It was Thursday, and she had been on Killara for three weeks. It didn’t seem possible. Neither did the fact that she and Burke had been lovers for a week, until she recalled the sweetness of their lovemaking during the night. That had been very real.
She had finally allowed Burke to have one of his men drive her rental car back to Tucson. It had seemed important to him and so she had given in. Funny.
She should try to go back to sleep, she told herself, but she knew the effort would be useless. It wouldn’t be long until dawn, and lately she had found it impossible to sleep once the sun was up. Strange how the rhythms of her body seemed to respond to the sun... and to Burke. Two natural forces, with Burke the more powerful of the two.
Suddenly a shrill, piercing alarm penetrated the stillness of the bedroom. Burke awakened instantly, and within seconds was across the room, checking the state-of the-art control device that indicated a crisis somewhere within the Delaney empire.
One glance told him what he needed to know. “Damn! It’s Shamrock.” He reached for his pants. “Cara, press the number ten on the phone and tell whoever answers to have the helicopter warmed up. I’m flying to Shamrock.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He was already stepping into his boots, but he paused to throw her a reassuring glance. “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Rafe probably decided to throw a party.”
“A party! At this hour?”
“You don’t know Rafe.”
“Stop trying to protect me, Burke. Bridget told me those alarms meant definite trouble.”
He walked over to her. “The point is, sweetheart, I don’t want you worrying.” He bent down and dropped a firm kiss on her lips. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Now, make that call for me and then go back to sleep. Promise?”
Reluctantly she nodded. He rewarded her with a smile, grabbed a shirt, and left the room.
Cara made the call, then lay in bed a long time, staring at the ceiling. Sleep refused to return. Finally she got up and dressed. By the time she walked into the kitchen, Bridget and Cougar were already there. One look told her that Cougar wasn’t happy.
“Cougar, shouldn’t you have gone to Shamrock with Burke?”
“He told me to stay here.”
“You should have talked to him, convinced him.”
Bridget set a hot cup of coffee in front of Cara, then joined them at the table.
“Burke is a little hard to talk to when he’s on a dead run.” Cougar had no intention of telling her that he, too, felt as though he should have gone with Burke. There had been a brief argument between the two of them, but it hadn’t taken long for Burke to win. He always won, Cougar thought with a mixture of exasperation and respect. “Besides, I would have only been in the way. When the Delaney brothers are together, they’re practically unconquerable.”
“Oh, honestly!” she exclaimed in disgust. “What is it with these three brothers? This is the second time Burke has run off to help one or the other of his brothers. Are constant emergencies the norm with them?”
Still trying to ease Cara’s mind, Cougar grinned. “It’s a little hard for people to understand. I sometimes think they create emergencies just so they can see one another more often.”
Cara wasn’t fooled. “You’re just trying to make me feel better.”
“You’ll understand what I mean when you see them together.”
“I hope I get the opportunity.” She looked down into her coffee cup, thinking how fast her time with Burke seemed to be passing.
“You will.” Cougar insisted, misinterpreting her response. “Burke can take care of himself.”
“Would you like some breakfast, Cara?” Bridget asked.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You should eat,” the older woman said firmly, “then maybe take a nap.” She appealed to Cougar. “She doesn’t sleep nearly enough, now does she?”
His dark eyes took on a twinkle. “Maybe she’s found something she likes to do better.”
Bridget’s face colored a flaming red, right up to the roots of her hair.
“Would you two mind not discussing me as if I weren’t here?”
“I’m sorry, Cara, but I can’t resist teasing Bridget. I’ve never seen a woman blush quite as prettily as Bridget.”
“Prettily?” Bridget harrumphed. “If you’re not full of the blarney, Mr. Jones, then I have never known anyone who was, have I now?”
“I’ll leave,” Cara said.
“No!”
“No, don’t leave,” Cougar said, agreeing with Bridget. “It’ll probably be some time before we hear anything. Why don’t you go for a ride? Or a swim?”
“No.”
Cougar shook his head in a helpless gesture, causing his hair to fan out over his shoulders, then settle back down. “Listen, Cara. Burke paused only long enough to tell me that I was to watch out for you and see that you didn’t worry. Now, that was important to him, and I intend to do just what he told me to do. The best way I know is to keep you busy. So if you’re not going to eat or ride or swim, what would you like to do?”
Wide gray eyes turned on Cougar. “Wait for Burke.”
His jaw clenched in frustration. Women! Would he ever understand them?
Bridget didn’t like to see Cougar so upset. She intervened. “Cara, there’s something else you could do. It might be a good time to walk over to the ranch business office. Mr. Burke asked them to check and see if they kept any of your da’s belongings, and it turned out they did.”
“They have some things of my dad’s? Why didn’t Burke tell me about this?”
“Mr. Burke didn’t want to mention it to you until he knew for sure the office had kept them. He didn’t want you to be disappointed, now did he? I’m sure he would have told you this morning but for the emergency at Shamrock.”
“But what could the office have?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure if Mr. Burke would approve of me telling you this while he’s away, but I reason that you need something to get your mind off what’s going on at Shamrock, and this is as good as anything, now isn’t it?”
Cara wasn’t sure about that and remained silent.
Bridget took her hand. “I can imagine how you must feel, can’t I? Your da, he just couldn’t stand losing you and your mother. And he went through a lot of changes after you left, none of them good. But I know for a fact that he loved you, now don’t I?”
“No.” Cara said quietly. “That’s not right, Bridget. He didn’t love me.”
“Why, of course, he did!” Bridget exclaimed, quite shocked. “What are you talking about? Didn’t I use to visit him, there in his last days when he was so sick? And didn’t I listen over and over again to what a grand young lady you must be? He was very proud of you, you know.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense!”
“Why don’t I walk you over to the office?” Cougar suggested. “Let’s see what they’ve kept.”
* * *
The office was situated in a modern building very near the stables. All of the ranch’s operations were computerized and controlled from here. As they stepped inside, Cara remembered the day Burke had shown her around the offices. He had laughed and said. “I sometimes wonder what old Shamus would say if he could see Killara now.” There had been pride in his voice... and strength. She wished he were here with her now.
At the sound of their entrance an extremely efficient-looking young man ambled in from an adjoining office. Cara recalled that Burke had introduced him to her as Steven Whitehead. Burke had confided that Steven had a master’s degree in business administration from M.I.T., but that he had never been happy with corporate life in the big city. As soon as the job of business manager for Killara had come open, Burke had transferred him from the administrative offices of Delaney Enterprises on the eighteenth floor of Delaney Tower to the ranch. It was an arrangement that had turned out to suit both parties extremely well.
&n
bsp; “Good morning, Cara. How nice to see you again.” His gaze switched to Cougar, and his smile immediately faded. It took a brave man to smile at Cougar Jones unless you knew him well. “Mr. Jones. Can I help you?”
As usual, Cougar spared no words in getting right to the point. “We understand that you have some belongings of Cara’s father here. She would like to see them.”
“Oh, certainly. Cara, why don’t you take a seat at the desk over there”—he pointed toward the comer of the room—“and I’ll bring the box out for you.”
“She’ll need privacy.”
Steven looked as if Cougar had taken two inches of skin off his back with his deadly quiet words. “Of course. I should have thought of it myself. Cara, you’re welcome to use my office. Just go on in and make yourself comfortable and I’ll bring the box in to you.”
A few minutes later Cara was sitting alone, staring at a medium-sized cardboard box. Not very big when she considered it was all that was left of a man’s life—her father’s life. Carefully she lifted the lid from the box and set it aside. Her eyebrows came together in a puzzled frown. She didn’t know what she had expected to find, but certainly not letters.
There were two stacks, and each stack was tied with a piece of string. She lifted one stack out and saw that her handwriting appeared on the first envelope. Flipping through them, she saw that they were all the letters she had written to him over the years.
With trembling fingers she untied the string and spread the envelopes out. They had turned yellow with the years. Fumbling, she reached into one of the envelopes and drew out the letter. The thin sheets of paper had been folded and refolded so many times, in certain places the words written on them had begun to fade. Her words. The words she had thought her father had read once at most and then thrown away. There had even been times when she had wondered if he had read them at all.
She put the one stack of letters aside and reached for the other. These were written in her father’s heavy scrawl, and her heart nearly ceased its beating when she realized what they were. They were his answers to her letters.
Slowly she began to read, and the long years of separation rolled away as she listened to her father tell her of his loneliness and pain. In his own words she heard him tell her how much he missed her, how much he wanted to see her, but that he felt it was best that she stay in Europe with her mother. He wrote that he didn’t want to expose her to his agony over the divorce. Just because he hadn’t been able to accept it didn’t mean he didn’t want her to, he said. She had a new, better life, and he wanted her to remember him always as the happy, healthy man he had been when the three of them had lived together on Killara.
Something wet hit her hand, and she realized tears were streaming down her face. She dashed them away with the palm of her hand and reached for more of his letters and discovered the Christmas and birthday cards he had bought for her every year until he had died. The stamped, addressed envelopes showed her how much he must have wanted to be able to mail them to her. Private demons had kept him from it. She knew all about demons.
“Oh, Daddy,” she cried softly. “If only I had known. If only I had understood. I would have tried harder. I would have.”
Her hands ran caressingly over the scrawled words. Surrounded by her father’s letters, she wasn’t even aware of time passing until the door of the office opened and Burke walked in, and then she realized that she must have been there for hours.
In an instinctive reaction Cara flew into his arms. “I’m so glad you’re home!”
“You’ve been crying,” he murmured, holding her to him with a fierce protectiveness. “They shouldn’t have showed you your father’s things until I got back.”
“It’s all right.” She raised tear-drenched eyes to him. “Really. It was something I had to face alone.” She pulled back and for the first time took in his appearance. Lines of strain had been etched into his face during the hours they had been apart, and his clothes were blackened and smelled of smoke. “Are you okay? Your clothes! What happened at Shamrock?”
“Everything’s fine. I’ll tell you about it later. Right now I want to know what’s happened with you.” As he talked, he led her to the leather couch that sat along one wall of the office. He was aware that he was scowling, but he didn’t even try to stop. It was totally unacceptable to him that Cara should be crying.
“Burke, my father loved me. He really loved me! He wrote me and told me so, it’s just that he never mailed the letters.”
“Why not?”
“You’d have to read the letters to completely understand. They show his deterioration, both physically and mentally. And by the way, they also talk about what you did for him, keeping him on when someone else would have fired him.”
“Don’t give me credit where it’s not due, Cara. I would have done the same for any longtime employee.”
“That doesn’t lessen what you did for him. And it speaks very loudly about the type of man you are.” She had too much on her mind to sit still. She jumped up and walked to the window. “I only wish I could have done something for him. I was his daughter. It was my place to help him. I gave up too soon.”
“I refuse to let you blame yourself. You were only a young girl. There was no way you could have understood what was happening.”
“I should have tried harder.”
“It wouldn’t have done any good.”
She whirled around. “How do you know? How does anyone know? Maybe one more letter from me would have made the difference. That one extra letter might have given him the courage to mail one of these letters or cards.”
A severe frown grooved lines across Burke’s forehead. “How many years did you write him? Six, seven years? That’s a long time for one so young and so sensitive to be continually rebuffed. You must realize that it wasn’t your fault. You have to remember I saw your father during those years. We tried to help him, but no one could reach him. There’s no point in tormenting yourself over this, Cara. Self-recriminations at this point are useless.”
Her shoulders slumped. “I suppose you’re right. Still, I’ll never be quite sure about whether one more letter would have made the difference or not, will I?”
After what he’d been through at Shamrock, he couldn’t tolerate even the few feet of office space separating them. He went to her. “Cara, I can’t stand to see you unhappy. Dwell on the good that’s come out of this. You know now that your father really did love you.”
And maybe, he thought silently, pulling her into his arms, this new knowledge would restore a sense of balance to her and give them a chance for a real life together.
Seven
“Dammit, Burke! I should have known! There’s no excuse for what happened!”
Cara was sitting in the corner of the study watching Cougar stride back and forth in front of Burke, who was sitting behind his desk. Cougar was an impressive sight, as his magnificent hair whipped about his shoulders and seemed almost to quiver with his anger. But in her opinion, he was no match for Burke.
An ominous rage smoldered beneath Burke’s stillness. An elbow rested casually on the arm of his chair, but the hand of that arm was clenched into a fist. He was staring out the window, to all intents and purposes looking at the scenery. But Cara had seen those eyes before they had turned to the window, and she knew the green depths contained a dark wrath.
“Don’t blame yourself. I underestimated the man too.” His voice was low, quiet, but with an underlying vibration that gave his words an earsplitting intensity. “Davis lured me away from the security of Killara. You couldn’t have foreseen his plan. No one could have.”
“But I should have! When I think about York—”
Burke swung his chair around. “It wasn’t serious, Cougar. And Rafe’s loss was trivial.”
“You have to let me call in the police.”
“Absolutely not. We’ve handled things like this before, and we will this time too. I had more than my share of banner headlines during t
he trial. The last thing I want is even more of the blasted media swarming around us. They and the police would only complicate matters.”
Cougar cursed under his breath. “Davis wants you bad, Burke, and he’s cunning.”
“Then pull out all the stops. Put every available resource at our command on this and then get more.” Slowly Burke stood up and he leaned toward Cougar. His hands splayed flat on the desk, supporting his weight: the Delaney emerald showed prominently. “That bastard used a gun against my family.”
Cougar looked at Burke for a moment, nodded, then turned and left. Burke settled back in his chair and rested his forehead in the palm of his hand.
His distress drew Cara to his side. “Are you all right, Burke?” He didn’t answer her, and she went down on her knees in front of him. “Burke?”
He raised his head. “I’m just so damn mad. York or Rafe could have been seriously hurt because of me.”
“For heaven’s sake! You worry about everyone but yourself. You could have been killed, or hasn’t that possibility even occurred to you?”
A small smile began to play around the corners of his mouth at her indignation on his behalf. “To tell you the truth, no. Now that I have you, I refuse to let anything happen to me.”
Her brief spurt of anger died away and a tingling warmth took its place. “Now that you have me?” It wasn’t so long ago that such possessive talk would have sent her running. Without analyzing the reasons, she moved closer. She lay her forearms along his thighs.
“I guess I shouldn’t have said that.” He rubbed his brow. “I don’t really have you. Just because we’re lovers, it doesn’t mean you’re mine, does it?”
Perhaps it was because of the emotional trauma he had gone through at Shamrock, Cara thought, but he had suddenly sounded so sad.
A surge of tenderness swept through her. “Come on. Why don’t you go upstairs and take a shower? I’ll go with you.”
He smiled wearily. “Will you scrub my back?”
“Absolutely.”
Burke, the Kingpin (The Shamrock Trinity) Page 10
