Читать книгу Reclaiming the Cowboy - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIT SHOULD HAVE been a peaceful Monday afternoon at the ranch. Instead, having counted every single second in the week since his meeting with Dallas, Mitch was going crazy.
On TV it took about thirty seconds to get a fingerprint match. Even factoring in reality, and the need to do this through back channels, what could possibly be taking eight whole days?
And then, just as Mitch was winding up the training session with Rusty, one of Bell River’s newest ponies destined to take the littlest guests on trail rides, he saw his brother coming toward him.
Hell. Dallas had news. And it wasn’t good news.
Mitch could sense that much from a hundred yards, just watching the way Dallas walked, framed in silhouette through the doorway of the indoor paddock. The first clue was the tight, squared-off position of his shoulders. And when Dallas cleared the door and the overhead lights hit him, Mitch could read the grim evidence on his face.
“Scat, Alec,” Mitch said to his nephew, not roughly but flatly, without sugarcoating. “Go help Rowena with the baby. Your dad and I are going to need some privacy.”
Alec made an irritated snicking sound between his teeth. He’d been having fun helping Mitch, and he didn’t want to quit. “Privacy for what?”
Mitch rolled his eyes. Seriously?
“We’re making plans to sell your scrawny body for spare parts. We can’t have you listening, so scram.”
Alec started to protest again, but then he glanced over at his dad, and apparently the kid could read body language, too. When Dallas had a face like that, Alec wanted to be somewhere else.
So did Mitch, who was suddenly as terrified as if he, too, were a kid. He tried to stop his heart from thumping so fast. He tried to stop his mind from imagining all kinds of horrors. Okay, the news was bad. How bad?
Bonnie was married. Bonnie was a criminal, a nutter...
Or even worse, she was still a mystery. If her fingerprints hadn’t turned up a match, then they were no closer than before to finding out who she really was.
Or... The thumping inside his chest stilled viciously.
Or Bonnie was dead. Whatever she’d been running from had caught her.
“Hey, there.” Dallas reached Mitch just as Alec disappeared through the side doors, leaving a trail of kicked sand behind him. Dallas patted the new pony’s neck. “How’s Rusty doing?”
“He’s fine.” Mitch stroked the pony’s flank approvingly. “But don’t make small talk. You know something. Tell me.”
Dallas continued to rub the pony’s glossy coat. He hadn’t yet met Mitch’s eyes, which was truly unnerving. Dallas was rarely daunted by uncomfortable truths. It was one of the traits that made him a good sheriff. He could deliver bad news with as much composure as he delivered the good.
“Dallas.” The drumming against Mitch’s ribs sped up. “You’re killing me here.”
Dallas finally looked straight at him. “We should probably sit down.”
Mitch didn’t argue. He waved a finger to one of the stable hands who was in the corner viewing room, talking on a cell phone. He pointed to Rusty, and the young man scurried out to take the pony away.
“Okay. Let’s go over here.” With the horse disposed of, Mitch led the way to the far side of the paddock. He opened one of the latches on the kickboards and took the first of the spectator seats on the first row of bleachers.
Dallas left an empty seat between them when he sat. He laid his hat down there with a sigh.
“We found her,” he said. “She’s alive and well. She lives in Sacramento. But...her name’s not Bonnie.”
At first, all Mitch could feel was the relief. Alive. Well. Damn, those were beautiful words.
But then the rest of Dallas’s sentence sank in. Her name’s not Bonnie. It shouldn’t have shocked him. He’d known she must’ve been using a fake name—nothing else made sense. But, as he heard it confirmed, he was glad he was sitting, as if the solid floor might have turned to swamp.
He thought of all the times he’d said her name. Laughing. Whispering. Crying into the night air.
Damn it, Bonnie, where are you?
Bonnie, Bonnie, please...
“No, of course not.” He sat up straight. “What is her name, then?”
Dallas eyed him for a minute before speaking. Mitch felt as if he were being measured, like a horse being fitted for a bit, to see how much of the truth he could take between his teeth at once.
“Annabelle Irving.”
The name was oddly anticlimactic. It meant nothing to Mitch. It was the name of a stranger.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “But who is Annabelle Irving?”
Dallas smiled. “I didn’t know, either. Apparently we’re just a couple of dumb cowboys. But with the cultured crowd she’s somebody. Her grandmother was a well-known artist, and Annabelle was her favorite subject. There’s a whole set of paintings of her called the Annabelle Oils, and collectors go nuts for them.”
Okay... Mitch rubbed the knee of his jeans. That was okay, right? An artist’s model. He could live with that. And instinctively, he could believe it. He remembered how unnaturally still and self-contained Bonnie could be. She didn’t even change her expression, sometimes for many minutes at a time. He’d once wondered whether she’d been a nun, because she seemed so accustomed to sitting in silent immobility.
But why would an artist’s model need to go on the run under an assumed name? It wasn’t as if your average person had ever heard of her. She could have shouted, “I am Annabelle Irving” from the rooftops of Silverdell, and no one would have so much as blinked.
He narrowed his eyes. “Wait a minute. To match her fingerprints, you have to have a set on file, right? I mean...her prints as Annabelle Irving had to be in the system. How does an artist’s model get her prints into the database?”
One of the trainers had just brought a palomino into the paddock on a lead line. Mitch wished he could yell at her to get out and come back later. But Bell River was a working dude ranch, humming with staff, guests and wall-to-wall activities. He wasn’t going to find complete privacy anywhere.
Dallas flicked a glance toward the young woman, then bent forward, his elbows on his knees, and lowered his voice.
“She was in the system because about seven years ago, when she was eighteen, she stabbed a man with a pair of pruning shears.”
Mitch drew back. “Bullshit.” He said it too loudly, and the trainer glanced their way for one split second before studiously returning her attention to the horse. Mitch wasn’t technically anyone’s boss, but the family tie was close enough to make employees reluctant to cross him.
Dallas frowned, and Mitch shook his head roughly. “Sorry, but...stabbed a man? Like hell she did.”
“I’m afraid that part isn’t even disputed. There’s a police report. She admitted stabbing her cousin, a lawyer named Jacob Burns. She says it was self-defense, because he tried to molest her. He says they were arguing over management of the estate, which, upon her grandmother’s death, had been left to an executor.”
Mitch felt a touch of nausea roll through him. “Her cousin tried to... What the devil do they really mean by ‘molest’? He tried to rape her?”
Then he realized that, instinctively, he’d already decided Bonnie was telling the truth, not this disgusting Jacob whatever. “I mean...come on. The guy’s her cousin? That’s just sick.”
“If it happened that way.” Dallas sounded patient. “But clearly the cops didn’t buy her story. Apparently, she had a history of erratic behavior, though this is the only episode that occurred after she turned eighteen. Earlier records are sealed, because she was a juvenile. And, no, I’m not going to try to get someone to pry them open.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to.” Mitch glared at his brother, his mind going a mile a minute. “So...what? What’s the bottom line here? You think she was running from her cousin?”
Dallas lifted his shoulders. “Don’t know. I didn’t dig any deeper. You asked for a name, and I got one. At the time, no charges were brought, so even if she thought she was running from her cousin, there’s no evidence that...”
“That what?” Mitch’s lips felt stiff.
“That Jacob Burns is dangerous. He was never arrested. He was about twenty-five at the time, just out of law school. He practices in Sacramento now, and apparently he’s a big deal. Annabelle, on the other hand...” He hesitated. “The authorities sent her for psychiatric evaluation, and she spent some time in a mental-health clinic. Just a few weeks, but—”
“But you think she’s nuts. What the hell, Dallas? You knew Bonnie. We all did. You think she’s insane?”
“No.” Dallas spoke slowly, and pity dripped from the word. He pitied Mitch, because Mitch had fallen in love with a kook. “Not insane. But maybe...troubled. You know? Maybe she’s trouble.”
Mitch thought his blood pressure must be about a thousand—he could feel his heart beating behind his eyes. He wanted to punch someone or something. He’d punch Dallas, except that he’d learned better about twenty years ago. Dallas might be a saint, but he had a right hook like a demon.
“Yeah, well, I remember what Dad said about Rowena, back in the day,” he countered acidly. “That she was trouble was the least of it.”
The minute the words came out, Mitch felt himself flushing. That was a low blow. It wasn’t fair. Mitch liked his brother’s wife, always had. And Rowena had had her reasons for acting wild. But why couldn’t Dallas see that Bonnie must have had her reasons, too?
“I’m on your side here, Mitch,” Dallas said mildly. “I thought you were through with her, anyhow.”
“I am.” Mitch stood. “I am. But just because she broke my heart...that doesn’t mean I have to pretend she’s a monster. She’s not. And she’s not a liar.”
Dallas raised his eyebrows.
“She’s not,” Mitch repeated. “A hundred times, when I was trying to make her tell me what was going on, it would have been easier for her to invent any old story, just to shut me up. But she didn’t. She didn’t want to tell me the truth, but she was too good to tell me a lie.”
“Okay.” Dallas nodded slowly, though he clearly wasn’t convinced. “But there’s one other thing you ought to know. If you look her up, you’ll see. She’s rich.”
“I don’t give a damn about that.”
“I know. I just want you to be prepared. When I say rich, I don’t mean comfortable. I mean really rich. Dripping, Rockefeller rich.”
Mitch hesitated, looking down at his brother’s somber face. “I see. What you’re trying to say is that she’s out-of-my-league rich.”
“More or less, yeah.” Dallas didn’t mince words. “I’m saying she’s trouble, and she’s out-of-our-league rich. Look, she left you. You had a grand adventure, but it’s over. She’s gone back to her real life. You need to let it go, Mitch. You need to let her go.”
* * *
MAYBE JACOB AND the rest of them were right, Annabelle thought as she knelt, here at this fork in the bricked path of Greenwood’s butterfly garden, oddly paralyzed and unsure where to plant the final daffodils. Maybe she was crazy. Divorced from reality, dysfunctional, paranoid—just as her mother had been.
Because the way she felt, now that she was back home at Greenwood...
She felt like her own ghost.
So maybe they were right. Maybe it was loony to feel that her invented alter ego, Bonnie O’Mara, was more real than Annabelle Irving could ever be.
Maybe it was bonkers to insist on living in the Greenwood gardener’s cottage and refuse to spend a single night in the elegant, twenty-two-room Italianate mansion where she was born and raised.
Maybe it was daft to dream of taking the Irving fortune, every hellish dollar of it, and burning it in a bonfire down by the creek.
But the truth was...being back here, being the heiress to all this had paradoxically stolen any hope of being happy. It had reduced her once again to an object, a thing, a possession, instead of a woman.
All her life, Annabelle had understood she wasn’t a person. She was an idea. An arrangement of colors on canvas. A mythical, imaginary creature who came to life only in the minds of the people who romanticized her pictures. When the lights were off, when the museums were closed, she was supposed to sink back into the ornate frame, frozen in place, until another art lover came to imagine her into existence all over again.
“The irises will be coming out any day now.”
Annabelle looked up as Fitz, the elderly gardener who had tended Greenwood since Annabelle was a little girl, came limping toward her, his wheelbarrow rumbling before him. She forced herself to smile. Fitz had been the one person she could honestly call a friend. Drawn together by their mutual love of growing things, he’d come to be like a father to her through the years.
And yet, in the end, even he had betrayed her.
“Yes, the irises will be gorgeous. And I’m so glad you put in day lilies.” Shading her eyes with the knife blade she held in one palm, she peered up at him. Only about five-three, with a face turned to tree bark by the California sun, he looked even browner with the light behind him, casting him in shadow. “They’re a wonderful addition.”
He reached into his wheelbarrow and lifted out a straw hat. “Here,” he said. “You don’t want to end up a grizzled old piece of shoe leather like me.”
“Don’t I?” She took the hat, but she didn’t put it on. She raised her face toward the sun. No one cared anymore—no one would punish her for getting dirty fingernails or letting the sun freckle her pale skin. And yet it still felt like the most luxurious act of defiance, to be out here at noon, with her hands in the earth and the heat on her face.
“No. You don’t.” Fitz plucked the hat from her hands and stuffed it on her head. “I bet you didn’t even use sunscreen. You know, BonnyBelle, you don’t always have to do the opposite of what your grandmother would have wanted you to do. Sometimes she was right.”
She looked down at her grimy fingernails, realizing the truth of his words. She could have put on sunscreen first, and she could have enjoyed her gardening without courting skin cancer. As it was, she’d be red as a watermelon by nightfall.
“You’re right, Fitz—I’m acting silly, and—” But she couldn’t complete her sentence. One of the maids was scurrying down the brick path toward them, her hand held up, waving urgently.
“Ms. Annabelle,” she said as she reached them. “I’m sorry. There’s a man, and he won’t go away. I told him you weren’t at home, and so did Mr. Agron, but the man says he isn’t leaving till he talks to you. He’s been here half an hour, and Mr. Agron said we should call the police, but—”
Annabelle’s heart hitched. Could it be Jacob?
The maid stopped to catch her breath and maybe to find the right words. “I don’t know if we should. He’s not doing anything, and he’s obviously not a reporter. He’s kind of like...a cowboy or something.”
Annabelle dropped her trowel and, without thinking it through, rose from her knees. She wiped her earthy palms on her jeans, then raised a hand to her hair, which was flyaway and tangled and probably littered with leaf debris and vermiculite.
“A cowboy?”
“Well, sort of. I don’t know exactly. He doesn’t have a horse or a hat or anything, but—” She shook her head. “Anyhow, he says you know him. He says if we’ll just tell you his name—”
“What is his name?” Annabelle’s voice came out tight, threaded with tension. She already knew the answer, of course. She knew because the maid was flushed with a pretty confusion, a heightened female awareness caused by a gorgeous young cowboy.
“Mitch,” the maid said, her lips curving into a small, puckering smile as she formed the word. “Mitch Garwood.”
* * *
MITCH HAD DECIDED he’d give her an hour. He’d wait out here, on one of the benches around the front fountain, till the sun disappeared behind the mansion’s fancy white colonnades.
If Bonnie hadn’t come out by then, he swore to himself, he’d go back to Silverdell and to hell with her.
But as the minutes dragged on, and it seemed likely he’d have to make good on the threat, he wondered whether he could really do it. Could he just hop on his motorcycle and head east, flipping the bird to Greenwood—and Bonnie—in his rearview mirror?
Because...if he did, what then?
He tried to imagine going the rest of his life without an explanation, without hearing from her lips what the whole crazy running thing had been for. He hadn’t been able to unearth anything that made sense, though he’d combed the internet and studied every single photo of the Annabelle Oils till he could probably paint one himself.
The prim, lace-draped Annabelle Irving was Bonnie, all right. But not his Bonnie. The Annabelle Oils girl was straight out of a fairy tale, with floating clouds of red curls so pale they were almost gold and huge blue eyes that looked haunting and strange, as if you’d never be able to see what she saw, not if you stared at the same spot forever.
His Bonnie wasn’t one bit strange. His Bonnie’s eyes were smart, clear and friendly. She didn’t wear lace, and she was too sexy to be allowed in a fairy tale. She was a normal, red-blooded woman. She hummed off tune and didn’t care who heard her. She ditched her shoes the minute she got inside, and sometimes her fuzzy socks didn’t match. She cooked a steak so tender it melted between your teeth. She bit her fingernails and looked killer in blue jeans.
So if he never found out what had happened—if he never found out how Annabelle became Bonnie, and then, like an evil magician’s cabinet trick, turned back into Annabelle again...
Well, if he never found out, he’d be so angry and bitter inside he’d rot like a wormy apple.
On the other hand, he wasn’t sure getting an explanation would make much difference. He might be doomed to sour from the inside out, no matter what.
He kicked the oyster-shell driveway beneath the bench and glared at the mansion, as if it were to blame. As if it had swallowed his Bonnie whole and was refusing to spit her out again.
But then he saw the big carved front door opening. He was on his feet in a flash. Even if it was just the stuffy butler coming out to warn him the police were on their way, anything was better than sitting here stewing.
A woman emerged. At first, in the shadows of the portico, she was barely visible. White shirt, long pants... Not the maid, then...
When the sunset caught her hair, he knew. Bonnie. His heart did that reflexive thing it always did, and his thighs flooded hot, thrumming with the urge to run toward her.
But he shoved his hands into his pockets and forced himself to wait. Not Bonnie, really. Not anymore. Annabelle.
She walked slowly. Carefully, as if she balanced an egg on her head. Her pace was measured, ceremonial, like a princess pacing down the wedding aisle. Or a queen walking to the guillotine.
Maybe she was buying time so that she could get her story straight.
Or maybe she was waiting for him to close the distance first.
He dug his heels a little deeper into the powdery shells of the driveway. Not going to happen.
“Hi,” she said as she reached him. Her voice sounded rusty, as if she didn’t use it anymore. Her eyes raked his face, clearly searching for clues to his mood.
He didn’t respond. “Hi” seemed laughable, and everything else he could think of felt as if it came from some entirely inappropriate script. From a melodrama where people yelled things like “How could you?” or some slapstick comedy where the dumb cowboy went all “Shucks, ma’am” around the elegant lady.
Or, even worse, from that pathetic script where someone gushed, “You had me at hi.”
He set his jaw and refused to let any of that spill out. Let her do the talking. She was the one who had the explaining to do. She was the one with the secrets.
She cleared her throat and tried again. “How did you find me?”
He raised his shoulder. “Fingerprints.”
“Fingerprints?” Her eyes widened, and he realized they did look a bit strange, now that they were set against the fantasy rose-gold of her real hair. The size of them, and the color... Nothing in the natural world should be that mesmerizing mix of blues, as if robins’ eggs and sapphires and summer skies had magically melted together.
“Fingerprints,” she repeated, her voice dropping slightly, as if she were disappointed in him. “Of course. The water glass.”
He could have defended himself. He could have explained that Rowena had been the one to supply the fingerprints, not him. Technically, that was true. But it would have been a lie in its heart, if not in its facts.
He hadn’t come all this way just to have another useless conversation laced with lies. So he simply stared at her, calmly defiant.
“I see.” She clearly had taken the measure of his anger, and she now knew he hadn’t come in peace. “All right, then maybe the more pertinent question is...why did you find me?”
He laughed harshly. “Come on.”
“I mean it.” She raised her chin. “You said you never wanted to see me again.”
“No, I didn’t. I said I was tired of thumping my head on the sidewalk while you used me like a yo-yo. I said I wasn’t interested in being your quickie next time you snuck into town.”
Her pale cheeks flamed red. To tell the truth, he felt a little flushed, too. He hadn’t intended to sound quite so nasty.
“But I never said I didn’t want answers, Bonnie. Because I damn sure do. And what’s more, I deserve them. I think you owe me that much, after—”
After what? After she’d broken his heart? He swallowed those words and gave her another hard, unblinking stare instead.
She was breathing fast. Her lips were parted a fraction of an inch, and he noticed suddenly she had a smudge of dirt right where a movie star might put a beauty mark. He glanced down, realizing she held a trowel in her left hand, its gleaming silver tip speckled with mud, too.
So at least that part hadn’t been a sham—she really did love gardening. Back at Bell River, she’d always wanted to be outdoors, always wanted to be rooting around in the dirt. Once, before they’d fled from Silverdell, they’d planted a white fir sapling on the abandoned Putman property, partway up Sterling Peak. They didn’t have the right—the property was in some kind of divorce dispute and couldn’t be sold or occupied—but they’d liked to hike out there and dream of owning it someday.
He’d talked about the house they’d build, complete with his ridiculous inventions. She’d laid out the fantasy gardens, describing them so clearly he might as well have been looking at a painting.
He’d swallowed the dream whole, fool that he was. He was surprised he hadn’t choked to death on it. She’d just been playing a game, playing house, as if she’d love to be the queen of the simple log lodge he was happily designing. Ha. All the while, she’d been keeping the secret of—he glanced at Greenwood, its marble arches slightly pink-gold in the sunset—the secret of this.
“I guess we should sit down,” she said. “If you really want to hear the whole story, it’s going to take a while.”
She didn’t seem to have any intention of inviting him into the mansion, so he dropped onto the garden bench where he’d been waiting the past half hour. He leaned against the scrolled iron back and waited some more.
She sat, too, and stared down at the trowel, which she’d rested in her lap, for several seconds. Then she looked up, met his gaze and shook her head slightly.
“I’ve thought about telling you all this so many times you’d think I’d have a speech ready. But it’s complicated. The whole thing is so weird, so convoluted...”
“And I’m just a simple cowboy who couldn’t possibly understand?”
Her eyes narrowed, and he saw her fingers close tightly around the trowel. “That’s cheap, Mitch. You’re not simple, and you’re not even really a cowboy. And I’m not a snob. You can be angry, but you can’t pretend we’re strangers. I won’t let you act as if all those months we spent together weren’t real. I won’t let you pretend we weren’t real.”
“We?” He shrugged, tapping his hand against the bench’s cool wrought iron armrest. “Who exactly is we? Do you mean me and Bonnie O’Mara? Problem is, I don’t see Bonnie here—not a shred of her. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t quite know what’s real and what isn’t.”
She flushed again—and he, who knew every nuance of her face, knew that shade of mottled red meant anger. Her flush of embarrassment was seashell-pink, and the flush of sexual desire was...
He tightened his jaw, trying to force those memories away. Forget all that—this look was pure anger. Well, fine. He might not be turning red, but he was mad, too. They were both mad as hell. Desire was a thing of the past.
She took a long breath, as if to steady her voice before she spoke. “Look, Mitch, if you want to tell me off, you should go ahead and do it. You have every right, and I won’t stop you. But if you want to know the truth, you need to let me talk.”
He nodded tightly. “Go ahead. I won’t interrupt again.”
She looked skeptical, but after a cautious second she started again. “As you can see, my grandmother, Ava, had a lot of money—some from her painting and some from her family. She left everything tied up in a life estate for my mother’s use.”
“Why? Why tie it up?”
“My mother had...problems.” Bonnie looked away briefly. “She wasn’t terribly responsible, and my grandmother obviously didn’t trust her to inherit outright. But she did want to provide for her, so the lawyers suggested the life estate. I was the first remainderman. That meant if I outlived my mother, I would inherit everything.”
Mitch shook his head without really meaning to. How complicated could you get? Rich people were nuts.
Or maybe it was the lawyers who were nuts. He thought of his patent applications and the documents Indiana Dunchik had drawn up so he could sell his chore jacket to the highest bidder. The papers provided for every imaginable contingency and some that Mitch could never have imagined, not in a million years.
So of course the lawyers for the rich Ava Andersen would provide for the remote possibility that a perfectly healthy young woman might get hit by a bus or a meteor and die before her mother did. If Bonnie was the first “remainderman,” there probably were ten other remaindermen behind her, just in case...
And then, finally, the lightbulb went on.
He got it. He felt like an idiot that he’d been so dense.
“Ahh,” he said slowly. “So who was the second remainderman?”
“My cousin Jacob.” She leaned back, as if she were suddenly tired. “I assume you know who Jacob is, since you found me through my fingerprints. He’s my first cousin. His mother, my mother’s sister, died giving birth to him, and his father, a lawyer in San Francisco, worked himself into a heart attack when Jacob was only twelve. That’s when Jacob came to live at Greenwood and began to make my life hell on a regular basis, instead of just in the summers.”
Mitch took a breath, but he didn’t say anything.
“And—this is the part I assume you found when you looked up my prints—when I was eighteen, I was arrested for stabbing him with the pruning shears.”
She didn’t even glance at the trowel she held, so Mitch tried hard not to do so, either. But it wasn’t easy. It was weird, almost freaky, to be sitting here with this woman who was half stranger, half lover and to be talking about wealth and violence.
Wealth and violence. He supposed those two things fit together in some sick way. People did crazy, terrible things over money. But neither word fit with Bonnie.
She paused, as if she expected him to interrupt again, probably to demand an explanation of the arrest, but he didn’t. He was itching to know the truth about that, but right now he wanted her to finish telling him why she’d been on the run.
“Anyhow,” she continued after a minute, “the will stipulated that if I died before my mother did, Jacob would inherit everything. No one expected that to happen, of course. My mother wasn’t old, but she was very, very sick. Everyone knew she didn’t have long to live. So it was almost impossible to imagine any way I would go first. Not naturally, anyhow.”
Not naturally, anyhow. How calmly she said such a thing.
“And if you didn’t die first, Jacob got nothing.” Mitch took a breath, still sorting it out. His mind balked at the implications. “Are you saying your cousin wanted to kill you so he’d inherit your grandmother’s fortune?”
She didn’t answer for a long second. Finally, she looked him directly in the eyes. “Yes.”
“Bonnie.” He raised a hand, correcting himself. “Annabelle. Look, how much money are we talking about here? For a man to kill...”
“Enough. More than enough.” Her voice dropped low and took on a harsh edge. “For pity’s sake, Mitch, people kill each other every day. Over a bar tab, over a pair of sneakers, over a purse, a cash register, a car. Why is it so difficult to imagine that a man would kill to inherit thirty million dollars?”
“Thirty...” His jaw dropped, and he had to tell himself to shut it. “Okay. It’s a lot of money. Still. Your cousin isn’t exactly a pauper. And he’s not a thug. I looked him up. He’s a big-time lawyer, doing just fine for himself. Why would he risk all that—”
“So you don’t believe me, either.” The angry flush had drained entirely from her cheeks, leaving a chilled porcelain ivory behind. She sat so still she might have been a wax figure, not a woman.
“I didn’t say that.”
Her lips curved slightly. “You didn’t have to. I know that look. I know that tone.”
Of course she did. He mustn’t forget that she was as familiar with every square inch of his skin as he was with hers. “Well, it does sound kind of...” He tried to think of a nonjudgmental word. “Kind of extreme.”
“Crazy, you mean?” She lifted her chin. “Don’t worry. You aren’t the first to hint at the possibility. He is, as you say, a big-time lawyer. I’m just this spoiled, troubled heiress, the daughter of a suicidal drug addict. And I’ve already tried to stab him once, so it’s obvious I have some paranoia issues.”
“No, I don’t mean crazy. But maybe...maybe just exaggerating the danger? I’m sure he was envious you got everything, and he probably gave off some fairly hostile vibes.”
She laughed darkly. “Yeah. He tried to overdose me with barbiturates, so I’d say hostile is a fairly accurate description of his feelings for me.”
“He did? How?”
“New Year’s Eve. Jacob always gives a big party, and of course he had to invite me—otherwise people would talk. He must have slipped the drugs into my drink somehow. I woke up the next day in the hospital. On a ventilator.”
Mitch’s body temperature had dropped about ten degrees in ten seconds. The balmy California air moved over his skin like ice. “Are you sure? I mean...how do you know he was the one who did it?”
“Well, I knew I didn’t do it. And, contrary to popular opinion, I’m not paranoid enough to think I have two different people looking to get rid of me.”
Mitch frowned. “But how did he expect to get away with it?”
“Oh, that would have been easy. No one would have doubted it was suicide. It was public knowledge that my mother had tried to kill herself. Twice.”
He made a low shocked sound, but she ignored it.
“And it wasn’t as if he expected me to be able to deny it. He gave me a huge dose. If I really had been drinking alcohol, as everyone assumed I was, I would have died that night.”
Mitch stared at her, speechless. Her own cousin didn’t even realize she wasn’t a drinker? He remembered all the times she’d carried a glass of soda water around at the Bell River events. She never made a thing of it, never got sanctimonious in front of people who did drink. He’d always figured it was simply a healthy-living kind of decision. Now he knew better.
The child of an addict would obviously avoid taking any risks. And her caution had saved her life, though not in the way she’d expected.
“What about when you did wake up? Did you tell anyone? Did you tell the police?”
“No.”
“For God’s sake, Bonnie. Why not?”
“Because I’d been down that path before. Accusing Jacob. And I ended up in a mental-health clinic. No one was going to believe me this time, either, and while I was trying to convince them, he would have tried again. Eventually, he would have succeeded. So I ran.”
“But...” He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of this. “Surely the police...your friends...other family members. Hell, even a lawyer—”
“No.” She shook her head implacably. “No one. There was no one I could trust.”
He felt himself stiffen. “Not even me, apparently.”
The sun had almost touched the western horizon, and he suddenly realized her face was almost entirely in shadows. Now, when he wanted desperately to be able to read her expression, he could hardly see a thing.
“No,” she repeated. “Not even you.”
It shocked him, the hot knife blade of pain that sank into him when she spoke the words. It shouldn’t have been a surprise—couldn’t have been a surprise. He wasn’t a fool. He knew that if she’d trusted him, she would have confided in him months ago.
And yet, hearing her dull monotone confirm it...
“Well, that’s direct.” He leaned back, trying to project a detachment he didn’t come close to feeling. “Guess there’s no point in sugarcoating anything, not now.”
“Mitch, be fair. How could I trust you? How could I trust anyone? My life was at stake. Even more importantly, my mother’s life was at stake. Once he’d gotten rid of me, how long would he have let her stand between him and the inheritance? How long would he have let her live?”
“Did it ever occur to you,” he asked slowly, “that I might have been able to help?”
She hesitated, then swallowed and shook her head. “No.”
Heat radiated across his shoulders and down his arms. He couldn’t decide whether it was anger or shame coursing through his buzzing veins. No? No? Damn it...he would have died for her. Literally. He would have killed for her.
But she hadn’t believed him capable of providing any security. She hadn’t seen him as up to the task of protecting her.
“Jacob is ruthless,” she said, bending forward as if she could close the emotional distance between them by shrinking the physical gap. “He’s vicious and such an expert liar. You have no idea—you can’t imagine. And I’m glad you can’t. You’ve lived with love all your life, surrounded by a family that adores you. You’re sunny, and you’re kind, and you think the world is good. You aren’t consumed by ambition and greed. Those were the things about you I most...”
She stopped, swallowing the next word oddly. “I mean...that’s what drew me to you in the first place. You were light, when all I’d known before was darkness. You understand laughter and joy. You don’t understand cruelty and greed.”
He made a harsh scoffing noise. “You make me sound like the village idiot.”
She straightened up, as if scalded by his sardonic tone. “I’m sorry you take it that way. That isn’t even remotely what I meant.”
“Sure it is.” He was so angry he could hardly keep his voice steady. He was doomed, wasn’t he? He would eternally be the dopey younger brother. The likable goof. The good-time Charlie. He was used to being written off as a gadfly by Dallas, but he’d imagined that Bonnie was the one person who saw him differently.
Wrong again, moron. Maybe that just proved how naive and gullible he really was.
“Mitch, that isn’t what I meant at all—”
“It’s exactly what you meant. You meant that I’m good for a few laughs. I can provide a little comic relief on a boring road trip. And I’m not bad in the sack, of course, so that part was fun, too. But I’m not the kind of guy you take seriously. I’m not the person you’d trust with your secrets, your problems.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not the man you’d trust with your life.”
She was shaking her head. “No. You’re twisting my words. This struggle with Jacob doesn’t have anything to do with my real life or my real feelings. I just had to get through this one dangerous moment, and then—”
“And then what? Don’t be so naive. Do you really think this is the last terrible thing you’ll face?”
He stood. Coming here had been a mistake. There wasn’t any such thing as “closure.” There was only loss and more loss. If he’d never seen her here, with her Titian-red hair and her backdrop of opulence, he could at least have kept the memories of his Bonnie intact.
Now Bonnie and Annabelle would be forever tangled in his mind. And he would always know that neither of them had really respected him. Neither one of them had loved him. Not the way he’d dreamed.
“Mitch.” She didn’t move, but she looked up at him with those complicated, beautiful, haunted blue eyes, overflowing now with unshed tears. “Mitch, please.”
“Troubles come to everybody, Bonnie,” he said roughly. “If you live long enough. People, even careful people, occasionally end up in dark places—in a courtroom, in a wheelchair, in chemotherapy, in disgrace. In tears, in therapy, in pain—all that’s part of life. And it should be part of love, too.”
“Yes. And it is.” She held out one slim lily-pale hand. It trembled. “It will be.”
“No, it won’t. You don’t think of me as a partner. You think of me as a plaything. And I have no interest in settling for that role in any woman’s life.”
She made a choking sound. He shrugged, thankful that, finally, numbness had set in and the pain had eased off, allowing him to come up with one final smile.
“Goodbye, Bonnie.” He cast one last glance at the purpling sky, lowering itself over her mansion like a shroud. “Have a good life.”
