The Price of Honor

by Janis Reams Hudson

  Louise’s look was ripe with skepticism. “Uh-huh. If you say so.”

  “I do say so.”

  “Hmm.” Louise looked at her watch. “What you need to be saying is goodbye. If you don’t leave in the next ten minutes you’ll be late.”

  “Late for what?”

  “The Hendersons?”

  Rachel blinked. “What about them?”

  “Hel-lo-o.” Louise tapped her knuckles against Rachel’s forehead. “Anybody home in there?”

  It took a minute, but finally Rachel remembered remnants of a conversation about the Hendersons’ horses. Something about—

  “You’ve got to pull a Coggins on a couple of their horses. Girl, where’s your head? I told you about it first thing this morning.”

  Her head was where it had no business being, that’s where it was, Rachel thought with disgust. “Right. Sorry.”

  Pulling a Coggins was a simple enough procedure, drawing blood and sending it to the lab. She’d done several in the few weeks she’d been out of school, and so far every one had come back negative. As she got in the clinic’s SUV a few minutes later, she hoped this one would, too. She’d rather not have to deal with an incurable, highly contagious virus like equine infectious anemia, if it was all the same to the powers that be.

  Two hours later Rachel pulled into town on her way back to the clinic and checked her gas gauge. Time to fill up.

  It wasn’t the blood tests, or even the visiting that had taken her two hours, it was the distance. Wyatt County was sparsely populated, with barely thirty-five hundred people. But shaped like a rough square measuring sixty miles by sixty miles it covered thirty-six thousand square miles. The Henderson place was almost as far from town as was the Flying Ace, where Rachel had grown up.

  She pulled into the gas station and up to an empty pump and killed the engine. It wasn’t until she unfastened her seat belt and reached for the door handle that she realized the man standing on the other side of the pump, filling his pickup with gas, was Grady.

  It startled her to see him standing there in the middle of town, doing something as ordinary as pumping gasoline. Not particularly because she’d been fantasizing earlier about him begging her forgiveness on bended knee, but more because she wasn’t used to seeing him at all. Wasn’t used to even the possibility of running into him.

  But while he wasn’t looking—apparently he hadn’t noticed her as she had pulled in from behind him—she took the opportunity to look. For some reason, she didn’t seem to be able to look at him enough whenever she saw him. Why was he so damn good-looking? Good-looking enough to make her heart pound.

  And wasn’t that ridiculous, for her heart to pound at the sight of the man who’d done her wrong?

  She had often wondered what would have happened if LaVerne Martin had lived. He would have married the girl. Surely, after her having borne his son, he would have married her. Despite the numerous fights he’d gotten into growing up, Grady had always had a strong sense of right and wrong—that was what had gotten him into the fights. And he’d always been honorable.

  But if he was so honorable, Rachel wondered not for the first time, why hadn’t he already married LaVerne, long before the night Cody was born?

  If he was so damned honorable, why did he have anything to do with LaVerne in the first place, damn his cheating hide?

  Of course the answer to the former was that he probably hadn’t known LaVerne was pregnant. Rachel had to believe that. Had he known, he would have married her, no matter what.

  That was the reason Rachel and Grady had never made love. Well, technically they hadn’t made love. They’d done everything but that final act. They used to joke that Rachel and he were probably the most experienced virgins around.

  But they had refrained from that final act because neither wanted to take a chance on Rachel getting pregnant. That would have meant they would have to get married. They were going to get married anyway—there was no question about that. But getting married before they finished college would have meant they would have been on their own. Both Grady’s father and Rachel’s brothers would have cut off their college funds if they’d gotten married before getting their degrees.

  One part of Rachel blamed herself for Grady’s turning to LaVerne. If Rachel had given herself to him, maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to go to a girl everyone called Loose LaVerne.

  But another part of Rachel scoffed. Other men resisted such temptations. Grady could have, too, if he’d wanted. If he’d truly been honorable. If he had really loved her.

  God, but it hurt to remember. Sitting there watching the breeze play with the ends of his hair, seeing the flex of muscles across his shoulders, remembering the solid feel of him…The pain was as fresh, suddenly, as it had been five years ago. And it shouldn’t be. She’d gotten over him, moved beyond all of that.

  And she’d be damned if she would sit there a moment longer and run the risk of his turning around and catching her staring at him. Okay, gawking. Drooling. Like some teenager gaping at a rock star. She opened her door and climbed out just as Grady finished filling his tank.

  As he turned to replace the nozzle, Rachel turned slightly away so as not to meet his gaze.

  Coward, her mind screamed.

  Okay, so she was a coward. Being around him was going to take a little getting used to.

  With a squeal of tires and a throaty roar of the engine, a snazzy yellow sports car zipped into the station, and Mavis Martin popped out like a cork held under water and suddenly set free.

  Rachel nearly groaned aloud. Mavis Martin could try the patience of a rock.

  “Grady!” Mavis waved and started toward him in her leather miniskirt, which was the same glaring yellow as her car. Her hair, a cloud of vivid red, bounced around her shoulders with every click of her three-inch heels across the pavement.

  Mavis would admit, after a few drinks, to being thirty. After a few more she’d cop to forty. Rumor had it she was closer to forty-five, but only her plastic surgeon knew for sure.

  “Grady Lewis, there you are. I’ll bet you don’t remember me. I’m Mavis Martin, Sheriff Martin’s cousin?” She said it like a question while she held out her hand and peered over his shoulder at Rachel. “Well, hello, Rachel. Or, Dr. Wilder, I should say.” She tossed Rachel a breezy smile. “I sure never expected to see the two of you together again. Especially so fast.”

  Rachel gritted her teeth, not daring to look at Grady. “We’re not together,” she muttered.

  “No?” Mavis’s smile widened. “Well, then. Grady, I wanted to be sure you’d be home later this afternoon so I could stop by and talk to you about the ranch. And I do hope that cute little boy of yours will be there. I caught a glimpse of him at your house after the funeral yesterday. He’s just the spittin’ image of you.” She peered over Grady’s shoulder again. “Isn’t he, Rachel?”

  Grady nearly choked. No kin of Martin’s had ever thought a Lewis offspring, with his Indian heritage, was anything but rotten to the core. Not since the day Sheriff Martin’s wife ran off with that Cherokee from Oklahoma.

  Grady didn’t dare look at Rachel. He’d known she was there before she’d had her car in Park. What he hadn’t known was how to act around her, what to say. He’d chosen to say nothing.

  But damn, Mavis Martin had gall, to throw La-Verne’s son up in Rachel’s face that way. If Mavis wasn’t a woman, he’d—

  But Rachel, it seemed, had a cooler head than he did. When she replied, her voice was smooth, calm, and, if his memory served him correctly, deceptively pleasant.

  “Oh, I agree,” Rachel said. “The spitting image. Except for his eyes, of course.”

  “Mmm,” Mavis murmured. “I’m sure I didn’t get quite that good a look at him to see what color his eyes were. I was just so grief-stricken that soon after the funeral, you know.”

  “Mmm,” was Rachel’s reply.

  “Now, Grady,” Mavis said, suddenly all business. “As I said, I wanted to talk to y
ou about the ranch.”

  Grady eyed the woman and scratched the side of his face. He could smell a rat as well as the next man. “What about it?” he asked cautiously.

  “About listing it, of course. I’m in real estate, you know. Your father—I’m so sorry, Grady.” She placed a hand on his arm. “He was such a good man. And I, for one, was certainly not immune to his…manly charms.”

  That choking feeling came over Grady again. His manly charms? Was Mavis talking about his father? She made him sound like some kind of ladies’ man.

  “I don’t know how we’ll go on without him,” she continued. “Just last week he spoke to me about selling the ranch.”

  “He what?” Grady demanded.

  “About selling,” she went on, undaunted. “You know, Grady, it was more than he should have had to handle, what with the clinic keeping him so busy. And since I’m sure you won’t be staying in town long, I thought…well, word is that the ranch belongs to you now. So I thought, even though I can no longer do business with Ray, that doesn’t mean I can’t do business with you. I can still sell the ranch for you, like I would have for Ray.”

  Mavis’s earlier comment about Cody hadn’t gotten a rise out of Rachel, but this one did. “Mavis Martin, that’s just about the biggest pack of nonsense I’ve ever heard. Grady, don’t believe a word she’s saying.”

  Two things struck Grady just then. First, he was disconcerted that Rachel would do anything that could be perceived as helping him, knowing what she thought of him. Second, it didn’t matter that he had yet to decide whether he would stay or go; he knew only that he wasn’t about to sell the ranch. Anyone who thought his father would have sold it was out of his—or her—everlovin’ mind.

  “Raymond Lewis would never have sold that ranch and you know it,” Rachel said heatedly to Mavis.

  “A lot you know,” Mavis countered. “We’d been dating for months. I was a great deal closer to him than you ever were.”

  His father had dated Mavis? Grady wasn’t ready to hear about this.

  “We were real close,” Mavis taunted. “If you know what I mean.”

  No, sir, not ready at all.

  Since it looked like the two women had forgotten Grady was even there, he tipped his hat, then stalked to the office to pay for his gas. When he came back out they were still at it, but starting to repeat themselves. Grady tipped his hat again. “Ladies.”

  Neither woman seemed to notice him.

  There’d been a time when he might have stepped between them, seeing how heated the conversation was getting, and that conversation being about his own father and all. But hell, the whole county thought he was a coward anyway for letting Sheriff Martin run him out of town, so no one should be surprised that he decided against getting in the middle of what was rapidly turning into a catfight. He got into his pickup and headed home.

  As he turned off the highway a few minutes later onto the gravel road that led to the house, he shook his head. He just couldn’t picture his fifty-five-year-old father dating a black-rooted redhead with a fake Texas drawl who was fifteen to twenty years younger than he was. A woman with the personality of a snake disguised as a chipmunk. It didn’t fit.

  His father selling Standing Elk. Who did Mavis think she was kidding? He hadn’t needed Rachel to tell him the woman was lying through her teeth. Raymond Lewis would have cut out his own eyes before selling the ranch that bore his wife’s name. The ranch that was, or so he’d said for as long as Grady could remember, his sons’ heritage.

  And why, Grady kept asking himself, had Rachel bothered to intervene? By all rights she should have encouraged him to believe Mavis. Should have urged him to put the ranch up for sale and leave town just as fast as he’d arrived.

  Maybe it was the clinic. Maybe she was worried about what would happen to it if a new owner took possession of the land on which it sat. It made sense that she wouldn’t want to see the ranch sold. As long as Grady owned it, Standing Elk Veterinary Clinic was safe. That had to mean a great deal to her. She’d wanted to work there practically her entire life.

  So had he, for that matter. They had planned to work there together, he and Rachel, with his father. That had been their dream. The dream that, for him, had turned to ashes.

  Stop it. He had no right to think like that. No right to regret. He’d known exactly what he was giving up when he left town that day. He’d done it with his eyes open. And his heart bleeding.

  All he had to do now was decide if he was staying…or going. But whether he stayed or left again, the ranch would not be sold. Standing Elk Ranch was Cody’s heritage now. Nothing was going to interfere with that.

  But just so there wouldn’t be any question, he left a very plain message to that effect on the answering machine at Martin Real Estate.

  All the way back to the clinic, Rachel fumed. How dare he? How dare Grady Lewis simply walk off like that when she’d been trying to set the record straight about his father and the ranch? How dare he treat her as though she were a stranger, not once even looking directly at her. Of all the nerve. If anyone should do the ignoring around here, it was her.

  She had half a mind to march up to his door and tell him just what she thought. By damn, she did.

  Half a mind. That was, she thought as she neared the clinic, a little too close to the truth for comfort. What else but having half her brain missing could explain the way her pulse had raced at the mere sight of him?

  A conditioned reflex—that was all it was.

  She’d loved Grady Lewis since she was five years old. From the time she was fourteen he’d made her pulse race. She just wasn’t used to being near him lately. If he stayed around, her reaction would level out. She would be able to treat him as though he were a stranger. Or, at best, a business acquaintance.

  Maybe he’d had the right idea in ignoring her.

  If he stayed, she would just have to get used to handling it. And she could handle it. After all, she wasn’t a starry-eyed teenager any longer, at the mercy of her hormones, with a crush on the high-school hunk. She was a responsible adult, a respected member of the community. A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. She was beyond crushes. Grady was just another man. A near stranger who happened to be her business partner, through no choice of either of them. Nothing more.

  She pulled into the clinic parking lot, but when she got out of the truck she turned toward the house two hundred yards away and started walking. She would be polite and to the point. She just wanted to make certain he understood that Mavis had been lying through her pretty capped teeth. Dr. Ray would never have considered selling the ranch. She wanted to get that idea out of Grady’s head immediately.

  She couldn’t imagine what Dr. Ray would feel if he knew that his family’s ranch, the place he’d lived his entire life, where all his wonderful memories lived, could end up in the hands of strangers. Strangers who might want to split it up into ranchettes for city-dwellers who wanted to experience life in the wild—for a couple of weeks a year.

  She had a brief, devastating flash of that happening to the Flying Ace. No! The idea was not to be borne.

  In a state of heightened anxiety that she was quite certain was an overreaction to the situation, she kept walking.

  Maybe not such an overreaction, she thought a minute later. This was beginning to feel like a mistake. A big one. She should have just gone to the clinic and told Louise what Mavis had said. Louise could have set Grady straight.

  But it was too late to turn back now. Grady had already spotted her. He was standing beside his pickup with the hood raised. With one hand braced on the fender, he watched her approach.

  Rachel halted twenty feet away, suddenly unsure of herself and doubting her right to butt in.

  Nonsense. Besides, it’s too late now—you’ve already butted in. Just go talk to him. Don’t make him think this is hard for you. That you’re nervous.

  After all, what did she have to be nervous about? She’d known him once, but they were essentially stran
gers now. She was doing this for Dr. Ray.

  Taking a deep breath, she squared her shoulders and took the last few steps to the side of his pickup.

  When Cody jumped out from behind Grady, Rachel nearly stumbled. Somehow she had forgotten to prepare herself for the sight of the boy who looked so much like his father. Her heart stuttered, then picked up a slow, steady beat.

  “Hi, Miss Rachel,” Cody said with a grin.

  “Hi, yourself, Cody.” How odd, Rachel thought, that it was easier to talk to him—the child whose very existence had meant the end of her world—than it was to his father. “How have you been?”

  “I been fine.”

  “Cody,” Grady said, stroking a hand over the boy’s glossy black hair. “Go inside and tell Alma you earned yourself a cookie and a glass of milk.”

  Cody looked up at him and grinned. “Just one?”

  “No.” Grady pursed his lips. “You can have two glasses of milk if you want.”

  “Aw, Dad, I meant just one cookie.”

  “Well, if you only want one cookie, that’s up to you. If it was me, I’d ask her for two.”

  “Yippee!” Cody leaped into the air, then raced off toward the house. “See ya later, Miss Rachel,” he called back over his shoulder.

  Rachel couldn’t help but smile at their play and Cody’s exuberance. “He’s adorable, Grady.” She met Grady’s gaze and forced herself to add, “You must be very proud.”

  “Of him? I am.”

  “And of yourself for doing such a good job raising him.”

  “Thank you. But I somehow doubt you came over here to compliment me on my child-rearing abilities.” His eyes narrowed.

  If Rachel hadn’t known better, she would have sworn he was on the verge of laughter.

  “You and Mavis get everything worked out?” he asked.

  “Very funny. I can’t believe you just drove off like that, when your ranch was the topic of debate.”

  “My daddy always taught me never to get between two females, especially if they’re fighting.”