by Jane Toombs
In the back of the limo. Russ shifted away from Mari. Once he’d discovered she’d left Mackinac without so much as a goodbye, he’d known she’d somehow learned of his double-dealing, so her overt rejection and her refusal to listen to him wasn’t a surprise. Since his attempts to call her never got him past Willa, he hadn’t expected Mari to greet him with open arms, but he had hoped she might remember what they’d meant to one another on the island. Had he been the only one—as his father put it—smitten?
He couldn’t help but be reminded of Denise bailing out of their marriage without even giving him a chance to succeed with the horse farm. She’d rejected not only their marriage, but him as well. If Mari cared at all about him, wouldn’t she be willing to hear him out?
Apparently he’d made another misjudgment.
While he’d been willing to explain himself, he certainly wasn’t going to beg to be heard. To hell with that. He crossed his arms over his chest, staring straight ahead. If she wanted to talk she’d have to speak first.
She didn’t, and since he’d asked the limo driver earlier not to make conversation, the rest of the drive to Reno took place in silence. When they arrived at the building where the lab was located, the driver parked, got out and opened the door for Mari. She exited, and the driver looked inquiringly at Russ, who shook his head. Let her find her own way to the damn lab; he had no intention of escorting her. After she disappeared inside the building, though, Russ got out on his side of the limo and walked around to the back, where the driver stood with one foot on the bumper.
“Quiet ride,” the driver commented after a moment.
“Yeah.”
The driver shrugged. “Women, who can figure?”
As he spoke, a blonde walked briskly past them, a striking young woman with long legs, a short skirt and a tight T-shirt. “’Course,” the driver added when she was out of sight, “when one comes along like that, it reminds a guy why he don’t want to live without ’em.”
Russ had eyed the blonde, too. What male alive wouldn’t have noticed her? But she hadn’t had Mari’s spectacular hair, her amber eyes, her grace of movement. In short, the blonde might have been sexy, but she wasn’t Mari. So she didn’t really interest him.
He nodded at the driver and strode off in the opposite direction from the one the blonde had taken. The day was hot, though the dry air made the heat tolerable. He thought his Blues would do well out here, but he wasn’t so sure about himself. And he wasn’t referring to the weather.
By the time he returned from his long walk, Mari was back inside the limo. The driver held the door open for him and Russ slid in. “Everything get done?” he asked her as the driver pulled from the parking lot.
“Yes,” she snapped. “You can report to your father the subject was cooperative and the lab tech swift and efficient.”
“I told you, I’m here on my own.”
She cast a disbelieving look at him.
He couldn’t leave it like this, but what to do? An idea struck him. He leaned forward to speak to the driver. “Pull over to the curb for a bit, okay?”
When the limo was no longer in motion, Russ said to Mari, who was obstinately looking the other way, “Would you like to drive up to Winnemucca and see your father’s grave?”
Her head whipped around and she stared at him. “My father’s grave? What are you talking about?”
“His name was Elias Grant, right?”
She nodded.
Russ spoke as bluntly as possible, sure that was the only way to reach her. “Well, do you or don’t you want to see where he’s buried?”
Mari tried to collect her scattered wits. In some secret part of herself she’d cherished the hope that she’d one day find her father since she had always thought of him as still alive. “I—I—yes,” she stammered. “But how did you find where he was?”
“We’re going to Winnemucca,” Russ told the driver. “You’ll have to inquire locally once we get there because I’m not sure where the cemetery is.”
“No problem,” the man said. “It’s in the center of town.”
Mari fidgeted, waiting for Russ to answer her question. She’d vowed not to talk to him unless she had to, but this changed things.
“After your uncle sent the copy of the birth certificate, Haskell Enterprises hired a private investigative firm to search for Elias Grant,” Russ said. “I had nothing to do with this, believe it or not.”
She hadn’t thought so, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “How in the world did they find him? I asked my uncle if Blanche had told him anything more about Ida Grant, but all he could remember was Blanche had decided that Ida must have gotten off the bus coming west on Highway 80. Winnemucca is east of Reno, of course.”
He nodded. “The investigators turned up Isabel’s divorce from Mort Morrison a year before he was killed in a racing accident. The address under her signature was Winnemucca, Nevada. So they started asking around in Winnemucca, and they found Isabel, known locally as Ida, had lived with a local rodeo rider named Elias Grant until he was killed in a fall from a horse. One of the women they talked to said Ida was ‘real pregnant’ when that happened, and she left Winnemucca soon after.”
Mari sighed. “Poor Isabel.” Her mother? It certainly seemed likely. What rotten luck Isabel had had with men. Maybe it was hereditary. A thought struck her. “Was she married to Elias Grant?”
Russ hesitated, then said, “The investigators didn’t find any marriage recorded.” He paused, then added, “Apparently Elias was well liked around town.”
Realizing he was trying to offer her a shred of comfort, Mari accepted it in the spirit it was offered. At least her father had never deserted her mother except in death.
“It didn’t take them long to discover all this,” she said.
“Haskell Enterprises hires the best.” His tone was wry. “Did you think your uncle was the first to contact Joe? There were six other claimants before you, Mari. This same investigative team exposed all six as, at the very least, mistaken. Can you blame my father for being suspicious of your claim?”
Startled—she was the seventh?—Mari said, “I would never have accepted the offer to fly to Mackinac Island if I didn’t believe I might be Isabel’s daughter.”
Russ nodded. “Once I got to know you, I realized that.”
That was easy for him to say, now that he knew she probably was Joe’s granddaughter. No, more than likely actually was. A tremor shook her. The realization was hard for her to grasp.
“Is he really all right? My—” She couldn’t yet bring herself to say “grandfather.” “Mr. Haskell, I mean.”
“He has to go back for bypass surgery, but, yes, he’s as all right as he can be right now.”
“I have to think about all this,” Mari said, leaning back in the seat and closing her eyes. Here she was vindicated, she and Uncle Stan, and the only emotion she felt was confusion. She was glad to know who she was, but underneath all that, she was still basically Mari Crowley. Becoming Mari Haskell would take some doing.
Russ didn’t try to talk to her again until they reached Winnemucca and the driver pulled into the cemetery. It didn’t take long to find the gravestone. Mari stared down at the incised rider on a bucking horse gracing the top of the granite slab. Underneath was written The Last Honest Cowboy.
Had her mother chosen the epitaph? Unexpected tears sprang to Mari’s eyes and she blinked them back to look at her father’s name, Elias Grant, and the dates of his birth and death.
There he lay, the last honest cowboy. Her father.
“A man couldn’t ask for a better epitaph,” Russ said from beside her.
Turning to him, Mari dissolved into tears. Russ’s arms came around her, comforting, protective, and she sobbed on his chest, too stricken by her sudden onslaught of grief to care that she was allowing him to hold her. Soothed by his murmured words and the strength of his body, she eventually regained her composure and pulled away.
“I never knew h
im,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m so upset.”
“All this has been hard on you, not knowing, never being sure. Now it’s all over.”
But was it really? “The tests today—” she began.
He waved his hand. “My father wanted those because he always asks for two opinions. In this case, Elias Grant has been found, and the divorce papers place Isabel in Winnemucca. Circumstantial evidence, he might argue, but damn convincing. As were the tests run back in Michigan by a very reputable lab.”
“We’d better be getting back to the ranch,” Mari said, more unsettled than she’d ever been in her life. It felt as though the very sand under her feet was shifting. If only Russ… But no, that was over and done with. She could never trust a man who’d betrayed her.
When he’d held her as she wept, Russ had hoped it might be the beginning of a thaw. How right she felt in his arms. But he could tell by her words and her expression now that she was distancing herself again.
“We could stop for something to eat,” he said. Seeing the refusal in her eyes, he hastily added, “It’s not really fair to let the driver go hungry.”
Her nod seemed reluctant.
“Fast food,” she said. “I don’t want to waste time getting home.”
Russ remembered all too well when she didn’t think having a meal with him was wasting time. Like their picnic in the meadow. Interrupted by tourists. Something always seemed to interfere with what was between them, but dammit, he refused to believe it was permanently destroyed.
“You left too soon,” he told her. “I came over that morning to make my confession about what I’d done. But you’d already figured it out, and you faked that headache, didn’t you?”
She raised her chin. “I don’t care to discuss it. If we’re going to eat, let’s go and do it.”
A fast-food place wasn’t what he’d had in mind, especially not with the driver as a third party, so nothing personal could be said. But at Mari’s insistence, that’s where they went.
Back in the limo, he watched her settle into her corner and close her eyes, shutting him out. After a time she began to breathe deeply, and he realized she’d dozed off. She started to slump sideways and he quickly slid toward her, so she could rest against him. Murmuring something unintelligible, she nestled closer, her eyes remaining closed. He smiled slightly, anticipating how upset she’d be when she woke up and found where she was. In his arms.
Dammit, she was where she belonged, as far as he was concerned.
After a time he began to whisper to her. “I bought that ranch property up the road from you—the old Curwith Ranch. You thought I was lying about wanting Nevada land, but I wasn’t, though I might not have gotten around to looking for any that soon if my dad hadn’t laid the spying trip on me.”
She shifted position slightly, but her eyes stayed shut, so he went on.
At first Mari thought she was dreaming about Russ whispering in her ear. He told her about the Nevada ranch he’d bought, of how well he expected his Blues to do out here, about hiring ranch hands. He was so close his warm breath tickled her ear.
“…collect Lucy,” he was saying. “I’ve got the perfect stud for her. Let’s hope she likes him better than you do me right now.”
Mari blinked, slowly awakening. It was Russ she was hearing. Where was she? Held close. Warm and safe. In Russ’s arms? With a start she came fully awake and jerked away from him, turning to give him a glare.
“Hey, you fell asleep on me. I didn’t have a thing to do with it,” he objected.
She recognized that might well have been the truth. “You said something about Lucy, didn’t you?”
He smiled. “So you did hear me. I was telling you now that I’ve bought Nevada property, I’ll be coming to collect Lucy soon. I need to get the men I’ve hired settled in first.”
Since she’d come to believe all his talk of a Nevada ranch and Lucy being a Blue was part of his masquerade, she couldn’t hide her surprise. “I thought I was dreaming,” she said. “You really did buy that ranch up the road from me?”
He nodded. “I’ve needed to expand for some time, and there’s been a growing market for draft horses here in the west. Nevada’s perfect.”
“But I thought—” she began, then shut up.
His raised eyebrow told her he understood what she didn’t say. “Occasionally I do tell the truth,” he told her.
To her annoyance, her heart gave a leap of joy that he’d be so near—not more than a couple of miles away. “If you’ve hired ranch hands, you probably won’t need to be around much.” The words were out before she thought, and she flushed. It sounded as though she cared.
He shrugged. “To the contrary, I expect to spend most of the summer fixing things up the way I want them.”
Did that glance of his mean he was including her in the things he planned to “fix up”? She stiffened. Fat chance.
“I remember you showing me the Curwith Ranch,” he said. “You’d lent me a chestnut gelding and you rode an Arabian mare—The Captain and Tennille, you said, named after singers your aunt Blanche admired.”
Did he never forget anything?
“I also remember my first sight of you on the top of that fence rail. You took off your hat and waved it at your student, so I noticed your remarkable hair. I had already taken note of your no less remarkable butt.”
Despite herself, Mari felt herself thawing. Thrown somewhat off guard, she said, “I’ll bet you can’t recall my student’s name.”
“Wrong. Yasmin.”
“What is it with you—total recall?”
“As far as you’re concerned.”
Realizing she was in danger of slipping back into their easy camaraderie, which she didn’t intend to do—ever—she said coolly, “My recall may not be as precise as yours, but I do remember that everything you said and did was a pretense.”
“You’re wrong.”
“So, okay, you bought the ranch I showed you. And I guess Lucy must really be a Blue. I just don’t care to discuss it any further.” She paused, then added in a softer tone, “Thank you for showing me my father’s grave. If it hadn’t been for all this, I might never have known where he was.”
“Much less that he was the world’s last honest cowboy. I can’t claim to be a cowboy, but I am, whether you believe it or not, basically honest.”
She frowned. “This is where I stop listening, so you may as well stop talking. Haven’t you already told me enough lies?”
Russ spread his hands, turned away from her and didn’t say another word until the limo pulled into the ranch driveway.
“Well—goodbye,” she said to Russ as the driver opened the door for her.
“I’ll be back,” he told her.
She opened her mouth to tell him to forget it, but before she could he added, “For Lucy, that is.”
So he had the last word, after all, Mari thought in some annoyance. Naturally he’d meant for Lucy—why would she expect otherwise?
Chapter Twelve
The following week Mari got another call from Lou Simon.
“Joe wants to meet you,” he told her. “He’s sending his private jet to fly you here.”
“To Mackinac Island?” she asked, trying to come to terms with this sudden announcement.
“No, he’s moved to his Manhattan apartment to wait for his surgery date, so you’ll be coming here. Would you also do him a favor and bring your lilac pendant with you?”
Taken aback, she asked, “My what?”
“Apparently you have a platinum pendant with a lilac blossom engraved on it. Joe would like to see it.”
“Why, yes, I do.” She left it at that, waiting for more of an explanation of why Joe Haskell was sending for her. She didn’t get it.
“Then he’ll be expecting you and the pendant tomorrow,” Lou Simon told her, adding the time that the limo would pick her up to take her to the airport. Then he hung up.
“Mr. Haskell wants to meet me,” she told Willa
. “Naturally, I wasn’t told why.”
“That’s obvious. The tests in Reno came out the same as those in Michigan. Added to what they learned about your father, Haskell knows you’re his granddaughter and wants to welcome you into the family.”
“He’s in New York City waiting to have bypass surgery,” Mari said.
“All the more reason to want to get to know you right away. Who can say how long any of us may live—and he’s at risk.”
“Russ!” Mari exclaimed. “He had to be the one who told his father about my lilac pendant—you know, the one Blanche gave me before she died.”
“What’s that have to do with anything?”
“Mr. Haskell wants me to bring the pendant with me. Why would he?”
“You can answer that yourself—the pendant must have some significance for Joe Haskell.”
Mari nodded, the words that Blanche had said when she’d handed over the pendant echoing in her mind: I should have given it to you long ago. Where had the pendant come from originally? Had it been Ida’s? “She was afraid,” Mari said aloud.
“If you mean Blanche, yes, the poor dear soul. She loved you, gal, and feared to lose you. Hard on a body, that. Don’t ever fall into the trap of trying to hold a love too close.”
“I can’t blame her.”
“Why should you? Just remember never to do it yourself. Blanche aside, there’s another thing to remember about love—it tends to be a free agent, choosing where it will, no matter whether a body wishes for it or not.”
Mari frowned. “If you’re back to my supposed broken heart, I was never in love with Russ Simon and I’m not now.”
“And that’s why you’re so angry with him, ’cause you never did love him and don’t now.”
“No! I mean, yes, I’m angry about his treachery. Who wouldn’t be? It has nothing to do with love.”
“Ah, well, it took me years to learn. Maybe I expect too much from a gal your age. Tell me, when are you leaving for New York?”
“The limo will be here at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Best we look over what you might want to pack. The city ain’t the same as a summer island. I figure you might have to add to your wardrobe.”