Sun Kissed

by Catherine Anderson

  Tucker gazed after Samantha until she reached the personnel door and disappeared outside. Then he turned to look at Clint. The man stood with his boots braced wide apart, all his anger seemingly gone, replaced by what now appeared to be hopeless regret. He was pinching the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed. An ashen pallor tinted his sun-bronzed face.

  “Damn it,” he whispered. “Why is it I can never get it right with her?”

  Tucker glanced uneasily at his brother. Isaiah met his gaze for a moment and then bent his head to dig at the straw with his boot heel.

  “Judging by what you just said, you think Samantha’s ex-husband did this to her horses?” Tucker was hoping for clarification and possibly Clint’s reasons for suspecting the man.

  Clint lowered his hand from his eyes, curled his thumbs over his belt, and nodded. “I don’t think; I know.” He gestured with his head. “And so does she.”

  Tucker rechecked the IV drip and patted Tabasco on the rump. “By law I have to report this, Clint. It appears that two horses have been deliberately poisoned. If you’ve got sound reasons for thinking it was her ex-husband, I’d like to hear them.”

  “She divorced him a little over a year ago, and there was a bitter court battle over the assets. Steve married her for her money, and when she finally wised up and sent him packing, he went after half of everything she had.”

  Tucker nodded to indicate that he was following.

  “Normally that’s fair,” Clint continued. “Two people get hitched, and they acquire assets together. But Samantha already had her inheritance when Steve came into the picture. That was what attracted the bastard to her in the first place.”

  Tucker could think of many other things about Samantha that would attract a man, but he held his tongue.

  Clint swung a hand to indicate the ranch. “When each of us kids turned twenty-one, our father gave us an equal share of his land and a hefty sum of money to start our own horse-breeding businesses.”

  “And this guy Steve wanted half of Samantha’s share?” Isaiah asked.

  “He damned near got half.” Clint’s jaw muscles bunched. “I talked myself blue trying to get her to make him sign a prenup agreement. But would she listen? Hell, no. She was young and in love, with stars in her eyes. The way she saw it, asking him to sign an agreement would have been a slap in his face and a betrayal of their love for each other. So when the marriage went bust, he got half of almost everything. The only thing the judge refused to split down the middle was the inventory. Samantha’s horses, in other words. They were hers before the marriage, and they were the backbone of her business. Steve had his rodeo stints to bring in an income. The judge felt it was only fair to leave Samantha with some way to support herself, too.

  “Steve was so pissed he couldn’t see straight,” Clint went on. “These horses are worth more than you can imagine, hundreds of thousands. One of Sammy’s regular foals can’t be touched for less than sixty grand, and that was before Blue Blazes won the cutting horse competition a couple of weeks ago.

  “Right after the hearing, Steve waited for her on the courthouse steps,” Clint said, his voice quavering at the memory. “He was so fit to be tied by the judge’s mandate that he forgot himself and got in her face, swearing on all that was holy to make her regret leaving him. I had a lot of pent-up anger.” Clint shrugged. “If you don’t have a baby sister, you just can’t know how I hated the rotten bastard. But there I go, justifying my actions. I decked him, plain and simple. He wasn’t going to bully my sister again, not on my watch, so I tore into him. My dad and brothers had to pull me off.”

  Tucker nodded. “I hope you whaled the snot out of him.” Just the thought of someone bullying Samantha, and possibly even striking her, made Tucker’s blood pressure go up several points. “It sounds like he had it coming.”

  Clint studied the sick stallion through narrowed, glittering eyes. “Evidently I didn’t whale on him quite enough, not if he worked up the gumption to do this. Spineless, sneaky, backstabbing asshole. I’m gonna take him apart.”

  Tucker could only imagine how deep and hot Clint’s anger ran. “We aren’t sure Steve Fisher did it yet,” he tried.

  Clint cut him a disgusted look. “Maybe you aren’t. I know him. I know how he thinks. In his mind, Samantha cheated him out of what was rightfully his, so now he means to kill her horses. It doesn’t matter that he walked away with more than his fair share, or that my sister had to borrow over a million dollars from our father to settle up with him instead of selling this place. All he cares about is what he didn’t get. So he figures she won’t have it, either.”

  “You need to keep a clear head, partner.”

  It was Isaiah who spoke, and the unexpected comment brought Clint’s head around and some sanity back into his dark eyes.

  “Tucker and I have a sister, too,” Isaiah elaborated, “and we’re a close-knit family. If anybody ever hit her or hurt her like this, we’d want to beat the hell out of him, no question about it.”

  Clint nodded his approval, and Isaiah’s face broke into one of his famous grins. “But wanting to do something is different from actually doing it. You know? If you lay a hand on the guy, he’ll file charges against you.”

  “Not if he’s dead, he won’t.”

  Isaiah shook his head. “You’re not a killer. You’d just mess him up real bad and leave him to lick his wounds. And the first thing you’d know, the cops would be hauling you away to the hoosegow. It’s better to keep a clear head and go after him through the appropriate channels. If he did this, the police will find evidence to prove it.”

  “He covered his ass,” Clint insisted. “Trust me on that. He’s a saddle tramp, but he’s a smart saddle tramp. They won’t find anything that points to him.”

  Samantha huddled in the corner of an outdoor stall where the fading moonlight didn’t reach her. It was dark, and it was quiet, and she needed the privacy as much as she needed the air to breathe. She couldn’t believe that her brother had said all that in front of two strangers, particularly Tucker. She didn’t want him to know she’d remained in an abusive marriage for five years. On a scale of one to ten, the shame of it went clear off the chart.

  She’d watched all the talk-show debates about battered women. She knew how cruelly they were stereotyped and had heard the clinical experts wax poetic on their theories. Women like that were sick. They were game players. They were trying to satisfy a deep, quirky, psychotic need to be punished. They fell in love with men like their abusive fathers, trying to reenact their childhoods and finally come out winners. They were helplessly attracted to brutal, bullish individuals because being knocked around turned them on.

  Only where did she fit into all their hypotheses? She’d never been abused as a child. Just the opposite. She’d been well loved by her father and adored by her brothers. At bedtime almost every night her dad had knelt with her to say her prayers before he tucked her in, and then he’d read to her until she fell asleep. On those rare occasions when he’d been too busy, her brothers had filled in for him. She could still remember Zachary, only two years her senior, trying to read her The Night Before Christmas when he’d been barely old enough to make out the words. She’d been loved, damn it. She’d been cherished. There was nothing within her that had ever gone looking for punishment because she had some irrational, perverted need to suffer.

  Why couldn’t the experts understand that nothing was ever as simple as they wanted to paint it? Marriage, for instance. Where in their theories did they allow for deep religious convictions that forbade divorce? Where in their theories did they explore habits and beliefs and behaviors and doctrines that had been drilled into a woman all her life? And where in their theories did they allow for the possibility that some women were simply too proud to quit or too humiliated to admit to the world that they’d made a stupid mistake?

  In her case, all of those things had applied, with an additional dash of pure terror that Steve would follow through with his th
reat to take half of everything her father had worked and sweated all his life to give her. Yes, she’d remained in the marriage. In the beginning she’d honestly believed Steve’s need for other women was due to something lacking in her, and she’d tried exhaustively to please him. Cooking. Dressing up for him at night. Never contradicting him in front of others when he made a poor business decision.

  She’d known he was an alcoholic. Right after he got a ring on her finger and consummated their marriage, the booze had come out of the closet. Some evenings he would pick a fight with her just to have an excuse to storm from the house, and then he’d come back in the wee hours of the morning, reeking of whiskey and another woman, so drunk he could barely walk.

  Toward the end, the physical abuse had begun. Just a light slap across her mouth when they argued. Just a push to set her off balance when he got mad. It hadn’t been serious at first. But then he had escalated, sometimes breaking dishes, sometimes dragging her up the stairs when he wanted sex and she was too furious or hurt by his constant infidelities to sleep with him. And finally the beatings.

  Samantha lifted her face to the sky and let the breeze cool her hot cheeks as she remembered those times. She hadn’t remained in the marriage for very long after the violence began, but looking back, she realized now that even a day would have been too long. It had done something to her way deep inside, snuffed out something that had once been clear and bright. Innocence, she guessed. She’d gone into the marriage believing in love, marriage, commitment, and forever.

  And why not? Her father had taught her by example to believe in all those things. To this day, nearly thirty years after her mother had died giving birth to her, he still never looked at another woman. He’d found his one true love—his sweet, precious Emily—and he’d told Samantha more than once that he could never settle for anything less. Her mother had been his everything, and if he looked for fifty years, he’d never find anyone else quite like her.

  “Samantha?”

  At the sound of her name, she gave a violent jerk. Tucker. The yard light shining behind her limned him in shimmering brightness, defining his sharply chiseled features with shadows and frosting his hair with silver. He stood at the opposite side of the rail gate, looking in at her. There were twelve outdoor holding areas. How on earth had he found her?

  “You startled me.”

  He nodded and folded his arms over the gate, one knee bent, his other leg stretched out behind him. “I’m sorry. I need to talk to you.”

  “About?”

  “Tabasco. Come morning, I’d like to take him to my clinic. I’ll be able to monitor his kidney and liver functions more closely there. I want to make arrangements with Isaiah before he leaves to come back with our trailer in the morning.”

  “I have a trailer. I can transport him.”

  “I’m sure you have a top-notch trailer, but ours is sort of special.”

  From somewhere out in the stable yard, Isaiah hollered, “Tucker’s version of a horse ambulance! The only thing it lacks is a siren and lights.”

  Tucker huffed and sighed. “Brothers. Don’t you love ’em? I’ve spent half my life pretending he isn’t related to me.”

  Samantha giggled. The sound burst from her, as unexpected as it was inappropriate, but somehow it felt wonderfully good.

  “You’re hearing me,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, I’m hearing you exactly. It’s pretty awful, isn’t it, with the family resemblance to contend with?”

  “Family resemblance?” Isaiah yelled something else that was indecipherable. Tucker grunted and swore under his breath. “Try having a twin. Then you’ve got real resemblance issues.”

  In the darkness, a poor imitation of a siren’s wail rose toward the moon. Tucker listened for a moment and then shook his head. “Do you have a gun? I’ll put him out of his misery.”

  She laughed again. “Only a shotgun for rattlesnakes. It’d be messy.”

  “True.” He shifted his weight and threaded his fingers through his hair. “And if his conjoined-twin theory holds water, I’d probably be lost without him.”

  Samantha could empathize with that sentiment, too. For all her grumping about Clint, she loved him dearly and wouldn’t know what to do without him in her life. She sighed softly, allowing some of her anger to slip away.

  “So what’s the real story on the horse ambulance?” she asked.

  “I just have our trailer set up to transport sick equines. Took the divider out, for one thing, to create one wide stall. Tabasco’s weak. If he goes down, there’s room for him to rest comfortably. I also installed hooks and clips so I can keep him on the IV.”

  Samantha pushed erect. Her feet had gone numb, and needles pricked her heels as she walked toward him. “Sounds pretty high-tech to me. All right, sure, let’s use your trailer. That will be better for him.”

  Tucker motioned the okay to Isaiah, and a moment later she heard a truck door slam closed, followed by the rumbling ignition of a diesel engine. Tucker drew open the gate for her; then they walked together back toward the arena. In the distance, she could hear Isaiah’s pickup going thump-ka-chunk, his headlights sending bobbing flashes of yellow light into the sky behind the buildings.

  “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” Tucker said.

  Samantha hadn’t really noticed. “Yes, gorgeous.”

  He opened the personnel door and stood back for her to enter. After stepping in behind her, he said, “Blue is doing great. If he consumed the morphine around ten, like Jerome figures, I think he’s through the worst of it. He shouldn’t need any more naloxone.”

  “It may have been more like eleven when he actually got the cob,” she informed him. “Jerome was working alone, there are a lot of horses, and Blue’s stall is at the back.”

  Tucker fell into step beside her. “I still think he’s through the worst. Morphine wears off after four to six hours. He’s going to be fine now. If you’d like to grab some sleep, no worries. I’ll be here until Isaiah comes back with the trailer in a few hours.”

  Samantha had no intention of leaving Tabasco, and de spite what Tucker said, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving Blue yet, either. “I’m fine. Raising horses, you get used to going without sleep.” She rubbed her palms dry on the legs of her jeans. “Tucker?”

  He tipped his dark head to regard her. “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry about the scene with my brother. I’m sure it was as uncomfortable for you and Isaiah as it was for me.”

  His blue eyes twinkled warmly down at her. “That was a scene? You should be around my family.”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no. I have it on good authority that we Harrigans hold the all-time record for creating scenes.”

  “Not true. Enter the Coulter clan. Six kids, five of us married, and of those five, most of them starting to have kids. My older brother, Zeke, married a singer and nightclub owner with two kids and a zany extended family whose sister, Valerie, once arrived at a family gathering wearing a handkerchief skirt over a thong with a rhinestone in her navel.” At Samantha’s amazed look, he lifted his hands. “Would I lie to you? Then there’s Jake, six-foot-four in his stocking feet, who married Molly, a plump, whiskey-haired munchkin who now controls the financial portfolios of practically everyone in the family and isn’t shy about critiquing our spending habits during family dinners. Normally that might only make for interesting conversation, except for the fact that she’s got this amazing talent for ferreting out secrets and exposing them over the crème brûlée, like the time Zeke’s wife, Natalie, paid almost a thousand dollars to have his name tattooed inside a heart on the left cheek of her butt, and the tattoo artist got the spelling wrong.”

  Samantha gulped back a startled laugh. “You’re kidding.”

  “Who’d kid about something like that? Zeke was so upset he wanted to sue. It cost him another thousand bucks to get the first letter removed and redone. And I can’t forget my baby brother, Hank, whose wife has congenital cataracts and lattice dystrophy
. She’s early on in her second pregnancy, which could make her go temporarily blind again, so Hank is constantly blending algae-green protein shakes for her to drink and killing everyone’s houseplants.”

  She cocked her head. “Their houseplants?”

  He nodded. “Carly pours the shakes in a flowerpot every time Hank turns his back, and he blends the shakes at all of our houses. Not that I blame her. They smell like putrid seaweed. But he’s convinced Carly’s corneas will remain healthy if only she’ll drink the stuff four times a day. When he catches her dumping a drink into a planter, the fight is on, and in my family, any upheaval draws in at least half the people present. Trust me, the Coulter clan’s familial altercations are far more entertaining than anything the Harrigans could come up with.”

  Samantha momentarily wondered if he was stretching the truth to make her feel better, but then she decided the profiles were too outlandish to be fabricated on such short notice. Some of the tension eased from her shoulders.

  “It sounds as if you have a very interesting family.”

  “Interesting isn’t the word. You can’t imagine what it’s like when twelve to fourteen adults and X number of kids are all talking at once about how much it will cost to remove a D from my sister-in-law’s butt and replace it with a Z—or how pissed Zeke got when our mother, God bless her frugal soul, suggested they just leave the wrong man’s name on Natalie’s posterior because no one but Zeke would ever see it, anyway.”

  “I concede,” Samantha said with a laugh. She took a deep breath and slowly released it. “Your family definitely has mine beat, hands down. But please accept my apology. It was rude of both Clint and me to quarrel in front of you.”

  “Apology accepted. But I still maintain that you have nothing to apologize for. It’s been one hell of a night. Everyone’s tense. Tempers flare. It’s no big deal.”

  Tucker continued to move back and forth between the two horses for the remainder of the night, keeping a close eye on both animals’ vital signs. Staying awake gave him plenty of time to mull over all that Clint Harrigan had told him about Samantha’s past. No wonder the lady was so reluctant to let down her guard. She’d been hurt—very badly hurt, and in the worst possible way—by her husband.