by Evie Nichole
Cal grunted. “Is that really surprising to you?”
“No. Not really.”
“Then, why are we talking about it?” Cal took a sip of burning hot coffee. It scorched his tongue and trailed like acid down his throat. He didn’t care. It helped to center him. “So, he’s going to have surgery. He’s going to have restrictions. Why is this a big deal? Mom spends most of her time trying to mother him to death. It’ll be good for her.”
“Actually, Mom is leaving him.”
Okay. Now Laredo had Cal’s full attention. In fact, Cal could hardly process what his brother was saying. Their mother was leaving their father? Why? What would possess the woman to leave after decades with Joe? Why bother? What? Was putting up with him suddenly too much after she’d been doing it for so long that she’d practically become a professional?
“Mom says that he’s been cheating on her for years.” Laredo shrugged. “I don’t know much about that.”
Damn. The way Laredo was staring made Cal really uncomfortable. Was Laredo trying to get confirmation or something? If he was, Cal wasn’t going to give it. He wasn’t talking about this. At all.
“Met has already told us that this is true.” Laredo sighed. He took another drink of his own coffee and then put his palms around the paper cup as though he needed the warmth.
Cal was surprised that his youngest brother had finally spilled the beans. The poor kid had been carrying that secret around since he was twelve years old. Why now? Or was their mother’s decision to rock the boat going to change everything?
“So, Mom is leaving,” Cal said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. He needed to get a grip. “I don’t see how this changes anything. Can we just go upstairs? I want to talk to our mother.”
“About what?” Laredo pointed at Cal. “We all know that you have information you don’t share. It’s not a secret. Not really. You were nineteen when Jesse came to live with us. You were probably aware of a lot of things about our parents that the rest of us weren’t.”
“What are you driving at?” Cal finally came right out and asked. He drank more coffee. He was running out of coffee. It was tempting to go back and get more. It at least gave him something to do with his hands. “Just say it.”
“Was Dad really having an affair with Amelia Collins before she was killed in that accident?” Laredo’s tone was flat and his voice was sharp.
Cal sat back in his seat. Then he gave up and stood. He couldn’t remain seated anymore. There were too many thoughts running through his head. Memories were like that. They plagued you for years and years until you finally learned to put a leash on them. Then, every once in a while, they would slip their leash and sink needle-sharp teeth in your psyche once again.
“What’s wrong?” Laredo asked. There was something so very pointed in the way he spoke that Cal had no doubt his brother was perfectly aware of what kind of memories he was dredging up. “You didn’t think that anyone else knew you were keeping that secret for Dad?”
“It’s not that simple,” Cal finally managed to reply. “You’re acting like it was just an affair.”
“What else would it be?” Laredo stood up too. He pointed at Cal. “Are you keeping that secret because secretly you know that Dad fathered a child on Amelia Collins?”
“What?” Cal swung his neck around so fast he felt as though his spine might snap. “You can’t be serious.”
“Is that why you’re protecting that secret? You don’t want anyone to know that Jesse is really our biological sister?” Laredo was on a roll and Cal was too speechless to intervene. “Is that why you’ve never allowed yourself to touch Jesse or even to think about her like that? You know that she’s really your sister?”
“Listen to yourself!” Cal managed to say. He hated how weak his words sounded. He could not even convince himself that he was telling the truth. How was he supposed to be convincing his obviously skeptical brother?
Cal shook his head. He could not handle this any longer. It was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. It was bad. Laredo had it all wrong, and yet he didn’t realize where he’d missed what could have been considered the most obvious details.
“I think you’re just keeping a secret to protect the family,” Laredo said quietly. He started walking toward the elevators. “I think you’ve always kept that secret. And I respect you for that, but it’s time to let that secret out. We all need to know what’s really happening in our family. You have no idea how much crap all of this has caused. You stay out on that ranch and you hide. But the rest of us are dealing with this bullshit every single day.” Laredo paused and held out his hand to indicate the bank of elevators. “So, let’s go come clean with our brothers, shall we?”
Cal snorted. Sometimes he thought that Laredo should have been the lawyer and not Cisco. Except Laredo had a habit of being way off. And this time he was so far off that he was going to make an even bigger mess by pretending that he knew what he was talking about.
Cal wasn’t signing on for that. This whole trip had been a bad idea anyway. He didn’t want to see his father. And he was pretty damn sure after a decade of ostracism that his mother didn’t really care to see him either.
So, with that in his mind, Cal turned and walked back out the front doors of the hospital. He could hear Laredo calling his name. That didn’t slow him down. He didn’t know where he was going to go. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe he should just go home, but he was afraid it wasn’t time for that just yet.
Chapter Two
Jesse Collins was sick and tired of people lying to her. Everyone lied. In fact, she was pretty damn sure that she had been lied to nearly every day of her life. It was a thing. Everyone had to lie to Jesse. And now Jesse was left feeling as though she had nothing left in her life that she could count on.
She blinked and swiped a hand across her face. The rain was thick. It was falling in black sheets that obscured the road and made her feel as though she were in a world devoid of sight and sound. At what point would she just cease to exist? Would she drive through one of those silly wormhole things you heard about in science fiction stories and just disappear forever?
Her truck fishtailed as she swung the wheel hard left in order to make her turn. The rain was so thick and her headlights did so little to penetrate the gloom that Jesse had nearly missed the turnoff to her own ranch.
The wheels hit the gravel and slid hard. Jesse bit her lip, but the shriek escaped anyway. Her whole world flipped around and around as her truck spun out of control in the wet gravel and mud. The headlights made crazy patterns on the ground. Rocks, trees, distant mountains, and then finally, and with sudden finality, she saw the bottom of the ditch as it came rushing up at her.
The impact was hard. It jarred her bones and made her teeth clack together hard. The coppery taste of blood filled her mouth. Her bottom lip was split. She had hit it on the steering wheel. The truck’s engine was roaring. She struggled to sit up. The seatbelt was pinning her in place. Then she realized that her foot had slammed down on the accelerator.
Jesse pulled her foot off the gas pedal, and the vehicle shuddered to a stop. The rear wheels stopped turning, and gravel stopped pinging underneath the wheel wells. The engine was still running. The headlamps reflected off the wet ditch in front of her. She had a bad feeling the front of the truck was pretty messed up. That didn’t really matter right now. Jesse was more concerned with getting the hell out of here and back to her warm, dry house.
Unlocking the driver’s door, she tried to open it. Nothing happened. She shoved again. It was stuck. It would not budge. Her brain stuttered to a stop for a second, and the sensation of being trapped bit deep.
Panicking, she began slamming her shoulder against the door. It squeaked but did not budge. The metallic screech of metal on metal lifted the hairs on the back of her neck. Her breathing was ragged. It began to fog up the window, and the humidity inside the cab increased. The heat was pouring into the cab from the dashboard heater.
S
he forced herself to calm down. Grappling for the heater controls, she managed to shut the thing off. Gradually the heat receded and Jesse could breathe. Her brain kicked into gear. She realized that the impact of the truck’s front end hitting the bottom of the ditch had pushed the front fenders back and caused them to trap the doors closed. Okay. She could deal with this.
Unfastening her seatbelt, Jesse scooted up in her seat until she could get her butt through the space between the two front seats. She squeezed herself over the center console and into the backseat. Once there, she exhaled a sigh of relief. She hadn’t really thought about the purchase of a crew cab truck as a necessity for anything other than space and cargo, but apparently, it was also a viable secondary exit strategy.
It only took a second to unlock the back door and get out. Once outside, she was instantly drenched. She didn’t care. Jesse pulled up the hood of her jacket and eased her way toward the front wheels of her pickup truck. She had to lock the hubs in order to get the thing in four-wheel drive and have a prayer of getting it out of the ditch without going home to retrieve a tractor. Sometimes being on her own sucked ass.
She put her right hand on the truck’s rain-slicked fender and put her boot in the mud. She started to slide through the gravel into the ditch and had to hang onto the tire to keep herself from slipping right into the bottom of the ditch.
Hub. Hub. Hub. Her index fingernail sheared off as she scrabbled to get that little knob inside the hub assembly turned clockwise a full turn. Finally, it gave and she heard a click. Turning around, she clawed her way back up to the road.
It took no time at all to get around the truck and head for the other side. But the passenger side was further buried in the ditch because the truck had gone in at an angle. That meant Jesse was stuck climbing down into the muck and freezing water gathering steadily in the bottom of the ditch. Her boots sank into the soft dirt. She gasped as it began pouring in through the top.
Faster, faster, faster, she tried to move quickly as she grabbed that hub assembly and turned it clockwise until she heard a click. Then she was trying to scoot herself back up onto the road by grabbing anything she could find. Her hands found purchase on the tire itself, and she managed to drag herself out of the mucky ditch bottom and back onto the road. The rain continued to pour down, and she wanted nothing more than a warm fire and a cup of cocoa.
Shivering and feeling like she also needed a shower, Jesse shoved wet hanks of her blond hair out of the way as she climbed back into the backseat of her truck. She pulled off her wet jacket and left it on the seat. Then she groped around for a sweatshirt or anything that might have been left in there sometime during the last few weeks.
Jesse finally came across a hoodie and tugged that on over her damp shirt. She left the hood up to cover her wet hair and began the awkward process of climbing back into the front seat. She was just glad the truck was still running. With the front doors trapped shut because of front end damage, there was every possibility that the engine compartment had been damaged. But there was no time to think about that right now. She needed to pray that she could get out of this ditch and home before anything else went wrong.
Jesse settled into the driver’s seat and reached for the gearshift. She dropped the truck into four-wheel drive and mentally crossed her fingers. Then she threw the truck into reverse and slowly applied the gas.
The wheels spun, but then they caught. She heard a horrible dragging sound as the undercarriage rasped across the wet road at the top of the ditch. But slowly the truck backed out of the mess until all four wheels were on solid ground.
Jesse put the truck in park and wrapped her icy hands around the wheel. She was shaking. This could have been a disaster. It was still about four and a half miles to her house. She might have had no choice but to walk that distance. The thought was frightening. She was all alone in the world. Was that how she wanted things to be for the rest of her life? Was that what she had signed up for by taking control of her inheritance at the ripe old age of twenty-one? What was she doing? She was going to get herself killed, and nobody would even know.
Would Cal even care?
She didn’t want to think about that. Not right now. Cal was a non-issue. She had made him one in the last two days when she had finally decided to set aside her girlish crush and her fantasy hopes and dreams. It was time to see life for what it really was. And Cal was not a part of her life. Not now. Not ever. Not anymore.
With that in mind, she put the truck in drive. With a grinding noise that made her cringe in sympathy, the poor vehicle shuddered to silence and sat there dead on the gravel road. Jesse’s heart sped up again. She felt it thudding against her ribs.
Shoving the gearshift back into park, she tried to start the truck again. The truck engine roared to life. Then she put the thing in drive, and it once again shuddered to silence.
“No!” Jesse shouted at the vehicle. “You worked. A minute ago you worked!”
She wrenched the gearshift back out of four-wheel drive in case that was making the difference. But no. Every time she tried to put the vehicle into drive, the engine died. That undoubtedly meant that she had damaged the transmission and not the engine or something of that sort. She wasn’t a mechanic. She had no idea how these things worked.
“Wait.” Jesse sucked in a breath and held it. “I used reverse. Just a minute ago I used reverse.”
The tricky part would be trying to make a three-point turn on this road, but there was a really wide spot back toward the entrance of the road because of the exit and entrance onto the highway. It was originally made so that trailers and big cattle haulers would have plenty of room to pull off if necessary.
Feeling determined and maybe just a little desperate, Jesse threw the truck in park and started the engine. Then she put the gearshift into reverse. To her relief, the vehicle did not stall. The engine whined, but it moved. She flung her hand over the passenger seat to anchor herself for a long trip backwards. Then she maneuvered her way into a U-turn in reverse.
It was a dizzying trip. The rain began to fall harder, if that was even possible. Sheets of it obscured her view through the rear window. Her reverse lights were barely able to illuminate the road that was now simultaneously in front of and behind her. She made careful progress. With shallow streams of water covering the road in several places, she had a tough time keeping herself headed in the right direction and on the road itself.
Her stomach was in knots. She kept looking for the barn lights of her ranch. Collins Ranch. That’s what it was called because her father wasn’t a fanciful kind of person. Her father. He was her father. She didn’t want to hear otherwise. Not from anyone.
Finally, she spotted a light in the wet darkness. Her front porch. The big floodlight on the front of the barn. They were all blazing a welcome that helped guide her down that last hundred yards of road leading home. And when she finally managed to get that truck to the farm, she parked it on the side of the barn because there was no doubt in her mind that it was going to take an act of God to get that thing working properly again.
When the engine was off, Jesse let her head fall forward to the steering wheel. The tears were hot on her cheeks. She had never been so worried and horrified about so many things simultaneously in her entire life. It was as if everything had fallen apart all at once.
With a deep breath, she forced herself to get her wallet and her house keys. The doors weren’t going to magically open again just because she was on her ranch. So, she had to climb into the backseat once more. It was awkward to get all of her stuff gathered up so she could slip out through the rear door. Perhaps that was why she did not notice when another truck arrived on the scene.
In fact, Jesse did not notice that there was another truck sitting in front of her house until she nearly ran into the front fender on her way to the stairs. Halting, she reeled back a little and struggled to figure out who had come calling without an invitation.
Wait. She should have known that white t
ruck anywhere. With the HLC brand emblazoned on the sides, it was essentially a beacon to the entire region that a Hernandez family member was in the area.
“What do you want?” she demanded of Cal as he exited the truck. “I’m a little busy.”
“I saw your backwards trek down the road.” Cal had to shout to be heard over the rain.
It was still coming down pretty hard. Water dripped down the back of Jesse’s neck and made her shiver. She jumped up the steps and felt relieved to be under the front porch overhang. The two-story farmhouse had been in her family for generations. Her family. She still refused to believe that it could be any other way.
“My transmission needs service.” Yes. That was a good way to put it. The service it required probably fell under the heading of overhaul, but there was no need to expand on that at the moment.
“I want to talk.”
She did not even have to think about her response. “Well, I don’t want to talk.”
“I need to explain.” He sounded desperate. She didn’t care.
Jesse turned toward her front door. “Some other time. I’m busy tonight. Just go home and I’ll do the same. Then maybe we can really think about the reasons your home and my home are fifty miles apart door to door.”
“Only if you use the road,” he pointed out. “It’s fifteen minutes by horse.”
Jesse didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to dwell on all of the trips she had made back and forth with Cal between the Hernandez ranch and the Collins place. Those were long ago and far away. Right now, Jesse needed answers, and they were not going to come from those memories. They were going to come from something outside her heart.
“Jesse. Don’t.”
But those were the last words she let him say. Or at least those were the last ones that she heard. Unlocking her front door, she stepped inside her home and let the door slam shut behind her. It shut Cal out of her life, and for now, that was how it had to be.