by Evie Nichole
But somehow, Cal did not seem as concerned as she was. The two of them were in Cal’s truck heading down the last bit of gravel driveway toward the Hernandez house. He had been silent most of the way while Jesse aired every single worry that seemed to fly right into her skull from seemingly nowhere.
“Okay, you have to calm down.” Cal finally turned toward her and reached over to gently brush the back of his fingers over her cheek. “I don’t think he’s going to burn anything down. Getting rid of the horses—hypothetically, mind you—seemed to be more of an act of rebellion because those are yours and he feels like the house and barn should be his.”
“Oh.” Jesse could see Cal’s point. “So, you don’t think he’s going to hurt something he wants to possess. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Exactly.”
“So, then, what do we do about him?” Jesse was feeling panicked. There was a man claiming—no, there was no claiming. The guy absolutely was her half-brother. And he was Cal’s half-brother too. “Why are our parents such idiots?” Jesse burst out. She flung up her hands and nearly ripped out her own hair. “Seriously! Did they not think about what they were doing?”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I know what my father was thinking,” Cal muttered. His expression was dark as he pulled up in front of his house and shut off the truck’s engine. “He was thinking with his dick and not his brain. He was thinking that your mother was young and pretty and everything that his crabby wife was not.”
“That’s unfair to Avery,” Jesse could not help but add. “The woman was dragged out here to the middle of nowhere. He never gave her much in the way of luxury even though he had money.” Jesse got out of the truck and walked up the front steps to the dark little front door. “Look at this place! If she was expecting to marry a wealthy rancher and be a Denver socialite, then Joe didn’t really deliver. Did he?”
Cal was right behind her, but she could almost feel the thoughtfulness and almost a sense of reticence going through his mind. “You’re right. My mom was out here by herself with three little boys. She was probably stressed out of her mind. Her husband starts romancing some cute younger woman who is all smiles and feel-good attitude. What’s my mother supposed to do?”
Jesse spun around on the balls of her feet. She pointed at Cal just as she stepped through the front door of his house and into the dim foyer. “She hates that other woman and spends years trying to eradicate her from their life.”
“And then you show up,” Cal continued.
Jesse didn’t wait for Cal. She pounded up the stairs to the second floor and headed right for her old room. If this is where Cal had potentially—and accidentally—stored her mother’s stolen journals, then this is where Jesse was going to stay until she found them.
Cal’s boots clomped up the creaky wood steps behind her. “But my mother wasn’t hateful toward you when you were younger, was she?”
“Not exactly.” Jesse glanced at a box and tried to decipher the masculine scrawl on the side. “Your mother wanted a daughter. Maybe she thought she could somehow raise me to be the girly girl she’d always wanted. The cheerleading and dresses and telling me that girls didn’t ride in the rodeo were all a part of your mother’s attempt to make me her daughter instead of Amelia’s.”
“But that didn’t work,” Cal said as he appeared in the doorway of the bedroom.
Jesse tossed him a look of annoyance. “Can you please try to read your handwriting? These are crazy messy, and I don’t want to open every box.”
“There’s more than you expected, huh?” Cal asked with an amused glint in his blue eyes.
“Much more.” Jesse was aghast at the sheer number of boxes. They weren’t small either. “Did you call your brothers to tell them about Adam? We need to at least let Melody and Cisco know in case, for some reason, he thinks he’s entitled to that piece of the pie too.”
“Right.” Cal pulled out his phone and pointed to it. “So, you’re going to dig through Mom’s boxes while I do that, right?”
“Right,” Jesse muttered. “Sometimes you are such a boy.”
She could hear him chuckling in the background as he paced up and down the upstairs hallway while he called his brothers. The irony was that Cal hated the phone. He hated talking on the phone. He hated having it in his hand and having to figure out how to access his contacts and even dial. He hated talking to pretty much everyone anyway, and doing it on the phone was particularly unpleasant for him. So, there was probably a certain kind of sick equality to their assigned tasks.
Which brought Jesse right back around to the task at hand. “Damn, this is a lot of crap,” she muttered.
There were boxes and boxes of linens. It appeared that Avery Hernandez had not wanted any part of her life here at the ranch to go to the city with her. The linens for the master bedroom were actually quite nice. The fabric was soft and had a high thread count. There were throw pillows and bed skirts and thick matching towels for the master bathroom. It was a bit surprising that Cal hadn’t kept the towels. But then most men didn’t particularly enjoy sky blue with lace edging.
The thought of that made her giggle. Cal drying off his gorgeous bare bottom with that lacy-edged towel would have been a priceless sight. On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t have needed what appeared to be his mother’s whole collection of scarves either. Jesse found boxes of sweaters and boxes of underclothes. A lot of this stuff needed to go to a thrift store somewhere.
Finally, at the very back of the room, stashed on top of her old empty dresser, Jesse found smaller boxes with Avery Hernandez’s more personal items inside. Jesse opened the box on top and discovered a jewelry box carefully packed in tissue. What woman left a jewelry box behind? What kind of sense did that make? Clothing? Linens? Yes. It was a little odd but not unheard of when someone really felt as though they were starting a new life. But the jewelry box would have held Avery’s most priceless things.
Jesse put the box on the floor and knelt beside it. Pulling out the jewelry box, she looked inside and discovered that it wasn’t actually Avery’s. The name etched on the glass inside the jewelry box was Amelia Ann Cassidy. It was so odd to see her mother’s maiden name.
Lightly running her fingers over the glass etching, Jesse pulled the jewelry box into her lap. She had no memory of this piece. How was that possible? Yet Jesse had been only eleven when her parents passed away. It was entirely possible that her parents had things in their bedroom that Jesse had never seen before. She hadn’t been allowed to go back. She had been told she was too young to go through her parents’ things. It had been taken care of for her. And now Jesse felt she knew why.
“Oh God,” Jesse whispered.
The pressure of tears was overwhelming, and she did not even realize that she’d given into them until they fell with a hot splash onto the blue velvet liner of the jewelry box. Jesse reached down and picked up her parents’ wedding bands. The white gold was worn and oh so very familiar. Both of the rings were tucked into a tiny square cubby in the jewelry box. They were nestled together just as closely as the two people who had worn them in life.
Jesse let her fingers linger over the cool white gold, but did not pick them up. She couldn’t go there just yet. She focused instead on the beautiful engagement ring she remembered her mother showing her just once. Why had it never occurred to Jesse to wonder where this was?
“I thought it had been buried with them,” Jesse whispered to herself. “Why wouldn’t it have been buried with them?”
Had Avery had the audacity to wear this stuff? There were diamond tennis bracelets and diamond earrings that had to be at least two or three karats. It reminded Jesse that her mother had once come from a very wealthy family in Fort Collins. They had more or less disowned their daughter because of her pregnancy—because of Adam. But that hadn’t made a difference to Amelia in the end. She had been happy with Rawling. Jesse knew that in her heart to be true.
Beneath the jewelry box, Jesse spotted some more of
the embroidered silk handkerchiefs. There was a very beautiful cashmere scarf, and beneath that, Jesse spotted the journals. They didn’t look as though they belonged in the box. They were worn and had obviously been read repeatedly at some point. They were more of that nondescript marbled sort of composition book. Jesse pulled both journals from the box and set them carefully in her lap. She needed to prepare herself. This was likely to be a very difficult read. Or rather, it would be a difficult moment altogether. There was no way to know what exactly was inside. As an afterthought, Jesse took the engagement ring from the jewelry box and gently wrapped it in a handkerchief before slipping it into her pocket. She wanted proof of what she’d found. The unarguable kind.
The first journal began just after Amelia had been banished to stay with the Farrells after she’d found out she was pregnant with Joe Hernandez’s baby. The journal was nothing like the others and nothing like Jesse remembered her mother. The short entries were filled with hope and expectancy about the baby. She was so in love with Joe, and she was sure he was going to leave his wife. Amelia had even entertained a brief fantasy of raising Joe’s other three sons with their little boy in the big ranch house on Hernandez land.
What had happened?
The journal went on to describe a big fight. Joe’s wife had discovered their secret. She was threatening to take the ranch from him in court. She wasn’t going to go quietly. Joe asked Amelia to give up the baby for adoption and to go back to her parents in Fort Collins.
The sadness in those pages ripped Jesse’s heart in two. She could not stand the thought of her mother pining away for a man like Joe Hernandez, yet Amelia had obviously been very much in love.
Jesse set the journal aside and began rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped around her knees. The floor was hard beneath her, but she didn’t care. She could still hear Cal out in the hallway. She thought about what might have happened if things between their parents had gone another way. Cal would have been her brother. Or rather, she would not have been herself because she was Rawling’s daughter and not Joe’s. No part of her was Hernandez, and there was a certain power in knowing that. Jesse was a Collins through and through.
“Jesse?” Cal stuck his head through the doorway. “My brothers are coming out. They insisted. I think everyone is coming out here. Maggie and Darren just have to wait until school is out. They’ll take the kids to the housekeeper at Clouds End and then come on out here.”
“Kids complicate things, don’t they?” Jesse murmured. She pointed to the journal. “Your dad and my mom were very much in love. Then your mother reminded him of the vows he made and basically held him to it.”
Cal stood in the doorway and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “It’s hard to say how I feel about that.”
“I feel bad for Avery,” Jesse said suddenly. “Believe me, I’m plenty angry with her.” Jesse gestured to the jewelry box. “This is my mother’s. My parents’ wedding bands are in there as well as my mother’s engagement ring and all of the jewelry that should have been mine. Your mother wanted it so she took it.”
“That was wrong,” Cal said flatly with a shake of his head. “What the hell gets into that woman?”
“Hate,” Jesse whispered. “Think about it. My mother was her rival for how many years? She forced her husband to come back to her because she had three little kids. He would have taken her sons from her and kicked her to the curb like trash, Cal. That—I am ashamed to say—was their plan, according to this diary.”
Cal didn’t speak. His expression told her that he was feeling as conflicted about all of this as she was. Then he moved closer and held out his hand. She reached out and took it. He drew her to her feet and pulled her into his embrace. The warmth of his body was incredible. It felt as though she was attempting to hug the sun. It felt so good. He gently pressed his lips to the top of her head, and Jesse felt more cherished in that moment than she ever had before in her life.
“What are you going to do?” Cal asked gently. “Obviously, these things are yours.”
“I haven’t even touched that last journal,” she admitted. “I’m almost afraid to.”
“Then, leave it for the moment,” Cal suggested. “It’s not like we don’t have enough crap going on right now to keep us busy.”
“I need to talk to your mother,” Jesse decided. After she said the words out loud, she was even more certain that this was the right decision. “I need to ask her what happened. I need her version of the story without all of the bullshit and the covering up that she seems so determined to keep up.”
“Keeping up appearances,” Cal murmured. “That’s always been her motto.”
He was right. Failing anything and everything else, Avery Hernandez was absolutely capable of making it look as though everything was just fine. Maybe it was time to poke holes in perfection.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Cal paced back and forth and wished that he hadn’t let Jesse leave the ranch. What if something happened? What if Adam Connolly found her somewhere on the road and decided the best way to get what he wanted was to run Jesse into the ditch? As he paced back and forth on his front porch, the ideas kept coming and getting more and more wild as they did.
There was some small comfort in knowing that she was driving his truck. Hers was obviously not fit for duty since driving in reverse all the way to Denver was a no-go. Perhaps Adam wouldn’t want to tangle with a Hernandez. He’d gone straight for Jesse to begin with. Perhaps Jesse was the focus and the target for the moment.
Finally, Cal saw great big plumes of dust as his brothers drove down the road toward the ranch. It was a big, long line of white trucks all carrying the HLC brand on the side. They were coming fast and with a purpose. Cal couldn’t blame them for that. It wasn’t every day that you found out that you had a long-lost half-brother.
Laredo was the first one to get out. He barely managed to shut off the truck engine before he leaped to the ground. Aria Callahan was with him. She bounced out of the passenger side and made a dive as though she were going to grab Laredo and tackle him to the ground.
“Laredo!” Aria called. “Laredo, slow down! You can’t just run over there and stick your fist in his face. Use your words!”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m Bella,” Laredo told her irritably. “I’m not going to punch him out. I just want to know why he’s buying into someone’s bullshit.”
That was fair. There was no doubt in Cal’s mind that Met and Cisco had filled Laredo in on the latest news about their parents’ melodramatic lives. It had to sound like one more load of crap hand-fed to them by their mother and their father. At least that would have been Cal’s stance had a man who was so obviously their brother not assaulted him inside Jesse’s barn less than three hours ago.
Met, Daphne, Cisco, and Melody appeared on the porch a few moments later. Melody immediately touched Cal’s shoulder and offered him a tentative look of sympathy. “What was he like? Jesse called me on her way in to talk to your mom. She says she’s afraid he’s going to hit my place next.”
“It’s hard to say what he’ll do.” Cal thought about that. It really was hard to say, and not just because Adam Connolly was an unknown. “The man has been bamboozled by Paul Weatherby. He thinks he knows what’s going on because Paul has told him that all of us have intentionally kept him from his inheritance.”
“But that isn’t true!” Daphne protested. She took Met’s hand and lifted it to her lips. Her worry for him and for their family was palpable. “You guys had no idea what your parents were up to in their younger years.”
“That’s true enough,” Cisco snorted. Then he pointed to Laredo. “Until a few hours ago, Laredo here was still convinced that Jesse was our biological sister.”
“I’m still not totally on board with the idea that she isn’t,” Laredo muttered. “It makes too much sense.”
“No.” Cal picked up the worn journal that Jesse had given him before she left for Denver. “Jesse found a huge bunch
of journals in her parents’ house. Her mother kept them. But our mother liberated two of the journals and a good amount of Amelia’s jewelry and personal effects. We found them this morning in a box of Mom’s old stuff I had upstairs.”
“Mom stole personal effects from Jesse’s mother’s home after her death?” Laredo scoffed. “I find that very difficult to believe.”
Met was already shaking his head. “I don’t. You guys don’t have any idea how much anger that woman can hang onto. She would feel as though that stuff belonged to her, almost like damages for a crime committed.”
“That’s sad but very much like a woman,” Daphne admitted. She glanced at Melody and Aria. “What do you guys think? You know Avery better than I do.”
“Maggie would be the one to say.” Aria spoke slowly. “I think her mental health background helps more than you think when she’s dealing with Avery. That’s why Avery likes her so much.”
Laredo held up both hands as though he were surrendering. “Fine. Let’s hear it. I’m willing to listen at least.”
“Today I found out that I’m pregnant with Joseph Hernandez’s baby,” Cal read in a clear voice. He could feel the stillness settling on his brothers as he kept going with Amelia’s words. “I know that Joe is going to be excited just like I know that I’m going to have a boy. Joe has three beautiful boys already, and I can’t wait for him to leave Avery and start a life that will truly make him happy. Avery isn’t the woman for him. I am. And soon enough, everyone will know it.”
There was absolute silence on the porch when Cal finished reading that passage from Amelia’s journal. He could feel the confusion and pain in his brothers’ hearts because he felt it too. Reading those words was like driving splinters underneath his fingernails.
“She sounds so sure of herself,” Melody marveled. She tugged on a lock of her brown hair and pursed her lips. “I feel like I want to be mad at her, but I don’t think I can be.”
“No,” Daphne agreed. “What did Joe tell her to make her believe such a thing? Can you imagine? The man had to have promised her the world.”
