He faced her from the other side of the kitchen table. “Then why are you? You don’t want to be single, get married. You don’t want to be childless, have a baby. Hell, you’ve got Reese Barnett on the hook. Reel him in. That ought to make your parents real happy—you married to a hotshot ex-jock white boy, turning out little blue-eyed, blond-haired grandkids by the dozen. Problem solved. You’ve got your perfect little future.”
“My parents never cared that you were Indian,” she said, her voice cold enough to make his cheeks turn bronze, because he knew it was true. “As for Reese, he was never a part of my perfect future.”
She knew he recognized the truth in that, too, because her idea of perfect had always included him.
He didn’t acknowledge it, though. “The point is, if you’re not happy with the future you’re facing, you can change it. I can’t. Nothing I can do will take these scars away. I can’t heal my hip. I can’t make myself walk normally. I sure as hell can’t do anything about this.”
Without warning, he pulled his right hand from his pocket, slapping it down on the curved rim of the laundry basket between them. She looked down, swallowed a horrified gasp and swiftly looked away. After only an instant, though, she forced her stunned gaze back to his hand, staring at scars, at misshapen fingers and empty space where three other fingers should have been. The scars were thick, discolored and covered the entire back of his hand. They were ugly, brutal, and they made her feel sick for the pain he must have suffered, the loss he’d been forced to endure.
“Oh, Easy,” she whispered and reached out. He didn’t let her touch him, though, didn’t let her brush even the tips of her fingers against his skin. Instead, he jerked back, hiding his hand in his pocket once more, turning away to stare out the window at the empty corral.
“Ropers are always at risk of getting bung up in their ropes and losing a finger or two.” His voice was flat, totally without emotion. “I roped professionally for more than sixteen years and never had a problem, and now... Funny, isn’t it?”
Now he would never rope a calf again. He would never train horses again, would never do a lot of things. It was so far from funny that it made her want to sink to the floor and cry.
But she didn’t. She breathed deeply a couple of times, made an effort to get her emotions under control, then softly asked, “Why didn’t you call me?”
“When?”
“After the accident.”
Swinging around, he fixed his dark scowl on her. “After the accident,” he repeated. His words grew harsher, his tone disbelieving as he went on. “And what was I supposed to say? ‘I know I’ve been a bastard to you and I broke your heart, but I’m so screwed up now that no other woman would ever want me, so, hey, would you come back?’”
“It probably would have worked,” she acknowledged. “Though I would have preferred if you’d just said, ‘Shay, I need you.’”
He stared at her so long that edgy discomfort began to tingle down her spine. When he finally spoke, discomfort was joined by hurt. “You’re a fool.”
“Maybe,” she acknowledged, then somewhere deep inside she found a sorry smile. “Probably. For fourteen years my mother’s called you ‘a good-for-nothing rodeo cowboy,’ and I’ve been her ‘empty-headed, fool-minded daughter.’”
After a moment he turned back to the window over the sink. The silence between them was uneasy, thick with sorrow, regret, unhealed wounds. The sounds of the refrigerator motor cycling on and off, a fan whirring nearby or a quail calling in the weeds outside weren’t loud enough to break the stillness. But the sound of her heartbeat was, and the slow, tautly controlled sound of his breathing.
Finally he sighed. It shuddered through him, made his shoulders shake, before whispering into the room. “How is your mother?”
Shay breathed and realized for the first time that she’d stopped. Her lungs were tight, her stomach muscles clenched, her fingers knotted. She breathed again and consciously relaxed her fingers, eased her muscles, filled her lungs. “She’s fine. She keeps busy running the house and the town and everyone’s lives.”
“And Jim?”
“Dad’s fine, too. He devotes his attention to the ranch and lets Mom handle everything and everyone else.”
Two civil questions, two civil answers. That was enough to qualify for polite conversation, she thought with a cynical smile. If they could master that, who knew what they might manage next? Someday they might even reach the point where they could discuss important questions like, Why did you leave me? and, Why did you do it that way? and, Don’t you feel anything besides guilt for me?
But he didn’t ask another question, and she couldn’t think of any of her own that weren’t important. After a moment’s fruitless search for one, she picked up the laundry basket and went into the hall that led to the bedrooms.
He was sleeping in his old room at the back of the house. It was sparely furnished, with wallpaper so faded the pattern was barely distinguishable. She remembered it, though—small dots interspersed with geometric shapes on an ivory background. Once, when they’d been sent off to play while the adults talked around the dinner table, they’d started a game of wallpaper dot-to-dot with crayons. By the time they’d gotten caught, she’d filled two dozen squares with her initial. As punishment, the next week she’d been farmed out to Betsey for spring cleaning, working harder than she’d ever worked before.
The only furniture in the room was a bed and a dresser, mismatched in style, material and finish. There was no mirror on the dresser, no curtains on the windows, no bedside table with a lamp. Not surprisingly, the bed was unmade—he’d spent the better part of sixteen years living in motels with maid service—but the room was clean, no doubt thanks to Joelle.
She didn’t put the laundry away, but simply set the basket on the dresser. She was turning back to the door when she saw him leaning there. His mere presence in the doorway changed the whole feel of the room. It was no longer an austere bedroom—plain, a little shabby, serviceable but nothing more. It was a room with tremendous potential—a room that promised passion and pleasure, disappointment and pain, heartbreak and healing. Some of their best times had been spent in similar rooms, in similar beds—some of the hottest, sweetest, most tender moments she’d ever experienced.
And some of her worst times had been spent in those same beds—alone, while Easy partied without her. Crying because he’d ignored her in favor of another woman. Hating him for going home with someone else. Hating herself for knowing she would welcome him back without an apology, without pride, without self-respect.
He had always come back, and she had always welcomed him, except that last time. She’d waited, ready to swallow her dignity—waited day after day for seven days before finally accepting that he wasn’t coming back. That time he’d done more than take up with another woman for a night or two. That time he’d really left her.
God, how she’d missed him!
And, God help her, how she’d suffered. She’d paid dearly for having him, and she’d paid even more dearly for not having him. And here she was, putting herself back in his life again.
Suddenly she wanted out of the bedroom. She didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to hurt, didn’t want to want. She’d been through enough with Easy—way more than too much. She wanted desperately to be free
But she would never be free.
Her throat tight, her nerves on edge, she slipped past him and walked away. She didn’t go far, though, just to the front porch, where she could stand in the sunlight, breathe the hot, dry air, warm the chills that had rushed through her, cool the panic that had followed.
It was a simple fact of life, one that she’d accepted when she’d run off with him fourteen years ago. One she’d faced again every time things got bad, every time they fell apart, every time they put themselves back together. Whether he was here or gone, a part of her life or just bittersweet memories, she would never be free of him.
That was a promise.
&nb
sp; Or was it a threat?
Chapter 4
Easy stood where she’d left him, eyes closed. She’d passed so close that with no more than a deep breath, he could have touched her. He could have let his cane fall to the floor, could have laid his hand on her arm, brushed his fingers over her skin, held her round the waist and pulled her tight and hard against him, and then he could have—
What? he thought bitterly. What the hell could he have done next? Seduced her? Maybe, if she was feeling generous. Undressed her? Probably, after a time, after working and fumbling and failing.
Made love to her? Possibly. After a fashion. In one way or another.
And what would it earn him, besides the incredible pleasure of her body? Besides some semblance of the affection she’d once given him freely? Besides a tenuous connection, however brief, to the man he’d once been?
It would gain him her pity. Quite possibly her disappointment. It could earn him her farewell. No matter how insufferable he’d been before, at least the sex had always been fantastic. Now, at best, it would be tolerable. His body didn’t look the way it once did, didn’t work the way it once did. With his hip as badly damaged as it was, he didn’t know whether he was even capable of making love to a woman.
Until he’d come back here, he hadn’t cared.
Now that she’d come here, he did.
Slowly he followed in the direction she’d gone, pausing when he reached the screen door. She was standing near the swing, facing west, hugging herself.
Sometimes he wished—for her sake, for his own—that they’d never met. Sometimes he thought she’d been a test of his character, a temptation he was supposed to resist, a way to prove that he had honor, strength, loyalty, willpower. His punishment for failing—for going with her to Buffalo Lake that April day, for running away with her that afternoon—was this. Having her, but not having her. Looking at her and seeing not just the woman he’d loved, but every person they’d had to hurt to be together. Lacking the honor to stay away from her, but possessing too much loyalty to his friend—too much shame and guilt were more to the truth—to allow himself to be happy with her.
He had always wanted desperately to be happy with her.
He pushed the screen door open with a creak, cleared the threshold and closed the door quietly so it didn’t bang. Though she didn’t turn, didn’t flinch, didn’t react at all, he knew she knew he was there.
Moving to the swing, he sat down and stretched out his left leg in an effort to ease the cramping, the pain in his hip. He braced the cane against the wall, fixed his gaze on a stunted mimosa just east of the house and wondered just how normal he could make himself sound. “You said something about a café.”
Her deep breath sounded stressed. After a moment she turned, lowered her arms and went to lean against the porch railing at the top of the steps. “Yeah. Heartbreak Café, operated by me, owned by the bank, my folks and me.”
“So you learned to cook.” Most of their meals had been taken on the road, in cafés and diners across the country, but for a few months each year when there were no rodeos to compete in, they’d settled into a temporary home somewhere. During those months, her ineptitude in the kitchen had been a constant source of bad jokes, heartburn and worse.
She almost smiled. The corners of her mouth lifted fractionally, and the shadows in her eyes—browner than ever, just as he’d expected—lightened. “No, ’fraid not. But I learned to hire good cooks. I’m only allowed into the kitchen to inventory supplies so I can place orders, and to wash dishes.”
“If you didn’t want a café, why’d you buy one?”
“I came back here with no money, no job skills, no ambition—nothing but the desire to not live off my parents, who were still very unhappy with me. The café had closed just a month or two before, and Dad thought helping me buy it might be his only chance to get me off his hands and out of Mom’s house.”
“You could have gone back to Guthrie.” Their old friend had loved her dearly. He would have forgiven her, would have taken her back.
“I didn’t want Guthrie,” she said flatly.
The no-room-for-doubt certainty of her statement pleased him somewhere inside, because he was the reason she hadn’t wanted Guthrie. And since he was also the reason she’d come back with no money and no job skills to a family who was angry with her, the pleasure just confirmed that he was a first-class bastard.
“So other than run the café, what have you done for six years?”
She tossed her head—a much more effective action when she’d had heavy blond hair reaching halfway down her back—and looked hard, unflinchingly, at him. “I took a cue from you. I dated a lot of men. Used them, then dumped them.”
In spite of the sun’s heat on his back, a chill crept over him—cold, ugly, angry. It took all his willpower to control it, to remind himself that when he’d left her, he’d lost his place in her life. He had no right to be jealous, no right to expect her to remain loyal to him. He for damn sure had no right to expect her to stay faithful to him when he’d betrayed her in every way but that.
“If I were in the habit of carving notches in my bedposts, I imagine my lifetime total might rival yours,” she said, her voice unsteady, her tone taunting.
“I doubt it,” he replied quietly.
Taunting turned reckless. “You don’t think I could find that many willing men?”
“I think any man you meet would be willing. But I know I haven’t been with that many women. In fact, I could count them on one hand.” He glanced down at his right hand and smiled bitterly. “Well, I could count them on my left hand.”
For one long moment she stared at him, disbelief and distrust heavy in her expression. Then she muttered an oath that was vicious, scornful. “You had that many in any one year we were together.”
He shook his head. In spite of the fact that he’d spent eight years fostering her disbelief and distrust, it stung that she’d learned it so well, that all these years later she was as ready to believe the worst of him as she’d been then.
“What about Clarissa? Tracy? Loreena? That redhead from Texas, the rodeo queen in Arizona, the reporter in Wyoming?”
He shook his head again.
“All those women, all those dances and drinks, all those nights you never came home, and you’re telling me you never made love to any of them?”
“I never made love to anyone but you.”
Making an impatient gesture, she damn near stamped her foot. “You never had sex with any of them?”
“Only before you, and after.” Long after. Two, maybe three years, when he’d gotten particularly morose and unbearably lonely. It’d been a futile exercise, though, like drinking vinegar to satisfy a thirst for water. It wasn’t mere intimacy he’d craved, but intimacy with Shay, to the exclusion of all other women in the world.
She stared at him with such derision, and such hurt. “You bastard,” she murmured, then her voice grew stronger, colder. “You arrogant, manipulative, selfcentered bastard! You hurt me! Every time you went off with another woman, every time you didn’t come back to our room to sleep, every time you came back smelling of another woman... You let me believe—you made me believe you were sleeping with them, and it hurt so bad I could hardly stand it, and it was lies? You made up lies to hurt me?”
He rubbed his forehead to ease the ache forming there, then let his fingers slide the length of the scar before falling away. “That was the point,” he said at last. “I wanted you to leave. I thought if I hurt you enough times you would get angry enough to go ”
“If you were so damn anxious to be free of me, why didn’t you leave?” she demanded.
“I couldn’t. It took eight years to find the strength to walk away.” Eight years of loving her. Eight years of hating them both.
She didn’t have a problem finding the strength. After staring at him for one long, hostile moment, she did exactly that. She turned away, walked down the steps and across the yard to her car.
&
nbsp; His jaw clenching, he watched her go, torn between the desire to call her back and the certainty that her leaving was best. She’d wasted too many years, too many tears, on him. He’d had nothing to offer her before and even less now.
But it hurt too damn bad to see her drive away, to know that this time she probably wouldn’t return. This time he had probably lost her forever, and while he had no doubt that would be best for her, he also had no doubt it would be one of the saddest things in his whole sorry life.
Sunday mornings were slow in the café, but five minutes after the first church service ended, the dinner customers would start arriving and they wouldn’t stop until Shay was tired and had made a nice chunk of the week’s profit. Calculating she still had about twenty minutes to spare, she poured herself a glass of cold milk, stirred in a generous spoon of chocolate syrup and went to sit in an empty booth.
She hadn’t slept well last night and had downed a pot or two of high-test coffee to make up for it. It hadn’t helped, though. She’d already been on edge, and now she felt about ready to explode. The first whiny kid or difficult customer, and she was going to drop everything and stand in the middle of the dining room screaming until she’d run them all off. Then she would send her staff home, put the Closed sign on the door and go hide somewhere. The utility closet in back sounded appealing—small, dark, the last place anyone would look.
The bell over the door rang, but she didn’t look up. Instead, she twisted her glass around in circles and wondered if she could justify a vacation. Better yet, maybe she could revert to old habits and simply run away. In her travels with Easy, she’d seen the entire country west of the Mississippi, with the exception of Alaska. She was familiar with most big cities and countless little towns. She could find a new place to live.
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