by Beverly Bird
“Shut up!”
“He was a bastard, Carly. A selfish, manipulative bastard. All he ever cared about was his land and his cattle and keeping it all going. Theresa was the perfect little lady, and I guess that was what he planned, but you were a tomboy and Michael was a bookworm, and that sure wasn’t what he intended from his offspring. Did you know that Michael was accepted at Harvard? I reckon not, because I never told him. He could have been a lawyer, Carly, but Gabe hid his scholarship letter. He hid it and told Michael that if he wanted to leave the Draw and go to college, then he had to pay for it himself. He didn’t think the boy could do it, that he’d keep him home. But Michael was a true Castagne—determined and stubborn as a Missouri mule. Maybe all he could scrape up enough money for was Oklahoma City University, but at least he’s a fine accountant.”
“You can’t know this,” Carly breathed.
“Sure I can. I found the scholarship letter after Gabe died. You didn’t want to go through his stuff and pack it up, remember? You asked me if I’d mind coming over and taking care of it for you.”
She remembered that. She did.
She didn’t want to ask and knew she had to know. “What else?” she asked warily. “Did you find anything else?”
Rawley looked at her evenly. “Isn’t that enough?”
“There was something else.” He was avoiding her question, and she was sick to death of avoidance and evasions. Even though pain was choking her—somewhere inside her chest it felt like pain upon pain upon pain—she sensed that there was something else Rawley wasn’t telling her and she wanted to know what it was. She waited pointedly.
“He paid Brett off,” Rawley said finally, tightly.
Her jaw dropped. “Paid…Brett? My Brett? Holly’s father? What for?”
“To leave the Draw. To leave you.”
“Why?”
“How the hell should I know? I can tell you what I guess. He did it just in case Michael kept earning his tuition. Like I said, you were his ace in the hole, and he had to keep you tucked aside here, just in case Michael really wouldn’t come back, in case he needed you in the end.”
“But—”
“Brett wanted you to go to Dallas with him, remember? He had some great job offer there.”
Oh, God, she did remember that now, too.
“He wasn’t that excited about it,” she tried. “I mean, he was at first, but then he never mentioned it again.”
“Yeah, well, I still have the canceled check that says he was more than happy to take Gabe’s money and go to Dallas without you. Gabe made him sign an agreement. That was in his papers, too.”
“An agreement? And you’ve kept all this? Why?”
For the first time Rawley looked uncomfortable. “In case it ever seemed like the right time to tell you guys about all this, and you didn’t want to believe me.” He glanced back in the direction of the camp. “It sure seems like the right time now.”
“Why? What difference can it possibly make?” she cried. “Dad’s dead!”
“Not hardly,” Rawley scoffed. “His kind of ghost just hangs on and on. He’s still here, and he’s working you into the ground. And I guess I’m just tired of watching it. I can’t stand to watch you crumble up and blow away on the wind. It didn’t matter so much before, but now, well, I just hate to watch you throw a good man away.”
She shook her head frantically. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t want it to make sense.
“Why couldn’t he just have paid Brett to stay here? You make it sound like he wanted to ruin my life.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t think he cared about your life one way or the other.”
She flinched. “But a son-in-law could work as well as a son if he didn’t…if he didn’t…” Want me to run the ranch. She couldn’t bring herself to say it aloud.
“My guess is that he would have had to match whatever Brett would have gotten paid in Dallas. And maybe that would have put a strain on his beloved Draw.”
“I can’t…” Carly trailed off and turned away shakily. She felt dizzy, shell-shocked, like the dazed survivor of a war. Everything was gone.
Everything.
Rawley had stripped away all the simple truths she’d lived by and had always taken for granted. He’d robbed her of everything she’d always clung to in order to pull herself through one more day. She felt naked, befuddled, lost.
She couldn’t deal with this. Not now.
“I need…” she began again, but then she didn’t know how to finish.
“What?” Rawley asked quietly. “Tell me and I’ll get it for you. Unless you want help hiding again. That I won’t do.”
I need to talk to Jack. She needed him to make it all go away, to make everything right again. But Jack was gone. She pressed her fingers to her temples. He was as gone as if he had already followed Scorpion, because he had betrayed her, too.
There were only two ways that picture could have come to be in his boot, she realized. Maybe he had snooped through her drawers at the ranch, maybe he had found it during his days there, but Carly didn’t think so. She thought maybe he’d had it with him all along.
Either case was a violation of her privacy and her trust. He knew a whole lot more about her than he had ever let on. She had accepted and lived with his not telling her everything about his case, about this Scorpion business. But that was his work, and this was personal.
This was her picture.
So she would lean on herself again. Somehow. She had always done it before, and she would remember how to do it again now.
“I’m going to bed,” she managed finally.
She pulled herself up on her mare again and headed back for the camp. After a moment, she heard Rawley’s hoofbeats behind her.
She wanted to hate him for what he had said, for what he had done, and couldn’t quite manage it. Because she knew he was right? She realized that she hadn’t actually laid eyes on Michael for six months now, since the last time she’d taken Holly to the pediatrician in the city and had stopped to visit him. It was true. He never came out to the Draw. She knew that he hadn’t gotten along with their father, but she supposed she’d always shied away from examining why too closely. She’d certainly never discussed it with him.
She reached the camp and tethered her mare again. She looked around briefly. Jack was nowhere in sight. Maybe he had already taken off after his bad guy.
Suddenly, she was too exhausted to care.
Tomorrow, she would care. She knew that. She thought maybe she would care for a long, long time. But right now, she was tired and her heart hurt. She was going to assume that he was in her tent, waiting for her. He would have a long wait.
She crawled into Holly’s tent and sat down inside, hugging her knees to her chest, staring grimly at her sleeping daughter.
Betrayal was a whole lot harder to swallow than loss, she discovered. Why couldn’t Gabriel Castagne have just settled for dying on her?
Chapter 18
Carly slept deeply and dreamlessly. No doubt it was an escape, she thought when she woke up groggily just before dawn. Then she had the strange sensation that someone was watching her.
Her heart began to race. She sat up fast, and found Holly studying her.
“What?” she mumbled. “Was I snoring?”
Holly shook her head. “How come you’re not with Mr. Fain?”
Carly’s heart skipped a beat. She wasn’t sure she could handle this imminent discussion without coffee.
Then she remembered everything that had happened last night, and she realized that she probably wasn’t going to be able to handle it today, or this week, or even this month. She had the feeling she wasn’t going to be able to handle much of anything fora very long time.
“Why should I be with him?” she asked carefully.
Holly skipped around that. “Well, you’re not even in your own tent. What’s going on?”
Carly rubbed her eyes, fishing through cobwebs of sleep for an answe
r.
“You’ve been with him every night,” Holly went on. “Even that one when you slept outside. Even then, you guys left the camp to talk.”
So much for their subterfuge. And Carly knew, suddenly, that she couldn’t lie to her anymore. She thought of all the countless, heartbreaking lies that had been told to her, and all those she had perpetrated upon herself.
No, she thought. No more. She wasn’t protecting Holly by not being honest with her, she realized. She had only been alienating her. Still, there was just so much she wanted her daughter to know about Jack Fain.
Carly chose her words with care. “There’s…uh, some kind of an escaped convict that the government’s looking for. They think he’s hiding out somewhere on the panhandle. So Jack’s looking for him, and he’s watching out for us.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Her heart skipped in surprise. “You do?”
“He told me.”
“He did?”
“Well, he said he was a cop. And he’s got that look on his face all the time, like he’s worried about something.”
“Well, that’s the only reason he was…uh, staying with me.” And that was a half truth she could live with, Carly decided.
“But you like him. I know you do, Mom.” Her face said please tell me you do.
Carly took a deep breath. Her heart spasmed painfully.
“Do you remember that time when I let you save the wild horse up in Wyoming?” she asked. There had been an auction, and Holly had been avid to buy one of the mustangs. She’d been six. It had been for a good cause, so Carly had relented. The herd had been starving because there were too many of them in a small area. The government had wanted to disperse a portion of them, so they had rounded up a few and put them up for “adoption.”
Holly nodded slowly, remembering. “I sure loved Buck.”
“I know you did. And Buck loved you.” And even after they had gelded him and had gentled him, even after he’d nibble a carrot right out of Holly’s mouth if she held it between her teeth, the mustang would allow no one—no one—on his back. He’d proved impossible to break. He still grazed on the back acres, but he ran free, essentially useless as a ranch horse. They only caught a glimpse of him now and then.
“Loving him wasn’t enough,” Carly pointed out quietly.
Holly chewed her lip. Carly thought she might cry, and if she did, she wouldn’t be able to stand it.
“So it’s like that with you guys?” she asked finally.
“Yes. I’m sorry, honey.”
“Even if you loved him, he wouldn’t be good for anything?”
Carly bit down hard on her tongue in an effort not to laugh. She thought that if she started, she might end up crying, too. “Exactly.”
“We’ll see.” Her chin came up.
“Huh?”
“That’s what you always say—we’ll see. So I’ll just wait and see. We’re still a couple of days from Kansas, right? A lot could happen between now and then.”
If only she knew. “Sure,” Carly agreed vaguely. “Anyway, I’ve got to go check on the herd.” She knelt and moved toward the tent door.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hey, what?”
“Thanks for telling me.”
Carly’s heart moved hard. She had done the right thing, and there was a certain gratification in that, her only spot of gratification in a very big nightmare.
“You’re welcome,” she said softly.
“And I’m not scared of that robber or whoever,” Holly went on. “Mr. Fain’ll get him.”
“I hope so. Listen, just don’t…don’t talk to anyone else about it, okay? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
She got outside and stood on legs that felt unsteady. Jack was standing right outside her own tent, looking back at her.
Her heart lurched, then thudded miserably. Don’t look at me that way! There was such naked regret in his face, such a need to set things right. And that was impossible. She knew suddenly that what Rawley had told her hadn’t quite had the effect on her that he’d planned. She couldn’t imagine herself ever trusting a man again.
Especially not this one.
She crossed to Jack, not wanting to, unable to do anything else. He waited for her to say something, and she cleared her throat.
“I just want you to know I meant what I said. I don’t want to hear your explanation, Jack. Not this time. I don’t want one unless you’re going to tell me the truth this time, the whole truth. Can you understand? I can’t keep playing this game with you. Either tell me everything, or stop tormenting me with bits and pieces.” He looked back at her silently, his face grim.
“You’re not going to do it, are you?” she asked wretchedly. “You’re not going to tell me it all.”
“Carly, I can’t.”
She felt as though he had struck her. She wanted to hurt him back. “Then just…go to hell.”
She spun away from him, hurt pounding through her with each beat of her heart. He didn’t trust her. She couldn’t trust him. So that was that.
I did fall in love with him, she thought as tears began burning her eyes. That’s the only way this could hurt so badly. But then she fought the truth. No, she definitely did not love him, she told herself out of sheer self-preservation. What was it he had said the other night? I don’t know you well enough to love you. Well, there you have it, she thought. She knew so little about him. He only showed her those parts of himself he wanted her to see. He was a man full of lies, full of shadows.
Jack let her go, feeling something inside him crack. But it was better this way, he told himself. He had to concentrate on Scorpion now. Scorpion was all that could matter today.
He finally followed her to the fire that Plank had built. He held back a good distance, staying out of her way as she helped to get breakfast together, then she rode out to collect the herd. He was amazed that he’d actually thought once that he knew what it was to feel hollow.
Everything good, everything precious, had been within his grasp. Now it was gone, and there was nothing he could do to fix that, nothing at all.
They were less than three miles from the river when Carly noticed the storm clouds. It looked like a major front coming in and everything inside her plummeted.
She didn’t need this now! There was Scorpion and Jack to deal with, and everything Rawley had told her last night. Her heart was tied in knots, and even though she had lost a handful of steers at the North Canadian, she still had 355 animals to contend with, not to mention the horses and the guests. She couldn’t take much more.
She felt herself getting hysterical. It took a physical effort to keep herself in control.
“What’s the matter?”
She flinched at Jack’s voice and looked over as he came up beside her. Just treat him civilly, professionally, she told herself. No matter what else lay between them—a chasm now— there was still the matter of Scorpion, so he had a right to know.
“Scratch what I said about nothing but dry land standing between us and the Cimarron,” she said expressionlessly.
He started to ask her what she meant, then he noticed the clouds as well. And in that moment he knew exactly what Scorpion had been waiting for.
The assassin had believed Carly about the storm she had blamed for their early departure. Or at least Scorpion hadn’t discounted that possibility. And he was going to use it.
Suddenly Jack knew something else. He knew why Scorpion had not tried harder to get Carly alone in all the days that had just passed. It hadn’t been necessary. He wasn’t going to try to win her heart all over again—that had been clear after the first couple of days. But Jack realized now that he wasn’t even going to reveal himself and ask her to run away with him. Not at the last moment. Not at all—not until they were already gone.
He was simply going to take her whether Carly Castagne was willing to go with him or not.
Jack’s heart stalled. Things kept clicking into place. Why did he need the storm?
Because he must know that Jack Fain was Gemini, and he hadn’t left yet, couldn’t leave, until he’d left no trace of his passing behind. He would have to kill Jack first, and the confusion of a storm was the perfect opportunity.
The business about Saturday had been more or less a red herring, convenient if it worked out, but not crucial if it didn’t. More than anything, Jack thought, the fire with the generator had probably been to draw Carly away from him, out of the parlor.
His heart started up again. It roared. “Over my dead body,” Jack breathed aloud. None of it would happen unless it was over his dead body.
“What?” Carly whispered back.
“Just hold on, cowgirl. All hell’s about to break loose.”
What was more, Jack realized, Scorpion wasn’t going to remove the money from the wagon. He was planning on taking the whole damned thing with him.
Carly finally halted the ride when the wind started to blow hard enough to flatten the spare tufts of grass. It moaned like a man dying, snatching her voice right out of her throat when she reined in to talk to Jack.
“I can’t take a chance on going any farther!” she shouted. “We have to find low ground!”
Jack flicked his gaze to the assassin, then back to her. “You mean like one of these chasms?”
Carly nodded. “There’s one straight ahead about a quarter of a mile. I remember it from the last trip. It’s big enough to protect everything.”
“You want to drive the herd and everything else down inside?”
“That’s the idea.”
Jack didn’t like it. If they were all trapped in a relatively enclosed area, making it impossible for the others to scatter and let Scorpion do his thing, then this was going to go down a whole lot worse. “No,” he said flatly.