“I…I’ll try.”
Libby hugged her cousin. “That’s good enough for me.”
There was again a flash of delight in Cathy’s eyes, indicating an imminent change of subject. “Is that car outside yours?”
Libby’s answer was a nod. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Will you take me for a ride in it? When the wedding is over and you’re home on the ranch?”
“You know I will. We’ll be the terror of the back roads—legends in our own time!”
Cathy laughed. “Legends? We’ll be memories if we aren’t careful.”
Libby rose from her seat on the bed, taking up the pretty burgundy dress, slipping it carefully onto a hanger, hanging it in the back of the closet.
When that was done, the two women went downstairs together. By this time Jess and his father were embroiled in one of their famous political arguments.
Feeling uneasy again, Libby went to the telephone with as much nonchalance as she could and dialed Ken’s number. There was no answer, of course—she had been almost certain that there wouldn’t be—but the effort itself comforted her a little.
“Try the main house,” Jess suggested softly from just behind her.
Libby glanced back at him, touched by his perception. Consoled by it. “How is it,” she teased in a whisper, “that you managed to look elegant in jeans and a T-shirt that says ‘If it feels good, do it’?”
Jess laughed and went back to his father and Cathy.
Libby called the main house and got a somewhat flustered Marion Bradshaw. “Hello!” barked the woman.
“Mrs. Bradshaw, this is Libby. Have you seen my father this morning?”
There was a long sigh, as though the woman was relieved to learn that the caller was not someone else. “No, dear, I haven’t. He and the crew are out looking for that darned bear. Don’t you worry, though— Ken told me he’d be in town for your wedding in plenty of time.”
Libby knew that her father’s word was good. If he said he’d be there, he would, come hell or high water. Still, something in Mrs. Bradshaw’s manner was disturbing. “Is something the matter, Marion?”
Another sigh, this one full of chagrin. “Libby, one of the maids told me that a Mr. Aaron Strand called here, asking where you could be reached. Without so much as a by-your-leave, that woman came right out and told him you were in Kalispell and gave him the number. I’m so sorry.”
So that was how Aaron had known where to call. Libby sighed. “It’s all right, Marion—it wasn’t your fault.”
“I feel responsible all the same,” said the woman firmly, “but I’ll kick myself on my own time. I just wanted to let you know what happened. Did Miss Cathy and the senator get there all right?”
Libby smiled. “Yes, they’re here. Any messages?”
“No, but I’d like a word with Jess, if it’s all right.”
Libby turned and gestured to the man in question. He came to the phone, took the receiver, greeted Marion Bradshaw warmly. Their conversation was a brief one, and when Jess hung up, he was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” the senator wanted to know.
Jess slid an arm around Libby and gave her a quick squeeze. “Dare I say it in front of the creator of Liberated Lizzie, cartoon cave-woman? I just got Marion’s blessing—she says I branded the right heifer.”
Chapter 11
Libby stood at a window overlooking the courthouse parking lot, peering through the gray drizzle, anxiously scanning each vehicle that pulled in.
“He’ll be here,” Cathy assured her, joining Libby at the rain-sheeted window.
Libby sighed. She knew that Ken would come if he possibly could, but the rain would make the roads hazardous, and there was the matter of that rogue grizzly bear. “I hope so,” she said.
Cathy stood back a little to admire the flowing silken lines of Libby’s dress. “You look wonderful. Here—let’s see if the flowers match.”
“Flowers?” Libby hadn’t thought about flowers, hadn’t thought about much at all, beyond contemplating the wondrous event about to take place. Her reason said that it was insanity to marry again, especially to marry Jess Barlowe, but her heart sang a very different song.
Cathy beamed and indicated a cardboard box sitting on a nearby table.
At last Libby left her post at the window, bemused. “But I didn’t…”
Cathy was already removing a cellophane-wrapped corsage, several boutonnieres, an enormous bouquet made up of burgundy rosebuds, baby’s breath, and white carnations. “This is yours, of course.”
Libby reached out for her bridal bouquet, pleased and very surprised. “Did you order these, Cathy?”
“No,” replied Cathy, “but I did nudge Jess in the florist’s direction, after seeing what color your dress was.”
Moved that such a detail had been taken into consideration, Libby hugged her cousin. “Thank you.”
“Thank Jess. He’s the one that browbeat the florist into filling a last-minute order.” Cathy found a corsage labeled with her name. “Pin this on, will you?”
Libby happily complied. There were boutonnieres for Jess and the senator and Ken, too, and she turned this last one wistfully in her hands. It was almost time for the ceremony to begin—where was her father?
A light tap at the door made Libby’s heart do a jittery flip. “Yes?”
“It’s me,” Jess said in a low, teasing voice. “Are the flowers in there?”
Cathy gathered up the boutonnieres, white carnations wrapped in clear, crackly paper, made her way to the door. Opening it just far enough to reach through, she held out the requested flowers.
Jess chuckled but made no move to step past the barrier and see his bride before the designated moment. “Five minutes, Libby,” he said, and then she heard him walking away, his heels clicking on the marble courthouse floor.
Libby went back to the window, spotted a familiar truck racing into the parking lot, lurching to a stop. Two men in rain slickers got out and hurried toward the building.
Ken had arrived, and at last Libby was prepared to join Jess in Judge Henderson’s office down the hall. She saw that august room through a haze of happiness, noticing a desk, a flag, a portrait of George Washington. In front of the rain-beaded windows, with their heavy, threadbare velvet draperies, stood Jess and his father.
Everyone seemed to move in slow motion. The judge took his place, and Jess, looking quietly magnificent in a tailored three-piece suit of dark blue, took his. His eyes caressed Libby, even from that distance, and somehow drew her toward him. At his side stood the senator, clearly tired from his unexpected cross-country trip, but proud and pleased, too.
Like a person strolling through a sweet dream, Libby let Jess draw her to him. At her side was Cathy, standing up very straight, her green eyes glistening with joyous tears.
Libby’s sense of her father’s presence was so strong that she did not need to look back and confirm it with her eyes. She tucked her arm through Jess’s and the ceremony began.
When all the familiar words had been said, Jess bent toward Libby and kissed her tenderly. The haze lifted and the bride and groom turned, arm in arm, to face their few but much-loved guests.
Instead of congratulations, they met the pain-filled stares of two cowboys dressed in muddy jeans, sodden shirts and raincoats.
Suddenly frantic, Libby scanned the small chamber for her father’s face. She’d been so sure that he was there; he had seemed near enough to touch.
“Where—” she began, but her question was broken off because Jess left her side to stride toward the emissaries from the ranch, the senator close behind him.
“The bear…” said one of them in answer to Jess’s clipped question. “We had him cornered and—” the cowboy’s Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat “—and he was a mean one, Mr. Barlowe. Meaner’n the devil’s kid brother.”
Libby knew what was coming and the worn courthouse carpeting seemed to buckle and shift beneath her high-h
eeled burgundy sandals. Had it not been for Cathy, who gripped her elbow and maneuvered her into a nearby chair, she would have fallen.
“Just tell us what happened!” Jess rasped.
“The bear worked Ken over pretty good,” the second cowboy confessed.
Libby gave a strangled cry and felt Cathy’s arm slide around her shoulders.
“Is Ken dead?” demanded Cleave Barlowe, and as far as Libby was concerned, the whole universe hinged on the answer to that question.
“No, sir—we got Mr. Kincaid to the hospital fast as we could. But…but.”
“But what?” hissed Jess.
“The bear got away, Mr. Barlowe.”
Jess came slowly toward Libby, or at least it seemed so to her. As he crouched before her chair and took her chilled hands into his, his words were gentle. “Are you all right?”
Libby was too frightened and sick to speak, but she did manage a nod. Jess helped her to her feet, supported her as they left the room.
She was conscious of the cowboys, behind her, babbling an account of the incident with the bear to Senator Barlowe, of Cathy’s quiet sobs, of Jess’s steel arm around her waist. The trip to the hospital, made in the senator’s limousine, seemed hellishly long.
At the hospital’s admissions desk, they were told by a harried, soft-voiced nurse that there was no news yet and directed to the nearest waiting room.
Stacey was there, and Cathy ran to him. He embraced her without hesitation, crooning to her, smoothing her hair with one hand.
“Ken?” barked the senator, his eyes anxious on his elder son’s pale face.
“He’s in surgery,” replied Stacey. And though he still held Cathy, his gaze shifted, full of pain and disbelief, to Libby. “It’s bad,” he said.
Libby shuddered, more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, her arms and legs useless. Jess was holding her up— Jess and some instinct that had lain dormant within her since Jonathan’s death. “Were you there when it happened, Stacey?” she asked dully.
Stacey was rocking Cathy gently in his arms, his chin propped in her hair. “Yes,” he replied.
Suddenly rage surged through Libby—a senseless, shrieking tornado of rage. “You had guns!” she screamed. “I know you had guns! Why didn’t you stop the bear? Why didn’t you kill it?”
Jess’s arm tightened around her. “Libby—”
Stacey broke in calmly, his voice full of compassion even in the face of Libby’s verbal attack. “There was too much chance that Ken would be hit,” he answered. “We hollered and fired shots in the air and that finally scared the grizzly off.” There was a hollow look in Stacey’s eyes as they moved to his father’s face and then Jess’s, looking for the same understanding he had just given to Libby.
“What about the bear?” the senator wanted to know.
Stacey averted his eyes for a moment. “He got away,” he breathed, confirming what one of the cowboys had said earlier at the courthouse. “Jenkins got him in the hind flank, but he got away. Ran like a racehorse, that son of a bitch. Anyway, we were more concerned with Ken at the moment.”
The senator nodded, but Jess tensed beside Libby, his gaze fierce. “You sent men after the grizzly, didn’t you?”
Stacey looked pained and his hold on Cathy tightened as her sobs ebbed to terrified little sniffles. “I…I didn’t think—”
“You didn’t think?” growled Jess. “Goddammit, Stacey, now we’ve got a wounded bear on the loose—”
The senator interceded. “I’ll call the ranch and make sure the grizzly is tracked down,” he said reasonably. “Stacey got Ken to the hospital, Jess, and that was the most important thing.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the waiting room then. The senator went to the window to stand, hands clasped behind his back, looking out. The cowboys went back to the ranch, and Stacey and Jess maneuvered their stricken wives into chairs.
The sounds and smells peculiar to a hospital were a torment to Libby, who had endured the worst minutes, hours, days, and weeks of her life in just such a place. She had lost Jonathan in an institution like this one—would she lose Ken, too?
“I can’t stand it,” she whispered, breaking the awful silence.
Jess took her chin in his hand, his eyes locking with hers, sharing badly needed strength. “Whatever happens, Libby, we’ll deal with it together.”
Libby shivered violently, looked at Jess’s tailored suit, her own dress, the formal garb of Cathy and the senator. Only Stacey, in his muddy jeans, boots, shirt and sodden denim jacket, seemed dressed for the horrible occasion. The rest of the party was at ludicrous variance with the situation.
My father may be dying, she thought in quiet hysteria, and we’re wearing flowers. The smell of her bouquet suddenly sickened Libby, bringing back memories of Jonathan’s funeral, and she flung it away. It slid under a couch upholstered in green plastic and cowered there against the wall.
Jess’s grip tightened on her hand, but no one made a comment.
Presently the senator wandered out, returning some minutes later with cups of vending-machine coffee balanced on a small tray. “Ken is my best friend,” he announced in befuddled tones to the group in general.
The words brought a startling cry of grief from Cathy, who had been huddled in her chair until that moment, behind a curtain of tangled, rain-dampened hair. “I won’t let him die!” she shrieked, to the openmouthed amazement of everyone except Libby.
Stacey, draped over the arm and back of Cathy’s chair, stared down at her, his throat working. “Cathy?” he choked out.
Because Cathy was not looking at him, could not see her name on his lips, she did not answer. Her small hands flew to cover her face and she wept for the man who had loved her as his own child, raised her as his own, been her strength as well as Libby’s.
“She can’t hear you,” Libby said woodenly.
“But she talked!” gasped Jess.
Libby lifted one shoulder in a broken shrug. “Cathy has been talking for years. To me, anyway.”
“Good God,” breathed the senator, his gaze sweeping over his shattered daughter-in-law. “Why didn’t she speak to any of us?”
Libby was sorry for Stacey, reading the pain in his face, the shock. Of course, it was a blow to him to realize that his own wife had kept such a secret for so long.
“Cathy was afraid,” Libby explained quietly. “She is very self-conscious about the way her voice sounds to hearing people.”
“That’s ridiculous!” barked Stacey, looking angry now, paler than before. He bolted away from Cathy’s chair to stand at the windows, his back to the room. “For God’s sake, I’m her husband!”
“Some of us had a few doubts about that,” remarked Jess in an acid undertone.
Stacey whirled, full of fury, but the senator stepped between his two sons before the situation could get out of hand. “This is no time for arguments,” he said evenly but firmly. “Libby and Cathy don’t need it, and neither do I.”
Both brothers receded, Stacey lowering his head a little, Jess averting a gaze that was still bright with anger. Libby watched a muscle leap in her husband’s jaw and stifled a crazy urge to touch it with her finger, to still it.
“Was Dad conscious when you brought him here?” she asked of Stacey in a voice too calm and rational to be her own.
Stacey nodded, remembering. “He said that bear was almost as tough as a Mexican he fought once, down in Juarez.”
The tears Libby had not been able to cry before suddenly came to the surface, and Jess held her until they passed. “Ken is strong,” he reminded her. “Have faith in him.”
Libby tried to believe the best, but the fact remained that Ken Kincaid was a mortal man, strong or not. And he’d been mauled viciously by a bear. Even if he survived, he might be crippled.
It seemed that Jess was reading her mind, as he so often did. His hand came up to stroke away her tears, smooth her hair back from her face. “Don’t borrow trouble,” he said gen
tly. “We’ve got enough now.”
Trying to follow this advice, Libby deliberately reviewed pleasant memories: Ken cursing a tangle of Christmas-tree lights; Ken sitting proudly in the audience while Cathy and Libby accepted their high school diplomas; Ken trying, and somehow managing, to be both mother and father.
More than two hours went by before a doctor appeared in the waiting room doorway, still wearing a surgical cap, his mask hanging from his neck. “Are you people here for Ken Kincaid?” he asked, and the simple words had the electrifying effect of a cattle prod on everyone there.
Both Libby and Cathy stiffened in their chairs, unable to speak. It was Jess who answered the doctor’s question.
“Mr. Kincaid was severely injured,” the surgeon said, “but we think he’ll be all right, if he rests.”
Libby was all but convulsed by relief. “I’m his daughter,” she managed to say finally. “Do you think I could see him, just for a few minutes?”
The middle-aged physician smiled reluctantly. “He’ll be in Recovery for some time,” he said. “Perhaps it would be better if you visited your father tomorrow.”
Libby was steadfast. It didn’t matter that Ken was still under anesthetic; if she could touch his hand or speak to him, he would know that she was near. Another vigil had taught her the value of that. “I must see him,” she insisted.
“She won’t leave you alone until you say yes,” Jess put in, his arm tight around Libby’s shoulders.
Before the doctor could answer, Cathy was gripping Libby’s hands, searching her cousin’s face. “Libby?” she pleaded desperately. “Libby?”
It was clear that Cathy hadn’t discerned the verdict on Ken’s condition, and Libby’s heart ached for her cousin as she freed her hands, quickly motioned the reassurances needed.
When that was done, Libby turned back to the doctor. “My cousin will want to see my father, too.”
“Now, just a minute…”
Stubbornly Libby lifted her chin.
Three hours later, Ken Kincaid was moved from the recovery room to a bed in the intensive-care unit. As soon as he had been settled there, Cathy and Libby were allowed into his room.
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