When Steve regained consciousness and found Jess and six other officers surrounding him, he had first tried to bluff his way out of the situation. Faced with the overwhelming evidence against him, though, he’d finally blurted out everything.
He had been desperate and had come to blame all his problems on her for scheming to take his uncle’s clinic away from him. It should have come to him, Steve said. He’d spent years working there, even as a kid, cleaning cages and doing miserable grunt work, all with the expectation that someday the practice would be his and he could reap the benefits of his uncle’s reputation in the community.
Then Ben had ruined everything by refusing to sell the clinic to him, instead bringing in an outsider with wacky California ideas that didn’t mesh at all with the conservative Star Valley mind-set.
Left with no other choice, Steve had been forced to build his own clinic and had ended up getting in over his head.
He told Jess he realized too late that the community wasn’t big enough to support two veterinary clinics so he tried to persuade Ellie to go into business with him to cut down overhead. When she refused, he knew he had to find another way to make her leave, especially after she started to eat into his patient load.
He was the one who had left the warning in her truck. And, he confessed, he’d broken into her truck and read her planner. It hadn’t been difficult to study her treatment log and inject specific horses with a virulent bacteria to make it look as if her shoddy care had spread disease.
When that didn’t work, he knew he had to take drastic measures, so he’d come up with the twisted kidnapping plan.
She could forgive him the rest. Although it would take time and effort, she could rebuild her reputation, her practice.
But she would never be able to forgive him for terrorizing her little girl.
She’d been a fool not to see it before. No. She hadn’t wanted to see it, the ugly bitterness he hid so well behind a veneer of friendship. It had been much easier to take Steve at face value, to see what she wanted to see.
SueAnn had seen it, had tried to warn her about him, but she hadn’t listened. She had trusted him, and her daughter had ultimately paid the price for her mistake.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and gazed at the flickering flames. How had she forgotten the lessons she’d learned so early in life? Depend only on yourself and you won’t ever have to know the cruel sting of disappointment.
A soft knock at the front door disturbed the silence of the house. She felt an instant’s fear and then she remembered all was well. Her daughter was safe at home, where she belonged.
She pulled aside the lacy curtain at the door and felt only a small quiver of surprise to find Matt standing on the other side. He wore that shearling-lined ranch coat again, leather collar turned up against the cold night, and his chiseled features were solemn, unsmiling.
He looked strong and solid, and she wanted nothing more than to fall into his arms and weep after the emotional upheaval of the day.
She couldn’t, though, and she knew it. Instead, she opened the door and ushered him inside. “Matt! What are you doing here? I thought you went back to the ranch hours ago.”
“I did. But I couldn’t stay away.” He stood just inside the door watching her, a strange light in his blue eyes that suddenly made her as nervous as a mouse in the middle of a catfight.
She cleared her throat and seized on the only benign topic she could think of. Food. “Would you like something to eat? I’ve got enough here to feed most of the town. I haven’t tried any of it, but SueAnn said Ginny Garrett’s cinnamon sugar cookies were to die for.”
To her intense relief, he shielded that strange light from her with his lashes. “Ginny does make one fine cookie,” he said after a moment. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“Eat as many as you want.” She led the way to the kitchen, where the table practically bowed from the weight of all the plates of goodies covering it. “I’ve got enough stuff here to have a bake sale.”
She peeled back the plastic wrap covering the plate the mayor’s wife brought over, and Matt took one cookie and bit into it. “It’s comfort food,” he said after he’d swallowed. “Sometimes people don’t know how else they can help.”
“I know. Everyone has been so kind. I’ve just been trying to figure out how I’m going to find room in my freezer for everything. Maybe you should take some home to your ranch hands.”
He leaned a hip against her counter. “Sure.”
Grateful for something to do with her hands, she found some paper plates in the back of a cupboard and started loading them up with fudge and lemon bars and chocolate chip cookies.
“So how are you?” he asked solemnly while she worked.
She flashed him a quick look. “Okay. A little shaky still.”
“Yeah. Me, too. I keep thinking, what if it had been Lucy? I wouldn’t have handled it with nearly the guts you did.”
A bitter laugh scored her throat. “I didn’t handle anything. I completely fell apart.”
He studied her solemnly out of those blue eyes, and for a terrible moment she feared he was going to cross the space between them and pull her into his arms. And then she really would fall apart, would give in to the tears of relief and hurt and remembered terror that choked her.
She turned to the table, ashamed that she couldn’t control her emotions better, and after a moment of silence, he spoke again. “Almost forgot. One of the reasons I dropped by was to give you this.”
Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw him hold out a wrinkled paper. It took her a few seconds to realize what it was, and then her face burned. It was the note deeding the practice over to him in exchange for the money to have her child returned.
She made no move to reach for it, mortified again that she had needed his help, that she had failed her daughter once more.
“Here. Take it. I don’t want it,” he growled.
As reluctantly as if it were covered in razor blades, she reached for it. A thousand unspoken words hovered between them. She would have preferred to leave them all that way—unspoken—but she knew she had to say something.
“I… Thank you for what you were going to do. I can’t say I understand why you would be willing to do such a thing, but it meant a lot to me anyway.”
“Did it?”
The hardness of his voice shocked her. “Yes! Of course!”
He didn’t say anything, just continued to study her out of those blue eyes, and she flushed under his scrutiny.
“I said I appreciated it. I don’t know what more you want from me.”
“Why is it so hard for you?”
“What?”
“Accepting help from me. Admitting you’re not some kind of superwoman and can’t handle every rotten curve life throws at you by yourself.”
She tensed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie burned her tongue, scorched her heart.
“No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me away.”
Better to hurt him by pushing him away than the alternative. He would leave her shattered if she let him. Would make her weak and needy and vulnerable, and she could never allow it, especially after tonight. She was all Dylan had, and she needed to remember that.
She said nothing, knowing there was nothing she could say. After a moment, he spoke again, his voice low and expressionless.
“It makes loving you pretty damn hard when you won’t let anybody inside.”
His words sucked the air from her lungs, every thought from her head. He didn’t say he loved her. He couldn’t have. It was a mistake. A terrible, cruel mistake.
Terror flapped through her on greasy bat wings. How could he say such a thing? Didn’t he realize that she didn’t want his love, that she couldn’t handle it?
Her breath started coming in deep, heaving gulps. What was she going to do? She didn’t want to hurt him, but she couldn’t let him destroy her like her father had destroyed her mother.
I love you. Heaven help me, I love you. Even though I know you would leave me broken and bloody, I want to curl up against you, inside you, around you, and never, ever let go.
Instead, she made her voice tight, toneless, and hated herself for it. “What do you want me to say, Matt?”
He gazed at her, and she nearly sobbed at the hurt in his eyes, then those blue depths hardened. “How about the truth? That you love me, too. That you push me away because you’re afraid.”
He knew. Shame coursed through her. How could he say he loved her when he knew what a terrible coward she was?
“I’m sorry,” she said, curling her hands into fists at her sides. “I can’t tell you what you want to hear.”
“You mean you won’t.”
“That, too.” Her hands were trembling, and she didn’t know if they would ever, ever stop.
“Dammit, Ellie. You don’t think loving you, needing you, scares the ever-living hell out of me, too? It’s the absolute last thing I ever wanted or expected.”
She dared a look at him and found his eyes fierce with emotion.
“My wife walked out on me, Ellie. Before that, she screwed around with just about every guy in town. I told myself I didn’t care, that I’d stopped loving her long before she took off, but Melanie still left me with deep scars covering every inch of my heart. I thought they’d be there forever, and I’d even learned to live with them.”
He reached for her then, picked up one fisted hand and brought it to his lips. “But then you blew into town with your smart mouth and your compassion and your courage. And one day I realized I couldn’t even feel those scars anymore. You healed them, Doc. I don’t know how, but while you were treating my horses, you were working your magic on me, too.”
This time a sob did escape her mouth, and she yanked her hand back to press it against her mouth so the rest didn’t follow.
“I love you, Ellie,” he went on. “I want you in my life, forever if you’ll have me. Up until now, you’ve shown more courage than any woman I’ve ever met. Don’t let your fear win now.”
For one wonderful, terrible moment, she let herself believe in fairy tales. In knights on white horses and orange blossoms and a happily ever after filled with laughter and love and joy.
And then the glowing picture faded.
In its place was a ramshackle trailer and a solemn-eyed little girl watching a woman who drank too much and sold her body and sobbed every night for a man who would never come back.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and blood seeped from her heart.
“I won’t ask again.” His terse warning was edged with infinite sadness.
She hitched in a ragged breath. “I know. I… Goodbye, Matt.”
With one last, searching look, he shoved on his Stetson and walked out into the night.
Only after he closed the door quietly behind him did her knees buckle, and she slid to the hard linoleum floor of her kitchen and wept.
Chapter 17
He never would have believed it.
Matt stood in the gymnasium of the elementary school on Valentine’s Day, completely amazed at what creativity and a little elbow grease could achieve.
Instead of a dingy old room that smelled like a cross between canned peas and dirty socks, the gym had been completely transformed into a magical place.
Thousands of little twinkling white lights had been strung across the ceiling like stars in the night sky and wrapped around the branches of a couple dozen small trees temporarily commandeered from Jerry Clayton’s greenhouse in town. A city skyline painted by the elementary school art classes graced the stage, covered by even more tiny white lights so it looked as if the windows of the buildings really glowed.
With the lights dimmed and the high school’s jazz band playing old dance numbers, this was the crowning jewel of the library fund-raiser—which by all accounts looked to be a smashing success.
It had been Ellie’s idea to try to provide something for everyone at the fair. The little kids were still running from classroom to classroom using the tickets their parents had purchased for fishponds and beanbag tosses and cakewalks. Their older siblings were busy in the auditorium watching a PG-rated scary movie. And judging by the crowd already out on the dance floor, their parents and grandparents were obviously enjoying the romantic escape the committee had created.
He thought he would feel pretty weird about having his name listed on the program as one of the organizers, but as he watched couples dancing cheek-to-cheek under the starry lights, he had to admit to a fair amount of pride.
All evening, people had been telling him what a great job the committee had done. It seemed bitterly ironic that he’d been even a little instrumental in helping everyone else celebrate this holiday for romance, especially when things with Ellie had ended so badly.
She was here somewhere, but he hadn’t caught more than a fleeting glimpse of her all night as she ran from crisis to crisis.
Even those brief, painful glimpses were better than what he had endured the last three weeks. Before today, he hadn’t seen her since the terrible night he’d gone to her house, told her his feelings and had them thrown back in his face.
He wanted to be angry at her. He had been for a day or two, and the thunder and fury had been much easier to deal with than this constant, aching sadness that settled in his bones and weighed down his heart.
Why was she being so stubborn about this? He knew she loved him. She never would have given herself to him so sweetly, passionately, if she didn’t. He couldn’t make her admit it, though. Not when she so obviously wanted to deny her feelings, to him and to herself.
A couple of giggles sounded behind him, distracting him from the grimness of his thoughts, and he turned to find Lucy and Dylan being teased by Jess. The girls both wore dresses for a change and had put their hair up, and they looked entirely too grown up for his peace of mind.
“Hey, big brother.” Jess grinned. “I think we need to escort these lovely ladies out on the dance floor. What do you say?”
The girls giggled again, and he summoned a smile for their benefit. “I think we’d be stupid not to grab the two prettiest girls here while we have the chance.”
Jess had already snagged Lucy so Matt obligingly held his arm out to Dylan, who took it with a blush that reminded him painfully of her mother. Out on the dance floor, she stumbled around awkwardly for a moment then quickly lost her shyness and started jabbering away about her favorite subject, horses.
“My mom says maybe I can get a horse in the summer, when I’d have more time to take care of him and learn to ride him. That would be so cool. Then I could ride with Lucy around the ranch without anybody having to worry about us getting into trouble.”
Like that day would ever come. The two of them invented the word. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he teased.
Ellie’s daughter giggled again. “Well, we wouldn’t get into trouble because I don’t know how to ride, anyway.”
He smiled and twirled her around. Dylan was a great kid, despite her mischievous streak. Full of spunk and fire, just like her mother. He thought of the night she had spent frightened and alone in a concrete room because of that bastard Nichols and saw red again. Good thing the man was in the county jail awaiting sentencing after his guilty plea. Maybe by the time he was released, Matt might have cooled down enough to keep from beating the hell out of him.
“Oh, look,” Dylan said suddenly. “There’s my mom.”
She pulled her hand from his arm and started waving vigorously to someone behind him, and he turned and found Ellie standing alone on the edge of the dance floor.
In the low, shimmering light, her green eyes looked huge. Haunted.
“Doesn’t she look pretty?” Dylan asked innocently, and he dared another look. Like her daughter, Ellie wore a dress—a soft, sapphire-blue clingy thing that flared and bunched in all the right places.
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He cleared his throat, but his voice still came out gruff. “Very,” he said.
“I told her she’d be a lot prettier if she’d smile once in a while,” Dylan said, sounding like a middle-aged, nagging mother instead of a nine-year-old, “but she hasn’t been doing much of that lately.”
“No?” He tried to sound casual and disinterested, even though the little scamp had his full attention, and she probably knew it.
“She’s been really sad,” Dylan said. “She even cries at night sometimes after I’m in bed, so I know something must be really wrong. My mom never cries.”
His heart stuttered in his chest at the thought of Ellie crying alone in her house.
Damn stubborn woman. If she was hurting, it was her own fault. Didn’t she know how absolutely right they were for each other? He needed her to bring lightness and laughter into his life, to keep him from taking himself too seriously.
And she needed him to show her nobody expected her to bear the whole weight of the world by herself.
“Maybe you could talk to her, or ask her to dance, even. You’re friends, aren’t you? That might make her feel better.”
Dylan’s green eyes shone with hope, and he hated to douse it, but he was pretty sure he was the last person on earth Ellie wanted to talk to right about now.
On second thought, maybe that’s just what he needed to do. He’d told her he wouldn’t grovel. But just trying to talk some sense into her wasn’t really the same, was it?
He had to try. Even if he looked like a lovesick fool, he had to try. Much more of this heartache was going to destroy both of them.
As soon as the dance was over, he would grab her, he decided, yank her into a dark corner and kiss her until she came to her senses.
But when the music ended and he walked Dylan back to Lucy and Jess, Ellie was nowhere to be found.
She couldn’t do this.
Ellie stood outside the side door of the school breathing the February night air and praying the bitter cold would turn her heart to ice, would take away this pain.
She pressed a palm to her chest, breathing hard with the effort it took to regain control of her emotions. Seeing Matt tonight—looking so strong and gorgeous in his black dress jeans and Western-cut shirt—had been bad enough. Watching him spin around the dance floor while Dylan smiled at him like he’d just handed her the stars had been excruciating.
The Valentine Two-Step Page 21
