Just a big, strong facade, without a damned thing behind it.
His words came back to her, along with the pure conviction that had rung in his voice when he’d said them. It was a facade, that cool, uncaring front. But she’d been wrong about what it was covering up. She’d thought he was warning her off, telling her that he was the kind of man she’d thought he was when she’d seen him with Cindy Crain draped around him, that to him, one willing woman as good as the next.
But it hadn’t been that at all. She had remembered when she’d thought about hollowness. It wasn’t far from there to the understanding that this was what he’d been talking about when he’d told her not to trust him. That what he was covering was not the shallowness of a womanizer, but the pain of a man who felt utterly empty inside.
What had he said about Kyra? I’m not her style...she knows better? Is that how he’d felt, that women like Kyra—and perhaps like herself—wouldn’t have anything to do with him if they knew what was behind the illusion, that image of tall, broad, impossibly handsome strength? That only women like Cindy would? Women who cared for little other than the image?
She suddenly remembered a horse she’d seen once, a big, gutsy bay stallion who’d been in a horse transport that had been hit by another rig. The animal had been hurt so badly he was obviously dying, but he kept struggling to get to his feet, trying to keep going. She’d been horrified at his pain, and had cried at his courage. She was feeling an echo of that combination right now, along with a fierce tightness in her throat. Several silent minutes passed before she could speak.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said huskily. “Except that none of it was your fault. But...I can understand why you might feel like it is, somehow.”
Even in the nighttime shadows beneath the tree she could see him go very still.
“Nobody ever understood before,” he said, in a voice so tightly controlled she wondered if he was as close to snapping as he sounded. “But I’ve never...spilled my guts like this to anybody, either.”
“Sometimes it has to come out, Cole. If you don’t talk about it, it will come out some other way. And those ways are usually worse.”
He made a wry sound that was almost a chuckle. “Were you a bartender in another life?”
“No. I just know how much better I felt after you listened to me about my father.”
There was a pause and then, quietly, “Is that what this is? A payback?”
“If that’s what you need it to be.”
And you don’t need to know how much more it is to me, Tory thought sadly. You wouldn’t want to know. She was only beginning to know, herself. In a peculiar sort of way, she’d been relieved to think of him as a casual, hit-and-run kind of lover, a love-’em-and-leave-’em type like her father, whom she doubted had ever experienced a sincere emotion in his life. It had made it easier for her to think she could keep her heart intact, knowing that there would be nothing beyond the physical in a relationship with a man like that.
But now she knew that Cole wasn’t that kind of man at all. She knew that he was a man who, if anything, felt too deeply—too deeply to easily accept the assessment that none of the tragic deaths he’d been so close to were his fault. Too deeply to walk away and go on with his life untouched. Too deeply not to question what he might have done to save the people who now haunted him. And so deeply that he changed his life because of them.
So where did that leave her? How was she now to keep the distance between them? How was she supposed to protect her heart, when everything she’d heard made her want to hold this man close and try to heal him any way she could?
For a very long time they sat in silence. Tory might have thought he’d passed out or gone to sleep except for the faint gleam that told her his eyes were open. He was staring upward, at the leafy canopy of the old scrub oak.
It came quietly out of the dark. “Tory?”
“What?”
“Why are you here?”
It was a much more sober version of that first question asked, what seemed like hours ago. She stifled a sigh.
“Looking for you,” she answered finally.
“In the middle of the night?”
“Closer to morning,” she corrected, only now realizing it was literally true. The sky was growing lighter in the east.
“Why?” he repeated.
Fine time for him to sober up enough so that she couldn’t divert him. Although the harrowing story he’d told her would be enough to sober anyone.
“I was...worried. And angry.”
“Oh.”
“And if you’re going to ask why, don’t. I haven’t even figured that out completely myself.”
“Oh.”
His noncommittal response jabbed at her. “Would you like to define what the heck ‘oh’ means?”
She saw his mouth twist wryly in the slowly gathering light of dawn. “It means I don’t know what else to say.”
She hadn’t expected that simple, honest answer. “Oh.”
He looked startled. Then, slowly, the wry set of his lips became a half smile. As if played back in her head, she heard the absurdity of that last exchange, and couldn’t help nearly smiling, too. But both expressions faded quickly. There had been too much pain, too much powerful emotion dragged out here to let it go easily. She felt exhausted; she could only imagine how he felt.
“We both need some sleep,” she said, starting to rise. “Are you okay to drive home now, or do you want to come back for your truck later?”
As she said the word “home,” she saw him stiffen. “I’ll drive back. To pick up my things.”
Tory sank back down, staring at him. “To what?”
“I told you. I’ve got to get out of here.”
“But—”
“I’ll find someone else to help you here.”
“You’re...leaving?”
He came up on his knees, a bare two feet away from her. In the new light she could see the rough texture of the beard stubbling his jaw, and the red-rimmed fatigue in his eyes.
“I have to, Tory. If you’d really walked into trouble tonight, you could have been hurt—or worse. Because I wasn’t fast enough.”
“Fast enough? You were right behind me!”
“Not fast enough,” he repeated. “Once I would have been there first. But I don’t have that edge anymore. And every second is critical. It has to be...instant, Tory. You could have died while I was...remembering.”
And he couldn’t take another funeral.
He hadn’t spoken the words, but she heard them as if he had. And she had the awful feeling that, even if she were to pour every bit of her heart and hope and caring into it, she could never heal this man. Only he could do that, and he was carrying around far too much guilt to even let the process begin.
She wondered if she was going to be any better at healing than he was.
Numbly, she got to her feet. He rose as well, for the moment steadier on his feet than she was. She felt as if she were the one who’d tried to find oblivion in a bottle. Maybe she’d try it yet.
“You can explain to Hobie,” she said, her voice sounding as weary as she felt. “I’m far too tired.”
“Tory—”
She turned her back on him. She was afraid she was going to cry, and she didn’t want him to see her. She’d made a promise to him, that she wanted nothing more than he was willing to give. She walked toward the Jeep, telling herself every step of the way that because she’d been kidding herself was no excuse for adding to his sense of guilt.
And she knew now that he would feel that way. That all his warnings to her, all his harsh words about himself and the way it would be, had been not solely to protect her, but himself, as well. Because if he knew, if he even thought she’d fallen as hard as she now knew she had, he’d take on that load, too.
Her hands were shaking as she opened the Jeep’s door and climbed in. She’d judged him on his looks alone, and deemed him like her father. But he wasn’t anythi
ng like that callous, using man. Where the one felt nothing, Cole felt too much. And he paid the price for it, as her father never had.
She glanced toward him, standing beneath the solid oak, looking nearly as solid himself. But much more alone. She’d never seen anyone who seemed so alone.
She had to blink rapidly as she pulled back out onto the road and turned the Jeep toward home.
* * *
Cole stood staring down the road until the square, white shape of the Jeep had disappeared. His head was beginning to ache, and although he tried to put it down to the excess influx of sour mash, he had a feeling it was just as much due to that unexpected outpouring of the grim details of his miserable life.
Another good reason for not drinking, he thought, rubbing his forehead. It loosens the hinges on your jaw far too much. He couldn’t believe what he’d done. Poured it all out for her like Whitey had kept pouring that Wild Turkey.
He’d even told her about Timmy. No one knew about Timmy.
He’d been on vacation from Sanders when Lisa had come to him. That had been the last vacation he’d ever taken, until now. And despite his efforts, the toddler had been found dead. When he had returned to the Sanders offices, three days after that appalling funeral, there had been comments on his taciturnity, and shock when he’d accepted the transfer to Research which Sanders had offered when he’d told him he was quitting. But when he’d made it clear the subject wasn’t open for discussion, they’d left him alone. And, thanks to the cooperation of a friend at the sheriff’s office who kept it quiet, no one at Sanders knew that the little boy who’d so sadly been in the news was connected to him.
And now he’d not only discussed it, but poured his soul out to the one person he knew was most dangerous to his hard-won equanimity. The one person who had shaken his resolve to never let down his guard. The one person who had made him question the course he’d chosen, and the life he led.
The one person who would never, ever forgive him if he stayed and it happened again. It was just too much to risk. He couldn’t bear to add Hobie’s name to that list, for the sake of trying to disprove whatever hex fate seemed to have dropped on him.
He walked slowly—and carefully—back to his truck. His legs were apparently feeling the aftereffects of the unaccustomed binge. And the rest of him wasn’t too happy, either. He felt exhausted, far more tired than a night without sleep should have made him.
Figures, he thought. It was his mind that he’d been trying to numb, and it was the only thing still working just fine.
He sat down in the driver’s seat, propping his elbows on the steering wheel and cradling his head in his hands. And he admitted reluctantly that it wasn’t just renewing his acquaintance with whiskey that had him so drained. It was renewing his acquaintance with a lot of old memories he’d kept buried, and buried deep, for a long, long time.
And the strung-out, wire-tight emotions that came with them. He’d had a lot of practice denying he even had such feelings. Five years ago, he’d walked away before they’d lowered that tiny white casket into the ground, and had sworn that caring and feeling were for fools. He’d sworn he’d never get close enough to anybody ever again to have to go to their funeral.
And he’d tried to make it stick. There were people he liked, people he respected, but he guarded his heart like a wary wolf guarded its cubs. And he’d got along fine, for years.
Then Kyra had come along. And she’d been even warier than he. When he’d realized she was afraid of him because of his looks, it had shaken him. He hadn’t liked it, and had, at least temporarily, set himself to actually try to get close to someone. It had taken a very long time, and he’d learned a great deal from her about self-protection in the process. He’d also learned, eventually, that she had good reason for her reaction. And by the time she was comfortable enough with him to talk about it, he realized he’d done a very foolish thing; he’d fallen in love with Kyra Austin. Even knowing she could never love him back.
Or maybe because of that fact, he admitted at last for the first time.
He lifted his head to stare out into the pink light of dawn. She was Kyra Riordan now, madly in love with the husband who adored her, pregnant and happier than Cole had ever seen her. And he was happy for her, he told himself, as he’d always told himself when he thought of her.
And then, with a little shock of realization, it hit him. He was happy for her. And the happiness, for the first time, wasn’t tinged with regret for what he’d...not lost, but never had.
He wasn’t sure what the absence of that regret meant, but it made him uneasy.
As did thinking of Kyra and Cash, for a completely different reason. Because of Cole’s expertise on terrorists, Bill Sanders, the head of Sanders Protection, had wanted to send him in to help Kyra when things had really got ugly at the end of that case, when the threats on Cash’s life had been coming closer and closer. But he’d known it would be inviting tragedy, because by then it was obvious to him that Kyra had come to care for the surprisingly modest, unassuming star she’d been sent to protect. And throwing Cole Bannister into a case to help a woman—and a man she cared about—was like inviting disaster to strike. So he’d refused. And Cash was still alive. Proof in reverse, he supposed.
Proof that he needed to get the hell out of here.
He started the truck and pulled carefully out onto the road. It was getting brighter out, and his eyes—gritty from lack of sleep and hurting from too much alcohol—protested. He reached into the glove box and tugged out the wire-framed, aviator-style sunglasses he hadn’t worn since he’d got here, relying on his hat for shade. He put them on, grimly acknowledging the ludicrousness of needing them when it was barely after dawn.
He drove toward the ranch, wishing he could put a halt to the mad racing of his mind. It was as if he’d stirred it up so with that rush of memories that now it wouldn’t settle down. It was a good thing this road was deserted at this hour, because he wasn’t concentrating on driving very well. He was too busy wondering what he was going to tell Hobie. And how the hell he was going to walk away from Tory.
But on some instinctive level his mind must be working, he realized, because he’d already slowed down before the dust cloud rising off to the right registered on his conscious mind. It was far down the road Tory had told him about, the road that came up on the far side of the hills. Whoever it was had already reached the end of the paved portion and was into the dust, kicking up the cloud he’d seen.
The fact that it was the road her trespasser had probably taken was enough to make Cole suspicious. He had checked it the day after she’d told him about it, and found what could have been recent tire tracks, and a few smudged footprints in the dust, but nothing else.
He turned off the main road and braked the truck to a stop. He reached once more into the glove box and took out the small binoculars he was now grateful he’d brought. The dusty windshield of the truck interfered, and he stepped to the ground to bring the binoculars up to his sunglasses.
The cloud seemed fainter, already dissipating in the morning sun, with no sign of the vehicle that had made it. Then he realized he was looking too far ahead. This was a second—or rather, first—cloud. The one he’d originally seen was farther back, apparently stirred up by a second vehicle following the first. He moved his head and the field glasses and focused again. And he felt his stomach knot when he saw the familiar, blocky white shape.
It was Tory.
Chapter 15
Cole lowered the binoculars, vaguely aware that he was gripping them so tightly his knuckles where white.
She must have seen the dust cloud raised by the passing vehicle just as he had. And had, with the kind of recklessness he’d seen too often lead to tragedy, gone charging after the intruder who might be the man responsible for the death of her beloved horses. It was useless hoping she’d realize her folly and turn back. When it came to a threat to her own, Tory Flynn would never back down. Images of the possible results that such a c
onfrontation brought made his stomach clench nauseatingly. He fought it down.
There was no way, unless the trespasser was utterly oblivious, that he couldn’t know she was behind him. That second rising cloud of dry California dust was a marker that would be hard to miss.
God, Tory.
“Move it, Bannister,” he muttered. You freeze up now and you’ll have another damned funeral to go to. Hers. And this time you might not be able to resist the urge to throw yourself into that grave, too.
He floored it until he ran out of pavement. And he didn’t try for secrecy as he hit the dirt, in fact, he purposely swerved every few hundred yards to make sure the quarry knew Tory wouldn’t be alone for long. The worn out shocks made it a rough ride, but he never slowed. He’d wasted enough time already, once more battling the memories that robbed him of those precious seconds that could make the difference between getting there in time and not. The old Cole Bannister would have been there by now, would have moved the instant he’d realized it was Tory following this unknown—and possibly lethal—intruder. He didn’t know who this Cole Bannister was, anymore.
The truck hit a rut and veered sharply to the right. He wrestled it back and slammed down on the accelerator once more. He had no business being here, he thought, damning himself for not having sent somebody who could function like he once had. But right now he was all she had.
He swore as he had to slow for a sharp turn around a large boulder. Those seconds he’d wasted before loomed larger and larger. If he didn’t—
He jammed on the brakes just in time to avoid Tory’s Jeep. It was stopped just around the boulder. And just behind a large, gray four-wheel-drive wagon.
And then he saw her. She was next to the Jeep’s still open door. The other driver was beside her, a short but very muscular man with neatly trimmed blond hair. She was saying something to him, and she was obviously angry. And as Cole’s truck skidded to a halt, the man reached out and grabbed her shoulders.
Fury shot through him like a lightning strike. He didn’t even remember moving, but the next thing he knew he had the man up against the side of the Jeep, his forearm across his throat. The man twisted and kicked. Cole dodged him easily. The man’s hands came up and clawed at the arm that was cutting off his air. Failing to budge him, the man pelted him with fisted blows that made him wince, but Cole didn’t let go. Fear began to dawn in the man’s eyes, but Cole held him fast. Until, at last, through the haze of anger, he heard Tory.
Out of the Dark Page 18
