“No, no, stop—” Fatima tried to grab Lucy away from Tate.
“No!” She ripped her arm out of her grasp. “No! I liked him when he had a cane and attitude about it. Not this pathetic lame little chicken shit strapped to a bed because he wants to die. This is ridiculous.”
Tate growled again.
“Shut up,” Lucy snapped. “Just shut up, Tate. You insulted your father, your brother, my fiancee. You’ve done enough damage.”
“Lucy, please--”
“No! Você não deve ver essa merda! Ele não pode nem tratá-lo como uma mulher, não importa a princesa que você é!”
“Por favor, ele está doente!”
“Não! Você está indo para casa! Não mais! I’m done with this. Don’t challenge me, irmã.”
“Speak fucking English!”
“Vai para o caralho.”
Lucy grabbed her elbow and tried to pull her out of the room. Fatima pulled back and looked at Tate, in the bed, boiling with rage. She studied him, and took a step closer. “I love you, Tate. You know I do. I don’t want you to leave this world, even if you’re not with me.”
His expression was neutral. “I don’t love you. Go away. Go home, back to New Jersey. I don’t ever want to see your face again.”
Tee stared at him. Taking a deep breath, she turned her back to him and left.
Chapter Twelve
Fatima skipped the stone across the wide stream.
The cattle were on the other side, and didn’t really care that she was there. That was about the whole story of her life at the moment. No one really cared if she was there or somewhere else. No one cared.
The sound of boots crushing gravel reached her ears, and by the weight of it, she guessed it was Reg. She was proven right a moment later when the stone he skipped went clear across the water to the other bank. Only Reg skipped stones like that. Neither Caldwell nor Tate could ever get the stone all the way across.
“You alright out here, princess?”
Honestly was the best policy at this point. “Not even remotely.”
“They’re moving him today. Up to the behavioral ward. He’s still out of control.”
“He’s never going to be the same Tate again. Not after that.”
Reg didn’t skip the stone this time. He just threw it, and hit the other bank. “I want to blame something—someone for this. I don’t even care who anymore. But who do you blame when your son tells you to fuck off? Who do you curse when he’s destroyed his own life?”
Her one-shouldered-shrug was just as confused as his words. “I wish I knew, Reg.” The stone made it almost to the other bank. “How’s Deidre?”
The smile in his voice came back. “Good. Her doctors are thrilled with her progress and prognosis. The super aggressive treatments seem to be doing everything they said they would. I just wish she didn’t know exactly what everything was. Cancer is cruel. The worst thing is an oncologist with cancer. At least she’s not fatalistic. The kids are motivating her, I think.”
“I hope!” Tee smiled. “She’s a strong woman, Reg. She wants to see all of them graduate.”
A few rocks went into the river when he kicked the ground. “Not fair. Not fair. She wanted to have another baby.”
“But if she hadn’t, you would have lost her. The kids would be motherless, and you’d be a widower.”
He took a cleansing breath. “You’re right. I still have her. We found and caught this in time. I just wanted to give her everything she ever wanted.”
“Love is a weird thing.”
He turned. “I’m sorry, Fatima. I truly am. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know why this is happening. He’s never been depressed. He’s struggled, but even then he was happy. Kind. The boy in that bed wasn’t really the son I know.”
“He wasn’t the man I knew either. I hope that they can stabilize him. Get him something that will keep him on the straight and narrow and sane.”
It was a comfortable silence as they skipped a few more stones across the river. Reg eventually shoved his hands back in his pockets. “Are you going back to New Jersey?”
“No point if Lucy and RJ are getting married in a few months. I keep trying to get into the local vet programs, but no one seems to want to talk to me about it or help me. I guess that’s the disadvantage of having a Yankee address and the hint of a foreign accent.”
“Well, New Jersey is a different kind of place, but I don’t reckon I’d out and out call it foreign.”
Fatima let out a laugh. “Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you for making me laugh.”
“My pleasure.”
The two of them turned at the same time, as the crunch of gravel reached Fatima again. This time, it was Caldwell scrambling down the bank. “Hey, dad. Mom needs you. The hospital is trying to get all the paperwork together to transfer Tate, and she’s having a bad day.”
Reg nodded, and took off up the bank to the horse he had tethered to a tree. Fatima and Caldwell watched him take off at a solid trot for the house, disappearing in the grass just a minute later. Caldwell turned, and just like his father, shoved his hands in his pockets. “You okay?”
“No.” Fatima turned back to the river. “Not even remotely.”
“Faking for everyone?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course. Who wants to deal with healthy little old me when your mother legitimately needs the help, and brother is now full-on psych patient who lives on morphine drips and thorazine.”
Just like his father, he picked up a stone and skipped it across the water, but without the skill or distance Reg had. “Maybe you should go back to your family, even if just for a few weeks. Being around everything you know might help. You’ve been through a lot, Fatima. Texas hasn’t been kind to you. Your sister, the horses, the Gibbonses relentless dicking about, finding my brother like that, and now his psychosis. I wish it were different.”
A hot anger rose up in her throat. “You are not going to pull this shit now, Caldwell. I am trying tofigure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life, how I want to handle this. and you’re not allowed to come out here and make sweet, idle chat. All cute and supportive.” She hurled a stone all the way to the edge of the water on the other bank.
“He’s my brother, and I have been a terrible person to him these last few months. I feel like we some how pushed him to this.”
“We?”
“We betrayed him.”
“We had sex, Caldwell, and I immediately made a decision to never talk about it, and never let it repeat. I chose your brother. I stuck with your brother. I helped him, I fought for him, I love him. And he betrayed me. He chose to turn his back on everything I tried to be to him. Twice! I wanted this with him. Now… I’m left here. Thinking about how much I love him, thinking about how I’m going to live my life, and… Here you come all sweet and innocent and throw me into another tizzy.”
He shook his head. “You know damn well there’s nothing innocent about my being here, Fatima.”
Spinning toward him, she kicked rocks at his shoes and shins. “Don’t you even try this! Don’t try it.”
Caldwell scrubbed a hand through his hair. “If Tate hadn’t seen you first, hadn’t walked up to you first, I would have. That was not just sex for me, Fatima. Even if it was dirty and rough and wrong. I wanted you when I first saw you and I wanted you then. I want you now. But Tate was happy with you. I hadn’t seen him so happy in years. You made him smile and laugh and step outside himself. And you… you were incredibly stubborn about sticking with him.
“Now he’s left both of us standing here holding the bag. You, because he’s broken your heart, and me because Ifeel like I failed him in so many ways. I know I haven’t. I did everything I ever could for him, always. Including walking away from the woman I wanted in my life. The one woman who had a primal pull on my soul. The woman with porcelain skin and dark chocolate eyes and a passion that burns like a fire under the clear, cold, starry sky, warming my very being.”
<
br /> “You don’t get to come out here and spout sonnets at me, Caldwell Verhoven!” Fatima was furious, confused and scared. “You can’t come out here and do this when we don’t know what’s going on!”
He sat on one of the logs that was dead and bleached from it’s time in the sun. “I know what’s going on, Fatima. He’s never going to be the Tate we knew before. We have to walk away from him for a while. We have to literally stay away and not show our faces so he can heal. Every time he sees us, he’s going to get riled again. Either one of us.”
She sat next to him on the log. “I know. But why are you out here spouting pseudo-Shakespeare at me?”
“Because I’m in love with you and if my brother wants to throw away what you were giving him, I’m trailing behind, picking it up.” He threw a leg over the improvised seat and put a hand on her cheek. “I know I shouldn’t be here. I know I should try to get to the hospital and attempt to help my brother get over whatever the hell is wrong with him now. But I can’t be. I only make it worse. Since he already hates me, and there’s probably no way that he’ll ever truly forgive me, I’m here to stake my claim on the other heart he has wrecked. The one I wanted I wanted to carry and comfort, the one I wanted to love. The one I already love, and will always love, no matter what.”
The details of Caldwell's face blurred through the tears that were stinging her eyes. How the hell had this happened? How was it she was in love with two brothers? It had taken everything in her to not pursue Caldwell after that one night, and pledge herself to Tate alone, instead. She knew how RJ’s mother felt—two men perfect for her and no way to choose. Only honor and respect made her realize that she couldn’t have both.
“Cald, you really came out here to do this?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I didn’t. I came out here to do this.”
In an instant, his lips were on hers. His kiss dominated her, and there was no resisting it. She couldn’t resist—but even more, she didn’t want to. She melted into him, his tongue sweeping across hers, tasting every last bit of her mouth, petting, stroking, sucking. He was a raw, possessive male, pulling her in close to his body, wrapping his arms around her, winding a hand into her hair. He tugged on it, lightly, and Fatima couldn’t help herself—she pressed in closer, tighter to him.
“This feels right,” she whispered against his lips. “But it shouldn’t.”
“Why shouldn’t it?” Caldwell asked. “You love me.”
“Your brother…”
Pressing his forehead to hers, he let out soft puff of breath. “My brother is not who he was. He won’t ever take either of us back. As much as I want to repair and fix all of this, of all of him, it’s not going to happen. And I’m selfish enough to not want to sacrifice my own happiness for his foolishness. You and I will never fall out of love with him. But he will never take us back. And I’m not going to walk away from you because it’s the right thing to do. The right thing to do would have been for Tate to not have stolen the pad of prescription sheets. The right thing would have been not taking all those pills, not trying to kill himself. If he can’t do the right thing, if he insists on doing everything wrong, so will I. You are my absolutely right wrong, Fatima. I won’t regret this moment, ever.”
She kissed him, with everything she had. She wouldn’t forgive herself for not seeing what Tate was going to do, but she also wouldn’t forgive him for doing it. Not until he was ready to forgive himself. Caldwell was here, was in the same place as her.
And she did love Caldwell.
Just as much as she loved Tate.
But this was the fork in the road. This was when she made the decision between the two brothers, the two different kinds of lives they would have. If she chose Tate, she would be haunted by him forever, no matter if he recovered or fought this his whole life. He might never accept her again.
If she chose Caldwell, they would raise Tate’s ire—loathing—but they would be together. They could have a life and walk out from under the shadow of Tate’s depression and psychosis.
In a sudden move, Caldwell stood and lifted her into his arms. She yelped and threw her arms around his neck. “What are you doing?!”
“I have a truck with blankets in the back. I’m not waiting to claim you.”
“Claim me? I’m not a head of cattle!”
He ran at the incline of the river bed and made it up the short bank in a few strides. “Then I’m not waiting to fuck you again, Tee. I need to be inside you. Right now.”
Fatima was momentarily shocked, and then realized she had made her decision. She dropped a kiss on his cheek. “Yes. Damn it, yes. You can have me. You Texas men know what you want and don’t mess around.”
“Oh, we mess around3” He laughed as he walked to the tailgate of the truck. “But only with the women who want us to.”
“I want you to.”
Chapter Thirteen
Fatima’s desire-filled statement made him even harder than he had been just seconds before
Jumping up into the bed of the truck, Caldwell yanked open the toolbox and pulled out all the bedding he had for the bed of the truck. She laughed, then covered her face with her hands. Glancing back he shrugged. “What?”
“You have a mobile bedroom? For your groupies?”
“Oh, woman, I have no groupies.”
“Says you.”
He tossed the memory foam mattress top on to the bed of the truck. “I don’t. Or not that I noticed, anyway.”
“You have your pick of the litter!”
Covering the mattress with a sheet, he threw a few blankets on the side.
“Pillows too!” Fatima was straight up laughing now.
Caldwell plucked off his shoes and dropped them in the toolbox, then walked back to the tailgate and offered her his hands. “I have gotten stuck one too many times sleeping in this truck, on the road, working the cattle, wandering the country. I am completely not interested in sleeping in uncomfortable, metal containers. I even have at tent I designed for the back of this if it’s really nasty out. Waterproof.”
Fatima took his hands and hopped on the back of the truck bed. She toed off her shoes as well, and he pitched them in the tool box with his own. He knelt on the mattress and pulled her down with him. “And I have never ever done this with any other woman. This was only for sleeping, until now.”
“I still feel like we’re doing something wrong.”
“No more talk of wrong. There’s been so much that’s been wrong. Let me see if I can convince you that this is right. That we’re right.”
“That’s a lot of convincing.”
He smiled as he slowly unbuttoned her shirt. “I have a lot of good reasons. Two of them are right here.” Slowly, Caldwell lowered his head to her beaded nipples.
He was right. There were a lot of good reasons...
They watched as the sky turned from flames of pink, red and blue—the color her mother had often called sky blue pink—to the dark velvet of night with pinpricks of a million suns and slashes of shooting stars.
Nestled up against Caldwell, she let out a sigh. They’d made love all day in the back of the truck and it was only with the sunset, they’d the realized the time.
“I think there may be a few angry people back at the ranch,” Fatima said.
“They won’t be angry, they just need time to adjust to this.”
“They aren’t the only ones.”
“You stayin’, Belle?”
“Where? Here? In Texas?” He nodded, and she smiled. “Only if you help me get in a damned vet program down here.”
Laughing, Caldwell pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Of course. We’ll get you in the best. Wait.” He lifted himself up on an elbow and stared at her. “Are you saying that you’re moving here? For good?”
“At least through college. Mom and dad are going to be upset that there’s two of us down here for the foreseeable future, but them I can handle.” She studied him in the semi dark of the moon. “We're goin
g to have to get you out of the ranch. I know you only kind of live there, but once Tate’s back, you need to be gone.”
“They're saying a month in the behavioral place, so we have time.”
“Caldwell, just move in with me. I have the apartment in Austin. You're there most of the time when you aren't on tour or playing, and it's just simpler to get you out.”
“You Jersey girls move fast.”
She heard the teasing grin in his words. “Sometimes we do. But is this really fast? We've known each other for plenty of time.”
“Belle, if I get to share the space with you, anywhere is home.”
Fatima shook her finger at him. “Sonnet.”
Caldwell laughed, then sobered a bit. “Think he'll ever forgive me?”
“Forgive us.” Fatima said. “You weren't masturbating back here. I've been with you the whole time. And I don't know. I'd like to think someday, yes. But I made my choice once and he flung it in my face twice. So there's no going back at this point, no matter what.”
“Fool me once?”
Fatima shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Dad's gonna need help with Big Butte once Tate comes home. He was the organizer in the house. Dad can handle the kids, but…”
“Well, why don't we ask Marcy? She's graduating from Villanova in a few weeks. She'd probably be happy to take on a job like Big Butte.”
“She's gonna have to deal with Tate.”
Fatima leaned up on her elbow. “Have you met Marcia? Are you kidding? The girl is the pretty version of Miss Trunchbull. She pulls no punches and brokers no shit. Even from me and Lucy.”
Princess of the Plains Page 10