Читать книгу The Wrangler - Lindsay McKenna - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

HOME...IT WAS the last place that Val Hunter wanted to be. She stood in the coolness of the Wyoming morning facing her past. The taxi had just dropped her off at the main house of the Bar H ranch. She bitterly recalled when her father, Buck Hunter, had remodeled the old one-story log home. Now, the house rose two stories and looked like an iconic cedar palace. Val’s mouth quirked as she heard the robins singing in the background. They sounded so happy in contrast to how she felt.

She had to enter the home and let her grandmother, Augusta Hunter, know that she’d arrived. Gus, as everyone called her, had been the only bright spot in Val’s upbringing. And she owed it to Gus to come home even though her heart felt weighted. Hot tears jammed into her eyes and Val hung her head and fought them back. Compressing her lips once her eyes were cleared, she picked up her two suitcases and slowly trudged up the cedar stairs as if she were going to her death.

After knocking on the huge wooden door with the emblem for Bar H carved across it, Val waited. It didn’t take long for a small woman with short silver hair to answer.

“Val!” she cried, her face lighting up.

“Hi, Gus. I made it home.”

Throwing her arms around her granddaughter, Gus held her for a long time. “Thank you for coming,” Gus said in a wobbly voice. She released Val and stood back, a cane in her left hand. “Come in. I have coffee waitin’ for us.”

Giving her short, wiry grandmother a forced half smile, Val picked up her luggage. It was always chilly on Wyoming mornings in June. “Thanks,” she murmured, setting down the bags and closing the door behind her. Gus hobbled on her cane as she limped down the hall. “I’ll take these to my old bedroom?”

“Yep, it’s waiting for you.” Gus pointed toward the polished stairs. “You get settled in and then come down and join me in the kitchen. Have you eaten?”

“Yes, I got breakfast on the flight over to Jackson Hole,” Val said. Gus halted at the opening on the right, which led to a huge kitchen. A kitchen that her father had built for her mother, Cheryl, many years earlier. Bitterness swept through Val. She passed her grandmother and headed up the stairs.

Her father had been violently drunk one night. He’d beat her mother so badly that she’d had to remain in the hospital for three days. After she got home, Buck had been apologetic and promised her that kitchen she’d always dreamed of having. He hadn’t built it because he loved Cheryl. No, it was a kitchen created out of guilt, terror and pain.

The hollow echo of her feet on the stairs sounded like an invisible ball and chain from the past. Her old bedroom was to the right of the stairs. Everything looked the same, as if time hadn’t touched it. Yet, as Val trudged unwillingly toward her room of terrible memories, she wondered how her grandmother managed to keep the house so clean. It was a large two-story home and Gus had broken her hip shortly after Cheryl died. Before that, Gus and Cheryl had lived here at the Bar H together, barely keeping it on life support. Val was ready to pull the plug on it.

Nudging the bedroom door open with the toe of her shoe, Val stepped into her hated past. On the bed, she saw the colorful flying geese quilt that Gus had made for her when she was ten years old. She set the bags on the floor, staring at the red, white and blue quilt. How many times had she wrapped herself up in it pretending that Gus was there, holding her? Holding her safe against her father? Of course, back then, Gus had lived with her husband, Pete, on a five-thousand-acre spread near Cheyenne, Wyoming. And Val knew her mother had worked hard not to let Gus know what was really going on at the Bar H.

Sighing, Val turned and studied the quiet room. There were frilly white curtains bracketing the large window, light pouring in and making it seem far more peaceful than she felt. Her childhood had returned. Only this time, her mother or father weren’t present. It was an odd, uncomfortable feeling and Val didn’t know how to deal with it. Why had she agreed to come home?

She went back downstairs. The only comfort in this life change she was making was being with her feisty eighty-four-year-old grandmother. Entering the warm kitchen, she saw Gus setting two mugs of steaming coffee on the rectangular cedar table.

“Ah, there you are. Come and sit down,” Gus invited with a smile. “I’ve got your sugar and cream here.” She noodled an arthritic finger toward the white porcelain containers sitting in the center of the table.

“Why don’t you sit down, Gus? You’re the one with a broken hip.” Val pulled out a chair for her grandmother.

“Thanks, honey.” Gus slowly lowered herself into it and propped the cane against the edge of the table. Smiling up at her, she murmured, “I can’t tell you how good it is that you’re home.” Gus gestured to the other side of the table. “Come on, sit down, Val. Let’s talk over coffee. That’s always a soothing, positive activity.” Gus chuckled indulgently.

Val couldn’t help but smile. As she walked around the table and sat opposite her silver-haired grandmother with her sparkling, lively blue eyes, a tiny part of her felt happy. The burden of the years living at the Bar H had overwhelmed any optimistic feelings. Picking up the creamer, Val said, “This is nice. Thanks for having coffee ready for me.”

“God’s lifeline.” Gus picked up her mug of black coffee. She raised it in a toast and then took a sip. “Westerners and their coffee are one and the same.” Sliding her work-worn fingers around the white mug, Gus watched Val as she poured the cream and sugar into her coffee. “I’m really sorry that I had to ask you to leave your career in the Air Force and come back home. I know what kind of courage it took to walk away from something you loved in order to help me.”

Val tasted the strong coffee and set the mug down. She reached across the table and brushed her grandmother’s hand. “I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else,” she said in a whisper, a catch in her tone. “You know that.”

Gus puckered her thin lips and nodded gravely. “You know, honey, when your mama died last year and you came home for the funeral, I knew…”

“Knew what?”

Gus shrugged and smiled a little. “I had this feeling you were coming home for good. Oh, I know you swore never to return.” Her silver brows fell and she scowled. “What I didn’t know is three months after your ma’s passin’, I’d fall out there at the corral and bust my femur.” She touched her right hip in memory of the accident.

“I know you’re giving up your career as an intelligence officer for this ranch.”

“I’m not doing it for the ranch. I’m doing it for you.”

Gus was truly a savior in Val’s life. Shortly after Cheryl had been released from the hospital that time Buck had laid into her, Gus had suddenly lost her husband to a massive stroke. After the funeral, Gus had sold her husband’s ranch and moved into the Bar H house. Val soon discovered Buck wouldn’t beat up her and her mother with Gus around. From that time forward, she remembered Gus as a guardian angel.

The tough woman rancher might have been only five foot tall and a weighed a mere hundred pounds, but Buck wasn’t about to push the envelope on her fierce protectiveness. And that’s exactly what Val and her mother had needed: protection from Buck. Gus had been a shield against her father for Val’s last two years spent in this house and for that she was forever grateful to her grandmother.

Reaching out, Val took Gus’s hand and squeezed it. “You saved us from harm and that’s why I came back. I wanted to pay you back for what you did for Mom and me.”

Gus sighed and her blue eyes teared up as she squeezed Val’s fingers. She gave Val a trembling smile and released her hand. “I didn’t know what Buck was doing until he landed your mother in the hospital. Cheryl never let on, not until I visited her in the hospital that time. Lord knows, I wished I’d known sooner.”

“My father was so careful to bruise me where no one would see it,” Val muttered. “He knew what he was doing. But my mother didn’t have the guts to call the sheriff. I still can’t believe she’d let my father beat the hell out of me.” Val shook her head, anger bubbling up within her as it always did when she thought about that time in her life. “Why didn’t my mother ever protect us, Gus?”

“Honey,” Gus said gently, “your ma was so beaten down by that bastard that she didn’t know she could ask for help and get it.”

“Why didn’t you take that information to the sheriff, Gus? I could never understand.”

“Because your ma pleaded with me not to. She wanted to go back to Buck. She said she loved him. And when Pete suddenly died, I knew I had to get over here. I felt Buck would leave you two alone if I was in the house, and I was right. So while I couldn’t go to the authorities, I did the next best thing.”

“You have no idea how grateful I was that you moved here, Gus.” Val gave her a look of admiration. “You gave up your whole way of life in order to protect us. I’ll never forget what you did.”

Giving her a gentle look, Gus said, “Honey, I’d do it all over again. I have no regrets about any of my decisions. My gut told me that Buck would stop if I was around. He was the kind of man who was so wounded, so scarred by life, that all he knew how to do was take his anger out on others. Truth be told, I had a baseball bat hidden in the closet and I swore to myself that if he ever lifted a pinkie against either of you, I was going to beat the hell outta him.” Gus gave her a wicked smile.

Val knew she meant it. Even Buck knew it. “You’re a force of nature, Gus. You always have been.” Val managed a slight smile toward her plucky grandmother.

Val unconsciously rubbed her tightened stomach. Looking around the warm, bright kitchen, she uttered, “This place is nothing but a vat of lousy memories for me, Gus.”

Gus reached out and patted her hand. “Honey, I know how much I was asking of you when I made that phone call to you in Bahrain. I knew you hated Buck and hated this house.”

Val slipped her hands around the mug of hot coffee. Warmth against the iciness inhabiting her knotted gut. “Like I said, I’m here because of you, Gus. If you hadn’t broken your hip, I couldn’t have gotten out of the Air Force. Because of the situation, I was able to get what they call a hardship discharge.”

“I’m so glad you’re here. An elder like me with a cranky hip can’t run this place alone.”

“Gus, why save the Bar H at all?” Val drilled a look into her grandmother’s wrinkled, darkly tanned features.

“Why not?” The elder perked up, feisty now. “This is your home, Val. It doesn’t have to always be the terrible place it was for you as a child. You can create happy memories here, too. I had to sell our ranch in Cheyenne and it was the last thing I wanted to do. Pete’s family started that ranch a hundred and twenty years ago. It broke my heart to have to leave it in order to come back here. But I did it. Sometimes, life puts huge demands on us we don’t want to face. But we must sacrifice for a greater good.”

Guiltily, Val said, “You gave up so much. I knew you were grieving for Grandpa Pete’s passing. And I know you two spent your sixty years together building that spread into a profitable ranch. You walked away from all of it for us, Gus. Even at sixteen I realized the terrible sacrifice you made for us.”

“I did it,” Gus said, her voice firm, “because you two were far more important than our ranch. Family comes first. Always. You’re my granddaughter and all I ever wanted for you was happiness.”

“That didn’t happen,” Val said in a rasp, fighting back rising emotions. She held her grandmother’s teary blue gaze.

“I just wanted to put this whole damn thing behind me, Gus. I never wanted to be here again.”

“Then,” Gus said gently, “maybe it’s time to start healing up from it? Everyone deserves to have a home. A place where they came from. A place where they can come back to and call their own. Us Westerners believe in family, home and loyalty. Maybe between you and me some healing and good might come from this.”

“You’re such an optimist, Gus.”

Perking up, she grinned. “Yes, I hold out hope for hopeless, that’s for sure. Pete always called me a cockeyed idealist,” and she chuckled.

Laughing a little with her grandmother, Val took a sip of the hearty coffee. She thought back on her life since she’d left this ranch. She’d gone to college at eighteen. From there, she went into the Air Force. She was twenty-eight now. She’d only spent six years in the military and had been counting on making it to twenty years so she’d have a pension. “This ranch’s back is broken, Gus. The corrals are in terrible shape. The barn needs a new roof. I don’t see any cattle. I see a few horses out in one pasture. This place is not a moneymaker, it’s nothing but a money pit.”

Nodding, Gus said, “After Buck died of a heart attack, your mother made a lot of poor choices insofar as hiring good wranglers. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know how to budget because Buck kept her out of the money and finances. He refused to let her know anything about the running of the ranch, and he took all his knowledge of keeping this ranch solvent to the grave with him. I tried to pick up the slack, figure out the accounting books, but there was only so much I could do.”

Val recalled that time. “I celebrated when Mom told me Buck had died.”

“No one can blame you, honey. But without Buck, this ranch went to hell in a handbasket. Your mom was depressed. No matter what kind of medication the doctors put her on, she spiraled deeper and deeper into a very dark place. I couldn’t talk or reason with her. She just locked herself away in her room.”

Val’s heart wrung with pain over her mother’s decline. She hadn’t been there to help her. She’d run as far away as she could.

“When it came to finding the accounting books,” Gus continued, “and then discovering all the places Buck squirreled money away, it took me a year to figure it all out. And your mother, by that time, had been diagnosed with the most virulent form of breast cancer and she died six months afterward.”

Val recalled the phone calls, the fact her mother was drifting away from her. Val had felt abandoned and adrift. “I remember the funeral.”

“Yes, and I remember telling you not to worry, that I could handle the Bar H. I felt at the time, I could bring it back bit by bit. But your mom chose wranglers like she chose Buck. They were young men who talked the talk but couldn’t walk the walk. That series of wranglers did nothing but allow the ranch to slide further into destruction. Good wranglers are worth their weight in gold.”

“And then, you fell and broke your hip,” Val said. She saw what the Bar H meant to her grandmother because of the fierce look that sparked in her watery blue eyes. Her jaw was set. Val knew the bulldog feistiness she’d always possessed was there even at eighty-four. “But even if that hadn’t happened, no one person could ever run this two-hundred-acre ranch by themselves.”

“No, I couldn’t. And then the hip replacement went wrong, and I’m stuck with this damned cane for the rest of my life. I can’t ride a horse or go out and mend the fences. So much was taken away from me when I broke my hip, Val. I grieved over this situation a long time before calling and asking you to come home. I don’t want to see this ranch sold, too. It broke my heart to sell ours. I cried for weeks over that decision. I was hurting so badly from Pete suddenly being torn away from me, too. We were a good team. The best of friends. And then, suddenly, in one moment, he was gone….”

Val reached out and gripped her grandmother’s hand, its knuckles slightly enlarged with arthritis. “You’ve had to go through so much, Gus. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, honey, I know you are. We’ve all gone through our share, it seems. When Cheryl would bring you to visit our ranch in Cheyenne, I couldn’t understand why you were such a shy shadow that hid from all of us. And every time Pete came near you, you were like a wild horse running in the other direction. Lord, how I wish I had picked up on your reactions properly. After the fact, I talked to a therapist about abused children. It was then I realized you were terribly wounded and wouldn’t trust any man. Not even my Pete. And he was one of the most gentle, loving men you could ever meet.”

Dragging in a huge breath of air, Val felt as if the weight of the world was bearing down on her shoulders. “Gus, you can’t blame yourself for not knowing what was going on. I myself wish I’d done something. If only I’d called the sheriff. Or talked to one of my teachers.”

“Don’t go there,” Gus warned her. “You were innocent in all of his, Val. You were a trusting, vulnerable child.”

Hot tears wedged into Val’s eyes. With an angry swipe, she wiped them away. “I just couldn’t ever understand why my Mom lied to the doctors when she was taken to the hospital. She had a broken arm and collar bone, eyes blackened and both cheeks fractured. And she lied to them! She told them she’d been bucked off a horse, hit the pipe corral fence and then fell to the ground.” Gulping, Val stared helplessly at Gus. “They believed her! When you came here and told me that, I just felt like I was going to implode with rage.”

“You were raised in a toxic environment, so you thought love was being beat. You never knew any different as a child. How could you?”

“I’ve tried so hard to forget my past!” Val choked, the tears flowing down her taut cheeks. “When you asked me to come here, I threw up. I couldn’t hold back the fear, the memories avalanching me again.”

Gus scraped the chair back, picked up her cane and hobbled around the table. Leaning down, she slipped one arm around Val’s shoulders and kissed her red hair. “You’ve had nothing but pain from the time you were born,” Gus agreed. “But you listen to me. You’re a Hunter. You have the blood of my family running strong through you, Val. I know this is the hardest thing you’ve ever done, but really, it isn’t.”

Val lifted her head, the tears blurring her grandmother’s deeply wrinkled face inches away from hers. “W-what do you mean?”

“Honey,” Gus said in a whisper, placing a kiss on her wrinkled brow, “the worst was living in this house when Buck was alive. He’s dead and gone now. I know you have the past to work through, but he ain’t here any longer. That makes this easier than the first eighteen years of your life, doesn’t it?” She gently held Val’s tearful blue gaze.

“I—I don’t know.”

“I do. Besides,” Gus said, gently wiping the tears from Val’s pale cheeks, “you have me. Together, you and I are a force to behold. We can bring this ranch back to life, and make it even better than before. We can make it beautiful, successful and you’ll have the money you need for when you want to retire.” Giving her a soft smile, Gus added, “Family should be a team, Val. Oh, it’s true, there’s always a rotten apple in every family barrel, but don’t walk away from it all just because of one person. Your ma put her heart and soul into the Bar H. Now, we’ll do the same. Together…”