Envious

by Lisa Jackson

  There was only one way to find out. Bliss would have to take the initiative and meet both her half-sisters, whether they wanted anything to do with her or not.

  * * *

  Mason drummed his fingers on his desk in his den, which was really the second bedroom of his apartment. Tonight the room with its glowing computer monitor seemed empty. Hollow. Like his own damned soul.

  It had been his night to see Dee Dee, but Terri had come up with another excuse to keep him from his daughter. Only half a mile away and it might as well be half a continent.

  Just like Bliss—so near but so damned far. Completely out of reach.

  “Where she should be,” he reminded himself as he refocused on the illuminated screen, but try as he might, he couldn’t concentrate on the spreadsheet for his ranch in Montana. Tonight he didn’t give a damn. The numbers didn’t mean anything to him now. Nothing did. Not when his daughter was being kept from him.

  Or when Bliss Cawthorne was less than twenty minutes away.

  “Stop it,” he growled at himself and blinked to clear his head.

  Restless by nature, he could never sit for long and had always worked off his excess energy in physical labor. But this evening had been different.

  After his telephone conversation with Terri, he’d kicked off his boots and jeans, donned sweats and running shoes and jogged six miles across hilly terrain. He’d returned sweating and overheated, his blood pounding, and had taken a cold shower, letting the needles of water spray against his skin as he’d rested his head against the tiles and willed his thoughts away from Bliss.

  So what if she was close by? So what if she was still as intriguing as ever? So what if he still wanted her so badly he felt himself stiffen at the thought of her? She was still John Cawthorne’s daughter and still off-limits. Way off-limits. He had enough problems in his life without the complication of a woman—especially that one.

  Now, as he sat in his boxer shorts, a half-drunk bottle of beer in one hand, he stared at the ledgers on the computer screen and wondered how his life had careened so far out of control.

  Oh, come on, Lafferty; it’s your fault. You’re the one who sent her out riding in that storm ten years ago, you’re the one who took her old man’s money and you’re the one who got Terri pregnant. If your life’s on an unwanted path, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

  He took a draft from his long-necked bottle. Ever since seeing Bliss again, he’d been distracted. Half-a-dozen times he’d reached for the phone to dial her number, only to stop before he picked up the receiver. Why call her? What could he say? The old torment gnawed at his soul. “You nearly killed her.”

  He snapped off the toggle switch, felt a sense of satisfaction as the screen faded, and took another long swallow. He remembered the first time he’d seen her as if it had been yesterday.

  She’d been the boss’s daughter, a pretty girl of nearly eighteen, who had come to spend a few weeks on her old man’s ranch. He’d been twenty-four at the time, old enough to know better, young enough not to give a damn.

  At first he’d wanted nothing to do with Cawthorne’s daughter, or so he’d tried to convince himself. She’d been trilingual, for Pete’s sake, danced ballet, rode polo ponies, played tennis, sailed, and was rumored to have a portfolio of investments that would have made a stockbroker’s mouth water. In short, she hadn’t been his kind of woman. No way. No how.

  But she’d been fascinating. No doubt about it. And it hadn’t just been her beauty. No, there was something more, something deeper that he’d sensed in her; and whatever that female essence had been, it had scared him. It had scared the hell out of him.

  With eyes as blue as a mountain lake, cheekbones that a model would have killed for, pouty lips and an easy smile, she had caused most of the men who had worked for her father to think about risking their employment for a few hours alone with her. Including Mason.

  Now he damned himself for being two times a fool, but the truth of the matter was that Bliss Cawthorne, curse her sexy smile and twinkling eyes, had gotten to him all over again.

  It had taken less than ten minutes.

  So what’re you gonna do about it, Lafferty? his mind taunted as he peeled the label from his beer bottle.

  There was only one safe answer—the same as it had always been. Stay away from the woman.

  Trouble was, Mason wasn’t known to take the safe path.

  * * *

  “So this is Bliss!” Brynnie Anderson-Smith-McBaine-Kinkaid-Perez breezed into the Cawthorne house in a cloud of sweet perfume laced with cigarette smoke. Her hair was a deep red beginning to streak with gray, her face tanned, her lips colored peach, her eyelids shaded in a soft pewter color. She wore jeans a size too tight and a white T-shirt that showed off her enviable chest. “Well, John, you’re right again. She’s beautiful.” Brynnie winked at Bliss and extended a beringed work-roughened hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you. All good, mind you, all good.”

  “Same here,” Bliss said, though what she’d found out about this woman had been recent and she wasn’t holding her breath that the story her father gave her was the entire truth. Besides, not only had Brynnie wed more than her share of husbands, but she’d been a married man’s lover. That thought was sour, no matter how hard Bliss tried to swallow it.

  John captured Brynnie in a bear hug, and with his arm still slung over her shoulders, led them all through the kitchen and onto the back porch. A sweating pitcher of iced tea and several glasses were waiting on the picnic table.

  “Looks like you were expecting me,” Brynnie said.

  “All Bliss’s doin’.”

  “Thoughtful.”

  “Thanks.” Bliss didn’t know what to say. This was, after all, the woman with whom her father had been involved in an affair, the woman who had knowingly cheated on Margaret Cawthorne, the woman who had gotten pregnant with John’s child while he was married.

  Forcing a smile she didn’t feel, Bliss told herself that discretion, if she could find it, was the better part of valor. Her mother was dead, had known of the affair and dealt with it in her own way. Somehow Bliss should do the same. But as she poured the tea into glasses, watching the slices of lemon dance, she felt a stinging loss, a pain deep in her heart, and she nearly slopped tea onto the table.

  They sat in deck chairs in the shade of a larch tree. A breeze moved across the rolling acres, stirring the leaves and bending the grass of a field of hay not yet mown. The sound of sprinklers jetting water to irrigate the surrounding pastures vied with the distant hum of traffic far off on the highway.

  “I know this is hard for you,” Brynnie ventured as she set her glass on the table. Her fingernails were long, squared off and matched the peach gloss of her lips.

  “Very.”

  “It’s hard on everyone,” John said thoughtfully, a hint of regret in his voice.

  “Well, here goes.” Brynnie looked Bliss straight in the eye. “Look, honey, I’m not proud of everything I’ve done in my life. Lord knows, I’ve made more than my share of mistakes and I’ll probably make a few more before they bury me.

  “Gettin’ involved with your dad was inevitable, believe me, but our timing was always wrong. Well, maybe there never could have been a good time. But you have to believe me when I tell you that I never meant to hurt your ma.”

  Bliss didn’t say anything. Her throat was too tight and her eyes stung with unshed tears.

  “From all I’ve heard, she was a good woman. Deserved better.” Brynnie’s brown eyes shadowed with a pain she’d borne for years, but still, Bliss wasn’t completely moved.

  “She deserved the best,” Bliss said. She slashed a glance at her father and noticed the hardening of his jaw, the determined set of his chin. Her mother had always said he was a stubborn man.

  “I’m making no excuses, Bliss. Never claimed to be a knight in shining armor. Sure, I’ve made my share of mistakes just like Brynnie said. But then what man, or woman for that matter, hasn’t?”
r />   Bliss cast a mental glance at her own fractured love-life. Her first and, really, only love had been Mason Lafferty, and surely that relationship had been doomed from the start. With trembling hands, she lifted her glass and took a sip of tea. The cool liquid slid down her throat as she pushed Mason from her mind and concentrated on her father who had taken out his pocketknife and was avoiding her gaze as he cleaned his fingernails with a sharp blade.

  “Unfortunate as it is, Blissie, your ma’s gone now and Brynnie’s divorced. Seems as if we’re finally gettin’ a break and this time we’re gonna grab it. It’s about time.”

  “Amen,” Brynnie said and reached over to pat John’s hand. Her rings sparkled in the sunlight and Bliss couldn’t help but wonder how many of the jeweled bands had been given to her on her various wedding days by her ex-husbands and which, if any, had been gifts from her secret lover.

  Brynnie’s smile seemed genuine and for the first time Bliss caught a glimmer of what her father saw in a woman who was so unlike her socially upstanding and rigid mother. Brynnie seemed like someone who could roll with the punches and always land on her feet. Nonjudgmental. No false sense of pride. No matter what challenges life tossed this woman’s way, Bliss guessed that Brynnie handled them and managed to end up grinning.

  “I, uh, I hope you’re happy,” Bliss said, more for the sake of conversation than from conviction. In truth, hadn’t everyone suffered enough? Reluctantly she conceded her father his point. It was time to make a stand, to recognize his other daughters, to find a place for all his family. She just wasn’t sure that she could be a part of it.

  “We will be happy, won’t we, darlin’?” Her father nodded and his mouth turned up at the corners.

  “Absolutely. That’s all there is to life, isn’t it? Being happy.” Brynnie appeared to relax a little, although she avoided looking directly into John’s eyes.

  “As long as you don’t hurt anyone in the process,” Bliss interjected.

  “Never intend to.” John was adamant.

  “Never,” Brynnie agreed, clearing her throat.

  Bliss couldn’t remember when she’d been more uncomfortable. She took another long swallow of the tea and watched several honey bees flit from one opening rose blossom to the next. In the lacy branches above them a squirrel scolded noisily, and off in the distance a horse’s whinny sounded over the rumble of a tractor chugging through the fields.

  “You know, there’s someone who’s pretty darned anxious to meet you.” Brynnie reached into a worn suede bag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind?” she asked, and Bliss shook her head. “Good. I know it’s a nasty habit and I should quit, but . . . Oh, well, what can I say? I just love to smoke.” She shook out a long white filter tip, lit up and waved out her match. “My daughter, Katie, is dying to talk to you.”

  “Is she?” Bliss’s stomach knotted. This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To see her half-sister, even if it meant coming face-to-face with the fact that her father had been unfaithful to her mother. She found a little bit of pride deep in her own innards and managed to force some starch into her backbone. “I’d like to meet her, too.”

  The minute the words were out, Bliss regretted them. This was all happening way too fast. She sensed that she’d just hopped aboard an emotional freight train that was suddenly careening out of control.

  “Good.” Brynnie’s grin was infectious. “I’ll let her know and we’ll set something up. If you’re lucky you’ll get to know her son Josh, as well.” Brynnie’s eyes sparkled. “My first and only grandchild so far, though I’m counting on a dozen more.” She sighed and tapped ash onto the lawn. “I’m afraid that Josh, devil that he is, has got Grandma’s heart twisted around his little finger.”

  “Several times,” John said with a chuckle as the telephone rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Bliss said, starting to stand, but her father, already on his feet, waved her back to her chair.

  “Stay put. I’m expecting a call.”

  As she watched Bliss’s father close the screen door behind him, Brynnie drummed her fingers nervously on the armrest of her plastic deck chair. “I worry about him, you know,” she admitted, then dragged hard on her cigarette. “He makes light of that heart attack, but you can’t convince me it was nothing. If it wasn’t, he wouldn’t have had to suffer through that god-awful surgery.” She eyed the glowing end of her cigarette, then frowned regretfully. “I’ll have to give these up,” she decided, her brow furrowing. “I hate to, but I can’t have them around the house tempting him.” She slid Bliss a conspiring glance. “I guess I’ll have to sneak one now and again. Just because I’m gonna get married, I can’t give up all my vices.” She bit anxiously on the corner of her lip. “This place . . . all the worries and work here, it’s too much for him, don’t you think?”

  “I guess so. But he loves it.”

  “Lord, don’t I know? But his health is the main thing, my big worry. He can’t expect to put in fifteen- or even ten-hour days around here.”

  “No . . .” Bliss agreed, wondering where the conversation was leading.

  “He’s just got to sell.” She took another nervous puff.

  Bliss laughed. “I thought you knew him better than that.”

  “He just needs to be convinced.” Brynnie licked her lips. “I guess that’s my job. Uh-oh, now who’s riling him up?” she asked as John’s voice filtered through the screen door.

  “Dammit!” The receiver crashed into its cradle and the door was flung open so hard it banged against the house. “What the hell’s going on?” John demanded.

  “Now, honey,” Brynnie said as she squashed her cigarette in the grass with the sole of her sandal.

  “I can’t believe you went behind my back,” he charged.

  “Oh, Lordy.”

  “So it’s true!”

  “John, just listen,” Brynnie placated.

  “To what?” Bliss was missing something—something important.

  “I got off the phone with my attorney and he’s been checking some things out with the county—the deeds and titles and records.” Her father’s expression was thunderous and he looked more like the hard-driven man she’d known as a girl. “It seems that my fiancée here has been doing some business that I didn’t know anything about.”

  “I can explain,” Brynnie said.

  “You sold my ranch to Lafferty.”

  “My half,” she said, standing and lifting a reddish eyebrow that dared him to argue the point “And I’d do it again. Like that!” She snapped her fingers.

  “Wait a minute,” Bliss interjected. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple. I deeded over part of the ranch to Brynnie for her and Katie—security if anything happened to me—and now I find out that she sold her parcel to Lafferty.”

  Bliss didn’t move.

  “John, now, don’t get upset,” Brynnie suggested.

  “I’m already upset. Way past it, in fact. I think it’s time you told me what the hell’s goin’ on.” His face was a mask of raw anger, his lips tight over his teeth.

  “I—I had to do something. While you were in Seattle, in a hospital bed because of your heart, I had a lot of time to think,” Brynnie began, her fingers nervously scratching her throat. “Oh, Lord, I need another cigarette.”

  “Just finish.” John scowled darkly, as if he were already reading his fiancée’s mind.

  “All right, I will. The truth of the matter is that I’ve spent too many years waiting for you as it is and I don’t want to lose you. That heart attack scared me and I thought, well, I knew that you’d come back here and work yourself to death, so I . . . I knew that Mason was moving back here to be closer to his daughter. He’d always been interested in the place, so I called him up and sold my part of the ranch to him.”

  “Just like that,” he challenged.

  “Just like that.” Brynnie didn’t back down.

  “I expected as much from him, but not from you, Brynnie. Never yo
u. He hornswoggled you, didn’t he?”

  Brynnie swallowed back the tears in her throat. “No, John,” she said. “This was all my idea.”

  John lowered himself onto a bench pushed up against the house. “But you know how much this place means to me.”

  “I’m hoping I mean more,” Brynnie said, her chin trembling as she dabbed at her eyes with her fingertips.

  John shook his head and Bliss decided they needed to be alone to sort this all out. “I need to drive into town,” she said, “for some supplies. I’m setting up an office in the den and this looks like a good time. You two need to talk. Alone.”

  “No, please,” Brynnie said. “Don’t run off, we’ll work this out—”

  Bliss smiled and lied through her teeth. “I’m sure. Listen, it was great to finally meet you, but, really, I’ve got to go. Bye, Dad” With a wave, she hurried into the house and grabbed her purse.

  She was going to drive into town, all right, but her trip had nothing to do with supplies. Nope. She was going to track Mason Lafferty down and get the straight story.

  If the man was capable of anything other than lies.

  Chapter Five

  Bliss jammed on the parking brake in the shade of an ancient oak tree and as the engine of her Mustang cooled, she tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Some of her anger should have dissipated during the drive into town, but it hadn’t and even though she took the time to call the phone company and locate Mason’s apartment, here in this huge Victorian manor, she was still ready to read him the riot act.

  Who was he to think that he could deal with Brynnie behind her father’s back? Why in the world was he so interested in the ranch? For once John Cawthorne was right There were dozens of other ranches Mason could purchase; all he had to do was talk to a real-estate agent or two.

  “Bastard,” she muttered as she climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut. She strode up the front walk, past a rose garden and a sign that advertised an apartment for rent. On the front porch, she punched the bell and heard the peal of melodic chimes.