“Then, at our place?” Lewis nodded toward his two brothers, Parker and Dale, so she knew he included them as well. “Dad turned the ranch over to our brother Marcus, aka Marcus the Terrible, and that’s what he’s been, first toward Parker and Dale and then…well Marcus decided he only needed one brother to help him out, and that wasn’t me.”
“With Uncle George and Aunt Norah fighting over the divorce,” Randy said, “and Marcus deciding he wanted to be the ruler of all he surveyed, my folks have kind of withdrawn from dealing with anyone else in the family—meaning my dad’s brothers. Carl and George, my oldest brothers, have been flexing their muscles a lot lately as well, mimicking Marcus and looking at me as if they consider me their personal serf.”
“So you can imagine how good it is for us to come here and see this,” Lewis said. “Not just our brothers and the cousins we know getting along—but seeing everyone so damn happy. And we couldn’t have you unhappy, either. So here we are.”
“I’m not.” She’d had only the one glass of wine. She didn’t know if it was that small amount of alcohol that had her feeling mellow or if it was the company of these men.
“There seems to be a lot of happiness hereabouts,” Randy said. “Or maybe it’s just our take, coming here from there.”
“No, it’s mine, too. I’ve thought about it a lot also. It’s the people of Lusty. They just open their arms and take you in. My dad didn’t ever go out of his way to make many friends. And yet, that day I laid him to rest—I think it was week or so before we met—the people who came! Some of the aunts brought me casseroles and banana bread and, oh God, the best pecan cookies I’ve ever tasted! But they came, and I understood they were there for me. A woman who works at the roadhouse, someone a lot of them had never met. So, definitely, it’s this place.”
“We’re glad,” Lewis said, “that our kin supported you when you needed the support.”
“Me, too.”
Michaela looked around the room. Tammy was still over in a group talking with Jenny and Jillian Jessop, married to the Doctors Jessop. There were a fair number of people here, and with the music playing in the background, it really was a congenial atmosphere.
“Let’s go grab that sofa.”
She hadn’t even seen Jesse, Barry, and Shar get up from the comfy-looking leather. She’d been on her feet since before dawn. She’d managed to get the broken boards on the porch removed and then mostly replaced. Her new nail gun helped with that. She’d also spent time on the stepladder, using a stiff wire brush on the outside of the house. There was no help for the windows. Those she would have to have professionally done, because she wanted eventually to have central air, so those windows needed to be airtight. But there was one board on the inside, part of the front door frame, that she thought she could replace herself.
But with having worked late Thursday and then spending most of the morning working on her place, a good soft sofa sounded very appealing.
“That sounded like a real ‘thank God I’m finally sitting’ sigh.” Lewis, on her left, said.
She hadn’t noticed that they’d managed to put her in the middle between them. A flash of panic ran through her, and then she relaxed. I think it’s time I stop acting like a shriveling virgin where these two men are concerned.
She’d been avoiding spending any significant time with them because, well, because they were only going to be here temporarily. But so what? She was a woman fully grown, and if she wanted to spend time with them or even have a flaming hot affair with them, well, why the hell not?
Heat flushed her cheeks, and she hoped like hell they didn’t notice or, if they did, that they had no idea the cause.
It took every bit of her will to recall what Lewis had just said and to act like it had only been a couple seconds since he had and to answer him as if nothing else was going on in her head.
As if I didn’t just have one gigantic flash of horny run through and tickle all my girl parts.
“I guess it was,” she said. “I worked late last night but wanted to get things done today before coming so I was up before the sun.”
“Working on your house?” Randy asked. “I heard Jenny telling Parker that the real estate agent came again today. Are you selling it?”
She waved her hand in a dismissive way. “No. This agent who’s out of Waco, Terry Gowan, stopped in to ask me, again, if I was. Claimed he had a buyer lined up. But I am not selling, period. I think this time, he believed me.” Michaela realized she’d been pretty closed-mouth with these two men. How silly was that, really?
“Right now, I’m working on the house. But it’s a ranch. Or a farm.” She shrugged. “I remember that, when I was a kid, there were cows and horses and a bit of tilling of the earth. My great-great-grandfather, Jonas Powell, settled our piece of land in the 1870s. I didn’t realize how much the place meant to me until I came back, when I found out my dad was sick.” She hadn’t really opened up much to anyone. She’d shared a bit with Jenny and Tammy and Bailey but just a bit with each of them. Talking about her feelings, about her heritage, now just felt right. “But I knew that first morning when I stepped out on the porch to greet the day—something I recall my mother always doing—that the house, the land, it was my legacy. And somehow, it was in my blood. Do you know what I mean?”
Michaela didn’t think she imagined that trace of wistfulness she saw in Lewis’s eyes, for all that it lasted but a heartbeat.
“I do. We both do,” Lewis said. “We thought we had that back in Montana, but we were wrong. Searching for that is why we’re here.”
“Having something like that down deep in the soul—that’s a powerful thing to have in common,” Randy said. “Don’t you think?”
The truth of Randy’s words hit deep. In the face of that, how could she go on pretending there was nothing between them? Michaela decided she couldn’t, not any longer. There was so much about these two men that drew her. She mentally threw in the towel. It didn’t matter, really, if they were only here for the short term. She wasn’t looking to build a family with them, or with anyone, for that matter. The ranch had to be her focus. So why not just have some fun along the way? Maybe spending time with Lewis and Randy would teach her something about herself.
“I do. I do, indeed.” It was time for her to just ease up on the roadblocks and see where the real attraction she felt led her.
* * * *
“Well? Did you buy the farm?”
Terry Gowan closed his eyes as he stepped into his house. The sound of his father’s voice, raspy from years of smoking and drinking before he’d been sent to prison, grated on him like a harbinger of hell. In some ways, Devlin Gowan the Second really was Terry’s own personal hell and had been for most of his life.
“Not yet, Dad. It’s more complicated than you know. Michaela Powell doesn’t want to sell.”
“What the fuck! Can’t you do anything fucking right? Nothing ever changes with you, does it? Still a fucking loser.” His last word was cut off by a coughing fit. Terry said nothing, just waited.
His father had arrived a month before, having been released from prison after an incarceration of fifteen years—a sentence that had been, as far as Terry was concerned, not nearly long enough.
Convicted of several counts of theft in Oklahoma, where the man had run off to when Terry had been a teenager, Devlin Gowan had served time in the state penitentiary in McAlester—the place they called “big mac”. Terry had been certain the old asshole would have ended up getting knifed in jail. He’d expected to, one day, get a call announcing the bastard’s death—not one announcing his upcoming release.
That phone call about six months back had started Terry on a quest. His father had said he wanted to buy a house, one about an hour or so west of Waco. He said he couldn’t remember how to get there, but he knew the name of the family who’d been the original owners in the nineteenth century, descendants of whom, it had turned out, still lived there now.
So Terry started looking
and, within a week, had located the house in question. As long as he thought he was just doing this one favor for his father, he could cope. He wasn’t particularly happy that the man would be within easy driving distance of him, but just because he’d live closer to him than he had since his dad deserted him didn’t have to change a thing. He had no reason to give his father any more time than he ever had and was pretty damn sure the old man wouldn’t waste a second on him, either.
But since the day he’d opened the door to find his father, wheelchair bound, dependent on oxygen, and a suitcase on his lap, expecting his son to take him in until the house was bought, Terry’s life had truly gone to shit.
“You told me old man Powell had no family.” Devlin had finally gotten some of his breath back. “The place is bound to be auctioned off for unpaid taxes. How hard can it be for you to get your hands on the place?”
“I never said he had no family. I said his only son died in Afghanistan.”
“There’s a difference?”
“He had a daughter who came home a few months back and took care of him during his illness.” Terry didn’t remind his father that this was a conversation they’d had more than once. He knew from experience that would do no good whatsoever.
When Devlin Gowan had contacted him for the first time in many years to ask him about the house, Terry had had no idea he was going to be dragged into…what?
His gut was telling him that whatever the reason was that his father wanted that specific house it couldn’t be a good one. However, Terry was in the real estate business and had often done deals with people he didn’t particularly like.
Under the heading that a commission was a commission, after that first phone call from his dad, he’d gone to see Mr. Powell—before he’d known the man was ill, when he was still living on his own—and told him he had a client who’d driven by and had been taken by his place. If the price was right, Terry had asserted, his client would be interested in buying. Terry had even entertained buying it and selling it to his father—for a damn good profit, of course.
Over the next couple of months, Terry had done his best to cajole Harold Powell into selling. He’d met the man for coffee in Gatesville and had even taken him to lunch a couple of times. The old man had been irascible, no doubt about it, but he hadn’t been rude or bullying.
Devlin had told him during that first phone call that there was a family connection between the Powells and the Gowans that went back to the late 1800s, and that was why he wanted to buy the place. Now, as Terry’s gut churned with the abusive tone of his father’s voice, remembered from his childhood, he knew there had to be another reason his father wanted to buy that particular property.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re so damn fixated on buying this damn house? It’s nothing special as far as I can see.”
“Maybe you’re just too fucking stupid on top of everything else!”
For one moment, Terry felt a chill, and so many memories from the past crashed in on him, threatening…what? This pattern was so fucking familiar. The disapproval, the insults, they’d always been followed by the old man’s fist or his belt. Hell, he’d throw anything at Terry that was close at hand, too. Other times he’d kicked him.
But Terry was no longer the cowering child who’d cried with relief when his father had left him and his mom. He was a man fully grown.
I was determined to do my duty toward the man who’d sired me, but there’s a limit. “And maybe I’ve just had enough of this shit. You can either come clean with me and tell me what this is all about, or you can damn well leave.”
“Leave?”
Terry blinked, and he wondered if the bullying bastard who’d been here for the last couple of weeks hadn’t actually been a figment of his memory. Because, in his place right now, was a weak, trembling old man. “Where the hell do you think I’m going to go? I got nobody else.”
Terry whipped around and took a step closer to his dad. “Out on the street for all I care!” He turned away, walked across the room, and sat in his favorite chair. “Give me one good reason, old man, that I don’t do that. You want the Powell house? Then you fucking tell me why.”
Devlin Gowan fell into another coughing fit. Terry got up and got him his bottle of water, which he must have dropped during his tirade earlier.
Devlin recovered slowly. Finally, he nodded. “You should know. It’s your legacy, too.” He paused, and Terry sensed he was struggling with more than just his memory. “Granddad showed me a letter from his own grandfather. It had been written while the first Devlin Gowan had been in prison in St. Louis—penned just before he died.”
Terry remembered, then, that his great-great-grandfather, also named Devlin, had lived a life of crime, too. Fucking great gene pool I’ve got.
“The letter said that he—Devlin—and two partners, Robert O’Grady and Ezra Powell, had pulled off a train robbery for which they’d never been charged—or even suspected. The plan had been to bury the loot and come back for it in a year. But they’d committed other robberies in the past, and it was a couple of them, in Missouri, that had finally caught up to him and his partners. O’Grady was killed during their arrest, but Powell had been sent to prison, too. Powell died before Devlin, and when he heard of it, he wrote to his son. That man passed the letter down to granddad. He said they never recovered the spoils of that heist, that they hadn’t been able to find the place. He also said that no one else ever did, either.” Devlin struggled for breath again. “The letter said they secretly buried the loot under a tree on the farm owned by Ezra Powell’s brother, Jonas.”
“What kind of loot was it? Any bank notes buried for that long underground would likely be nothing more, at this point, than moldy mulch.”
“Fool.” His father seemed to think better of the scathing tone. He shook his head then began again. “It wasn’t money as you and I know it. This was the 1880s. Twenty-dollar gold pieces,” Devlin answered. “Thousands of dollars in great-great-granddad’s day. But now? That loot’s worth millions. Millions! And we’re the only people on the face of this earth who know that it’s there.”
Millions in gold coins? That sounded like some kind of fantasy. It couldn’t be true.
But what if it were?
Terry let the silence play. He had noticed one thing about his father. The man tired easily. After a couple of minutes, he looked over at Devlin, who’d dozed off in his wheelchair.
Terry had some thinking to do. First, he’d investigate whether or not there had been a train heist in Texas about the time Devlin had mentioned. Then he’d look into the current value of twenty-dollar gold pieces from the nineteenth century.
After that, he’d decide what, if anything, he would do about this information.
Chapter Four
Michaela worked the early shift on Saturday, and that was a good thing. Well, maybe not so good in that she’d returned home after the party the night before well past midnight and had to set her alarm to get up early.
But good in that she’d done something that, in the light of day, felt just a little bit scary. She’d accepted a date with Lewis and Randy—they’d made it clear it was both of them—and that date was for tonight.
Michaela decided the moment she awoke that the best way to go forward was to set aside the reality of an impending date for the moment. There was work to be done. She got up early, grumbling at her alarm, and was at the roadhouse by ten-fifteen to prepare for the eleven o’clock opening. Her car’s starter had seemed to be rebellious, but it had finally caught, and because she lived so close, she wasn’t late. Bailey arrived at the same time, for the exact same shift. Being summer, there were a handful of students on the payroll. Some were back for their second or third summer, which meant they needed little supervision. One of them would show up at eleven, so if they did get a surprise lunch run, with three of them serving, they wouldn’t be run off their feet.
Michaela recalled thinking, when she first started to work at Angel’s Roadho
use half a year ago, that it was an amazing thing she’d been hired, since her last name hadn’t been Benedict. She’d been certain just from observing them that all these wonderful women must have known and loved each other all their lives. She hadn’t known what the connection was with Angela Stone, who owned the place, but the roadhouse had felt as if it were a family business.
What a shock to learn that hadn’t been the case at all. And how pleased she’d been at the ease with which she’d slipped into good, solid friendships with each of her coworkers.
Michaela had some good friends in Austin—or believed she had. She’d only heard from one of them, Julie Rogers, since she’d come home to take care of her dad and decided to stay.
Somehow, Michaela had the sense that if she had to move back to Austin, she’d hear from these women on a regular basis and for the rest of her life.
Patrick Riley, the man in charge of all things yummy in the kitchen, had arrived ahead of them. The scent of something very mouthwatering wafted into the dining room. She inhaled deeply and her mind told her chili.
“Good party last night,” Bailey said. She, like Michaela, had just inspected her section, pulling chairs off the tables in the first step toward opening.
“It was!” She smiled at Bailey. “I had a really good time. I think everyone who attended did.”
“Looked like you were having a very good time—after those two new Montanan cousins sat down with you between them.” Bailey raised her eyebrows twice in rapid succession and followed that up with an overplayed wink and an elbow nudge. All those gestures were delivered with the glee of a cartoon character.
Michaela laughed, because she knew Bailey’s teasing really was good-natured.
“I’m hoping the fact that y’all had your heads together that way meant…. Well…” Bailey turned to her and huffed out a breath. “I’ve noticed, as have others, that you were giving those two a wide berth since they arrived. I was wondering if you’ve decided to try them on for a bit. Or did they just finally push their way in?”
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