Sullivan's Promise

by Joan Johnston

  Which meant, Rye realized, he could probably expect his younger sister to show up a heartbeat from now. “Did you tell her Lexie is staying in her room?”

  “I did.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “What you might expect.”

  Rye knew he’d infected his younger sister with his less-than-positive feelings toward Victoria Grayhawk. Having Amy Beth in the house was bound to wreak havoc with the truce he and Lexie had worked out. He’d call his sister first thing in the morning and encourage her to stay where she was.

  “Get some sleep,” Rye said.

  “I’ve got a rollaway in Mike’s room. I’ll be fine. Rye, I think you should know that your father and I—”

  He cut his mother off before she could start a conversation he wasn’t yet ready to have. “Good night, Mom. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” He hung up before she could say anything more.

  Rye tried to sleep, but it was impossible to relax when he knew Lexie was right down the hall. He spent half the night wondering what his mother had been about to say and the other half wondering how he’d managed to screw up his conversation with Lexie so badly.

  He’d told her how he’d felt in the past, all right. But he’d left her thinking those feelings had vanished the same way she had the morning after their night together. They’d ended up discussing the need to be responsible adults who didn’t argue in front of their child.

  He supposed he’d been saved from making a terrible mistake. What if she’d been open to a sexual fling? What if they ended up in bed together again? What if all those feelings they’d experienced together had somehow survived the hiatus he’d imposed on their relationship? Then what? Was he willing to take the chance that she wouldn’t disappoint him again? Did he dare offer his heart to a woman who’d once done something so wrong there was no forgiving it?

  He was tempted to do just that.

  Needless to say, he was groggy and grumpy the next morning. It didn’t help that Lexie had gotten up before him, put on the coffeemaker, and prepared his favorite breakfast, although he wasn’t quite sure how she knew it was his favorite.

  Then Cody padded into the kitchen wearing his footed sleeper, his blond hair askew, a huge smile on his face, and said, “You made my very most favorite breakfast!”

  Mystery solved. Rye wolfed down the blueberry pancakes slathered in butter and drowned in huckleberry syrup, inhaled a cup of black coffee, and when Pete honked, jumped out of his chair and headed for the door.

  “Wait!” Lexie cried.

  He turned back and said irritably, “What is it?”

  “You don’t have to snap at me!”

  “I didn’t—” But of course, he had. This whole breakfast scene was just a little too homey, a little too perfect, a little too…much. He moderated his tone and met her gaze, carefully avoiding her dishabille in what looked like an expensive, full-length, navy-blue silk bathrobe.

  The robe might have been sexy by itself, but she’d spoiled the effect by adding a pair of fuzzy gray slippers with pink rabbit ears. It was not an outfit intended to entice a man, but he was nevertheless smitten. The paper-thin silk was snugged against her body with a belt that emphasized her tiny waist and defined her figure well enough for him to see she wasn’t wearing a bra. He wondered what else she wasn’t wearing under there.

  His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He swallowed the drool he imagined someone would have drawn in a cartoon of the moment and said, “Pete’s waiting. What do you want?”

  “I’m planning to take Cody to Kalispell to shop for groceries. I thought we might go by the hospital and visit your mother. Would you like me to give her a message?”

  “Tell her to give me a call if she needs me.”

  “I hope you find some evidence that leads you to the shooter,” she said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Will you be tracking the grizzly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

  “Be careful.”

  He was surprised at the warning, which sounded a lot like she cared. He just wasn’t sure if she was more worried about what the bear might do to him. Or what he might do to the bear. He grinned. “Don’t worry. I won’t kill any grizzlies if it can be avoided.”

  “That bear is wounded,” she reminded him. “That’s likely to make it even more unpredictable.”

  He grabbed his coat and put it on and reached for the doorknob.

  “Rye…”

  Her voice saying his name—his first name—held him in place. He turned and waited for her to speak.

  “Be careful.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I wish I was going with you.”

  “To protect me? Or the grizzly?”

  She opened her mouth to retort, but he was out the door before she could speak.

  VICK HAD HER hands deep in dishwater when her cellphone rang. With Mike’s life in the balance and Sullivan out searching for a wounded grizzly, not to mention three sisters whose lives were fraught with calamity, she needed to answer the phone. She shook her hands free of soapy water and ran for her bedroom.

  As she picked up her phone from the nightstand, Vick glanced out the window and saw snowflakes being driven sideways beneath a treacherous gray sky. With everything going on, she hadn’t paid attention to the weather. A heavy snowfall was going to make tracking the grizzly difficult, if not impossible, and create a new set of problems. Since a wounded bear was more likely to attack humans, folks coming into the area to hike, or illegally hunt out of season, would need to be warned. Technically, that was the job of federal, state, and local authorities, but Vick believed you could never put out too many warnings. She had a network set up to make that happen. Making sure folks were careful in and around grizzly habitat, that they stayed on trails rather than bushwhacking, hiked in pairs, made plenty of noise, and carried lots of bear spray they knew how to use, prevented injuries like the ones Mike had suffered. Fewer bear attacks meant fewer sensational news stories suggesting grizzlies were a danger to humans and ought to be exterminated.

  She glanced at her phone screen and realized her fraternal twin, who was also her best friend, was calling. Taylor had endured a harrowing experience the previous summer, when the Twin Otter she was piloting for smoke jumpers crashed in the middle of a raging forest fire in Yellowstone. The charred plane was found, but Taylor had remained missing and was presumed dead, along with the only other passenger, smoke jumper Brian Flynn.

  The Grayhawks and Flynns, neighbors who were mortal enemies in the normal course of things, had searched together for nearly two weeks before Taylor and Brian were finally found, barely alive after their terrible ordeal. Taylor was now happily married to her firefighter husband, Brian, and they were eagerly anticipating the birth of twin girls in May.

  Vick accepted the call and said anxiously, “Are you and the babies okay?”

  “We’re fine. Everyone’s fine. Especially Leah.”

  Vick couldn’t figure out what her half sister—they had the same mother, but King wasn’t her father—had to do with Taylor and Brian’s twins. “Especially Leah? What’s going on?”

  “Are you sitting down?”

  “No, why?”

  “You’ll want to sit down for this.”

  Fearing something awful had happened to her eldest sister, who was the closest thing Vick had to a mother, she sank onto her bed. Her heart in her throat, she said, “I’m sitting.”

  “How long before Leah loses the ranch to Matt, and he kicks her out for good?”

  Vick was expecting news of some physical injury, so it took a second for her to do the math in her head. “Beginning March 31 a year ago until now…Omigod! Just twenty days are left.”

  Since Matt had shown up, two of Vick’s sisters, Eve an
d Taylor, had married and left Kingdom Come, and Vick had moved to Montana. Leah had stayed right where she was, swearing that, by hook or by crook, she would rid herself of Matt Grayhawk before the year was up.

  “Kingdom Come is my home,” she’d vowed, “and I’m not leaving.”

  Except, nothing Leah or any of them had said or done had made a dent in Matt’s determination to own the ranch. He’d settled in with his twenty-year-old daughter, Pippa, and seven-year-old son, Nathan, and hadn’t budged an inch, even when an unhappy, unwed, and pregnant Pippa had moved to Devon Flynn’s cabin and refused to see her father. Since then, Pippa and Devon had married and were busy raising their twins.

  “What is Leah going to do?” Vick realized that while she’d been distracted with her own problems, the sister who’d single-handedly raised her was facing a life-altering crisis. “She has less than three weeks to get him out of there.”

  “Matt’s gone.”

  “What?” Vick exclaimed.

  “That’s why I wanted you sitting down. Matt left last night. Devon heard it from Pippa who told Brian who told me. Matt didn’t say why he was leaving or where he was going. He just walked out and took Nate with him.”

  “What did King say to that? What did Leah say? Do you have any idea why he left? Or where he was going? This is great news! I mean, for Leah.”

  Over the past year, she and her sisters had learned that Matt wasn’t the complete monster he’d seemed to be when he’d first arrived. But thanks to King favoring his son over his daughters, Leah had gotten stuck with the short end of a very ugly stick.

  Suddenly, Matt was gone, like a puff of smoke. The fact that he’d taken his son with him spoke volumes. Clearly, he’d broken his contract with King.

  “Does this mean Leah will get the ranch?” Vick asked.

  “I think so. But who really knows? Remember that financial trouble King was in last year? I think there’s still a chance he might need to sell the ranch to bail himself out.”

  “Poor Leah, if he does!”

  Unfortunately, that sort of ruthless behavior was typical of King. Vick didn’t exactly hate her father. She might even love him. She just didn’t like him very much. “Wait a minute. Do you suppose King’s financial woes have anything to do with Matt taking off like he did?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Taylor said.

  “What if King is reneging on his promise to Matt? What if he does need to sell the ranch? Has Leah said anything?” Vick asked.

  “She’s as mystified by Matt’s behavior as the rest of us. But ecstatic, of course.”

  “Unless King plans to screw them both,” Vick muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing. Has King weighed in? What does he say about all this?”

  “As far as I know, he hasn’t made a peep.”

  “I can’t imagine why Matt would leave at this late date.”

  “Obviously, something happened,” Taylor said.

  “Like what?”

  Vick heard the silence on the other end of the line and imagined her twin deciding whether to share what she knew or, at least, suspected.

  “Come on. Give. You must have some idea what sent Matt dashing off like that,” Vick said.

  “Actually, I do. I’ll bet it has something to do with Pippa’s mother.”

  “I thought Matt and Jennie weren’t speaking to each other.”

  “As far as I know, they’re not.”

  Matt and Jennie Fairchild Hart, Pippa’s mother, had a long and torturous history together. But if they weren’t talking, Vick couldn’t imagine what Jennie might have to do with Matt’s disappearance.

  “What happens now?” Vick asked.

  “I guess we wait for events to unfold.”

  Vick snorted. “I know you. You’ll have the skinny on the whole situation before sundown. Call me when you find out.”

  Taylor giggled. “Will do. While I have you on the phone, what’s new with you?”

  Vick’s heart was suddenly racing again. Her own news was every bit as momentous as Taylor’s. Her twin, who knew her so well, would understand the ramifications of what she was about to reveal in the next few moments. She took a deep breath and said, “Sullivan’s brother got mauled by a grizzly yesterday. He was also shot, probably by a poacher.”

  “Oh, no! Why didn’t you call me? Is he going to be all right?”

  “The doctors aren’t sure. He’s going to be in the hospital for a while, so I’m staying at Sullivan’s ranch, in his sister’s room, while Darcie stays at the hospital in Kalispell with Mike.”

  “You’re doing what?”

  Vick pulled the phone away from her ear, then put it back again and said, “I’m sure you heard me the first time.”

  “Are you nuts? Out of your mind? Why would you put yourself in a situation where you have to interact with that bastard every day?”

  “Please don’t call him that. Sullivan is my son’s father.”

  “Cody can’t help that. You told me at Christmas you’ve still got a crush on the guy, but this sounds like an exercise in masochism.”

  Vick flushed. She’d forgotten she’d shared that tidbit with Taylor over the holiday. She remembered also mentioning that Sullivan didn’t reciprocate her feelings, so she could understand why her twin might be upset.

  “I’m happy I get to spend more time with Cody,” she said.

  “That lowlife should have offered to change your custody arrangements a long time ago.”

  Her twin was pushing. Vick needed her to back off. “Taylor, please. Don’t.”

  Taylor sighed. “Fine. Be careful, Vick. You’ve already lost your heart. Don’t lose your good sense. Keep your elbows out.”

  Vick giggled at the mention of a posture they’d used when they were dating to keep unwanted male attention at bay. No man could get close if they kept their sharp elbows extended from their bodies.

  “Spend time with your son,” Taylor said without taking a breath, “and stay away from that—”

  “Taylor!”

  “I wasn’t going to say bastard. Or lowlife.” She hesitated, then admitted, “I was going to say sonofabitch.”

  Vick smiled and shook her head. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. More than fine.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Call me when you find out about Matt.”

  “I will.”

  Vick caught her lower lip with her teeth after she disconnected the call. She wasn’t used to keeping secrets from her twin. But it was too dangerous to admit her hopes aloud. Taylor would have had a shit fit if she knew what Vick intended to do.

  Tempt Sullivan.

  Vick had to know, once and for all, if what they’d experienced together all those years ago had survived, or could be revived. If it couldn’t…better to know for sure, one way or the other.

  “WHERE ARE WE going to live now, Daddy?”

  It was a simple question, but Matthew Grayhawk had no idea how to answer his seven-year-old son. He only knew there was somewhere he had to be, and time was of the essence. The girl who’d stolen Matt’s heart when he was sixteen, Jennie Fairchild—former U.S. senator from Texas Jennifer Fairchild Hart—was fighting for her life at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

  “We’ll be living in Houston, Texas, for a while,” he told his son.

  “Grandpa King told me lots of cowboys live in Texas,” Nathan said.

  “They do.”

  “Grandpa King said maybe I can ride a horse again someday.”

  Matt hadn’t expected his father, King Grayhawk, to spend so much time with his grandson, when he’d spent so little time with any of the eight children he’d produced with his four wives. But King had clearly doted on Nathan. Matt fought off any guilt he felt about taking King’s grandson so far fr
om Kingdom Come.

  The truth was he hadn’t returned from his self-imposed exile in Australia a year ago in order to possess his father’s Wyoming ranch. He’d come because he’d realized that the only woman he loved—would ever love—lived in America, and he didn’t want to spend another moment of his life without her.

  You really screwed up your chances of that, old buddy. You’ll be lucky if Jennie ever lets you back into her life.

  He simply couldn’t give up hope that Jennie would forgive him for keeping the existence of their daughter, whom she believed had died at birth, a secret from her for nearly twenty years. Time had raced past without stopping, and he’d missed his chance to do the right thing. Almost missed it. As long as they were both still alive, there was still a chance to undo the wrongs of the past. That might not be true for long, because Jennie was deathly ill with cancer and might not survive.

  Which was why he’d left Kingdom Come the instant he’d discovered she was in the hospital and flown to Texas in the family jet.

  Matt met his son’s sapphire-blue eyes in the rearview mirror of the Lexus SUV he’d had waiting for him at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport and watched as Nathan swiped at the sweaty hair at his nape. It had been cold in Wyoming. Texas was sweltering. He turned up the AC, then asked his son, “Would you like to ride a horse again?”

  Nathan made a face and admitted, “I’m still kinda scared of horses.”

  “No worries,” Matt said, using one of the Australian expressions he’d picked up over the years running a cattle station in the Northern Territory. “Someday you won’t be scared anymore.”

  Matt wanted to believe that. His son had been injured in a freak riding accident that Nathan’s mother, Irene, had caused. Her horse had cut off Nathan’s horse in an attempt to win an ill-advised race, causing Nathan and his mount to plummet over a ledge into a deep ravine.

  When she reached their son, Irene had panicked at the sight of Nathan’s two badly broken legs and the sound of his agonized shrieks. She’d put her hand over his mouth in an attempt to stifle his screams, which were upsetting his horse. The panicked animal, also badly injured, was writhing on the ground threatening to kick her. Unfortunately, she’d also covered Nathan’s nose, accidentally suffocating him, putting him in a coma that had threatened his life.