Can't Buy Me Love

by Molly O'Keefe

  His father was marrying the sex doll, whose name was Tara Jean Sweet. Who the hell had a name like that? Porn stars, that’s who. Strippers.

  The blessed event was happening next month at Crooked Creek Ranch. Pig roast to follow.

  Time slowed for Luc, the way it did when he was in that sweet spot behind the net, the ice open in front of him. He could see every move in every player’s head and outsmart them all.

  The bastard was getting married.

  Funny, he had never seen that coming.

  “It’s a joke, right?” Victoria asked. “It has to be.”

  He shoved the invitation and that ridiculous picture back in the envelope. Tara Jean Sweet. Please.

  “Who cares?” He tossed the envelope on the hutch in the foyer. It slid right off, landing on the floor, and he didn’t bother to pick it up.

  But Victoria scrambled to grab it.

  “Who cares?” Victoria followed him when he took off down the hallway toward the living room. “I care, Luc.”

  “You shouldn’t.” He pulled loose his tie, then tossed his coat across the white couch some designer had picked out for him. No doubt Vicks was going nuts at the negligence, but he didn’t care. “Didn’t he disown you?”

  “No. I mean … I don’t think so. He just kicked me out.”

  Christ, his head hurt.

  “That money.” Her voice was climbing the rafters; the neighbor’s dogs were going to go berserk in a second. “I need—”

  The sigh—weary and impatient—slipped from his mouth before he could stop it and she closed her mouth, pinching her lips together.

  The gray day outside the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows suited him. The traffic jam on Yonge Street matched his frustrated mood.

  He just could not catch a break.

  “You don’t need anything from him.” He tried to sound like a never-ending well of patience, a beacon of gentle understanding, but it was a total lie and Vicks knew it.

  “We have nothing.” Her voice creaked like an old floor tired of all the weight. “Jacob and I—”

  “I can take care of you and Jacob. I’ve told you that.”

  “I don’t want your charity.”

  “But you’ll take that bastard’s? You’ll take money from him?”

  “I earned that money.” She lifted her chin. “We both did. Being that man’s child was a job. Those summers—”

  “I want nothing from Lyle.” End of that discussion. He stepped into the cream and black kitchen—again some designer’s sense of masculine—and pulled open the stainless-steel fridge to get a beer.

  He felt her eyes on him as he paced and drank, trapped in sophisticated clothes and an ugly kitchen. “You could get a job,” he offered. “Hell, I’d pay you to redecorate this condo.”

  “A job?” she asked as if he’d suggested she become a hit man. He didn’t understand this attitude of hers, as if work were something totally out of reach. She had jobs before. Not great ones but, she’d worked. “I have no qualifications or experience.”

  “I’m not sure my designer did, either.”

  “This isn’t funny!”

  “I’m not laughing. I’m trying to get rid of this stupid idea I can see in your head.”

  “I need the money.”

  “Vicks, maybe if you hadn’t given it all to the lawyers—”

  “I couldn’t keep that money.” Funny how strong her voice was now, how resolute. “Joel stole from those people. Bankrupted some of them—”

  “I know, I get it. I do. But, Christ, you’re stubborn.”

  She smiled slightly. “I learned it from my big brother.”

  He sighed, bracing his hands against the counter. She was going to go down to Texas and take on their father—her intentions were a neon billboard all over her pale face. “We should at least find out if it’s really true.”

  “You’re going to call Dad?”

  He laughed and pulled out his cell phone. “Better,” he said. “I’m going to call his keeper.” He hit speed dial before holding the phone up to his ear.

  “Maman,” he said with a smile.

  A year ago, Victoria had had her pride shoved down her throat by her husband and as humiliating and awful as that experience had been, as soul-crushing and horrifying, it freed her from pride. From hubris. From everything in her life except Jacob.

  In return, it gave her clarity. A worldview that was based on survival.

  She’d earned her inheritance. She needed it. And there was simply no way a woman named Tara Jean Sweet was going to take it away from her.

  Victoria carefully pushed herself into one of the terribly uncomfortable bar stools that lined the kitchen counter. Luc was on the phone with Celeste, his mother and Lyle’s ex-wife, who paid lawyers a lot of money to stay on top of the old man and make his life miserable. If anyone could find out if this was joke, it was Celeste.

  Luc ran a hand through his dark hair, rubbing a spot on his forehead as if something under the skin was bothering him. He’d been doing that a lot lately, and she’d started to wonder if that hit he took in the last game had done some serious damage.

  “Non. Non.” His laugh was a revelation and it made her smile. French wasn’t a language they shared. Because her own mother, Lyle’s mistress, had been a bored New Yorker with an appetite for self-destruction and Celeste had been an elegant and snobby French-Canadian model.

  In those long and bleak summers she and Luc had shared in Texas, learning to hate their father, the “half” part of their relationship had become irrelevant. They were born eighteen months apart and they might as well have been twins.

  Luc’s conversation grew terse. His hands were white-knuckled around the phone and the neck of his beer, and Victoria’s stomach sank with a sick gurgle into the soles of her feet.

  Not a joke.

  Luc hung up, and Victoria felt herself begin to fray and snap. She smoothed the hem of her gray wool skirt with shaking fingers—as if that would help. As if all that stood between her and a life of security was a wrinkled hem. “It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked, not quite able to look her brother in the eye.

  She wished she were a different woman. Better able to care for herself and her son. But she wasn’t. She was Victoria Schulman and right now, she needed her father’s inheritance.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Maman was notified by her lawyer that Dad changed his will two weeks ago. If he marries that … woman, she inherits everything.”

  His eyes were so pitying and she couldn’t pretend not to see it.

  “And I’ll lose everything.”

  “I’m not going back there, Vicks,” he said through clenched teeth. His shoulders curled and bunched as if he wanted to hurl the beer bottle across the room. “I haven’t been back there in twenty years and I don’t give a shit who he marries, or if he’s dying. I’m not going back.”

  “I’m not asking you to.” But she was. Oh, she was. And he knew it; her act didn’t convince anyone, least of all her brother. “You’ve done enough. I’ll go alone.”

  “Right,” he scoffed. “You down there with him … by yourself? Someone will get killed.”

  “It might be Bimbo Barbie,” she said with a smile.

  Luc laughed through his nose and it took a few minutes, but she saw his mind change, just like she’d known it would. If there was one thing she could count on in this world, it was her brother.

  “And that I gotta see,” he said.

  Relief that she didn’t have to be strong fizzed through her body like cheap, too-sweet champagne.

  Luc picked up his phone. “But first we need to find out everything we can about this Tara Jean woman. You still have the number for that private investigator?”

  The purpose in Luc filled her, too, and she shoved off the stool to go find her purse and Gary Thiele’s card. When the lawsuits started rolling in after Joel’s suicide, she’d hired a P.I. to weed out the fraudulent ones.

  She handed the worn card to her br
other, who grabbed her cold fingers in his warm palm.

  His dark eyes, so like their father’s, were warm with affection and pity, a combination she hated but had grown used to. “We’ll get you your inheritance, Vicks. I promise.”

  Thank God.

  chapter

  2

  Tara Jean Sweet was driven by a demon. A white-trash demon standing in twelve-dollar stilettos.

  Shorter! the demon screamed, and Tara flipped her pencil and erased the hem on the sketch, redrawing it a few millimeters higher.

  More pink. Pinker.

  And fringe! Lots of fringe.

  Oh, the demon cooed, sucking on a Virginia Slim … bedazzle it.

  “Come on, really?” Tara muttered, staring down at the sketch of the last skirt for Baker Leather’s fall line. It was short, pink, and fringed. What’s more—

  I said bedazzle it!

  “Fine,” she muttered, amending the sketch and making notes in the corresponding notebook.

  The demon, for all her faults, knew what the leather-wearing woman wanted, down to a very uncomfortable line of thongs.

  As muses went, the demon was a bitch. But she was never wrong.

  Tara spread out the sketches, the short skirts, the tight pants, the bustiers and feminine biker jackets. Boots and shoes. Belts and earrings. Purses. Bags. Fifty new products for the five hundred Baker Leather stores in Texas and Oklahoma.

  They looked good. The demon earned her spot in Tara Jean’s head.

  She took a handful of Mike and Ikes, picking out the yellows because yellow washed her out and she’d been taking the yellows out for over twenty years. One by one, she popped the rest in her mouth.

  From the bottom drawer of her two-drawer filing cabinet, she pulled out three thick files and sorted through the sketches from the last three years, deciding which ones would be brought back for the fall line. She decided on the black duster with the red feather trim. Popular on Halloween. She also kept the suede mittens with the fur lining and matching hat—a perennial favorite. The blouse with the pretty heart cutouts on the collar. She imagined librarians who thought themselves edgy bought that one.

  Her demon nodded in agreement.

  The last sketch was an old one, three years according to the date stamp on the back. The paper was faded, the brown rim of an old coffee-cup stain on the top corner. Her first design. The one that had turned her life and Baker Leather all the way around.

  The pink calfskin cowboy boot with the tooled leather, one-and-a-half-inch heel, and delicate metal toe.

  She shook out the box of Mike and Ikes but there was nothing but yellow. So ugly, she thought, but she ate them anyway.

  In three months, at the end of July, she had a meeting with the Region Four Nordstrom buyer about possibly getting her boots in Nordstrom all across the southeastern United States.

  It would be … Tara blinked, trying to find a word for it. She hadn’t grown up with dreams of designing. She was utterly unmoved by pink cowboy boots.

  But the money … that she had dreamed of. Growing up in a trailer on the far side of Nowhere, Arkansas, she’d dreamed of money like it was Prince Charming coming to save her from the cigarette stink and beer-stained filth she’d been born in.

  It was simple. The Nordstrom deal meant freedom. She’d sold her soul to cement it; now she just had to deliver.

  Ya welcome, the demon cackled.

  “Thanks, Momma,” Tara whispered. The demon was a mixed blessing, here to help after a lifetime of neglecting Tara when she needed her mother the most.

  She chose to ignore the deeply psychotic nature of it all.

  Tara sighed and stretched, rolling her neck, staring up through the glass panels of the renovated greenhouse that she used as an office and studio. The bone-white moon was high and full in the cloudless sky. The small pool of light from the desk lamp threw deep shadows in the glass house and the moonlight made it all somehow spookier.

  She was here way later than she liked to be. Night on the ranch was creepy. All that sky. The empty space. It wasn’t natural. It seemed as though all her secrets and ghosts waited for her under that moon.

  Lyle insisted that she work from the ranch—it’s how it had always been. Since the turn of the century, when Lyle’s great-grandfather started making chaps and boots and selling them from the stables to every cowboy and rustler within a hundred miles.

  Lyle’s granddaddy had bought Crooked Creek and since then, the land and the leather had gone hand in hand.

  By the time Lyle’s daddy died, Baker stores were all over the Southwest. Their leather was being worn by teenagers, homemakers, even a few state politicians.

  But when it fell into Lyle’s negligent hands, the stores and the brand started to nose-dive. He cared more about raising registered Angus cattle than he did about selling their pink-dyed hides. But when Baker Leather was about to go bankrupt, he woke up to what he’d done to the family legacy.

  Five years ago, hat in hand, Lyle went to his son, the successful hockey player, and asked him to get his photo taken while wearing a pair of Baker boots. Luc had refused. And while there was no medical proof, Tara believed that was the beginning of the end for Lyle’s health. A year later, he was admitted to the hospital after a series of strokes.

  Lucky for all of them that she stumbled into his hospital room when she did.

  Tara filed the drawings and locked the beat-up metal cabinet. Tomorrow would be an early day—Edna and Joyce were showing up at dawn to start making samples of the designs.

  The demon loved that.

  Uppity bitches, the demon scowled, running pink fingernails through the black roots of her long blond hair. Edna disapproved of how short the skirts were.

  Tara clicked off the light and the black-and-white topography of her office threw her off, damaged her depth perception. The headless tailor dummies seemed to shift in the shadows, as if they were coming for her, and she felt her heart beat hard in the back of her throat.

  It’s not him, she told herself, earning herself some credit in the freak-out department.

  But someday she knew he would find her. And he would come for his pound of flesh.

  Until then, however, it was just the moon, a couple of tailor dummies, and her own imagination.

  She pulled on the tight purple suede boots with the black heel that went with the matching knee-length purple skirt she wore. The more demure of last year’s line.

  You look like a librarian, the demon whispered.

  A beloved two inches taller, she hustled out of the office, locking the door behind her. Which was more than stupid considering the glass walls, but old habits died hard. The gravel of the path from the greenhouse to the parking area crunched beneath her feet and she hummed under her breath to fill the roaring silence.

  So many animals out there. So many miles of nothing. Funny how nothing but flat land and a big starry sky could feel so damn suffocating.

  She walked around the yellow blocks of light thrown through the kitchen windows of the big house, keeping to the dark shadows, hoping Ruby or, worse, Eli wouldn’t see her. She just wanted to go home tonight. Sleep in her own bed, drink her own coffee in preparation for her long day tomorrow. Was that too much to ask?

  She dug through her deep purple hobo bag for her keys, feeling the guilty thrill that she might just make it off the compound without being noticed.

  In the bottom of the bag she found ten pencils, an empty pack of gum. Two fuzzy Swedish fish.

  “There you are,” she murmured, pulling out the necklace with the pretty key charm and the broken clasp she thought she’d lost.

  Stupid big purses, it was too easy to lose everything.

  Including her keys. Every damn day.

  Ah ha! She wrestled them from the small pocket in front and glanced up.

  Only to see a man waiting in the shadows by her car. Her heart thundered in her chest, trying to break free from her ribs.

  It’s him.

  Fear paralyzed h
er.

  “It’s only me, Tara,” a thick, deep voice said, and Eli stepped into the light, his face still hidden by the brim of his ever-present hat.

  “Christ, Eli,” she panted, relief making her woozy. “You scared the shit outta me.”

  “That’s what happens when you try to sneak off.”

  “Come on, Eli, we both know they’re not coming.”

  “We don’t know that—”

  “It’s been nine days and we haven’t heard anything!”

  Eli tipped up his hat and rested his long, lean frame against the car. “You agreed, Tara Jean,” he said, his voice a low, slow lick. What he meant, of course, was “he bought you, Tara,” but Eli was a gentleman and wouldn’t say such a thing.

  Guilt shimmied in her stomach.

  “Fine.” She threw her keys back into her bag. “But you get off on this jailer thing. I know you do, Eli.”

  His chuckle warmed the night.

  They turned and walked up the gravel path to the stone steps of the big house. Built from oak and stone, the heart of the big house was the same one that Great-Granddaddy Baker had bought with money from making all those chaps. But the generations had added to the home, until it was seven thousand square feet of “holy hell.”

  A wraparound verandah, a sleeping porch, turrets, two two-story wings, a glass portico; it was like an architectural death match, and both architects had died.

  The demon loved it.

  So classy, she sighed.

  “He’s going to die all by himself, isn’t he?”

  Eli, who over the last few years had become the totally secretive, silent ninja cowboy brother she never knew she wanted, just shrugged. Like it didn’t matter.

  But she hated that. Lyle Baker was a son of a bitch in every sense of the word and probably a few that she wasn’t entirely aware of, but death wasn’t something anyone should meet by himself.

  “He’s got us,” Eli said. Tara Jean’s smile hurt with bitterness.

  Eli might just be a saint, for all she knew about the man. But she was a lying con-artist thief of wholly questionable roots who had sold herself and her vacant smiles to Lyle Baker in exchange for financial freedom.