She angled her head to watch him. He drove left-handed, with his right elbow resting on the center console. Though his face was little more than a silhouette in the darkness, she could make out the chiseled plane of his cheeks, the dark dusting of stubble over his square jaw, his expression of concentration.
Allowing her heavy eyelids to flutter shut before he felt her staring, she smoothed a hand over the silky fabric lining the interior of Kellan’s suit jacket. Why had he been standing outside her house that morning? Dressed in a suit like a door-to-door salesman. No, the suit reminded her more of the clothing the Chef Showdown producers wore—crafted of high-end fabric, beautifully tailored. Was her mind playing tricks on her or had she actually caught a glimpse of a black leather briefcase on the porch?
He’d seemed so straightforward at first glance last weekend at the Quick Stand. A local good ol’ boy, with the wardrobe and the physique of one too. He owned and operated a ranch, and kept the schedule to prove it. Early to rise, early to bed, with lots of hard labor in between. But every time she’d seen him since church on Sunday, he appeared less like a cowboy. More city-dwelling and sophisticated. More complex.
She cracked her eyelids open again and studied him, her instincts on alert. Where was his tie? Doffed for comfort? The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled up to expose his forearms. His face gave nothing away except a hint of his fatigue, but Amy’s instincts wouldn’t shut up. She had no evidence to support her theory, and could easily blame her fatigue for her paranoia, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that Kellan was more than he seemed. That he was concealing a crucial piece of himself. Like Brock McKenna.
What had he said to her the night before, in his bedroom as Amy scrounged on the floor for her discarded clothes? This isn’t the way I envisioned telling you the truth about me—about my other business connection in Quay County and the conflict of interest.
What other business?
At the time, she was too humiliated by her wanton behavior to listen. But now, she wanted to know. Had her manipulations at the hands of Brock McKenna left her looking for betrayal where none existed . . . or was Kellan hiding something?
The car slowed, then turned. The road grew bumpy. They’d arrived at Sorentino Farm. The sound of movement from the backseat told her Jenna and Rachel were stirring, probably jostled awake by the change in terrain. Amy stretched and straightened. In her periphery, she saw Kellan’s gaze dart to her, his brows pinched in concern.
She didn’t acknowledge him, knowing her eyes would give away her tumult of emotions. Her body felt electric, alive. Angry. She wanted answers. And so help her, Kellan wasn’t leaving her property until she got some.
He pulled to a stop in front of the big house, angling it so the headlights illuminated the porch, and shifted into park with the engine running. He opened Rachel’s door and offered her his hand. Amy twisted in her seat and squeezed Jenna’s hand. “Get some rest, sis. I’ll call you in the morning.”
Jenna yawned. “Not too early. Maybe Tommy’ll let me sleep until seven or so.”
“That would be awfully considerate of him.”
Amy’s door opened. Cold night air whooshed over her. She stared up at Kellan, who regarded her solemnly and offered his hand. She hung his jacket over his fingers as though it were a coat hook and stood. “You’re going to drive Jenna and Tommy home?”
“Yeah. I’ll walk back for my truck.”
“I’ll be waiting. We need to talk.”
A flash of surprise crossed his features before disappearing, replaced by resolve. “Not tonight. You need to rest. And I do too. It’s been a long, draining day for all of us.”
Nice try. She brushed past him toward the house.
“Good night, Amy,” he said quietly.
She paused, one foot on the stairs, her gaze settling on the elegant black leather briefcase tucked on the floor near the porch swing. “Take Jenna and Tommy home. I’ll be waiting.”
The screen door banged shut behind Rachel. The porch light flickered on. The shadows on the porch shifted as Kellan swung Jenna’s car around and drove away. Amy propped the screen door open with her shoulder. Rachel had left a trail of lights on for her, leading to the second floor.
“I’m going to watch the stars for a bit, see if I can screw my head on straight before I try to sleep,” she hollered at the staircase.
Rachel’s head poked over the railing. “Don’t push Kellan tonight. He did us a big favor, driving us to the hospital and keeping an eye on Tommy.”
With a plastic smile, Amy shut the front door on Little Miss Bossypants. She settled onto the porch’s bench swing and hauled the heavy briefcase onto her lap. Her palms slid over the cold, smooth leather.
This isn’t the way I envisioned telling you the truth about me.
Her thumbs settled on the latches. Time to open it and discover Kellan’s secrets. Then again, perhaps he’d come to her farm that morning with a Slipping Rock beef supply contract. If so, then violating his privacy would be a huge mistake. But she didn’t think today’s surprise visit had been about beef, not with the designer suit and tie. And yet, he’d driven his beater truck. The pricey briefcase and truck didn’t line up. A flick of her thumbs pushed the latches open. The sound cracked in the silent night. A fist through the darkness.
Rancher Kellan or Businessman Kellan. Worn-out Cowboy Boots verses Polished Loafers. Who was he?
She sounded as paranoid as her mom on one of her bend-ers. Another flick of her thumbs resealed the case. She hugged it to her chest. Papers inside shifted, along with the clink of pens sliding and resettling. Rocking the swing with the heel of her boot, she waited, staring at the outlines of distant mountain ridges framed against the moonlit sky. The winter air numbed her fingers and ears.
The crunch of boots on gravel preceded Kellan’s arrival. Amy’s heart rate picked up. Locking her fingers together to steady them, she blanked her expression and watched Kellan approach.
He stopped at the base of the stairs, his dark eyes intense on her, toggling from her face to the briefcase, then back. The line of his lips straightened and thinned. His cheek rippled, like he’d clamped his teeth together. “Did you look inside?”
“No.” But now she wished she had.
He nodded and took the stairs two at a time. Perching on the far edge of the bench, he eased the case from her lap and set it on the floor, out of her reach.
Amy gnawed her bottom lip, working up the nerve to begin the interrogation. “Why did you come to my house this morning?”
“You’ve been through enough today. Can’t we save this for tomorrow? Get some sleep?”
“I’m going to the hospital tomorrow. So we’ll talk about this now. Why did you come to my house, when last night you didn’t want anything more to do with me?”
He shifted his weight more fully onto the swing and propped his elbows on his knees, head in hands. Amy counted stars, giving him time to work up to an explanation. Clearly, it was going to be a doozy.
“I grew up in Henderson Mill, Florida, Calhoun County,” he said, leaning back. “Me, my mom and dad, and my brother, Jake.”
Okay. “What are you getting at? I want to know about this morning.”
“This is part of it—how I grew up, my family. You need to understand.”
He seemed tormented, as though he were confessing to dark secrets or sins. She had no idea how stories of his childhood related to their discussion, but she’d indulge him to a point. “All right. Is your family still in Florida?”
“No . . . I don’t know . . . I’ll get to that. My mom worked the evening shift at the local grocery store. She was like a ghost. We felt her presence in the house, found evidence, but didn’t see much of her. Most of the time it was only Jake and me, and my dad in the evenings. He was the one who made us dinner, tucked us in bed most nights. We did all right for three guys until he decided it was more fun to be high than deal with his real life.”
“Sounds like my dad, more
or less. Did your dad have a job?”
“He worked at a silkscreen factory. By high school, I looked for any excuse not to be at home. It was so depressing, seeing my dad half baked. My mom, too, on her days off.”
Amy shoved her hands in her pockets, lest she reach out to comfort him like she wanted to. “So what did you do to fill the time? Wander the streets? Stay with friends?”
“Football.”
She visualized a younger version of Kellan, beefed up in football gear, looking tough. “Bet you were the star quarterback. Girls probably threw themselves at you on a regular basis.”
He cracked a halfhearted smile. “They might’ve, if I’d stuck with it. I only played my freshman and sophomore years. Never got a chance to be the star quarterback, though I dreamed about it every night.”
“Were you injured?”
“No. We moved school districts, Jake and me. After that, there wasn’t any money for football.” He paused, his eyes distant and sorrowful. With a slow exhalation, he raked his fingers through his hair. “When I was sixteen, the summer before my junior year, my parents were arrested.”
That was not at all the direction of the story Amy had anticipated. “Arrested?”
“For embezzling money from the grocery store Mom worked at. They were convicted on multiple counts, with a fifteen-year sentence each.”
“Oh my God.”
He leapt to his feet and walked to the rail. “Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what? Like I care?”
He whirled to face her. “No, like it’s so shocking. Like it’s the first time in the history of the world people got arrested for being greedy and stupid. Stuff like that happens all the time. Greed’s not a new sin.”
Amy nodded. He didn’t want pity. She collected herself before asking, “What about the instant mashed potatoes you love because they remind you of growing up? When you told me that, I assumed you had a great childhood.”
“I like remembering that part. When I was young and sometimes my dad would let me cook. I was so proud to help. The potatoes were one of the few foods I knew how to fix. Besides opening a can. And I felt like a man, like Dad trusted me to be safe around the boiling water, even though I was only six or seven. I think about it now and he was probably high. Or drunk.”
That’s how Amy learned to cook. When her mom was too depressed to leave her room, and her dad was nowhere to be found, Amy took charge of the meals. The kitchen was the one place where she had control of the outcome. “What happened to you and your brother after they went to jail?”
“Jake and I entered the foster care system, but there weren’t many placement options for teenage brothers. We ended up in a boy’s home the next county over.”
“And when you were eighteen, you left.”
He turned to the rail, hunching into his arms. “When I was eighteen, I left.”
“And Jake?”
“When he was eighteen, he left, too. He’s a cop in L.A. A damned good one, as far as I can tell. We aren’t close.” His tone was laced with regret.
“Why not?”
Kellan shook his head. “He hated me for leaving. He took it personally, like I was abandoning him. And you know what? He was right. It was a shitty thing for me to do.”
She joined him at the rail, not so close that she brushed his sleeve with her arm, but near enough to feel his heat and wish she were at liberty to lean into it. “You were only eighteen. It wasn’t fair for him to put that burden on you.”
“I should’ve stayed in Florida. I was way too immature to become his guardian or anything, but I should’ve stuck around. We could’ve celebrated Christmas together, and our birthdays. I could’ve helped him when he aged out of the system. But I was an angry, selfish punk. We had family in Texas—my mother’s brother and his wife. All I could think about was hitchhiking to their doorstep to demand answers about why they didn’t take Jake and me in when we needed a place to stay. I didn’t give any consideration to what Jake needed from me. I’ll regret that choice for the rest of my life.”
“Have you told him that?”
“No. Tried once, but he was too angry to hear me out.”
“What about your parents?” She did some quick mental math. “They must be out of prison by now.”
“Yes. My mom served eight years of her sentence. My dad, ten. Didn’t take him long to violate his probation, though. Not only did he fail a drug test within the first year, but he was caught with possession and stolen property. Dumb bastard served five more years.”
“Did you stay in contact with them while they were imprisoned?”
“No.” He spit the word out so vehemently, Amy didn’t dare push for details.
“What about since their release? Your mom—”
“Yeah, my mom called after she got out, even managed a Honey, I missed you before hitting me up for bus money and a place to crash.”
“And?”
His broad shoulders grew even stiffer, sliding up toward his ears. He watched his hands close into fists and release, over and over. “I don’t have any use for my parents, or my uncle. My friends in Catcher Creek, the Bindermans and Vaughn, they’re all the family I need.”
Liar, she thought. No one who spoke with such pain could convince her of his indifference—especially to family. She’d learned the hard way that blood ties weren’t a coat to shed when they became inconvenient or painful. Family was forever, no matter how often or how desperately one wished otherwise.
Kellan’s tone, the tension in his body, told Amy he knew it too.
“Did you actually hitchhike to Texas and confront your uncle?”
“I did. Took four months of working odd jobs along the way, but I made it.”
“What did you say to him?”
A bemused smile flashed on his lips. “At first, I didn’t say anything. I socked him in the jaw.”
“Seriously?”
“Like I said, I was an angry punk. But half-starved and weak. My uncle, Bruce, wrestled me into a headlock and dragged me into his house.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. He gave me a shot of whiskey and a job. Never did like his answer about why he didn’t take me and my brother in—his wife, Eileen, couldn’t have handled teenage boys, he said—but I took the job he offered.”
“Why?”
He met her eyes. “I wanted to take his money. I wanted to make him pay.”
“And did you make him pay?”
“No. Revenge never actually works, does it? He gave me the property that I turned into Slipping Rock Ranch and a fifty-thousand-dollar loan when I turned twenty.”
Amy’s brows raised. “That’s a lot of money. Not too many folks have cash like that sitting around, much less available to loan.”
He shook his hands out and braced them against the railing. Looking up at the sky, his next words were strained. “Here’s where we get to answering your questions about what I was doing at your place this morning. Why you and I can’t see each other again on a personal level.”
Oh, how she wanted to cover his hand with hers, the pain on his face was so deep. One glance at the briefcase on the floor, though, and she remembered how he’d hurt her, remembered that he’d withheld secrets. “This is about what you mentioned last night, your other business connection in Quay County.”
He walked to the northern edge of the porch and looked in the direction of his property. “My uncle originally bought the Slipping Rock property to look for oil. He thought it would be a great investment, but it turned out dry. So he gave it to me, daring me to make something of it. Which I did.”
Amy wasn’t getting how the story pertained to Kellan’s visit that morning. “Your uncle, how did he make his money? Oil investments?”
“Yes.”
“And he gave you a slice of his oil riches, didn’t he?”
Kellan nodded. “Yes. The year I paid him back for the property.”
A niggling feeling started in Amy’s gut. She knew wher
e he was headed with this windy tale he’d told her. He was secretly rich. The cattle ranch was only a front. Oh, God, he was a fake cowboy. Like Brock McKenna.
Rule number four: no tears in public. Rule number five: don’t say anything stupid. She took a deep breath. She could handle this turbulent day; she wasn’t her mom. She had the rules to prove it. “What is your secret business connection?”
He turned and looked her square in the eye from across the porch. “Amy, I’m the sole heir of Amarex Petroleum.”
He held his breath. It felt odd, coming clean to Amy. Saying the truth aloud. He expected to feel relieved, not ready to pass out. Or throw up. He found himself hoping for any reaction, silently urging her to explode with the anger he so rightly deserved, but her face was blank.
A moth swooped near her head. She flinched and swatted at it.
“Your uncle is Bruce Morton?” She stared at the dirt near Kellan’s feet as she spoke. “CEO and founder of Amarex Petroleum?”
“Yes.”
Her cheek twitched. “And he made you his . . .”
“His heir, in his will. Yes.”
She blinked at him. Not really at him, because she wouldn’t meet his eyes. The blinking turned to nodding. Man, was she nodding like a crazy person. Her eyes flickered to his face, then she lunged and snatched up his briefcase.
She marched down the porch stairs and into the darkness, nodding and muttering, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Kellan jogged behind her. “Amy, listen to me, I’m not like him. My uncle. I don’t want you—”
“Shhhhh!” she scolded, flinging a wild arm back toward him.
Pursing his lips, he stayed a few paces behind her, staring at her ponytail and the pale, smooth skin of her neck. Her stride was purposeful, determined. She turned onto a dirt road that led deeper into the property.
The Trouble With Cowboys Page 18