A Stranger in the Family (Book 1, Bardville, Wyoming Trilogy)

by Patricia McLinn

  Irene stored the bedding each winter in the cedar closet Ted had built years ago in the attic. Cambria tried arguing each year that since people paid good money for cedar air fresheners, the scent should please them just fine in the cabins’ quilts, blankets and coverlets. Irene replied each year that if the guests wanted cedar they could buy it, but the Weston Ranch gave them something never caught in a bottle—the wind-scoured, sun-blessed, sage-tinged clean scent of Wyoming.

  Cambria had started right after breakfast, but the task was taking longer than she remembered. Maybe because the sight of Boone, hard at work on the new cabin across the open circle, posed a distraction.

  She wished he’d put his shirt back on. Or maybe she didn’t. She wished they’d made love last week in the canyon, and she was relieved they hadn’t. He made her laugh. He made her angry. She admired his responsibility, determination and discipline, then lost all patience when she saw how they had hurt him. She dreaded his leaving, but she looked toward it as her salvation.

  She didn’t have one thought or feeling about this man that couldn’t be turned on its head and still be true. Jessa had been right from the start. She was deeply attracted to him, in a combustible chemical sort of reaction she couldn’t deny or explain away. She was also drawn to him on a level that had to do with mind and character and the integrity in a pair of level gray eyes.

  Boone Dorsey Smith ruffled her. More than that, he scared her.

  Cambria was putting the last quilt on the double row of clothesline when she saw Sheriff Milano’s car turn onto the road. Holding aside a blanket billowing like a sail, she gave him a wave. He waved back and stopped the car well short of the house. When he got out, he started toward her, only pausing for a brief wave of hello at Irene, who’d come out on the porch at the sound of the car. Cambria tailored her path to meet him.

  “Sheriff, how are you this morning? Sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you Saturday, but you seemed pretty occupied.”

  Dark color flagged the sheriff’s naturally ruddy cheeks at her oblique reference to his interest in Rita. Cambria expected a teasing answer in return, or at the least, an admonition to not be starting on him. Instead, with a solemn face and an unusually solemn tone, the sheriff said, “I had a right nice time, always do at the Weston cookout.”

  “Glad to hear that,” Cambria said, trying to gauge his unusual mood.

  Instinctively she glanced toward the rising cabin across the way. Boone had been watching. As soon as she looked up, he started toward her. From the corner of her eye, she saw that Irene had already left the porch, heading this way.

  “Uh, Cambria, I got something I need to tell you.”

  A weight of anxiety pressed against her chest. “Yes?”

  “You’ll be getting official word a bit later, but I thought I’d come by and tell you personal.”

  She felt as she had once when, rear-ended by a drunk driver, her car went airborne over a ditch before landing on an embankment. In those brief seconds she had felt weightless, suspended. For that beat of time she had been uninjured, unbruised, yet fully conscious that pain would come as soon as she landed.

  “Just tell me.”

  “Angie Lee’s dead. She died last week in Los Angeles. It was cancer. I—”

  “What is it?” Irene demanded, still several yards away. “Oh, God...Pete?”

  “No, Mama.” Cambria met Irene, putting her arms around the white-faced older woman. “Pete’s fine.”

  Sheriff Milano cleared his throat. “It’s Angie Lee, Irene. I was just telling Cambria, she died last week in Los Angeles.”

  Irene’s hold changed, from taking support to giving it. But Cambria didn’t need that. She straightened and met Boone’s worried look over Irene’s shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Boone. We’re okay. You can go back to work.”

  Irene, keeping one arm around Cambria’s waist, reached out her other hand to cup Boone’s arm. “You stay right here, Boone. Sheriff Milano came to tell us that Cambria’s mother has passed away. Poor soul.”

  “It’s no concern of mine.” The harsh words left Cambria’s throat feeling ragged and sore.

  “Oh, Cambria.”

  Irene’s hold on her tightened as if she needed consoling, and Boone’s brow creased in worry.

  “It’s not,” she insisted.

  Sheriff Milano cleared his throat. “Matter of fact, it is, Cambria. That’s the other thing I came to tell you.”

  “Her dying doesn’t change the past and it doesn’t change that she’s no concern of—”

  “You’re her sole heir. I got a letter from a lawyer here that says so. And I guess you’re going to have to be deciding what to do about her things and such.”

  He handed over a sealed, crisply thick envelope with her name typed in the precise center. Cambria accepted it, but made no move to open it.

  “But how did you get it, Tom?” Irene asked.

  “This lawyer fellow called our office yesterday trying to find out if we knew where you might be. Seems the last address Angie Lee had for you was Washington, D.C.—” Cambria gave an involuntary jerk at the news that Angie Lee had kept track of her at all, much less as recently as Washington. “When a letter sent there came back Addressee Unknown, he got associates to check. ‘Course they didn’t find any sign of you. Not having any fancy associates in our corner of the world, he decided to scope out the lay of the land. I talked to him yesterday and said when the letter came I’d bring it out personal. Damned if he didn’t get it here overnight.”

  “That was nice of you, Tom. Real nice.”

  “It only seemed right. It’s a shame...” He let that trail off without specifying what was a shame. “Lawyer said Angie Lee got sick suddenlike, and when she went to a doctor, the cancer was too far gone for them to do more than make her comfortable.”

  “Poor soul,” Irene repeated with genuine sympathy.

  Cambria pulled from her and faced off against the three people watching her, each with a mix of wariness and worry.

  “How can you waste your sympathy on her? You knew her. You knew she never cared for anyone but herself. She thought of herself first, last and always. Dying doesn’t change that. And it doesn’t change that I don’t want to have anything to do with her.”

  “Cambria...”

  She brushed past Boone, knocking away his hand when he would have touched her, and headed for her cabin. She knew someone would follow her; Irene most likely. And Irene’s calm good sense would coax the poison out of Cambria’s system bit by bit as it had many times over the years.

  But this would be the last time, because Angie Lee was dead.

  And first, Cambria needed some time alone.

  * * * *

  “Give her some time.” Irene’s hand on his arm stopped Boone’s instinctive move to follow Cambria.

  He listened while the sheriff and Irene talked quietly, a few commonplace memories of the woman who’d borne Cambria easing into the everyday doings of their community and ending with Irene’s thanking Tom Milano again for coming by personally.

  Boone stood beside Irene as the sheriff drove off in a slow-growing tail of dust. He nodded when she said, “I’m going to find Ted,” then watched her head off in the four-wheel drive to the range her husband was working. He went to his cabin to wash up, then he went to find Cambria.

  She sat on a sun-bleached picnic table bench in the shade of the cottonwood behind her cabin, not far from the creek. Leaning forward with her forearms on her thighs, she used her thumbnail to peel an orange with slow, meticulous attention. The pages of the opened lawyer’s letter sat loose atop the envelope on the bench, as if waiting for a breeze to spirit them away.

  He picked them up as he sat beside her, not near enough to touch.

  Without lifting her head from her task, she said, “Go ahead and read it if you’re interested.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Go ahead. Read it.”


  He looked at her bent head for a long moment, reading one message from the straight line of her back, the levelness of her shoulders and the studied movements of her hands. But he heard something else in the rough-voiced words that sounded again and again in his head. He smoothed the sheets and started to read. When he’d finished, he folded the pages together and returned them to their envelope.

  The dry, legal phrases that had followed a stilted expression of sympathy had put him back on a familiar ground.

  He drew in a deep breath.

  “I can imagine how you feel, Cambria. You must—”

  “You have no idea how I feel.”

  “I’ve pushed people away in my life, too. My sister. Friends. Employees. My high school sweetheart.”

  He swallowed on that one, pausing long enough that she shot him a dour grin before returning her attention to her orange.

  “Is that supposed to have special significance, Boone? Did you think I’d be jealous of your youthful liaisons?”

  “No. Who is not the point. The point is that I did it. I pushed people out of my life. Being here has helped me see that.’’

  “Good for you. But that has nothing to do with Angie Lee dying. If you’re thinking I’m feeling bad for pushing her out of my life, you have it totally wrong, Boone. She walked out of my life and never looked back. She did me one good turn in my lifetime and that was leaving me with Ted. For that I say thanks, even though I suspect it was pure lack of interest on her part not any concern for me. There’s no reason to pretend I’m sad about her dying.”

  “She left you everything she had. Her house—”

  “She left me nothing. Nothing I want. I don’t want her house—this is my home. Ted and Irene and Pete are my family. They are what counts in my life. Nothing else.”

  She was your mother. Just as I’m Pete’s father. He had the sense not to say that. “She left you a beautiful name.”

  “A beautiful name...” Her thumbnail dug deep into the flesh of the orange. Juice welled up over her nail, then dripped to the ground between her feet. She didn’t seem to notice. “I went to see it once, you know, when I was about twenty and...I was curious, so I went to see this place I was named after. Has anybody told you about Cambria, Wyoming?”

  “Yeah, remember?” He reached to stroke her hair. She drew back, no more than half an inch, but his hand stilled immediately. He brought it to the bench between them, wrapping his fingers around the edge. “Irene told me the day I arrived, it’s the name of an old mining town.”

  She shook her head. “Not even a town. More a scratch on the side of a hill early in the 1900s. Now it’s nothing. When the mine went dry, folks just up and left. They walked away, left their houses, their furniture, even the dishes on the table. Are you starting to get an image here? Coal-mining. Dusty and dirty. Nothing worth taking. Deserted. That’s what my mother named me after, that’s the legacy she left me.”

  He had to do something. Something to help her deal with this, with the emotions she might not admit, maybe even the ones she wouldn’t let herself feel. But he didn’t know what. And that clawed at him worse than anything. So he did what he’d always done.

  “Don’t worry about any of this, Cambria. I’ll take care of everything. It says there’s a house she owned that’s yours now. And all the contents. I’ve got connections in L.A. I can find a good real estate broker there. Someone who can take care of all the details for you. Find an auctioneer to deal with the furniture and stuff. I’ll call this lawyer in the morning and see about—”

  “Shut up.”

  She didn’t say it loud, but it stopped him.

  “Cambr—”

  “I don’t want you doing things for me. I don’t want you organizing things. I don’t want you to make any phone calls or send any faxes or shoulder any responsibilities for me. I don’t need your help. Is that clear?”

  He looked at her pale, strained face and knew she did need help, even if it wasn’t with dealing with lawyers and auctioneers and real estate brokers. But he didn’t know how to be what she needed.

  “That’s clear. I’ll leave you alone then.”

  “Fine.”

  He stood. “If you change your mind...”

  “I won’t.”

  * * * *

  The moon, nearly full, valiantly spread thin, silver light across an infinity of sky.

  Boone had gone into Bardville for dinner at the cafe, figuring Cambria would be more comfortable alone with her family considering the way he’d messed up this afternoon.

  It was near midnight. He hadn’t seen a light in her cabin all night. When he couldn’t take the wondering anymore, he went over and quietly opened the cabin door to listen; he heard only the silence of emptiness.

  He went looking for her.

  He almost missed her among the shadows under the cottonwoods. She sat on a large rock by the wooden footbridge. Her forehead rested against her arm, which was supported along the edge of the bridge. She might be staring at the water below through the triangle formed by her arm and body, or she might have her eyes closed—he couldn’t tell.

  He knew she heard his approach, but she didn’t move.

  He sat beside her, the ground cool and faintly damp through the tough fabric of his jeans. He didn’t touch her.

  They sat there for a time he never thought to measure. He watched the glints of light from water running over a sprinkling of submerged rocks, and remembered when he’d been very young. A time with his parents and his grandmother and his younger sister and growing up on the mountain with Cully. And he wished he could take Cambria back to that safe, magical time, to protect her always from pain and disappointment.

  “I’m not crying.”

  Beneath the huskiness her voice held a healthy dose of belligerence.

  “I know that.”

  “I’m not grieving.”

  “Okay.”

  “I have no cause to grieve, so I have no need for your sympathy.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “I don’t need your damn organizational skills.”

  “That’s not why I’m here, either.”

  For a moment he thought that would be the end of it. Then she shifted, straightening slowly, as if she’d grown stiff from holding the same position. Not until she sat completely straight did she turn to look at him. In the faint light her eyes looked dark and shadowy, like a forest path that wavered and glinted as branches moved—tossed by benign breezes or the stirring of a coming storm? Impossible to tell.

  “Why are you here?”

  Swinging his shoulders around, he faced her as squarely as he could.

  He was here to give her what she’d said she didn’t want. Consolation. Caring. Solace.

  He was here to give it to her in a way he’d never known how to give. A way he hoped he could learn for her.

  He brushed his fingertips along the line of her cheekbone, then to the fragile indentation at her temple, and finally along the arch of her brow.

  He was careful to take his hand away before he bent his head to her. He would not hold her, not by even such a light touch, if she did not want this kiss.

  He didn’t hurt her, but the kiss was not gentle. His mouth was firm and hot on hers. He wanted, and his lips told hers that.

  An instant, that’s all. But for that instant she held utterly still and he felt as if his soul had stilled as well.

  A slight, sighing gasp escaped her, slid from her mouth, over his and out into the night. Then she brought her mouth back to his.

  Tilting their heads broadened the kiss. Another move, and it deepened. Tongues, teeth, lips sought and gave. Still, he didn’t touch her anywhere else. They leaned into each other for kisses that left them gasping, then greedily returned for more. He sank into the heat of it, the waves washing over his head. Another second...

  “Cambria.” He lifted his chin when she would have stilled his mouth with another kiss. She placed her lips to his Adam’s apple. “Damn. I’ll
go crazy if I can’t hold you, but if I hold you...This is only leading one place—”

  She was rising, taking his hand and drawing him to stand beside her.

  Feeling slightly dazed, he stood. “What are you doing?”

  “That’s my line, remember?”

  “But—”

  She tugged on his hand, leading him away from the creek. “Inside.”

  “What?”

  “That’s where this is leading.”

  She smiled, and he followed her toward what he wanted. But inside her bedroom, the faint light of moon and stars glinted through the sheer curtains to cast a shadowy glow on the pictures of her family, reminding him of whom she was and whom he was. Damn.

  “Cambria, I don’t...I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.”

  “For you?”

  “For you.”

  She took his face between her palms. “I know that I want to be between the sheets with you, Boone Dorsey Smith, and it has nothing to do with your financial assets.” A wicked little grin played at the corners of her lips, a contrast to the heaviness of her eyes. “Though certain other assets do interest me.”

  He might have denied his own wanting, but not hers.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, he grasped her waist and drew her between his legs. She started unbuttoning his shirt. Under the loose material of her blouse, he sculpted up her ribs to the underside of her breasts. Cambria moved in to reach the lower buttons of his shirt.

  Boone couldn’t begin to count the number of times he’d taken a shirt off in his life. Old, worn, sometimes dirty shirts in the old days; new, luxurious, indulgent shirts more than occasionally now; and almost every variation in between.

  Not one of those had felt like this, with Cambria’s palms sliding along his skin as she spread her hands across his chest, over his shoulders, then down his arms. The fabric followed, aided by the shifting of his shoulders. Cambria unbuttoned his right cuff with infuriating and enticing exactitude, and tugged it over his hand.

  By the time she started on the left cuff, his patience was fraying. He returned his freed hand to her jeans, trying to unsnap them one-handed, without success but with the pleasing side effect of tucking his hand against her warm, smooth abdomen.