Just then they reached Jesse. “Hey, bro,” said Zane. “Glad you’re taking over guard duty on The Silent One.” He shot Cade a glance filled with mischief.
Jesse gave Cade a quick one-armed guy hug, then caught Zane in a headlock. When Zane socked him in the ribs, Jesse merely sidestepped while exchanging grins with Cade. “Sure thing, little brother. Better me than you.”
Cade couldn’t agree more. Jesse understood his need for solitude in a way no other family member could. Cade was trusting his brother to respect his privacy.
“Amen to that,” Zane said. “Now let’s go devil our little sister.” He tried to take Cade’s duffel from him, but Cade stubbornly refused to yield, though the weight of his cameras was sizable and he was still getting back to full strength. He’d wanted to leave them behind, but that would have attracted more of his family’s attention when he needed less.
He couldn’t talk about any of it, not how he woke up sweating in the night, how he couldn’t forget the image of his friend’s body, crumpled and bloody, how the gift that had defined him had vanished and he didn’t know who the hell he was without it.
It would come back. It had to. In the meantime he needed to occupy his mind with anything else. “Anybody know what Jenna’s got up her sleeve?”
His brothers glanced over and both shrugged. “No idea,” said Jesse.
“Me, either,” responded Zane. “But sure as shooting, there’s something.”
Jesse grunted acknowledgment as they made their way to his car. “On second thought, maybe you’d better hang around,” he said to Zane.
“Not happening, dude. I’m sure you two can handle her.” Zane snorted rudely then started laughing.
Even Cade found himself smiling.
“WANT A BEER, CADE?” Jenna called from the kitchen the next night.
“Sounds great.” He rubbed his hair with a towel then slung it around his neck. “So who’s coming to this party and why do I have to be here for it?”
Jenna rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to act like you’re being sent to the slammer. It’s just some of my friends from work and stuff.” She frowned and pointed at his belly. “That’s an old scar. Not from the fall.”
“Nope. I was shooting tigers in Kenya. Crossed paths with a cub whose mama didn’t think much of that idea.”
“You never told us.”
He shrugged. “I don’t like to worry Mom and Dad.”
Her eyes rose to meet his. “We worry, anyway. It’s hard never knowing where you really are or if you’re safe.” She popped the cap off the beer and handed it to him. “Are you itching to get out there again?”
“I’m not finished with physical therapy,” he said, dodging. He took a sip. “But I couldn’t stay with the folks anymore. I love them, but…”
“I understand, and they do, too. You need something to do to make the time pass. I can put you to work.”
“Doing what? Swinging a hammer on your housing project?” That actually sounded good, and it wasn’t as though he’d never done manual labor. His dad was a firm believer in everybody pitching in and kids not being idle. By the time he’d left home after high school, he’d performed every job available on a cattle ranch, everything from riding herd to construction to dosing cattle.
“I could definitely use you, though Diego would kill me if you tore anything loose, but I had another idea.”
Cade grinned. “Zane owes Jesse and me steak dinners. We knew you had something up your sleeve.”
Jenna sniffed and set her pageboy-cut hair swinging. “That’s a rude thing to say.”
“But…?” He chuckled. “Come on, Jen, this is me, your big brother.”
“I have entirely too many big brothers.”
“Tough break. So what’s your game plan?”
“Well, I have this friend…”
“You have about a zillion, always have.”
“Sophie’s special.”
“Oh, crap, you’re not trying to fix me up, are you? Jen…”
“You should be so lucky.” She glared at him. “For your information, I’m asking for your help, not matchmaking.”
“Not that you wouldn’t try.”
She stuck out her tongue at him. “This is serious. She’s in a bit of a bind and I want you to sell Sophie some of your photographs.”
“I can do that.”
“Cheap.”
He cocked his head. “And I would want to…why?”
“Because you love me?”
“Maybe not that much.” He grinned. “How cheap?”
“Very. Though…since you’re not doing anything… I was actually thinking maybe you could take new photographs just for her.”
His chest felt tight at the thought of picking up a camera. “Not happening.”
“Look, this could be good for you, too. You’re not ready to go back on the road, but you’re tired of sitting around. Your skills are wasted swinging a hammer. Sophie’s such a nice person and she’s had a hard life and she’s in a real spot and I want to help her but she won’t let me and she’s about to kill herself doing too much of the work but she has this great idea for the decor and I know you could—”
“Whoa, kid. Take a breath.”
The doorbell rang. “Drat. Well, we’ll discuss this later. Go put your shirt on.” Jenna raced from the kitchen, leaving Cade staring after her.
His little sister had always been a sucker for a sob story. From the time she learned to walk, she’d been trying to fix things for other people. Her heart was as big as North America, but her common sense left much to be desired.
And now this Sophie chick had played the sympathy card, and Jenna was donating his hard work—forget new shots, which he was not taking for anyone—for peanuts. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford to do so or wouldn’t for a good cause, but he knew better than to trust Jenna’s judgment. His little sister always had a scheme and had absolutely no qualms about dragging her family into her latest enthusiasm.
If this Sophie was on tonight’s guest list, he’d scope her out, see what her game was.
Nobody was going to take advantage of his little sister.
SOPHIE SLIPPED THE EARRING with its delicate fall of citrine drops through her earlobe and reached to close the antique jewelry box she’d found abandoned in a corner of the attic.
As she lowered the lid, the cheap locket tucked into a corner of the box caught her eye, and for a moment, her hand lingered on the carved gold trinket.
She brushed her fingers over the surface before prying open the clasp. Inside she traced the features of the lost boy who’d loved her and the child she’d buried with him.
So young. So long ago. In the sixteen years since, she’d made a life utterly unlike anything she and Kenny had dreamed of. There was little left of the runaway girl who’d been so scared when she’d met him. So alone.
Luck had dropped Kenny in her path, a boy with countless strikes against him and precious few reasons to hope.
But in spite of everything, they’d loved and they’d hoped, anyway, two babies having a baby. They’d lived in what others might call squalor, but the efficiency apartment had felt like a castle to her back then, the close-knit, loving little family they’d built exactly what she’d longed for ever since her parents had drowned.
Then she lost everything again, this time to a careless driver who stole the people she loved and left her with nothing but a pile of twisted metal.
Sophie stared sadly at the images of the dark-haired boy and the grinning baby. With a quiet click she closed the locket’s clasp, then the box. The past should stay where it belonged, locked away. She was not that girl anymore, would never be again. Home and family were not her future.
Instead she’d
create a place of peace for others, a temporary home, a refuge.
So she went down the stairs and headed off to meet Jenna’s brother, who would probably never agree to Jenna’s crazy plan. He’d likely turn up his nose and consider Sophie’s hotel a lousy venue for the art of a world-renowned photographer, but Sophie wasn’t going to let his fame intimidate her.
If Cade balked, fine. She’d survived far worse.
JUST AS CADE WAS ABOUT to join Jenna’s party, the cell phone in his pocket vibrated. Grateful for the escape, he answered without looking first. “MacAllister.”
“Cade,” a very familiar voice said. “It’s Karen.”
His agent. Whom he’d been dodging.
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
“Coming along,” he said more lightly than he felt.
“I’m glad.” She hesitated, and he knew what was coming next. “How’s the book?”
“Fine.”
She wouldn’t settle for that, but she was too blasted perceptive for him to offer some flimsy excuse. “Any idea when you can finish? The first deadline is long past—not that everyone doesn’t understand, of course.”
She didn’t have to remind him he’d been paid a princely advance on a book the publishing house had already put a lot of support behind. It was supposed to be a collection of his favorites, aptly billed Eyes on the World. Preorders were sizable, even in this day of declining coffee-table book sales.
“I’m working on it, Karen.” Or at least he’d tried. But he couldn’t look at his portfolio without thinking of what it had cost. Every glimpse into his files only made him want to throw something against the wall.
“That’s good.” Even if she suspected otherwise, she had always been quietly encouraging. “They have another idea they want to run past you.”
“What is it?”
“They want to change the focus of the book, frame it as a view through the eyes of someone who nearly died for his work.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“They were thinking it would be a journey through your life, beginning with your first efforts, leading up to your accident and ending with what it feels like to look back on your career and measure it in terms of what you nearly lost.”
“Bullshit. I’m not baring my soul in print. It’s no one’s damn business.”
“But it’s a tremendous marketing angle. Sort of like Sebastian Junger’s work, only better because you’re not just writing about someone else who nearly died, you’re relating firsthand experiences. They’ll give you a ghostwriter if you want one.”
What Cade wanted was to crush the phone in his hands. “No.”
“Don’t say no yet. They’ll make it worth your while.”
“Not possible.”
“Cade, you’re under contract. You’ve missed a deadline. If they decide you’ve reneged on the contract terms, they could make you pay the advance back, and it’s a sizable chunk of change.”
“I don’t care. Tell them to go to hell.” He was not reliving the last several months or using his friend’s death to make more money, not for anything. “They have no right.”
“Not to your story, maybe, but to what you promised them when you signed the contract? Absolutely.”
“Then I’ll pay them back.”
“And then what? They’ve been financing your expeditions for ten years now. You torpedo your relationship with the publisher and your career will be over.”
I can’t do the work. And I’m nothing without it.
“Just think it over, Cade. Not while you’re mad, but later.” She hesitated. “I’ll need your answer within two weeks. I can hold them off that long, but no longer.”
How could two weeks, hell, two years make any difference? He’d been physically well enough to work on the original concept for a while now, but that wasn’t the problem.
Maybe if he believed the shots he’d have to weed through wouldn’t turn out to be the last good ones he’d ever take, or if he didn’t have to stumble over memory after memory of Jaime… “I gotta go, Karen,” he said.
“Cade…”
“Not now. I’m…I’m sorry.”
“You can call me anytime to talk,” she responded. “You know that. I care about you, Cade, and not just as your agent.”
He ended the call as politely as he could, only too aware that she’d been a friend as much as a business partner and that she deserved better than for him to behave so unprofessionally. He’d never done anything like this before.
Then again he’d never been trapped in a cage of his own fear before. He’d been in countless hairy situations all over the world and never blinked an eye. But he’d never nearly died before, either, or been haunted by the death of someone whose only crime was being a friend to Cade. Nor had he ever faced losing the most essential element of his existence.
Sick to death of stumbling around in the labyrinth his mind had become, Cade jammed his phone in the top drawer and clenched his jaw. Dodging and doubting…who the hell had he become?
CHAPTER THREE
A FEW FRIENDS…RIGHT. Cade should have remembered that Jenna did nothing by halves and had never met a stranger in her entire life. He hung around the edges of the crowd for as long as he could stand it, letting himself be introduced to a whole bunch of people whose names he would never remember, and didn’t care to.
But none of them had been called Sophie, he was positive. So where was she, his sister’s latest charity case? Not that most of the people present couldn’t qualify for that same status. She’d invited several families for whom her nonprofit organization was building homes, as well as unemployed workers she thought needed a good meal or a chance to find jobs, the old lady next door, a waitress she liked…
He had to hand it to her, though. Everyone brought something, even if it was only a bag of chips, so all got fed but no one felt like a beggar. Every one of them thought the world of Jenna, that much was clear, and he couldn’t fault their taste. His baby sister had a heart of pure gold, one she took no care to guard. In the world of the downtrodden, Jenna was a rock star.
Good-natured as the gathering was, however, there were too many people for him, and their first question was always “what do you do?” After an hour or so, he slipped out the back door and decided to take a walk.
Instantly he was reminded that he was in a city. Jenna’s little street was not much traveled, but South Congress was only a handful of blocks away. Sirens and traffic, music escaping from some club, all within hearing distance.
Why had he said yes to coming here? If he was going to be grounded somewhere, West Texas suited him far better. There you could go a whole night and only hear the occasional coyote and the sound of the wind.
In West Texas, however, his family would watch his every move, alert to any sign he was pushing himself too hard—or worse, doing nothing at all—and worrying over how long it would be until they saw him again once he left. They loved him, of course, or they’d never have put up with the life he’d chosen. But acknowledging that love meant he’d have to acknowledge the guilt that came with it. He was a lousy son and brother, he saw now, and wondered why he’d been so blind to that before.
Maybe he should return and offer to work on his dad’s ranch. Hang around for a while.
And wasn’t that just a dandy way to dodge the fact that he didn’t know if he could ever resume the career that had been all he’d ever wanted since the day his dad had placed a camera in his ten-year-old hands?
Damn, but he was sick of himself. He’d never in his life felt lost or uncertain and now he was swamped by both feelings. To top it all off, he’d skipped out on Jenna’s party when all she’d asked was for him to help out a friend.
He’d go back inside and m
ake nice soon, but for now, he just had to move. He let himself out through the front gate and onto the sidewalk.
SOPHIE DECIDED TO WALK to Jenna’s party. The hotel was only eight blocks away, and she knew Jenna’s street didn’t have many parking spaces. Plus, the pickup she’d traded her snappy convertible for had proven invaluable, but it wasn’t good in crowded parking conditions.
The day had cooled a little, thank goodness, though summer nights remained very warm in Austin. She crossed South Congress Avenue, went down a block and turned west onto the street that would intersect with Jenna’s. The trees in this part of town were old, their branches creating canopies that cast shadows on the streets. The homes were small in the neighborhood, most of them frame and surrounded by abundant foliage. Roses scented the air, and once she caught a whiff of honeysuckle, which made her smile. She’d uncovered a patch of it on the grounds near the carriage house, and that had decided her to go with her instinct and make the apartment above it into the honeymoon suite.
Just then her heel twisted on the cracked, uneven sidewalk and she grabbed the nearby picket fence, silently cursing the high heels of her sandals. She was clearly out of practice at walking in anything but work boots or sneakers. The thought brought a grin. Who from her former corporate life would have imagined such from Sophie of the trim suits and killer heels?
“You okay, child?” called out a voice from the porch of the frame dwelling.
So much for thinking no one had witnessed her gracelessness. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Nice night for a walk, but you be careful, hear? World’s got some meanness in it nowadays.”
“I’m always careful, but thank you for your concern. I’m just headed over to a friend’s house.”
“Don’t you walk yourself home late, child. You get a cab or have some nice young fella walk you back.”
A Texas Chance Page 3