Читать книгу Valentine's Day - Nicola Marsh, Allison Leigh - Страница 15
ОглавлениеBUT Cari was wrong. C.J. turned out to be a wonderful cook, to the surprise of at least two of the dinner participants. She threw together plates of finger food, which included bite-size pieces of filet mignon on toast, salmon and crème fraîche on rye crackers, a light-as-air pâté on sautéed slices of croissant, lobster tail on sourdough bread rounds, bruschetta on deep-fried parmesan toast, and a few other things, each more delicious than the last.
“Appetizers,” Max said without enthusiasm when she first put out her spread. But once he’d started eating, the only sounds to be heard were sighs of ecstasy.
“You see,” C.J. said to Randy, flouncing her apron as she sashayed past. “I can cook. And on little tiny good-for-nothing stoves, too.”
It turned out her purpose was to convince him that she could help him cater one of his large parties. He didn’t need much more persuading once he’d tasted her food.
“Hire her,” Max proclaimed, his mouth full of lobster. “She’s a genius at cooking. This is wonderful stuff.”
“I’m not trying to get a job with him,” C.J. said pertly. “I’m trying to hire on with you, and you know it.”
Max looked at the two women, one after the other, and inwardly he groaned. C.J. was gorgeous in an exaggerated way, all red lips and aggressive breasts and swinging hips, with fire-engine-red hair as icing on the very tempting cake. She was vivacious, exciting.
But—what the hell? He’d been there, done that. She was just like every other woman he’d dated since he was seventeen. He was bored with it, bored with her.
Cari was something new to him—warm, sweet, principled. She had standards. Imagine that! Rules she used to guide her life. He’d thought such things went out with high-buttoned shoes, except for boring, shriveled people who wanted to stop anyone from having fun.
But what Cari had was something different from anything he’d ever known. She had integrity. Wow. What a difference it made. Loving her would make him a better person. He knew that intuitively. She would change his life. Too bad it was so impossible.
Still she had a special spark that attracted him in a way C.J. and her type never could. What was he going to do about that? Or did he really need to do anything at all?
“That was the best meal I’ve had in ages, C.J.,” Cari told her when the men had gone down to the bar for an after-dinner drink and left the women behind.
“My one talent,” C.J. said with a sigh. “You see why I need to marry Max.”
They were lounging on the couch, and Cari was feeling almost friendly to the woman.
“Do you really need to marry him?” she asked hesitantly. “I mean, after all, I’m sure he’s willing to pay you quite a bit for the ranch. Why not just sell it to him and invest the money you get out of the deal?”
C.J. shook her head fervently. “No can do.”
“Why not? You could get a lot of money for it.”
“‘Money’ per se, isn’t what I want. Security is what I need. The kind that major wealth can bring. That’s my goal.” She settled into the corner of the couch, pulling her legs up under her. “Here’s a lesson in life, Cari. Money is very nice, but just plain old money has a way of slipping through your fingers. I’ve learned that often over the years. Money evaporates.” She nodded wisely. “The land is always there. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg. You don’t sell off that darn old goose. Not if you’re smart.”
“So the ranch is doing well?” Cari asked, wondering just who was managing it. C.J. didn’t seem to be doing it and she never seemed to talk about it.
“As well as can be expected. But that’s not where I count on to get my support. It doesn’t matter how much money the ranch makes. As I said, money can disappear in an instant. All kinds of things can make money disappear. Life can soak it right up. I’ve seen that happen. The ranch is my leverage. It’s something I can use to get the life I want. I’m just lucky I’ve got it.”
“I see.”
“You know what?” C.J. went on. “This may surprise you, but I’m tired of being a party girl. It’s getting hard to keep up that front. Once my looks go, it’ll be over anyway. I’ve got to prepare for my future. I want kids and a family just like everybody else.”
“You do?” Cari stared at her. “I thought babies gave you the willies.”
“They do. You don’t think I’d be caught dead taking care of my children, do you? That’s what servants are for.”
“Oh. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you don’t think ahead the way I do. You really should start planning for your own future, honey. I’m a bit older than you. I’ve been around the block a few times. I can teach you a few things.” She nodded wisely and Cari tried to smile, but was afraid she wasn’t very convincing.
“But as for me,” she went on, “here’s the bottom line. I want it all, but I don’t want to do it grubbing in poverty. Max is my only hope for the good life. And I mean to take advantage of that hope any way I can.”
Cari had to admire her honesty, even if she didn’t think much of her ethics. Later, when C.J. and Randy had left, she told Max about what the woman had said.
“How well does that ranch do?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “The ranch is mortgaged to the hilt, from what I’ve been able to ascertain. They tell me she can’t come up with the monthly fees at this point.”
“Isn’t there some way you can just sort of squeeze her out?”
He grinned at her terminology. “It’s complicated. If this was an ordinary project, I wouldn’t hesitate. That’s how you make the big deals. But in this case, my mother wouldn’t stand for it. She wants everything aboveboard and by the rules. She has a certain compassion for C.J.”
Cari could understand that. For Max’s mother, C.J. was a part of the Texas she’d left behind and still seemed to yearn for.
“So you’ll have to marry her?”
He merely shrugged and looked deep into her eyes without saying anything. Finally he just walked away.
A half hour later, he asked if she’d like to come out to the ranch with him the next day.
“I want to go out to see it. Every time I ask C.J. to take me out, she finds a way to avoid it. I want to go out on my own and find out what she’s trying to hide.”
“Sure. We’ll go with you.” She didn’t go anywhere without Jamie anymore.
“Good. I’ve ordered a picnic basket from the kitchen. We’d better leave early, just in case C.J. and Randy get a yen to visit again.”
She laughed. She thought it was funny that Randy seemed to have attached himself to C.J. so thoroughly at the same time the woman thought she was romancing Max—sort of.
She left Max to watch a little television, and she went to bed, glad she had her own nightgown instead of the T-shirt. She was exhausted. Taking care of a baby was tiring work, even when you loved every minute of it. She quickly went to sleep and slept like a log until the wee hours.
Something woke her. She opened her eyes and for just a few seconds, wasn’t sure where she was. Turning toward the crib, she saw a shadowy figure standing there and she gasped.
“Relax.” It was Max. “It’s only me. Jamie was whimpering, so I came in to make sure he was okay.”
She reached out and turned on the bedside light and there he was, holding Jamie in his arms, the picture of the perfect dad. Joy filled her heart and tears sprang to her eyes.
“Oh, Max,” she said, blubbering a bit.
“What’s the matter?” He was astonished. “Did I frighten you that much? Cari, I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s not that.” Slipping out of bed, she pulled her robe on and went to him, kissing his cheek and then smiling at the baby. “I’m just so happy,” she said, choking on her words and smiling at him tearfully. “I just… it’s just that my husband…” She sniffed and shook her head. “Never mind.”
Max looked concerned. He started to put Jamie down in the crib but the baby was having none of it and started to whimper for real.
“Uh-oh,” she said, looking down at the baby lovingly. “It looks like it’s going to be one of those nights.”
“One of what nights?” Max said as he pulled him back up into his arms.
“We’re going to have to walk him.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled at him. “You’ll see. I’ll take the first shift. You can watch and learn.” She shrugged. “Or go ahead and go back to bed,” she added, giving him an out. “Whatever.”
She changed his diapers and put on a fresh shirt and they tried putting him down to sleep again, but, just as she’d feared, he was totally awake and ready to play.
“No hope,” she said cheerfully. “He going to need some coaxing to get back to sleep.”
She pulled Jamie’s blanket around him and put him to her shoulder, then started out toward the living room. Max followed close behind, slumping onto the couch as she began to pace with the baby in her arms.
“They love this,” she told him. “The longer you walk, the happier they get.”
“But do they go to sleep?”
“Ah, that’s the question. That’s why we’re doing this. But sleep can be long in coming.” She held Jamie close and kissed the top of his head. “There were nights I spent hours walking Michelle. Luckily, I think Jamie is a better sleeper than she was. He ought to go out pretty quickly.”
He watched for a few minutes, then said quietly, “You’ve never told me much about your marriage, Cari. What was your husband like?”
“Brian?” She bit her lip. This wasn’t one of her favorite topics. “He was just a guy.”
“There’s something I’ve wondered about,” he went on. Rising, he met her on one of her passes and took her hand in his, spreading her fingers. “No rings. Why is that? As a widow, I would think you would want to have that sort of memento of your marriage.”
She stared at her own hand and nodded slowly.
“I used to have rings.”
“What happened to them?”
She looked up into his face. “I sold them.”
He narrowed his eyes, searching her face as though he wanted to understand. “You sold your rings?”
“Yes.”
Jamie began to stir, and she pulled her hand away from Max so that she could start pacing again.
“I had a beautiful wedding set with a very pretty diamond,” she went on as she walked. “But I sold them. They went to pay for me finishing college and starting on my real estate license.” She smiled at the irony of it all. “Brian never knew that he financed my new start in life.”
Max had a point about the rings. If she’d valued her marriage, she would have kept them, no matter how tight money got. But she couldn’t really grieve for Brian, not the way she knew she should. By the time he’d died, she’d known she was going to have to leave him one way or another.
He’d made life with him impossible and had pretty much killed the love she’d once had for him. When she thought about it now she couldn’t believe she’d stayed as long as she had. What had kept her with him once she’d known he was getting more and more irrational? The fear of admitting failure, she supposed.
“So you’re getting a real estate license?” he noted, interested that she would have chosen a field so close to his. “Why? Residential real estate is dead as the proverbial doornail in most areas right now.”
“I know. But real estate always comes back. And I want to be ready when that happens.”
He nodded, glad for the evidence that she was an optimist. He liked that about her.
She smiled at him. “In the meantime, I don’t mind working as a waitress. It’s honest work and I can make a decent living as long as I only have myself to take care of.”
Jamie chose that moment to begin happily making motorboat noises. They both laughed.
“It doesn’t sound like he’s falling asleep,” Max said.
“Not yet,” she replied. “It takes a while sometimes.”
“Let me take my turn,” he said, reaching for the baby. “You sit down and tell me about your marriage,” he said.
She gazed into his eyes. “Why do you want to know?” she wondered.
He touched her cheek with the palm of his hand. “Because I care about you,” he said simply. And as he said the words, he knew it was true. He’d never known a woman like Cari before, never had a relationship like this. He liked her. He wanted to talk to her. He wanted to know more about her. That had never happened with a woman before. But it felt right.
“Sit. And talk.” He began to pace with Jamie cuddled nicely in his arms.
She sat. She usually hated to talk about the past. But tonight the words just started to flow out.
“I knew Brian for years. All through high school. I had no excuse.” She sighed. Wasn’t that the truth? It was amazing how one could delude oneself. “I knew what he was like. But I had the young girl’s syndrome, thinking love would conquer all, marriage would change him, I would change him, my love would show him the way.”
“Change him how?” Max asked.
“Change him from being a jerk, I suppose,” she said with a short laugh. “Change him into a decent person and a good husband and father. It didn’t happen, of course.”
“It hardly ever does,” he agreed.
She nodded. “Living with Brian was like living with a human geyser. You never knew what might set him off, but you knew he was going to blow. And it was over something different every time.”
Max’s tone was tense. “Was he violent with you?”
She hesitated. What was the point of going over all that? “Only a little.”
She could see the veins in Max’s neck cord and she hurried to add, “I knew where it all stemmed from. His father was an alcoholic and he had a very rough childhood. You always think that love and goodness will heal things like that. And they so seldom do. It’s just not enough to overcome the damage that sort of childhood does.”
It was funny. She’d never told anyone, even Mara, all these details. So why was she telling Max? Of all the people in the world, he was probably the one who least needed to know these things about her. But it was such a relief to tell someone about it.
“I don’t want to make it sound like unrelieved agony. It wasn’t like that at all. There were many good times. He could make me laugh. And he loved the baby.” Her voice softened as she thought of her baby. “Michelle was a perfect baby, all pink and plump and smiling. He was so proud of her. And yet…” Her voice got a little rough.
“When she cried, he would go crazy. He couldn’t stand it. It almost seemed as though he thought she was trying to get to him on purpose. He took it personally. I would do everything I could to keep her from crying.” She choked as painful memories surged. “Sometimes he would smash things,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “And then he would leave.”
Max stopped in front of her, staring down. “But he didn’t hurt you? Or the baby?”
“Not…not really.” She was skimming over the truth a bit here, but she really didn’t want to dredge all that up again. “I was afraid of that, though. He would just get so irrational. There was no telling what he would do eventually. That last night, he was so angry.”
She closed her eyes as she remembered, and her voice became almost robotic.
“He grabbed Michelle and raced out to the car with her. I ran after him, pleading with him to leave her, but he threw her into the backseat and started the car up. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. I was frantic. I managed to get into the car before he had time to lock the doors. We took off down the street. I was trying to climb over the seat to get into the back to take care of Michelle when he…he…” She closed her eyes again, seeing it as though it were yesterday. “We crashed into a fence and then a tree.”
She took a shuddering breath and looked up into his face. His beautiful eyes were filled with compassion and reflected her pain. Somehow that was so comforting.
“It could have been my fault,” she hurried to add. “I’m just not sure. The way I was climbing over the seat, only thinking about getting to Michelle, not about how I might be interfering with his driving. I can’t put all the blame on Brian.”
Max snorted. “I can,” he muttered, beginning to walk again.
“I was in the hospital for about a week. A couple of broken ribs and injuries to a few internal organs.” She shrugged. “I got better. They didn’t.” She took a deep breath. “They didn’t tell me that Brian and Michelle were dead at first. I kept asking for her.”
Tears filled her eyes and she shook her head angrily. She didn’t want to cry. She’d done enough crying to fill an ocean, and she’d thought she didn’t have any more tears to give. But there were always more.
Max was leaving the room. She blinked after him.
“Where are you going?”
“He’s asleep,” he told her softly. “I’m putting him in his crib.”
She nodded, rising to follow him. By the time she got to the nursery, he’d put Jamie down and covered him. He turned and took her in his arms, raining kisses on her face and muttering something in Italian.
She laughed with tears still filling her eyes. When he kissed her, she kissed him back, giving him her passion as well as her joy. But only for a moment.
“No,” she said, pulling away from him. “Max, no.”
He said something in Italian. She didn’t understand the words, but she knew his meaning. She shook her head.
“No,” she said again. “Max, you’re going to marry C.J. You’re going to belong to another woman. We can’t.”
This time the Italian was a curse word she fully understood, but he released her, only to grab her hand and hold it up.
“You should have rings,” he said with Italian intensity. “You should have beautiful jewelry to match your beautiful eyes. You should be draped in diamonds.”
She laughed aloud. What a concept!
“I don’t need jewelry,” she told him. “It just gets in the way.”
He shook his head in disgust at her attitude, and then he kissed her again. Gently but firmly, she pushed him away and led him to the door of the room.
“Good night, Max,” she told him, her growing affection for the man shining in her eyes. “Better get some sleep.”
“Yes,” he reluctantly agreed. “Don’t forget. We’re driving out to the ranch in the morning.”
“I’ll be up early,” she promised.
He gave her a crooked grin. “So will I. We have no choice. We play by Jamie’s rules these days, don’t we?”
The drive to the ranch went through some beautiful Texas landscape. Max filled the time with stories his mother had told him over the years of adventures she’d had growing up in the Texas countryside, stories that made it sound like an ideal place for an old-fashioned upbringing. But the arrival, when it came, was anticlimactic.
“This can’t be it,” Max said, staring at the dilapidated buildings on a hill that appeared to stand at the end of the driveway leading up from the highway where the Triple M Ranch sign hung by one corner on a rusty archway.
There was a gate, but it gave easily to a little push from the nose of the car. They drove slowly up the long entry. Straggly trees lined the way, only a few of them still alive. The buildings were empty. It was pretty obvious no one had been living there for quite some time.
“I don’t see any sign of cattle,” Max said, shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed out over the dusty plains surrounding the hill. “This doesn’t even look like a working ranch.” He shook his head. “And this certainly doesn’t look like the ranch my mother told me about all my life. They’ve let it go to hell. It’s a damn shame.”
Cari could see how disappointed he was. “Maybe we came to the wrong side of the property,” she suggested.
He shook his head. “No. This seems to be it. No wonder C.J. didn’t want me coming out here.”
“Well, we can have our picnic here at least,” she said, beginning to unload the car and set up a shaded place for Jamie.
Max agreed, though he was grouchy about it. She felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t help but wonder how this was going to impact his plans. If this made him look at things more realistically, maybe it was all for the best.
They spread out a ground cloth under a tree and opened up the picnic basket to find fried chicken and biscuits and corn on the cob.
“In February?” Max said, looking at the corn suspiciously.
“It’s either imported or frozen,” Cari agreed. “Not quite up to the quality you expect in the good old summertime, but it tastes pretty good.”
They ate and chatted and played with Jamie, and gradually Max’s mood improved. He got to the point where he could see some of the good things in the land around him, such as the wildflowers just beginning to poke up their heads, and the white, puffy clouds scudding by in a pure blue sky.
“You know, I have to admit, this place could have fit in with my mother’s stories in better times. But beyond that, I had a different picture of the ranch in mind.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. I realize now it wasn’t even based on what she’d told me. I watched that TV show. What was the name of that ranch on it? Southfork? Well, that was sort of the picture I had in my mind. A big house. A big barn. Lots of big cars parked out front. A helicopter pad out back. Miles and miles of expensive fencing. Some cattle, maybe.”
She smiled, nodding. “I’ve seen the show.”
“Even though this might have been an impressive place in its day,” he said, “it was never like Southfork. Still, it was probably a good working ranch. Too bad that time seems to be long past.” He grimaced. “I’m glad my mother isn’t here to see this. I hope no one ever tells her about it.”
They drove back to the city, taking the long way and enjoying the scenery. Max’s mobile chimed and he pulled over to take the call. He looked serious as he listened, but Cari was playing with Jamie and didn’t pay too much attention. When he’d hung up, he turned to her.
“Bad news,” he said shortly. “Sheila won’t be coming back.” His gaze flickered over Jamie and he winced slightly. “They found her body in the river. Seems to be drug related.”
“Oh, Max!”
They both looked at the child who was happily playing with a ring of plastic keys, totally oblivious to the fate of his mother. Then they looked at each other and without a word, came together for a long embrace. This was a tragedy for a baby, but at least he was too young to understand what an earthshaking event had just contorted his life. Perhaps it was best that way.
Back in town, Max made some calls and came up with more news.
“The police haven’t been able to find any relatives for Sheila, and neither have any of my people.” He looked deeply into Cari’s eyes. “Everything is going to ride on the DNA results.”
She laced her fingers under her chin as she considered that. “And if they come back negative?”
He looked pained. “Cari, if that happens, it will be out of my hands. If I have no marriage or blood ties to Jamie, there is nothing I can do. I’ll have no right to keep him here.” He shook his head. “Even all those lawyers I pay so much money to won’t be able to fix that one.”
She shrunk back. “So he would go into the county system.”
“I imagine so.”
If that happened…
Oh, it couldn’t happen. Blindly, she turned and hurried back to the nursery. Jamie was sound asleep, but she had to hold him. Hadn’t there been a time she’d vowed not to fall in love? That time seemed very long ago.
