Either way, it was a mistake for her to leave, because when she turned the corner he slipped into the room.
The skeleton was unconscious on the bed, so still it was as if his body were held in suspended animation.
Is he dead? Luc’s ribs were an empty net.
Then he noticed that Lyle’s chest rose and fell in time with the gasping machine beside the bed. The mask over his mouth fogged and then cleared with every breath.
Not dead. Yet.
Luc stepped closer. Closer again. Close enough to see the old man’s big hands hidden among the hills and valleys of the blue blanket thrown over him.
He stopped. It was an old ingrained habit: staying close enough to see his hands, but just out of reach in case the old man got it in his head to take a swing.
Seemed unlikely at the moment, but Luc wouldn’t count Lyle out until they had six feet of dirt over his coffin.
Luc’s heart pounded hard in his neck and he tilted his chin, stretched his throat, trying to make the pounding go away. Years ago he’d dealt with this crap. His fucking daddy issues. They were gone. Sliced to ribbons under a hundred pairs of skates.
He was known for his cool on the ice. He played without emotion, with total control. A machine.
Ice Man.
But here he was with one eye on the old man’s hands, his other on the door, as if he were ten years old. And scared.
Growing up, Luc had been small for his age. Something that used to infuriate Lyle, as if Luc were refusing to grow just to spite him. Those beatings … it had been as though he was trying to force Luc’s bones to comply to his will.
But when Luc turned fifteen, everything changed. In four months he’d gained fifteen pounds and five inches.
He remembered, because for the first time he’d been excited to go down to Texas and show Lyle that he couldn’t be pushed around anymore. That he wasn’t puny. Or chicken shit. An embarrassment.
That winter, awake at night with growing pains, Luc had nursed dreams, elaborate and extensive visions of kicking the ever-loving shit out of his father.
But his mom must have caught wind, because he didn’t go to Texas that summer. Instead, Celeste had signed him up for hockey camps and touring leagues. And then hockey took over his life. His love for the game, his natural affinity, the home he found among the guys—it became the fire that fueled him.
Visits to the ranch became fewer and farther between. He stopped going down during the summers. Never went at all during the winter. March break had been about it.
On the bed, Lyle coughed and then wheezed, his head shifting against the pillow. The oxygen mask slipped, revealing thin, pale lips, and Lyle gasped. Gasped again.
Luc watched, waiting to be moved. Waiting to care.
Your father is dying. Right now. In front of your eyes.
But it didn’t happen. The dying or the giving a shit about it.
Part of Luc’s shit-kicking fantasy had involved a little speech he’d give Lyle while the old man was lying in the dirt, his nose broken and his lip bloodied.
It was a good speech, changed and tweaked some throughout the years. And it was a shame Lyle had never heard it.
Luc had given that speech once to a woman, the night the Canadian Juniors won the World’s. That night he’d watched teammate after teammate get hugged by fathers with tears in their eyes. Teammate after teammate invited their dads to come celebrate, and so he spent the whole night surrounded by so much fatherly pride it ruined the victory. Turned the whole night sour.
So, he’d picked up one of those puck bunnies who’d been waiting for a shot to add his sweater number to her list of conquests. Surly and poisonous, he’d gotten drunk and laid.
And when the girl asked what he was so angry about, he gave her the speech.
Weaving at the foot of the bed, wearing his boxers and clutching an empty bottle of vodka—a champion with nothing but a bright future to look forward to—he told Lyle Baker what a shit father he had been. How every single good thing Luc managed to accomplish had nothing to do with being a Baker. That in the end, Lyle would die. Alone. Unloved.
The words of that speech were burned into his brain. Unforgotten. After all these years. After Olympic Gold. Stanley Cup Finals. He was an elite athlete. Paid a fortune. Respected by the world.
And he couldn’t let go of those words.
His body twitched with adrenaline, and he couldn’t outrun it or even slow it down.
He stepped closer to the bed, where Lyle’s gasps were fast and shallow, the plastic edge of that oxygen mask cutting into his chin.
Get up! he wanted to shout. Wake up, you coward!
Let me tell you what a shitty father you were. Let me tell you how much I hate what you’re putting my sister through. Let me tell you how much it sickens me to even think of you even looking at Jacob.
He told himself that he was just here to protect his sister, but part of him was here for another shot at his dad. Another crack at the speech. The split lip. All of it.
But, looking at the gasping dying skeleton, he realized it wasn’t going to happen.
He was never going to get satisfaction from Lyle. Even if the old man were healthy and whole, he wouldn’t care what Luc thought of him.
Why the realization always came as a surprise, he couldn’t say.
You’re better than this, he told himself, the way he had year after year. Disappointment after disappointment.
You don’t need this man in any way. You never did.
Brick by brick he rebuilt the wall he kept in front of the red-eyed temper he’d inherited from his father. Brick by brick he made it stronger. Thicker. Impenetrable.
His control had to be complete if he was going to take care of his family. Get rid of the bimbo and get back to his life on the ice.
The adrenaline deflated and the cold air that filled him every other day of his life returned, pushing the anger back into the corners and crawl spaces, where it had lived for the last twenty years.
He was Luc Baker, leader of the Cavaliers, and he had nothing to do with the corpse on the bed.
At long last, Luc lifted his hand and shifted the oxygen mask back over his father’s mouth and nose, allowing him to breathe.
Tara Jean pushed another yellow Mike and Ike through the barbed-wire fence. Right into the sloppy mouth of one of the cows.
Please, she thought, wiping off the cow slobber on her jeans. Please let me have done the right thing.
Telling Luc not to go into his father’s room seemed like the most surefire way to insure he would go into the room, like waving a red cape in front of a bull.
And granted the plan had all the sophistication of a Hallmark Special, but she had to hope that once he was in the room Luc would take a good look at what his father had become and if there was a working heart inside that big ol’ chest of his, it might be moved.
She had to pray that Luc would see his father for the lonely, pained man he was. So desperate to see his family he’d concocted this ridiculous scheme.
Lyle was dying. Only an animal would look at his flesh and blood and not care. Right?
All the shit her mother had done to her and Tara still managed to sob like a child in the hospital when her mother died. And Lyle may have been a doozy of a parent, but he had nothing on Rayanne.
Excuse me, the demon muttered. I’m right here.
“What do you think, cow?” She looked into the beautiful bovine eyes of the candy addict she’d created. “Did I do the right thing?”
The cow lowed softly and blew a raspberry past big elastic lips.
“Yeah,” she whispered, her heart a clump of dirt in her chest, “probably not.”
Her skin broke out in goose bumps seconds before she heard someone coming up behind her. There was only one person on this ranch—hell, maybe in the world—that could give her skin a reason to wake up.
“I imagine you went in?” she asked when the footsteps stopped behind her. She knew, to the inch, how f
ar away he was, her body doing the finite math between her flesh and his.
“Of course I went in.” His voice cool and filled to the brim with mocking superiority.
With Luc’s arrival, the cow shook her head, making her ears flop. The bovine equivalent of a hair toss.
Tara Jean rolled her eyes. Honestly, some women couldn’t get past a set of shoulders.
“So?” She turned on her heel. The sun was behind him, set against that blue eye-shadow sky. Judging by the scowl on his face there had been no deathbed revelation. His hate was rooted all the way down.
Plan Deathbed Reconciliation had not worked. Which was not surprising. It was a pretty crappy plan.
“Is he still breathing?” She cracked the hard shell of a red candy with her teeth.
His smile was the meanest thing she’d ever seen. And she’d been on the receiving end of some maliciousness in her life.
“Oh, stop,” she said, tired already of the theatrics. “You can’t scare me.”
Luc took another step closer, his beautiful calf-skin loafers covered in fine Texas dust, and all of her warning signals and alarm bells clamored for her to step away. Out of reach. But she stood her ground.
“I’m only going to say this once.” Luc took off his sunglasses, revealing his daddy’s deep hazel eyes. Good God, the man was cold! She needed a sweater just to be this close to him. “You’re not going to marry my father.”
“Really?” she asked, playing her part without much conviction. “And why’s that?”
“Because I will make your life hell.”
“A will is a will. And you can argue he wasn’t in his right mind and all that stuff.” She waved her hand around as if she just couldn’t be bothered with the legalities of it all. “But there’s not a judge in this part of the world that will see it your way. And you know it.”
His narrowed eyes delighted her, sent her inner self soaring. Those sticks she poked at him had found their target.
“I don’t care about his money.” She snorted. People might say they didn’t care about money, but those people were liars. “I’m talking about your life. Jane.”
Her skin shrank. Her bravado cracked like that candy shell between her teeth.
Jane.
“How—”
“You think I’m stupid? As stupid as my father? I hired a private investigator—and you hid your tracks well, you really did. Tara Jean Sweet doesn’t exist. Not really. No phone. No address. My dad must pay you in cash, right? A couple hundreds on the bedside table?”
She clenched her fists, refusing to rise to his lame bait.
“But four years ago a woman named Jane Simmons was in the hospital at the same time as my father. A woman fitting your description.”
She knew she should have dyed her hair. If she were a brunette, they probably wouldn’t be having this discussion.
“Changing my name isn’t against the law.”
“No. But my investigator isn’t finished yet. And the reporters haven’t even gotten started.”
Chewing her tongue, she forced herself to stay where she was. To stand her ground, because the only man in the world who believed in her had paid her to stand here and take Luc Baker’s shit.
“The reporters, particularly the Sports guys—they’re relentless. And they’re the ones who would be on you, because if you marry Lyle you’re stepping into my world, honey. You know what those parasites would do to a woman like you?” he asked. “They’ll dig up all your little secrets. Every inch of dirt and filth you keep hidden behind that smile.”
She swallowed. There was so much filth behind her smile, he had no idea.
“And I suppose you’ve got all that power?” she asked.
“One word,” he purred, managing to be both evil and seductive. “One press conference. One photo. I can ruin your life.”
Right. One photo. Anger settled in along her spine. Righteous fury on behalf of the man dying inside that ranch.
“Mr. Big Shot,” she cooed, inching closer even though it made her skin hurt. “All that power and you’d waste it on me?”
He started to smirk but she kept talking, using far less sugar and much more poison. “When you couldn’t be bothered five years ago to save your father’s company?”
That he looked confused ignited her own back-alley temper. “You don’t remember?” she asked.
“Remember what?”
“Your father meeting you in Houston, asking you to wear his boots. Have your photo taken. One photo. As a favor.”
“You have no idea what you’re even talking about. We hadn’t spoken in years and he shows up at my hotel asking for favors. After the way that man treated my sister and me, he had no right to think I would wear his crappy boots.”
“He was desperate,” she said, through gritted teeth. “And you are his son.”
Immediately she knew she’d crossed some line.
But she had so many lines in her rearview mirror that another one wouldn’t change a thing.
“He had his first stroke after that meeting,” she told him, sharpening the sticks she’d carried for four long years on Lyle’s behalf. “The first of three that put him in the hospital a year later. In intensive care.”
She had the powerful feeling of being assessed. Measured. And she knew clear as day that she’d come up wanting in his eyes.
“If you’re trying to make me feel guilty, it’s not going to work.”
He stood there, immoveable. A glacier of cold, hard purpose. It was rather familiar; she had, in fact, been trying to manipulate and placate a similar glacier for the last four years. But Lyle had a living, scheming heart under all that ice and enough fire to keep him alive long after doctors’ predictions. Luc seemed like he was ice to the core.
“You’re a lot like your daddy.”
She expected him to get angry. Braced herself for it. But he laughed. “You have no idea what I’m like.” He looked down at his watch. “I’m going to take my sister and nephew back home where they belong and I’m going to give you a week to pack up your lipstick and high heels and get the hell away from this family—”
“Or?” She looked down at the chipped paint on her thumbnail. Honestly, was there a bigger lie in the world than “chip proof”?
He stepped closer, his suit jacket pressing against her hands, and she dropped them to her sides. Suddenly, she wished she hadn’t baited him. For a woman who was trying to just do her part and stay out of the way, she’d managed to position herself right out in front of the cannons.
“Listen,” he sneered. “You trash-eating—”
“Trash-eating?”
He blinked, stunned slightly off course, which had been the point.
“That’s a new one,” she said. “Truly. I had you pegged as a traditionalist. I expected ‘gold digger’ or even just ‘whore,’ but trash-eating? Really, if your opinion mattered even the slightest bit, that one might sting.”
“Marry him,” he said, breathing sparks and lightning bolts that burned through her bluster and scorched her throat, her skin, “and there won’t be a rock you can hide under.”
“Is there a problem here?” Eli, the ninja, appeared behind Luc, breaking the charged atmosphere. And Tara took a much needed step back, searching for clear air and distance, quickly gathering the ragged ends of her composure.
Trouble, she thought, this man is pure trouble for me.
“No,” Luc answered, his eyes raking and then dismissing her. He glanced sideways at Eli and then did a double take. “Eli. I didn’t realize you were still on the ranch.”
“Where else would I be?” Eli asked, making it somehow seem like an insult, and she wanted to hug him. Buy them some team jerseys.
“I suppose you’re right.” Luc looked at Eli with warmth that was not only surprising, but slightly disarming.
Even Eli’s ninja-ness seemed to wilt. “But it’s good to see you. How’s your dad?”
Tara didn’t have the capacity for small talk, not after b
eing threatened so effectively, so she turned back to the barbed-wire fence and took a few steps away from the two men.
The sugar-addict cow followed, and Tara opened her palm. The candy had melted into sticky red goo and she held out her hand for the cow to clean it.
Jane Simmons. She hadn’t heard that name in four years. Hadn’t thought of that girl since she buried her.
She heard Luc leave and her spine relaxed.
“You know these cows are on highly restricted and carefully monitored diets, don’t you?” Eli asked over her shoulder.
“This girl has a sweet tooth,” she said with a shrug. “What can you do?”
Eli touched her shoulder and she flinched, feeling brittle and sun-scorched.
“You okay?” he asked.
No, she thought. She’d sold her soul one too many times. And it was getting a little threadbare.
“Right as rain,” she said, smiling brightly. She turned, making sure not to look Eli in the eye. “I better get to work, it’s a busy day. Sample sewing and all.”
“You’re not fooling anyone,” Eli said.
She wanted to laugh.
I’m fooling everyone, she thought.
chapter
5
Luc couldn’t find anyone. Not his sister. Not Jacob. Even Ruby was missing. Or maybe he just wasn’t looking in the right places. A whole new wing of the house had sprung up since he’d been here last and every time he thought he knew where he was going, he kept walking into the empty kitchen.
It was, no doubt, Bimbo Barbie’s work. Every one of Lyle’s mistresses and wives had put their mark on this house in some way. And it only made sense that Tara Jean’s contribution would turn it into a maze.
On his third trip through the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator door and found the big mustard-colored Tupperware pitcher, which in his youth always had sweet tea in it. Right now, choking on his frustration and the fine Texas dust, nothing sounded better.
The phone tucked into his front pocket buzzed and he pulled it out to see the display. Beckett Jones, his agent.
“Hey, Beckett,” he said, picking up the call.
“You watching ESPN?” Beckett asked.
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