Vickie closed the distance between them and repeated herself. Wyatt said, “I figured as much, but I had to be positive. He was pretty convincing.”
“When he’s lying, he’s always convincing.”
From inside the cookshack, Slade yelled, “I heard that! Just go to bed, Vickie. I’ll find you when I think I can discuss this without throttling you.”
As if Slade hadn’t just filled the night with an angry male roar, Wyatt said, “I needed to make sure you were okay, too.”
Vickie touched his shirtsleeve. “His bark is worse than his bite,” she said, barely above a whisper. Volume of speech wasn’t necessary for Wyatt to understand her. “You shouldn’t have worried about me.”
She patted the younger man’s arm and stepped around him.
* * *
• • •
Wyatt went inside to check on Slade. The boss was as hard to take down as a gnarly old oak tree, but that didn’t mean he was invincible. And it had been a rough night, stressful for everyone in camp.
“I’m fine,” Slade told him. “Sorry if I gave you a scare. I didn’t think about frightening all of you. I just wanted to teach her a lesson about practical jokes by scaring the bejesus out of her.”
Wyatt bit back a smile. He guessed even people past retirement age were entitled to act like children every once in a while. “I think you succeeded. Now you’re even. She scared you just as badly.”
“Yeah, the score was even for all of a minute. Not now, though. She got in the last punch.”
Wyatt had no idea what to say, so he kept quiet. After a moment, he said, “If you need to talk, I’ll be happy to stay. If not, I’ll head to bed.”
“I couldn’t carry on an intelligent conversation right now if I tried. Go ahead and get a good night’s sleep.”
Wyatt left the tent. He’d never seen the boss look so devastated or defeated. He didn’t know what had passed between him and Vickie, but it had shaken Slade up. As he walked to his tent, he stared at Vickie’s. Her light was still on. Her shadow danced against the golden walls. It looked as if she were pacing in tight circles. He glimpsed a light-colored blur moving toward her shelter. Four Toes. Wyatt stopped in his tracks. Was the bear about to go inside? If so, the third scare of the evening was about to occur. Vickie’s screams would rattle the nerves of every man in camp except his.
Just as Wyatt feared, the bear stopped in front of her doorway and pawed the flap aside as if he did so often. Seconds later, in he went. Muscles snapping taut, Wyatt glanced around, expecting men to pop from their quarters like peas from a shooter. Nothing. That meant Vickie hadn’t shrieked in terror. He swung his gaze back to the illuminated wall of her tent and saw her shadow drop to its knees. The next instant, Four Toes’ silhouette was cast against the canvas, and the two shapes blended together.
Wyatt closed the distance between him and her shelter. City folks tended to have romantic notions about wild animals and believed they could be domesticated with enough love and understanding. Vickie seemed to have a vast knowledge of the wilderness and its inhabitants, but maybe she’d lived in town for so long that she’d forgotten some of the things she’d learned as a kid. Tamed bears could be friendly and harmless most of the time, but if any little thing set them off, they could kill a person with one swat. And Four Toes was not tame. He’d spent most of his life out in the forest, coming in to his feeding station at the ranch in the morning and at night so Slade could feed him. Slade had stopped providing Four Toes with food the previous summer, after serving him the pepper bomb, and the bear had been out for revenge ever since. Slade wasn’t afraid of him. No one who’d been around Four Toes in his infancy was. But nobody was stupid enough to hug him, either. Vickie was putting her life at risk.
Wyatt almost tried to knock on her door flap but caught himself. His knuckles rapping against canvas would make no sound that Vickie would notice. He cleared his throat. “Vickie, this is Wyatt. Can I speak to you for a second?”
From this angle, her shadow didn’t show, so he was mildly startled when she swept back the canvas partition and stepped outside. With the night temperatures plunging as they were, most people would have invited him inside. He decided she must be trying to hide her furry visitor.
“I saw Four Toes going into your tent,” Wyatt told her. “I couldn’t turn a blind eye. It’s dangerous for you to be chummy with that bear.”
Shivering from the cold, she hugged her middle. Then she spoke, but with the illumination of the tent behind her to play heck with his night vision, he couldn’t read her lips. He held up a hand. “Sorry. I can’t hear you, Vickie, and it’s dark.”
As soon as the bear slipped past the two of them and lumbered back out into the words, Wyatt bade Vickie good night and sought out his quarters, removed his phone from his pocket, and started texting Erin before he even reached the bed to sit down. He could only hope she was awake. “Things are a mess here.”
His phone vibrated almost instantly. Her reply popped up. “Is Uncle Slade okay?”
“Physically, he’s okay. Emotionally, I think he’s a wreck.”
“What happened?”
Wyatt tried to think how he might explain without typing a whole manuscript. Texting was his only means of communicating over a phone, so he could light up a keyboard and overwhelm people with long texts. “It’s a long story.”
“Hit me.”
Wyatt pressed the microphone symbol and just started talking. He was tired, and he didn’t relish the thought of tapping out everything he had to say. “There’s this woman named Vickie Brown in camp. Years ago, she and your uncle were in love and about to be married. Before the wedding, some girl told Vickie that your uncle had sex with her at a beer party. He says he never touched the girl, but Vickie broke their engagement and vanished. I think he cried to find her.” Wyatt stared down at the words. Damn. He’d been lazy and allowed his speech to slur. He manually corrected the errors and moved on, speaking more deliberately. “He still loves her. Never stopped.” Okay, he was being lazy again, but she’d be able to make sense of the incomplete sentences. “I think she’s the reason he never got married.”
“Uncle Slade, in love? OMG!”
“I get the feeling from Slade that a part of him died when she walked out. Anyway, she popped back into his life without warning, and it’s like she’s got a vendetta against him. Playing stupid practical jokes that target him. Tonight she went too far. Don’t think she meant anything bad to happen. Put a fake rattlesnake in his sleeping bag.”
Wyatt went on to tell Erin the rest of the story, ending with, “I guess Slade decided to show her just how awful it sometimes is to be on the receiving end of a joke. He pretended to have a heart attack. Scared me so bad that I almost had one myself. I’m pretty sure it ended with them having a huge fight. Being deaf, I can’t eavesdrop, but it sure looked like things got ugly.”
“I’m coming up. I need to make sure he’s okay. He never married. It sounds like this Vickie gal was his one and only. He must be devastated.”
“I thought you couldn’t get time off.”
“I made friends with the dispatcher who had it in for me. It’s my weekend off, and she won’t call me in. She’s promised to pick on someone else for a while when there’s an emergency.”
Wyatt’s heart lifted at the thought of seeing Erin again so soon. But the feeling of gladness was another warning sign to him that she was dangerous. He’d vowed never to mess with another woman, and he’d kept that promise to himself for years. Most of the time, he could look at females to his heart’s content and just walk on by, but Erin De Laney was different somehow. Despite that tough-gal, kick-ass-and-take-names image she tried to project, he sensed something vulnerable and fragile in her that attracted him. Everything within him felt frozen at the very thought of starting anything with her. He had learned that women were bad news.
“No nee
d to come up. I’ve got this,” he texted. “Take the weekend to rest. You deserve the downtime.”
“No way am I staying home. I’m coming. If nothing else, I’ll have a one-on-one talk with her and tell her how the cow ate the cabbage.”
The last thing Wyatt wanted was two pissed-off women in Slade’s camp. Slade might have a real heart attack if the two women he loved tore into each other like she-cats.
“I don’t think confronting her is a good idea,” he typed. “They aren’t kids. We need to butt out of their personal relationship.”
“You can butt out. But if she’s hurting my uncle, she’ll do it again only if she goes through me.”
Wyatt politely concluded the texting session. Shit. Maybe he shouldn’t have told Erin about the fake heart attack episode. He’d just been worried, not so much about the older man’s ticker, but about his mental state. Slade’s behavior tonight had been totally out of character for him. He was normally levelheaded and calm. He never grew impulsive and did stupid stuff, but faking a coronary was plain-ass stupid. At Slade’s insistence, Wyatt had gotten first-responder medical training and knew better than to perform CPR on anyone whose heart was still beating, but the rest of the hired hands hadn’t taken classes. If Wyatt hadn’t been there, the dopes might have done Slade serious harm.
Weary beyond words, Wyatt decided to hit the sack and “listen” to some music on his phone. It always soothed him. He got settled on his cot, pressed his cellular device to his chest, and was starting to relax when he remembered that damned bear. How were he and Slade going to explain the presence of Four Toes in their camp when Erin showed up? Slade had taken full responsibility for rescuing the bear when he was a cub, but Wyatt and Kennedy had been his partners in crime. The three of them had broken the law nine ways to hell. Erin was honor bound to uphold those laws. If she realized that Four Toes had been habituated to humans, which was clearly the case, she’d have to turn Slade in. It was more than just a part of her job; she’d taken an oath when she was sworn in to uphold the law, and that meant she couldn’t turn a blind eye when she loved someone who had done or was doing something illegal.
Chapter Twelve
Slade jerked awake when Vickie entered the cookshack before the crack of dawn. He could normally see well in the dark, but not in a tent with all its walls lined with stocked shelves. Even so, he knew it was her by the light tread of her boots. Men walked differently, taking longer strides and making louder thuds with the soles of their shoes. He heard her groping for the lantern that sat on the table and then the rustling of stick matches in the box. He angled an arm over his eyes to shield them from the sudden glare of light.
“You can look now,” she bit out. “No modeling of underwear this morning. I’m fully clothed.”
Okay, she was still in a snit. Under any other circumstances, Slade might have offered her an olive branch, but he was too damned pissed off himself to give a shit how mad she was. “What the fuck were you thinking to name my kid Brody?” He snarled the question as he lowered his arm to glare at her. “What kind of name is that?”
She flashed him a stiff smile, more like baring her pretty little teeth than making a friendly gesture. “Oh, jeez, sorry if you don’t like it. In the first letter, I did ask what name you’d like if it was a boy. No answer, so I just went with what I liked. It seemed fair at the time. I was the one who had to work while puking my guts up with morning sickness. I was the one who spent three months of my life unable to see my toes. And I was the one who went through three days of labor without my child’s sorry-ass father in attendance to so much as hold my hand. How inconsiderate of me.”
“I never got a fucking letter!” he yelled. “I didn’t know I knocked you up! How could you do this to me, Vickie?” He sat up and thumped his chest with a knotted fist. “My son, my very own flesh-and-blood, and you never bothered yourself to even so much as call my folks’ house? They would’ve told me. I would have been banging on your door in a fucking heartbeat!”
“If you use that word one more time, you may wear your breakfast, you son of a bitch! Unless you’ve changed, you never use the F word around ladies.”
“I’m not so sure you qualify as a lady anymore,” he shot back.
When she rounded on him, Slade had a flashback to their younger years when she’d been such a beauty that she’d taken his breath away. And, damn her, she was still beautiful even though she’d pulled her wildly curly hair back into a rubber band and it poked out at the nape of her graceful neck like the prickly fur of a hedgehog. He knew how soft it would actually feel, though. And he’d always loved the scent of her hair. How it tickled his lips. And her body. She still had the slender figure of a woman half her age. And those eyes. It broke his heart just to look at her.
“I’m no longer a lady,” she agreed. “I’m one hell of a woman. Shall we exchange insults, Slade? I’m ready.”
“You used to say you wanted to name our first boy Slade. What happened to that plan?”
“That plan flew out the window when I was forced to marry a logger who could support me while I was pregnant and too sick to work, and then later support your son.” She sent him one of those angry looks that always had made her eyes look like emeralds shot through with sunlight. Some things never changed. “Fool that I was, I still loved you, but my husband wouldn’t have tolerated it if I had named our son after you. So I did the next best thing.”
Slade didn’t want to hear that she had still loved him. She’d thrown her diamond engagement ring at his feet and walked away from him, damn it. And she hadn’t trusted him at his word. And then, to make all that even worse, she hadn’t made sure that he knew he had a kid. What if he had gotten drunk and screwed April Pierce that night? If Slade had been guilty of the most horrible mistake of his life—which he wasn’t—it wouldn’t have diminished his love for Vickie one bit.
“So where did ‘Brody’ come from? It’s Irish, isn’t it?”
“It’s American slang for making a car or motorcycle spin in circles. About that time, you were doing rodeo and spinning in circles on a bull or a bronc.” She bent to shove wood into the stove and crouched to light the fire. When she slammed the door, the sound of cold metal striking metal rang out so loudly that he thought it probably woke every man in camp except Wyatt. She stood and dusted her hands clean on her jeans. “Pretty much the same thing. Don’t you think? Slade Wilder, the rodeo champ, doing his damnedest to get himself killed.”
“And I damned near succeeded a few times.”
“I know.” He heard her voice break. She tried to cover it up with a cough, but he wasn’t fooled. “Marilyn and Mary Alice wrote me letters and kept me updated on you. I burned them so Matt wouldn’t find them.” She shot him another sparkling look, beautiful but lethal. “Stupid fool.”
“And why do you think I didn’t give a shit if I lived or died, Vickie? Because I loved you. The rodeo was all that kept me sane.”
“I’m sure the buckle bunnies and booze helped a bit.”
Slade bent his head. He wasn’t proud of what he’d done during that period of his life. “Yep, there was a long string of women and a lot of hangovers, Vickie. And maybe all that helped, too. Bottom line is, if you loved me, why in the hell couldn’t you trust in my word when I told you I didn’t get drunk that night and have sex with April?”
She walked past him. “Get your ass up and fold that cot. I’m going to need that prep table to start breakfast.”
“I asked you a question!” he shot back, putting more volume into his words than he intended.
She turned from the sink with a butcher knife clenched in a white-knuckled fist. For an instant, Slade thought she might come after him with it. “Because you must have had sex with April! She was at the party! You never denied that! And she described that birthmark on your right butt cheek perfectly.” She laid the knife across the edge of the sink with exaggerated care. “Hmm, let
me see. Maybe April had X-ray vision and could see through a pair of Wrangler jeans. Nope. Mere humans aren’t gifted with that superpower. So I guess that must mean at some point during the evening, your britches were down around your ankles.”
Slade couldn’t have been more bewildered if she’d told him that he’d spelled his name on April’s neck with hickeys. “What?”
“Give it up, Slade. You’re guilty. Why can’t you just admit it? She saw the birthmark.”
“She couldn’t have seen the birthmark! She wasn’t even there the whole time. Her brother got too smashed to drive and she came late to give him a ride home. Somebody had his truck radio on. I did dance with her, Vickie, but even that didn’t include touching. It was fast music, not the snuggle-up-and-cop-feels kind.”
“She described your birthmark in detail. It has that little jag on one side that makes it look like a pie somebody took a slice out of.”
Slade felt so agitated that he wanted to get up and pace, but he’d be damned if he’d do that in front of her when he wore nothing but soot-streaked boxers. “I never dropped my trousers in front of that woman! Why in the hell can’t you believe that?”
“You say you weren’t drunk, but you’d been drinking when you came by my parents’ house to see me. We made love in our hayloft that night.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “Did you even shower her off of you before you buried yourself inside me?”
Slade was getting one hell of a headache. And he decided he didn’t give a shit if he was wearing only dirty shorts. He sprang to his feet. He was no longer so angry that he feared he might harm her, but his hands did itch to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her perfect teeth rattled. “I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-woman! And you can paint it any way you like, but the bottom line is, you kept my son from me! My son, Vickie. I never got any damned letters! I never saw a picture of him when he was a baby! Even if you believed that I’d screwed every girl in Mystic Creek that night, did that obliterate everything you knew I stood for? Everything you knew I believed in? Did it alter your feelings so damned much that you couldn’t trouble yourself to climb in your damned car and drive home to make sure I knew you were pregnant? Or later, if you were too sick to drive during the pregnancy, why didn’t you come home then?”
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