CASSIDY HARTE AND THE COMEBACK KID

by Reanne Thayne

  Zack had gone to nine different elementary schools, he had told her, in six different states.

  He had never experienced this. The sense of continuity, of community. Of being inextricably linked with something bigger than yourself. A wave of pity for him crashed over her, and she wanted to gather him close in her arms right there in front of everyone and cradle him against her.

  "You belong in Denver now," she offered. "You have a big apartment there and your business. Oh, and your ranch in the San Juans. You belong there."

  He was quiet for a moment, then he gave her another of those slow, serious smiles. "I've never felt as much at home in either of those places as I do right here in Salt River when I'm with you."

  Unbearably touched, she felt the hot sting of tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them back and reached across the width between them to place her hand on his where it rested on the arm of his lawn chair. He turned his hand over and clasped hers, and they stayed that way, fingers locked together, for the rest of the parade.

  She always grew a little melancholy when the last float passed by, when people gathered up their little flags and their lawn chairs and headed home. It was the same ache that always settled in her chest as she watched the last leaf fall from the big sycamore outside her window at the Diamond Harte at the knowledge that she wouldn't see another until spring.

  Where would she be a year from now when the parade again marched down

  Main Street

  ? Would the man who sat beside her still be a part in her life? Or would he march on just like the parade?

  Her chest felt tight and achy at the thought. She knew she was going to have to face that possibility, but right now she didn't want to think about anything beyond the moment.

  "So what's next?" he asked as they packed up their own chairs and began the trek back to his Range Rover. "Do you have to hurry on back to the ranch to fix dinner?"

  "No. Jean told all the guests they were on their own today. I think most of them were coming into town for the Lions Club barbecue later."

  "So you're free for the rest of the day?"

  She nodded. "What did you have in mind?"

  His grin somehow managed to be mischievous and seductive at the same time, something only Slater could pull off. "Well, if I had a pickup truck, we could always take a picnic up in the mountains later and make out while we watch the fireworks."

  An instant image of their first time together flashed through her mind and an answering heat curled through her stomach. Drat the man for stirring her up like this right on crowded

  Main Street

  !

  "What's that old saying? If wishes were horses then beggars would ride?"

  He laughed. "Not a horse. A pickup. I have this sudden, overwhelming compulsion to buy a truck. Where's the nearest dealership?"

  "Matt always buys his ranch vehicles in Idaho Falls. It shouldn't take more than an hour to pick out a truck, right? I should think we can make it there and back before the fireworks show with time to spare."

  He stopped dead and stared at her. She met his gaze squarely, wondering if he could correctly read the message in her eyes. She was ready to move forward, to take the next step with him. The sooner the better, as far as she was concerned.

  "Are you sure?" he murmured, as if he could read her thoughts.

  With a slow smile she nodded. An instant later he dropped the folded lawn chairs and yanked her into his arms, right in the middle of town, and lowered his head for a fiery kiss.

  She would have stood there all afternoon just basking in the hot promise of that kiss—with no thought at all for where they were and who might be watching—if a carload of teenagers hadn't chosen that moment to drive past honking and catcalling.

  With a flustered laugh she broke the kiss. "Whoa." That was the only coherent thought she could put into words.

  Before he could answer, she saw his gaze sharpen on something behind her. Fearing one of her brothers had stumbled onto them, she turned and saw with relief that it was only Wade Lowry.

  Her relief was short-lived.

  Wade stepped forward, his hands clenched into fists and his handsome face twisted with anger. "I heard the rumors but I couldn't believe they were true. How can you stand to be seen with this...this son of a bitch after what he did to you?"

  She blinked, stunned by his words, his animosity. A regular churchgoer, Wade hardly ever used profanity. It was so out of character that she didn't know how to answer him.

  Why would he be so furious? Was it jealousy? Maybe he thought they had more of a relationship than they did. She went out with him occasionally but she had always tried to be clear that she wasn't interested in anything more serious with him. He was her friend. She hated the idea that she might have hurt him.

  "Wade—" she began, but he cut her off.

  "He took Melanie away! She never would have left if it hadn't been for him."

  She blinked, disoriented by his words. Melanie? This was about Melanie? Had Wade been one of the many men ensnared in her sister-in-law's twisted, sticky web of destruction?

  She couldn't believe it. The man she knew was far too decent and principled to sleep with another man's wife, no matter how alluring she might be. But the emotions in his eyes told a different story. Of betrayal and loss and something else she couldn't recognize.

  "Wade, he didn't leave with Melanie," she said gently.

  He turned his anger toward her, and she drew in a shaky breath at the force of it blazing at her. "Of course he did! Everybody knows that! People saw the two of them go. Your own brother saw them leave together!"

  Zack stepped forward. "You know exactly why I left town ten years ago, don't you, Lowry? And it wasn't because of some imaginary tryst with Melanie Harte." Zack's voice was sharp, his eyes suddenly as hard as granite.

  Wade stiffened. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "I'm sure if you put your mind to it and thought real hard, you could probably figure it out."

  "You're crazy. Everybody knows you ran off with Melanie. The only mystery is why a woman like her would be willing to settle for a no-account drifter like you."

  "That's what I might have been then," Zack murmured, pure ice against Wade's fiery anger. "But not anymore. Now I have money and power. And a very long memory."

  Wade flexed his hands into fists, looking as though he was ready to lash out any second and turn the verbal confrontation physical.

  She could just imagine Jesse's reaction as Salt River chief of police if he had to come break up a fight between the two men. She huffed out a breath, furious with both of them—Wade for starting it and Zack for tossing fuel onto the fire.

  "This is ridiculous. You two are not going to brawl in the middle of

  Main Street

  . Not if I have anything to say about it. I'm sorry you're upset, Wade. I don't know what was between you and Melanie. That's your business. Just as what is between Zack and me is mine."

  She didn't give him time to respond, just grabbed on tightly to Zack's arm. "Come on, Slater. If we're going to make it to Idaho Falls and back, we had better hurry."

  He looked down at her as if just remembering her presence. With one last stony look at Wade, he opened the door to his glossy Range Rover for Cassie, then climbed in and drove away, leaving the other man standing in the street glaring after them.

  They were almost to Tin Cup Pass before she finally lost patience with his continued silence. "Okay. Spill it. What was that all about."

  He gripped the wheel. "You tell me. He's your boyfriend."

  She barely refrained from slugging him while he was driving. "He's my friend. You want to tell me what you have against him?"

  He said nothing for several moments while yellow lines passed in a blur. "I'm fairly certain he was one of the men I saw that night unloading that airplane full of drugs," he finally said.

  She stared at him. "Wade? You're telling me you think Wade Lowry was part of some vicious crim
inal operation? A drug smuggler? That's impossible! You must be mistaken."

  "Why?"

  She could give him a hundred reasons. A thousand! Wade was a kind and gentle man. A little stuffy, maybe, but generally considered to be one of the nicest men in town.

  She was struggling to put it into words when she suddenly remembered something else. "It's impossible! Ten years ago he was on the other side of the law. He was an officer with the Salt River PD."

  He kept his eyes on the road but his mouth hardened. "So were the rest of them."

  Her jaw sagged. "What? You're telling me the Salt River Police Department was running drugs?"

  "I don't know about all of them. There were only four men there that night, all wearing masks. The only one I recognized for sure was Chief Briggs. He was the one giving the orders."

  She didn't find that such a stretch of the imagination. Jesse had told her enough horror stories about his predecessor that she could certainly believe Carl Briggs would have been capable of anything. He had been completely dirty, as crooked as a snake in a cactus patch.

  Briggs had been under indictment on multiple counts of corruption five years earlier when he'd dropped dead of a heart attack.

  Jesse was still trying to repair the damage Briggs had done to the small police department's reputation during his tenure.

  But Wade? The image of him involved in any kind of criminal enterprise just didn't fit the man she knew. "You said they were all wearing masks," she said slowly. "So you can't be sure Wade was there."

  "Not one hundred percent," he admitted. Damn, he wished he could remember that night more vividly, could put faces and names to the men who had so gleefully taken turns beating him.

  If he could, he would find a way to even the score now that he was no longer that no-account drifter Lowry had called him. What was the saying? Vengeance was sweeter when it was savored. He would love to be able to savor a little delayed justice.

  His memories were just too hazy, though. He only had vague impressions of Briggs ordering one of the men to cuff him. Then the chief had circled around him a few times, just for intimidation's sake, before offering him three choices that were really no choices at all.

  They could kill him right then and bury him deep in the mountains surrounding Star Valley where nobody would ever find him.

  They could let him take the rap for the drugs.

  Or he could leave Salt River and never come back.

  Cocky bastard that he'd been a decade earlier, he had spat in the chief's face. Briggs had eased back on his heels, his pale blue eyes narrowed.

  "Boy, you just made a big mistake," he murmured softly, then had ordered the other men to finish him off.

  They had all taken turns beating on "Cassie Harte's pretty-boy boyfriend" who stuck his nose in the wrong place.

  He must have passed out from one too many kicks in the head. His last thought before he had surrendered to the pain had been for Cassie.

  When he regained consciousness, he'd been alone. No plane, no handcuffs, no Briggs. Only his beat-up truck and a note staked to the ground in front of him that said only five words. "Jail or bail. Your choice."

  He had no doubt in the world Briggs could make a charge of drug smuggling stick against him. He wanted to stay and fight it. But then he thought of the expression he would see on Cassie's face if she saw him behind bars. The hurt and the dismay. The disillusionment.

  He couldn't make her endure that kind of shame. She deserved better than to have to go through that.

  She deserved better than him.

  It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to make his shaky way into the driver's seat of his old truck and start it up, pain shrieking through him with every second from what he would later learn had been a half-dozen broken ribs, a concussion and a shattered elbow.

  He had a vague memory of that drive out of town, how he'd decided to head south toward Utah. He had known he was leaving Cassie forever, and his heart had cracked into sharp little pieces that gouged him just as painfully as his broken ribs.

  "Where did you go?"

  He blinked back to the present, to the soft, beautiful woman beside him who had suffered the consequences of that decision. "What?"

  "Just now. You looked like you were miles away."

  "I was remembering. Regretting. I should never have left. I should have stayed and fought Briggs."

  Her eyes softened and she reached across the vehicle and touched his arm. "You would have lost. He might have killed you."

  "Maybe. But at least I would have known I tried."

  "Small consolation that would have been to you in your grave. No. I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I'm glad you made the choice you did."

  He stared at her, taking his eyes off the road for several beats too long. When he realized he had just narrowly missed hitting a reflector pole, he yanked the Range Rover into the nearest pullout and shoved it into Park.

  "How can you say that? Running out on you was unforgivable."

  "No it wasn't. You broke my heart when you left, I won't lie about that. But broken hearts eventually heal, even if they never quite fit together perfectly again." She was quiet for a moment, then she grabbed his hand. "If you had been killed, Zack, I never would have recovered."

  * * *

  After her low admission, he didn't say anything for several moments, just gazed at her with a bemused kind of wonder in his eyes, then with a muffled groan he reached for her.

  The kiss was soft and sweet and so full of tenderness she melted against him, her bones dissolving inside her skin.

  They had shared dozens of kisses in this last week. Hundreds of them. But she sensed something deeper in this embrace, as if they had both crossed some invisible line.

  A heavy tractor trailer passed them, and its wake rattled the windows of the Range Rover. Zack groaned and pressed his forehead against hers. "I don't deserve you."

  "You deserve whatever you want out of life." She touched his cheek. "You always have."

  "You're what I want. Whether I deserve you or not." He drew away suddenly and shoved the Range Rover into gear. "Come on. Let's go buy a pickup truck."

  A little disoriented by the shift in the conversation, she blinked at him. "You're serious? I thought you were only teasing!"

  His lopsided grin left her as breathless as his kiss. "Sweetheart, I wouldn't joke about something as important as this."

  Driving with one hand, he grabbed her fingers suddenly with the other and pressed a kiss on her palm. "Seriously, Cass. I know nothing I do will bring back the last ten years. But I'd like to re-create at least one thing from that time."

  "You're crazy! You can't just walk into a dealership at two in the afternoon on the Fourth of July and walk out with a new pickup truck!"

  "Watch me."

  She did just that. Not that she had much choice. The sales manager at the small dealership didn't quite know how to deal with an immovable force like Zack Slater with his mind set on something.

  The two of them—Cassie and LeRoy Thomas, his nametag read—just stood back and watched, while Zack quickly perused the inventory on the lot.

  "What's your favorite color?" he asked her at one point while he peered under the hood of one big beast

  "I don't know," she answered helplessly, unable to believe he was actually doing this. "Um, I like the sage color of this one."

  She didn't think he would appreciate the observation that when he stood next to it, the color perfectly matched the green flecks in his eyes.

  "Sage it is, then," he said, poking his head up. "LeRoy, my friend, let's talk."

  A half hour later, after some hard-core negotiations that made her head spin, Zack was the proud owner of a hulking three-quarter-ton pickup with all the extras and a price tag that left her feeling slightly ill.

  He took her to a late lunch at a pizza place in Idaho Falls. On the way out of the restaurant he offered her the choice of driving home the new truck or the sleek Range Ro
ver.

  Home. She really liked the sound of that. Pretending to consider, she cocked her head, looking at both vehicles in the parking lot. "You take the truck," she finally said. "It's your new toy."

  He grinned with such boyish excitement that she fell in love with him all over again.

  She loved Zack Slater. The sweetness of admitting it to herself flowed through her like pure honey.

  She loved his strength and his laughter and his decency.

  As certain as she was that this was right between them—that she wanted to take this next step with him—by the time they drove under the wooden Lost Creek Ranch sign, her nerves were stretched thin, her body taut with restless anticipation.

  When she parked the Range Rover next to the shiny new truck that gleamed in the late afternoon sun, she was chagrined to realize her hands were shaking, just a little. She climbed out, then shoved them in the pockets of her jeans to hide her nerves.

  "Let me just grab a couple of...of quilts." She felt herself blush furiously. "I'm afraid I, um, don't have any strawberries."

  "That's okay." He smiled. "Strawberries aren't what I'm hungry for, anyway."

  Her mouth went dry and she had to grab the railing of the porch steps to steady herself. He followed her up the steps, and she was almost painfully aware of him as she unlocked the door.

  Inside her little cabin he seemed to take up all the available air, leaving her breathless and a little dizzy.

  She cleared her throat. "I'll just grab those quilts." She turned away and nearly jumped out of her skin when he reached out and rested a strong hand on her shoulder. The heat of his fingers scorched through the soft cotton of her shirt as he turned her to face him.

  His eyes were intent, searching, and she knew all her sudden anxieties must be glaringly obvious on her far-too-transparent features.

  "Do you want me to leave?"

  She shook her head fiercely.

  "We don't have to do anything you're not ready for. Slow and easy, remember? That's what I promised. I meant every word. We don't even have to go anywhere. We can sit right out on your porch swing and watch the fireworks from here, okay? You can always make me go jump in the cold stream out back if I start misbehaving."