by Brenda Novak
Aunt Millie shrugged. “Ask Laney.”
Short and wiry and nearly seventy-five, Uncle Ralph rubbed the bald dome of his head and turned his soft brown eyes to Delaney. “Is something wrong?”
She was tempted to tell him about the library closing and try to distract him with that bit of bad news. But Delaney refused to be such a coward. She needed to take responsibility for her actions, get it over with.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said, as loudly and clearly as she could.
Aunt Millie spilled her tea, and Uncle Ralph rushed to help mop up the hot liquid before it could burn her.
“Come again?” he said, when the immediate crisis was over.
Delaney curled her nails into her palms. “I’m pregnant.”
Both jaws sagged wide open and two sets of dentures nearly tumbled out onto the floor.
Aunt Millie seemed to recover first. “Did you say what I think you said, Laney?” she asked, her voice sounding oddly strangled.
Delaney nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Uncle Ralph finally closed his mouth. “Does this mean you’re getting married?” he asked tentatively.
Delaney sat up straighter and shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”
“But how could that be?” Aunt Millie asked. “Who…I mean how…I mean you—”
“Out of wedlock?” Uncle Ralph cut in.
“It…it was just a one-night thing, a mistake,” Delaney said.
“Damn right it was a mistake,” he nearly shouted. “Who did this to you?”
“A man I met in Boise.”
“Then, we’ll find him, make him own up to—”
Delaney stood. “No. What happened was my fault. I take full responsibility.”
Uncle Ralph didn’t seem to know what to say. He turned to Aunt Millie. “How could this have happened?”
“I don’t know,” Aunt Millie said. “She’s always been so good.”
“I’m still the same person,” Delaney said.
“You’re not the same person,” Aunt Millie replied. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you’re not the same person at all!”
The high pitch of her voice indicated impending tears. Delaney winced as Uncle Ralph put a protective arm around his wife. “How could you do this?” he asked. “Didn’t we teach you better? Hasn’t Millie been a good mother to you?”
“You’ve both been good to me,” Delaney said. “And I’m grateful.”
“Well, this is a heck of a way to show it,” he said.
Then Millie started to cry in earnest, and he took her in his arms and tried to comfort her, and Delaney didn’t know what else to do except leave.
* * *
EVIDENTLY DELANEY’S NAME was as unusual as Conner had thought. No one he’d met in Jerome had heard of a Delaney. But it was a much bigger town than he’d expected from her description. He couldn’t ask all 18,000 residents. And she might live in an outlying area. Or it was possible that her family wasn’t as well-known as she’d made it sound. He couldn’t be sure. He only knew that it was late, and he was tired and angry with himself for wasting so much time trying to find a woman who obviously didn’t want to be found. If she’d been interested in seeing him again, she would’ve left her phone number. He should just forget her and keep his mind on what he was doing.
The warmth of the heater threatened to put him to sleep. Rolling down the window of the ranch’s old pickup, he let the cold night air revive him, and fiddled with the radio, looking for a station that didn’t play country music. But before he could settle on anything, the voice in the back of his mind started in on him again.
It’s Friday night, man, and look at you. You’re driving a beat-up truck down a long stretch of road, heading back to an empty house. It’s pathetic what the old man’s reduced you to. Haven’t you steeped yourself in isolation, sweat and hard work long enough? Isn’t it time for a little fun?
A little fun? Conner eyed the Honky Tonk as he drove into town, heard the music spilling out its doors. A drink would reward him for all his hard work—and anesthetize him against the hopelessness that edged closer every day.
Why not, Con? Just one drink.
He turned into the gravel drive and parked alongside a row of pickup trucks that looked as dented and work-worn as his. He knew from the condition they were in that the trucks had been used to carry hay and fencing, tools and tack. The men who drove them, the men inside the bar, would resemble him, too, now that he was wearing cowboy boots and a pair of snug-fitting jeans. He hadn’t taken to chewing tobacco, knew he never would, but after the sunburns he’d suffered on his face and neck, he was already on the hunt for a good hat.
Maybe the town was rubbing off on him more than he thought. Maybe he was turning into a real cowboy. There were times when it seemed he was slowly becoming part of the ranch, or the ranch was slowly becoming part of him, but he was fighting the transformation almost as much as he wanted to embrace it. Belonging would only make matters worse.
A drunken cowboy came stumbling out of the bar. Staring at the street, he swayed unsteadily on his feet, as though he was about to stumble off the curb.
Someone in a passing Cadillac honked; startled, the man stepped back and crumpled to his knees.
Conner shook his head, his desire to numb his senses with alcohol suddenly waning.
Come on, the voice in his head complained. You said one drink. One drink isn’t going to hurt anything.
But he knew he’d never stop at one drink. He’d spent enough hours in clubs and bars to know that. Besides, there weren’t any answers in places like this. If there were, he’d have found them by now. He needed to go home and get a good night’s rest so he’d be worth something in the morning. They had cattle to move again, and with the way the temperature was dropping, they’d probably have to fill the water troughs, as well.
Getting out of his truck, Conner strode over to the inert cowboy and hauled him to his feet so he wouldn’t pass out and freeze to death on the sidewalk. “Come on, buddy,” he said. “If you can tell me where you live, I’ll drive you home.”
The man mumbled something about a trailer behind the single-screen movie theater a few blocks away, so Conner started guiding him toward the truck. But as soon as their boots began to crunch on gravel, the cowboy jerked out of his grasp.
“Where we going?” he asked, his tone belligerent, his words so slurred Conner could barely understand him.
“Home,” Conner said, calmly propelling him forward.
“What for?” the guy demanded.
When they reached the truck, Conner opened the passenger door. “Because it’s time for bed. Five-thirty in the morning comes pretty early when you’ve got to be at work,” he said, then grimaced at his own words. What the hell was the matter with him? He was sounding like his grandfather. Worse, he’d let a woman from a one-night stand send him on a wild-goose chase. He was giving up drinking, dammit, by choice. And he was going home to bed, alone, at barely ten o’clock.
Evidently more than his style of clothing had changed. But he noticed, for once, that the voice in his head had nothing to say.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“WHERE CAN I GET a good haircut?” Conner asked Roy, who was riding shotgun in the pickup as they made their way into town after work the next day.
“There’s the beauty shop. And then there’s the barbershop,” he said.
“Where do you go?”
“The barbershop.”
Conner sent him a meaningful glance. “In that case, I’m going to the beauty shop.”
Roy’s mouth twitched as though he was tempted to smile, but he didn’t. After six weeks of working together, Roy seemed to be softening toward him, although why Conner cared so much about the opinion of a crusty old cowboy, he couldn’t say.
“You want a city-boy haircut to go with that city-boy face?” Roy asked, curling up the brim of his hat on both sides.
“You think I’d prefer the butch you’ve got?”
Conner said.
This time Roy did laugh. “Don’t blame me if you come out looking like Goldilocks.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
They rode another few blocks before Roy pointed to a glass-fronted building with pink awnings. “That’s the place you want—Hair and Now. They’ll fix you up with ribbons and bows.”
“What’ll you do while I’m in there?”
“I sure as hell ain’t gonna wait for you, not with all those ladies jawin’ about neighborhood gossip. Just take me to the hardware store. I gotta get some stuff to repair the barn door. It’s about to come off its hinges. Then I’ll swing by the café and grab a burger. We’ll have missed dinner by the time we get home, so you might want to join me there later.”
“Sounds good,” Conner said, and drove him to Ellerson’s Hardware before doubling back to Hair and Now, where he parked on the street and sauntered inside to find a handful of women. One was doing an older lady’s nails in the corner, the noxious chemicals strong enough to burn his nostrils and sting his eyes. Another, a blonde, was trimming a young girl’s bangs, laughing and talking as though the pungent odor didn’t affect her. And a third, wearing the customary pink smock of a hairdresser, was sitting under an old-fashioned dryer with a section of her hair up in rollers, reading a magazine. She was the only one who didn’t look up when the bell jingled over the door.
“I think I should get this kind of dress,” she said. “It isn’t white, but then, white’s so boring, you know? Who says a wedding dress has to be white?” She flipped her magazine around to show everyone, but they were all staring at Conner. And then she saw him, too, and leapt out of her chair, dropping the magazine in the process.
“What are you doing here?” she cried.
Conner’s brows shot up in surprise. It was the woman who’d walked into the Bellemont with Delaney. What was her name? Raylynn or Rhonda or—something with an R. He’d have recognized her anywhere. Not many women were so tall, for one thing. And not many colored their hair such a distinctive shade of…whatever it was.
“Hey, can you tell me how to reach Delaney?” he asked, delighted that he’d happened to run into her again.
“Laney’s the town librarian,” the blonde volunteered. “Just go down the street another block and—”
“Katie, I’ll handle this,” Rebecca interrupted, and unless Conner was mistaken, he detected an edge of panic in her voice.
“Wait a second,” he said, taking in the stricken look on her face, Katie’s words and his lack of success in Jerome. “What’s—” And then, before he could even finish his sentence, the truth hit him with startling clarity: There weren’t two Delaneys! The Delaney who’d sent him the pie was the one he’d taken to bed at the Bellemont.
* * *
CONNER WAS FURIOUS. Evidently Delaney wasn’t what she’d appeared to be. She wasn’t the daughter of a prominent farmer, as she’d claimed. She had no brothers or sisters, going to high school or otherwise. She didn’t live in Jerome; she lived right here in Dundee. Yet she’d seemed so sincere. He’d believed everything she told him, but now all he knew for sure was that she’d wanted to have sex with him, and he’d stupidly obliged.
What a fool! Stephen had probably hired her to intercept him at the hotel and lead him astray, hoping he’d never show up at the ranch. But either his uncle hadn’t coached her well or he hadn’t paid her enough, because, instead of tightening the noose, she’d abandoned the project before it could interfere with his arrival in Dundee.
“I want to talk to her,” he said. “Is she at the library right now?”
Rebecca sent what looked like a silencing glare to the others, the blonde in particular, then hurried toward him and tried to drag him outside.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk privately.”
Conner’s first impulse was to resist, simply for the sake of resisting. But he was at least halfway convinced that Rebecca could resolve a lot of his confusion. And the women in the shop were staring at them both, looking more than eager to hear the whole story. He didn’t see any need to broadcast the fact that he’d been so easily conned.
He allowed her to guide him out and around the building, toward an old Firebird. He waited while she unlocked the doors. Then she slipped behind the wheel, and he took the passenger seat, assuming they’d talk in the lot. But as soon as he’d closed his door, she started the engine and began to back out of the parking space.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“For a drive.”
“You have curlers in your hair.”
“Who cares?” she said scornfully. “This town has seen me looking worse.”
Somehow, Conner didn’t doubt it.
They drove for several minutes, heading out toward the open road, an old disco tape playing in the equally dated tape deck, while the defroster worked overtime to clear the ice from the edges of the windshield.
“So?” he said when they’d driven several miles, too impatient to wait any longer. He’d taken Delaney at her word, had remembered her fondly, frequently—even gone searching for her in Jerome. And here she was, living in Dundee, only ten miles or so from the ranch. He still couldn’t believe it and hated what it might mean.
“So, what?” she said.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
Rebecca didn’t answer right away, but her expression was grim, which wasn’t a pretty sight on a woman with rollers on top of her head and loose sections of purplish hair hanging limp at the sides.
“I’m thinking,” she finally said.
“What’s to think about?” he asked as the town behind them began to recede in his mirror. “Just tell me why Delaney lied to me. Does it have anything to do with my uncles?”
“Your uncles?”
“Stephen, Dwight, Jonathan. Those names ring a bell?”
Rebecca shook her head, a vague expression on her face, then turned onto an icy dirt road that bisected a large, snow-blanketed piece of farmland.
“Did they?” he persisted, as she pulled to a stop.
She cut the engine. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“So what’s all this about? Why were you and Delaney in Boise that night if you live way the hell out here? Why did Delaney want to be with me instead of hooking up with someone a little closer to home? And why was she in such a hurry to get away when it was all over?”
He wasn’t sure what he expected to come out of her mouth—some kind of weak excuse, probably—but what she said surprised him.
“Well, Delaney doesn’t want this to get out. This is a small town, and she doesn’t want everyone feeling sorry for her, whispering, ‘Poor Delaney’ all the time. But if you can keep a secret…”
“I can keep a secret,” he assured her.
“Laney has a terminal illness.”
“What?” he croaked.
“She has cancer.”
That took him aback, quickly deflating his anger and making him feel terrible, until he remembered that Delaney and Rebecca didn’t possess a great deal of credibility. After everything that had happened, he wasn’t willing to trust either woman much farther than he could throw her, but Rebecca’s statement could be true.
“What kind?” he asked skeptically.
“It’s…um…” Her gaze lowered to the pack of cigarettes on her console. “In her lungs.”
He crossed his arms and shifted to lean against the door so he could scrutinize her more closely. “She doesn’t smoke.”
“She used to.”
Delaney didn’t seem like a smoker. But on the off chance that Rebecca was telling the truth, Conner thought it better to play along. “How does the future look for her?” he asked.
Rebecca knotted her hands and stared down at them, as though she found the subject almost too painful to talk about. “Not good. She has less than a year.”
“So why would a dying woman drive two hours to get herself laid?”
“She wanted a last hurra
h.”
“That couldn’t have happened closer to home?”
“She knows everyone around here.”
“Doesn’t someone who’s facing cancer have more important things on her mind than seducing a stranger?”
She unknotted her hands to rub her arms against the cold. She hadn’t bothered to grab any kind of jacket when they’d fled the salon, but damned if Conner was going to offer her his. He still wasn’t sure he liked this woman.
“She wanted to try it once, to see what it was like. You might have guessed she isn’t exactly an old pro in the bedroom.”
“I had some inkling,” he said.
“Well, we were just trying to have a little fun before the…you know, the end.” Her voice dipped reverently on that last word, which hit Conner hard enough to put a lump in his throat even though he was almost certain he didn’t believe her.
“How terrible,” he said, still watching her closely. “I’m sorry.”
Rebecca nodded and blinked rapidly, as if she were about to cry.
Conner reached out to take her hand, knowing he’d feel like a complete jerk later if he found out she’d been telling the truth and he hadn’t done what he could to comfort her.
“It is terrible,” she said, managing a few very real tears, which served to confuse Conner even more.
“I’m not sure what to think,” he admitted. “I knew she was a virgin, of course, but she didn’t say anything about the rest of it.”
“She was a virgin?” Rebecca said, her voice suddenly strident.
“You didn’t know?”
She pulled away to wipe her eyes. “No. But it figures, don’t you think? She didn’t want to take her virginity to the grave.”
“But she seemed in perfect health. Isn’t chemotherapy and radiation hard on a body?”
Rebecca squinted into the distance. “Yeah, well, she’s a naturalist. She doesn’t believe in ruining her quality of life, and the cancer’s not to the point that it’s painful, you know?”
The tears had been pretty convincing, but…something still didn’t seem right.
