Red-Hot Ranchman

by Victoria Pade

  “What did the state police say?”

  “Three months ago, John Jarvis was arrested for murder.”

  Her heart leaped into her throat. “That can’t be true.”

  “It’s true all right. My contact with the state police tracked it down. He even talked to an officer in Austin, Texas, to confirm it.”

  “But John’s here…in Pine Ridge…now. If he committed a crime, he’d be in jail in Texas.”

  “The charges were dropped, but there weren’t any details on why. I have the Austin cop’s name and number and I’ve put a call in to him already to see what else I can find out. But the word is that Jarvis was guilty. That he shouldn’t have gotten off. You and Robbie had better give that guy a wide berth, Paige. Don’t go anywhere near him. And whatever you do, don’t let Robbie follow him around.”

  Paige felt like the rug had just been pulled out from under her. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what to do. The best she could come up with was to mutter, “Robbie’s safe. He spent the night with Julie.” Then, still struggling with what the sheriff had told her, she said, “Maybe there’s a mix-up. John isn’t—”

  “You don’t know what he is or isn’t, and neither do I. But I told you something was going on with him, and it is. Something bad.”

  Paige couldn’t help thinking about the man just upstairs, in her bed. The man she’d given herself to. Trusted. Believed in. The man she’d just moments before attributed with healing all her residual divorce wounds.

  Could that be the same man who was responsible for another man’s death?

  “Paige? Are you there?” Burt asked when she’d let silence fall too long.

  “Yes, I’m here,” she said weakly because it was all the voice she could muster.

  “I’ll let you know the minute I find out more. But stay away from Jarvis, whatever you do,” he repeated yet again, enunciating each word slowly, carefully, as if to impress upon her how crucial he thought his warning was.

  “Thanks for calling, Burt,” she said, then hung up.

  It suddenly flashed through her mind that maybe she should grab her keys and make a run for it. Go to Julie’s where she would be safe, too. And she might have, except her knees had turned to jelly and the best she could do was pull a chair out from the kitchen table and sit down on it.

  John a murderer?

  It couldn’t be true.

  Yet as she thought about it, she began to recall the reasons he’d given for moving here two months ago. A fresh start. Wanting to live a normal life. Hiding out and not letting people get too close…

  Too close to what? To knowing he’d killed someone?

  Was that why he’d kept such a low profile here? He’d said it was because he hadn’t wanted anyone to know about his healing powers. But he didn’t have to be a recluse to conceal whatever powers he might have. He had only not to use them in order not to reveal them.

  Hiding out…

  Was it possible he’d taken someone’s life? John, who seemed so kind, so gentle, so compassionate. John, who claimed he could heal people, help them.

  Could he also harm them?

  Paige turned cold, thinking about all the times she’d let Robbie go next door to be with John. She’d not only allowed her son’s hero worship, she’d also accommodated it. Encouraged it.

  She’d gotten involved with John herself. She’d let her guard down, let him get closer than any man since her divorce. She’d made love with him…

  Oh, Lord, had she done it again? Had she come under the spell of yet another man who wasn’t what he seemed? Who harbored treacherous, ugly secrets? Was this man even worse than the last—

  “Hey, I thought you were coming back to bed.”

  John’s voice, John standing in the kitchen doorway, startled Paige. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, trying to picture him as someone evil, dangerous, someone to be afraid of.

  But one look at him, wearing only his suit pants with the waistband left open, his exquisitely honed torso bare, his face shadowed with the night’s growth of beard, his hair sleep tousled, and she had second thoughts.

  This was John.

  Was he really a liar? A killer?

  Looking at him made that even more impossible to believe.

  He came into the room, toward the table, toward her, but any thoughts of running evaporated. In that moment, she wasn’t afraid of him. But she was confused. And curious. And very, very leery.

  His eyes were on her, searching her face, and the closer he got, the more deeply he frowned. “Are you okay? Is something wrong with Robbie?” he asked, stopping in front of her.

  “The call wasn’t about Robbie,” she said, sitting taller in her chair, raising her gaze up that incredible body that hers craved even now.

  “What was it about? You’re as white as a sheet.”

  “Tell me the real reason you left Texas.”

  He froze. He didn’t say anything. He only went on staring at her for endless moments.

  Was he wondering how much she knew? What he could get away with telling her?

  As if he could read her thoughts and found them repugnant, he stepped back, leaned his hips against the counter and crossed his arms over his bare chest. “Let me guess,” he said. “The wake-up call was from the sheriff and he’s done some digging.”

  Paige didn’t respond to that one way or another. She just watched him. Watched his jaw tighten. Wondered if he was going to deny the whole thing. Try to lie his way out of it.

  But after another moment, he raised both hands to finger comb his hair—a glorious sight as the muscles in his sides expanded to widen the V that was already formed from his narrow waist to his shoulders. Virile, masculine, sexy…

  Not that he was trying to be.

  Or that Paige wanted to notice any of it. Or to be affected by it.

  When he’d raked his hair back and let go, he held those two hands out in front of him and looked at them, palms up, then palms down. “Some people call the power to heal by touch a gift,” he said in that deep, resonant voice. “‘He’s got the gift’ is what they’d say. ‘He’s blessed.’ When things got so crazy that hundreds of people a day were showing up at the ranch, and I couldn’t walk down the street in town without dozens of them grabbing at me, begging me for help, Dwight and I began to wonder if the blessing wasn’t really a curse. Then, about three months ago, that notion took on a whole new meaning.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said when he paused and seemed to be so lost in his own thoughts that she wondered if he still knew she was there.

  John recrossed his arms over his chest, jamming each hand under the opposite arm. “The gift seemed to go bad.”

  “How so?”

  “There were always people I couldn’t help. I don’t know why exactly. My success rate was high, but every now and then…I just couldn’t do any good for a handful of folks. Then, three months ago, I started not being able to help any but the smallest problems people came to me with. Anything bigger than a minor ache or pain and I had no effect. Then things started to go the other way.”

  That sounded very ominous and again he stalled. But this time Paige thought she should wait for him to be ready to go on so she didn’t say anything.

  After a few minutes he said, “People who came to me left in worse shape. Not everyone. Just a few. And nothing that didn’t go away in time. But still…” He shook his head, looking perplexed, troubled by it even now.

  “Then a man with some simple back pains came,” he went on. “Twice I treated him and he said he’d found some relief, but it wouldn’t last. He wanted me to try a third time, so I did. He lay on my table, on his stomach, and I put my hands on his spine. The minute I touched him he went stiff. Just froze up. I called him by name, and when he didn’t answer me, I turned him over. He was already dead by then.”

  John was staring into space, shaking his head. He seemed to be reliving the tragedy again, his expression terribly disturbed, a far
away look in his eyes.

  But Paige wasn’t sure she could believe either what she was hearing or what she was seeing.

  “So you’d killed him?” she asked quietly.

  “Dwight says no. He doesn’t believe the power went bad. He thinks I was just wrung out, that I needed a rest, that something had gone haywire because of my exhaustion and that’s why I’d had some negative reactions. But he doesn’t believe that the power had gone so bad that I could have killed the man.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Dwight’s right about the exhaustion part. The last year…well, you can’t imagine what it was like. There weren’t enough hours in the day for all the people who came to me. From dawn until I couldn’t stand on my own feet anymore at night, I’d be at it, and there’d still be more comin’. Folks were camping out on our front yard so they could be first the next day, and there’d be more added to ‘em when I woke up. But maybe I’m just looking for an excuse. That’s what the father of the man who died claimed. The father was a Texas superior court judge—retired but still with a lot of clout. I was arrested. Charged with murder.”

  “But the charges were dropped.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not even sure why. The fact is, I still haven’t been privy to what was the cause of death, if you can believe that. The old judge tied up the autopsy report and every lick of information. I have lawyers in Texas working on getting it all released, but the judge has friends in high places who don’t want to add to his grief by going against his wishes, so I don’t know if I’ll ever know the truth. I count myself lucky that I got off the way I did. The judge was pushing to have me hanged as a charlatan who’d murdered his son no matter what could be proven.”

  “And what do you think?” she asked again.

  He was looking at her once more, watching for her reactions just as she was watching him.

  “I think the same way the power came to me, it might have turned bad. That I just might have killed that man.”

  Something flashed through Paige’s mind just then, a memory of a small incident. “Is that why you pulled back from touching my hand when I burned it fighting the barn fire?”

  “I know I’ve been seeing positive effects in the animals I’ve tended—some around my place, and Robbie’s frog, Nijjy, your cow. But that isn’t the same as ministering to a person—to you—even with just a burned hand. I couldn’t risk hurting you.”

  Except that he had hurt her. Maybe not then, maybe not physically. But he’d left her so much in the dark about himself, concealed this most important part of his past until she had found out about it herself, that she couldn’t help being hurt by it. Hurt by thoughts that maybe even what he was telling her now wasn’t true. That it could well be shaded for his benefit. Or that the whole healing thing could be a hoax. That he could be nothing but a con artist like her ex-husband, a con artist who had played some part in a man’s death.

  Yet he seemed so sincere, so honest, so straightforward…

  But then he’d seemed that way last night, too, she reminded herself. While all the time he was leaving out a very big, very important piece of the story.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she asked, an accusation in her tone that she couldn’t keep out.

  “Should I have just added it over cocktails? ‘Oh, and by the way, I may have killed a man,’” he said with an edge to his voice, as well.

  “You should have told me, yes.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I had a right to know what I was getting into!” She hadn’t meant to shout, but that’s how it came out as those old scars began to sting again.

  John’s frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “I didn’t think you had a reason to know.”

  “You’re hiding out here from a murder charge and you didn’t think I needed to know it?”

  “I’m not hiding out from a murder charge.” His voice was tight and Paige could see that he was as angry as she was.

  “You said yourself that you were hiding out here.”

  “Not from a murder charge. From people getting too close. From folks finding me, wanting me to heal them when maybe all I could do was hurt them. The murder charge was dropped, remember?”

  “I still had the right to know before I…” She couldn’t go on, as mad at herself as she was at him.

  She’d let herself be swept off her feet again. She’d succumbed to a man’s charm and wit and intelligence and good looks just the way she had before, rather than keeping her distance, honestly getting to know him inside and out, the way she should have. The way she’d vowed she would.

  John finished what she hadn’t been able to. “You had the right to know I’d been charged with murder before you let me make love to you.”

  “I should have known even more than that. And I didn’t. I don’t. Because I let myself get sucked in again.”

  John straightened up to his full height. “I wasn’t trying to suck you into anything. I’m not your damn ex-husband!”

  “You also weren’t completely honest with me.”

  “I didn’t lie to you, not once.”

  “But you left out plenty and that’s the same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t the same thing. I didn’t mislead you. I didn’t make you think I’m something I’m not. I just kept some things private. I think I have that right when what I don’t tell you won’t hurt you.”

  “’What you don’t know won’t hurt you’—that was my ex-husband’s favorite saying.

  “The difference is that I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Too late.”

  “That’s damn unfair,” he said through clenched teeth that told her he was working hard to keep control of his temper. “You tell me one single thing I’ve done to hurt you.”

  “This. And who knows what else. Burt thinks—” But even in anger she couldn’t tell him all of what the sheriff suspected him of.

  “Burt thinks what? That it’s me who’s been doing the burglaries and the damage around here? That’s not news to me.” John pinned her with his eyes. “But I didn’t think you thought so, too. Do you?”

  Now she didn’t know what to think. How could she? There could be any number of other things—bad things—that he hadn’t let her know about himself. Just the way her ex-husband hadn’t been the man he’d seemed to be. All she knew with any certainty was that she didn’t know this man.

  So she couldn’t answer his question.

  And her silence must have seemed like confirmation that she suspected him of as much as Burt did because John’s expression was suddenly a storm cloud.

  He let out a wry, mirthless, harsh laugh. “I’ve faced this all my life,” he said. “The doubts, the disbelief. The thinkin’ that I’m working some kind of angle to cheat people. But I didn’t expect to find it here, from you.”

  “Maybe you should have been honest with me,” she countered.

  “I was honest with you.”

  “Selectively.”

  “I just didn’t lay myself all the way open to you. But you know what? I don’t think it would matter. I think that twenty years down the road when I said I ate three peach pies at one sitting when I was ten and it was the first time you’d heard about it, you’d do this same thing. I don’t think that anybody can be honest enough for you because you’re just lookin’ for a reason to pull on that armor of yours and hide inside it again.”

  “I don’t think eating peach pies compares with a man dying by your hand.”

  “And I don’t think either one of them affects you any more than the other, so it wasn’t any kind of emergency for you to be told.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  His eyes bored into hers. “Apparently I was wrong about a lot,” he said pointedly.

  Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway and upstairs, only to come down again not five minutes later carrying his things.

  Right out the back door.

  Without cast
ing a single glance in Paige’s direction.

  It was for the best, she told herself.

  Even if he was as innocent as his recounting of what had happened in Texas made him sound—and she couldn’t be sure he was telling the truth—he’d still hidden it. And how could she ever be sure what else he might have hidden? What flaw in his character he might have concealed?

  She and Robbie were better off on their own. They were safer all the way around.

  Yet even as a part of her felt comforted with that thought, another part of her just felt like sitting there and crying.

  JULIE HAD SAID THERE WAS no hurry in picking up Robbie that morning and it was a good thing because Paige was not in top form after John left.

  For a long while, she stayed sitting in the kitchen, thinking about him, wondering how she could have let herself be swept off her feet for a second time.

  And, somewhere deep down, underneath it all, she kept wishing she hadn’t been wrong to let it happen. Wanting him still.

  It was nearly an hour before she finally forced herself away from the table and up the stairs, but she stalled once again at her bedroom door. At the first sight of her rumpled bed.

  Vivid images sprang into her mind of being in that bed with John such a short time ago. Of making love with him. Of sleeping in his arms. Of hearing him tell her he loved her. Of telling him she loved him in return.

  And why was her body such a traitor that even now it craved being back in that bed, in those arms of his, feeling his hands on her, his mouth, having him inside her…?

  Swallowing hard against tears that threatened to flood her eyes, she crossed to the bed, stripped the sheets from it with a vengeance and threw them down the laundry chute. And although it was hard work to do it by herself, she even turned the mattress before she remade the bed, as if that would somehow wipe away the thoughts, the memories, the feelings.

  Then she got in the shower. A cool shower to bring her to her senses. To shock her out of the lingering longings for a man she should never have let get through the barriers she’d erected after her divorce.