Front Range Cowboys (5 Book Box Set)

by Evie Nichole

  “So I would think the worst!” Avery insisted.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly why Amelia would lie in a journal, Avery.” Jesse let every sarcastic feeling in her heart drip from her words. “My mother knew she was going to die, so she left those journals deliberately to torture you because she could see into the future and she knew that you were going to steal them along with her jewelry box and her most treasured personal items. That just makes a ton of sense, Avery.”

  Avery was crying now. It was sad. Jesse could not even begin to imagine what the woman was going through. “Your mother was trying to hurt me! She wanted my husband, and she wanted me to be miserable!” Avery sank into a little French revival-style chair that sat beside an equally delicate-looking console table in the foyer. “Your mother hated me. I know she did.”

  “Have you ever hated anyone just because they hurt someone that you love?” Jesse asked quietly.

  There was a long pause. Avery’s hands were clenched primly in her lap, and she looked as though she was trying to be ladylike even in what was obviously her memory of the lowest point in her life.

  “Of course I know what that’s like,” Avery whispered. “I hated Joseph Hernandez for hurting our sons over and over again. I remember when Met came to me and said that he had seen his father with some two-dollar hooker at a motel in town. I felt like killing Joe. I could have happily sent him off with Amelia then,” Avery said bitterly. “But she was dead.”

  There was something about that comment that jogged a memory loose in Jesse’s brain, but for now, she had another point to make. “Don’t you think that’s the only reason why Amelia ever hated you? Joe told her over and over again how miserable you made his life. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. That’s what he told her. So, why would she not hate you? Why would she not want to take him away from you so that she could make him happy?”

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” Avery said bitterly. “You’re trying to make me feel sorry for her.”

  “No. I would never expect you to do that.” Jesse shook her head. “My mother hurt you. She might have done it under some kind of promises or pretenses from Joe, but he’s not around to explain himself anymore.” Which brought Jesse around to her next question. “Did Joe know about Adam? Is that how you knew his name?”

  “Yes.” Avery pursed her lips. “He knew about Adam. He found Adam not long after Amelia died. He kept saying that he wanted to reconnect with the one person who connected him and his precious Amelia.” Avery’s bitter smile spoke volumes about how she felt regarding that relationship. “But Joe got an unpleasant surprise when Adam completely shot down any attempt on Joe’s part to speak with him.”

  “So, how did you find him, then?” Jesse had a feeling that this was more important than any of them knew. “How did you locate Adam?”

  “It took years,” Avery said slowly. “Joe hired a private investigator, and the woman took forever to find Adam. I guess by then he’d been given back to the state.” She rolled her eyes. “I bet his parents got sick of him. God knows what that combination would be like!”

  “Actually, his parents got divorced.” There was no reason for Jesse not to believe what Adam had said on that topic. It wasn’t like the guy had any real incentive to lie about that. “So, Joe hired a female private detective?”

  “Yes.” Avery seemed to be coming back to herself. “You need to stay away from Adam. You need to stay away from my family, Jesse Collins. You Collins women are kryptonite for Hernandez men.”

  Somehow, Jesse couldn’t really fault Avery on her choice of words. It did sort of seem that way from a certain perspective. Sometimes life was far more complicated than it needed to be.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Thank God you’re back.” Cal folded his arms around Jesse and finally felt as though he could breathe again. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  “Do what?” She made a face at him. “Leave the ranch? Dude, I don’t think I have a lot of choice about that. I have to leave sometimes.”

  The entire family was gathered in the front room of the Hernandez family home. The remaining diary was sitting in the middle of the coffee table. It was like the proverbial elephant in the room. None of them wanted to look at it or think about what was inside, and yet there was no doubt in Cal’s mind that it was pretty much the only thing that they could think about.

  “Good Lord!” Jesse stared around the room. “Have you been waiting for me before you look at that thing?”

  Cal shrugged and looked around at his siblings and their significant others. “It seemed like the right thing to do. Don’t you think?”

  There were a lot of nods. Jesse sank down in front of the coffee table on her knees. She looked so young. Her blond hair was falling over her shoulders in tangled waves, and she continually shoved it behind her ears as though she just could not be bothered to do anything much with it. She was in jeans and a T-shirt, and she was the most wonderfully down-to-earth person that Cal had ever known. He hated thinking about what reading this journal could do to her—to all of them—but especially to Jesse.

  Maggie reached out and gently touched Jesse’s shoulder. “We’re here for you, Jesse. This isn’t just you anymore. This is all of us together. Adam showed up here. We met him.”

  “He showed up here?” Jesse lifted her gaze from the journal on the table to look around the room at all of them. Cal’s heart double tapped when she locked on him and would not look away. “Paul brought him, I bet. Right?”

  “Yes,” Cal confirmed. “It’s pretty much exactly as we suspected.”

  “Your mother knew about Adam,” Jesse said distractedly. “I think she’s known for years because your father went looking for him.”

  Cal blinked as he tried to process that. Across the room, Laredo’s angry snort was shushed by Aria’s soft and yet iron-firm voice. There was a ripple around the assembled brothers and their women. It was hard to stomach the notion that Avery and Joe Hernandez had known this deep and horrible secret for all this time and had never thought to tell their children the truth. It was one more layer in the lies that seemed to rule this family.

  Then Jesse pointed at Met. Cal’s gut clenched tight. The youngest brother had been through too much already. But Jesse wasn’t rude. Her tone was almost kind. “Tell me about that night you saw your father with another woman. Not my mother, someone else.”

  Met looked startled. His arm was slung around Daphne, and you could see her curl closer into his side for comfort. Finally, Met spoke, but his usual drawl was stunted and almost terse. “I was at the old burger drive-in. There’s a cheap motel across the street. I saw my father walking into a room with a young woman. She was in fishnet stockings and a tube top.”

  “Stop for a second and close your eyes,” Jesse coaxed. “I want you to picture that night really carefully. Hang onto that image in your mind and then tell me what you see.”

  “Long legs,” Met began slowly. “She had on brown boots that went to her knees. Stockings. There was a stretchy kind of top and a black leather jacket. Her hair was sort of big.”

  “Did you see your father kiss her?”

  “No. He just followed her into the room.” Met paused. His face was tight as though he were trying to rip the memory out by the roots. “They shook hands. That’s weird. Why would you shake hands with a hooker? Closing the deal?”

  “She wasn’t a hooker.” Jesse’s quiet announcement took them all by surprise.

  Cal shook his head. He could not just cut his father some slack like that. His baby brother had left home because of this incident. To think that it wasn’t what it seemed was horrible!

  Jesse was busy looking at the other women in the room. “Remember the clothes when we were in high school? Come on. Big hair, boots, and all of the lycra and spandex? Some people actually had bodysuits of that stuff. We look back now and roll our eyes, but if you think about that description, she was just wearing the current fashion.”

  �
�So, you’re saying I just don’t know what I saw?” Met was getting agitated. “I know what I saw, Jesse. And I asked Dad about it! I even asked him about it a few days before he died. A week maybe. I don’t know. I asked him!”

  “And what did he say?” Cal demanded. “What were his words?”

  “He refused to admit that he was cheating. He swore he’d never been with anyone but Mom or Amelia. He kept saying that it wasn’t what I thought.” Met stabbed his hands through his hair. “If it was something else, why wouldn’t he just say it? Why would he let me believe that he was cheating? Even back then, when I asked, he just told me to mind my own business! What else was I going to think?”

  “He hired a female investigator to find Adam.” Jesse’s words had the effect of an emotional bomb. Everyone was thrown back in their seats. Cal could actually see them trying to reconfigure their thoughts to include this new information. But Jesse wasn’t done. “Avery confirmed this for me. It was around that time. It, apparently, took a long time for the investigator to find Adam because he’d been tossed back into the foster system when his adoptive parents divorced.”

  “Oh.” Melody’s voice was quiet. “That’s horrible!”

  Cal could not have agreed more, but he couldn’t excuse everything that Adam had done based on that information either. He cleared his throat and looked to Jesse. “So, what you’re saying is that Dad was meeting with a woman that night and you believe that was the investigator and it was actually possible that Adam was in that motel room.”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I think happened.” Jesse looked at Met. Her blue eyes were filled with compassion. “I cannot imagine how hard that must have been or how difficult it must be now to look back and see things differently. But to be fair to you, Met, your father could have told you something to alleviate your fears and to make you see that he hadn’t betrayed you. He chose not to, and that’s on him.”

  Met seemed to calm down. Cal felt the atmosphere in the room shift. It moved right back to that stupid journal. Cal gestured to the thing and then looked straight at Jesse. “It’s time to read the last entry, Jess. We need to know what happened.”

  Jesse picked up the book. Her apprehension was as palpable as it was understandable. “I don’t know when the last entry was. It could totally miss the mark.”

  “Try it,” Maggie suggested gently. “Just open it and look.”

  Jesse opened the journal. Cal’s hands itched to hold her. He needed to feel her cheek pressed against his chest and her arms around him. Her scent was precious to him. He loved the way it made him feel. The anticipation and the arousal all rolled up into one. It was incredible, and he would never get tired of it. But moments like these were when he needed that physical contact and assurance most of all.

  With that in mind, Cal slid off the chair where he had been sitting. He moved to the floor and sat directly beside Jesse. She glanced over at him and said nothing. But maybe that was because no words were necessary. He could hear what she was saying in his heart.

  Jesse reached over and took his hand as she looked at the journal’s last pages and looked at the date. “My mother made an entry in her journal before she left for the Farrells’s home the last night she was alive. That’s the last entry.” Then she paused and cleared her throat. “Sometimes I think that I am doomed to make the same mistake over and over again. I don’t understand why Joseph Hernandez still has the power to overrule my common sense. I know that Rawling and I are having some problems. I want another baby. Rawling says that it’s too hard on me and that my body can’t handle that kind of stress. I know he’s worried. I’ve never had anyone in my life love me the way Rawling does. But when we argue, it’s such a mess! And this afternoon I did something stupid. I met with Joe to discuss Adam. He wants to find Adam. He keeps saying that he’s going to leave Avery and he wants to find our son and bring him home to live with us. I told Joe that there is no us anymore, but he still managed to slide right under my defenses. Now I have to tell Rawling that I made a very big mistake. Making love with Joe in the barn this afternoon was all wrong. I regret every second of it. I love Rawling. We’re going to the Farrells’s tonight to talk more about our marital issues. They’re like parents to us, but better. And I know that they’ll help us keep things together. I can only hope that Rawling will forgive me. I know I sometimes can’t forgive myself for allowing Joseph Hernandez to fill my mind with his empty promises. The man is a liar, and that’s all he’ll ever be.”

  There was a very long pause after Jesse finished. Cal was pretty sure that his siblings were waiting for the rest, but that was it. Perhaps Amelia had expected to be able to finish the journal entry after the visit with the Farrells. That would have made sense. Amelia had no idea that this would be her last journal entry ever. She hadn’t known she was going to die that night.

  Laredo was the first to speak. “Well, I suppose that makes things pretty clear.”

  “I’m glad one of us thinks so,” Darren muttered. “Why was our father such an ass? Seriously. Did the man care about anyone but himself?”

  Cal thought about the words that Joe had spoken from his hospital bed the night he died. “Dad loved Mom. He also loved Amelia. In fact, I think he loved Amelia far more than he ever loved our mother. He knew he screwed up. That last night before he died, he was trying to say something about it. I’d never heard so much regret in his voice. He didn’t want Mom to say anything bad about Amelia. He was determined that her good name should be protected.”

  “So, basically,” Laredo said in a voice heavily laden with sarcasm, “our father got into a relationship and a situation he could not get out of. Then he made it worse by finding something else he wanted but couldn’t have. So, he screwed that up too.”

  A little smile crossed Jesse’s lips, and then she pointed first at Laredo and next at Aria. “What would you have done if you couldn’t get rid of Helena but Aria came into your life anyway? Would you be able to just shut off what you feel for her?”

  Laredo opened his mouth but then snapped it closed. There was no doubt in Cal’s mind that Laredo would not have been able to resist. He loved Aria with a passion that changed everything about him when she was around. Gradually, Aria was making Laredo into a better person. That was what the right relationship did. Had Laredo still been tied to Helena when he met Aria, the results would have been devastating. Laredo would have ended up just like Joe Hernandez—loving one woman and being tied for eternity to someone else.

  “Don’t judge poor Joe too harshly,” Jesse told them. “He hurt himself more than he did anyone else. And believe me, that’s hard to believe.”

  “That’s for sure,” Cisco muttered. “The man was a walking disaster.”

  “Speaking of.” Darren raised his hand. “Has anyone heard when the service is? Mom isn’t really returning phone calls.”

  “Your mother is living in la-la land,” Jesse muttered. “But according to the paper, the service is tomorrow evening.”

  “Evening?” Cal glanced at Jesse and raised an eyebrow. “Is it a cocktail party or a formal dinner?”

  “Ha, ha!” Jesse made a face at him. “We still have to worry about Adam showing up unannounced and making trouble.”

  “I think Paul will be too busy dealing with the ongoing Internal Affairs investigation to worry about bringing Adam to the funeral,” Met predicted. “You should have seen Cisco go after that guy, Jesse. He was rabid!”

  The chatter went on and on. It was good for all of them to be in this house together. There was an element of family that hadn’t been present in their lives for a very long time. Adding the presence of Maggie, Aria, Melody, and Daphne only served to make everything better. It was crowded and warm and merry, and the laughter was only building as they started swapping stories about being raised on the ranch by Joe and Avery Hernandez.

  Jesse snuggled in closer to Cal’s side, and he wrapped his arm around her. Pressing a kiss to her cheek, he loved the way she rested so trustingly again
st him. He kissed her forehead and gently nuzzled her neck.

  “Well, that’s certainly something I never expected to see happen,” Laredo commented.

  Met was laughing. “Then you’re completely obtuse.”

  Aria reached over and smacked Laredo in the belly. “Really obtuse, actually. How could you not see this coming? Jesse Collins has been in love with Cal Hernandez since she was old enough to know the difference between girls and boys.”

  Jesse didn’t move away from Cal, but she did level an accusing finger right at Aria. “And Aria Callahan has been in love with Laredo Hernandez for just as long. Do not ever let her tell you otherwise, Laredo. She complained about lots of boys, but let me tell you. She was obsessed with your flaws! She used to rant and rave and rail about how you did this wrong and you did that wrong! She thought about you more than anyone else on the planet.”

  And perhaps that was the measure of how much a woman loved a man or vice versa. Complaining was apparently the language of love in their family.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jesse didn’t know what time it was or how long they had all been sitting around laughing and talking together when she first smelled the smoke. At first it was the drifting sort of scent that made her think of fall and fire pits and maybe even camping. Then it got more pungent and harsher.

  “Hey!” Jesse struggled to disentangle herself from Cal. “Smoke. I smell smoke!”

  Cal was up in a flash. He and Laredo headed for the front of the house, no doubt to stick their heads outside to check the barns. Everyone else jumped up as well. They rushed out onto the porch and into the gravel parking area in front of the house. The shadows were just starting to stretch long. It looked like three o’clock or after with the sun’s rays striking the pasture with enough heat to curl the grass. The sky was blue, but Jesse could see a fine smoke filtering through the atmosphere. It was still full daylight, and that was why Jesse immediately noticed that there was an extra vehicle out front that had the wrong brand on the door.