Rancher's Proposition

by Anne Marie Winston

  “So you left,” Lyn said softly. She rose, too, and walked to the sink to start some dishwater.

  “Yes.” She exhaled heavily, leaning both hands on the counter. “I wanted to take Cal with me. But Tom wouldn’t hear of it. We had some terrible fights. Finally, he told me that if I took his son, he’d come after him. He said he’d tell everyone at home how I’d run off…he said he’d tell them I’d been with other men and wasn’t a fit mother….” She whirled and faced Lyn. “I know this might seem stupid to you, but I was raised in a wealthy Southern family where scandal simply is not tolerated. Even a hint of something improper sticks like glue. If it had only been me, I wouldn’t have cared. But it would have affected Mama and Daddy, our whole family.” Her voice was bitter. “Southerners of good family,” she said in a mocking voice, “can be a cruel, insular group. It might have been the twentieth century, but there were still some mighty rigid standards in place.”

  Lyn didn’t know how to respond. What Cora Lee was describing was so far outside her admittedly limited experience that it hardly seemed credible. Still…she believed it, and that was what was important. “So you left Cal with his father.”

  “Not exactly.” The older woman sat heavily on one of the bar stools. “I couldn’t leave without my son. I told Tom I wouldn’t go then, but he threw me out. Bought me a plane ticket back to Virginia and told me I’d never get through the front door of his home again.” She looked around her former husband’s home with a rueful half smile. “He’s probably rolling over in his grave right about now!”

  “He should be. Tyrant.” Lyn was so shocked she could barely speak.

  “I cried for weeks. Months.” Her eyes were misting, and Lyn could feel her own tears welling up. “I called but Tom would hang up. Daddy contacted a lawyer in Rapid City who laughed and said there was no way I could get Cal since I’d abandoned him.” She put her hands to her eyes and pressed fiercely. “Eventually my divorce was final, and a couple of years after that I met Silver’s daddy.”

  “But…your— Tom allowed Cal to begin visiting with you?”

  Cora Lee nodded behind her hands. “When Cal got old enough to start asking hard questions, Tom relented a little. He let me have Cal for a week or two every summer.” She took her hands away from her face and the tears rolled down her cheeks. “You can’t imagine— I lived for those few days every year. But every year Cal grew a little more distant. Even when he came that summer after the accident he wouldn’t let me comfort him—”

  “Ready to leave, Mother?” It was Cal’s voice, deep and mocking.

  Both women jumped. Lyn’s gaze flew to the archway to the living room, where he’d apparently come out of his office…when? Cal’s jaw was clenched, his face a stony mask. But his eyes were alive, livid and leaping with fury.

  “Cal.” Instinctively she reached out a hand. “What—how—”

  “How much did I hear?” He sneered, and the expression was so ugly he didn’t even look like her husband. “The whole touching tale.”

  “I’ll get my coat.” Cora Lee’s face was as white as the hand soap at the sink.

  “I’ll take her home.” Lyn started to walk toward the mudroom where the coats were but Cal stepped forward and caught her by the arm.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Lyn went still. She’d sworn to herself that she would never allow any man to touch her in anger again. “Take your hand off me,” she said in a low, flat voice.

  To his credit, he released her instantly. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  She turned her back on him. “Give me the keys.”

  “No. She’s my—”

  “I said give me the keys!”

  She didn’t know which one of them was more shocked. Cal’s head snapped back as if she’d struck him.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth.

  They stared at each other through a space far more vast than the few feet separating them across the kitchen. Then the same blank expression slipped over his features again. Silently, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the keys, tossing them to her.

  The jarring jangle of the keys was the only sound as she turned, equally silently, and walked into the mud-room. Cora Lee stood in a small, miserable hunch at the door. When Lyn got her coat on, she opened the door and gestured for Cal’s mother to precede her.

  He was still standing where she’d left him. She started to walk out the door, then stopped, though she didn’t turn to face him. Quietly, she said, “Shall I come back?”

  There was total silence behind her for a moment and she thought he might say no. Her heart skipped a beat. Then he spoke in a deep, toneless voice. “I’m not my father. I won’t throw you out of your home.”

  Nine

  He was watching the news when she got back.

  How should she handle this? Instinct told her Cal wouldn’t bring it up. The man was a master at sweeping undesirable emotions under the rug. The same instinct told her, though, that if the wounds his little-boy’s heart had suffered were ever to heal cleanly, they had to talk about what his mother had revealed.

  It was an unfair position for Fate to place her in. She loved Cal too much to see him suffer for the rest of his life. On the other hand, she could lose whatever chance she had of winning his love if she forced him to confront his past. Neither choice, she thought bleakly, was palatable.

  She finished cleaning up the kitchen and then joined him in the living room. Since the first time they’d made love, he’d begun sitting on the couch with her cuddled in his arm while they checked the news and weather. But tonight he was back in the recliner where he’d sat before.

  Her heart sank, but she quietly took her usual seat on the couch and opened the basket that contained her sewing. She had a button to sew onto one of Cal’s shirts, and when she had finished that, she resumed work on the tiny sweater set she was knitting for Deck and Silver’s baby. She was finished with the sweater itself and nearly done the hat, and she was sure she’d have the dainty booties done before Christmas.

  The room was silent except for the drone of the newscaster. How to begin?

  “If you heard the whole story,” she said, as if they’d been in the middle of a rational discussion, “then you know your mother didn’t just walk away and forget you.”

  He turned his head and looked at her, and his eyes were a frozen lake of gray. “She can twist the story any way she likes. My father can’t defend himself anymore.”

  “Your father told you your mother was an aristocratic snob, true?”

  “Your point being?”

  “Think about it,” she said forcefully. “For such a terrible snob, she surely seemed friendly with Rilla. God knows Rilla will never win any prizes for gentility, but she’s got a big heart. She’s also a good judge of people and she liked your mother.”

  He didn’t answer, merely compressed his lips into an even grimmer line.

  “You heard her explain why she never made friends here,” she said desperately. “And anyone could see that her heart still aches at the memory of leaving you—”

  “No!” He slammed a fist down on the arm of his chair, and she jumped. “I married you because I wanted a steady, sensible wife who could handle ranch living.” His eyes weren’t cold any longer, but hot and turbulent. “I didn’t ask you to butt into my personal life.”

  Every word sliced into her tender heart like butcher knives. A steady, sensible wife… Every dream she’d ever had of Cal returning her love shriveled into dust and blew away like prairie topsoil. Slowly, she bowed her head and stared at the floor so he wouldn’t see the trembling lip she was biting so fiercely. “No. You didn’t.”

  “Then don’t try to change me,” he said. “Either take me and this marriage the way you found them or…” He didn’t finish the sentence but the implication ricocheted around the room as if he’d shouted it.

  She could hardly see her needlework for the tears that flooded her eyes, but she kept her gaze on it anyway. She couldn’t
have looked at him if she’d been ordered to. It was too painful to view the death of all the hopes she’d had for the future.

  Cal got to his feet. He crossed to the door, and as he passed her, he hesitated for a moment. But she kept her head down, willing herself to concentrate on making her shaking fingers complete the tiny purls on which she was working, and after a long, tense couple of heartbeats, he walked out of the room and up the stairs.

  And her fingers stilled as the tears fell.

  After what seemed like a long time but probably was less than an hour, she stirred. The forgotten needlework lay in her lap, and she folded it carefully and put it away. Then she rose, slowly, feeling like a creaky old woman, and went methodically through the house turning off lights. At the top of the stairs, she paused. Did Cal expect her to sleep with him tonight?

  The door to the room she’d been coming to think of as theirs was slightly ajar, the way it usually was at night. But she couldn’t bring herself to walk into that room and slide into bed with him. He’d made it very clear that while he might want her body, he certainly didn’t want or need any of her emotions in his marriage. A steady, sensible wife…

  So she slipped into her old room and got ready for bed, then turned out the last light after she’d climbed in and pulled up the covers.

  At the other end of the hall, Cal lay alone in the bed he’d shared with his wife for the past several nights. Though there was little light, he stared, eyes dry and burning, at the ceiling. He’d heard her go into her old room and realized that she wasn’t planning to sleep with him tonight.

  Resentment tightened his throat until he could barely swallow. He’d gotten along fine without a mother most of his life. Why did Lyn constantly try to shove his mother down his throat?

  He lay for hours, wrestling with questions that had no answers. When he finally slept, his mother’s voice haunted his dreams.

  When he awoke in the morning, he forced himself to move through his normal routine instead of running down the stairs and grabbing his wife and kissing her senseless until she forgot why she’d been mad at him. As he descended the stairs, a cautious sense of pleasure spread through him as he inhaled the welcome scent of coffee. This might be his favorite part of the day, this moment when Lyn handed him his first cup of coffee and he held her against him for a few moments. And if she thought this morning was going to be different just because they’d had their first fight, she was in for a big surprise.

  But she wasn’t in the kitchen. His coffee was still in the pot, freshly dripped thanks to the timer. On the counter lay a note.

  Cal— I volunteered to take Mrs. Jenssen to the airport in Rapid. Your lunch is in the fridge. We have to talk this evening. Lyn

  His pleasure in the day evaporated. The note was businesslike in its simplicity, not a word of intimacy. It could have been written by an employee.

  Guilt struck. Wasn’t that essentially what he’d told Lyn she was?

  How in hell had things gone so wrong between them? On his wedding night, and every night since, he’d felt like the luckiest man in the world. He needed Lyn to make him complete. Didn’t she realize that? Though he hadn’t fully realized it until he’d slipped his ring on her finger and heard her soft, husky voice repeating their wedding vows, he needed her.

  His heart was racing and his chest was tight as he reread the terse note. Talk? About what? Was she leaving him? Last night’s ultimatum had slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it. Even then, he hadn’t been able to utter the word “leave.” He was too terrified she’d do it.

  He stared at the door, unseeing, with dry, burning eyes. His life had finally seemed perfect. He was a rancher again, something he’d wanted almost since the day he left South Dakota as a miserable teenager. He had a ranch that promised to do reasonably well, and he’d found the woman he’d been looking for his entire life to share it with him.

  The woman he’d been looking for his entire life. Lyn, with her quiet competence, her graceful presence, her soft, sweet body and the way she became a wildcat in his arms. She loved him, he was sure. It might have started out as gratitude for giving her a home, but he didn’t really care as long as she never stopped loving him. He wished she’d told him how she felt, but then why would she? He’d made her think she was no more important to him than a valuable ranch hand.

  The room suddenly seemed cold, and he shivered. If she left him he didn’t know what he’d do.

  My God, he loved her. He’d never intended to let himself open to loving someone, never intended to give someone the power to shatter his life as his mother had shattered his father’s. But he hadn’t had a choice. She’d sneaked into his heart and blown down all his carefully placed fences and now he didn’t think he could live without her.

  If she left him it would be one more thing in his life to blame his mother for.

  As soon as the thought entered his head, he knew it wasn’t fair. Lyn would tell him he was a better man than to have petty thoughts like that, and he guessed she must be rubbing off on him because even he couldn’t blame his mother for his current predicament. He’d come out of his office to drive her home last night and found the two women so deep in discussion they’d never even heard him halt just outside the kitchen door.

  All his life, he’d heard about the woman who hated South Dakota, who couldn’t abide its citizens and who cared so little for her own child that she abandoned him as an infant. He’d visited her in Virginia and seen a woman serene in her environment, apparently perfectly happy with her second family and pleased to include him in the charmed circle on a temporary basis. A woman who’d forgotten all about his father, even though Cal knew his father remembered her every time he looked at the son they’d created together.

  Lyn had seen something entirely different when she looked at his mother, and despite his displeasure, she’d risked her own happiness to show him he’d been wrong.

  He’d been wrong! His father had been a good man, but clearly he hadn’t been entirely fair to Cal’s mother in his recall of their shared past. Lyn was right. His mother surely didn’t behave as if she thought she was better than someone like Rilla, who was definitely a diamond in the rough. The memory of the devastation in Cora Lee’s voice when she’d spoken of leaving him behind pierced his heart, creating for the first time a small opening, like the abscess in the gelding’s hoof, through which the poison and bitterness that had infected his system for so many years began to drain.

  He closed his eyes. He wanted to share his moment of truth with Lyn, but after the things he’d said last night, he was afraid she’d think he was just mouthing the words so she wouldn’t leave.

  Tonight, he promised himself. Tonight, he and Lyn were going to have a long talk. A talk that included words like love and forgive, words like forever. He’d start over with his mother, make up for the years he’d held back. Lyn would be cleared of the charges of murder just as soon as they figured out who had killed her husband, because he knew with every fiber of his being that she couldn’t have done it.

  He paused, something nagging at the back of his mind. The day of their wedding they’d stopped at the police station. Biddle and Amick, the detectives, had questioned Lyn, and she’d told them about the dreams. The dreams…there was something about the dreams…

  And then he knew what it was. And his blood ran cold.

  On an impulse, he picked up the phone and called the Pennington County Sheriff’s Department. Amick answered the phone in the investigations division.

  “Where’s your partner?” Cal asked peremptorily after he’d identified himself.

  There was a silence. “He’s taking some personal leave,” Amick answered cautiously. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I think the son of a bitch killed a man, and he might be after my wife.”

  There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Tell me,” said the detective. “We need to know everything you know. Your wife’s life might depend on it.”

&nbs
p; “It was right under your nose,” Cal told him roughly. “The last time we were in, when Lyn mentioned her dreams, she never said anything about where she was hiding. And yet your good buddy Biddle asked her, “How did you get out of the closet and get away?”

  “Damn,” Amick said. “I can’t believe I missed it. We’ve been investigating him for some high-stakes gambling activity, which I suspect is how Galloway got involved.”

  Amick’s tone was infused with urgency when he spoke again. “Mr. McCall, keep your wife within sight at all times until I personally contact you again.”

  “I can’t.” Cal’s voice was flat. “She drove my mother to the airport in Rapid this morning.”

  “We have to assume he might have been watching for a chance to get her alone,” Amick said. “Let me make a few calls for manpower and we’ll start looking right away.”

  “I’m doing the same,” Cal informed him. “And you’d better hope you find him first.”

  Amick drew in another sharp breath. “I can’t advocate vigilantism, McCall—”

  “Then don’t. Just get busy.”

  “McCall.” There was a pause. “He drives a dark blue Ford.”

  Cal exhaled resolutely. “Thanks.” And he cut the connection. His heart was pounding; adrenaline rushed through him. The thought of Lyn and his mother in the hands of a cold-blooded killer twisted his gut into knots, and he forced the panic from his mind, coolly concentrating on what he needed to do.

  He called Deck, Marty and his cowboys. They spread out over the highways, moving toward Murdo, toward Interior, toward Martin and Midland and over every other halfway decent road, looking for the silver pickup Lyn would be driving. He took off along the route she should have used, taking I-90 straight to Rapid City.

  She shouldn’t have much of a head start on him, if any, because Silver told him he’d just missed them when he called. So he floored the gas pedal well beyond the legal limit, rocketing down the interstate at nearly ninety. This early in the morning, there wasn’t another vehicle in sight.