by Susan Crosby
“No onions,” Butch said. “I thought of that. Want that pronounce-you-man-and-wife kiss to be sweet.”
“Husband and wife,” Tony corrected, picking up a plate and passing it to his father, then grabbing one for himself. “Equal partners.”
Hoyt made a little sound, a kind of snort, but said nothing. Tony didn’t want to get into an argument with his father today, of all days, so he left it alone.
They settled at the dining table to eat first, then turned it into a poker table. A couple of hours flew by. Hoyt had barely uttered a word the whole time, only raise, stay or fold. He had the best poker face in the world. Could’ve made a good living at the game, Tony thought.
“You’re quiet, Butch,” Tony said, dealing another hand, finally realizing his foreman had been as quiet as his father.
Butch shrugged. “One day of this was entertaining. I’m ready to be home.”
Tony knew exactly what he meant.
“Yep, this celebrity business is wearisome,” Cal said dramatically. “People at your beck and call, and you don’t even have to pay for anything except a tip now and then. Want some food? Pick up the phone. Need extra towels, all white and fluffy and big? Pick up the phone. It’s killing me.” He grinned and started the bidding for the next round with a ten-dollar chip.
Grady tossed in his own. “I’m kinda surprised the press hasn’t given you and Maggie one of those combo names, you know, mixing your first names so they don’t have to say both of ’em?”
Butch added to the pot, then so did Hoyt.
Tony put in a chip, raised it ten. “I’m pretty sure you both have to be celebrities for that to work.” Small blessings, he thought, that he wasn’t a star himself.
“But what would yours be?” Grady asked, looking at the ceiling and contemplating. “Let’s see. Maggie. Tony. Mag…ony. Magony! Wow. That’s kind of close to agony, isn’t it?”
Tony smiled.
“Carrying that idea through,” Cal added, “then that Scott Gibson guy she was engaged to before? They coulda been Maggott.”
Grady howled. Even Hoyt cracked a smile.
“Why weren’t they called that, do you suppose?” Butch asked.
“Because,” Tony said, “Maggie commands a lot of respect from the media.”
“Maggot,” Grady repeated, chuckling. “She was destined to dump the guy. Which reminds me, I heard somewhere that he got tossed by that Gennifer rebound girl, too. Must be somethin’ really wrong with the guy. Call.”
They played in silence for a while. Tony raked in chips.
“Good thing we’re not playing for cash,” Cal said. “We’d all be contributing to your honeymoon, big time.”
“Where are you going?” Grady asked.
“I haven’t even told Maggie yet, so I’m not about to tell you,” Tony answered. In fact, he was still debating about the honeymoon trip. Only Dino knew his plans—ten days in a cabin in Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, a location Dino assured him she hadn’t been before. He figured there weren’t a whole lot of places that qualified.
“And she’s okay with that?” Cal asked. “Not knowing? Wouldn’t she want to choose her steamer trunk full of clothes accordingly?”
Grady grinned. “He probably figures she won’t be needing much in the way of clothing.”
That’s exactly what Tony had hoped for. “The fewer people who know, the less chance of our honeymoon becoming a public spectacle.”
“But, including her? Who’s she gonna tell? I can’t imagine she isn’t bugging you to know,” Butch said.
“Course she is. I wanted to do it this way.”
Hoyt stared at his cards. “Shoulda kept the vows as they were, man and wife. Would’ve been truer. Partnership? Mighty strange definition.” He said “partnership” as if it were a curse word.
He hadn’t made a comment earlier when they’d talked about the vows, so why now? Tony counted to five before he answered. “That’s not fair. I wanted it to be a surprise for her. My gift to her.”
“May look like that. Fold.” He tossed down his cards.
All the attention shifted to Hoyt.
“What do you think it is?” Tony asked.
“You bein’ boss. You’re old-school. It’s showin’.”
“You figure I got that from you?” Tony asked.
“Hard to go against your upbringing. Pretty ingrained.”
“I’m nothing like you.” Nothing. Tony had made sure of that.
The room got quiet.
“You’re a rancher,” Hoyt pointed out.
“I’m also a poker player and a stock market investor.” He kept his substantial investments, seeded in the beginning with his poker winnings, separate from the ranch funds, which he needed to be self-sustaining. “You ever take risks like that? No. You play it safe. That’s a big difference between us.”
“True. I never had extra to play with. Provided for my family just fine, though.”
“We got by, sure. But ‘provide’? Depends on how you look at that word.”
“How do you look at it?”
Cal, Grady and Butch quietly left the room, leaving father and son alone.
“Son? I’m waitin’.”
Tony didn’t want to have this discussion—this argument. It’d been brewing too long. Could get too emotional. He started picking up the poker chips and putting them in the trays. “Not now, Dad.”
“You’ve been holdin’ back for years. No better time than now. You’re startin’ a new life. I like your girl, by the way. Got spunk.”
Of all the things he could have said, it was the worst—a reminder of the fact the marriage would end almost before it began.
“I’m glad I finally did something you approve of,” Tony said. Too bad it wouldn’t last. “Took me long enough.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
That he even had to ask staggered Tony. Every repressed emotion, every old hurt, came tumbling out. “All my life I’ve been trying to prove myself to you. I brought home trophies, and you said nothing. I won championships, and you stood there while everyone else congratulated me, not saying a word.”
Tony shoved the tray of chips. It fell off the table, scattering them on the floor. “I got inducted into the hall of fame, and you were there, watching the whole ceremony, then…nothing. Not a word, just a handshake, like I was someone you hardly knew.” He tunneled his fingers through his hair. “I got myself engaged to Maggie McShane. No comment. All that success, and…nothing. You’ve never believed in me, accepted me.”
The eye-opening self-revelation had Tony jerking back from its impact. He hadn’t been trying to prove his success all these years. No, he’d wanted to be accepted, just as he was, as a man who was different from Cal and Grady, different from his father. Anthony Young, an individual. A son loved only for himself, his existence, nothing more.
“You always held yourself apart,” Hoyt said. “But I did accept you.”
“I know better. I heard you say it yourself. You never wanted me. Never thought I’d make anything of myself.”
The lines on his father’s face trenched deeper. “You better explain that.”
Tony walked away from him as the memories filled his head again, memories he blocked most of the time. “I was twelve.”
“I remember that year. You went from bein’ a gabber to hardly talkin’ at all.”
“After I learned the truth.”
“About what?”
“I came upon you and Mom, having a discussion about me.”
“What’d you hear?”
“You were telling her you should’ve stopped at three kids, like you’d planned all along.”
“Hell, son, every parent says that when their kid is being ornery. Don’t mean nothing by it. You’re every bit as important as the others.”
“You said I always had my head in the clouds, thinking only about rodeoing.”
“Well, that was a fact you can’t dispute. Was all you talked about. Always ou
t practicing, disregarding your schoolwork, hardly coming in to eat unless we threatened you. So? That’s a crime, too, telling the truth?”
And then the worst of what he’d overheard. “You told Mom I’d never make it in rodeo.”
Hoyt stared at him for the longest time, then he put both hands on Tony’s shoulders. “That was a turnin’ point for me, too, son. That discussion with your mom. I knew the rodeo world. On talent alone, you were bound to succeed. But I was talkin’ about survivin’ it.”
With Hoyt’s hands on his shoulders, Tony had no choice but to focus on his father’s face. “What do you mean?”
“Well, first there was the finances. I knew how much it cost to launch a rodeo career. Even back in those days, it took a pile of dough just to get up and running.”
“Right. So?”
“Your mom and I couldn’t afford to help you.”
“I got sponsors. I slept on the ground. Ate out of cans.”
“And how much were your winnings that first year?”
Tony’s mouth twisted. “About three grand.”
Hoyt nodded. “And then the mental survival. You were a dreamer, son. A hard worker, but a dreamer. I did what I could so that you would survive in that world, a hard one, sometimes a vicious one.”
“By bein’ harder on me than you were on Cal or Grady?”
“Was I? Maybe so. I didn’t coddle you. Couldn’t. You wouldn’t’ve survived the circuit if I had. By the time you left home, you were tough. I made sure of it.”
“And angry.”
“Sometimes that’s what a man needs.”
Tony tried to sort through the revelations. “You believed I could be a winner?”
“No doubt about it—if it was based on skill alone. You were hell-bent on suffering all kinds of abuse, even just practicin’. Nothin’ I could’ve said to you would’ve changed your mind. You were born to it. And, son? I love all you kids the same. You’ll see. When you’re a father, you’ll see.”
When he was a father…
Hoyt’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, raised his brows as he answered. “Yeah, he’s here with me,” Hoyt said. “What? Right. I’ll tell him.” He closed the phone and slid it into his shirt pocket.
“That was Dino. Seems you’ve got a bit of a problem, son.”
Tony went rigid. “Maggie?”
“She’s fine, I guess. But she’s got a visitor. One Scott Gibson. She—”
But Tony was out of the room before Hoyt finished.
Chapter Seventeen
“He’s already out in the hallway,” Dino said to Maggie.
“You brought Scott Gibson up here? To my suite? Without asking me? How could you do that?”
“Because you have to talk to him sometime, and I didn’t want a ruckus in the lobby. Seemed easier this way.”
“On my wedding day?”
“Why not? You’re just killing time at the moment.”
Maggie’s hair and makeup were done. She’d just sent everyone away, wanting a little time alone before her stylist and Leesa came back to help her dress.
“Tell him I’ll give him five minutes,” she said. “And don’t tell Tony.”
Then she sat down and waited for the man who’d started the whole thing, the man she should thank with all her heart…
He’d kept his hair blond and spiked with gel. It suited him, Maggie thought objectively as he came toward her. When they’d met, he’d had dark hair, styled like a businessman. That Scott would’ve suited her—or the Maggie she’d been at the time, not the woman she’d become. This ultra-contemporary man didn’t suit her at all.
She looked at her watch. “Four minutes and fifty seconds,” she said.
He grinned.
“Four minutes and forty…”
“Okay, okay.” He moved closer, until they almost touched.
Maggie stood her ground, refusing to let him get to her.
“I know you don’t love him,” Scott said.
She raised her brows dramatically high. “Really? And you would know that how?”
“I have my ways.”
She laughed and stepped away from him. Dino and Leesa would’ve been the only ones who could’ve been close enough to make any kind of judgment about such things, and they would never talk. He was grasping at straws. She wondered why. “If you paid money for that bit of information, you got counterfeit data.”
His smile faltered a little.
“So, how’s Gennifer?” Maggie asked. “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I heard she’s moved on to Morgan Kristoff. Isn’t that just a shame. Of course, since you pretended to the press that she’d just been a rebound gone wrong, you’re still the good guy to the world.”
“Go ahead, have your fun. I can take it. You haven’t thrown me out, so I figure you’re still carrying a flame. It’s not too late to go back to the original plan, you know.”
“You’re such a kidder.” She tapped her watch. “So, why are you really here, Scott?”
“I told you. I want you back. I don’t know what was wrong with me, why I gave you up, but my head’s on straight now.”
“Actually you didn’t say you wanted me back. And for the record? You don’t want me back. You’re using this opportunity as a publicity stunt. Show up on my wedding day, act like you want me back and keep your name in the rags, the poor, sad, besotted, dumped fiancé. I know how it all works.”
“A little publicity never hurt anyone, but that’s not why I’m here.” He moved closer.
The door opened. Tony came through, his expression hard, his movements stiff but not faltering for a second.
“I thought the groom wasn’t supposed to see the bride until the ceremony,” Scott said, looking a little less sure of himself as he watched Tony cross the room and stand next to Maggie. Tony slid an arm around her waist. He was entirely controlled, but she figured he was pretty angry. Whether he was angry at her or Scott, she didn’t know.
“Hi,” she said, trying to convey everything she felt in that one word. I love you. Please don’t make a scene.
“You doin’ okay, Margaret?”
Margaret. Was it for show or for real?
“I’m fine, thank you.”
He faced Scott then. “Where I come from, men don’t infringe on another man’s territory.”
Maggie should have been offended by the chauvinism, but she was encouraged that she was his territory, so she kept quiet. Obviously he hadn’t yet figured out Scott was just trying to get some attention for himself.
“I happened to be in town,” Scott said. “I’m only paying a visit to an old friend.” He didn’t look at all confident anymore, probably because Tony was being quiet and calm. It was throwing Scott off. Her, too, for that matter.
“Do you call that Gennifer Bodine an old friend, too?” Tony asked. “That relationship lasted about as long as a knee jerk, didn’t it? Must be humiliating, losing all your women so fast.”
His chin went up. “I don’t know what Maggie told you, but I didn’t lose her. I gave her up. I’m pretty sure she wants me back.”
“I know exactly what happened,” Tony said. “She shared the truth with me. And as for wanting you back, let’s just ask her.” He met her gaze. “You want to change grooms again?”
“No.”
“No,” he said, even duplicating the succinct tone. “The lady says no. You can be on your way now. And if you get so much as one finger in a photograph that appears from our wedding, I’ll make sure you live to regret it.”
“Tough guy.”
“I take care of my own.”
The change in atmosphere happened in an instant. Neither of them had thrown down a gauntlet, but they might as well have. She sensed that one more insult from Scott would have Tony all over him.
“Scott, you can leave now,” Maggie said, putting a hand on Tony’s chest, as if that would stop him from charging.
“Stay out of it, Margaret.”
When had she lost control of her life?
“I’m going,” Scott said, backing up, his hands up in surrender mode.
“He’s only after publicity,” she said to Tony.
“It’s a two-for-one deal,” Scott said. “I get publicity and another chance with her. I wish I hadn’t broken things off with her. What’s wrong with telling the world?”
“Where I come from,” Tony said, “men handle problems between them. They don’t involve the world.”
“I’m only interested in Maggie’s well-being. I’m not sure you’re the right man for her.” Scott looked at her. “You can still marry me. You don’t have to be stuck with the choice you made to save face.”
Her response was to move to the door, open it and speak to Dino. “Take Mr. Gibson out of the hotel and see that he’s put in a cab, please?”
Dino looked to Tony. She caught him nodding, a tiny movement. When had Dino started needing Tony to confirm an order she gave? It ticked her off but good.
“My pleasure,” Dino said. “Mr. Gibson?”
Scott stopped when he reached her side. “I’m seeing issues between you two. You ever need a friend…”
Dino shut the door before he could finish, leaving the bride and groom alone.
“Well, that was…interesting,” she said, using as vague a word as she could come up with.
“You didn’t discourage him much,” Tony said.
“He’s not a bad guy, you know. Egotistical and career-driven, but I think he was sincere, in his own self-absorbed way. I like to think I’m not that bad a judge of character.”
“He gave you an out, Margaret. If you want to take him up on it, tell me now, before Dino puts him in the cab.”
Margaret. Why was it she got such hope from him calling her that? Because it seemed more natural? More real? Or was he just conditioned to it?
She’d been moving slowly toward him and now was close enough to touch. She didn’t. “I don’t want him back.”
“That’s not an answer. My question was, do you want out? Because I don’t want you out of obligation or a deal made. I thought I did. Even last night, I thought that. Not anymore.”
“Same goes for me.”
They both went silent. Who talks first? she wondered. And will it be the truth or a guess about what the other one was feeling?
