by Lisa Jackson
“What? Oh, Dad, why’re you bringing this up now?” she asked, and seeing his face light up as she acknowledged for the first time in ten years that he was her father.
“Because it’s got to be said, that’s why.”
“I have a life in Seattle—”
“You got a husband?”
“Well, no.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No ... not any longer.” She’d dated, of course, some more seriously than others, but the last man she’d been involved with had moved to San Francisco.
“Not even a pet.”
“No, but my job, my friends—”
“You can work here if you want to, not that you would have to, and you have friends here and can make some more. Maybe not in Bad Luck, but in San Antonio or Austin.” He was warming to his subject, his hands shifting so that his fingers tented over his belly. “In fact, I’ve got invitations to a few things coming up—a charity dinner and some wing-ding down in Galveston—and I want you to go with me. I’ll introduce you around. Lots of men about your age. All of ‘em decent-enough lookin’, some of ’em rich.”
“I won’t be here long,” she said, a bad taste crawling up the back of her throat. “As soon as I find Elizabeth, I’m out of here.”
Some of the wind left his sails. Placing his hands on the desk, he leaned across it. “Don’t say it, Shelby-girl. I know I’ve made my share of mistakes raisin’ you alone as I did, but I’ve missed you, honey. Oh, God, how I’ve missed you.” He cleared his throat, and his eyes watered enough that he blinked and looked away. “You look so damned much like your mother. Oh, shit, I miss her, too. I wasn’t the best husband in the world, nor the best father, but, as God is my witness, I loved your mother like no other. And you ... well, know it or not, you’ve always been the apple of my eye, even when you were hell-bent to rebel against me.”
Shelby’s throat grew thick, but she reminded herself of all the lies that had festered in this house for years, secrets and innuendoes that had been whispered around town. She leaned across his desk and placed a hand over his gnarled knuckles. “I came back here to find my daughter. That’s all. I’d hoped that you would help me.” Then she left, and as she walked into the hallway, she drew in a deep, struggling breath. Only when she passed the mirror mounted over a lacquered table in the front hall did she realize that her eyes were red and brimming with unshed tears.
“Damn it all.” Dashing the foolish drops from her eyes, she silently vowed she wouldn’t let her father get to her. Couldn’t. She had too much to do. She climbed the stairs to her room, intent on calling her office in Seattle to check on her clients and listings, then searching for Nevada’s private investigator on the Internet. But as she walked past the family portrait in the upper hall, a picture commissioned only months before her mother’s death, when Shelby was barely four, her facade of strength fractured. She hardly remembered the woman who had given her life.
No, most of her memories were of another time. Those images, the ones she’d tried so hard to tamp down, assailed her now—vivid, bright, and laced with pain.
Unable to keep them at bay any longer, she walked into her bedroom and wrapped her arms around one of the beveled posts at the foot of her bed, the very four-poster where she’d grieved for months after Jasmine’s death, the same bed where she’d dreamed of making love to a half-breed rebel who had touched her heart and soul, the bed in which she’d lain alone, only her own arms surrounding her as she’d cried silent tears of frustration, pain and fear when she was a seventeen-year-old in the worst trouble of her life.
“Don’t do this,” she warned herself, but it was already far too late. Memories, long hidden away, appeared in her mind’s eye, and she saw herself as she was then, fresh-faced, sassy, unaware of life’s wretched ironies.
Letting her fingers trail down the smooth rosewood post, she slowly lowered herself onto the hand-stitched quilt and gave into those faraway and gut-wrenching images. Had it really been ten years? A decade of her life?
In some ways it felt like forever, but in others, it seemed like only yesterday....
Chapter Seven
Ten years earlier
“I’m tellin’ you, Shelby, you can’t trust him. Nevada Smith spells nothin’ but trouble. He was raised wild and he still is, I don’t care what you say.” Her father tossed his jacket over the back of the couch in the family room and walked to the bar, where he pulled a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet. “Besides, he’s too old for you.”
“I’m seventeen—not a baby,” she argued, kicking off her riding boots and wincing as she yanked the rubber band from her hair. She caught sight of her reflection in the beveled mirror over the liquor cabinet. Freckles, wild hair, flushed cheeks and zero makeup. No wonder her father treated her like a little kid—she looked like one.
“And he’s what? Twenty-four?”
“You were twelve years older than Mom.”
“Case in point.” With his bare hands, he scooped ice out of the bucket that Lydia always had ready, then dropped the cubes into a short glass. “Look, Nevada Smith worked for me, you know that, and I kept him on, didn’t I? Even when he was hauled into my courtroom. He and some of his buddies got drunk, stole the keys to the funeral home’s hearse and went out joy-riding. I figured at the time it was just a case of letting off steam, you know, ‘boys will be boys.’ Then him and the McCallum boy were caught shootin’ at mailboxes. I let that slide, too, but I don’t trust him.” Twisting the cap off the bottle, he eyed his glass and poured in three fingers.
“He’s working for the Sheriff’s Department now.”
“I heard.” Her father scowled and scratched his chin, then capped his bottle and stuffed it into the cabinet. “Won’t last long.”
“You don’t know that—”
“Oh, I do.” He nodded as if to himself, and for the first time in her life Shelby had a glimmer of truth, a hint that her father might not be as upstanding and honest as she’d thought, that he might actually manipulate others the way he did her.
“He’s been in the Army,” she added. “Got promoted and ...”
“Yeah, I heard all that. But a man doesn’t change, missy, much as you’d like to believe otherwise. It’s about personal ethics. Our boy Nevada, he doesn’t have many. Not really his fault; just the way he was raised.” He swirled his drink and the ice clinked softly.
Shelby wanted to defend Nevada up one side and down the other, but she knew her father well enough to know when to hold her tongue. There was no use arguing. When it came to the boys she dated, her father was a tyrant.
“So, we got that settled?” he asked, dropping into his favorite recliner. Positioned near the fireplace, the brown leather tufted and worn in spots, it was the only chair that he swore was comfortable in the entire house. He loved this room, angled . as it was off the kitchen. Through a bank of windows he had a bird’s-eye view of the swimming pool and gardens. Only a few steps away, on the other side of the back stairs and through shuttered French doors, was another room occupied by a sturdy billiard table covered in blue felt. Once a week the Judge’s inner circle of friends came over to play cards and pool. On those nights Shelby was banished to her room upstairs, though she’d often listen through the vents to the bawdy stories that were passed around.
“Shelby?” her father said now, and she snapped back to the present. He climbed out of his chair to stare her in the eye.
“We understand each other? You’re not to see Nevada Smith again.”
“When I’m eighteen—”
“We’ll talk again. Until that time, you stay away from him.” He stood in front of the cold grate of the fireplace, and the polished longhorns that were mounted on the bricks over the mantel appeared to sprout from his head. “I’d hate to have to ground you or take back your car, now. That would be a shame.”
“You won’t have to,” she lied. She loved the car, a lemon-yellow convertible, almost as much as she loved her prized Appaloosa mare, but not
nearly with the same intensity she felt for Nevada. No, the feeling she had for him defied description.
Even though a part of her knew she was rebeling against an overbearing father, knew that Nevada, with his wild streak, wasn’t right for her, she couldn’t help herself from going against the old man’s wishes and doing what she wanted—including seeing Nevada Smith on the sly. She was sick and tired of being known as “the princess,” Judge Cole’s spoiled daughter, a Goody Two-shoes.
Besides, these days she wasn’t even being all that wild. Nevada Smith was, except in her father’s mind, an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. Though he’d been with the Sheriff’s Department less than a year, he was on the road to the straight and narrow. So why did she cross her fingers as she climbed the stairs?
She paused at the family portrait and stared straight at the image of her mother—Jasmine Alicia Falconer Cole. With patrician features, ash-blond hair and eyes that were a vibrant shade between green and gold, Jasmine had been a striking woman, the sought-after daughter of an oil mogul. And she’d taken her own life a few days shy of her twenty-eighth birthday.
“Things would be different if you were here, Mom,” she muttered as she headed for her room. She wished she could say that she hated to go behind her father’s back, but it would’ve been a flat-out lie. The truth of the matter was that she was meeting Nevada tonight and no matter what her father thought, she’d gladly move heaven and earth—even hell if it got in the way—to see him.
The night was hot, the air seeming to crackle with excitement. The top of her convertible down, Shelby drove with one eye on her watch, her Porsche whipping through the streets of Bad Luck as quick as the lightning the weathermen had been predicting all day.
“Watch out, Shelby, you’re gonna miss the tumoff!” Lily yelled from the sliver of a backseat she shared with her boyfriend, Todd. Lily Ingles, a waif of a girl, was Shelby’s best friend, the only girl in the entire senior class of Austin High Shelby felt she could trust. “Hey—here it is!”
Shelby cranked the wheel of her convertible hard, tires screeching as she landed with a jolt in the middle of Lily’s driveway.
“Jesus, Shelby, you tryin’ to kill us?” Todd asked, leaning forward. He smelled of cheap wine, cigarettes and marijuana. His hair was windblown and stuck up at odd angles.
“Nope. You seem to be doin’ a good enough job of that yourself.”
Lily giggled and the couple, laughing, struggled out of the car. On the front lawn, Todd tried to tackle Lily, but she side-stepped and he reeled into a hedge. “You sure you’re not comin’ in?” Lily asked, her white dress seeming blue in the lamplight, her hair tangled as it fell over one side of her face.
“No.” Shelby wasn’t about to budge. Not tonight. “I already told you, I’ve got plans.”
“But—”
“Shh. Go inside before you wake the neighbors.”
Todd had climbed to his feet and grabbed Lily around the . shoulders. She nearly buckled under his weight. Shelby checked her watch. Eleven thirty-five.
“If you’re sure—”
“Go!” Shelby insisted.
“Okay, okay—”
Todd was nuzzling Lily’s neck and clinging to her as they weaved their way under a trellis to the back door. Once they were inside, Shelby wasted no time. She kicked off her short skirt, exchanging it for a pair of cutoff jeans that she’d stashed under the passenger seat, then replaced her sandals with her favorite worn pair of boots.
She threw the Porsche into reverse and backed onto the street just as the lights snapped on inside Lily’s house.
Ramming the car into first, Shelby headed out of town and ignored the twinge of conscience that suggested she was about to make yet another big mistake. One of a steadily growing list. She’d already lied to her father, to Lily’s folks and to Nevada. Biting her lip at that particular thought, she felt some guilt because she knew he’d been reticent about meeting with her alone, that he’d been having second thoughts about getting involved with Judge Cole’s daughter.
But it was too late.
They were involved already. Well, at least Shelby was involved with him and she wanted desperately to see him, had spent the entire day waiting for the time when she could throw her arms around his neck and kiss him wildly. He was a little more cautious, didn’t like the fact that they were sneaking behind her father’s back. Well, too bad. That was the way it had to be right now.
She flipped on the radio as the town disappeared in her rearview mirror, but didn’t hear a word of the music thrumming through her speakers.
She and Lily had gone to the high school dance and it had been a bore with a capital B. A local band had only known about five Country and Western songs, and they’d played them over and over again, grating on Shelby’s already frayed nerves. She told herself now that she’d really tried to get into the mood of the dance but hadn’t been able to find anything remotely romantic or exciting about the gym that always smelled faintly of over-used wrestling mats. The boys were immature, the music had been dull, the ambience, if that’s what you’d call it, an odd mix of desperation and redundancy.
Shelby was sick to death of high school, tired of her friends, uninterested in the cliques and social scene that everyone else seemed to find so incredibly fascinating. Yeah, about as intriguing as a tobacco-spitting contest.
Earlier in the day, as her father had been packing his garment bag for a trip to Dallas, she’d claimed that she was staying overnight with Lily, and Lily had lied to her folks, who were going out of town, about sleeping over at Shelby’s house. It had been a perfect plan. Lily could spend some time alone with Todd, and Shelby could meet Nevada.
She smiled and shifted down as she stared at the twin splashes of light cast by her car’s headlights. She and Nevada had been seeing each other on the sly for a couple of months. She’d known of him all her life, but she’d been too young to really care when, as her father had said, “that hellion’s going into the service, thank God. It’s good news for this town but bad news for Uncle Sam.” She hadn’t thought a thing of it; she had always heard Nevada was wild and out of control, a “half-breed bastard too smart for his own good.” Nevada had left town, and her life had gone on its unerring path.
But then he’d returned, and it was her time to rebel. She hadn’t seen him until one night, driving home at the speed of light because she was late, she’d been pulled over by Nevada Smith. Serious and unblinking, he’d asked for her license and registration and, after scanning the documents with his flashlight, he’d turned the beam into her face. She’d blinked. “Hey, cut that out.”
“Well, isn’t this some sort of sweet irony,” he’d said. “You’re Judge Cole’s daughter.”
“What of it?”
One side of his mouth lifted. “Let’s just say he’s a friend of mine.”
“Hardly.”
“What do you know about it?”
“The Judge doesn’t have friends.”
His smile widened, and she noticed then how good-looking he was, how ruggedly handsome, even if he was a cop.
“Well, I’m gonna let you off this time,” he said, “but slow down, will ya? That lead foot of yours is gonna get you into trouble, Shelby.”
That was when she caught a glimpse of his name tag and she realized who he was. Nevada Smith. The half-breed juvenile outlaw her father seemed to hate. “You know all about trouble, I hear.”
“I did.”
“And now you’re a cop?”
“Yep.” He laughed, a deep-throated chuckle that was filled with the very irony he’d mentioned. “Who would of thought?”
“Not my dad.”
“Hey, not even me.” He’d patted the side of her car and said, “Now you slow down and stay out of trouble.”
Never, she’d thought and watched him walk back to the cruiser parked behind her car on the side of the road. Her heart was racing out of kilter and she was nervous as she pulled onto the road.
From tha
t moment on she’d been smitten, and it didn’t help that she seemed to keep running into him, at the coffee shop or the fountain at the drug store. She’d spent hours daydreaming of him and then told herself she was an idiot. But the boys in school were so immature, and she found reasons to hang out wherever she knew he’d be. It was spring, she was restless and Nevada Smith, once-upon-a-time bad boy, appealed to her at a level she’d never experienced before. Maybe it was because he still got under her father’s skin, maybe it was because he wasn’t a boy, maybe it was because he was the sexiest man she’d ever met. Whatever it was, she thought of him constantly, even going so far as to carve his initials under the dumb hitching post by the pharmacy, and when she ran into him one night in Coopersville in a cafe after she and her friends had gone to a movie, she knew she had to have him.
“Hi,” she’d said as he sat at a table alone, nursing a beer. In faded jeans and a clean T-shirt that pulled across his back, he sat low on his spine, long legs stretched into the aisle.
He glanced up. “Well if it isn’t leadfoot. How’s your pa?” “Same as ever.” She felt the back of her neck turn red. He was baiting her. Teasing her. And it felt good.
“Whatever that is.” He took a long sip and appraised her slowly, from the tips of her toes sticking out of her sandals, up her legs to her cut-off jeans and short blouse. “I figure he’s still using his ranch as kind of a home for renegade boys who would rather work for slave wages than do time.”
“Well, it’s slowed some, now that you’ve gone straight.”
He barked out a laugh and smiled that killer grin that caused Shelby’s breath to catch and her pulse to beat a smart tattoo. “S’pose it has.” He finished his beer, checked his watch. “What’re you doin’ out from under your daddy’s thumb?”
She stared straight into his steely eyes. “Anything I damned well please.”