by Neva Brown
Tres tucked her close to his side as they picked their way through the snow to the Escalade. “Here is only the beginning. The best is yet to come. He grinned at her.
“Besides you’ve already outgrown the cabin. Just look at what we’ve crammed in these SUVs.”
He gestured toward her SUV hooked to his vehicle with a tow bar and cram-packed with her things. He opened the passenger’s side door of the packed-to-capacity Escalade for her. “I just barely had room for you by the time we found a place for all those little extras you said you found during an artisan show last Christmas.”
She chuckled. “Guess I bought more stuff than I realized.”
As the miles slipped by, Casey became quiet. Tres could almost hear her worry. “Tell me what’s bothering you. You know that between the two of us we can fix most anything.”
“I’m just trying to figure out how to handle things with my parents. They’re going to be really unhappy with me.”
“I’ll go with you to talk to them if you think it will help.”
“Thanks, but I have to do it alone. I have to know I can stand up to them for what I believe is right for me while still being sure they know I respect them and love them dearly. Besides, you’re ‘the boss’ as far as they’re concerned. It’s not like I fell in love with some ordinary man that they can tell what to do.” She smiled at him. “Even I’m in awe of you.”
“After all we’ve done together? I’d say it’s hard to say who’s in awe of whom.” He touched her hand. “You do know you’re loved with all I have to give?”
Her hand tightened on his. “I still wonder how I could ever live without you.”
With a glint his eyes, he glanced her way. “The great part is, you don’t have to. Want to stop for the night?”
“No, as tempting as the thought is, I think we better keep going. I’ll drive if you’re tired.”
“I’m not tired. I’m just thinking how hard it’s going to be for us to be together when we get home. I know you said you didn’t feel right about staying at Spencer Mansion until we’re married, but have you considered staying in the gatehouse at MacVane Manor like Mattie Lou suggested?”
“I spoke with Mattie Lou while you showered. I accepted her offer to stay there. I know staying with my parents would end up being too stressful for all of us since they feel the way they do.”
Tres breathed a sigh of relief. “Good! Now you’ll be close to town to do all the things that need to be done before the wedding.” He grinned at her. “Besides, maybe we can have a little privacy once in a while at the gatehouse.”
“Mattie Lou asked me if Pauline and Jake would consider letting her help with the wedding arrangements. She said she had always dreamed of doing a wedding, but had never really had the chance. I had planned to do things by myself. My folks were married by a Justice of the Peace between rodeos and I don’t think they will be comfortable with some of things I would like.”
Tres knew keeping Mattie Lou from helping would be a Herculean task. “How do you feel about Mattie Lou helping? You know she can be a mini-bulldozer at times.”
Casey smiled. “I’d really appreciate her input. She seems to do everything beautifully.”
Darkness had fallen by the time they drove into the driveway of the gatehouse, but Rudy brought help to unload the SUVs. Casey insisted they put everything in the garage and she would decide where to put thing later.
Reluctantly, Tres left Casey and headed to the ranch. He was worried. The closer they’d come to home, the quieter she became, as if she were drawing into a shell to protect herself. Since he’d known the free, self-confident Casey he’d made love with in the mountains, he was determined to keep her and not let her slip away into that biddable, constrained person she had once been.
Casey slept fitfully, rose at dawn, and dressed in jeans and boots as if she were going to work. She arrived at the old headquarters just as Pauline, Jake, and Maria were finishing breakfast. She shouted a hello at the kitchen door and entered. After a short silence that seemed like forever, her father said, “Well, the prodigal has returned. I hope you’ve come to your senses and are ready to get back to work.”
Her mother offered a quiet, “Hello, Casey,” from her wheelchair while Maria got up and offered Casey a cup of coffee.
Casey sat and folded her hands around the warm cup, psyching herself up for what had to be said. “What I’d really like to do is talk.”
Her mother frowned. “Doesn’t look like talking’s done much good. I see you’ve got a gaudy ring on your finger that has Spencer written all over it.”
The harsh words hurt, but Casey steeled herself against them. “Tres and I plan to marry in May. We know it will take time to build bridges to span the gap between our different lifestyles. But we know our love will make it possible.”
Her mother sat silent for a moment then said, “That’s a pretty speech but I think you and your daddy better saddle your horses and ride off to wherever you used to, so he can explain a few things to you.”
“She’s right,” Jake said. “I should have known it would come to this.” He pushed back from the table.
Casey stood up, too, a surge of anger fueling her.
Her mother swiveled her chair to leave the room. “All your things are in the storeroom beside the garage. Maria and I have to go to town so I won’t be here when you get back from your ride.”
“Before I forget,” Casey said, “Mattie Lou asked if she could help with the wedding, and I told her I’d ask you about it.”
Pauline whipped her chair back around. “You know I’m not able to do any fancy wedding like the Spencers will expect, even if I knew how. So you and the Spencers just do as you please and leave me out of it. That is, if there’s still a wedding after you hear what Jake has to say.”
Alarm sent cold chills along Casey’s spine. Her mother’s blunt words she was accustomed to, but the ominous note about what Jake needed to tell her ignited a frightening uneasiness.
“Let’s go,” her father ordered.
Not another word was spoken until they saddled their horses, passed through the last corral gate, and headed across a grassy expanse of cured Grama grass on their way to Cottonwood Creek.
Jake nudged his mount to a gallop and Casey followed suit. They streaked across the rolling grassland with the crisp air whipping their faces. The horses, sensing the restlessness, stretched out to a lope, enjoying doing what came natural to them on a brisk winter morning.
After a while, Jake eased the pace. They trotted, then finally slowed.
“I never planned to say this to anybody,” Jake said. “I’m not sure how to start.” He paused. “Pauline is not your mother. Your mother called herself Cheyenne, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t her real name. She was a wild-riding, redheaded girl who followed the rodeo. She didn’t have a horse, but she would offer different barrel racers half of her winnings for the use of their horse. She nearly always placed in the money so some of the girls were happy for her to ride their horses. Easy money, especially when they hadn’t been winning much themselves.”
Casey felt like the air had been knocked out of her lungs. She couldn’t believe her ears. A dull ache pounded behind her eyes. Was her mind playing tricks on her?
Jake stared off into the distance. “I guess she’d be called a groupie now. She’d bum a ride with anybody who’d take her to the next rodeo. She had lots of takers. She was fun to have around and really made a man feel macho.
“I did lots of winning there for a while so she was with me regular a big lot of one season. Along near the end of the season, Pauline and I hooked up so Cheyenne moved on. The next year she didn’t show up until late in the summer. She had a good pickup of her own, and you. She still rode borrowed horses and exercised horses for anybody who’d hire her. There was always somebody around willing to baby sit you while she worked.”
Casey and Jake rode through a live oak motte and down a steep bank to the creek. They dismounted and let the
horses drink then dropped the reins to let them graze on the green rye grass growing in the shelter of the creek bank.
Casey watched as her dad looked at the horses, but she knew he wasn’t seeing them. He was seeing a time long ago.
His voice was barely audible. “One day I was restringing my favorite saddle. Cheyenne came up, leaned on the fence, and offhandedly said, ‘The baby’s yours, thought you ought to know if anything happens to me’.”
“I made some smart remark about, ‘Yeah, how many cowboys have you told that to?’ She turned around and left without another word.”
“Less than a month later, she was hazing for a cowboy practicing his steer wrestling and got killed. Nobody really saw how it happened but both horses and the steer got tangled up and fell. When the dust settled, Cheyenne was at the bottom of the pile, dead.”
Casey stood in the lee of the creek bank, the sun shining on her; deep-seated shivers raised goose bumps all over her body. Her mind raced searching for an anchor.
Jake looked at her for the first time since he’d started talking. He saw her shudder, but offered no comfort. He continued to talk. “Pauline and I were pretty serious by then. We talked about you and decided to get married. I claimed you as mine and nobody questioned it. Back then, government agencies didn’t bother with things like they do now.”
He squatted down, picked up pebble after pebble, and skipped them across the water.
Casey couldn’t find words. She struggled to organize her thoughts as she watched Jake through tear-clouded eyes.
“Are you my father?” The quietness of her voice surprised her. Screaming better described what she was doing inside.
“I don’t know. I guess we could’ve done a DNA test or something, but what’s done is done. I knew you could be mine.”
“Did anybody try to locate her family when she died?”
“We searched through her stuff but didn’t find anything about where she came from, so we all chipped in for a funeral. She’s buried in a cemetery near a little town in Arizona where we were at the time.”
“Didn’t her driver’s license have an address on it?”
“Yeah, an apartment in Fort Worth, but the manager had never heard of her. An old leather suitcase that was in her pickup had the initials CM engraved on it, nothing traceable.”
Casey watched the ripples widen from the last pebble Jake had skipped across the water. “How did I get a birth certificate?”
“Back then, a lot of kids were born at home, so all we had to do was get two people to swear you were ours and the state issued a birth certificate. Two bronc riders I’d traveled with a lot agreed to do it when you were six and started to school.”
Casey felt like she would shatter into a million pieces. Her thoughts sped along. She had no roots to hold her firm. No mother, maybe no father, and no true identity.
As if he read her thoughts, Jake said, “Not hard to see that you don’t have anything to add to the proud Spencer clan. They can trace their family back for hundreds of years and it’s something they’re mighty proud of. If you’re bullheaded enough to go ahead with this marriage, you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to measure up. If you’d just come to your senses and stay with what you know and what you’re already recognized as an expert in, you’ll be looked up to and admired. I’ve had some people contact me that will pretty much let you write your own ticket if you’ll handle their horses for them.” Jake frowned at her. “You can end up being the nobody that married Tres Spencer if you go ahead with this Cinderella fairy tale you’re trying to live or you can get back to the horse business you know and be a somebody.”
Casey’s world crumbled. The emotional upheaval left her reeling with a myriad of questions tumbling around in her head. She squared her shoulders. If she were ever to make her own decisions, rather than bend to other’s wishes, now had to be the time. The true test of her resolve to be her own person had arrived. She caught the reins of her horse. “I have some serious thinking to do. I wish I’d known this a long time ago.”
Jake swung his leg over the saddle with impatience. “It wouldn’t have helped a thing. What’s done is done.”
Tres’ day had been full, but his fatigue receded as he drove up to the gatehouse. Even though darkness had set in and he had been up since dawn, he didn’t feel tired. He longed to be with Casey.
When he entered, instead of finding a beautifully attired Casey in a house that smelled of fresh-baked bread and apple pie with a warm fire in the fireplace, he saw her clad in work clothes sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold. Her red, puffy eyes swam with tears as she stared out the window into the darkness.
“Ah, Casey, what’s wrong?” He gathered her in his arms and cuddled her close.
“Everything! It’s all such a mess, and I don’t know what to do.” Fresh tears trickled down her cheeks as she gazed at him with such love in her eyes. He wanted to make love to her until she couldn’t remember what had made her so sad.
He scooped her up and carried her to the living room where he sat on the couch with her in his lap. He handed her his handkerchief. “I want to hear every word of what happened to upset you.”
Casey wiped her eyes and nose. “I don’t know who I am and Jake says I’ll always be a nobody and I don’t have anything to offer you.”
“I’m not sure I understand. Please start at the beginning,” Tres said as he tucked her head under his chin, knowing she didn’t need to see the rage in his eyes.
Between hiccups and involuntary sobs, she poured out the whole, miserable story, while he soothed her with soft words and gentle caresses. When she finally sat silent and spent in his arms, he lifted her chin until her eyes were looking at him. “Jake didn’t mention anybody who really loves you in his plan, did he?”
When she shook her head, he continued. “I’ve lived that life of success with no one to love and no one to love me. I can tell you first hand it’s a pretty empty way to go through life. Let’s take our chances in this world. Together, with love.”
Casey studied him, like maybe she would find the answer in his face. “But what about all this mess? There’s no telling who I really am.”
“If it’s really important to you, we can start a search for your background after we are married and settled. But it doesn’t matter to me. I’m marrying the most important person in my world, the love of my life, not her ancestors. And you, sweet Casey, are marrying me, not the world I live in.”
“But what if I really am just a nobody?”
“That person you are talking about is the buddy of my youth and the courageous woman who struggled to regain a life she almost lost. She’s the unsure beauty who melted in my arms as she learned how to dance. She’s the pain-ridden, determined muleskinner who led a bunch of men out of a deathtrap canyon. She’s that wonderful, accomplished, self-confident woman I made love with in New Mexico. She’s my life and certainly not a nobody.” He picked up her hand and ran his fingers over the diamond on her finger. “You have more facets than a fine-cut diamond and I love every one of them. You are my treasure, never doubt that.”
Worry creased her brow. “Do you really think it’s safe for us to marry?”
“I don’t know about safe, but I know with every beat of my heart it is right.”
The magic of his words and gentle hands made her world come right. Soon nothing but the two of them was important as their need for each other made them one.
Chapter 23
Casey stared at the stranger she saw in the full-length mirror in the room at MacVane Manor. In all her dreams, she’d never envisioned herself dressed in such splendor.
Mattie Lou adjusted the wide, pearl-encrusted empire-waist band at the top of the circular, front-opening overskirt that cascaded to a train in the back. “The skirt hangs perfectly,” Mattie Lou said. “The three-inch pearl work on the border holds the skirt apart just enough to show the sheath dress underneath.”
Casey thought of th
eir compromises. She’d selected a pattern of a slim-fitted, floor-length dress with an oval neckline and cape sleeves as she and Mattie Lou pored over designs. Mattie Lou agreed it was lovely then enthused over the overskirt that would add, what she called, ‘such a regal appearance’. Seeing herself in the mirror, Casey had to agree that Mattie Lou had been right. The hairdresser adjusted the pearl tiara and coils of pearls entwined with Casey’s upswept hair, then opened the leather jewel box where diamond earrings and a matching necklace sparkled against the black velvet.
Casey picked up the necklace. She could almost feel Tres’ warm hands fastening it around her neck just like he had last night when he gave it to her. Right now, what she would give for him to be here with her. Since they’d returned from New Mexico, their time had been filled with activities that involved other people. They had sneaked away from a party last night to be alone for a while. They found an old-fashion glider hidden away under a big live oak tree. Their conversation wouldn’t have impressed anyone, it wasn’t scintillating or witty. But the breathtaking kisses were treasures to be stored for all time to come. In her mind she could still see the moonlight as it had filtered through the rustling leaves of the sheltering tree to create shadows and bits of light that danced all around them like happy, teasing fairies. Tres’ warm hands had stroked all those place that made her body hum. He’d teased her about purring like a kitten then she’d retaliated with touches that delayed their return to the festivities for some time. Her face heated. Taking risks and being wicked with Tres was spine tingling.
Glancing at the clock, Casey secured the necklace around her neck and put on the earrings. Time to go publicly proclaim what she had privately vowed to Tres that cold night in February in the mountains of New Mexico.
