by Beverly Bird
Jack saw her expression. “You can’t, cowgirl,” he said in an undertone.
“Can’t she at least sleep in my tent?” she pleaded. “Please?”
Jack hesitated, then shook his head.
“But—”
“We can’t do anything too obviously skittish or out of the norm,” he interrupted. “I want him to leave without ever suspecting that any of us know who he is, that anybody’s on to him.” Or maybe he wouldn’t just leave, Jack thought. Maybe he’d blow this whole damned thing sky-high.
Carly nodded stiffly. She could see where that would make it more possible for Jack to sneak after him and take him by surprise. But that didn’t mean she had to like it.
By the time the moon rose, even Scorpion professed to be tired. He went to his tent, and Jack scowled in that direction.
Tonight. It had to be tonight.
“Now what?” Carly asked quietly. Only they and Rawley were left at the fire, and Rawley was watching them with an odd look of understanding and curiosity.
Jack spared the man a glance. He knew Rawley must have a relatively clear idea of what was happening by now. He’d been the one to clue Carly in about the news broadcast, after all. But Jack still wasn’t eager to confirm or deny his suspicions. Thankfully, Rawley seemed willing enough to go along with Jack reasonably blindly.
“Can you do the same as last night?” Jack asked him.
Rawley nodded. “You want me to keep an eye on the kid again?”
“An extra eye. I’m going to stay awake and watch her, too.”
Carly stiffened. Why was that necessary?
“No problem,” Rawley said. “There’s just one thing.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked warily.
“When this is all over, I want a bottle of bourbon, and all the sordid details. Good bourbon. I want to know exactly what I’ve been doing and why. Hell, this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me since I fell off that damned stallion.”
Jack surprised himself by chuckling. He surprised himself even more by liking the man. “Fair enough.”
Rawley rolled his chair away, bumping and winding over the hard ground toward his tent. Jack stood up and gave Carly a hand, pulling her to her feet.
Carly was purely amazed at herself. She was bone-deep exhausted. She was terrified. And she was still hungry, because as far as her body was concerned, carbohydrates just didn’t cut it. She had a driving headache from the tension of the day, and she felt grimy with trail dust. Despite all that, she still wanted Jack.
As soon as everyone had gone and they were alone, she discovered that she wanted him just as fiercely as she had last night and this morning. She wanted him to make everything else go away again, and she knew he could, he would.
“Wait,” she said suddenly, pulling her hand out of his. “I want to go wash up first.”
He looked at her as if she had grown horns. “Wash up? Where?”
“The same place where all those cattle are guzzling.”
Jack looked that way. “It’s a mud hole.”
“Nope. It’s an underground spring. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She hurried off, away from the tents. Jack followed her reluctantly, casting a look back over his shoulder. Something rigid and wary invaded his muscles at the thought of leaving Scorpion and the wagon. It just wasn’t possible right now, he thought, not tonight.
His gut rolled. They were already too far away for him to see much in the camp, and he didn’t entirely trust his ears to sort through all the night sounds from this distance. Rawley was minimal backup. Following her was an unconscionable risk.
“Carly, I can’t…”
Some sound alerted him. He trailed off to look back at her.
She was at the hole, and she had already taken off her shirt and her bra. His breath went out of him as if someone had punched him. It would take a stronger man than he to walk away right now.
“Look. Right here,” she said, kneeling.
Jack looked down dumbly. The water seemed to bubble at the spot she motioned to.
“It’s clean—well, it’s clean enough,” she amended. “We make do with what we can find out here.” She unbraided her hair, then tied it up in a knot, well off her neck. Jack tried to find his voice as he watched her, and he couldn’t do it for the life of him.
It struck him that she looked so very much like she belonged right here, surrounded by stark land and the simplest essentials of nature. She leaned back, spilling water over her chest from her cupped hands, and smiled like a cat being stroked just right. Her back was arched a little so that her breasts were thrust toward him. Her nipples tightened as the water dripped over them.
Jack began moving toward her, shrugging out of his shirt as he moved. When he reached her, he sat down near the mud to tug off his boots. She leaned forward to capture his mouth.
“Come on, cowboy,” she said after a moment. “Hurry up.”
He thought about Scorpion. “Damned right. How do you feel about quickies?” He tried to convince himself that Scorpion wouldn’t do anything until the camp was asleep. After all, he’d already waited this long.
“Give me your other foot,” she answered, her voice husky, “and I’ll show you.”
She grabbed his heel and pried his left boot off. She made a move to throw it aside, then a strange sound caught in her throat as she inadvertently turned it upside down. Something fluttered out.
“You carry pictures in your boot? Is this a spy thing?”
“What?” He pulled his eyes away from her breasts, away from the slender column of her throat, to the ground. This time the invisible fist that plowed into him left him without air.
He moved fast, instinctively, to grab the photograph before she could. But he wasn’t fast enough, because his moment of understanding had been half a second behind hers, and she was closer to it, kneeling, not off balance as he was. Carly grabbed the photo and wiped it off on her jeans, then she held it close to inspect it in the first of the moonlight.
He saw the exact moment when she realized that she was looking at herself.
Her head spun. Her eyes widened. Her throat closed. Carly knew the photograph. In it, she was standing beside the first horse barn at the Draw, barefoot in a white, gauze dress, her hair long and free except for some baby’s breath that held it back on one side. She recognized the dress, and she’d only worn flowers in her hair once in her life.
The picture had been taken on the morning of the day she had married Brett.
She looked up at Jack slowly. Why did he have this?
Her blood turned to ice, drenching everything inside her. She knew, instinctively, that this was the last little bit he had been holding out on her. This was the part that she had sensed, the part she had known, somehow, that it was useless to pursue. She could have pestered him until the cows came home, and she knew he never, ever, would have told her that he had this picture in his boot. He had never intended to.
In his boot. The simple fact that he had hidden it, that it hadn’t been in the wallet she’d peeped through, told her more than she had ever wanted to know.
The photograph fluttered from her nerveless fingers. She turned away.
“Carly…” He couldn’t bear the look in her eyes, so bleak, so haunted, so…betrayed.
“Don’t.” Her voice snagged hoarsely. She cleared her throat and spoke without looking back at him. “I don’t want to know, Jack. I don’t want to hear it.” She began grabbing her clothing again.
“There’s an explanation.”
She laughed shrilly. “There always is.” Easy, she told herself, hearing her own strident, desperate tone. Easy. “You’ve got explanations and excuses for everything. You won’t tell me the truth about this anyway, so spare me another lie. At least give me that much.”
She dressed again and headed back for the camp, halfrunning, stumbling in the darkness.
“Carly, wait!” He had to say something—what?—to stop her from going. He
had to tell her that all that picture meant was that he had loved her for so many more years than she could know. He had loved the image of her, the flash in her eyes, the sweet simplicity of the world she represented, a world he’d never hoped to find. But she had given that world to him. He had found her, and she had laid it right in the palms of his hands.
Tell her. If he told her that, she would come back, maybe she wouldn’t run from him. Surely he wouldn’t run from this, not when she had accepted him through everything else.
But his head pounded and the words wouldn’t come. They were trapped in his throat, trapped by his past and by her future, because I love you was so much more than planting a first, tentative seed. It was a whole damned tree, he thought wildly. And he wasn’t ready, couldn’t bridge that chasm between his own yesterday and what she had offered to him now.
He couldn’t tell her, because there really was no way to explain that picture without letting her know that Scorpion was Brett. And he couldn’t bring himself to destroy her with the truth, no more than he could betray her with more evasions.
He let her go, feeling a misery and regret so deep it staggered him.
Chapter 17
Carly moved blindly, without direction or intent. When she realized that she had returned to the camp, she panicked.
Jack would find her here. He’d try to talk to her, to explain with more half truths. More lies. Her head was filled with too many jagged, conflicting thoughts to let her listen to him, so she kept running through the camp, to the place where her mare was hobbled. She snatched the leathers off her fetlocks and swung up on her back, pulling her around by the mane.
Jack reached the camp just as she galloped off. His stomach rolled with the true nausea of fear. Not tonight, cowgirl, please don’t go off by yourself tonight.
Blessedly, Scorpion was in his tent and did not seem to know that she had left. Jack looked at the tarpaulin. There was no movement there, no light inside. At least he prayed to God the man was still in there.
His eyes moved tensely along the lines of Rawley’s wheelchair tracks. If he went after her himself, Jack knew she’d just outride him, and that could be disastrous. He couldn’t leave Scorpion. His heart twisted with fresh pain at what had happened, but there was no time for it now.
She might stop for Rawley, he thought. He went to the man’s tent and rattled the door.
“Hey!” Rawley answered.
Jack stuck his head inside. Rawley took his duties seriously. He had been dozing in his chair, with his gun on his lap.
“Carly’s in trouble,” Jack said tersely. “You’ve got to go after her.”
“Where?” Rawley began wheeling his chair toward the door before he even finished biting out the single word.
“She took her horse. She left camp. She can’t be alone right now. I’ll watch Holly, you go after her. Stay with her until she’s ready to come back.”
“Get me up on my horse.”
The man’s upper body was amazingly strong. It didn’t take anywhere near as much effort on Jack’s part as he would have anticipated.
“Which way?” Rawley asked when he was astride.
Jack pointed.
“I reckon you’re going to be talking for a good long time when this is over. And it better be one hell of a bottle of bourbon.” But, true to form, Rawley didn’t ask questions now. Jack watched him canter away, then he went slowly back to Carly’s tent to wait.
It was going to be a very long night.
Rawley found Carly sitting beside a deep, chiseled gorge. She was at the edge, holding herself very still, staring down into the hole as though the answers she sought were in there somewhere.
Rawley reined in beside her. She acknowledged him with a quick glance, then she turned her attention back to the gorge.
“Leave me alone, Rawley,” she said softly, without venom.
“Well, that’s just not a good idea right about now.”
She stiffened. “Did Jack send you?”
Rawley made an affirmative sound.
“With explanations?”
“Nope. With my gun.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure if she was disappointed or relieved. “You know, he’s not what he says he is.”
“No kidding.”
Her throat felt strangled. “You don’t understand. It’s not…it’s not just a killer running around through my ride. That would have been almost easy.”
“Everything’s easy, Carly. We make it hard.”
Carly hugged herself and stared down again at the patterns of moonlight on the rocks below her. The gorge was filled with strange, provocative shadows. Secrets, she thought. Everywhere, there were secrets. Even if she listened to Jack again, if she accepted whatever explanation he had for that picture, how many more shadows was he concealing?
She blew out her breath helplessly, needing tb cry, unwilling to do it. Not for a man. Not again.
“Oh, boy,” she managed after a moment. “Can I pick them, or what?”
Rawley shrugged. “He seems like a good man to me.”
“You don’t know.”
“You love him, huh?”
She recoiled as though he had physically struck her. “No.”
“Well, okay, so the both of you are a little wary—”
“Wary?” she repeated, emotion finally breaking through in her voice. “I gave him the best, truest part of myself!” Rawley gave a sound of derision. “Hell, I’ve been watching you two for days now, Carly. You’ve been circling him just the same way he’s circling you. You both want each other so bad, and you’re playing games with each other, scared to death to take that one last little step to close the gap. So I guess you’ve just been waiting for this…whatever just happened. You’ve been waiting for any excuse so you won’t have to take that last step, so you can turn tail and run.”
She jolted. “No,” she answered, strangled. “You’re wrong.”
But was he? She hadn’t been able to fight her physical attraction to him, so had she given in to it because deep down she knew that this was coming, that something was coming, that there really wasn’t any future for them anyway?
He had accused her once of considering him safe because she knew he wasn’t going to stay. Did she?
Why did he have her picture?
What could that possibly have to do with Scorpion? Her mind reeled again. No, she thought, no, that was another issue entirely, one she couldn’t quite deal with yet, not until she had her own heart straightened out. It was just another secret, and the real problem was that he had so many of them, not the truths they hid.
Not yet. Later, she would deal with the truths. She could only handle one thing at a time.
She felt Rawley’s eyes on her and looked up at him defiantly. “Well, so what if I was?”
He was quiet, thoughtful. “Do you want to know what I think?” he asked after a moment.
“Not particularly, but I guess you’re going to tell me.”
“Yeah, I am. It’s long past time. You’ve got to give up hiding behind your father and Brett, Carly, and what they did to you. Gabe Castagne was a selfish bastard, and Brett was an opportunistic thief, and if you cling to those old scars, you’re gonna dry up into a withered, bitter old woman and blow away on this damned Oklahoma wind.”
Carly blanched. Hurt shimmered through her. “How can you say that?” she whispered. He was the last person she’d ever expect to take a hurtful swipe at her. They were friends.
“Because it needs to be said. I should have done it a long time ago. All along here, I’ve been the quiet guy in the background, the nice, polite friend and neighbor, sitting back in my chair, watching all the goings-on over there at the Draw. And I’ve seen a whole lot, let me tell you.”
“Daddy—”
“Was a coldhearted, selfish man,” Rawley finished for her. “He sure as hell wasn’t worth what you’re doing to yourself now, killing yourself to keep his ranch alive, sealing yourself off so no other man has the c
hance to take another piece of you like he did.”
Carly gasped. She could resent Gabriel Castagne. She could do it because she had loved him profoundly. How dare Rawley say these things?
She struggled to her feet.
“Come on, Carlotta, wake up and smell the coffee,” Rawley went on implacably.
“I’ve smelled it a lot more clearly than you have all these years! I’ve lived it!”
“Nope. You’ve got great big blinders on, girl. Now me, well, I was one of the few people who ever recognized Gabe Castagne for what he really was. Guess that’s why he always gave me a pretty wide berth. Gabe didn’t take much notice of me, if you’ll remember.”
“Don’t say this,” Carly warned.
“You idolized him, Carly. And he didn’t deserve it. You never really saw him, never knew what he was capable of. You think he entrusted the Draw to you. Well, that’s hogwash, lady. Gabe didn’t want you to run the ranch. He wanted Michael to run the ranch. He settled for you. He used you because you loved him to death and if he asked you on what turned out to be his deathbed, then at least you’d break your back trying to do it. He settled for you, Carly, because his son wasn’t going to do it and he didn’t have any other choice if he wanted it to stay in the family.”
“Don’t say that!” Why was he saying this?
“He kept bullying your brother and coercing him for years to come back here to the panhandle, to take over the Draw, after Michael moved to the city. Do you think Mike didn’t confide in me how much he hated the old man? Why do you think he never sets foot on that goddamned ranch now, Carly? He hates the place, that’s why. It was Gabe’s baby, the only one of you that really mattered to him.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Gabe only settled for you when he figured that he’d run all out of time to try to twist Michael to his will.”
“Stop it!”
“I remember when we were all little, and he was teaching you guys to ride. When Mike would get thrown, you’d hoot and whistle. ‘Look, Daddy, look, I’m doing it!’ And he never looked, Carlotta, because he never gave a tinker’s damn whether you could ride or not. You were just a girl who wasn’t even much use in the kitchen, and his son couldn’t ride. His son couldn’t ride, and what kind of man didn’t ride? The boy was going to learn that damned ranch if Gabe had to burn every book in his room and beat the knowledge into him. And that was all that mattered. He never even glanced your way, Carly.”