Renegade Father

by RaeAnne Thayne

  Joe had done his best to make damn sure of that.

  His brother knew that if he ever set foot on the Double C, he would find himself in one of two places, depending on who got to him first, Joe or the sheriff.

  If he tangled with the law first, he would end up behind bars for a long, long time after his last vicious attack on Annie left her with two broken ribs and a broken arm that still bothered her when it rained.

  And Joe had left his big brother with absolutely no doubt that if he found him first, Charlie would end up right where he belonged.

  In hell.

  No, Charlie wouldn't be coming back. Either the vet was mistaken about Dolly being poisoned or someone else had done it.

  "So what do we do for her now?" Annie asked from her position on the floor.

  "She should be out of it most of the night. Just watch her closely. If there's any change in her condition—anything at all—give me a buzz. I'll stop by first thing in the morning to see how she is."

  "Do you think I should call the police?"

  Graham snapped his bag shut. "Might not hurt to give Sheriff Douglas a heads-up. But I'll warn you now, nonfatal dog poisonings probably won't be a real big priority with him. Especially when we don't have any proof a crime actually occurred."

  Joe showed Graham out of the family room. "So what's the prognosis?" he asked quietly once they were out of Annie's hearing. "Do you really think she'll make it, or were you just saying that for her benefit?"

  "I think she'll be okay. It's lucky you found her when you did before she went into full-fledged seizures. I'll keep her snookered for a couple days until the toxin works its way out of her system but I don't anticipate any lasting effects."

  "And you're sure it's slug bait?"

  Graham nodded regretfully. "I wish I could say it was something else, something that just imitates all the symptoms. Maybe I'll find something else when I run the tests, but I doubt it. I hate the idea that somebody might have done this to her on purpose."

  He shrugged into his coat. "Of course, there's always a possibility she found a stash somewhere on one of the neighbors' places, but I really doubt it. Like I said, it's pretty rare around here."

  After Joe said goodbye to the vet, he returned to the family room to find Annie in the same position, hovering protectively over the sedated animal. She looked up when he came into the room and he frowned when he saw how pale and frightened she looked.

  Still, she forced a smile. "I really appreciate all the help you've given me." Her voice had clear dismissal in it. "I think I have everything under control now so you can go on back to the cottage and get some sleep."

  He crossed his arms across his chest. "Save it, Annie. I'm not going anywhere."

  "You need some rest."

  "And you don't?"

  That soft cupid's bow of a mouth tightened. "Go home, Joe."

  "I'm staying. We can take turns. One of us can watch over her while the other one sleeps."

  "You don't have to do that. I can take care of her."

  He started to argue, then he saw the defeated exhaustion in the droop of her shoulders and the fine lines bracketing her mouth, and he decided to take another route.

  "I want to help," he answered. "If you won't accept it for yourself, at least take it for Dolly. You're not going to do her any good if you're completely worn out."

  "You've done enough. You already gave up your whole evening to help me and I want you to know I sincerely appreciate it. But I can't keep turning to you every time something goes wrong in my life."

  He would give anything he had to fix things so nothing else ever went wrong in her life. Since he didn't have that kind of power—and she wouldn't have let him use it, even if he had—he focused on what he could do.

  "Not every time," he agreed quietly. "Just tonight."

  She opened her mouth, probably gearing up for more arguments, but whatever she planned to say was lost amid a giant yawn she tried unsuccessfully to hide.

  Joe pressed his point. "You're exhausted and even though you might want to, you just can't stay up all night with her. It wouldn't be good for either one of you. Besides, Dolly's completely out of it. She won't be waking up any time soon and she won't even know either one of us is here."

  He pointed toward the couch. "I'll take the first watch. Why don't you stretch out and try to get some rest?"

  "I couldn't possibly sleep."

  "Try. For me."

  She sent him a sidelong look and he could tell she was wondering how hard he would fight her on this, then she sighed. "I'll lie down because I know you'll hound me about it all night if I don't. But I can tell you right now, I'm not going to nod off."

  Ten minutes later, she was as out of it as Dolly. He watched her for a long time, the rise and fall of her chest and the way her lips parted slightly with every breath she took.

  She looked delicate, ethereal, with milky-white skin and her fine-boned features, and he wished again that things might have turned out differently between them.

  If only he hadn't run away from her all those years ago. If only he had stayed and fought for what he didn't even dare admit to himself he wanted instead of letting all the vast differences he saw between them chase him away.

  Now it was too late. Much, much too late.

  He knew he had nothing to offer her back then—she was the heiress to a vast, wealthy cattle ranch and he was the son of a drunk bully who was only able to support the family he menaced by the skin of his teeth and the benevolence of his employer.

  And what had changed in the past thirteen years? Now she was the owner of that cattle ranch and he was the owner of a prison record and precious little else, other than a pickup truck he still had fourteen payments on.

  By necessity, he had put his feelings for her away when he came back to Madison Valley, had shoved them way down deep in the recesses of his heart. What else could he do? She had married his brother—his brother, of all people—and had given birth to two children.

  But sometimes his feelings emerged. Sometimes they bubbled up like boiling water, until they were a hot, heavy ache in his chest. Guilt and love and betrayal all wrapped up in one messy package.

  He rubbed at the ache, willing it to subside. Annie could never be his. And if it took moving six hundred miles away to get that through his thick skull, that's what he would have to do.

  * * *

  She awoke an hour before dawn.

  Disoriented, she blinked a few times, trying to figure out why she would have been stupid enough to fall asleep on the couch again instead of in her own comfortable bed upstairs.

  Her neck had a nasty kink and the room was cold. She twisted her neck back and forth trying to ease the tightness, then looked toward the woodstove to check the status of the fire.

  The sight she found there brought all the events of the previous night rushing back. Joe was sprawled out in the recliner, eyes closed and one hand on the fur of Dolly's back.

  He probably dozed off petting her, she thought with a small, tender smile.

  The crisis seemed to be over. Dolly slept peacefully, her breathing deep and even. To reassure herself, Annie crossed the room and knelt beside the little collie, moving as slowly and quietly as she could so she didn't wake either the man or the dog.

  She ran a quiet hand over Dolly's fur. The dog snuffled in her sleep but didn't awaken. All seemed to be fine, as far as she could tell. Dolly's sides expanded and contracted evenly with each breath, with no sign at all of convulsions.

  Annie whispered a prayer of gratitude, fighting the urge to bury her face in Dolly's fur. What would she have done if they hadn't found her in time? If she hadn't gone into the tack room or if Joe hadn't been there to keep her calm or if Graham hadn't been able to come so quickly to sedate her and lessen the seizure's effects?

  Annie didn't even want to think about it. She knew Dolly wouldn't be around forever but she couldn't bear the idea that the dog had suffered—and might have died—because of
such a vicious, unconscionable act.

  Poison.

  She shivered at the thought. Graham had to be wrong. He had to be. Who would possibly want to poison an innocent dog? What could anyone hope to gain?

  It was exactly the kind of thing Charlie would have done to teach her one of his innumerable lessons. But Charlie was gone, so it had to be someone else. Maybe the same person who had taken that photograph and slipped it under her door.

  Dolly's poisoning forced her to rethink her conclusion that the photo was an isolated event, a prank. A chill climbed up her spine again. Were the two incidents related? She couldn't ignore the possibility, not now.

  But what could anybody hope to gain, other then terrorizing her? It was a sobering thought, that she might have enemies somewhere out there she wasn't even aware of.

  Joe made a low noise in his sleep and she shifted her gaze to him, welcoming the diversion from the ugliness of her thoughts.

  He looked so different in sleep, more like the quiet boy she had loved as a child than the hard, forbidding man he had become.

  He had taken off his boots some time in the night and he looked strangely vulnerable in his thick wool socks. The right one had a little hole in the toe and she wished she could think of some way to offer to fix it without offending him.

  She didn't have the chance to watch him in this kind of unguarded moment very often. After a furtive glance under her eyelashes to make sure he still slept soundly, she decided to allow herself this one harmless indulgence.

  And it was definitely an indulgence. Like eating a whole box of chocolates by herself or taking Rio up the High Lonesome trail on a summer day just for the sheer joy of it.

  This, though. This was worlds better than any of her other guilty pleasures. Joe was raw, masculine beauty, all chiseled features and hard-hewn man, and she loved looking at him.

  She wasn't going to have many more opportunities like this. The days seemed to be slipping away from her—he would be taking his new job in less than five weeks now.

  It wasn't like she would never see him again—she could comfort herself with that—but at the same time she knew that any encounters would be sporadic and painfully brief.

  Her stomach trembled whenever she thought about how gray and colorless her days would be without him. He would leave a huge, jagged tear in the fabric of her life.

  Joe had been part of her existence as long as she could remember. Most of her best memories were tied up with him—riding fence together, dry-fly fishing the Madison, listening to him recite the stories of his people he learned from his mother.

  She wanted him to share those stories with her children. Rubbing at her stomach as if she could take away the ache there, she sighed softly. It was only a quiet sound but it was enough to wake him. He had always been a fitful sleeper and his time in prison had only heightened that. Now he went from sleep to consciousness instantly, his long dark eyelashes opening without so much as a flutter.

  He gazed at her then at the dog, then muttered an uncharacteristically pungent oath. "I must have fallen asleep."

  She hid a smile at the self-condemnation in his tone. "Looks that way."

  "Is Dolly all right?" He whispered so he didn't disturb the dog.

  "Sleeping soundly," she whispered back. "Graham's treatment seems to have worked."

  He raked a hand through his thick, dark hair. "I'm sorry, Annie. I was supposed to be watching her, not snoozing away."

  She arched an eyebrow at him. "You were supposed to wake me up so I could take a turn at nurse duty instead of trying to stay up all night by yourself."

  "I didn't have the heart to wake you. Not when you were snoring away so enthusiastically."

  Her heart flip-flopped in her chest at the familiar teasing grin she rarely saw anymore. Sweet Lord, she had missed it, so much that she didn't even mind the old jibe. He and Colt always used to try to convince her she made enough noise to wake the dead.

  "I do not snore," she said primly.

  His gaze shifted to her pursed mouth, then caught there. To her shock, a strange, murky look suddenly gleamed in his eyes. If that same look had appeared in C.J.'s gaze, she would have kept one eye on the cookie jar and the other on his itchy fingers.

  Why would Joe be looking at her as if she possessed something he had suddenly developed a powerful craving to have?

  He swallowed hard, a muscle flexing in his jaw, and it took her a few stupid moments to clue in.

  He was looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her!

  Now it was her turn to swallow, and for the life of her she couldn't figure out how to respond. She was probably misreading things anyway. Joe could hardly stand to touch her most of the time.

  Thorny disappointment bloomed in her stomach when he cleared his throat and shifted his gaze away from her toward the window, where dawn began to climb over the mountains dressed in pale rose.

  "Guess I'd better head back to the house so I can catch a shower before tackling the morning chores."

  She looked down at her hands. "I need to be getting the kids up for school in a few moments or they'll miss the bus."

  He tugged his boots on, then stood to leave. She held a hand to stop him before he walked out of the room, needing to say so many things but knowing she could only focus on one of them. "Joe, I…thank you," she said softly.

  He shifted uncomfortably. "For what?"

  "Everything. For being so willing to go out in the cold to help me search for Dolly last night. For taking care of everything when I was too upset to think straight. For staying even when I told you I didn't need you to."

  "It was nothing."

  "Not to me." She smiled up at him and once more his gaze caught on her mouth. Instantly the mood shifted back to that strange tension of a few moments before.

  "Dammit, Annie," he growled. "Don't look at me like that."

  She blinked. "Like what?"

  "Like you're wondering what it would be like if I kissed you."

  Heat soaked her cheeks. He started it! He was the one who had been staring at her mouth like it was a triple-decker strawberry ice cream cone he couldn't wait to dip into. She would have kept all her wonderings to herself if not for that.

  "You're crazy," she lied. "I wasn't thinking anything of the sort."

  "Yeah? Well, I was."

  He growled something that sounded like "God help me" and then he leaned slowly, adamantly forward.

  Chapter 8

  He couldn't be about to kiss her. She must have misheard him. Joe always acted about as remote and uninterested around her as if she had no more appeal to him than one of her horned Herefords. It simply wasn't possible!

  But she couldn't argue with the dip of his dark head or the subtle sway of his body toward her. She had time only for a quick, shocked intake of breath, for a hard kick of her heart, and then his mouth was on hers.

  She spent just an instant trying to puzzle out why he would be kissing her, what she had done to deserve this incredible, unexpected gift, then she was lost to the wonder of it.

  It was the perfect kind of kiss: not too hard, not too soft but in some heavenly place in between.

  In the nearly fourteen years since the first—and only—time he had kissed her like this, she had forgotten nothing. Not the glide of his mouth against hers or the warmth of his breath or the sheer emotional onslaught of his touch.

  All of it was imprinted on her synapses, burned into her memory. To have him kissing her again, to be in his arms once more like this, seemed like some kind of miracle. Like one of those surreal, heavenly dreams adorned with hearts and flowers, where everyone smiled and treated each other with kindness.

  The kind of dreams she never wanted to wake from.

  The kiss was gentle—slow and thorough and lovely—and she wanted to cry from the beauty of it.

  She had no idea how long they stood there in the middle of her family room floor. It could have been a few seconds or several moments. She completely lost track of time, mi
ndless to the furnace whooshing to life, to the tired creaking of the old house, to Dolly's soft, even breathing.

  To everything but Joe's mouth, his touch, his heat.

  He made a sound against her lips—it might have been her name, she couldn't be sure—then he tangled his fingers in her hair and started to deepen the kiss.

  She parted her lips, welcoming him, just as a small squeak of floorboard upstairs rang through the room like a foghorn. At the sound, Joe's mouth froze on hers and he drew in a ragged breath.

  Don't stop. Please don't stop.

  But she knew he would. Even before she opened her eyes, she knew he would.

  Her gaze met his and she watched the hazy blur of desire in those black depths shift abruptly to shock and dismay.

  With another ragged breath, he stepped away from her and the room suddenly felt impossibly cold.

  "I've got to…I should…"

  He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his old, soft jeans. "I need to go."

  She nodded. She couldn't think straight right now with all her emotions a huge, overwhelming jumble.

  For thirteen years she had been careful to keep her feelings to herself. He hadn't wanted her love; she had known that even as she had given herself to him so many years ago.

  He cared about her, she knew that and he had certainly wanted her, at least that day. Maybe he even loved her a little in his own way. But like the red-tailed hawk, Joe soared the air currents of his life in solitude. He always had, even when he was a small boy, and she knew nothing she did would ever change that.

  He might have given his friendship to her and to Colt but there was always a part of himself he kept separate from them, a part he would not allow them to touch. Maybe the part his father had scarred forever with his cruel words and his even more cruel fists.

  But he was the one who had stepped forward, who had said he wondered what it would be like to kiss her and then had acted on that, and she didn't know what to think about it.

  She didn't have time to wonder. The footsteps moved to the stairs and before Joe could put on his coat and Stetson, C.J. padded into the room, his pajamas wrinkled from sleep and his dark hair sticking out every which way. He looked completely adorable, in the way only a sleepy-eyed little boy can manage.