She jerked her hand free and stepped back. He stared at her for a beat, his rumpled hair falling over his forehead, those amazing eyes dark in a way they hadn’t been back then. Full of shadows and storms—and desire. Current, or remembered? Best not to wonder.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“Fixing your tractor, remember?”
She gave an impatient shake of her head. “You said you’d send a mechanic.”
“I did.” He spread his hands to say Here I am, and the gleam in his eyes sharpened, as if he sensed how her body clenched at the view. “As long as you’re here, you can give me a hand.”
Her mind slipped again, into the quicksand of memories. Oh, she’d given him a hand, all right. And a mouth. And… She ground her teeth, irritated. Damn him, invading her space this way. She wouldn’t have accepted the offer if she’d known he planned to do it himself.
He paused at the door to the arena and glanced over his shoulder as he tucked the earbuds into his pocket. “Coming?”
Not lately, her body whispered. But if you’ve got a few minutes…
Tori growled under her breath but had to follow him. Inside the arena, the tractor hood was open, its innards exposed, a toolbox and a portable battery charger on the ground next to it.
Tori lingered by the door. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing some basic maintenance won’t fix,” he said, shooting her an accusing glare.
She returned it in kind. She’d only owned the thing for a month—it wasn’t her fault if the previous owners had neglected it. “Can you get it running tonight?”
“I said I would.” He wiggled his fingers. “I’m almost done working my magic.”
Her breath hitched at a new explosion of memories. She knew what those hands could do. Could feel the soft rasp of calluses against her skin as his palms slid over her…
For God’s sake, stop! She resisted the urge to stomp her foot in annoyance. What had happened to her little cocoon? One touch, one steamy look from him, and the damn thing just up and disintegrated, leaving her as trembly as a newborn colt, and just as clueless. Letting those eyes and that body get to her again was beyond stupid.
“Here.” His voice became abrupt, his expression shuttered as he handed her one end of an extension cord. “Plug this in. I don’t know where the outlet is.”
She did, then planted herself safely on the opposite side of the tractor as Delon popped rubber, cup-shaped connectors onto the spark plugs. “So…this is your place,” he said.
“Yep.” Though he hadn’t phrased it as a question, there were half a dozen embedded in the casual statement. She ignored all of them.
“Why Dumas?”
“Property is cheaper out here.”
He worked in expectant silence for a few beats. When she didn’t further enlighten him, he shot her a glance over the tractor. “Did your family disown you?”
“No.” If only it was that simple to become a non-Patterson.
Delon popped the last spark plug connector into place, then straightened. “Then why not live at the ranch?”
“It costs too much.” A price wrung out of her soul, drop by drop, in guilt and failed obligations. With great fortune comes great responsibility. The Patterson creed. She alone had walked away. Call her selfish, but she’d let the rest of her family bear the burden of moral duty to mankind and country. She’d vowed to avoid being extraordinary at all costs. So far, so good.
“Live in our house, play by our rules?” Delon bent to adjust the settings on the battery charger. The view did not suck. He glanced over his shoulder. “You said your mother was upset that you dropped out of medical school.”
Tori dragged her attention back to the conversation. “Is.”
“Excuse me?”
“Is upset. My mother’s ambitions for me don’t have an expiration date.”
Delon shot her a baffled look. “She still wants you to go back to medical school after all this time?”
“At this point she’d settle for a PhD.” Tori shrugged. “If one angle doesn’t work she tries another, and another, until one day you find yourself doing what she wants.”
“Doesn’t she care what you want? If you’re happy?”
Tori gave a dry laugh. “She deals in survival rates. Functional capacity. Measurable outcomes. Happiness cannot be calculated, so is therefore irrelevant.”
Delon shook his head. “That’s messed up.”
“That’s my mother. Relentless. But not evil. That’s what makes her scary. She truly believes she’s doing the right thing. She’s convinced that someday, I’ll wake up and regret that I didn’t take advantage of my opportunities to have a bigger impact.”
And she might be right, at least about the impact part. Tori helped one patient at a time. Her mother’s technical advances and her sister’s research could benefit thousands. But Tori couldn’t imagine regretting her chosen path. She liked digging into each individual case, watching her patients improve, day by day, reveling in every small victory.
Now if she could just find a way to count Delon among those victories.
“What about your mother?” Tori asked. Tit for tat and all. “You said she was gone.”
Delon gave the battery one last swipe before tossing the rag on top of the tractor engine. “She lives on the Navajo reservation.”
In Arizona? Or New Mexico? Both, maybe. Tori’s brain sifted and shuffled images—Delon so dark, his dad so fair…
Delon jumped to the conclusion for her. “My grandfather took his stepfather’s name. We have no Hispanic blood.”
“Oh. That must be weird, people assuming…” That he was different than what they expected from his last name? Huh. Sounded vaguely familiar. “How long has she been gone?”
He rummaged in his toolbox for a plastic, cylinder-shaped gizmo and screwed it down over the nearest battery terminal, twisting it back and forth to scrub the metal post clean. “Her father had a stroke when I was four. Her mother already had severe diabetes. They couldn’t live alone, so she went home.”
Her father. Her mother. Not my grandparents. A telling distinction.
“Did she try to take you with her?”
He shook his head. “They lived way out on the mesa. No electricity. No running water. We would have had to go to a boarding school. She thought we were better off here.”
“Did she come back to visit?”
He paused, then said, “At first.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“It was fine, until she had to go.” He reattached the battery cable and tightened the bolt with a quick jerk of the wrench. “Every time she left, I threw screaming fits, my brother would yell that he hated everyone, and Dad would sit up all night for a week staring at the television.” He hitched rigid shoulders. “The visits got farther apart, until finally it was just phone calls on birthdays and holidays and a week with my mother in the summer.”
God. It sounded like an extended version of hell. “Your dad hasn’t remarried?”
“They aren’t divorced. Never got around to it, I guess.”
“Oh. That’s…” Sad. Her heart ached, imagining a child trying to understand his mother’s repeated abandonments. “It’s hard to picture you throwing tantrums.”
“It never did me any good.” The corner of his lip curled. “I get a lot further being the nice one.”
He twisted nice into an insult, and the depth of his bitterness set Tori back on her heels. Whatever had scraped him this raw was fairly recent. His anger was ragged, an uncomfortable fit, as if he hadn’t had time to grow into it. Probably just about four months.
“I watched the video of your wreck. Violet ran you down.”
His hands stilled for an instant. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“I suppose she did the best she could, given the situati
on.” But agreeing didn’t take the acid out of Tori’s voice. “Still part of the family, I take it?”
Delon stared at her for a long, charged moment. Then his eyes narrowed. “You don’t like Violet?”
“Violet never liked me. None of her crowd did, from the moment I walked on campus.”
He fiddled with the cables so long she thought he wouldn’t respond. “Do you know Krista Barron?”
Tori blinked at the unexpected tangent. “Her daddy and mine were elected to the Senate the same year, and we went to the same private school in D.C.”
But Krista was three years older than Tori and very…adventurous, so they’d never been more than casual acquaintances. Odd that Tori turned out to be the true rebel. Nowadays, Krista Barron-Tate was the very proper wife of an up-and-coming Oklahoma politician. “What’s Krista got to do with me?”
“Besides being a rich, sexy blonde? She bailed on law school to come slumming in the Panhandle.”
“She’s from Oklahoma. I was born and raised here.” With the exception of those excruciating prep school years in D.C., separated from the land, the sky, and especially her horses.
Delon only shrugged. “Krista hooked up with one of the local boys for a few months. She got pregnant. He wanted to marry her, but the Barrons weren’t having some no-account cowboy for a son-in-law. They tried to cut him out of the kid’s life. He wouldn’t let go and the custody battle got ugly. So when you showed up…”
They all saw another spoiled brat, looking to sow some wild oats and wreak havoc. “This cowboy…is he a friend of yours?”
“Nah.” Delon gave a hard laugh. “Just my brother.”
And pow! The lightbulb finally turned on. She tucked her arms tightly around her waist to contain the slow roll of her stomach. God, she’d been such a fool. “You had no idea who I was the night we met.”
“No.”
Shit and damn. When she’d dropped Delon off that next morning, Tori had been so sure he would call her before the end of the day. Maybe pop by before he left town for the first rodeo run of the season. She’d waited. And waited. While he’d gone to the Jacobs ranch for New Year’s dinner, where goddamn Violet had poured poison in his ear. And Delon had soaked it up, because wasn’t a woman just like her already making his brother’s life hell? Of course, he’d listened. The miracle was that he’d ever come near her again.
Well, at least now Tori understood exactly why Violet’s attitude toward her had gone from amused contempt to palpable animosity after that New Year’s Eve.
He hopped up onto the tractor, pulled out the choke knob, and turned the key. The engine groaned, coughed, then sputtered to life. He adjusted the throttle until the tractor settled into a steady roar. “There you go,” he yelled over the racket. “Let it run for at least ten minutes before you turn it off.”
He climbed down and unclipped the charger cables. She coiled up the extension cord as he gathered his tools.
She followed him, pausing at the arena gate to hand him the cord. “Thanks. For coming out on a Friday night and all.”
“I’ll send you a bill.”
As he stepped out the door into the darkness, she said, “Hey, Delon?”
He looked back, eyes wary. “Yeah?”
“If it makes you feel any better, I never thought you were all that nice.”
He stared at her for a long moment, then gave another of those hard smiles. “You didn’t really know who I was, either.”
Chapter 13
Well, that went just fucking great. Delon slammed the door of his apartment behind him and tossed his coat onto a couch worn threadbare around the edges. Nothing better than digging up ancient family bones and chewing them over. What was it about this stripped-down, brutally honest Tori that made him feel obliged to respond in kind?
His boots thudded, first one, then the other, against the wall as he kicked them off, then stalked out to the kitchen and fished a bag of mini Snickers from the back of one of the cabinets, where he’d hidden them from Beni. Empty. He balled up the plastic and fired it at the trash can. It bounced off the wall and ricocheted onto the tile floor. Dammit. He’d polished off the last of the bag in his car on the way to Tori’s, and the clerks at the Kwicky Mart were starting to make smart-ass comments about his chocolate habit. He could drive back over to Dumas, he supposed, but he wasn’t quite that pathetic. Yet.
So now what? He turned a slow circle to examine his hearth and home. Nothing to do here. Everything else might be a mess, but his apartment was in perfect order. Breakfast and lunch dishes stacked in the drying rack, Beni’s toys stowed away in a big wooden box in the corner, books and DVDs lined up neatly on the shelves of the entertainment center. He’d vacuumed and dusted the previous weekend—he’d even taken down the photos from the wall to polish the glass.
Six months ago, the gallery on the wall had illustrated his life. Pictures of Beni as a toddler grinning from beneath the brim of Delon’s too-big hat. On his pony, with Delon on one side and Cole Jacobs on the other, all of them proud as punch. A group shot from Thanksgiving two years ago, the whole mob gathered around Miz Iris’s overloaded table. And one of Beni as a baby, cradled in Violet’s arms, with Delon smiling proudly beside them. The perfect family.
Delon snorted out a breath. The perfect idiot, more like. He’d wanted that life, that security, so badly for Beni. A normal family with all the usual parts. His son would never waste letters to Santa begging for his mother to show up at Christmas. Beni wouldn’t be the center of battles over every holiday and long weekend like Gil’s son. Delon wanted better for his kid. He’d thought Violet wanted the same. They’d grow into it as they aged, he’d imagined, from friendship to love. He should’ve known better. Violet had always been a sucker for the renegades. Guys like Joe Cassidy. Gil. Not Delon.
If it makes you feel any better, I never thought you were all that nice.
He and Tori had had sparks—the whole damn fireworks show—but she didn’t know the real him. The boring one. She only knew the cocky bastard he’d pretended to be when he was with her. His gaze moved across the rest of the pictures. Action shots of him at San Antonio, Pendleton, the National Finals. Even Cheyenne. The photographer had snapped that photo as the horse launched out of the chute, the spectators in the infield grandstand clearly visible.
Had Tori been one of them? He stepped close, squinted, and examined the faces row by row, but didn’t find hers. Had she watched him ride? Cheered just a little? Or had she made a point of being elsewhere during the bareback riding? He lifted his hand to the claw marks on his neck. Felt the cool touch of her fingers. Saw the pop of awareness in her eyes. Yeah, she remembered, but it was buried deep, inside a woman he didn’t recognize any more than he recognized himself these days.
Dredging up those old feelings was a straight shot to disaster, with the hurt and resentment lying coiled in the middle of it all, waiting to lash out and bite them. And still, his body hummed from brushing up against hers out there behind the barn. The featherlight touch of her fingertips.
His gaze ranged over the pictures on his wall. His past. It seemed as if that was all he could see anymore. Once upon a time, he’d had a clear vision of where he was headed. Then Fate had reached down, crumpled his road map into a ball, and tossed it in the trash. Without the family he’d built with Violet and Beni, without the rodeos, with no solid position at Sanchez Trucking beyond mechanic and part-time truck driver…
He flopped down on the couch and let his head fall back, eyes closed. Who would have dreamed, on that New Year’s Eve seven years ago when anything had seemed possible, that his life would come to this?
If he hadn’t been on such a high, he might have questioned his luck when Tori landed in his lap, but it was his birthday and he’d had a couple of beers and a whole night of back slaps and handshakes to loosen him up. For the first time, he felt like his own man. Not Gil Sanchez’s
little brother. Not another wanna-be. He looked into the eyes of people he’d known most of his life and saw respect. Admiration. More than a touch of envy.
He saw his reflection, and it said, You are for real, Delon Sanchez. So when heaven dropped into his arms, he scooped it up without a second thought.
He’d fended off plenty of groupies along the rodeo trail, and had learned to suspect the motives of any strange woman who got too close too fast, but the instant he touched Tori, he knew she was different. She looked like sunlight and smelled like the shady corner of a flower garden where he could play Adam to her Eve.
It had taken some coaxing before she relaxed against him. She seemed both fascinated and nervous, like a tourist at the petting zoo. And here we have a genuine American cowboy. Watch yourself, now, they’ve been known to bite, especially tender young things…
The kiss at midnight had damn near vaporized him. He had to get her out of there. Where, he had no idea, but he wanted her alone. Then she completely blew his mind by pointing across the parking lot. “I live right over there.”
He stared at her, stunned. She couldn’t mean…she wasn’t offering…was she? The way she was looking at him, her eyes wide with equal parts nerves, defiance, and desire…
His mind blanked out with lust, and he heard his voice saying, “Well, all right, then. Lead the way.”
Even though he knew he should say thanks a million—make that ten million—but no. He’d spent a lifetime trailing along, learning from his brother’s mistakes. This was the first time in months he’d been tempted to even bend his own rules, let alone break them, and since he wouldn’t trust any condom that’d been stuffed in his wallet for weeks, he didn’t bother to carry them. But…
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