How much worse it must have made things to be publicly blamed for causing the crash—a crash later attributed to a substance abuse problem Hernandez had taken great pains to hide. No wonder Zach had such contempt for reporters. And here she was, trying to tear apart the new life he was building.
“When I came back home,” he told her, “there was my mother, with this child of my brother’s that neither of us had ever guessed existed. My mama gave me some story about a girlfriend, a woman who was overwhelmed and desperate, showing up out of the blue and handing Eden off. A wild, crazy story—but if you had seen my mother’s eyes, all lit up, the life in them, the hope and purpose...”
He shrugged his impossibly broad shoulders, the fabric of his shirt pulled by the hard muscle. “Marines sent me to survival school, where they teach you that if a man’s lost in the desert long enough, he’ll walk ten miles just to get to a mirage. Sometimes, he’ll even kill himself trying to drink down the illusion. Only in my case it wasn’t hot sand, but a sweet, funny little kid who filled that big empty house with all her chatter. Unhappy as I was at first about getting stuck here to do my duty, it took me a little longer than my mama, but pretty soon, I fell in love with Eden, too.”
Jessie felt a pang, deep inside. But she couldn’t let compassion, along with an attraction she realized was more than physical, keep her from following through. Not until she had the whole truth—and maybe even the miracle she’d come here seeking....
Not the miracle she’d prayed she might find, she thought as her gaze sought out the grinning little girl in the frame on Zach’s desk. But something as unexpected as a butterfly in winter.
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it the first time I set eyes on her,” said Jessie. “The hair may be a little darker, but otherwise, it’s like looking at my sister, back when Haley was her age.”
“Like looking at yourself, you mean. That’s when I first suspected, when you showed up the first time. Before then, you have to believe me, I had no idea. Zero.”
The coffee suddenly bitter, she slammed her cup down, too, her sympathy abruptly morphing into anger. Coming to her feet, she paced the room like a caged wildcat. “And yet you never told me. You blame yourself for keeping your mouth shut about Hernandez? Well, I blame you for this. And so would any judge or jury.”
He shook his head, his eyes pleading. “You have to understand. My mother showed me guardianship papers. They’re notarized and everything. The woman signed away parental rights.”
“What woman?” Jessie challenged, feeling lightheaded as the blood drained from her face. “Not my sister. Haley wouldn’t have permanently given up her—”
He rose and stood in her path, stopping her in her tracks. “How would you know what she’d do? You didn’t even know your sister had a child, much less how she felt about that. You had no idea what was going on with her, whether she was worried about her kid going hungry or if Frankie was pounding the snot out of them both every night. So don’t be telling me what your sister would or wouldn’t do. Because you have no idea.”
“You’re the one who has no idea,” she argued, wanting to explain how clearly she had felt her sister, how she still sometimes imagined she could feel her even now. “So don’t presume to tell me what I know or feel about my twin. And don’t you dare use it to try to justify kidnapping.”
“That’s a hell of a harsh word,” he warned. “Harsh as abandonment and neglect. All I know is that we have the papers.”
She opened her mouth to argue, feeling a stab of despair to realize he was right. “With my sister’s name on them?”
“It wasn’t her name,” he admitted, his tone softening a little. “Or I’d have definitely told you. I swear I would’ve, Jessie.”
“If it’s not her name, then it can’t be legal. For all we know, your mother forged the signature—or paid off someone to do it for her. While you knew and did nothing.”
His gaze slanted down to study her eyes, and she fought to still her trembling, to quiet the sense of betrayal roiling inside her.
“I couldn’t really admit it to myself until last night,” he said. “Instead, I told myself a lot of people have green eyes, tens of thousands of ’em, maybe. I let Mama convince me, and Eden seems so happy—and so upset at the thought of leaving. Heaven only knows what that poor kid went through before she came here.”
“Of course she’s happy here.” She blinked back threatening tears. “You’ve bribed her with puppies and a pony and heaven knows what else.”
“It’s not bribery. It’s love. And I blame my friend Nate for the puppies.”
She snorted, almost as angry at herself for beginning to trust him, to care for him, as she was at Zach. “I’ve met your friend Nate. Just last evening. You should’ve gotten your story straight with Mr. Rodeo if you hadn’t wanted him tipping me off.”
Zach swore under his breath. “This was no conspiracy. I swear it.”
“Your mother lied to me about when Eden came here for a reason, just like she freaked out when she saw me the first time. What Eden said when she saw me yesterday, telling me she wouldn’t go with me—it all makes so much sense now. She was afraid I was her mom at first, come to take her back.”
Though his eyes remained dry, grief passed across his handsome features, a bottomless heartache that made him hang his head. When finally he spoke, his voice was rough and raw with emotion. “I know,” he admitted. “I heard and saw it, too. I swear, I saw the moment it sank in that you weren’t her.”
She took a step nearer, looking up at his face. And unable to keep herself from reacting to the misery etched in it. From feeling for the impossible situation he’d been put in, and the innocent child whose future was at stake. “So how are we going to handle all this?” Jessie asked him, her voice softening a little.
He shook his head. “Not with lawyers, please. My mama—she’s never been strong. Not strong enough to stand up to my father’s bullying and not strong enough to deal with his death, let alone her younger son’s. She was a drowning woman, not even in her right mind, when that child showed up. For all we know, she’s convinced herself that Eden’s really a Rayford, that a part of Ian lives on through her.”
Jessie raised her palms, and then, on impulse, laid them against his broad chest. Bandaged though her right hand was, she felt the pounding of his heart beneath it, the heat pouring off him, though the room was cool. And she ached to bury her face there, to comfort him as she accepted comfort. Resisting, she instead assured him, “I promise you, Zach, I’m not out to put your mama in a cage or tie us all up for years on end with a bunch of litigation. I know you don’t think a whole lot of reporters, and I know you have good reason to suspect me. But I swear to you, I’m not that kind of person.”
He studied her face, searching its depths for...something. Sincerity, perhaps, but between them, something else ignited, the spark of something far too dangerous to contemplate.
Or so she told herself, but with temptation arcing through her body, her eyes refused to obey. One glance at his lips, and it was too late to step back. Too late to do anything but tilt back her head when he whispered, “I believe you.”
To do anything but part her lips when his mouth fell upon hers.
His taste was bittersweet: the mint of toothpaste mingled with the darker notes of coffee. But this sensation submerged completely beneath the unexpected pleasure, her every nerve ending flaring, awakening to his touch.
Some slim margin of her brain warned, this kiss, this passion, was too sudden and too needful, and flung at her like a net....
A net that he could use to save his family.
Swept up in the moment, though, she didn’t struggle to get free, didn’t make a sound to stop him. Her mind’s warnings fell away, and she became aware of nothing else except the power of his embrace, the explorations of her own hands, the kiss that s
ent pure desire pulsing in parts of her that had gone wanting far too long.
Yet on the frayed edge of her awareness, she recognized the urgent trilling of her cell phone, a sound programmed to escalate the longer she ignored it. But not even that would have brought her to her senses, had Gretel, trained to think for herself rather than blindly obey, not come over and nudged her hard, then reached up to push her damp snout under Jessie’s top.
“Yuck,” she said. “Go lie down. Platz! And no more cold-nosing my stomach.”
Looking chagrinned, the dog whined once before complying, and her call rolled to voice mail.
Zach cleared his throat. “Your dog clearly hates me.”
“Gretel doesn’t hate you. She’s probably confused, that’s all, wondering if you were attacking me.”
“You mean, she thought we were fighting?”
“Oh, no. If you’d done something she’s been taught to recognize—pulled a weapon, put your hands around my throat or struck me—she would’ve ripped your arm off.”
He gave the dog a sidelong glance. “Is that supposed to reassure me?”
Jessie shook her head. “No. It shouldn’t. Because this isn’t a good idea, not on any level.” Regret welled up inside her, a desperate wish to touch him again.
He turned his gaze directly to her, those blue eyes blazing. “Felt to me like a very good idea, Jessie, maybe the best one I’ve had in a long, long time. You didn’t feel it, too? I thought you—I could’ve sworn you—”
I’m still feeling it, still wanting... “It doesn’t matter what we both felt, not when you and I have such a huge conflict of interest. We don’t even know if my sister’s still alive, or if she’s...” Her throat tightened. “I thought—for a moment, I could’ve sworn I felt her last night—”
“Felt Haley?”
“You’ll probably laugh at this,” she said, “but sometimes, we used to know things, things we shouldn’t have. Back when we were just eight, I stayed home sick while a friend’s mom picked up Haley and took her to a roller-skating party. A couple hours later, I started crying, telling her my arm hurt. I could hardly move the elbow. But it was Haley who had broken hers.”
“Coincidence?”
“It happened other times, too. When I got poison ivy, she itched. When some creep broke her heart, I cried. And those last two years, before she ran off with another loser, it was so hard for me to stay on course. Her emotions were like a big tornado outbreak, slamming into me so hard that I had to run for cover to survive it.”
His forehead creased, his gaze sympathetic. “How’d you manage that?”
“I distanced myself from her,” she said quietly, “threw myself into my schoolwork and the debate club I’d joined. It was self-defense, that’s all, pushing her away in an attempt to save myself from being smashed to pieces, but in the process, I lost the connection. And I lost my sister, too.”
The old regret resurfaced, the idea that she should have fought harder for her twin. Should have found some way to make her dad lay off Haley, rather than trying to appease him by being the “good daughter.” Not that he had ever praised Jessie to her face.
“Self-preservation’s a hard-wired instinct,” Zach said, as he gently touched her arm. “You have nothing to feel guilty for.”
“Tell me that if it turns out my sister’s—” She sucked a breath through her teeth. That call she’d missed. It might have been Andrew Pollard, from the body farm in Huntsville.
To Zach, she said, “Excuse me for a second. I need to see who called me.”
Sure enough, when she looked at her cell, she saw the call had been from Dr. Pollard. Instead of calling back, she listened to the voice mail he’d left for her.
As the forensic anthropologist spoke, his words chewed through her strength like a strong acid. Her vision dissolved into blackness and her knees wobbled so severely that she might have fallen if Zach hadn’t helped her to a chair.
Chapter 13
As Jessie let the phone sag, Zach squatted down beside her to take it out of her hand.
“Lean forward and put your head between your knees,” he said. “Otherwise, you’re going to pass out.”
“I—I told you, I’m not the kind who faints. I was on the night beat. I saw e-everything, s-so much of it—”
“Just humor me, okay?” Was arguing her defense for everything?
“Forget it,” she said, her fair skin flushing. “Go ahead. Replay the message. But put it on speakerphone this time.”
He did, and they both listened to the recorded voice speak, “This is Andrew Pollard, about those photographs you sent me. I know I told you I was backlogged, but I was thinking about our conversation, and it got me curious.
“Before you put much stock in this, remember that without the actual specimen to test and measure, nothing that I say would be admissible in court. There wasn’t anything in the photos to give the sample scale, but I can tell you that the shape of the femoral head in photo three and pattern of heat fracture—from where the steam from boiling marrow creates its own escape route—has me convinced this is bone tissue. And the chunk of mandible in photo five leaves me no doubt it’s an adult human.
“Get me more, Ms. Layton, and I may be able to determine race and gender. If you can get me properly handled samples, I might even—and here, I emphasize the word ‘might,’— be able to gather enough mitochondrial DNA to—”
The message stopped abruptly, probably because the recording time had been exceeded.
“I was praying those were pork bones,” Jessie whispered to Zach, “or beef or something like that. Anything but human.”
“You’re not the only one,” Zach said, feeling as troubled as the reporter looked. “But we still can’t say for sure it was your sister.”
Taking a deep breath, she pushed herself up from the chair. “No, but we will get a positive ID. And she’ll have a proper burial—if I have to go dig up Clem Elam’s dump by hand.”
Zach nodded grimly. “It could take months for us to find those bones, even if we knew for sure they buried the grill there.”
Her gaze locked on to his. “You said we,” she pointed out, “so does that mean you’re finished interfering, no matter where the facts lead?”
He wanted to say, Hell, no, wanted to tell her there were certain lines that he could never cross, as he recalled his mother’s terror in the call he’d overheard. A wave of paralyzing sickness washed over him at the thought that she might have somehow been involved in Haley Layton’s murder. Was it possible? In her grief-stricken state, could she have seen a child in need, a child suffering the kind of abuse he and Ian had both endured, and done something—something terrible—to stop it from happening again?
“You’re not answering,” Jessie pointed out, “and I can see wheels turning in that head of yours. And I know you’re thinking about her. Your mama.”
He nodded and admitted, “I can’t do anything to hurt her. But whatever’s going on, whatever she and Canter both know, I can’t just let something this big lie.”
“Maybe she found Haley,” Jessie suggested. “Found her abandoned after Frankie’d killed her. That makes sense, doesn’t it? That your mother would take in a child she thought was an orphan? That she’d fall in love so quickly, especially after losing your brother, that she’d make up a new identity, a way to keep Eden for her own.”
He let it sink in, trying it on for size until relief cascaded through him. “Yeah, that has to be it. It makes a lot more sense than anything else I’ve come up with. Except why would Canter know about it?”
“Maybe she called him when it happened. Could be they decided together to temporarily leave her with your mama. And then, when she got so attached...”
“Canter definitely has a soft spot for my mama,” Zach agreed, “maybe a bit too soft.”
Jessie’s head tilted, her delicate reddish brows rising. “Surely, you don’t mean there’s some kind of— That’s an awfully big age difference.”
“Maybe not so much when the widow owns a big chunk of this county,” he said, anger coiling low in his gut. “Especially when that chunk is about to see some serious new drilling.”
“I thought you told me that the oil wasn’t a big deal. Just a little something to help your cattle business.”
“My mama always told me, a man ought not to brag on what he’s got. But the truth is, if the geologists’ predictions are on target, the ranch is about to be worth a whole lot more.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Maybe that explains the way Canter’s acting toward you. If his plan is to catch a widow, he can’t be happy you’ve come home.”
Zach shook his head. “There’s no way. I can’t see it. My mama and a big strapping sheriff in his forties?”
“Stranger things have happened,” Jessie said. “Which means he can’t be happy to have you back in the picture. I’d watch my back if I were you.”
“Me?” he burst out. “You were the one shot. You’re the one who ought to worry.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but the dog interrupted, coming to her feet, growling. Bounding to the door, she looked to her mistress for instruction, every canine muscle tensed.
“Ruhig,” Jessie whispered, quieting the animal before turning to look at Zach. “There’s someone out here. I heard an engine. And do you smell something odd?”
“Don’t set her loose. It’s probably just Virgil talking with one of the cowboys,” Zach warned, as Jessie went to the Rottweiler. “We usually meet here around this time for coffee, and I’d hate to get my foreman chewed up.”
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