His hand went to his eye socket. The taut skin below it.
Now, the only thing a night like this meant was that the cold made his bones, his jaw, the empty space that had once been an eye, ache.
Why would the eye hurt when it didn’t exist anymore?
He’d asked the doctors and physical therapists the question half a dozen times and always got the same answer.
His brain thought the eye was still there.
Yeah. Right.
Jake’s mouth twisted.
Just went to prove what a useless thing a man’s brain could be.
The bottom line was that it was cold and he hurt and why he’d got out of the ‘Bird and set off on this all-but-forgotten ribbon of hard-packed dirt and moldy leaves was beyond him. But he had, and he’d be damned if he’d turn around now.
The trail was as familiar as the gate, the road, his old Thunderbird. It had been beaten into the soil by generations of foxes and coyotes and dogs, by ranch hands and kids going back and forth to the cold, swift-running waters of the creek.
Jake had walked it endless times, though never on a cold night with his head feeling as if somebody was inside, hammering to try and get out.
He should have taken something. Aspirin. A couple of pills, except he didn’t want to take those effing pills, not even the aspirin, anymore.
By the time he emerged from the copse of trees and brambles, he was ready to turn around, get in the car and head straight back to the airport.
Too late.
There it was.
The house, the heart of El Sueño, a brightly lit beacon. Sprawling. White-shingled. Tucked within the protective curve of a stand of tall black ash and even taller oaks, and overlooking a vast, velvety lawn.
Somewhere in the dark woods behind him, an owl gave a low, mournful cry. Jake shivered. Rubbed his eye. The skin felt hot to the touch.
The owl called out again. A faint, high scream accompanied the sound.
Dinner for the owl. Death for the creature caught in its sharp talons. That was the way of the world.
Some lived.
Some died.
And, goddammit, he was getting the hell out of here right now …
You can’t run forever, Captain.
The voice was clear and sharp in his head.
Somebody had told him that. A surgeon? A shrink? Maybe he’d told it to himself. It wasn’t true. He could run and run and never stop—
The big front door of the house flew open.
Jake took a quick step back, into the shelter of the trees.
There were people in the doorway. Shapes. Shadows. He couldn’t make out their faces. Music floated on the night air.
And voices.
Many voices.
He’d made it clear he wanted to see nobody but family.
A useless request.
His sisters would have invited half the town. The other half would have invited itself. This was Wilde’s Crossing, after all.
Okay.
He could do this. He would do this.
Just for tonight because the truth was, deep in his heart, he still loved this place more than any other on earth. El Sueño was part of him. It was in his DNA as much as the Celtic ice-blue of his eyes, the Apache blackness of his hair. Centuries of Wilde blood pulsed through him with each beat of his heart.
“Dammit,” he said in a soft growl.
He couldn’t deny it—but he couldn’t understand why it should matter. The past was the past. What did it have to do with the future?
Two different army shrinks had given him the same answer. The past was the basis of the present, and the present was the basis of the future.
Jake hadn’t returned for any more lie-on-the-couch-and-vomit-out-your-secrets crap. He’d never given up his secrets to start with. What was the point of having a secret if you handed it off?
Besides, the shrinks were wrong.
The pain behind his eye, his nonexistent eye, had become a drumbeat. He rubbed the bone around it with a calloused hand.
He thought again of the stories he and his brothers had grown up on.
“Never forget,” the General would say. “Everything we are, everything we have, we owe to the courage and convictions of all those brave men who came before us.”
The brothers had all grown up waiting for the chance to carry on the tradition. College first, because their mother would have wanted it. Business management for Jake, law for Caleb, finance for Travis.
But Jake had been the only one who decided to become a soldier. He’d joined the army, longed for, and snagged, training flying Blackhawks, often on covert missions.
He’d loved it.
Taking out the enemy. Saving lives when nothing and nobody else could do it.
Suddenly, with gut-wrenching speed, he stood not in the dark Texas countryside, but in a place of blood and fire. Fire everywhere …
“No,” he said sharply.
He drew a shaky breath. Straightened his long, tautly muscled frame and stood as tall as his aching head would permit.
He was not going to make that mental journey tonight.
Tonight, he would be the son his father had wanted, the man his brothers had known, the guy his sisters had adored.
The owl called out again. The bird was a hunter. A survivor.
Yeah, well, so was he.
He set off briskly over the night-damp grass, toward the house and the family that waited for him there. The moon was climbing higher. He felt its cool ivory light on his face.
The figures in the doorway grew clearer.
“Jake?”
Jaimie and Lissa cried out his name.
“Jake?”
Caleb and Travis shouted it.
“Jake,” Emma shrieked, and just as he reached the house, they all came racing down the porch steps and engulfed him, laughing, crying. He felt dampness on his cheeks.
His brothers’ tears. His sisters’.
Maybe even his.
CHAPTER TWO
A PROMISE MADE was a promise kept.
That was Addison McDowell’s credo.
It was the only reason she was at this damned party tonight. She’d promised her financial advisor and her attorney—her Texas advisor and her Texas attorney—that she’d show up, so she had.
Doing what you said you would do was The Proper Thing. And doing The Proper Thing was important. She’d stuck with that ever since she’d decided that she was an Addison, not an Adoré.
Girls who grew up in run-down trailer parks might be given that awful name, but she’d left those days far, far behind.
She had become all that the name Addison implied.
She was successful. Sophisticated. She owned a Manhattan condo. Well, she had a fat mortgage on one, anyway. She had a law degree from Columbia University. She dressed well.
Only one fly in the ointment the last few months.
Her reputation was better suited to an Adoré than an Addison, and wasn’t that one hell of a thing after all her efforts to escape that miserable trailer park and its sad heritage of silly, round-heeled women?
Addison raised her glass to her lips and took a sip of merlot.
If only Charlie had not left her that damned ranch.
If only he hadn’t died.
He’d been the best friend she’d ever had. The only friend she’d ever had. He hadn’t wanted her for her body, he’d wanted her for her intelligence, and to hell with what people thought.
Charles Hilton, the multimillion-dollar lawyer, had liked her. Respected her.
They’d begun as business associates, though she’d been only a junior member of his legal team, but as they’d gotten to know each other, Charlie had looked past the obvious: the glossy, dark hair she wore severely pulled away from her face; the silver eyes; the curvy figure she did her best to disguise within severely tailored suits.
Charlie had seen the real her, the one with intelligence and the determination to succeed. He’d become her mentor.
She hadn’t trusted his interest. Not at first. But as she’d gotten to know him, she’d realized that he loved her as the daughter he’d never had. In return, she’d loved him as the father she’d had and lost.
And when he’d grown frail and ill, she’d loved him even more because he’d needed her, and being needed was a wonderful feeling.
There had never been anything even remotely intimate between them, unless you counted rubbing his aching shoulders near the end of his life.
It was obscene even to consider.
But blogs and gossip columns didn’t care about truth, not when fiction was so much more juicy, not in Manhattan or, as it had turned out, not in Wilde’s Crossing, Texas.
She’d kept a low profile since coming to Wilde’s Crossing, but that didn’t mean a thing.
People watched her whenever she showed up in public.
She’d known tonight would be the same, no matter what the Wilde brothers said.
People would stare. Or try to be stealthy about it.
Either way, eyes would be on her.
“Wrong,” Travis Wilde had said.
Addison sipped at her wine.
The one who’d been wrong was Travis.
She was getting lots of looks. And, hell, maybe she deserved them.
She’d started out wearing a business suit. Too New York, she’d decided; she’d stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.
So she’d ditched the suit for jeans, a silk blouse and boots.
A glance in old man Chambers’s cracked bathroom mirror told her she looked like a New Yorker dressed for a Western costume party….
And wasn’t it amazing that she’d fallen into calling Charlie’s ranch, her ranch, by its former owner’s name the way everybody else still did?
Finally, she’d looked in the mirror and said, “To hell with it.”
The sound of her voice had set a mouse to scampering in the walls.
Good thing she wasn’t afraid of mice, she’d thought, or bugs, or the big snake she’d swept off the porch of the miserable pile of shingles she now owned.
She wasn’t afraid of anything.
That was what had taken her from Trailer Park, USA, to Park Avenue, New York City.
So she’d changed to a black silk Diane von Furstenberg wraparound dress. It was very ladylike until you noticed how low the neckline dipped, and how the silk clung to her when she moved. Black kid, sky-high Manolo Blahniks were the finishing touch.
Another look in the mirror and she’d tossed her head.
Stories about her had reached Wilde’s Crossing before she did.
When she’d questioned the Wildes, they’d both blushed.
The sight of grown men blushing had some charm, but Addison wasn’t interested in charm. She was just damned tired of people talking about her.
Tonight, no matter what she wore, people would stare. Why not give them something to stare at, never mind that her dress and stilettos wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow back home.
She’d suspected that most of the women would wear jeans or what she thought of as tea dresses—frilly, flowery prints that only looked good on six-year-olds.
Right on all counts, Addison thought now, as she swapped her empty wineglass for a full one from the tray of a passing server.
Right about the women’s clothes and the town’s attitude. The women were the real pains in the ass because they weren’t just judgmental, they were holier-than-thou.
Like the one watching at her right now.
Frilly dress? Check. Too much lipstick? Double check. And big hair. Did Texas wives not know that big hair looked good on Dolly Parton and nobody else?
Addison flashed the smile a cat might offer a mouse.
The woman flushed and looked away.
Pleased to meet you, too, Addison thought coldly, and then she also thought, Why did I come here tonight?
Because Travis and Caleb Wilde had asked her.
Back to square one.
They’d asked, and in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, she’d told them she’d do it, she’d go to their brother’s homecoming party, which wasn’t supposed to be a party at all.
“Just family and a couple of old friends,” Caleb had said.
“Well, maybe one or two more,” Travis had added.
Right, Addison thought, with a mental roll of her eyes.
Just family and old friends. She should have known better. When Travis fell into that good-ole-boy drawl of his, anything was possible.
What looked like a zillion “old friends” had gathered in the enormous great room at El Sueño.
El Sueño. The Dream.
Addison hid a wry smile in her wineglass as she lifted it to her lips.
In Spanish or English, that was a pretty fanciful name for half a million acres of scrub, rolling grassland, flower and vegetable gardens, dusty roads, expensive horseflesh and gushing oil wells, but one of the things she’d discovered during the time she’d been here was that Texans could wax poetic about their land as easily as they could raise a sweat working it.
Even Charlie, who had not been a Texan at all, but like her was a born and bred Easterner, though from a very, very different background, even he had somehow let the poetic part draw him in.
Not the sweat part.
It was impossible to imagine Charlie had ever raised a sweat on anything more labor-intensive than his stock portfolio.
Addison sighed.
Perhaps if he had, if he’d flown down to take a hard look at the Chambers ranch, ridden its seemingly endless dusty acres instead of relying on a picture-book spread in a fancy real-estate catalogue, he wouldn’t have bought it.
But he had bought it, sight unseen, and died a week later.
Losing him had just about broken her heart—and then had come the shock of learning he’d willed her the ranch.
She’d done nothing about it for a while. Then, because the place had obviously been important to Charlie, she’d done what he hadn’t.
She’d strung together all the vacation time she hadn’t taken in two years, added this year’s allotment and flown down to see it.
What she’d found wasn’t a ranch at all, not if you watched old John Wayne movies on late-night TV.
The Chambers place was umpteen thousand acres of scrub, outbuildings that looked as if a strong wind would topple them, a ranch house that had its own wildlife population, half a dozen sorry-looking horses and not very much else.
Which was the reason she had the Wildes as her advisors and—
“Now, little lady, how come you’re drinkin’ red wine when there’s champagne flowin’ like a stream to the Rio Grande?”
A big man wearing an even bigger Stetson, a flute of champagne in each oversize paw, flashed her a big smile.
Oh God, she thought wearily, not again.
“Jimbo Fawcett,” he said. “Of the Fawcett Ranch.”
How could somebody manage to tuck an entire pedigree into six words? Another Jimbo Fawcett look-alike already had, with the clear expectation that she’d want to spend the rest of the evening listening to him explain—with some modesty but not much because, after all, this was Texas—how incredibly lucky she was that he’d picked her out of the herd.
Except for the Stetsons, big-shot New York attorneys and Wall Street tycoons did it much the same way, so she was used to it.
“How nice for you,” she said pleasantly.
“You jest got to be Addie McDowell.”
“Addison McDowell. Yes.”
Fawcett gave a booming laugh. “We’re not so formal down here, little lady.”
What the hell, Addison thought, enough was enough.
“Mr. Fawcett—”
“Jimbo.”
“Mr. Fawcett.” Addison gave him a bright smile. “In the next couple of minutes, you’re going to tell me that I’m new to Wilde’s Crossing and what a sad thing it is that we haven’t met before.”
Fawcett blinked.
“An
d I’m going to say yes, I’m new and we haven’t met because I’m not interested in meeting anyone, and then I’ll tell you that I prefer red wine and that I’m sure you’re a nice guy but I’m not interested in champagne or anything else. Got it?”
Fawcett’s mouth dropped open.
Addison took pity on the man and patted his arm.
“Thanks anyway,” she said, and she turned her back to him, wound her way through the crowd until she found an empty bit of wall space near a big Steinway grand piano and settled into it.
Dammit, she thought, glancing at her watch, how much longer until the local hero showed up? Five minutes more, and then—
“Why do I suspect you’re not having a good time?”
Addison turned around, ready to provide a sharp answer, but when she saw the tall, good-looking man who’d slipped up next to her, she fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare instead.
“Travis Wilde,” she said, “you owe me, big-time.”
“Well, that answers your question,” Caleb Wilde said as he joined them. “You suspect she’s not having a good time because she isn’t. Right, Addison?”
“Considering that I’ve spent the last months turning down invitations from the country club, the ranchers’ association, the ladies’ sewing league—”
“Not the sewing league,” Travis said in shocked tones.
“The sewing league,” Addison said, and when she saw the brothers’ mouths twitch, she relented, if only a little. “You said he would be here by eight.”
“Jacob.” Caleb cleared his throat. “That’s what we figured.”
“It’s almost eight-thirty. And there’s still no sign of the mystery man.”
“Jake’s not a mystery man,” Travis said quickly. “And he’ll be here. Just be patient.”
Addison made a face. The last few months, her patience had been in increasingly short supply.
“You need an expert to take a long, hard look at the Chambers place, figure out if it makes sense to fix it up before you put it on the market or not. In today’s economic climate—”
Addison held up her hand.
“I’ve heard this speech before.”
“It’s still valid. Jake’s recommendations could make hundreds of thousands of dollars’ difference to you.”
She could hardly scoff at that. Those Manhattan mortgage payments, the tuition loans …
The Dangerous Jacob Wilde Page 2