by Ann Major
Now, as he stared intently at the little group clustered around Ivory’s grave in the shade of the live oak in the cowboy cemetery, his insides churned.
He had to squint a bit and wipe the sweat from his brow to make sure it was really her.
So—Cheyenne had come back.
Jack had avoided her all the other times.
She shouldn’t have come.
Not even for her mother’s funeral.
She should be running for her life.
There was a price on her head.
On her rich husband’s and kid’s, too.
Chantal had told him that some super-rich, border gangster was after them.
Word was they had been boarding a plane to France when Ivory died.
That was just like Ivory. Ornery to her last breath. Cheyenne and Cutter should have kept on running. Which was probably why Lord kept casting those glances over his shoulder.
Jack’s fists balled as he remembered the final conversation he’d had with Chantal. She’d laughed when she’d told him that the monster who’d killed Martin was going after Cheyenne—and her son, too.
“And how would you be knowing that?”
“I’m her sister.” Chantal had smiled nervously in that evil, knowing way that could scare even him.
“First time I ever heard you claim kin to her,” he’d taunted.
Cheyenne, who was standing apart from her husband and son, looked Jack’s way, saw him for the first time and smiled.
Jack froze.
He’d hurt her. He still hated himself for sacrificing their love on the twin altars of greed and lust. But the ranch would be his someday now. At least he had his daughter.
When Cheyenne kept smiling at him, as though she’d forgiven him for what he couldn’t forgive himself, Jack remembered his manners. Forcing a wary smile, he tipped his Stetson. Not to be outdone, Salvavidas snorted and pawed the earth.
Jack rode the big horse up to the gate of the cemetery and dismounted. After tying Salvavidas, he began the slow walk up the hill. At the top, he took time to pick at a thick clump of lantana blooming under an ebony tree.
He held the golden blossoms to his nose. Their woodsy scent and Cheyenne’s presence brought back the sweet times they’d shared as children. They hadn’t wasted much time in front of television sets. Instead they’d ridden bikes and galloped horses across the prairies. They’d picked flowers and run wild and free through the grasses. They’d swum in the creek when the water had been up. He remembered how she used to talk to animals and birds, even snakes in that magical way. How wild things had come to her and eaten out of her hand. How she had talked to plants, too, so that they grew to enormous heights.
Jack put his memories aside and strode toward the small group by the grave. With his white shirt sweat-stained and glued to a strip of skin that ran the length of his lean, muscular back, with his ragged jeans and chaps caked with grime, he wasn’t dressed for a funeral.
The preacher was just finishing up as Jack knelt and laid his bright yellow flowers on the dark, gleaming coffin.
After the service, Jack was stunned when the first person to approach Cheyenne was Theodora. He was further stunned when she invited Cheyenne and her family to El Atascadero for refreshments.
Cheyenne smiled hesitantly before taking his mother-in-law’s thin hand.
Theodora smiled, too. The gossips began to buzz when slowly the two women turned and took the first step on that long walk toward the big house together.
It was about time.
Ben West’s other daughter, his best daughter, had finally come home.
Not back to her mother’s shack in the swamp.
But home to El Atascadero, her father’s home.
Where she had always belonged.
They should be on a jet right now. Not in Texas, riding around on shoulderless blacktopped, county roads in this heat.
“There!” Cheyenne suddenly cried as a shabby cedar roof loomed above tangled branches of a clump of mesquite and salt cedar that grew dangerously close to the road. “That’s it! Turn-n-n—here!”
Cutter wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right. The car swerved, its engine snarling as if it were a bad-tempered cat as the car jounced onto the narrow, potholed shell driveway that led to Ivory’s shack.
Maybe it was the heat. Maybe he was just tired from a long day filled with senseless delays and fruitless sentimentality. Whatever. Such emotional craziness was what Cutter had feared when he’d tried to talk Cheyenne out of attending her mother’s funeral.
Didn’t she realize they were going to be murdered if they didn’t clear out and fast?
It was just before twilight.
The air was warm and humid, the huge sky a soft, glowing lavender above wide-open, brown pastures. A white mist clung to the ground near the marshes behind Ivory’s shack. When Cutter braked, whorls of dust curled around the car.
It wasn’t hard to see where the mantle of grime that lay on top the two, ancient, rusted pickups that had died in the driveway had come from. Both vehicles had smashed windshields. They had no tires and were propped on cement blocks. Waist-high weeds and cacti surrounded the house and cars. A pair of feral, black cats slunk from the porch. When they vanished into the weeds, he felt their eyes watching him. Other eyes, too.
Ivory had only been dead two days. Yet, her house already seemed dead as well. The wind made eerie, rustling sounds in the branches of the squat oaks and in the long shadowy grasses behind the house. A broken shutter slammed back and forth against a wall.
He and Cheyenne should be clearing out—before it got darker. Before José sent who-knew-how-many villains after them.
But there was no talking sense to her. She was determined to give him the local tour of her childhood.
Hell, maybe this guilt trip was about his not letting her come sooner. Whatever. She had been in this strange, desolate mood ever since she’d found out her mother was dead. He had tried to comfort her, but her black mood had only worsened after her mother’s coffin had been lowered into the ground and Theodora had welcomed her into her daddy’s house as if she was a long-lost daughter.
“I’m Ivory’s daughter,” Cheyenne had repeated guiltily to him as Theodora had led them across thick, plush carpets, down long halls into showy drawing rooms of Ben’s vast mansion. “Not Theodora’s. I want you to know that.”
Now, in the fading light, Cheyenne fearfully studied her mother’s dilapidated house and then searched his face.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re here. You’ve shown it to me. Now, can we go?”
Cheyenne turned to him; her face ashen, her eyes brilliant and charged. “This is where I grew up. My mother was Ivory Rose, the witch woman. She skinned rattlesnakes and made hat bands out of their hides. She collected bird eggs, pierced and drained them, painted them, and gave them to the vaqueros’ children to wear as necklaces. She could pick up a snake by the neck and charm it to sleep.” Cheyenne flung the car door open and raced up the driveway.
He jumped out. “Why are you doing this, when you know we’re in danger—”
“Because I want you to see this. To know exactly who I am. I wasn’t raised in my father’s mansion.” She paused. Her green eyes dilated with pain. “You didn’t think I was good enough back when you first heard of me—”
“I’m sorry for that. Sorrier than you’ll ever know. But that was a long time ago. We really should go,” Cutter insisted, quickening and lengthening his strides so that he could catch her. “The sooner we get out of here, honey, the better. Hernando—”
The warm swamp mists enveloped them. Cicadas sang from an oak mott. Unseen animals splashed in the dark ponds hidden by the tall reeds. Behind the house rosemary and other herbs had gone wild and grown to magical heights.
She opened a screen door that had innumerable small holes and tears. He got a whiff of the vile stench of cats.
“You have to see this first,” she pleaded in that same stricken tone. “This i
s the worst house anywhere for miles around Westville. People used to say it was haunted even when Mother was still alive. The few kids that would play with me at school were afraid to play here.”
“Cheyenne, baby, you’ve got to forget all that—”
“No. You’ve got to forget Hernando for a second and listen to me.” Her voice was quivering now. “I’ve been running from this place and my childhood all my life. You followed me to the island because you didn’t think I was good enough to marry Martin. Well, neither did I. I probably would never have dated him, if growing up here, and being thought the trashiest and wildest girl in town, hadn’t given me the neurotic need to prove—”
“Cheyenne, darling, stop it—”
“Don’t you see?” she pleaded. “Martin might never have felt he had to borrow that money, if money and its trappings hadn’t been so important to me.”
Cutter didn’t feel up to this. “Look. Ambition is usually fueled by neurotic needs. Mine was. Forget the past. Now isn’t the time—”
“No.” With a shaking hand she pointed to a trellis from which the thick black tatters of a dead vine hung. “I used to climb that. I’d sit up on the roof all night long when Mama had some new cowboy lover here. The stars and moon would seem so close and bright...sometimes I’d stand up and try to touch them. A bunch of buzzards used to roost every night in that mesquite tree, so I never felt all that alone even though sometimes it was nearly dawn before I came down and went inside. You probably didn’t know that buzzards are real friendly creatures. Friendlier at least than most small town kids who’ve been taught by decent folk to hate you.”
“Cheyenne—”
“I was so ashamed. Some nights I wanted to stay out on the roof forever. I didn’t want to hear them making love. I vowed that when I grew up, I would do things so differently. I swore my child wouldn’t ever have to grow up feeling ashamed of who he was or who I was. I was going to live in a house grander than my daddy’s, too. Most of all, my child would have a daddy. That’s why I married—” Her frightened voice fell away.
He suddenly knew. why she’d had to marry Martin.
To protect her child.
No. To protect their child.
“What a laugh,” she whispered. “I made an even bigger mess of my life than she did of hers. Every time Martin and I fought, Jeremy would go out and climb a tree. Then I got Jeremy kidnapped.”
The porch was steamingly hot, as though it still held all the heat of the day, and yet Cutter scarcely felt it. All he saw was the helpless, scared look in Cheyenne’s eyes.
“I wish you could have known her,” she said.
“I do, too.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yes.” Gently Cutter took her by the hand. “Honey, let’s go.”
She clutched his fingers tightly, tugging him closer.
“What the hell are you so afraid of, Cheyenne?”
“Just, just come inside. This is very important to me. To us.”
He cast a backward glance over his shoulder as she led him inside.
All the windows were closed, and the hot rooms reeked of musty, sick-room smells. He felt an aching inside him when she showed him her pitifully tiny bedroom.
Mice had made a nest in one corner. As he studied the scribblings of happy faces she’d made on the wallpaper as a child and the dusty bookshelves stacked with used, paperback thrillers, he remembered the vast mansions of many floors and much privacy that he’d grown up in.
“I think you turned out pretty well,” he said.
Silently she led him into her mother’s bedroom.
He opened a window, but the fresh air could do little toward dispelling the sickening odors that had been accumulating for weeks.
Outside it was getting dark fast.
Anybody could see the car.
Ivory’s house was a trap.
As if in a trance, Cheyenne stood at the foot of the bed, staring at the bare mattress, no doubt imagining Ivory lying there still. No doubt feeling guilty she hadn’t been with her at the end.
“Nobody thought she was much of a mother. She got all my clothes out of barrels at the church that were other kids’ castoffs. She never made me take a bath or wash my hair or brush my teeth like other moms. I could stay up to dawn if I wanted to. I could sleep out in the woods or wherever else I wanted. I could wear what I wanted or run around buck naked. I could eat cake and drink sodas for breakfast every day. I had way too much freedom, and everyone disapproved of me. Even Maverick, Chantal’s cousin. Everybody except Jack...at least till Chantal got to him, too. You see, Chantal was always somewhere in the background, making me feel like I was dirt with just a few well-chosen words about me or my mother. You don’t know what it was like, having a sister like her. Terrible things happened to me at school. But Ivory wasn’t so bad,” Cheyenne murmured. “I loved her. She loved me.”
If that were so, maybe Cheyenne had had more than he’d had growing up in his parents’ mansions. People were what counted. Relationships. He wanted some strong, loving relationships in his life. He wanted her.
“We have to go,” he repeated.
“When you came to the island because you thought I was no good, you probably didn’t guess by a long shot what a lowlife I really was.” She turned to him. “Well, now you know. I was wild and bad and poor—So poor, Jack, who was poor, too, chose Chantal over me even though he didn’t think much of her. So wild...I didn’t take his rejection like a lady.”
“Shhhhh—”
Suddenly he realized why she was so afraid.
A guilty flush crept up his neck. It was his fault she had so little faith in him. His fault she thought the cabin would make him despise her and reject her again.
They stared into each other’s eyes. For a long moment neither of them spoke; neither moved.
His heart began to slam in slow, painful strokes.
He loved her.
“Cheyenne.” His voice was quiet and deep. “Do you really think I give a damn about any of this now?”
“Well, you used to. You disapproved of me just like everybody did around here. You thought I was easy. Trash. Somebody you could have sex with and leave pregnant. I—I loved you. I really loved you. I thought I would die when you didn’t come back.”
Tears began to spill down her cheeks.
He had never known someone else’s pain could hurt so much.
“When you didn’t come back I knew you hated me just like everybody did here.”
“No. It didn’t happen that way.”
She was so beautiful in black, with her flaming hair and pale oval face. As he gazed down at her, his own eyes grew dazed and unfocused as he realized the extent of her pain and fear and hurt. Her lovely face began to blur.
“I—I shouldn’t have said these things to you,” she whispered. “I—I want too much. Things a girl like me can’t ever hope to—”
He caught the scent of her, and it was alluringly warm and fragrant. His emotions were so bafflingly deep and profound that his heart began to slam against his rib cage. “No—”
“I don’t expect you to care about me. Not really. I just wanted you to know why I was so afraid of being poor, of feeling ashamed for the rest of my life—But none of that is important to me now. I just wish I could have been with her when—” She tried to push past him and run from the house.
“Cheyenne. I do care.” He wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her against himself, crushing her, her damp cheek against the heavy pounding rhythm of his heart. “Honey,” he whispered, beginning in a rush. “I loved you, too. From the minute I saw you, I must’ve loved you. I still do, and I always will. I guess I just didn’t know how to say it till now. Nothing else matters. Not Martin. Not this house. Not your mother. I don’t care how you grew up. I’m glad you loved her.”
Gently he kissed her.
She was trembling.
Suddenly so was he.
“I love you,” he repeated. “I loved you that
first day on the beach. I always will.”
“Why didn’t you ever say it then?”
“Maybe everything happened too fast. Maybe I just didn’t know how. Maybe I thought you could tell how I felt. I didn’t deliberately make you pregnant and leave you. I always wanted you and Jeremy. You have to believe that.”
She looked up at him—very, very slowly, studying every single one of his features in one of those suspended moments in time. “I—I guess I do. I really do. And I love you, too,” she whispered at long last. “I love you.”
And as she said it, he found the courage to say it to her again. And again. “I love you. I love you—”
Years of frustration and pain flowed out of him. Out of her, too.
Desire overtook him.
He forgot José.
Nothing mattered but his fierce pagan need to have her and to show her how much he cared.
He began to kiss her.
First her warm, silken throat. Then her mouth.
The outer lips. And inside them, too.
She melted.
His passion escalated.
So did hers.
The rapidly increasing throb of his chest grew in tempo with the mad beat of her heart. Within seconds he had her up against the wall again, their lower bodies joined. Impatiently he yanked her black silk dress above her thighs and his fly apart so he could plant himself inside her.
He was too hard and too fast.
It was over too soon.
And yet afterward as they stared at each other in that steamy darkness of their own making, their bodies drenched with perspiration, their sticky clothes a twisted tangle at their hips, there was a new understanding as well as a new tenderness between them.
Fierce and quick as their mating had been, more than lust had been involved. It had been a mating of their souls and minds and hearts as well. It had held the beginning of true trust and long-lasting love.
Still, when they could breathe again, he gently cupped her chin, meaning to apologize for his roughness.
But she sealed his lips with a fingertip.
“No—”
“I—I—”
“Don’t spoil it.” Her voice was soft and a little wondrous. Her eyes gentle and hot. “You said you loved me, and I knew you meant it. It was wonderful.” She blushed. “Too wonderful for words. And sometimes I’ll want it like that again.”
