by Laurie Paige
“He had to. I mean, DNA tests and everything.”
Lexine grinned at her daughter. “Which will convict him. Don’t you see, my dearest daughter? You’re in the clear. It’s all working out perfectly.” She gave the younger woman a tender, sympathetic look. “Besides, it isn’t as if you meant to kill her. It was an accident. Why should you suffer when it was the stupid girl’s own fault? She shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
Audra nodded. “I wish that old scarecrow, the prospector, hadn’t seen me, though. He makes me nervous.”
“No one will believe anything Homer Gilmore says, not after he identified Emma and was wrong, so that’s no problem. You’re free to start searching for the sapphire mine again.”
The girl brightened at Lexine’s reassuring words.
At least this daughter was easy to control. That Emma—ungrateful brat—hadn’t wanted to help at all. She hadn’t believed Lexine’s explanation of the past and how the Kincaids had set her up. Too bad the girl got off the murder rap. It would have solved several problems for her and Audra. Those damn Kincaids had interfered again.
“I have some new maps,” she said, unrolling the topography maps the government so conveniently provided.
She pointed out likely search areas on the old Baxter homestead. With the arrest of Gavin Nighthawk, the pressure was off Audra. She could get started on their quest once more without interference from the law.
“Here’s where the original mine was,” Lexine said, pointing to the area. “Here’s where the new vein was located.”
Anger washed over her at the memory of Homer, who’d prospected the mountains for years, finding the sapphires that should have been hers. The gem-stones, valuable for lasers used in medical research, were the reason she’d come back to Whitehorn and married that wimp, Dugan Kincaid, and put up with his lecherous old daddy, Jeremiah.
People kept getting in her way. She should have gotten rid of Homer when she had him locked in the cave used as a jail at the old mining camp years ago. She grimaced. There was no profit in dwelling on the past. She had other fish to fry, as the saying went.
“Here’s where I found some loose stones in the creek. The triangle between these three places is the logical place to look. There’s a logging road you can use for access. Your boyfriend, Micky What’s-his-name, he’ll let you use his truck, right? And he’ll keep his mouth shut?”
“Oh, yes,” Audra said airily. “Micky will do whatever I tell him, no questions asked.”
Mother and daughter grinned at each other.
Audra felt much better by the time she left the prison and returned to the trailer. Micky was there, watching a game show on television. A dirty plate was on the beat-up coffee table, a beer bottle beside it.
She hated the…the squalor of her present life. Desperation seized her. It was her mother’s fault—her adoptive mother’s. The stupid Felicia Westwood had lost their money by trusting that crooked attorney, then had expected Audra to go to work to support the two of them. Audra despised her.
But that was the past.
The future gleamed brightly ahead. With those sapphires, she would be free of past mistakes. She’d make a new start, find a husband who was worthy of her. She studied Micky, who sprawled on the sagging sofa, and laughed at the irony of her being with someone like him.
But he had his uses.
“You seem to be in a good mood,” he remarked. “What’s so funny?”
“You. Me. Us. Life,” she proclaimed dramatically. “How much money do you have? I feel like going out. Let’s celebrate—dinner and dancing in the big town of Whitehorn in the glorious state of Montana. What do you say?”
His smile was instant. “Sure.”
She turned away so he wouldn’t see the contempt she couldn’t disguise. He was so easy to manipulate. Too easy, really. No challenge at all.
Ten
“Mmm, fry bread,” Meg said, gesturing toward a booth. “I love it. I’ll have that for lunch.”
Hope laughed. It was the first Monday in September. Labor Day. Meg had talked her into coming to the festivities at the Laughing Horse Reservation for the day. To her total surprise, her father had decided to join them.
“That’s setting a good example for Gabe,” he said with a mock-scolding glance at Meg.
Hope pushed Gabe in his shaded stroller and studied her friend and her father surreptitiously as they drifted from booth to booth. Something odd there. It was almost as if they were friends.
Or lovers.
She shied from the thought as pain clutched at her chest. Her imagination was running wild.
“Hop,” Gabe said, demanding her attention. He pointed to the rabbit cages.
The three adults veered toward the livestock area. Hope viewed more types of rabbits than she had ever before known existed. At one pen, children were allowed inside to pet the furry little creatures.
“Jor,” Gabe said, and held up his arms.
Dumbfounded, Hope watched as her father lifted the boy and went into the pen. He set Gabe on his feet and lifted a rabbit so the child could pet it. Speaking softly, her father told Gabe where to rub and how to touch the rabbit. He explained how rabbits hopped on their strong back legs and how fast they could run.
Gabe listened solemnly and was gentle. Jordan reminded him from time to time to be careful. The two moved on down the pen, petting and discussing various rabbits.
Hope turned a perplexed gaze on her friend. “Gabe seems to know my father.”
To her further surprise, Meg blushed. “Jordan has been over to the house,” she said.
“To your house?” Hope blurted. “When?”
“Uh, actually nearly every night for the past week. And a couple of times the week before,” Meg added truthfully.
Hope was speechless.
Meg smiled ruefully. “I, uh, stuck my nose in without being invited. Remember that Tuesday—it was nearly three weeks ago—when you kept Gabe because I had a wedding reception to decorate?”
As Meg recounted her impulsive decision to put in her two cents’ worth to Jordan, Hope listened, half in shock, half in disbelief.
“It’s a wonder my father didn’t throw you out.”
Meg laughed softly. “I walked out before he had the chance.” She gave Hope an embarrassed glance. “I hope you’ll forgive me for interfering. I had absolutely no right to do what I did.”
“No. No, that’s okay,” Hope assured her, not sure what she thought.
“Shortly after that, the following Friday, in fact, your father stopped by the cottage. I thought he’d come to tell me to stay out of his business, but he asked me about you. He finished bathing Gabe and said he had raised you.”
“My father?” Hope said as if she thought aliens had taken over his body and deceived Meg.
Meg laughed, understanding in her eyes. “Yes.”
Hope studied Jordan as he knelt beside Gabe, talking softly to the inquisitive child, showing him how soft the bunny’s fur was. She suddenly recalled a time when she’d been sick with the flu. Her father had made a bed for her under his desk, hidden from the sight of two businessmen who were in a meeting with him. Her presence had been their secret, and she had stayed quiet as a mouse, soothed just to be near him.
“I once thought he was wonderful,” she murmured.
“He’s good with children,” Meg said. “I think it’s easier for him to trust children and therefore be at ease with them. He learned when he was hardly more than a boy not to trust the adults in his life.”
Hope nodded, her thoughts in a whirl. For the rest of the morning, she observed the other two adults. There was more than friendship between them. They were attracted to each other. It was obvious in the frequent meeting of their eyes, the casual touches, the tension between them as they shared Gabe’s care.
She swallowed as her throat filled with a painful lump. Again she felt the outsider, the one who watched from the sidelines while others engaged in life.
> Turning from the Norman Rockwell scene of Meg and Jordan helping Gabe eat his first fry bread with honey without getting too messy, Hope encountered a hard stare from summer-blue eyes.
Collin Kincaid watched her with a relentless gaze filled with passionate intensity. Perspiration broke out all over her, and her step faltered. Meg and her father, who was pushing Gabe in the stroller, strode on ahead of her.
Collin inclined his head slightly in greeting. He didn’t smile. She forced a smile on her face, nodded back and walked hurriedly on, her heart beating very fast.
She hadn’t seen him since last Wednesday, the day of the meeting in her father’s conference room, and that night, when he had shown up at her condo.
Come live with me.
What had he meant by that? Marriage? A live-in arrangement until their passion played itself out?
Her father would have a heart attack if she did, then he’d disown her just as he’d threatened. She, too, had a heritage. She couldn’t toss it away because of passion and intense blue eyes.
Collin kept an eye on Hope as the day wore down into late afternoon. Her smile was as fake as a three-dollar bill. He knew. He’d seen the real Hope, and she was nothing like this quiet woman who observed the crowd at the fair from the fringes, as if she were a researcher sent to observe others at play.
She, her father and the wedding planner made an odd trio. The little boy seemed at ease with all the adults. Collin watched Jordan and Meg. If they weren’t lovers, they were headed that way. That much was obvious.
Anger coursed through him. Jordan Baxter was the only obstacle between him and Hope. The man didn’t deserve happiness when he denied it to his daughter.
Collin heaved a heavy sigh. Who was he to think she could only be happy with him? Hope was an adult. She had to make her own choices. Actually, she had. Only she hadn’t chosen him.
When he saw the other attorney who worked with her on the case against the Kincaids arrive and rush over to them, he had to restrain an urge to jerk Hope out of their midst and keep her with him the rest of the day.
Or forever. Whichever came first.
As evening spread lavender fingers across the sky, the dancing started under the covered pavilion. The tribe liked to display its ceremonial dancing and explain it to the Anglos, then invite the outsiders to join in. Later the dancing would be taken over by the younger members of the Cheyenne, who would play tapes of rock ‘n’ roll music and do the latest gyrations to it.
He stood in back of the crowd and watched Hope as her little group watched from the sidelines. Kurt Peters tried to get Hope to dance. She refused. When the man gave up and turned to talk to her father, Hope moved a few feet away. She looked around as if searching for the nearest exit.
An impulse stirred Collin into action. He might regret it. Hell, he might end up in a fight. But Hope was worth the effort, and he couldn’t stand another minute of her lawyer cohort fawning over her.
He strode over. “Evening,” he said. He took her hand. “Dance?”
“No, thank you.” She used her prissy back-East voice.
He grinned, the devil on his shoulder spurring him on to recklessness. “Perhaps I’d better rephrase that. Are you coming peacefully, or do I have to drag you?”
Her eyes flew open at the threat.
“Yeah, I’m that desperate,” he told her.
Her chin went up in the air. He tugged on her hand and she stepped forward. Relief speared through him. She wasn’t going to fight him over the dance.
“Smart thinking,” he murmured as they took their place, face-to-face, in the line of dancers.
She glared at him, her movements stiff and wooden as she moved to the tempo of the drums.
He felt the beat vibrate right down to his core as he feasted his eyes on the woman he hadn’t seen in nearly a week.
“I’ve missed you,” he said honestly.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t miss you or don’t say it?”
“Don’t be impossible.”
Her eyes almost pleaded. Guilt gnawed at him, along with the hunger and the need that was more than hunger. “Don’t make it so hard for us.”
She glanced from side to side as if to see if anyone had heard him. Her lips were pressed tightly closed. He remembered how soft they were, how responsive.
He took her hand and moved closer. “Come away with me.”
She jerked free, panic in her eyes.
“To Elk Springs,” he continued softly, soothing her as if she were the filly he was training for his sister. “There are some beautiful spots in the Bitterroot Mountains, too. There’s one on the ranch next to the river where we could picnic…and then make love under the stars.”
Her mouth dropped open in a silent gasp before she snapped it closed. She gave him a repressive glare.
He grinned and dared her with his eyes. When she missed a step, he caught both her hands and held them as they moved in time to the powerful beat of the drums, faster and faster, moving in a circle of writhing humanity joined in the elemental force of music and movement.
When the music stopped, he held on to her hands. “I’ve really missed you.”
“Huh. Kincaids miss having every woman they meet falling at their feet.”
He frowned at her cynical tone, then grinned. “It could get mighty crowded considering the number of us. I don’t believe Gina would allow many women to pile up around Trent’s feet. Leanne would string up any female who came on to Cade and leave her carcass for the buzzards.”
Someone put on a tape of popular tunes. The first one was a slow love song. Without giving Hope a chance to protest, Collin took her in his arms.
The heat from his lean masculine body invaded her, melting some part that was icy and rigid. Her muscles loosened, and she moved with greater ease than she had on the first dance.
“That’s better,” he said, resting his chin against her temple.
She spotted Kurt Peters watching them from the edge of the crowd, his eyes flat and cold. Meg and her father sat on a bench under a scrawny cottonwood while Gabe ate a drippy ice-cream cone. While she watched, Jordan touched Meg’s hand, squeezed it, then bent to wipe a long slurp of chocolate ice cream from Gabe’s mouth.
“Your father has found a lady friend,” Collin remarked.
She looked up and found sympathy in his eyes, which were warm and tender. Caring.
But men were always warm and tender and caring when they got their own way. Her father was a prime example with his unpredictable temper that lashed out without warning, particularly since his return to Whitehorn.
“I hope he doesn’t hurt her…”
She wished she hadn’t voiced the worry. She didn’t want her friend to be disappointed. Neither did she want to lose Meg because of her father’s interest, which was probably temporary at best. He’d never maintained a male-female relationship for long. His work came first.
And his need for revenge.
She forced the thought away, feeling it was a betrayal on her part. Her father sought justice, not revenge.
“What?” Collin asked as if sensing her turmoil.
“Nothing.”
He was silent after that. When the song ended, he led her out of the dancers and away from where her party waited for her. “Emma is here. She was asking about you this morning. She said she left word at your office yesterday for you to call. She thought you two might have lunch this weekend if you had a free moment.”
“Yes, she did. I was busy.”
“Don’t follow in your father’s footsteps and cut out those who want to be friends with you,” he advised, acting the wise older one. “Including me. Especially me.”
She stiffened. “If you truly want to be my friend, then leave me alone.”
Now he was the one who tensed. “Not a chance,” he said with a brief shake of his handsome head.
She turned away from the sheer appeal of him. “The situation is too complicated between us, between our families,”
she corrected. “There will never be anything between us.”
“Coward,” he said softly, and walked away.
She spun around, but he was already gone, mingling in the crowd, a tough man who walked with the assurance of one who knew his place in the world and was secure in it.
She wished she were half as certain of her own. She returned to Meg and her father. Lifting Gabe in her arms, she volunteered to take him home and put him to bed, thus letting the couple have some time on their own.
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t saddle my worst enemy with Gabe tonight. He’ll be cranky and probably impossible after such a busy day,” Meg protested.
Jordan smiled at Meg. “Let’s take advantage. I feel like dancing for the first time in years.”
In the end Hope, succeeding in wresting Gabe from his guilt-ridden mom, drove home in Meg’s car, which had a car seat. Kurt had been gracious when she’d said good-night, but she had sensed his anger.
She couldn’t believe he thought he had a chance with her. Her father’s yes-man, who somehow spied on her and reported her moves to her elder? She trusted him about as far as she could throw him. Which would likely be from her office window.
With a sardonic smile, she bundled Gabe into the house, gave him a quick bath and had him tucked into bed by nine. He gave her a damp kiss and was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
She watched him for a minute, her heart tight and achy. Men had careers and families. Why was it so hard for a woman to do the same?
Jordan laid his hand flat in the middle of Meg’s tummy. Her skin was soft, smooth and still slightly damp from their lovemaking. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
He had dropped her at her cottage before eleven, said good-night and gone home. His daughter’s car had been in the drive. At midnight, he’d returned.
A light had been on, and Hope’s car was gone.
Meg had greeted him in her nightgown and robe. She hadn’t been surprised to see him. “I waited,” she said simply when he stepped inside and shut the door.
When he took her in his arms, the world had seemed right. For that instant.
