Unbound Pursuit

by Lindsay McKenna

Wyatt gave Tal an “I’m sorry” look and decided he should talk to his dad about this in private.

  “Dunno about a drone,” Hank said. “It just happened two weeks before you arrived, and we’ve been a little busy around here with Christmas and getting ready for you. Plus, it happened during the Christmas rush, so there was very little law enforcement around. You know how it is around here during the holidays, Wyatt.”

  “Well, how about we table this until we can talk privately?” Wyatt suggested.

  He saw his dad give Tal a studied look. “Good idea, son.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “How’s that ankle of yours feelin’?” Wyatt asked Tal. He had her sitting comfortably on his old brass bed, leaning against the headboard, pillows behind her back, her bad ankle over his thigh as he gently massaged it.

  “Mmm, better,” Tal said, closing her eyes.

  “Did you take your medication?” Wyatt asked her, sliding a glance her way. She had just come out of the bathroom after soaking in the old claw-foot bathtub. Her black hair was still up in a mussed topknot. She looked tired, and he knew traveling with her bum ankle had taken a toll on her. Tal would never complain about pain. It just wasn’t part of her makeup. As a Marine Corps sniper, she’d always worked hurt. It might not have been broken bones like this, but, as a mountain goat climbing around in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, out in brutal weather and other harsh conditions, bruises, cuts, scrapes, and even a strain were tolerated so she could successfully finish a mission.

  “No, you know I didn’t.”

  Wyatt chuckled and continued to tenderly ease the swelling out of her once-crushed ankle. He did this every night when they were home, and he especially wanted to do it when he was on the road with her. “I think we did a little too much walking around the ranch this afternoon. Your ankle is really swollen. Sure you aren’t in pain?” He knew she was and saw her lips flex at his needling her about it.

  “I’ll take some ibuprofen to get you off my back, Lockwood.”

  Chuckling, he said, “I’m such a pest to you, Ms. Culver.” The corners of her lips lifted and she opened her eyes.

  “You are a royal pain in the ass sometimes, on that we agree.”

  “But,” Wyatt said lightly, moving his fingers down from below her knee to her ankle and then beginning to massage her foot, “there are other times, Ms. Culver, you really enjoy having me around.”

  “That is very true, cowboy. Good thing those times outweigh the pain-in-the-ass times, huh?”

  Seeing the sparkle of teasing in her green eyes, Wyatt moved his hand over the red flannel robe she wore on top of her white flannel pajamas. “Indeed.” He felt her begin to relax as he pushed the fluid out of her ankle area. “Feelin’ a little better?”

  “Oh,” she sighed, “much . . . I don’t know what I’d do without you, Wyatt. You spoil me rotten.”

  “I’m better than any meds you aren’t taking.”

  “I don’t like drugs, Wyatt, so don’t climb on that bandwagon tonight, okay?”

  “Miss Grumpy, are we?”

  She couldn’t stay irritable long with Wyatt around. He had that Texas good-ol’-boy attitude, was a terrible tease in a nice way, and inevitably lifted her out of her low mood. “Hey, getting serious for a moment?”

  “I’m always serious where you’re concerned,” Wyatt drawled, giving her a warm look.

  She snorted. “Yes, you’ve been acting like a mother hen with me all day today. Shadowing me, keeping a hand on my elbow or against the small of my back in case I might stumble and fall.”

  “Ah, the truth comes out now.” His lips quirked.

  “I’m not going to use a cane while I’m here, Wyatt. That’s all there is to it. And you need to let me walk on my own and stop hovering around me as if I’m going to fall on my ass any second.”

  He moved his fingers to her arch, hearing her groan with pleasure. “Okay, I’ll stop being a mother hen with you. Fair enough?”

  “Yes . . . thank you.”

  “My family does not see you as a weak woman, darlin’. They know you’re one tough Marine.”

  “I just hate showing up like this,” she muttered.

  “We all have our prideful moments,” Wyatt said amiably, working each of her toes, hearing her groan with more pleasure. Tal loved to have her feet massaged.

  “I thought that story about you telling Cathy that Santa Claus didn’t really exist was interesting,” Tal said. “You never told me about it.”

  “Well, I probably would have, sooner or later.”

  “Talk about pride!” Tal laughed a little, holding his amused gaze.

  “Yeah, guilty as charged. It wasn’t one of my best moments growing up, that’s for sure. My dad had a right to paddle my britches. What the family didn’t tell you was that after I nagged on Cat about Santa not existing, she burst into tears and cried off and on the rest of the day.”

  “Oh, dear,” Tal murmured.

  “Yeah, I felt bad about that. I was just being my cocky ten-year-old self. And Dad was right: I was pretty full of myself at that age. Our parents brought us up to be sensitive and aware of other people. I was out of line.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve always been a big-time teaser, Wyatt.”

  “True, but there’s an art to teasing, and my dad told me mean teasing was something he never wanted to see me do again to anyone. I knew I had the paddling coming, and I agreed with him on that. In fact, what did happen?” His mouth curved as he looked into Tal’s half-closed eyes. “My dad asked me what punishment I’d think I deserved if I were in his place. I was feelin’ bad that Cat was crying like the world had ended. That had not been my objective. My dad had never lifted a hand to any of us growing up. Mom either. So when he took me out to the shed, I knew what I’d done was pretty bad. Worse than bad. And generally speaking, me and Mattie, Cat, and Jake got along really well with one another. There was no so-called sibling rivalry between us. We were like a band of little wolf pups roving around in our happy little pack, out exploring, having fun, and getting in trouble together.”

  “So, who decided on the paddling then?” Tal asked, interested. She saw a glimmer in Wyatt’s gray eyes.

  “Actually, I did. My dad sat and talked to me. He put what I did to Cat into my framework of understanding. What if he or my mom had told me that Santa didn’t exist when I was five or six years old? Because at that age, I fully believed in Santa Claus. He made me go back to that time and see how I might have felt if they’d ripped that reality away from me. Would I have been devastated? Of course I would have. I got his example, big-time. I told him I’d probably be crying like Cat was crying. I believed with all my heart Santa Claus was real at that age. I wrote letters to him, to the North Pole. It was then I honestly realized what I’d done to my sister, and I hadn’t before that. I felt like cow dung at that point. I asked Dad if there was any way I could fix it, put it back together again for Cat. He shook his head and said no. That I had destroyed her faith in what she believed in. My dad asked me what my punishment should be for doing that to her. I told him he should paddle my britches. That I really deserved it.”

  “Your dad is a remarkable parent,” Tal said. “Making you own up to what you did. Talk about a teachable moment.”

  Wyatt smiled a little, finishing up with her foot and then running his hand lightly over the injured ankle, which was now looking normal in size once more. He opened up a jar of Gram Bell’s herbal ointment and slathered it gently around her ankle. It had a nice, citrusy fragrance. “Yeah, he was. He’s a very black-and-white kind of man. There’s right, and there’s wrong. He’s a typical cowboy with a code of morals, values, and integrity that means something to him. He lives by that code. That’s the way we were all raised. You didn’t lie, you didn’t cheat, you were honest to a fault, your word was your bond, and you followed the Golden Rule.”

  “Why did you choose being paddled by your dad when he’d never done that to you before?” Tal asked, holding his gray gaze. Wyatt,
freshly showered, was wearing a black T-shirt with a pair of loose blue pajama bottoms.

  “I made Cat cry. I figured if I got paddled, I’d cry too. Tit for tat.”

  “Did you choose it out of guilt for what you’d done to her?”

  “Yep,” Wyatt murmured, standing up. He turned off the overhead lamp, throwing the room into semidarkness. The light of the moon sneaked in around the dark green drapes at the window, allowing him to see where he was going. “Dad had me bend over his knee and he used his hand on my butt.” Wyatt pulled the covers down. “It really didn’t hurt that much. He didn’t hit me that hard.”

  “It just hurt your pride?” Tal asked, getting off the bed and pulling the covers down on her side of it.

  Chuckling, Wyatt said, “Yep. I had a heap of pride, I discovered. My dad worked that out of me, too. He told me there was a huge difference between pride and having confidence. He taught me the difference.”

  Tal slipped into bed, watching as Wyatt sat down and maneuvered himself around. “I think my dad will love Hank. They have a lot in common.”

  “I think so too,” Wyatt said, gathering Tal into his arms as he lay down. Sliding his arm beneath her neck, his other hand guiding her hip toward him so they lay face-to-face with one another, he gave a growl of satisfaction. “Now, this is nice,” he murmured, leaning over to kiss her hair, which she’d taken down. Some of the strands were crinkled from the humidity in the bathroom.

  “Mmm,” Tal murmured, sliding her arm across his hard belly, feeling his muscles contract as she skimmed his black T-shirt.

  Wyatt took her arm across his belly and gently sliding his fingers from her shoulder downward. “I love you,” he said gruffly, finding her fingers, then squeezing and holding them.

  Tal snuggled her cheek against his shoulder, inhaling the clean scent of the Ivory soap he’d used earlier. “I’m so lucky to have you in my life, Wyatt. I love you so much . . .”

  “We are lucky,” he agreed, his voice deep and thick with emotion.

  “Luckier than your poor sister Mattie and Mark Reuss. That seems to be an ongoing open wound in your family.”

  Growling, Wyatt said, “It’s a messy, complicated situation, Tal. Mattie and Mark, I think, fell in love with one another in grade school. Puppy love. And then, when they were in high school, things got serious between them. They hung out together all the time and were a known item.”

  “Did your parents know about it?”

  “Oh yeah, for sure. My mom was worried that Mattie might run off and get married to Mark. He was a leader of sorts at the high school, good at playing football, and was the star quarterback. He had a dark side and a lot of anger, and I imagine that’s because his father, Jeb, was always beating the tar out of him at home. I was very close to Mark. We hung out a lot together. I don’t really know the whole story about him and his family. I know Mattie told us some of the abuse he endured while protecting his younger sister, Sage, from his father. But that’s all.”

  “It sounds from tonight’s discussion like Mark was a seriously abused kid.”

  “Yeah, he was. I don’t think Mattie’s blowing anything out of proportion that she found out from Mark and told us. I was on the football team with Mark, and in the locker room, when we’d strip down to being buck naked after practice and hit the showers, you could see wide leather-strap bruise marks across his back and his thighs.”

  “God,” Tal muttered, shaking her head. “Why didn’t someone report Jeb Reuss to the authorities?”

  “In order for someone to report him to the sheriff, Mark would’ve had to be prepared to admit to the authorities what the old man did to him. And that wasn’t gonna happen. His mother was dead, so his father was the only parent left. And if he had? The state of Texas’s Child Protective Services would have removed them, and they’d have gone into foster care. And chances are, he and Sage would have been split up and gone to different families. Mark devoted his young life to protecting Sage from that bastard father of theirs. There’s some parents around this area who believe that a whippin’ every now and then is good for a kid. I don’t agree with it, but that’s neither here nor there. Jeb was always saying, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ to anyone who would listen. Mark was always catching hell from him.”

  Groaning, Tal said, “That’s terrible. My parents never lifted a hand or their voices to us. And we aren’t spoiled. We knew right from wrong. We were raised to be responsible adults.”

  Wyatt sighed. “Yeah, but there’s an old-fashioned kind of mind-set to some Texans that hasn’t left the eighteenth century when it comes to being parents and dealing with their offspring. My dad, thank God, is not one of them. Nor is my mom. But Mark’s dad is a mean rattlesnake. And the abuse moves forward from one generation to the next, as we all know.”

  “That being the case, Wyatt, how did Mattie get mixed up with Mark?”

  “Oh, that.” He sighed heavily. “Each of the four of us kids has a very different personality. Mattie, who’s two years younger than me and the second born. She holds out hope for the hopeless. Loves teaching kindergarten. Loves kids—thrives on being around them, as a matter of fact. She’s found her calling, no question. The problem is that she’s an idealist, Tal. And she doesn’t see the dark side of human beings like you and I do. We’re realists. But Mattie sees their potential, sees what the person could be, not where they’re at right now. Plus, Mattie is always saving things. She finds the baby bird fallen out of the nest and brings it home and takes care of it, feeds it, until she can turn it loose. Or if someone drops a mongrel dog off on the side of the freeway, she’ll pick it up and take care of it.”

  “Or an injured young man named Mark Reuss who needs saving?” Tal suggested.

  “Yeah, exactly,” Wyatt muttered. “Hey, by the time he was in high school, the guy was angry, but when you saw him being beat by his old man weekly, you could understand his anger up to a point. The Lockwood kids and the Reuss kids were always friends growing up, what with the boundaries of our ranches butting up against one another, but Mark and Mattie always had a special connection.”

  “Did you fight with one another?”

  “No, never. Mark’s a big guy like I am. He was always gentle around Cat and Mattie, liked Jake and me, plus was respectful toward my mom and dad. He and I got into a lot of boyhood adventures in the Guadalupe Mountains. We had a lot of fun together, as a matter of fact.”

  “So what happened? What turned him into a drug dealer, Wyatt?”

  “Mark was in the Marine Corps from eighteen through twenty-six. He joined just as I was joining the Navy to go into the SEALs. He went into black ops with Force Recon. He was over in Afghanistan most of the time, and he saw a lot of action and combat. According to my father, when Mark got out of the corps at twenty-six, he went to Nogales to find work as a truck driver. It made no sense to me or my family. Mark’s a damned intelligent person. But, according to Mattie, he wasn’t anything like he used to be.”

  “What does that mean?” Tal asked, frowning.

  “PTSD symptoms—anxious, irritable, couldn’t sleep at night, nightmares, and flashbacks,” he muttered. “It upset Mattie a lot. He wasn’t the person she had been friends with all her life.”

  “I’m sure it would be jolting,” Tal murmured, sympathetic. “So? When did the drugs enter the picture?”

  “Mattie said he’d be gone for days at a time and wouldn’t tell her where he was going. He lived in Nogales, but he had a truck route where he could stop off and see her and Sage maybe once or twice a month. He just started seeing less and less of Mattie. She went to Sage, who works at their father’s ranch, and asked her if she knew anything about Mark’s strange activities. Sage had no idea. She didn’t know why Mark was disappearing weeks at a time either. Mark wasn’t telling his father, whom he hates, or Sage when this disappearing act would happen.”

  “So, he went dark for some unknown reason,” Tal said, moving her fingers across his chest.

  �
�Yeah, ’fraid so.”

  “Poor Mattie, my heart breaks for her, Wyatt.”

  “Mark became a ghost in her life,” Wyatt muttered, sadness in his tone.

  “That’s hard, when you’ve had a friend for so long who starts removing themselves from your life,” Tal said. “No wonder she looks so sad and beat down.”

  “Yeah, it knocked the stuffing out of her,” Wyatt quietly agreed. “And of all the kids, she’s the most vulnerable among us. The one that has no shields in place to protect herself from shit like that. I’m surprised my family brought it up tonight, to tell you the truth. It’s one of the so-called skeletons in our closet. We tend not to talk about Mark in front of Mattie. It’s like the elephant that’s in the room; no one wants to say it’s there. She’s still suffering badly over it.”

  “She was blindsided.”

  “For damn sure,” Wyatt grimly said. “She’s twenty-nine now and still hasn’t come out from under it. I personally think she’s grieving. Why those two never said they loved one another, when it was clear to all of us, is a mystery.”

  “She doesn’t have a present relationship?” Tal asked.

  “No. Since Mark more or less left, she’s lost interest in life. No matter what Cat or Jake do to introduce her to a new man, a good man, she won’t engage with him at all. She’s still carryin’ a torch for Mark, and I don’t know why.”

  “Is Mattie one of these women who falls in love and can never love again if she loses the love of her life?”

  “Wish to hell I knew, Tal. It appears to be that way. The whole family is flummoxed by it. So is Sage. They’re like sisters, but Sage is the opposite of Mattie. She’s one tough, boarded-up customer. Doesn’t take shit from anyone. In fact, according to my dad, she runs the ranch. Jeb, the father, has had a series of strokes over the last five years due to his drinking habit and is pretty much housebound. Most of the time, he doesn’t know where he’s at. Sage hired a foreman a while back, from what my dad said, and things are straightening out at the ranch for them, finally. Sage has put their homestead back on solid financial footing since that new foreman was hired a few years ago. As a matter of fact, he’s ex–Delta Force and knew Mark. He called Sage and told her that he was getting out and looking for a foreman’s job, so she hired him.”