But that had always been her passion, just as becoming a “real”
Blackridge had always been his.
Without a word Carson walked into the room, shifted boxes off the couch, grabbed his coffee and cognac and sat next to Lara. He sensed her watching him with a curiosity that grew greater with every second he didn’t speak. From her reaction he knew that his expression must have accurately reflected how he felt inside – cold, closed, hard. Trapped. He put his foot against a box of papers and abruptly shoved it onto the floor, making room on the coffee table for something other than the dusty residue of Blackridge history.
Lara set her empty coffee mug and nearly untouched cognac beside his in the cleared space on the coffee table. Biting her lip unhappily, she turned toward Carson.
“I just realized how unfair this is to you,” Lara said quietly. “There are six cartons of Cheyenne’s journals and mementos back at the homestead, and I haven’t had the courage to open even one of them. Even the thought of going through all the pictures and personal treasures was just too painful.” Lara closed her eyes against the sudden sting of tears. “So instead of coping with my feelings and reading Cheyenne’s journals, I come here and ask you to rummage through your own family mementos, your own pain. I’m sorry, Carson. That was terribly selfish of me.”
Strong arms closed around Lara as Carson lifted her onto his lap. He tucked her head against his shoulder and kissed her gently, repeatedly.
“Sweet little fox,” Carson said huskily, kissing Lara’s eyelids, “you wouldn’t know how to be selfish if someone gave you step-by-step instructions.”
Lara’s lips trembled as she tried to smile. “Oh, Carson,” she whispered suddenly, burying her face against his neck, “sometimes I miss Cheyenne so much that – “ Her voice broke. Carson’s arms tightened around Lara as he rocked her slowly against his chest. “Go ahead and cry,” he murmured, stroking her gleaming black hair and kissing her forehead.
“It isn’t the kind of pain that crying makes better. This makes it better, though,” she said, closing her eyes, letting Carson’s presence seep into her, filling her with warmth. “Having you hold me is…healing.”
“Yes,” whispered Carson. “For me, too.”
For a long time there was no sound but that of Carson’s hand gently stroking the raven silk of Lara’s hair. Finally he began talking quietly, his voice so deep that she could feel the words resonating through the hard bone and muscle beneath her cheek.
“Larry was like you,” Carson said, “obsessed with the Blackridge family history, the Blackridge bloodlines. He had genealogical charts drawn up that began with the Battle of Hastings and stopped with Larry Blackridge.” Carson made a sound that was partly amusement, partly disgust. “I doubt if there’s any truth in the damn charts beyond Great-Grandfather Blackridge – -or was it great-great?” Carson shrugged, dismissing the distinction because it no longer mattered to him. “Whichever. The Blackridge who piled up those boundary stones you can’t find on Windy Ridge. Beyond him, I think those fancy charts are a load of raw crap.”
Carson leaned forward, holding Lara in place with one arm while he reached past her with the other and snagged a snifter of cognac between his fingers, He offered her some, watching hungrily while she took a delicate sip and ticked her lips. He wanted very much to lick her lips for her, to bend his head and taste the sweet warmth of her mouth. But he knew that he had to talk first, to try to make her understand why he was so hostile to the recent past. He had to tell her enough to dull her curiosity about him personally…and not so much that her curiosity found a new, much more dangerous direction. Frowning, Carson took a sip of the brandy, sighed and wondered how to begin talking about his least favorite subject. He leaned back against the couch once more, taking Lara and the snifter with him. The subtle movements of her body as she found a new balance in his lap were an exquisite torture. He hadn’t known a man could want a woman so much, in so many ways. Not for the first time he cursed his parents for the power struggle whose ramifications were still shuddering through his own life, threatening to tear it apart. He should have married Lara four years ago, when she had wanted him. But it had been impossible then.
“For a while,” Carson said almost roughly, “I was just as wild about the Blackridge family tree and history as you or Larry. I was still young then. I still believed that one day my dear adoptive ‘father’
would look at me and see his son instead of a changeling who had been foisted off on him.”
Lara’s eyes widened and darkened. She wanted to ask what Carson meant. Hadn’t Larry wanted to adopt a child? And if he hadn’t, why had he gone through with it? But the sight of old pain and anger drawing Carson’s face into dark, tight lines made Lara ache. She didn’t want to hurt him by asking unnecessary questions, questions he might answer if she were just patient and listened quietly. Carson swirled the rich amber cognac around and around in the crystal glass for the space of several breaths before speaking again.
“But no matter how much I tried, how hard I worked, how much I wanted it, Larry never looked at me as his son,” Carson said finally.
“It never seemed to occur to him that a baby might grow up feeling that the man and woman who raised him were actually his parents in the only sense of the word that mattered, and that the child might want to love and be loved by those parents.”
Carson shrugged impatiently, as though throwing off the grasp of the unhappy past. “The only part of being a parent that mattered to Larry had to do with extending his bloodline. The rest was sentiment, and God knows Larry never had much use for that.” Carson swirled the liquid again and added softly, “Except with your mother. I have a feeling that was as close as Larry ever came to loving. And you, probably. For your blood. His blood.”
And may he spend eternity regretting his obsession with blood, Carson added silently, bitterly. He sure as hell made everyone else regret it while he was alive.
Lara’s fingers moved to cover the strong hand that had tightened on her hip. She didn’t know what to say. She did know that Carson’s thoughts must have been even more painful than his words.
“None of it is your fault,” she whispered, lifting Carson’s hand and rubbing her cheek slowly over it. “You were everything a reasonable man could want in a son.”
Carson’s curt laugh made Lara wince. “Too bad Larry wasn’t a reasonable man,” Carson said savagely. “But it’s over now, over and done and buried with him. He fouled up enough lives in the past. I’ll be damned if I’ll let him foul up any more in the future.”
As Carson’s words echoed in the silent room, he knew that he had the answer to the question that had been keeping him awake nights: No. He would tell Lara nothing. The bitter result of the power struggle between Sharon and Larry Blackridge would be buried with them, never to see the light of day again.
“To the future,” Carson said, lifting the brandy snifter, “and to hell with the past.”
He drank swiftly, draining the potent liquid. He leaned forward, traded the empty glass for the other one and settled back again without loosening his hold on Lara.
“Where were we?” he asked. “Oh, yes. The precious Blackridge family archives.”
Lara winced again and said nothing. She had a better understanding of Carson’s bitterness now. Everything in the room was a reminder of a family that he had tried desperately to belong to. In the end Larry Blackridge had never allowed Carson to be more than a stranger who happened to share the same living quarters. The thought of growing up like that made Lara ache in silent sympathy. Being a bastard had been difficult for her at times, but she had always known that she was loved. She hoped that Sharon Blackridge had somehow made up for Larry’s inability to love his adopted son. Yet even as the thought came, Lara doubted that it had worked out that way. Sharon Blackridge had been a proud woman rather than a loving one.
“There they are,” Carson continued, waving the
snifter of brandy in a wide arc that included the chaos of cartons and boxes. “At one time I spent a lot of time pouring over this junk, looking for the key to Larry’s respect. I guess I figured that if I knew as much as he did about the Black-ridges, I’d somehow magically become one.”
Carson’s laugh was harsh, but the arm holding Lara was not. With a sigh he bent and brushed his lips over her silky black hair.
“I spent damn near as much time learning the family history as I spent on getting a bachelor’s degree,” he said.
“It didn’t make me a Blackridge, though. Nothing did. Nothing would. Larry told me that so often that I finally believed him. I’m not a Blackridge and I never will be. So after he died, I was tempted to burn all this junk to ash and throw it to the wind.”
Lara’s breath came in with an audible rush at the idea of so much history being destroyed. Eyes wide and dark, she studied Carson’s face. Once she would have thought that the smile curling the corner of his mouth was cold, unfeeling, almost cruel. She knew better now. She could see the hurt beneath the hard exterior, the lingering remnants of the child who had never belonged, no matter how hard he had tried.
Sadly she realized that in some ways it must have been a relief for Carson when Larry died. The Rocking B was Carson’s home now. He finally had a place where he belonged, a place where he would no longer have to feel like a stranger every time the man who refused to be his father looked at the son he had adopted but never accepted into his heart.
Very gently Lara brushed her lips against the warm, slightly rough skin along Carson’s clenched jaw. He turned to look at her, and for an instant his eyes burned into hers like those of a cougar brought to bay. Then he bent and gave her a kiss that tasted like cognac and fire. When the kiss ended, he looked at her again, his tawny cat eyes clear and hot.
“Then I decided that what the hell, maybe some good could come of all this Blackridge stuff in the right hands. So it’s all yours, Lara. May you get more joy out of it than we did.”
Chapter Nine
Carson watched Lara’s dark head as she bent over the coffee table, sorting through yet another box. The floor was checkered with documents, photos and mementos divided into decades. When the pile of material Lara was building threatened to slither off onto the floor, Carson gathered everything up in his big hands.
“Are these for the 1910 pile?” he asked, stifling a yawn. Lara made a noise that he thought sounded positive, but he wasn’t sure.
“Lara?”
She looked up from the photograph in her hand. Tears magnified the blue depths of her eyes. Carson’s hands opened. A cascade of photos and papers poured unnoticed to the floor.
“What is it, honey?” he asked, reaching out to her. Wordlessly Lara held out a handful of faded color snapshots.
“These were buried in with all the early 1900s photos. I don’t know why.”
Carson looked at the picture on top. He recognized Long Pool, the water-smoothed granite ledge and the swirling, tumbling wealth of the Big Green. There was a young woman stretched out on the pale granite, sunning herself as unself-consciously as a butterfly. She was slender, elegantly shaped, and her hair was the color of the sun. Although her face was turned away from the camera, Carson had a visceral certainty that the woman’s eyes were the brilliant blue of a high-country lake.
“Your mother,” he said, no question in his tone.
Lara nodded.
For a moment Carson’s hand tightened on the snapshots as though he would fling them across the room. He stared down without seeing anything, wishing that he had looked for more than incriminating documents when he had gone through the archives. He could have spared Lara the pain of meeting her mother’s ghost so unexpectedly. Slowly, almost against his will, he slipped the first photo from the group and put it underneath the others.
The sound of the camera must have alerted Becky. She had propped herself up on her elbows, turned and smiled. Carson’s breath hissed out of him as though he had taken a blow. He had seen that smile before, when he came upon Lara unexpectedly and she turned toward him, her face glowing with pleasure. If he had had any doubt about who was taking the pictures, he no longer did. Only one man would have been able to light up Becky Chandler like that, the man whose mistress she had been for thirteen years, the man whose bastard child she had given birth to.
The next snapshot was a stunning close-up of Becky looking into the camera, approving of the man she saw. The angle of the light told Carson that this picture had been taken later in the day. Becky’s lips were slightly swollen, her cheeks were flushed and her hair was a wild radiance around her face. She had the languid, sensual look of a woman who had been loved recently and well.
Carson’s body tightened as he wondered if Lara would look at him half so approvingly after they finally made love.
The last snapshot made Carson go as still as Lara had. It was a close-up of Larry Blackridge, but it was a Larry whom Carson had never before seen. His father was smiling with affectionate indulgence while Becky took his picture. Despite the gentle curve of Larry’s lips, his pale blue eyes blazed with emotion as he looked at the woman who held the camera.
And there was no doubt that it was Becky Chandler who had taken that picture. Larry had never smiled gently at anyone else. In fact, if it weren’t for the picture in Carson’s hand, he would have sworn that Larry had been incapable of that much tenderness, that much intensity, that much passion.
Or was it love that Larry had felt, as well as passion? Had he loved Becky, but not enough? Had he loved the Rocking B more, and chosen it over Becky?
Because Larry couldn’t have had both of them legally, the woman and the land. He had had to choose. Sharon had seen to that. Then Larry had tried to have the last word in the long, bitter struggle over love and the land; in doing so, he had inadvertently ensured that Carson would have neither love nor land if Lara found out what Larry had done.
“I – I didn’t realize mother was so beautiful,” Lara said, her voice aching. “The photos I have of her are either as a child or after I was born.”
Carson looked down at the haunting, bittersweet pieces of the past held in his hand. He had hated Larry because he was cold, stubborn and occasionally cruel in his determination to have his way. Yet Larry had also been a man caught between two overwhelming loves. He had kept both the land and the woman, for a time. When a storm had taken the woman and left him with only the land, Larry’s cruelty had become more than occasional.
Carson hadn’t thought about any of that, even though he had been old enough to see Larry as more than the man who refused to be a father. Carson had been twenty-one when Becky Chandler died, yet he had not seen his father’s grief. Carson had seen only his mother’s hurt and humiliation, and his own. He had not asked if Larry might have found something in his mistress that his wife could not provide, or if a cruel necessity had doomed him to marry the wrong woman. Carson had simply hated Larry without trying to understand him at all. And then Carson had gone out and poured that hatred like acid over a girl whose only crime had been to laugh with him, to ease his fatigue at the end of a long day, to bring him passion, to trust him and to make him feel alive in a way that he had been trying to recapture for the past four years.
“I’ve heard that women in the first flush of love often are beautiful,” Carson said quietly, looking up at Lara. “I know that I’ve never seen a woman half so perfect as you were the night we ate a picnic in your apartment.”
Carson saw memories darken Lara’s clear eyes and draw her face into lines of pain. His mouth turned down in a bitter curve.
“That’s all you remember of that night,” he said. “Pain. Humiliation. I gave you no pleasure at all, nothing to repay your warmth, your trust, your – love.” His fingers opened and the colored fragments of the past fluttered down like autumn leaves. “Oh, God, little fox,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “There are times when I wish I cou
ld crawl out of my skin and die.”
Carson came to his feet in a wild surge, but before he could turn away, Lara had thrown her arms tightly around his hips, holding him close.
“It wasn’t like that!” Lara said fiercely, scratching her temple against his silver belt buckle and not even noticing. “You made me feel like the most beautiful woman ever born. And when you kissed me, touched me – “ Her voice broke. She moved her cheek caressingly against Carson, feeling the hard warmth of his body beneath the faded jeans. “You turned me into fire and I – I burned. For you. With you. Nothing was ever that beautiful for me. Nothing. That’s why it hurt so much when you – when you – “
Carson’s fingers tangled in Lara’s thick, silky hair as he held her tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said hoarsely. “If I had known I was going to hurt you so much, I never would have walked into that cafe.”
He felt the shudder that went through Lara as though it were his own.
“Then I’m glad you hurt me,” she said, her breath ragged. “If that was the only way we could be here, now, together, then I wouldn’t take back a second of the past. Do you hear me?” she asked urgently, tilting her head back from his waist and looking up at him. “Not one second. It was worth it, all of it, for this.”
Carson looked at the deep, brilliant clarity of Lara’s eyes and felt his throat close around emotions he had never felt before. “You are so beautiful to me,” he whispered hoarsely, stroking her cheek with fingers that trembled. “I’d give everything I have to take back what I did to you.”
“You can’t take back the past,” Lara said, turning to kiss the hand that was touching her cheek. “You can only understand it, forgive it and go on to build a different future.” Her head pressed tightly against Carson as her arms held his hips in a hard hug. “But until you understand and forgive,” she said, caressing his body with her cheek, her hands, her mouth, as though touches could make him understand what words could not, “until then you’re like a fly in amber, imprisoned forever in the past. Don’t do that to yourself, Carson. Please.”
Sweet Wind, Wild Wind Page 14
