Derek pushed through the crowd, ignoring the occasional woman who turned to say hello to him. He felt extremely uncomfortable, as they all seemed to be way too familiar with him. One girl put her hand on his arm. “Back so soon, Derek?” He brushed her off and didn’t answer.
He went straight up to the counter and spoke to the man behind the bar. “Hey, Jim. How’s life treating you?” He looked around uneasily.
“Pretty early for drinking, especially for you, Derek.” Jim raised his eyebrows as Derek leaned over the counter. “I thought you must have had so much last night that you’d be passed out for a week. You must be made of steel to be sobered up already. What did ya do? Go home and take a bath in a vat of coffee and get yerself all gussied up to come back and talk to me some more?” Jim threw his head back in laughter.
“What in tarnation are you talking about?” Derek hadn’t been anywhere near the saloon since he’d last come in with George.
“Well, I’ll be. I mean, lots of people forget their drunken stupors, but after all that bragging about how well you hold your whiskey, I did not expect you to be one of them.”
“Stop fooling around, Jim.” Derek glared at the man. “I wasn’t here last night, and you know it.”
“Of course, you were. You’ve been here nearly every night of the week, and you rented a room upstairs. That’s where I expected you to be right now, come to think of it.”
Realization began to dawn on Derek. This wasn’t the first time in his life he’d been accused of things he hadn’t done.
Before he went to find out exactly how true his assumptions were, he had to find out one more thing. He leaned a little closer to Jim. “Tell me, Jim, did I tell you about the father of Emilia, the girl that came to stay with the Carson family?”
“Of course, you did! You told everyone who would listen. You were laughing up a storm right there with all the boys. Took me by surprise, seeing as you never spent much time here and then, all of a sudden, just seeing you every night. I’m not judging, though. Sometimes, a man gets in a spot and comes in here to work things out. You know how it is.”
Derek shook his head in disgust. Now he knew who was behind Emilia’s secret being leaked. It was Luke who had spread the rumors around town. And what really made Derek mad is that his brother had done all of these things in Derek’s own name.
“You know, I never did understand one thing.” The man behind the bar was giving him a confused look.
“What’s that?”
“You seemed to really care about that girl. Why would you spread something like that around? You know that she won’t ever be seen the same by a lot of folks in town. It just doesn’t seem like something you would do.”
Derek wanted to punch a wall—or, even better, his brother. “It wasn’t me!” he shouted before Jim could interject what he was obviously thinking. Derek held up his hands. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but it wasn’t me. He just looks like me. Now, I believe I have someone to talk to in his room upstairs.”
Derek left the man shaking his head with a dumbfounded look on his face and hurried over to the staircase, taking three stairs at a time in his big strides. He had known that Luke leaving like that was much too easy. He had been suspicious of it all along, and he should have listened to his gut.
“Derek! It’s good to see you!” A man Derek didn’t recognize clapped him on the shoulder halfway up the stairs as he was passing.
Derek had a feeling that he wasn’t completely friendly by the warning look on his face. He stopped and turned to face the stranger.
“You, too… I’m not sure I remember—”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. You were as drunk as a horse when I won you at poker, but I still expect you to pay. After all, I beat you fair and square, and you know it.”
Derek’s stomach twisted and he felt as if he were going to throw up. What all had Luke done in his name?
Of course, he hadn’t told the people in town about his twin. He didn’t want to drag his family’s past history into his life here. Only George and the Carson family really knew anything about his family, and even they didn’t know much about it. They certainly weren’t aware he had a twin.
Derek groaned. “I have to go and talk to… someone, right now.” Derek didn’t care anymore. He would have to pay the man money he hadn’t gambled with, and he would have to apologize to people he hadn’t offended later. He just needed to sort out this mess.
“I know you’re good for it, and, well, if you’re not… well… I know where you live.” The man let out a barking laugh as Derek walked away. It made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like that he was being threatened. And he certainly didn’t want to endanger the Carson family.
This was Luke’s fault, and Derek planned to make sure that it never happened again. As he turned to go up the stairs again, someone touched him on the arm. Derek thought it was the man bugging him about his apparent gambling debt, but instead, he turned to find Janie standing there.
He was certainly surprised. He had never wanted to see Janie again, and it caught him off-guard.
He didn’t feel the attraction or the fondness he had once had for her. Instead, he felt anger and revulsion at the idea he had ever been planning to marry her. “Hello, Janie, what are you doing here?” Derek gestured around him.
As much as he disliked Janie, he never expected to see her in a saloon. It was no place for a lady, even one like Janie.
“They needed someone to help in the back and I needed the money.” Janie glanced away for a moment. Derek knew her well enough to know she was embarrassed.
He felt a smug smirk make its way onto his lips. “So, your other man needs help with the money?” Derek knew he shouldn’t make fun of someone in need, but he still felt slighted by Janie.
He had been preparing to share his life with her, to share everything with her, and she had been shopping around to find the best option for a man who would provide her with the most comfortable life.
“I’m not with him anymore.” Janie looked up at him and held his gaze, despite the fact that he didn’t want to look straight into her eyes.
“Well, I would congratulate him, but I don’t see him anywhere.”
“You don’t have to be so mean, you know. I realize that I did you wrong.” Janie put her lower lip out in a pout, a tactic Derek knew well. There had been a time when he would have cared and tried to make her happy.
But he knew better now. He knew all of her tricks to ensnare a man into doing her bidding, and he wasn’t ready to fall for any of them this time. He had other, more important things to take care of—like his brother, who was upstairs in this saloon instead of on a train back home.
“If you’ll excuse me, Janie, I have to—”
“Actually, I need to talk to you.” Her eyes were wide and pleading and she planted herself right in front of Derek as if to show that even if he turned her down, she wouldn’t let him pass until she’d had the moment she was asking for.
“Fine, but I’m in a tad of a hurry, so try to make it quick.” Derek knew he was being rude, and it made him feel uncomfortable. His parents had raised him to be a gentleman, or at least his mother had tried. And he liked to think of himself as gentlemanly, but Janie made that hard, if not impossible.
“I just wanted you to know how terribly sorry I am at how I treated you and that I know I made the biggest mistake of my life. I thought that leaving with… well, with him was what I wanted, but being away from you made me realize that I really loved you. I still do, Derek.”
Derek sucked in a breath. He was actually proud of the fact that her words had no effect on him.
“You want to get back together now.” Derek didn’t frame it as a question, it was easy to see what she wanted.
“If you’ll have me, I’ll make you the happiest man alive.” She fluttered her eyelashes and her red lips curled into a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“You know what, Janie? You already made me the h
appiest man alive once.”
Janie’s eyes lit up and her familiar smile of victory made her face glow. “I did?”
“Yes—by leaving me and showing me your true colors. If I had realized too late what your true intentions were, or who you really are, I don’t believe I’d have ever been happy again. You made your choice. Now, you get to see if it was the right one.”
Any traces of joy or triumph disappeared from Janie’s face. “I just need one more chance. I promise—”
“I’m sure that you have promised many people many things, Janie. You should try to start keeping those promises and maybe things will work out better for you in the future. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.”
For the first time in his years of knowing Janie, he could see she had nothing to say. She opened and closed her mouth as if she were a fish, pulled from the river and confused about how to breathe in its new environment. She had a look of utter shock on her pretty face.
He pushed his way between her and the wall and continued up the stairs without looking back.
Derek was surprised at how good he felt after the confrontation. He liked to avoid such situations when he could, but that had been one of the most satisfying things he’d done in quite some time.
Chapter 26
Derek almost expected to be stopped once again on his way to his brother’s room. After all, it seemed everyone in this saloon seemed to have it out for his brother, or in this case, him.
If he’d frequented the saloon more often, they probably would have figured out that there were two of him. But people who spent their time in the saloon usually stayed in the saloon. And people who didn’t frequent the saloon regularly only stopped by on a rare occasion.
The way things had worked out were certainly not in his favor. He stood in front of the door that Jim had indicated his brother was staying in and, with no mercy, began to pound on the door.
If Luke had consumed half of the whiskey everyone said he had, Derek knew the sound would be close to unbearable. “Luke! Open up!” he yelled.
He hated to draw attention, but he had a feeling that with the noise downstairs, few people would pay them any mind. After several more moments of consecutive banging, he heard some rustling on the other side of the door and the sound of things being knocked over as who he hoped was indeed Luke tried to make it to greet his visitor.
Finally, the door opened a bit and Derek found himself staring into Luke’s bloodshot eyes and tired face. He looked as if he had been up all night and hadn’t shaved in two or three days.The room was a mess and his breath smelled like rotten whiskey.
“Oh, goodness. Can my morning get any worse?” Luke groaned, slapping himself on the forehead. “What are you doing here, Derek?” he slurred.
Derek tried to contain his anger as he shoved through his brother’s door. Luke was standing there, or at least trying to, without a shirt. His pants were wrinkled, leading Derek to believe he had slept in them.
His hair was pointing every which way, and one side of his face had wrinkles folded into it from where he had been sleeping on his cheek.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here, Luke? What happened to leaving town? You came and said goodbye to me and everything. I should have known you were lying when you said you were going to leave.”
“Well, very good. You figured it out. Did you really think I was just going to waltz back home and leave you here? I need my life back. Derek and dear old Pa won’t let me lead it unless you come back and help with the family business. Help a brother out, would ya?”
“Why don’t you help yourself out by doing things yourself instead of depending on Pa to pay for it?” Derek responded with irritation.
“I could, except I don’t want to. I don’t want to do it myself. I want you to come and help me. I don’t know how to run the business by myself, and Pa just talks about, ‘If Derek was here,’ and, ‘Derek would do this and that.’ So, I need you to come back with me.”
“Why did you go and tell everyone about Emilia’s past? How did you even know she was here or who she was in the first place?” This had been bugging Derek. Of all the people that Luke could have picked to play one of his games with, it had to be Emilia.
“I followed you around, tried to see who your friends were. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was crazy Emilia herself who you’d grown attached to,” Luke taunted.
Derek shook his head, trying to keep his anger below the surface. “She is in no way crazy, and I am not attached to her.”
“Your attachment is obvious, brother. I remember her quite clearly from back home. Everyone knows her and her family’s tragic story. It wasn’t too hard to get people to think that you had spread the rumor. Has she found out about it yet? Tell me, what did she think of you when she found out you told everyone that her father died a crazy man?”
For a moment, Emilia’s anger at him surfaced again, making Derek itch to punch his brother. He remembered how she had been so ready to believe it was him who had told, but he forced the memory back. Luke wanted that. He wanted him to get mad at Emilia, and that wasn’t going to happen.
Of course, she would have thought it was him. After all, she didn’t even know Luke was in town. It wasn’t her fault that she had believed Derek responsible, with no proof to the contrary.
“She didn’t believe it was me. I told her it wasn’t, and she believed me because she trusts me.” Derek could see that his words momentarily affected Luke.
“She looked pretty upset when she left town.” Luke shrugged. “She’ll turn against you, eventually, you’ll see. Even though she believed you didn’t do it at first, she’ll ask around town and people will tell her that it was you.”
“Has it not occurred to you that I can just tell her that you’re in town?”
“But would you do that? If we ended up talking… well, she might find out more about the past than you would like. See, I might not know Emilia as well as you do, but I do know that she’s not the type to love someone who has let bad things happen, as you have. You let it happen and didn’t do anything about it. Do you think you’re the kind of man that she would want to be with, after that?”
Derek’s jaw clenched. He knew what Luke was threatening. He lived every day wishing that his family’s past was not intertwined with his own. He may not have been directly responsible for the accident, but he had known what had really happened.
He hadn’t spoken to the police and he didn’t testify against his father. He had just let everything get swept under the rug, just like his family had wanted.
“If it comes down to it, I will tell her you are in town and I’ll even tell her about the past. You are not going to ruin things between us, Luke, no matter how hard you try.”
“Then maybe I’ll stop trying.”
“I believed you once, but I doubt I can trust you again. You know what? I’m going there now. I’m going to find Emilia and tell her what’s happened. I can’t let this go on.” He moved toward the door, as if to walk out.
“You really think that she’s just going to believe everything that comes out of your mouth? Be careful, brother, or you’ll lose her.”
Derek was surprised that, for once, Luke’s words almost made sense. Maybe telling Emilia the full truth was a mistake.
He smothered a groan and turned back to once again face his tormenter. “I don’t know what your long-term game is here, Luke, but I suggest that you settle the debts that you’ve made in my name and get out of here before I tell this whole town who you really are. I’ve worked hard to build my reputation here and I’m not about to let you just come into my life and destroy it.”
An Enduring Love to Heal Her: A Historical Western Romance Book Page 20
