch faced the big house, and if Emma or Logan saw him out there, one or both of them would want to talk it out.
He needed to think it out first.
His heart still felt a little fast; he’d very nearly lost it, and these past few years, that was usually a bad thing. He’d almost lost it at his little sister. In front of his niece and nephew. Over a girl he barely knew.
When she’d come into the Jack that first night, he’d noticed her at once. It wasn’t unusual for strangers to stop at the Jack—the dudes from the Moondancer always wanted some local color in their vacation, and the town was close enough to the highway that sometimes people wandered off the road to stop for the night and relax. But she’d seemed unusual right off.
She was gorgeous, and that had had all the patrons’ attention on that evening where most everyone in there was a guy at the end of his work day. He’d been sitting with Emmett and Paul, who’d both acted like they’d stepped out of an old Tex Avery cartoon when they’d seen her.
But Heath hadn’t cared about her looks so much, other than to notice them. Her eyes had caught his attention right away, long before he knew they were brown, with green flecks. There was something old in her eyes. It had made it hard to guess her age—those old, haunted eyes in her smooth, fresh face.
He’d felt literally caught each time their eyes met, and it hadn’t been a good feeling. It was like he was seeing too much, far more than he wanted to see, or than she wanted him to see.
Disturbed, and long out of practice with women anyway, he’d been an asshole to her. But he honestly wanted nothing to do with her. He had no interest at all in having anything to do with women ever again. Certainly not one that trapped him in her haunted eyes.
He’d never been what anyone would have called gregarious, but the past few years, he only let his guard down here at the ranch. Reese knew it, and he knew why, everybody in the whole fucking town knew why, and Heath thought it had been a bullshit move of his friend to put him in that situation.
But at the end of that day at Moondancer, seeing a new glint of light behind the age and sorrow in those pretty brown eyes, Heath had felt something loosen up inside him. It scared the shit out of him, and he’d been relieved to learn that she was near young enough to be his daughter.
But now he knew what was in her eyes.
Trauma.
And knowing her story, he wanted to see her. He shouldn’t, he wouldn’t, but he wanted to.
His front door opened, and Emma walked in. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
She lifted an eyebrow at his beer. “Really?”
For an answer, he put the bottle to his lips and had a drink. Emma sighed and sat down on the other end of the sofa.
“So, I’m sorry.”
“Me too.” He was. He didn’t like making Emma feel bad.
“You’re right. It’s a terrible story. I feel awful for her.”
“Then don’t go spreading it around. If she wants it told, she’ll tell it.”
“You know that’s not how it works around here. If she’s going to stay, she’ll just have to get used to that.”
That was true, but it stank to high heaven. Heath had another drink, finishing the beer, and set the bottle on the table at his side. He and his sister sat in silence for awhile.
“Catherine says that girl’s got her eye on you.”
“Any sentence that starts with ‘Catherine says’ is probably bullshit, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t. What she says is usually true, ugly or not. And that’s not ugly. I think it would be sweet. She’s so lovely. Her real name is Gabriela. I don’t know why she’d muck up a pretty name like that with that awful nickname.”
He rolled his eyes at his sister’s fascination with Gabe’s choice of name, but there was something more important to ask than why she cared about that. “What are you doing, Em?”
She turned and faced him on the sofa, pulling her knee up onto the cushions. “Heath, it’s been a long time. You can’t live the whole rest of your life alone. And this girl shows up in town with a story even more horrible than yours—”
He cut her off with a snort, then stood and took his empty to the kitchen.
Emma followed him. As he pulled a third beer from the refrigerator, she said, “Okay. A story as horrible as yours, if you want to see it that way. Either way, she knows something like you do. Maybe it’s the hand of Fate. Maybe it’s God’s plan. I heard she stopped here because her truck died right outside town, and even she took it as a sign. Maybe it’s a sign for you, too.”
“Jesus. She’s twenty-one years old.”
“So? Fifteen years isn’t so much. Mama was twenty-three years younger than Dad.”
“I am not Dad.”
Emma laughed. It came out like a bark. “Please.” She came to him and set her hand on his forearm, stopping its arc as he brought the bottle to his mouth. “Don’t you miss being happy, Heath?”
He did. But what he’d known before wasn’t something he could ever get back. That kind of happiness was only possible in a life where things that weren’t supposed to happen didn’t happen.
And Gabe was possibly the only person he knew who might truly understand that.
“Emma, you meddle. You’re worse than Mama ever was.”
“I just want all my men happy.” She looped her arm around his waist, and he closed her up in a hug.
“Why don’t you pick on Logan, then?” Their brother had never been married or even serious with a woman. He preferred the buckle bunnies of the rodeo circuit or, lately, the bored wives who came down from the Moondancer while their husbands were out failing to rope calves.
“Logan is happy. Just as he is. Don’t worry—if he ever looks like he needs a woman, you can rest assured, I’ll be on that like flies on shit.”
Heath laughed and kissed the top of his sister’s head. “Hey—language. It’s Sunday.”
Chapter Six
Daddy! Daddy! DAAAA-DEEE!
Heath sat upright with a strangled shout, and the dream faded away, but, as always, its claws scraped over him on its way into oblivion. The sheet was twisted damply around his body, and he struggled in a panic to get to his feet. He had to get out of the fucking bed.
With Ruthie’s screams clawing down the back of his brain, he stumbled naked through his howlingly empty house, past the closed door he never opened, and into his kitchen. He yanked open the fridge door, making the bottles and jars in the door shelves jangle angrily.
Squinting against the bright light inside, he saw noth
ing on the top shelf but a mostly-empty jug of tomato juice and half a red onion. He was out of beer. Fuck.
Fine, then. He preferred bourbon anyway, and it would get him drunker.
Slamming the door shut, he opened a cupboard and pulled down a bottle of Jim Beam instead. Not bothering with a glass, he untwisted the cap and put the bottle to his lips, drinking it down like water until the burn finally forced him to stop. Then he leaned back against the counter with the bottle in his shaking hands. He closed his eyes and did what Doc Lind had told him to do: visualize a calming scene. For him, it was always the same: riding Maggie through the woods, then coming to the wide clearing at the back of the ranch and giving her her head, letting her ease into her gallop, a gait so smooth it was like her hooves barely touched the ground.
It had been months since he’d had that dream. Not since Ruthie’s birthday. It wasn’t even a dream, not really. It was a memory, a true thing, relived in perfect recall, every detail in high definition.
As each year passed, it came a little bit less often. The first few months, he’d hardly slept, because it had lain in wait for him at every slip of consciousness. Now, it only reared up on special occasions.
Or on a random night like this, when he’d had cause during the day to think hard on what he’d lost. Whom he’d lost. And how.
Knowing he wouldn’t sleep more without the help of the bottle in his hand, he put it back to his lips and took another long, burning drink, swallowing four times before he pulled away.
There. Now he could feel quiet seeping up his spine. He’d sleep undisturbed the rest of the night.
But he took one more swig, just to be sure.
*****
The following Friday night, Heath sat in his usual chair at his usual table at the Jack. Emmett, Paul, and Victor sat with him, rounding out the table in the usual way. They were all winding up to their usual Friday night fever pitch, and the bar was starting to hop like a usual Friday, but Heath just sat back, drinking and listening to his friends’ banter with half an ear and his eyes at half mast.
Somewhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories Book 1) Page 6