Ana was heartened by that news, that the authorities were still working in the area. “That is good.”
“I’m worried about Clay, though,” Jewel said. “He’s taking his brother’s death very hard.”
Ana frowned. “This is the brother who was in prison?”
Jewel nodded. “He wasn’t a bad kid, really, just a little wild. He didn’t know what he was getting into.”
A bit cynical about criminals claiming innocence, Ana said nothing, not wanting to dispute Jewel’s assumption.
“I think the fact that he didn’t even claim Clay as next of kin, that he put down he had none on the prison forms, didn’t even use their name, really got to Clay. He didn’t even find out he was dead until seven months after it happened, when he went to the prison to find out why his letters came back undeliverable.”
“I am sorry for his pain,” Ana said. That, at least, she could honestly say.
“Tamara told me Clay tried so hard. Not many eighteen-year-olds who would take on the task of raising two younger siblings. But Clay did. And he feels responsible, guilty that he couldn’t keep his little brother out of trouble.”
“No one,” Ana said carefully, “has more power to hurt us than the ones we most love.”
Ana felt Jewel’s gaze sharpen, and regretted speaking even those vague words. But Jewel kept her word, to ask no questions Ana did not want to answer, and once again Ana silently thanked her.
As she watched Jewel load up the kids for another trek to the Bar None for pony rides, Ana was very happy that her benefactor had found a new friend. And if she found it odd that Tamara and Clay Colton were by all appearances back together again, with the one-time forensics expert happily settled back at the Bar None, she kept the thought to herself. She knew nothing about their relationship.
It was a lesson she’d learned in the hardest of ways, when everyone told her she should turn a blind eye to Alberto’s dealings, just as they had told her she had no right to judge her father. They were impressed by her father’s polish, his education, the whole, false package. They had called her an idealistic fool to expect any man to turn his back on a lucrative career, just because she did not like some aspect of it.
The illegal aspect of it, she thought. The taking of things they had not earned, from people who had worked hard. The selling of evil, destructive things they called simply “commodities,” never caring what the drugs did or the lives they destroyed. The coercion of innocent people to help in their “work,” coercion by threat to families, children…
She was not sure which disturbed her more, the actual activities, or the urging of those around her to look the other way. Perhaps she was a naïve, idealistic fool, but she refused to have her baby grow up in a place where such things were accepted.
Alone again, she checked on Maria, who was napping peacefully. She decided she felt up to resuming some of the tasks she had taken on before, in an effort to earn her keep. Jewel had told her not to worry, not to push herself too hard so soon after the birth, but after nearly a week she was restless.
And really, other than feeding and bathing Maria, she had little to do; the children at Hopechest had seemed fascinated by Maria, and the girls especially were always offering to help. Ana suspected they looked upon the baby as an animated doll of some sort, but she still found their wide-eyed interest touching.
At the same time, she looked at these children with a quiet determination that Maria would never end up needing help like this. She would always be there for her little girl, making sure she always knew she was loved. For that was what she saw most in the too-old eyes in the too-young faces around her here. So few of these children had ever been certain they were loved.
“You will always know, mija,” she told her sleeping child. “You will always know.”
“You all right, boy?”
Ryder sighed, knowing it must be bad if Boots could tell even over the phone that he was in an uproar.
“Things are just…complicated,” he said.
“Life is,” Boots agreed. “That’s why the Boss gave us brains, to figure it out.”
“Yeah, well, I could use a better one just now, then.”
“Nothing wrong with your brain, Ryder. How you’ve used it on occasion, well, that’s another story.”
The teasing was gentle, and Ryder took no offense. Boots had his best interests at heart, and that was something Ryder had never honestly believed of anyone before in his life. Except maybe his mother, but Mary Lynn Grady had spent most of her too-short life struggling to support her three children sired by, but never acknowledged by, Graham Colton, the profligate brother of the current presidential front-runner.
Ryder had heard some wonder if Joe Colton was fit to be president, with a brother like Graham. Ryder had never been one of them. After all, didn’t Clay, straight-arrow, upstanding, good-man-to-the-core Clay, have a brother like him?
What he’d never understood was what his mother had seen in the clearly sleazy, too-slick Graham Colton.
“What are you thinking about, boy?”
Startled, Ryder chided himself for this newly born tendency to get lost in thought.
“My mother,” Ryder said, “and how I wish I’d known her before.”
“Before?”
Before she got tangled up with my bio-dad, he thought.
“Before she gave up the rodeo,” he said. “She must have been something. All fire and sass. But all I ever knew was the woman who got up before dawn every day to work in that diner.”
“And you find that less appealing than being a rodeo rider?”
“Well, yeah,” Ryder said, barely managing not to add “Of course!”
“Even though she did it for you?”
“You see, that’s what I hate about it. Woman gets pregnant, and her life like…ends. She gives up her dreams, like nothing else matters but the kid. Or she dies young, like my mother did. She was only forty-six.”
And while that still seemed old to him, he knew that it was far too young to die.
“So why don’t you tell me,” Boots began, in that tone Ryder had come to know meant some heavy thinking was coming his way, “what it is that’s more important than raising kids?”
“I’m not saying it’s not important, I know, they turn into adults someday and they’ll be in charge, I know all that, but—”
“Did you miss having a father, Ryder?”
“Not mine,” he said sourly.
“Agreed. Yours left a lot to be desired. But a father like you might imagine? One who cared about you, was involved in your life, one you could look up to?”
“I guess,” Ryder said.
“Do you think things might have gone differently if you’d had one?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think your brother might have been a little more relaxed if there had been a father around to do the things he took upon himself, at far too young an age?”
“Sure.”
“And perhaps your sister might have avoided falling for a smooth-talking city boy?”
He’d had enough. “What’s the point, Boots?”
He could almost see the leathery old man shrug, could hear in his voice that lopsided smile that meant he was about to drive it home.
“Your biological father thought everything was more important than the kids.”
Ryder felt as if he’d been sucker punched. Boots was too damned good at that, led you down the path to exactly where he wanted you to go, then hit you between the eyes.
“Damn it, Boots,” he muttered.
There was a moment of silence before the man asked, “What’s brought this on, boy? Why are you thinking about all this now?”
He almost spilled it, right then and there. But he couldn’t, he knew he couldn’t. If he’d tell anyone it would be Boots, but not now, not on a cell phone, not on a phone at all. There was no way in hell he was going to try and explain what had happened the other night over the phone. Hell, how could he explain som
ething he himself didn’t understand?
I helped deliver a baby, Boots. For the gutsiest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. And now I can’t get it out of my head. Her…or the baby.
“I don’t even like babies,” he muttered. “They’re messy, they throw up on you—”
Boots voice was suddenly sharper. “You haven’t done anything stupid, have you boy? Get some girl in trouble?”
“No!”
There had been, admittedly, that girl in New Mexico, when he’d been out of Lone Star for less than two weeks. He’d gone a little crazy, he knew, but it had been a long time. When the sexy little blonde had laughed at him, saying he made love like he’d just gotten out of jail, he’d laughed with her, but he hadn’t gone back.
And he’d been, as he always was, careful. No trail of bastards across the country for him.
“It’s just this whole…thing I’m working on. It’s hard for me to understand.”
“Of course it is. You’re a decent human being, Ryder.”
Ryder laughed. “Now there’s something I don’t hear much of.”
“Take it from a man who was not at one time. I know them when I see them.”
Boots didn’t often refer to his past. He’d once told Ryder that the man he had once been was dead and buried, and his evil ways with him. To Ryder’s amazement he hadn’t been bitter at the prospect of spending the rest of his life locked up, despite being a changed man. He didn’t even make a true effort at seeking parole, something he’d once explained to a puzzled Ryder.
“Not many believe in jailhouse conversions,” he’d said simply. “And I can’t blame them. They see it as a criminal’s way to try and get out, convince everyone you’ve found religion so they’ll let you go. I won’t belittle my faith in that way. And,” he’d added, “I have a lot to atone for. Here is as good a place as any to do that.”
A lot to atone for…
He remembered how that had hit him, hard. He’d always thought atonement had to be forced on you, like when Clay would order him to apologize to Georgie for teasing her, or that it was something akin to his going to jail, to make up for being stupid enough to get fooled into driving a truck in coyote territory without being sure of what was inside it.
He’d never thought about what it would take to make a man feel that from inside himself, to feel like he needed to atone for his transgressions, and to proceed to do so in his own way, with no one forcing it on him, no judge ramming it down his throat.
Simply because it was right.
That was the turning point, he realized now. That was the moment when he’d begun to look at Boots not just as a fellow inmate who was older and wiser in the ways of prison life, not just as a man who’d done far worse than Ryder had ever thought of, but as a man who had found something Ryder had never known—a solid, unshakable center, a path to follow and the strength to walk it.
Ryder was no Holy Roller, but when it came right down to it, he didn’t think the source of the strength Boots had mattered as much as how he used it. And for some reason he’d chosen to use that strength to help Ryder find his own way.
“You know what the right thing is, Ryder, whatever it is that’s eating at you. You just need to let down that guard of yours enough to see the answer.”
They’d hit the end of Boots’s allotted phone time, and had to say a hasty goodbye. But long after he’d disconnected, Ryder sat thinking.
So what was the right thing? Was Boots right? Was the answer right in front of him—he just couldn’t see it?
He shook his head sharply. It was time for him to get back to work. He needed to check the perimeter of the Bar None. There was always a chance of more tunnels that hadn’t been found yet. But he wanted to be back at his usual observation post at Hopechest by 2:00 a.m.; he’d seen that somewhere around two or three, the baby usually awakened and her mother got up to feed her.
Tonight was no exception. It was 2:15 a.m. when the light in that front room came on.
Even from a distance, through the high-powered binoculars, the sight of that mysterious, lovely woman with the baby he’d brought into the world at her breast, was the most incredible thing he’d ever seen. It was as if all the pain she’d endured was forgotten, as if the bloody, sloppy mess of the delivery had never happened, all of it wiped away by the miracle she now held in her steady, loving arms.
Had his mother felt like that? She’d been alone, too, thanks to his useless father.
There it was again, that odd, uncharacteristic sense of connection. He’d never felt it before, and now that he couldn’t seem to get rid of it, he didn’t know what to do about it. He’d always thought being a loner was easier—no strings, no ties, no responsibilities. But the sight of this woman, alone and frightened and yet ready to fight for the child she hadn’t even laid eyes on yet, had given him a whole different view of being alone.
And the sight of her now made him feel his own isolation in a way that dug deep.
That famous guard Boots had mentioned seemed useless when it came to this woman.
And to that tiny human she held.
The baby was wrapped in a different blanket this time, something again pink, but with big flowers printed on it. Girly stuff, he thought again, with a smile that surprised him. He didn’t know much about that, girly stuff. Georgie had always been a tomboy of sorts, more interested in horses than dolls, and the rodeo schedule always won out over a social calendar. And he’d never been with a woman long enough to really get to know the ins and outs of all that…frilliness.
But the baby’s mother didn’t seem like the frilly sort. Courageous, definitely. Beautiful, obviously. Tough, absolutely. And he suspected he should throw smart into the mix as well.
And classy.
That was the word that had eluded him until now, when he was watching her tend to her baby with gentle care. Something about her made him picture her in some sleek, designer outfit, turning heads….
As he drove back to the motel in the minutes just after dawn, he thought about that. And he couldn’t quite reconcile his image of her with his image of the frightened, desperate illegals that he’d discovered—at the same time as the border patrol agents—in the back of that truck he’d been tricked into driving.
Obviously, one of his assumptions, his images, was wrong.
Maybe both, he thought wryly.
Chapter 8
“…presidential campaign of front-runner Joe Colton will be heading to Texas, where the scandal-plagued candidacy of disgraced Governor Allen Daniels has ground to a halt. Colton and his wife, Meredith, plan a joint visit in a few weeks.”
Ryder sipped his coffee in front of the small, motel television. As he watched the video clip of the surging candidate and his wife, he found himself studying them dispassionately. As if they were any other couple in the news, nothing to do with him.
Joe Colton was a tall, lean man in his late sixties. Ryder had heard some time ago that he was an accomplished and lifelong horseman. He’d thought of Clay and Georgie then, and wondered idly if such things were passed on genetically.
Colton’s dark hair was peppered with gray, and pure gray at the temples, giving him a distinguished look; any hint of his age was belied by his obvious fitness and his ease of carriage.
As the video played on, Ryder shifted his focus to Meredith Colton, Joe’s wife of nearly forty years. She was trim but curvy, and dressed in a classic suit that showed she still had a great pair of legs. Her golden-brown hair was in one of those chin-length cuts that swung as she moved. Her eyes were a warm brown, and sparkled with a kindness that seemed very genuine. She was a classy woman.
Odd, that wasn’t a word he often thought of, and yet now he’d done it twice in a day, about two very different women. He frowned. At least, he thought it was today…he had to think to remember if it had been before or after midnight that he’d had the thought about the woman at Hopechest Ranch.
He took another sip of coffee as the report ended with a mentio
n that several of the Colton children, both biological and fostered, would be joining them periodically on the campaign trail.
His cousins, he thought suddenly.
The coffee suddenly tasted bitter, and he dumped it down the motel sink.
Joe Colton and his wife, it seemed, had hearts big enough to take in a multitude of kids not their own. They had even taken in the daughter of Meredith’s late sister, who had tried her best to destroy her sister’s life.
It was that daughter who was given the chance to run the Hopechest Ranch here in Esperanza. He’d even seen her and had no trouble recognizing her; the woman he’d spotted at the ranch looked just like Meredith Colton.
It occurred to him yet again to wonder how this whole Hopechest Ranch thing had happened. Before he’d gone to prison, the place hadn’t even existed. How had it ended up here, on the Bar None of all places? Had Clay somehow joined the Colton fold? Just how much had he been involved in this decision? Was there more to this than merely the sale of some land Ryder knew Clay had been thinking about unloading for a long time? Had Joe and Meredith Colton decided Clay was worthy of inclusion in the illustrious Colton dynasty?
His mouth quirked wryly at the string of questions shooting through his mind. This was getting old fast, this constant wondering and introspection. It occurred to him then that perhaps he was dodging the real question that would likely never be answered. Which was why Graham Colton, so obviously unlike his brother Joe, couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge—let alone care about—children he had actually fathered himself, Ryder thought sourly.
A Colton family portrait flashed on the screen. In it, Joe Colton was seen wearing his trademark dazzling smile. Every time he saw a picture of that smile, Ryder had felt an odd sensation, not quite uneasiness, but a sort of twitchiness it had taken him a long time to figure out. When he had—when he happened to have seen a photo of the then senator shortly before having his own photo taken for his driver’s license—it had been a jolt he would never forget.
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