A Dark Lure

by Loreth Anne White

  Cole held on to her hand a fraction longer. “How’s my father?”

  She glimpsed real concern in his eyes. It threw her slightly. It messed with her prejudiced animosity toward him.

  “In a great deal of pain,” she said quietly. “But he’s stoic about it. You know he can be . . .” She paused. “Then again, maybe you don’t.”

  His features darkened. He released her hand. “And I presume you do. After all, you’ve lived here what? A whole three years?”

  She felt something tighten reflexively inside her.

  “Thanks for coming out to meet me,” he said, scanning the surroundings. “Would you mind giving me a ride to the house?” His voice was low toned, velvet over gravel. Her stomach tightened. A voice like that had cost her everything.

  She glanced at the plane, and it struck her, given the ease with which he’d just landed, and those little fat-ass tundra tires: Cole McDonough could have brought this thing down just about anywhere on the ranch. “You didn’t need me to scope out the landing at all, did you? You just called me because you wanted a chauffeur.”

  His lips curved slightly. Irritation sparked in her, and she latched fast onto it. It was a safety mechanism. It was easier to put up walls than deal with her very primal gut reaction to this man.

  “Admittedly it would have been a bit of a walk—I can’t bring this puppy down much closer to the lodge because of the hydro wires and phone lines. More so, I was worried about livestock.”

  “We no longer run cattle,” she said, words clipped. “Just a few horses and chickens left. Since Myron took ill last spring the place has gone downhill. Guests no longer stay in the lodge house. Only the cabins and the campsites open during season. Staff has been cut down to core.”

  His brows rose slightly in interest.

  She glanced at the plane again.

  “It’ll be fine there. I’ll sort it out later.”

  “Fine.” She yanked open the driver’s door of her truck and scooted Ace into the middle of the seat. “As long as you don’t mind my stopping by the campsite first—I have some guests who need to be checked in. I missed seeing them this morning.”

  “I’d rather go straight to the house.”

  She stilled, hand on the door. “After thirteen years you can’t wait a half hour?” She couldn’t help it. The words just came out. He’d made her jump to his bidding. He was here to stick Myron into a hospice, carve up and sell this ranch. Make her find a new home. And she was drawing her own line in the sand.

  He regarded her, a silent energy coming from him in waves. He dipped his gaze, taking her in, head to boot. Absorbing her. She shifted uncomfortably, aware suddenly of her hidden scars, her latent shortcomings. Her shame. Her need for distance from people.

  “Olivia,” he said quietly, his voice deep, resonant. It curled through her like seductive smoke, and she hated him for it. It scared her. Her reaction to him. Everything about this guy. He took up too much space—too much of her space.

  “I don’t know who you really are,” he said quietly, “or what your exact role is on this ranch, or what your relationship is to my father, or why you have clearly prejudged and taken a disliking to me, but you were the one who phoned me, remember? When you told me that my father was dying, there was a very real sense of urgency. I went directly from the bar to the airport, and I slept on a plastic seat until they could get me on a plane. Then I flew to Vancouver, drove up to Pemberton, got my plane, and flew directly here. I’ve been in transit for almost twenty-four hours. I’m beat. And you might have noticed I could do with a shower. But I’ll concede.” He hefted his duffel into the back of her truck. It landed with a soft thud on top of the wood she had piled in there.

  “Come. Let’s go do your chores first.” He went round to the passenger side and opened the door, got in.

  She opened her mouth in shock, leaned into the cab. Ace was trying to lick his face. “What do you mean about my relationship with your father?”

  “My sister said you and he might be involved.”

  “What? Is that what you really think, that I’m in some kind of relationship with your father?”

  “Get in, Olivia. I’m tired.”

  “Jesus,” she muttered as she climbed in, slammed the door, and fired the ignition. “I’m taking you back to the lodge first.”

  “I’d rather you got your cash from the guests.”

  “Forget it. I’d rather offload you.” She rammed the vehicle into gear and hit the gas, spitting up dirt. They bombed down the hill, grass ticking against the undercarriage, her hands tightly gripping the wheel. “Maybe if you’d come home in the last thirteen years you’d know your father better, and you wouldn’t make such goddamn offensive insinuations. Because you would know he’d never look at anyone other than your mother.”

  “Right. I forgot. My mother who’s been dead twenty-three years. He holds so tightly to that bitterness he can’t let anyone else in. Not even his kids.” He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the headrest. “Glad to hear you’ve gotten through his bitter crust.”

  She shot him a look, dumbfounded.

  “I don’t owe you any explanations,” she snapped. “I don’t owe you a thing.” She spun the wheel sharply and barreled too fast over the cattle grid. The vehicle juddered like a machine gun, forcing him to sit upright and curse.

  Cole stole a quick glance at her profile. She was prickly all right, but also easy on the eyes. Pretty, full mouth set in a tight line. Thick hair that fell to her shoulders. Like her photo on the ranch website, she was dressed cowgirl-style in worn jeans, button-down flannel shirt over a white T-shirt, boots that had seen the business end of a barn. He’d noticed right away how her ass fitted into those jeans, her slim, long legs. What red-blooded male wouldn’t notice? She was lean and fit looking with a soft tan that offset her haunting green eyes.

  The color of her eyes made him think of the National Geographic photos Holly had shot of a young Bedouin woman. His mind darkened as he was reminded of Holly’s photojournalism. His own work. The Sudan. The politics.

  Holly’s son. His little family. Lost to him.

  Nausea and the thought of a drink washed through him.

  She swung the truck onto the main road that led to the lodge, dislodging Ace, who slid along the seat into him. Cole put his arm around the German shepherd, holding the dog steady as they juddered over another grid. “It’s okay, big guy. I’ve got you.” He scratched behind the dog’s ears.

  Olivia shot him a withering look.

  She had a mother of a hunting knife secured at her hip, along with a holster of bear spray and a phone on her belt. His guess was this was a capable woman. No wedding band. No jewelry at all. Her words on the phone came to mind.

  Wherever you’re wallowing in your own self-pity, drinking yourself into a stupor every night is not going to bring your family back to you. You’re no survivor, you know that?

  Resentment and curiosity curdled through him. She knew things about him. She knew about Holly and Ty. About his time spent “wallowing” in Havana bars. Things that could only have come from his father. Which meant those two were close. At least on some level. He could see a confident, capable, and yes—very sexually attractive—woman like this managing to appeal to the old man’s aging ego. Or could he? She was right in that his father had always put his mother on a pedestal. Then again Cole hadn’t been home to see his father in a long while. Things could have changed.

  He was too tired to dig at it all right now. He needed sleep. Food. A hot shower. And he needed to get his first meeting with his father over and done.

  He wound down the window and let the cool wind wash over his face as he turned to look out at the rolling fields. Empty fields. Dotted with stands of ghostly white-barked aspens, gold leaves blowing free from the branches in the wind. Fences sagged in disrepair. The old wrangler cabins list
ed with sunken-in roofs. Swallows darted in a cloud out from the rotting eaves.

  She was right. This place had fallen into a state of sad dilapidation. No one had told him it was this bad. But why should he expect different?

  They neared the lodge house. It too looked like it could use some love—a power wash, a fresh coat of paint on the shutters. Cole tensed as she pulled up in front of the big porch. She hit the brakes hard, jerking him forward.

  “There,” she said coolly. “Looks like you made it home in time for supper.” She waited for him to get out, engine running, her hands fisting the wheel.

  He suddenly noticed the scars on the insides of her wrists. They were puckered and ran lengthways up into her sleeves. Scars that meant business.

  She flinched as she saw him notice, then looked away, out the window.

  He swallowed, off-kilter suddenly. Tension inside the cab was thick. He opened his door, got out, and reached into the truck bed for his gear.

  “Where are you going?” he said, leaning back into the door. “You don’t take dinner at the lodge?”

  “Not tonight. I’m going to park my truck and then go to my cabin.” She refused to face him.

  He closed the passenger door. She pulled off, leaving him in a cloud of dust.

  Curiosity rustled through him as he watched her go.

  Cole slung his duffel over his shoulder, and turned to take in the lodge. A carved bear statue still stood guard at the base of the stairs. The old swing seat was still on the porch, but with fresh cushions. A cocktail of memories churned through him. He was in the last year of his thirties, yet he still felt a twinge of boyhood trepidation at walking into that childhood home. Facing his father.

  Odd how life played those tricks on a grown man. He’d lived a rich life so far, had his own family for a while. Lost them. But the boy always lurked inside the man. And with that thought came the weight of exhaustion, failure. As if the past decades of his life had meant nothing.

  He jogged up the porch steps and entered the hall, stepping back in time. The big rack of antlers was still being used to hang coats. The stuffed moose head, an animal his grandfather had taken down in the Sumas swamp, still peered down from the archway that led into the living area. A fire crackled in the living room hearth, and he could smell polish on the stone floor tiles.

  “Cole McDonough! My good Lord!”

  He swung around at the sound of a voice from his childhood. “Mrs. Carrick,” he said with a smile. “You’re still here. And you haven’t changed a day.”

  “Of course I’m still here. And I’m Adele to you now, young lad,” she said with a smile, clutching a basket of folded laundry against her chest. “Why, look at you.” She came forward, as if she might set the basket down and give him a hug, but she restrained herself. Mrs. Carrick wasn’t a hugger—never had been.

  “I . . . had no idea you were coming. Does your father know?”

  “Not yet. Where is he?”

  She looked a little flustered. “He took a late nap today. He wasn’t feeling well. I was about to go wake him for supper.”

  “Let me do that.”

  “Uh . . . perhaps you should wait until he’s dressed and comes down. I imagine he’d like to be in fighting form when he sees you.”

  “I imagine he would.”

  Her face reddened suddenly. “I mean—”

  Cole smiled. “He still in the same room?”

  “Yes, the one at the end of the hall on the third floor.”

  He took the stairs, two at a time.

  Tori turned over another page, filled with a voyeuristic salaciousness, her heart beating faster as she read more of her mother’s work.

  In the early days of that winter she sometimes heard choppers thudding behind the low cloud. That was the most devastating, hearing them searching for her, knowing her family and friends were worried.

  She knew there would be search dogs, too. Big groups of volunteers on ground teams. She wondered if they’d found her fallen basket of berries, seen signs of her scuffle when he’d put the sack over her head. She doubted it. She’d told no one where she’d been headed that afternoon. And a snowstorm had blown in that night. The snow hadn’t let up for days afterward. Any whisper of a trace would’ve been buried deep under that first thick, smooth blanket of the season.

  Then one day came silence—they’d stopped looking. It was her new reality. Deadening winter silence. Darkness. If she’d thought that hearing them search was the worst, it wasn’t. It was this. They’d given up on her. And aloneness was suddenly suffocating.

  A light died inside her during those first days of silence. She went numb to his abuse, to the things she glimpsed through the cracks in the chinking of the shed where she was chained and roped to the wall. She knew she wasn’t the first he’d kept in there, on that pile of stinking bearskins and burlap sacks. There’d been at least one other. She’d seen her gutted body hanging on the hook outside the neighboring shed. The body had red hair. He took it down after a freeze, and she heard chopping and thudding and, once, the sound of a saw. She wondered if the body on the hook was the redheaded forestry worker who’d gone missing last fall.

  She wondered if there would be another woman taken next fall. If he’d kill her before that, and hang her on that hook, too.

  As the daylight grew shorter, she tried to figure out whether it was Christmas yet. She tried to imagine how Ethan was handling things, how her mother and father, her friends were doing. Did they go into the store and speak about her in soft, sorrowful tones?

  Occasionally over the months she heard a small bush plane up high. She’d listen and scream inside her heart for help, pray for some miracle.

  And then something did happen.

  She became certain that she was carrying a child. Ethan and she had been trying for almost a year to get pregnant, and she’d undergone fertility treatments. Before she was taken she’d skipped a period. She’d felt changes in her body. She’d made a doctor’s appointment to have it confirmed. An appointment she’d been forced to miss. But now she had proof. Her belly was rounding, going hard. Her breasts were swelling, becoming tender, her nipples darkening. This dawning realization changed everything. She had part of Ethan with her.

  She was no longer alone.

  She had a beating little heart inside her belly. A baby—their baby. And by God she was going to live. She would do whatever it took in the Lord’s or the devil’s name to survive now. She would kill that bastard. She would be a master of restraint while he fucked and hurt her—because when she fought him and screamed, he got off on it, and just hurt her more. She would wait for exactly the right moment.

  She would not end up on that meat hook . . .

  Tori lifted the manuscript page and placed it upside down on the growing stack of others already read. Rain ticked against the windowpane. Wind gusted.

  She knew it wouldn’t be long before he noticed her belly growing. She needed a plan for that . . .

  So engrossed was Tori, so ensnared by her mother’s fictional world, that she didn’t register fully the sound of a vehicle entering the driveway. The front door downstairs banged, and her father’s boots clattered up the stairs.

  She froze.

  “Tori!” Her dad’s voice boomed down the hallway. “Where are you?”

  She quickly scrambled to gather up the pages. They fluttered to the floor.

  The door to her mother’s office swung open and her father loomed in the doorway. A range of emotions raced across his face as his gaze dropped to the manuscript in her hands, the loose pages on the carpet.

  “What the—” He strode in.

  Tori shrank back on the bench, hiding the rest of the manuscript with her body. His face reddened. His eyes turned bright. He didn’t look right. His neck muscles corded, and his hands fisted like hams. Suddenly, for the first time in her
entire life, she felt afraid of her dad.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing in here!” He snatched a handful of pages off the floor, glared at them.

  “I miss her,” she snapped. “I wanted to be with her things!”

  “What is this?” He lunged for the rest of the manuscript behind her.

  She yanked it out of his reach. “No!”

  He swung up his hand. His face was twisted, dark red. His eyes gleamed with moisture.

  She cringed back against the window. “Please . . . don’t hit me, Dad!”

  It was as if her words pulled a plug out of him. His mouth opened, and his features went slack. He lowered his hand slowly and stared at her in silence for several beats, as if refocusing. Then, deflated, he sank onto the bench beside her. He bent forward, scrubbed his hands hard over his face.

  “Jesus . . . I’m so sorry, Tori. Please, just give me that manuscript. You have no right to be in here, in her office.”

  But Tori scooted farther back, pressing herself between the corner of the wall and the bay window. She curled herself into a ball over the pages. “It’s mine,” she said. “Mom dedicated it to me. It says so right on the front page. ‘For my dear Tori, a story for the day you are ready. I . . . I . . .’” She choked on the next words. “‘I will always love you.’”

  Surprise chased over his face. Then worry entered his eyes, and his features steeled with fresh determination. “She meant it, Tori. One day—not yet, not now.”

  “Why?” she screamed. “Why not now?”

  He reached for the pages again. She jerked them away as his hand closed on the corner of the dedication page. It tore. A jagged line right through their hearts. They stared at each other in pulsing, electric, palpating silence. This tangible metaphor of their lives ripped in their hands, their little nuclear family, rent apart by the two people who loved Melody the most.

  Her dad swallowed.

  “I hate you!”