by Isla Bennet
Dinner continued and the noise gradually picked up after Valerie turned on the sound system to play something by Nickelback, at Lucy’s request.
Jack and his wife started clearing the table for dessert. “A perfect lemon meringue pie you’re gonna want the recipe for,” Dinah had called it.
“I’m going out for a minute.” Peyton rose from his chair.
Will raised a brow. “Not lookin’ to find Coop, now, are you?”
“No.” Though the thought did occur to him, even as he opened the French doors off the kitchen and stepped onto the flagstone patio.
Outside the air was brisk with an autumn chill, and he hoped to hell it would cool his temper or whatever else it was that had him feeling so damn uneasy. He looked out into the dark sky—cloudy with no stars to be seen.
“Chances are she’ll end up with a plot right next to—”
Next to Anna.
Peyton was certain Anna had been buried in the town’s only cemetery, but he didn’t even know where to find her marker. He didn’t know the date of her death, didn’t know how long she’d been sick before …
He dragged both hands through his hair, breathing harshly, letting the air burn his nostrils. He wanted a deeper connection to the child he and Valerie had lost. A kindergarten photo wasn’t enough.
And he was beginning to want to be more than an in-name-only father. But Lucy didn’t trust him enough to be upfront with him. She wrapped herself in lies as if she were a fragile parcel and needed the protection.
Truth be told, just because he wanted to be her father didn’t mean he could do the job. Jasper was right—Valerie and Lucy’s lives could be worse. Even though he wouldn’t set out to hurt his kid, like his mother had hurt him, how could he be sure it wouldn’t end up happening anyway? How could he know just how much of Marin Beck he carried in his veins?
The doors opened and in his periphery he could see Valerie stepping beside him. In one hand was a plastic sandwich bag. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Got treats for the dogs.”
For the first time he noticed the large outdoor kennel a few yards away. She opened the baggie as she strode to the kennel, then unlatched the door and released two athletic, shiny-coated Labrador retrievers—one yellow and the other black.
They shot across the yard as if blasted from cannons, their guttural growls and jubilant barks ripping open the quiet. Then, with twitching noses and hungry onyx-dark eyes, they returned to Valerie and the treats she held.
“Guard dogs?” he asked, as the black one devoured its treat then slunk toward Peyton as if sizing up potential prey.
“Only when necessary.” Valerie indicated the dog that now circled him, sniffling fiercely. “That’s Mimas—a male.” She crouched to be eye level with the other dog, which began to plant its front paws on her shoulders but hesitated and sat instead to be rewarded with a treat. “This girl’s Titania.”
“Interesting names.”
“I’ve got a lot of respect for Herschel’s discoveries. He’s one of my favorite astronomers.” She whistled and Mimas halted his sniffing exploration to gallop back to Valerie, who pocketed the now-empty baggie in her jeans and scratched both dogs affectionately behind the ears before letting them run freely.
“Can we sit, Peyton?” She pointed to a picnic table under a pergola at the opposite end of the yard.
“Yeah.” Following her lead, he sat on the table beside her with his feet planted on the bench. “No stars’re out.”
“That’s too bad,” she murmured, casting her gaze skyward with that same look of wonderment and appreciation that she’d had as a kid, pointing out the Big Dipper and the almost invisible red dot she swore up and down was Mars.
“Valerie, would you show me where Anna … where she is?”
She stilled, clearly unprepared for the request. He braced himself, unable to accept no for an answer. If she wouldn’t show him their child’s gravesite, then he’d find someone who would.
“Sure you’re up to visiting that place? The cemetery?”
No, he wasn’t. But sometimes life came at you, ready or not. “Yes.”
Valerie nodded, a sharp bow of her head. “Meet me here tomorrow. Ten o’clock or so. Lucy’ll be in school.”
“And you don’t want her to see me.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you. She doesn’t like to visit Anna’s marker. Or even really talk about …”
“I get it.”
After a moment they slid into a lengthy silence that was interrupted only by the dogs’ barks and grunts.
“Peyton, Coop didn’t mean to upset anyone with that comment about Lucy and the horse. The thing is, he’s stubborn as hell and doesn’t trust my judgment, but he’s useful on this ranch. And he really does care about her safety. Mine, too, to be honest. He doesn’t, however, care about my feelings or my authority.” She sighed. “I can hold my own against Coop. But it was … interesting … to see you react the way you did.”
“It wasn’t for your or anyone else’s benefit.”
“No, it was instinct,” she said softly. “Instinct to protect her.”
“We’ve got that in common.”
Valerie gritted her teeth. “Except I’ve never scared her the way you just did. Calm one second, then on the attack the next. All this time away didn’t change you the way you want people to believe. It’s still there.”
“What?”
“That dangerous part of you. That act first, think later part. I don’t think you can change.”
The disappointment in her words penetrated. He hadn’t a single run-in with the police since leaving Night Sky, but some things, like mending victims of violence and knowing that they’d only walk back into the cruelty he wanted to save them from, tested his control.
“Peyton, when I found out Lucy hadn’t come home, when I saw you with her, the idea hit that maybe you’d try to take her.”
An indirect way of asking him if he would have the audacity to do so. “I won’t disappear into the night with her, Valerie. I’d never hurt you—” he swore, immediately realizing that she didn’t trust him simply because he had hurt her before, by disappearing “—I wouldn’t hurt Lucy that way.”
He took a breath. “I have changed. I swear to you, I’ve been treading the straight-and-narrow ever since I left this town. Following the rules, keeping the peace. Even when it’s the hardest thing to do.” Tipping his head, he found her examining him with those serious brown eyes. He could practically see her guard lowering as if someone were letting down a drawbridge. “I want to get to know our daughter. And she should get to know me. You, too.”
“Okay.” That single word was packed with reluctance and doubt and even a dash of dread.
But it was a yes. And that was good enough for him.
“A missionary, huh?” she said after a minute, pulling her knees up and resting her chin on them. “Suppose you found a life that really was different from being Nathaniel Turner’s heir.”
“I didn’t go searching for that life. I just knew I didn’t want to be attached to my grandfather’s money. So I bailed on that New Zealand mentorship. I ran into some guys who were talking about going to Sri Lanka. I went.”
“You make it sound so cut-and-dried.”
“It wasn’t.” He shuffled his feet on the bench. “It wasn’t easy. Leaving you.”
“There’s more of Estella in you than I thought.” Valerie’s voice came out in a rush, as if to erase his last words. “She’d be proud. Of your work. Didn’t you use to talk about a hospital in Los Angeles?”
“My grandfather had a cardiovascular surgical position waiting on a silver platter for me. All I had to do was finish med school, bring in publicity—and money—and it was mine.”
“Nathaniel’s nothing if not influential. And thorough.” She lowered her feet to the bench. “So you said to hell with L.A. You did return to the States every once in a while, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Ended up in C
hicago for med, specialized in emergency surgery. But I never came back to Texas until now. My most recent assignment was in Côte d’Ivoire.”
“And before that?”
“Delhi. Before that Japan.”
“Côte d’Ivoire … after the earthquake and …” She shook her head. “On the newscasts everything looked so horrific. Night Sky Memorial ran a donation drive and sent money, but that just seemed like a drop in the bucket of what those people needed—probably still need. What was it like to be there?”
In flashes Peyton saw face after face of hurt, anguish and fear. He saw demolished buildings, streets cluttered with remnants of destruction. He saw himself being dragged into a musty building, then crying out at the blinding, searing pain of a blade shoved deep into his thigh, then foreign shouts and quick footsteps on pavement as his attackers disappeared into the night with the cash and half-eaten bag of peanuts he’d had in his pockets.
“It didn’t break me,” was all he said.
He knew from the way she cleared her throat that she didn’t appreciate the vague brush-off of an answer, yet she didn’t push. She asked only, “How did you get through it?”
“Mostly I prayed. I needed something to believe in.”
“Why were you at Memorial yesterday?” she queried, switching gears.
“I was meeting with Chief Lindsey to talk about a visiting surgeon gig. I took a leave of absence from Johns Hopkins right after I returned from Côte d’Ivoire. There’s family … stuff … to work through with my grandfather.”
“So you live in Maryland?”
He wouldn’t say he lived anywhere. His address was always changing, his assignments leading him all over the globe. “Not exactly. For now I live in Night Sky, Texas.”
“I’m not looking to pry, but … Does this ‘family stuff’ have anything to do with your grandfather’s will?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Only what Nathaniel thinks I should know. He wants a place for Lucy in his company. He’s bulldozing me into letting her jump into this drawing and fashion thing with both feet—says stability’s the best thing he can leave behind for his family.”
“What does Lucy want?”
“She doesn’t know about Nathaniel’s plans. I say she’s too young to get caught up in that world. He says I’m holding her back, smothering her talent.” Valerie sighed. “This ranch was my dream for myself and the girls. Now Anna’s gone and Lucy … well, if given the choice between couture and glitz or flannel and cattle, there’s no question what she’d choose.”
Peyton stiffened. His grandfather had attempted to browbeat him into taking an interest in his business, but it hadn’t worked. So he’d moved on to the next generation. Now that he had his sights set on a blood relative who was both talented and enamored with fashion, Nathaniel was probably after Valerie with his guns of manipulation and persuasion blazing.
And Peyton didn’t like that. Nor did he like the suspicion that at the heart of his grandfather’s reason for calling him home was his cool, black determination to put Peyton to use as someone to sway Valerie.
“I’m not here to do his bidding,” Peyton told her, and she nodded though she didn’t look completely convinced.
A gust of wind ruffled their hair and caressed the fuzzy fabric of Valerie’s sweater. An impulse shot through his blood and had him laying a hand on her back. His fingers splayed against the sweater as his hand dropped lower. And he felt Valerie just below all that cotton-candy-soft fabric.
“Peyton …”
Had she whispered his name, or had it just been the whistle of wind? Unsure, he slowly drew the bottom of the sweater up, his knuckles coming in contact with her exposed back. The contrast between the cool fabric and her body heat was mesmerizing.
She arched against his hand as it moved upward. Skin sliding over skin. No barriers. Wanting more out of this moment, he angled toward her, shifted her so that his other hand could snake underneath the front of her sweater. His fingers moved freely up her abdomen to close over the soft weight of one of her breasts. A groan fell from him but she didn’t move. Even as he worked his fingers beneath her bra, discovering details of her body that had changed since he’d last touched them, she stayed put with her sweater hiked up and her lips parted.
“You’ve saved people all over the world with your hands,” she said. “And you were going to hurt Coop with them, too.”
He didn’t have a response to that, except that compromising the single most important instruments to a surgeon—his hands—hadn’t occurred to him when he’d bolted out of his chair in the dining room, ready to take the old cowboy to task for what he’d said.
Now he felt a shadow of regret, along with gratitude to Valerie for reminding him to think about the bigger picture.
Valerie’s hand covered his where it curved over her breast. Holding him to her, her eyes shut, she sighed. “I was happy when we were friends.”
Was she not happy now, with a successful ranch and surrounded by people she could depend on? Did she want more of the past, more of that friendship they thought could last forever?
He wanted the dark heat of the here and now, of this moment with her. His hands blazed a trail downward, then met at the front of her jeans. The button popped soundlessly free.
But that movement seemed to snap her out of a trance. She yanked her sweater down and leapt off the picnic table, saying, “We should get back before the dessert’s gone.”
He started for the pathway along the side of the house, with fallen leaves crunching under his shoes. He’d parked at the curb, not intending to stay as long as he had. Certainly not planning on this … whatever it was, he couldn’t name it … with Valerie under a cloudy sky. “Actually, I’m heading back to Grandpa’s,” he said. “Thank Dinah for me.”
“What about dessert?”
Peyton detoured, striding to her and murmuring close to her ear, “After what just happened out here, you want me to stay? Want to play with that kind of fire, Valerie?”
She started to shake her head no, but then her gaze fastened on his mouth and she hesitated. “Um …” her brows drew together in a frown, as if she was struggling to make a decision “… we don’t need that kind of fire.” She hadn’t answered his question, but she retreated a few steps.
Then Peyton walked away, and the dogs, apparently judging him to be a minimal threat, didn’t follow. Her words chased him, taunted him. We don’t need that kind of fire. Valerie perched on that picnic table, so open, letting him touch her … telling him that he’d made her happy once … It was enough to undo a man. And the only thing more destructive than that was the dangerous urge to make her that happy again.
EPISODE FOUR
CHAPTER SEVEN
“PRAY TELL,” JUNIE Peera said, twirling a gnawed pencil with her large-knuckled fingers and wiggling her head in such a way that her penny-red hair and silver hoop earrings shined under Fork Diner’s lights, “what gives a man the idea to get up with the rooster, get himself all dressed and come here to order a bowl of Wheaties? Wheaties!”
With a pointed look that said “Good luck with that,” Lucy sauntered ahead of Valerie into the diner, past the counter and stools to an unoccupied table at the rear. The place, located off the downtown fork in the road and decorated with what could be found in a 1970s time capsule, was packed with the usual breakfast crowd—men in tee shirts and worn jeans, hunched over coffee cups and plates of greasy meat and short stacks; the elderly churchgoing ladies who were called “the Old Faithfuls” and gathered here every morning for high-fiber breakfasts; high-schoolers engrossed in conversation and French toast—but no one seemed interested in indulging Junie’s complaints. And when the woman blinked expectantly at Valerie, who’d been like a sitting duck still lingering in the open doorway, letting the heady aroma of fried food waft into the street, it was clear she wanted an answer.
“Which man are we talking about, Junie?” Valerie took off her hat and nodded a greeting at Le
s from the hardware store. He removed a folded newspaper from the stool beside him and offered her a place to sit at the full counter. “Looks like most of the room ordered your morning coronary special.”
“Wayne Beaudine. Alone at a table, two o’clock.”
Valerie discreetly scanned the area over her shoulder. Sure enough, he sat dressed in Beaudine Body Shop coveralls, with his dirt-smeared Mets cap turned backward, eating his “breakfast of champions” methodically and nursing a glass of grapefruit juice.
“Doesn’t he tip you well enough, no matter what he orders?” she asked Junie, who, for such a gifted gossip, failed to see that Wayne’s visits to the diner had less to do with cereal and more to do with keeping a very male eye on the head waitress.
“It just doesn’t make sense to come here for something you can shake into a bowl in your own kitchen.” Deciding that she was correct, no matter how much sense Valerie made, Junie whipped out her order pad. “What’ll it be?”
“Two fruit salads. Add on a glass of water with lemon for Lucy and a—”
“Cola with extra lime for you,” Junie interrupted with an almost pitying sigh. “You’re too young to be so predictable, Valerie.”
“How about that? Now you’re giving me tips.” Valerie craned her neck to get a better look at the announcements board on the wall at the end of the counter. This weekend a country-and-western band from the high school would be performing. It was heartening to see the diner supporting the garage performers, who were still bright-eyed and optimistic that someone with clout might stroll into the place and put them on the path to fame. On the other hand, she couldn’t help but suspect that the diner’s owner, Bud Frowler, had used his autographed photos of Kenny Loggins and Willie Nelson as part of an ulterior motive to reel in high-hoping local entertainers and bigger weekend crowds.
“Got another tip for you, then,” Junie said, tearing off the slip of paper covered with her shorthand scribble. She stopped to flash her pearly whites at the two Bishop men trooping in—the detective in a tee shirt, tight jeans and boots with his badge clipped to his belt, and his brother the patrolman in full uniform. “Christ,” she murmured softly, “that Jeremiah Bishop was doing something right when he made those boys. Fine from top to bottom, the whole lot of ’em.”
