Читать книгу The Cowgirl in Question - B.J. Daniels - Страница 11

Eleven years later

A storm blew in the day Rourke McCall got out of prison.

At the Longhorn Café, Cassidy Miller brushed back an errant strand of hair from her face and tried to pretend it was just another day as she picked up the coffeepot and headed for the table in the corner now full of ranch hands from the VanHorn spread.

On the way, she made the mistake of looking out the window. The sky outside had turned dark and ominous, dust devils swirled in the street, the first drops of rain pelted the front window and streaked the glass.

Past the rain and dust, someone else was also staring out at the storm—and her. Blaze Logan stood at the window of the Antelope Development Corporation. Their eyes met across Main Street and Cassidy felt a chill rattle through her.

“I’ll take a little more of that coffee, Cass,” called Dub Morgan, the VanHorn Ranch foreman, from the table she’d been heading toward.

Cassidy dragged her gaze away from the window and Blaze, not realizing that she’d stopped walking, and took the pot of coffee over to the tableful of cowboys. But as she filled their coffee cups and joked and smiled, her mind was miles away in Deer Lodge, Montana, where Rourke McCall, the wildest of the McCall boys, would be walking out the gate of the Montana State Prison this morning.

None of her patrons had mentioned it, but everyone in town knew. That was one reason the café was packed this morning and she’d had to call in an extra waitress.

Everyone was wondering if Rourke would come back to town and make good on the threat he’d made against her eleven years ago.

As he was being dragged out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he had called back to Cassidy, “I know you framed me. I’m going to get out and, when I do, I’ll be back for you.”

The judge had given him twenty-five years but Rourke was walking out a free man after only eleven. For most of those years, Rourke had worked the prison’s cattle ranch. Ironic since he’d hated working the family ranch and done everything possible to avoid it in all the years Cassidy had known him.

Good behavior, the warden had told the parole board. “Rourke McCall is a changed man. A reformed man. He is no longer a threat to society.”

No, he was only a threat to Cassidy Miller—no matter what he told the parole board or the warden.

“You okay, honey?” Ellie whispered, slowing as she passed Cassidy with an armload of plates headed for the VanHorn Ranch table.

Cassie nodded and glanced outside again, trying to imagine what it would be like seeing Rourke after all these years. Maybe he really was a changed man. Maybe he was reformed. Maybe he’d forgotten his threat against her.

But even as she thought it, she knew better. Rourke McCall might have fooled the prison officials but he couldn’t fool her.

The bell dinged indicating that an order was up. She moved toward the kitchen, determined to keep up a good front. She didn’t want anyone to know she’d been dreading this day for eleven years. Or the real reason why.

ACROSS THE STREET, Blaze Logan stood at the window watching the crowd at the Longhorn Café and smiling to herself. How appropriate that one hell of a thunderstorm would hit town just before Rourke McCall did.

She could sense the change in the air, smell the rain and expectation, hear the hush that had fallen over Antelope Flats, Montana. She loved nothing better than a good knock-down-drag-out fight. She’d had that and more the night Forrest Danvers was murdered and she was ready for the hell Rourke was going to cause when he got back.

As she caught another glimpse of Cassidy Miller through the café window across the street, her smile broadened. Cassidy. The good girl and a thorn in Blaze’s side since they were kids. Her cousin Cassidy had always been the perfect one. She now owned her own business, was president of the chamber of commerce, helped with every damned fund-raiser in town. No one ever had a bad word to say about her.

“Why can’t you be more like Cassidy,” her father had said from as far back as Blaze could remember.

She and Cassidy competed against each other in regional rodeos and Cassidy always won, and Blaze always threw a fit when she lost.

“You could learn something about being a good sport from your cousin,” her father would say.

But Blaze knew she should have won, had to win, was expected to win because her great-grandmother had been a trick rider with a Wild West show. Her cousin Cassidy’s great-grandmother was nobody.

“Even when Cassidy loses, she’s gracious,” her father would say.

Yeah, well that was because Cassidy seldom lost at anything.

Except when it came to Rourke McCall. Blaze had felt not even a twinge of guilt when Cassidy had confessed back in junior high that her dream was to someday marry Rourke McCall.

Blaze had never paid much attention to Rourke before that. He was tall, sandy-blond with blue eyes and a temper. At the time, he’d been a teenager, moody and full of himself. She could tell by looking at him even back then that he would never amount to anything.

But Blaze was already developing and boys were noticing. Cassidy, on the other hand, was two years younger, and a tomboy.

Getting Rourke to notice her had been a piece of cake for Blaze, who hadn’t really liked him but wanted to win just once. As it turned out, she’d not only beaten Cassidy, she’d ruined any chance her cousin ever had of ending up with Rourke McCall.

Blaze stared across the street, catching glimpses of Cassidy as she worked. Blaze still resented her. Probably because Blaze’s father still threw Cassidy up to her.

The worst fight she’d ever had with her father was over Cassidy.

“My whole life you’ve compared me to Cassidy,” she’d cried. “I’m sick of it. I’m nothing like her and I’m glad.”

Her father had nodded ruefully. “No, you’re right, you’re nothing like your cousin. She’s doing something with her life. She doesn’t just live off her parents.”

“Her daddy ran off and her mother is poor,” Blaze had retorted. “We’re not.”

“I’m not,” John Logan had snapped. “You, my daughter, are going to get a job and start growing up.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m cutting you off. No more money. You’re on your own.”

Blaze hadn’t been able to believe her ears. She’d always been her father’s favorite between her and her stepbrother, Gavin Shaw. How could her father turn against her like this? “You’re doing this because of Cassidy.”

He just shook his head. “You’ve always put your cousin Cassidy down, but it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little more like her.”

Well, Blaze thought wryly, she was damned glad she wasn’t Cassidy now. She wouldn’t want to be in that woman’s shoes for anything. Not today. Not with Rourke getting out of prison and coming back to even the score.

No way was Rourke going to let Cassidy Miller get away with what she’d done to him. Blaze was almost rubbing her hands together in her excitement. Antelope Flats had been too dull for too long, but Rourke McCall was about to change all of that.

Unless he was the one who’d changed. Unless all that good behavior that got him released early wasn’t an act. The thought ruined her day. What if he didn’t come back? What if he really had put the past to rest?

No, not the Rourke McCall she’d known, she assured herself. He’d just sold all of that bull to the warden so he could get out early. Good behavior and Rourke McCall…the two had never gone together, she thought smiling again.

Poor Cassidy Miller. Blaze couldn’t wait. Finally her cousin was going to get her comeuppance. It couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

ROURKE MCCALL WALKED out of Montana State Prison, stopped and, looking up at the wide blue sky, took a deep breath of freedom.

Eleven years. Eleven years of his life.

He heard his little brother get out of the pickup and come toward him. Lowering his gaze from the sky, he took Brandon’s outstretched hand and shook it firmly, smiling at the youngest of his brothers. Of his family, only Brandon and their little sister Dusty had kept in touch with him on a regular basis, and Dusty only on the Q.T. since their father had forbidden it.

“You have any plans?” Brandon asked as he led the way to one of the ranch pickups.

Rourke stopped to study the graphic painted on the pickup door. The words Sundown Ranch were printed over the top of the longhorn in a stylized print. New. He liked the old, more simple script that had been on the trucks since his grandfather’s time much better, but he was sure that a lot of things had changed in the eleven years he’d been gone.

“I mean, if you don’t have any plans, I have a few things going I could let you in on,” Brandon said as he opened the driver’s side door and climbed behind the wheel.

Rourke got in the passenger side. Yeah, a lot of things had changed. He tried to remember if he’d ever ridden with Brandon, who was only nineteen when Rourke had gone to prison. Rourke had only been twenty-two himself. “What kind of things?”

Brandon smiled. “Moneymaking.”

Rourke shook his head and leaned back against the seat, adjusting his cowboy hat. “Thanks, but I have plans.”

He could feel Brandon’s eyes on him. Unlike the warden, Brandon wouldn’t even attempt to give him a pep talk about letting go of the past, starting over, looking at this as a new beginning, forgetting he’d been framed for murder and had just spent eleven years of his life in prison because of it.

He closed his eyes and let the sound of the tires on the pavement lull him. He was free. Finally. Free to do what he’d promised himself he would do all those nights in prison.

He didn’t wake up until the pickup left the highway and bumped onto the dirt road. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know exactly where they were. He’d been down this road enough times to remember every hill and turn and bump. How many times at night in his prison cell had he lain awake thinking about the day he would drive down this road again?

He opened his eyes and rolled down his window, realizing he’d forgotten the exact smell of the sage, the sun-baked earth and summer-dried grasses, the scent of the cool pines and the creek.

He’d forgotten too how much he loved this land. The red rock bluffs, the silken green of the ponderosa trees etched against the summer blue of the sky or the deep gold of the grass, tops heavy, bobbing in the breeze.

McCall Country. Miles and miles dotted with cattle that had been driven up here from Texas by his great-great-grandfather when this country was foreign and dangerous and full of promise.

His memory hadn’t done it justice. White puffs of clouds scudded across a canvas of endless deep blue as the pickup raced along the muddy dirt road, still wet from an earlier rain. Chokecherries, dark as blood, bent the limbs of the bushes along the creek as the summer golden grasses undulated in waves over the rolling hills. And above a narrow draw, turkey buzzards circled, black wings flapping slowly over something dead below.

Rourke fought that old feeling of awe and ownership. He stared out, feeling the generations of men before him who had fought for this land, feeling its pull, its allure and the price of that enticement. No matter how he felt about his old man or how Asa McCall felt about him, Rourke was a McCall and always would be.

The pickup dropped over a rise and he saw it. The Sundown Ranch house. It seemed a mirage shimmering in the afternoon sunlight.

Rourke caught his breath, surprised by the ache in his chest, the knot in his throat. When he’d left here in handcuffs, he hadn’t looked back. Afraid he would never see it again if he did.

“We had a hell of thunderstorm here this morning,” Brandon said.

Rourke could feel nervous waves of energy coming off his brother as they neared the ranch. No doubt Brandon was worried about the reception the two of them would get. Rourke doubted Brandon had told their father that he was picking up the first McCall to ever go to prison.

Brandon slowed the truck, pulled up in the yard and parked. Rourke sat for a moment after the engine died just looking at the ranch house, reliving memories, the good mixed with the bad, all treasured now.

The house seemed larger than even he remembered it: the logs more golden, the tan rock fireplace chimney towering above the roofline more majestic, the porch stretching across the entire front of the building, endless.

“I’ve got some business in town, but I’ll catch you later,” Brandon said, obviously anxious to get going. “Your pickup’s over there. Still runs good. I took care of it for you. Left the keys in the ignition.”

“Thanks,” Rourke said, looking over at his little brother, and extended his hand. “I appreciate everything you’ve done and thanks for coming up to get me.”

“No problem,” Brandon said, shaking his hand, then looking at his watch, fiddling with the band.

Rourke studied his little brother. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?”

“No,” Brandon said too quickly. “I’m fine.”

“These investments you were talking about, they’re legal, right?” Rourke asked, seeing something in his brother that worried him.

Brandon fiddled with the gearshift, seeming to avoid his gaze. “Hey, it isn’t like that, okay?”

It was something, Rourke thought. Something that equaled trouble, sure as hell. “If you need help for any reason—”

“Stop acting like a big brother,” Brandon said, then softened his words. “I’m okay. I can take care of myself.”

Rourke climbed out of the truck and Brandon took off in a cloud of dust. He watched him leave, wondering how deep Brandon was in. And to whom.

As the sound of the ranch pickup engine died off in the distance, Rourke heard the front door of the house open, heard the solid thump of boot soles on the pine floorboards and knew before he turned that it would be his father.

Asa McCall had always been a big man, tall and broad and muscular. He’d also always been a hard man, mule stubborn, the undisputed head of the McCall clan, his word the last one.

The years hadn’t changed him much that Rourke could see. He was still large, rawboned, still looked strong even at sixty-eight. The hair at his temples was no longer blond but gray, the lines around his eyes a little deeper, the sun-weathered face still granite hard and unforgiving.

They stared at each other as Rourke slung his duffel over one shoulder.

“So they let you out,” Asa McCall said, his deep voice carrying across the wide porch.

Rourke said nothing. There was nothing to say. He’d told the old man he was innocent eleven years ago and hadn’t been believed. Not Rourke McCall, the wildest McCall.

“Don’t worry, I’m not staying,” Rourke said. “I just came by to pick up my things.”

Asa McCall nodded. Neither moved for a few moments, then Rourke mounted the steps and walked past his father and into the ranch house without a word or a look, torn between anger and regret.

As he stepped through the front door, he saw that nothing had changed from the Native American rugs on the hardwood floors to the western furnishings and huge rock fireplace.

He turned at a sound and was struck by the sight of a pretty young woman coming out of the kitchen. She stopped, her eyes widening. A huge smile lit her face as she came running at him, throwing herself into his arms.

“Rourke,” she cried. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back.”

He stepped away to hold her at arm’s length to study his little sister. “Dusty? I can’t believe it.”

She’d been six when he’d left, a kid. Now she was a woman, although it was pretty well hidden. She wore boys’ jeans, a shapeless western shirt and boots. Her long blond hair was woven in a single braid down her back and a straw cowboy hat hung from a string around her neck. She wore no makeup.

“Dusty?”

Neither had heard the front door open. They both turned to find their father filling the doorway.

“We got fencing to see to,” Asa said, and turned, letting the door slam behind him.

Rourke listened to his father’s boots pound across the porch. “You best get going. We can visit later. I’ll let you know where I’m staying in town.”

“You’re not staying here?” Dusty cried.

Rourke gave her a look.

“Daddy is so impossible,” she said, sounding like the teenager she was. “I swear he gets more stubborn every day.”

Rourke could believe that. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Cash lives in town. You know he’s still the sheriff?”

Rourke nodded.

“J.T. is running the ranch now, but Daddy and I help. Brandon is hardly ever around. J.T. is probably still out riding fence this morning. Did Brandon leave?”

“He said he had business in town,” Rourke told his sister.

She nodded and frowned. “I hate to think what kind of business. Daddy says he’s headed for trouble and I’m afraid he might be right.”

Headed for trouble. That’s what Asa used to say about him, Rourke thought.

“I’m so glad you’re finally home,” Dusty said, and stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss on the cheek before closing the front door behind her.

He watched Dusty join their father out in the yard, watched her walk past the old man. Rourke had to smile, recognizing the familiar anger and stubbornness in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head. The old man shook his own head as she sashayed past him, giving him the silent treatment just as she’d done to them all when she was mad as a child.

When Asa finally followed after her, he looked older, almost sad, as if another defiant kid would be the death of him.

Rourke’s smile faded as he watched his father follow Dusty to one of the ranch pickups. He stayed there at the window until they’d driven away, then he turned and climbed the wide staircase at the center of the room. At the top, the second floor branched out in two wings. Rourke walked down the wood-floored hallway to his old room at the end of the west corridor. He tried the door, wondering if his stuff had been moved out, the room used for something else.

But as the door swung in, he saw that his room was exactly the same as it had been when he’d left eleven years before. He expected the room to smell musty, at least be covered in dust. But neither was the case. Asa must have had the housekeeper clean it each week. What the hell?

He dropped his duffel on the log-framed bed and looked around, spotting the small straw cowboy hat he’d worn the day he’d won his first rodeo event at the age of seven. His first real chaps, a birthday present for his first cattle drive at the age of nine. His first baseball glove. All gifts from his father, placed on the high shelf Asa had built to store memories.

“In the end, that’s what life comes down to,” his father had told him the day he’d built the shelf. “Memories. Good and bad, they’re all you will ever really own, they’re all that are uniquely yours and ultimately all you can take with you.”

“You think Mom took memories of us to heaven with her?” Rourke had asked, looking up at his father.

Asa’s weathered face had crinkled into a smile, tears in his blue eyes. “She could never forget her kids,” he said without hesitation. “Never.”

“Or you, Dad. I’ll bet she remembers you.” It was the one time he’d ever seen his father cry, and only for those few moments before Asa could get turned and hightail it out to the barn.

Rourke walked through the bedroom, past the sitting room, to open the patio doors that led to the small balcony off the back. Stepping out, he gulped the afternoon air, the familiarity of it only making the lump in his throat harder to swallow.

As he looked out across the ranch, he spotted his brother J.T. riding in. Rourke watched him until J.T. disappeared behind one of the red-roofed barns, then he turned and went back inside.

Too many memories. Too many regrets.

He looked up again at the high shelf and all his trophies from first grade through high school for every damned thing from best stick drawing to debate, basketball to bull riding, baseball to target practice. And not a lick of dust on any of them.

He shook his head, not understanding himself any better than he did his father. He’d been wild from the time he could walk, bucking authority, getting in trouble, but somehow he’d managed to excel in spite of it. He got good grades without trying. Athletics came easy as well. In fact, he thought, studying the trophies on the shelf, maybe that was the problem. Everything had always come too easily.

He glanced around the room suddenly wondering why he’d come back here. Not to get his things. He hadn’t left anything here he needed. His grandfather had left all of them money, money Rourke had never touched. He could buy anything he needed for this new life the warden had tried to sell him on. He didn’t even need his old pickup. Hell, it was fifteen years old.

But he couldn’t leave without taking something. He went to the chest of drawers, opened several and took out jeans, underwear, socks, a couple of once-favorite T-shirts he knew he would never wear again and stuffed them into the duffel bag, zipping it closed.

Then he picked up the duffel bag and started to leave the room. His throat tightened again as he turned and spotted the faded photograph stuck in the edge of the mirror over the bureau.

It was a snapshot of Blaze and Cassidy.

He dropped the duffel bag on the bed and walked to the mirror. Blaze with her mass of long, curly fire-engine red hair and lush body standing next to her cousin at the rodeo grounds. Blaze nineteen and full of herself, he thought with a smile.

His gaze shifted to Cassidy and the smile evaporated. Cassidy looked plain next to Blaze with her brown hair and big brown eyes peering out of the shadow of her cowboy hat. Blaze was smiling at the camera, her hat pushed back. She was smiling at him behind the camera, flirting, being Blaze.

But Cassidy was leaning back against the fence, head angled down, peering out at the camera and him from under the brim of the hat, not smiling. Not even close. Her brown eyes were narrowed in an expression he hadn’t even noticed. Probably because he’d only had eyes for Blaze.

Now, though, he recognized the expression. Anger. Cassidy Miller had been furious with him.

He swore and plucked the picture from the edge of the mirror, remembering when he’d taken it. Only a week before Forrest Danvers’s murder.

Stuffing the photo into the duffel along with the clothes, he zipped it closed again and walked out of the room as he’d done eleven years ago, slamming the door behind him. He’d waited eleven years for this day. He couldn’t wait to see Cassidy.