Читать книгу Texas Born - Diana Palmer - Страница 8
ОглавлениеMichelle felt the vibration of the vehicle before she smelled the dust that came up around it. Her back was to the direction it was coming from. Desperation had blinded her to the hope of better days. She was sick of life. Sick of everything.
She put her hands on her knees, brought her elbows in, closed her eyes, and waited for the collision. It would probably hurt. Hopefully, it would be quick....
There was a squealing of tires and a metallic jerk. She didn’t feel the impact. Was she dead?
Long, muscular legs in faded blue denim came into view above big black hand-tooled leather boots.
“Would you care to explain what the hell you’re doing sitting in the middle of a road?” a deep, angry voice demanded.
She looked up into chilling liquid black eyes and grimaced. “Trying to get hit by a car?”
“I drive a truck,” he pointed out.
“Trying to get hit by a truck,” she amended in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Care to elaborate?”
She shrugged. “My stepmother will probably beat me when she gets back home because I ruined her sale.”
He frowned. “What sale?”
“My father died three weeks ago,” she said heavily. She figured he didn’t know, because she hadn’t seen any signs of life at the house down the road until she’d watched his truck go by just recently. “She had all his things taken to the landfill because I insisted on a real funeral, not a cremation, and now she’s trying to sell his stamp collection. It’s all I have left of him. I ruined the sale. The man left. She hit me....”
He turned his head. It was the first time he’d noticed the side of her face that looked almost blistered. His eyes narrowed. “Get in the truck.”
She stared at him. “I’m all dusty.”
“It’s a dusty truck. It won’t matter.”
She got to her feet. “Are you abducting me?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “Okay.” She glanced at him ruefully. “If you don’t mind, I’d really like to go to Mars. Since I’m being abducted, I mean.”
He managed a rough laugh.
She went around to the passenger side. He opened the door for her.
“You’re Mr. Brandon,” she said when he climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
“Yes.”
She drew in a breath. “I’m Michelle.”
“Michelle.” He chuckled. “There was a song with that name. My father loved it. One of the lines was ‘Michelle, ma belle.’” He glanced at her. “Do you speak French?”
“A little,” she said. “I have it second period. It means something like ‘my beauty.’” She laughed. “And that has nothing to do with me, I’m afraid. I’m just plain.”
He glanced at her with raised eyebrows. Was she serious? She was gorgeous. Young, and untried, but her creamy complexion was without a blemish. She was nicely shaped and her hair was a pale blond. Those soft gray eyes reminded him of a fog in August...
He directed his eyes to the road. She was just a child, what was he thinking? “Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Do you speak French?” she asked, curious.
He nodded. “French, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Russian, German and a handful of Middle Eastern dialects.”
“Really?” She was fascinated. “Did you work as a translator or something?”
He pursed his lips. “From time to time,” he said, and then laughed to himself.
“Cool.”
He started the truck and drove down the road to the house he owned. It wasn’t far, just about a half mile. It was a ranch house, set back off the road. There were oceans of flowers blooming around it in the summer, planted by the previous owner, Mrs. Eller, who had died. Of course, it was still just February, and very cold. There were no flowers here now.
“Mrs. Eller loved flowers.”
“Excuse me?”
“She lived here all her life,” she told him, smiling as they drove up to the front porch. “Her husband worked as a deputy sheriff. They had a son in the military, but he was killed overseas. Her husband died soon afterward. She planted so many flowers that you could never even see the house. I used to come over and visit her when I was little, with my grandfather.”
“Your people are from here?”
“Oh, yes. For three generations. Daddy went to medical school in Georgia and then he set up a practice in cardiology in San Antonio. We lived there. But I spent every summer here with my grandparents while they were alive. Daddy kept the place up, after, and it was like a vacation home while Mama was alive.” She swallowed. That loss had been harsh. “We still had everything, even the furniture, when Daddy decided to move us down here and take early retirement. She hated it from the first time she saw it.” Her face hardened. “She’s selling it. My stepmother, I mean. She’s already talked about it.”
He drew in a breath. He knew he was going to regret this. He got out, opened the passenger door and waited for her to get out. He led the way into the house, seated her in the kitchen and pulled out a pitcher of iced tea. When he had it in glasses, he sat down at the table with her.
“Go ahead,” he invited. “Get it off your chest.”
“It’s not your problem...”
“You involved me in an attempted suicide,” he said with a droll look. “That makes it my problem.”
She grimaced. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Brandon....”
“Gabriel.”
She hesitated.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not that old,” he pointed out.
She managed a shy smile. “Okay.”
He cocked his head. “Say it,” he said, and his liquid black eyes stared unblinking into hers.
She felt her heart drop into her shoes. She swallowed down a hot wave of delight and hoped it didn’t show. “Ga...Gabriel,” she obliged.
His face seemed to soften. Just a little. He smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. “That’s better.”
She flushed. “I’m not...comfortable with men,” she blurted out.
His eyes narrowed on her face, her averted eyes. “Does your stepmother have a boyfriend?”
She swallowed, hard. The glass in her hand trembled.
He took the glass from her and put it on the table. “Tell me.”
It all poured out. Finding Roberta in Bert’s arms just after the funeral, finding them on the couch together that day, the way Bert looked and her and tried to touch her, the visit from her minister...
“And I thought my life was complicated,” he said heavily. He shook his head. “I’d forgotten what it was like to be young and at the mercy of older people.”
She studied him quietly. The expression on his face was...odd.
“You know,” she said softly. “You understand.”
“I had a stepfather,” he said through his teeth. “He was always after my sister. She was very pretty, almost fourteen. I was a few years older, and I was bigger than he was. Our mother loved him, God knew why. We’d moved back to Texas because the international company he worked for promoted him and he had to go to Dallas for the job. One day I heard my sister scream. I went into her room, and there he was. He’d tried to...” He stopped. His face was like stone. “My mother had to get a neighbor to pull me off him. After that, after she knew what had been going on, she still defended him. I was arrested, but the public defender got an earful. He spoke to my sister. My stepfather was arrested, charged, tried. My mother stood by him, the whole time. My sister was victimized by the defense attorney, after what she’d already suffered at our stepfather’s hands. She was so traumatized by the experience that she doesn’t even date.”
She winced. One small hand went shyly to cover his clenched fist on the table. “I’m so sorry.”
He seemed to mentally shake himself, as if he’d been locked into the past. He met her soft, concerned gaze. His big hand turned, curled around hers. “I’ve never spoken of it, until now.”
“Maybe sometimes it’s good to share problems. Dark memories aren’t so bad when you force them into the light.”
“Seventeen going on thirty?” he mused, smiling at her. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how he knew her age.
She smiled. “There are always people who are in worse shape than you are. My friend Billy has an alcoholic father who beats him and his mother. The police are over there all the time, but his mother will never press charges. Sheriff Carson says the next time, he’s going to jail, even if he has to press charges himself.”
“Good for the sheriff.”
“What happened, after the trial?” she prodded gently.
He curled his fingers around Michelle’s, as if he enjoyed their soft comfort. She might have been fascinated to know that he’d never shared these memories with any other woman, and that, as a rule, he hated having people touch him.
“He went to jail for child abuse,” he said. “My mother was there every visiting day.”
“No, what happened to you and your sister?”
“My mother refused to have us in the house with her. We were going to be placed in foster homes. The public defender had a maiden aunt, childless, who was suicidal. Her problems weren’t so terrible, but she tended to depression and she let them take her almost over the edge. So he thought we might be able to help each other. We went to live with Aunt Maude.” He chuckled. “She was not what you think of as anybody’s maiden aunt. She drove a Jaguar, smoked like a furnace, could drink any grown man under the table, loved bingo parties and cooked like a gourmet. Oh, and she spoke about twenty languages. In her youth, she was in the army and mustered out as a sergeant.”
“Wow,” she exclaimed. “She must have been fascinating to live with.”
“She was. And she was rich. She spoiled us rotten. She got my sister into therapy, for a while at least, and me into the army right after I graduated.” He smiled. “She was nuts about Christmas. We had trees that bent at the ceiling, and the limbs groaned under all the decorations. She’d go out and invite every street person she could find over to eat with us.” His face sobered. “She said she’d seen foreign countries where the poor were treated better than they were here. Ironically, it was one of the same people she invited to Christmas dinner who stabbed her to death.”
She winced. “I’m so sorry!”
“Me, too. By that time, though, Sara and I were grown. I was in the...military,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the involuntary pause, “and Sara had her own apartment. Maude left everything she had to the two of us and her nephew. We tried to give our share back to him, as her only blood heir, but he just laughed and said he got to keep his aunt for years longer because of us. He went into private practice and made a fortune defending drug lords, so he didn’t really need it, he told us.”
“Defending drug lords.” She shook her head.
“We all do what we do,” he pointed out. “Besides, I’ve known at least one so-called drug lord who was better than some upright people.”
She just laughed.
He studied her small hand. “If things get too rough for you over there, let me know. I’ll manage something.”
“It’s only until graduation this spring,” she pointed out.
“In some situations, a few months can be a lifetime,” he said quietly.
She nodded.
“Friends help each other.”
She studied his face. “Are we? Friends, I mean?”
“We must be. I haven’t told anyone else about my stepfather.”
“You didn’t tell me the rest of it.”
His eyes went back to her hand resting in his. “He got out on good behavior six months after his conviction and decided to make my sister pay for testifying against him. She called 911. The police shot him.”
“Oh, my gosh.”
“My mother blamed both of us for it. She moved back to Canada, to Alberta, where we grew up.”
“Are you Canadian?” she asked curiously.
He smiled. “I’m actually Texas born. We moved to Canada to stay with my mother’s people when my father was in the military and stationed overseas. Sara was born in Calgary. We lived there until just after my mother married my stepfather.”
“Did you see your mother again, after that?” she asked gently.
He shook his head. “Our mother never spoke to us again. She died a few years back. Her attorney tracked me down and said she left her estate, what there was of it, to the cousins in Alberta.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Life is what it is. I had hoped she might one day realize what she’d done to my sister. She never did.”
“We can’t help who we love, or what it does to mess us up.”
He frowned. “You really are seventeen going on thirty.”
She laughed softly. “Maybe I’m an old soul.”
“Ah. Been reading philosophy, have we?”
“Yes.” She paused. “You haven’t mentioned your father.”
He smiled sadly. “He was in a paramilitary group overseas. He stepped on an antipersonnel mine.”
She didn’t know what a paramilitary group was, so she just nodded.
“He was from Dallas,” he continued. “He had a small ranch in Texas that he inherited from his grandfather. He and my mother met at the Calgary Stampede. He trained horses and he’d sold several to be used at the stampede. She had an uncle who owned a ranch in Alberta and also supplied livestock to the stampede.” He stared at her small hand in his. “Her people were French-Canadian. One of my grandmothers was a member of the Blackfoot Nation.”
“Wow!”
He smiled.
“Then, you’re an American citizen,” she said.
“Our parents did the whole citizenship process. In short, I now have both Canadian and American citizenship.”
“My dad loved this Canadian television show, Due South. He had the whole DVD collection. I liked the Mountie’s dog. He was a wolf.”
He laughed. “I’ve got the DVDs, too. I loved the show. It was hilarious.”
She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I have to go. If you aren’t going to run over me, I’ll have to fix supper in case she comes home to eat. It’s going to be gruesome. She’ll still be furious about the stamp collection.” Her face grew hard. “She won’t find it. I’ve got a hiding place she doesn’t know about.”
He smiled. “Devious.”
“Not normally. But she’s not selling Daddy’s stamps.”
He let go of her hand and got up from his chair. “If she hits you again, call 911.”
“She’d kill me for that.”
“Not likely.”
She sighed. “I guess I could, if I had to.”
“You mentioned your minister. Who is he?”
“Jake Blair. Why?”
His expression was deliberately blank.
“Do you know him? He’s a wonderful minister. Odd thing, my stepmother was intimidated by him.”
He hesitated, and seemed to be trying not to laugh. “Yes. I’ve heard of him.”
“He told her that his daughter was going to pick me up and bring me home from church every week. His daughter works for the Jacobsville police chief.”
“Cash Grier.”
She nodded. “He’s very nice.”
“Cash Grier?” he exclaimed. “Nice?”
“Oh, I know people talk about him, but he came to speak to my civics class once. He’s intelligent.”
“Very.”
He helped her back into the truck and drove her to her front door.
She hesitated before she got out, turning to him. “Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed. I’ve never actually tried to kill myself before.”
His liquid black eyes searched hers. “We all have days when we’re ridden by the ‘black dog.’”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
He chuckled. “Winston Churchill had periods of severe depression. He called it that.”
She frowned. “Winston Churchill...”
“There was this really big world war,” he said facetiously, with over-the-top enthusiasm, “and this country called England, and it had a leader during—”
“Oh, give me a break!” She burst out laughing.
He grinned at her. “Just checking.”
She shook her head. “I know who he was. I just had to put it into context is all. Thanks again.”
“Anytime.”
She got out and closed the door, noting with relief that Roberta hadn’t come home yet. She smiled and waved. He waved back. When he drove off, she noticed that he didn’t look back. Not at all.
* * *
She had supper ready when Roberta walked in the door. Her stepmother was still fuming.
“I’m not eating beef,” she said haughtily. “You know I hate it. And are those mashed potatoes? I’ll bet you crammed them with butter!”
“Yes, I did,” Michelle replied quietly, “because you always said you liked them that way.”
Roberta’s cheeks flushed. She shifted, as if the words, in that quiet voice, made her feel guilty.
In fact, they did. She was remembering her behavior with something close to shame. Her husband had only been dead three weeks. She’d tossed his belongings, refused to go to the funeral, made fun of her stepdaughter at every turn, even slapped her for messing up the sale of stamps which Alan had left to Michelle. And after all that, the child made her favorite food. Her behavior should be raising red flags, but her stepdaughter was, thankfully, too naive to notice it. Bert’s doing, she thought bitterly. All his fault.
“You don’t have to eat it,” Michelle said, turning away.
Roberta made a rough sound in her throat. “It’s all right,” she managed tautly. She sat down at the table. She glanced at Michelle, who was dipping a tea bag in a cup of steaming water. “Aren’t you eating?”
“I had soup.”
Roberta made inroads into the meat loaf and mashed potatoes. The girl had even made creamed peas, her favorite.
She started to put her fork down and noticed her hand trembling. She jerked it down onto the wood and pulled her hand back.
It was getting worse. She needed more and more. Bert was complaining about the expense. They’d had a fight. She’d gone storming up to his apartment in San Antonio to cry on his shoulder about her idiot stepdaughter and he’d started complaining when she dipped into his stash. But after all, he was the one who’d gotten her hooked in the first place.
It had taken more money than she’d realized to keep up, and Alan had finally figured out what she was doing. They’d argued. He’d asked her for a divorce, but she’d pleaded with him. She had no place to go. She knew Bert wouldn’t hear of her moving in with him. Her whole family was dead.
Alan had agreed, but the price of his agreement was that she had to move down to his hometown with him after he sold his very lucrative practice in San Antonio.
She’d thought he meant the move to be a temporary one. He was tired of the rat race. He wanted something quieter. But they’d only been in his old family homestead for a few days when he confessed that he’d been diagnosed with an inoperable cancer. He wanted to spend some time with his daughter before the end. He wanted to run a free clinic, to help people who had no money for doctors. He wanted his life to end on a positive note, in the place where he was born.
So here was Roberta, stuck after his death with a habit she could no longer afford and no way to break it. Stuck with Cinderella here, who knew about as much about life as she knew about men.
She glared at the girl. She’d really needed the money from those stamps. There was nothing left that she could liquidate for cash. She hadn’t taken all of Alan’s things to the landfill. She’d told Michelle that so she wouldn’t look for them. She’d gone to a consignment shop in San Antonio and sold the works, even his watch. It brought in a few hundred dollars. But she was going through money like water.
“What did you do with the stamps?” Roberta asked suddenly.
Michelle schooled her features to give away nothing, and she turned. “I hitched a ride into town and asked Cash Grier to keep them for me.”
Roberta sucked in her breath. Fear radiated from her. “Cash Grier?”
Michelle nodded. “I figured it was the safest place. I told him I was worried about someone stealing them while I was at school.”
Which meant she hadn’t told the man that Roberta had slapped her. Thank God. All she needed now was an assault charge. She had to be more careful. The girl was too stupid to recognize her symptoms. The police chief wouldn’t be. She didn’t want anyone from law enforcement on the place. But she didn’t even have the grace to blush when Michelle made the comment about someone possibly “stealing” her stamp collection.
She got up from the table. She was thirsty, but she knew it would be disastrous to pick up her cup of coffee. Not until she’d taken what she needed to steady her hands.
She paused on her way to the bathroom, with her back to Michelle. “I’m... I shouldn’t have slapped you,” she bit off.
She didn’t wait for a reply. She was furious with herself for that apology. Why should the kid’s feelings matter to her, anyway? She pushed away memories of how welcoming Michelle had been when she first started dating Alan. Michelle had wanted to impress her father’s new friend.
Well, that was ancient history now. She was broke and Alan had died, leaving her next to nothing. She picked up her purse from the side table and went into the bathroom with it.
Michelle cleaned off the table and put the dishes into the dishwasher. Roberta hadn’t come out of the bathroom even after she’d done all that, so she went to her room.
* * *
Michelle had been surprised by the almost-apology. But once she thought about it, she realized that Roberta might think she was going to press charges. She was afraid of her stepmother. She had violent mood swings and she’d threatened to hit Michelle several times.
It was odd, because when she’d first married Dr. Alan Godfrey, Michelle had liked her. She’d been fun to be around. But she had a roving eye. She liked men. If they went to a restaurant, someone always struck up a conversation with Roberta, who was exquisitely groomed and dressed and had excellent manners. Roberta enjoyed masculine attention, without being either coarse or forward.
Then, several months ago, everything had changed. Roberta had started going out at night alone. She told her husband that she’d joined an exercise club at a friend’s house, a private one. They did aerobics and Pilates and things like that. Just women.
But soon afterward, Roberta became more careless about her appearance. Her manners slipped, badly. She complained about everything. Alan wasn’t giving her enough spending money. The house needed cleaning, why wasn’t Michelle doing more when she wasn’t in school? She wasn’t doing any more cooking, she didn’t like it, Michelle would have to take over for her. And on it went. Alan had been devastated by the change. So had Michelle, who had to bear the brunt of most of Roberta’s fury.
“Some women have mood swings as they get older,” Alan had confided to his daughter, but there was something odd in his tone of voice. “But you mustn’t say anything about it to her. She doesn’t like thinking she’s getting on in years. All right?”
“All right, Daddy,” she’d agreed, with a big smile.
He’d hugged her close. “That’s my girl.”
* * *
Roberta had gone away for a few weeks after that. Then, not too long after her return, they’d moved to Comanche Wells, into the house where Michelle had spent so many happy weeks with her grandparents every summer.
The elderly couple had died in a wreck only a few years after Michelle’s mother had died of a stroke. It had been a blow. Her father had gone through terrible grief. But then, so had Michelle.
Despite the double tragedy, Comanche Wells and this house seemed far more like home than San Antonio ever had, because it was so small that Michelle knew almost every family who lived in it. She knew people in Jacobsville, too, of course, but it was much larger. Comanche Wells was tiny by comparison.
Michelle loved the farm animals that her grandparents had kept. They always had dogs and cats and chickens for her to play with. But by the time Alan moved his family down here, there was only the small herd of beef cattle. Now the herd had been sold and was going to a local rancher who was going to truck the steers over to his own ranch.
Her door opened suddenly. Roberta looked wild-eyed. “I’m going back up to San Antonio for the night. I have to see Bert.”
“All...” She had started to say “all right,” but the door slammed. Roberta went straight out to her car, revved it up and scattered gravel on the way to the road.
It was odd behavior, even for her.
Michelle felt a little better than she had. At least she and Roberta might be able to manage each other’s company until May, when graduation rolled around.
But Gabriel had helped her cope with what she thought was unbearable. She smiled, remembering his kindness, remembering the strong, warm clasp of his fingers. Her heart sailed at the memory. She’d almost never held hands with a boy. Once, when she was twelve, at a school dance. But the boy had moved away, and she was far too shy and old-fashioned to appeal to most of the boys in her high school classes. There had been another boy, at high school, but that date had ended in near disaster.
Gabriel was no boy. He had to be at least in his mid-twenties. He would think of her as a child. She grimaced. Well, she was growing up. One day...who knew what might happen?
She opened her English textbook and got busy with her homework. Then she remembered with a start what she’d told Roberta, that lie about having Cash Grier keep the stamp book. What if Roberta asked him?
Her face flamed. It would be a disaster. She’d lied, and Roberta would know it. She’d tear the house apart looking for that collection...
Then Michelle calmed down. Roberta seemed afraid of Cash Grier. Most people were. She doubted very seriously that her stepmother would approach him. But just to cover her bases, she was going to stop by his office after school. She could do it by pretending to ask Carlie what time she would pick her up for church services. Then maybe she could work up the nerve to tell him what she’d done. She would go without lunch. That would give her just enough money to pay for a cab home from Jacobsville, which was only a few miles away. Good thing she already had her lunch money for the week, because Roberta had told her there wouldn’t be any more. She was going to have to do without lunch from now on, apparently. Or get a job. And good luck to that, without a car or a driver’s license.
She sighed. Her life was more complicated than it had ever been. But things might get better. Someday.
