Ominous

by Lisa Jackson

  Until now.

  Because everything had changed.

  “What about you?” she asked him.

  “I’ve got a bunk over the garage.”

  Shiloh remembered the old attic as a musty collection area for unwanted, broken-down furniture, picture frames, suitcases, and bags of clothes that had never made it to the thrift store. She’d had friends over, and they’d hung out there when she was a teen; she’d even stolen one of Tate’s whiskey bottles and, with Tommy Monroe, sampled her first searing swallow of Jim Beam when she’d been in the tenth grade. The place was uninhabitable, or had been the last she’d been up there. “You live here?” Oh no, that wouldn’t work. She couldn’t imagine waking up to Beau Tate or trying to sleep when he was nearby.

  “No. I don’t live here. Or I didn’t.” His lips compressed. “I have my own place, but since Faye took ill a few months back, I’ve stayed here off and on.”

  “Well, you can go home now,” she said emphatically.

  “I’ll stay tonight.”

  Man oh man, this wasn’t going how she’d planned. “So where do you really live?”

  “Outside of town, not far from the Kincaid ranch. You know where that is?”

  Of course she did. Anyone who grew up in the area knew about the two major spreads in the area. The Rocking D was owned by the Dillinger family, the other was the Kincaid place. “Yeah.”

  “I work for the Kincaids. Blair and Hunter.”

  “Not the Colonel … no, wait, I mean the Major?” she asked, referring to the Kincaid patriarch.

  Beau gave a quick shake of his head. “Nope. He passed on a couple of years ago.”

  “What about his wife?”

  He grimaced. “I keep forgetting that you weren’t around. Georgina’s still alive, I think, but she’s not in Prairie Creek.” Shiloh waited for more, but he walked to the window, looked outside, as if thinking about how much he should share about the family that had hired him. “None of the Kincaids talk about it much, but rumor has it she’s in a private care facility somewhere in Colorado, I think. Denver, maybe.”

  “Because … ,” she prodded, sensing there was more to the story.

  He seemed reticent to gossip and shrugged. “I guess she lost it after her husband died, got herself into some kind of trouble, and ended up there.” He met her gaze. “I don’t pry.”

  “So, then, who’s in charge of the ranch?”

  “Blair’s the overseer. All the Kincaids own a share of the ranch, as I understand it, but Hunter and Blair actually work on the day-to-day dealings. Hunter’s married, a fireman, and he needed help with a spread that big, so he practically begged Blair to come back and help out.”

  “And he came? Just like that?”

  Beau lifted a dismissive shoulder. “Just what I heard. I work with a few of the hands, Scott Massey, Roland Gonzalez, and Belle Zeffer.”

  She’d heard of Massey and Gonzalez but didn’t recall Belle Zeffer.

  “You’d have to ask Blair what really brought him back to Prairie Creek. Again—”

  “I know, I know.” She held up her hands as if in surrender. “You ‘don’t pry.’” Still, she was curious as she remembered Blair from her youth as being kind of a rebel.

  Beau slid a glance her way before walking to the short hallway, where he peeked inside Morgan’s bedroom.

  “She okay?” Shiloh asked.

  “Still asleep.”

  “Good.”

  He added, “So the long and the short of it is that I live near the Kincaid ranch and work for them too. Blair’s my immediate boss. I don’t deal much with Hunter or his wife.”

  “Who’d Hunter marry?”

  “Delilah Dillinger.”

  “Dillinger? Really? But I thought … huh …” A person couldn’t have grown up in Prairie Creek and not known that the Dillingers and the Kincaids were sworn enemies, two ranching families whose animosity had gone on for decades.

  He seemed to read her mind. “Heard they’ve got a baby, too, but yeah … a lotta bad blood there. Big ranches, big families, and even bigger egos. At least back in the days when Major Kincaid and Ira Dillinger were in charge. Guess Hunter got over it, now that the Major’s gone. Ira’s lost some of his fire too. He’s letting his kids run the Rocking D.” He walked into the kitchen and, as if he owned the place, opened the refrigerator and pulled out a beer. “Time has a way of making people forget the bad times.”

  “Does it?” She didn’t believe it. Not after what she’d been through. If so, she would have forgotten about the night of Ruthie’s rape, the horror of nearly being killed, and, of course, of the cruelty of Larimer Tate. Without thinking about it, she rubbed the scar on her shoulder where the would-be killer’s blade had sliced through her skin.

  “Usually.” He studied her for a second so intently that she felt a wave of heat rise up the back of her neck. “Maybe not always.”

  It was as if he knew about that night, which, of course, he couldn’t.

  “Want one?” He held up a long-necked bottle, and she shook her head.

  “Not now.”

  “Suit yourself.” He twisted off the top and took a long swallow. Again, as if he’d done it a hundred times and was comfortable in her mother’s home.

  “So the feud is over?”

  “I wouldn’t say over. Seems unlikely, y’know. For now, though, it’s at least buried.” His brow furrowed. “Things seemed to have calmed down a lot since Hunter and Delilah’s wedding.”

  “Sometimes marriage only makes things worse.”

  “Tell that to Sabrina Delaney. She’s marrying Colton Dillinger. In September.”

  “Sabrina Delaney.” Shiloh wasn’t certain she remembered her, but, of course, she’d run into all of Ira Dillinger’s kids growing up. Colton had been way ahead of her in high school, but that boy had caused more than one teenage girl’s heart to pound. “Well, good luck to them on making it work,” she said dryly.

  “Speaking from experience?”

  “Thought you didn’t pry.”

  “You seem to have a tainted view on marriage.”

  “Well, yeah. I’ve seen enough bad ones.” And one of the worst happened here, within these four walls. “Everyone thinks marriage will make things better, improve their life.”

  “Not everyone.”

  Fine. Your turn. “So now you’re speaking from experience.”

  He smiled faintly. “If you’re asking if I’ve ever been married, the answer is ‘no.’”

  “I wasn’t asking,” she said, lying a little. “So how’d you get involved with the Kincaids?”

  “I’d just come back to town and ran into Blair down at The Dog. The ranch is massive, and they needed a foreman.”

  She nodded, remembering the Prairie Dog, a local watering hole.

  “Blair and I were in school together, and I knew most of his brothers and sisters. We got to talking, and I said I’d run several other spreads out of state. He was looking for someone, so it was kind of a perfect deal. They needed a foreman. I needed a job. The rest, as they say, is history.”

  “Recent history.”

  He took a long pull from his bottle. “Right.”

  She looked around the kitchen, wishing his big body was not in it. “Look, I’ve got this. At least for tonight. You really don’t need to hang out here.”

  He shook his head. “I’m good. If she”—he hooked his thumb toward the hallway and the closed door beyond—“wakes up, she’ll want me to be around.”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “Course not. I don’t know you, and neither does Morgan. You’re a stranger to her, someone she’s heard about but never met.”

  He waited for her to argue. She couldn’t.

  “So for the next few days at the very least, I’ll be around. Until the dust settles and I see that she’s good.” Another drink and the beer was gone. He set the empty on the window ledge.

  “And your job?”

  “Don’t worry about that
. I’ve got it handled.”

  That’s more than she could say. “All right. Fine.”

  “Glad you agree,” he said sardonically, then he checked on Morgan once more, whistled to the dog, and walked out the back door.

  Through the windows, she watched as he crossed the dry patch of lawn to the garage. With Rambo at his heels, Beau mounted the steep exterior stairs that led to the attic tucked under the ancient building’s rafters.

  Why, she wondered, did it seem so obvious that he belonged here while she felt like a damned intruder?

  *

  Shiloh Silva.

  Beau should have expected her to show, but she’d stayed away for so many years, who would have thought that Faye’s last dying plea would get to her? He unrolled the sleeping bag he’d brought with him and spread it on a folding camping cot that had seen better days. A dusty rug covered the ancient floorboards, and haphazard junk, the detritus of a hardscrabble life, surrounded the small open area. He’d opened the two dormer windows earlier so the heat of the day was slowly dispersing, and he could hear the sounds of the night: a faraway train rattling on distant tracks, a night owl hooting softly, the flutter of insect wings drawn to the attic light. He eyed his surroundings and smiled to himself. He’d slept in worse. More times than he could count, once in a while with a woman, often alone.

  He glanced through the open window to the house, where lights glowed in the living area, though the bedrooms remained dark. Again, his thoughts turned to Shiloh. Tall, athletic, with wide, green eyes that narrowed on him with distrust. As if he were cut from the same cloth as his old man.

  So now, she was back? In worn jeans, a loose blouse, curly blond hair clipped at her nape, and carrying a don’t-mess-with-me attitude as if she had every right to be here.

  He opened the backpack he’d left propped against an old bureau capped with a cracked mirror, opened the flap, and pulled out a bottle of Jack that was about half full. With a flick of his wrist he uncapped the bottle, then took a long pull. The whiskey warmed a familiar path down his throat and hit his empty belly hard. He didn’t need the distraction of Shiloh or any other woman now. The kid needed him, and he had a ranch to run, a mortgage to pay, the damned Dillingers breathing down his neck. Hell, no. Shiloh Silva was a distraction of the worst order, but luckily she despised him.

  “Thank God for small favors,” he muttered to himself and took another swig.

  So why the hell was she so damned intent on staying? Through the window, he watched her move through the living room to the kitchen and back again. She had a natural grace to her, a fluidity of movement. Long legs, rounded butt, high breasts, not too big, not too small, and straight shoulders. She claimed she’d never married. He decided she was probably telling the truth, though he hadn’t heard much about his stepsister. Faye had mostly kept mum about her, though there were a few pictures of Shiloh as a girl or teen in which she’d always been standing rigidly or riding a horse of some kind.

  Those pictures were on the mantel, and he knew them by heart. In the first photo, Shiloh had been standing next to a docile pinto pony, reins gripped loosely in one hand. She must’ve been around seven or eight, her freckled face tipped up beneath the brim of a pink cowgirl hat that was buckets too big, her smile wide but missing one front tooth.

  Next to the first was a slightly larger framed shot. Shiloh had been older, around fifteen, and the picture had been taken after a barrel-racing competition, Faye had explained when Beau had picked up the dusty picture. The spotted pony in the first photo had been replaced by a black horse that looked part Arabian. Astride the gelding, Shiloh was definitely on the edge of womanhood. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced, and her lips, without the slightest hint of lipstick, were full and lush, but now the earlier wonder in her eyes replaced with a mixture of innocence and suspicion, at least in Beau’s estimation.

  “She’s beautiful,” Faye had murmured once, when she’d caught him looking at the photos.

  “If you say so.”

  Shiloh’s mother had smiled knowingly. “I do. But she’s a handful. A real pistol. Never could get along with Larimer, rest his soul.”

  Beau had doubted that the old man’s soul was resting at all. If there was a hell, Larimer Tate was surely a deep-seated resident.

  He took another sip, then recapped his bottle.

  Never before, to his knowledge, had his stepsister shown an iota of interest in her mother or sister. So now she was back? Intent on staying? Going to, what, “mother” Morgan? Like that would fly. If nothing else, his half sister was stubborn and knew her own mind. Morgan would peg Shiloh fast.

  So what was the deal?

  Did Shiloh think she had to come here to stake her claim?

  Was she angling for ownership of this scrap of land?

  Or feeling some latent sense of remorse for taking off and barely communicating with her mother?

  Shiloh had left years before under a cloud of suspicion, around the same time other girls had gone missing. Some people thought she’d been abducted, others considered her a runaway, but Faye had always maintained she was fine, had even talked to the police and insisted her wild child was just “growing up” and “finding herself.” No one had said differently, but Beau had suspected her abrupt leaving had to do with his old man. Larimer Tate’s quick temper and liberal use of “corporal punishment,” which of course was abuse, was a widely known secret around these parts.

  Beau grimaced. It made him ill to think Shiloh might have been on the receiving end of Larimer’s cruel sense of justice. Hadn’t Beau been the object of his father’s rages more often than not while growing up? He’d certainly felt the bite of his belt more times than he wanted to remember. Beau doubted that Larimer’s warped sense of values had stopped at “disciplining” a child just because she was a girl.

  Was that why she left? The thought made him go cold inside. Sure, it had crossed his mind, but he’d preferred to believe Shiloh was spared, that she’d escaped what Beau had endured—abuse that hadn’t abated until Beau turned sixteen and grabbed that sharp leather snake that kept a drunken Larimer at bay. They’d been in the barn in the sweltering heat of summer, Beau raking out the stalls, getting rid of the urine-soaked straw while flies buzzed near his head. Larimer, who’d been visiting Beau’s mother, had wandered out to the barn and had seen it as his opportunity to offer up his special brand of parenting, starting by badgering Beau and commenting upon how slowly he had been working.

  “You’re a lazy son of a bitch,” his father told him, and Beau could smell last night’s alcohol seeping through the older man’s skin as he sauntered into the building. Larimer paused at the stall where Beau was working and looked over his son’s shoulder.

  Beau hadn’t responded, knowing his dear old dad was baiting him. Trying to tamp down his rage, he’d kept raking, dropping the filthy straw into a rapidly filling wheelbarrow.

  “A do-nothin,” Larimer goaded.

  Beau’s jaw had tightened, and his hands gripped the smooth handle of the rake until his knuckles showed white. He’d been tired and dirty and had better things to do than clean the stalls, but he’d acquiesced, figuring it was a way to avoid his old man. Obviously, he’d figured wrong, so he kept on working, sweat pouring down his neck and shoulders, his T-shirt clinging to him.

  “Won’t amount to nothing.” Larimer scowled into the stall.

  “If you don’t like the way I’m doing this, then why don’t you do it yourself? Or better yet, just leave.”

  “You need to listen to me.”

  “And you need to screw off.”

  “What’s that, boy? What’d you say?”

  Beau had turned then, standing as tall as the man who had sired him, his shoulders flexed, his fists balled, his gaze staring straight into Larimer’s. With more calm than he felt, he clarified himself. “I said, screw off, but I meant fuck off. If you don’t like what I’m doing, then either you grab a damned rake and do it yourself or get the hell away from me.”r />
  “That’s no way to talk to your father, boy.”

  “You’re right. But then you’re not much of a father, are you? So go on. Go back to your other family. Mom and I don’t need you.” He’d turned back to the job at hand, but every one of his muscles was stretched tight, and if he didn’t control himself, he’d swing the damned rake right in the old man’s face.

  “You want to fight me?” Larimer challenged.

  You bet! “Not worth the trouble.” But, yeah, what Beau wouldn’t give to square off with Larimer, punch his lights out.

  “You need a lesson in respect.”

  Then he’d heard the familiar hiss of a belt being stripped from Larimer’s jeans. The same sound he’d heard as a boy of not more than five. His heart stilled. Bastard, he thought. Beau then turned, dropping the rake in the same motion, and his father had drawn back and started to crack the slim leather over his head. As it whipped toward him, Beau had deftly caught the belt in one hand. Sharp leather cut into his fist, but he barely felt it.

  “You ever try this again, I swear I’ll kill you,” he warned in a low voice. Larimer tried to yank his weapon away, but Beau had wound the snake-like strap around his fist, drawing his father closer until they were glaring eye to eye. His father’s nostrils flared, and Beau smelled the stink of whiskey and tobacco on his breath. A drop of sweat drizzled along the old man’s hairline.

  “You don’t have the guts.”

  “Oh, sure I do.”

  “You’d spend the rest of your life in prison.”

  “No court in the county would convict me.” With his free hand he lifted his shirt to show the scars that were visible on his skin. “You wanna take your chances?”

  “You’re just like me,” Larimer insisted. “You look like me, and now you’re acting like me.”

  “I’ll never be like you, you sick piece of shit.”

  Surprisingly, the old man had backed down. For the first time in Beau’s memory, he dropped his belt and backed out of the doorway of the barn, his looming silhouette visible against the backdrop of the setting sun. Beau had gone about finishing his chores, then later swung his leg over the saddle of his miserable excuse of a motorcycle and roared off.