Can't Buy Me Love (8 page)

Fifteen minutes and two tea-soaked towels later, Luc was fielding calls from half his teammates.

“I haven’t heard anything,” he tried to assure Gates, who was taking these trade rumors as if it were news of his parents’ divorce. “And rumors are just rumors.”

“But you’re in Texas—”

“It’s family stuff, Gates. Honestly. I swear I’m not going anywhere.”

He managed to get off the phone for a second before Billy called.

“Holy hell, man,” Billy said by way of greeting. “This is nuts—the team is acting like you died.”

Luc sighed and stepped out of the kitchen and down one of the hallways, hoping it led to his room. “Just try to spread the news that I’m not going anywhere.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Of course not,” he snapped, “but there’s no point in everyone losing their minds right now. Gates was about to start crying.”

“I’ll cry if they bring Lashenko here. I swear, Luc, I might just kill that asshole.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Billy. Control yourself.”

He realized he was heading down the hallway toward his father’s room and he almost turned around. Then he
heard Jacob’s muffled voice, and his protective instincts roared to life.

“I’ll talk to you later, Billy. Just try to keep the guys from making any kind of statement to the vipers.”

“Yes, Grandpa,” Billy said, using the team’s nickname for Luc. He hated that nickname and Billy knew it, so Luc hung up without saying goodbye.

The closer he walked down the hallway toward Lyle’s room, the louder Jacob’s voice got, and concern for his nephew momentarily outpaced his concern for his career.

He pushed open Lyle’s bedroom door in time to see Lyle lift the oxygen mask off his face.

“What … you … got … there?” Like a hand coming out of a grave in some B-movie, his trembling, bony fingers pointed at the Optimus Prime Jacob carried.

Jacob lifted it and stepped closer. “He’s an Autobot. He transforms between a robot and a truck.”

“Show … me …,” Lyle whispered and Jacob started to flip apart the robot, but it was hard without a place to put it. “Here …” Lyle said, patting the side of the bed.

Jacob took two more steps and put the toy on the bed.
Too close! Too damn close!

From the corner of Luc’s eyes he caught movement—Victoria lifting her hands to her mouth, her eyes dry and calculating. No doubt wondering how much this reunion might pay her.

Disgust for his sister washed over him, quickly souring into anger.

This was what she’d come to. How far she’d fallen.

“What the hell is going on in here?” Luc barked, bursting in through the open door. Victoria jumped and so did Jacob, as if caught doing something wrong. But Lyle, his eyes glued to Luc, reached over and grabbed
Jacob’s arm. Jacob pulled away, but the old man was stronger than he looked.

“Get your hands off the boy,” Luc said through clenched teeth.

Lyle smiled, his white lips pulling away from gray teeth, revealing blood-red gums.

Jacob whimpered and twisted his arm free. He got away, running toward his mom.

“Go,” Luc said to Victoria, who for a moment seemed about to resurrect some backbone. In the end though, she just led Jacob from the room.

“He’s my flesh and blood, Luc,” Lyle said. “Just like you. You can deny it all you want, but that’s the God’s truth. You’re mine.”

Luc leaned forward, the cloying scent of illness and death filling his nose. “You don’t own me. You can’t control me.”

“Watch,” his father gasped, “me.”

Seconds later, Luc slammed the door shut on the small study his sister had hustled Jacob into.

“This is a joke, right?” Luc blinked away the image of the old man’s hand on his nephew’s arm. That macabre smile.

The old man was up to something and Luc didn’t want to know what. He didn’t care.

All he cared about was getting back to Toronto and repairing his career.

“Jacob wanted to meet him,” Victoria said, standing in front of a window that was draped in yellow curtains. The sun filtered through, surrounding her in an eerie glow. She looked radioactive.

“I don’t want to meet him anymore.” Jacob held his robot in front of him like a shield. Luc looked pointedly
at his sister, still unable to believe that she’d taken her son to that man’s bedside.

“Jacob,” Victoria whispered, crouching down to look in his eyes. “I think maybe you should go rest for a while—”

“Rest?” he protested, and Luc fought his instincts to intervene.

“Or go see what Ruby has in the kitchen?”

You mean besides a mess of sweet tea?
He’d cleaned up some, but it was still a sight.

“I saw some cookies in the drawer,” he told Jacob.

“You guys can’t just get rid of me whenever you want.”

“Jacob,” Victoria sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Please. Ten minutes.”

Jacob scowled at both of them and left the room.

“What the hell are you doing, Victoria?” Luc demanded when the door was shut behind the boy.

“He wanted to meet his grandfather.” She stuck to her lie, and Luc gaped at her.

“Bullshit.”

She jerked as if he’d hit her, and his shoulders twitched with the need to do something. Push something. Hit something. His job on the ice was so clear. The expectations were simple. Puck in net. Manipulate the forces against him. Stay three steps ahead of everyone.

Out here—in the real world—things were too damn messy.

“Dad is dying. I don’t think he’s about to go into one of his rages.”

“He had his hand on him!” he cried. “Jacob was scared. Don’t you remember what that was like? How you would cry—”

“I remember.”

“And you’re so desperate for money, you just stood there?”

Victoria smoothed her clothes, running her hands over the straight edges and buttons, her tell. Her perpetual effort to keep up the façade at the moment it was hardest.

“It was fine before you showed up,” she said lamely.

“You’re introducing your son to our abusive asshole of a father to ensure your inheritance. That’s not you, Vicks.”

It was the ranch that was making her act this way. This place ripped away everyone’s decency, leaving behind the rocks and bones of selfishness and survival.

“Judge me all you want. But you have options. You’ve always had options. I have none.”

“Christ, how many times do I have to tell you—”

“Get a job? Like it’s that easy. I have no skills, Luc. I have nothing to offer anyone. I am exactly what Daddy always called me—totally worthless.”

“This is your chance to change that! You don’t have to be useless your whole damn life.”

The air in the room went cold and she shrank even further into her skin, her bones. Away from him.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said quickly, as softly as possible, but she still flinched.

“Yes, you did,” she whispered, her voice thick, and he hated that he’d made his sister cry. His sister who’d been so tough while her life and her pride were ripped away from her over this past year.

“The only thing I managed to do right was get Joel to marry me.
Me
. The bastard daughter of a bastard daughter. I caught his eye. I was the one he pursued. He could have married anyone he wanted and he chose me, the hostess at his goddamned golf club. And he made me a queen, Luc. I was untouchable. A force to be reckoned with. Me.”

She was killing him. Destroying him. The girl who’d
been ridiculed by her father, the very man who should have loved her, had found a way out of the dark, only to have the light ripped away. It broke his heart.

“And then everyone forgot where I came from. For the first time in my life, I actually got to be who I wanted to be, instead of who I was born to be. And now … it’s all gone. And I can go back to being a hostess and let everyone laugh and point, or I can go find myself another husband to take care of Jacob and me. Or, I can get as much as I can from my father, because he didn’t give me shit growing up but bruises and nightmares.”

Luc knew this was the truth, that these were the options Victoria saw, but she was blind to all she could be.

“Tell me, Luc. Tell me what I should do.”

“Let’s just leave this place,” he said, wanting to take her somewhere she could heal, because this place wasn’t it.

But she shook her head.

“Jesus Christ, Vicks, I can’t stay here.” He couldn’t. Not when his life was falling apart a thousand miles away. And frankly, he was tired of being the only witness to his sister’s self-flagellation.

“I’m not asking you to. In fact … it would be easier if you left.”

“You want me to go?” That was a first and it didn’t sit well. Not at all.

She nodded, and his hurt temper flared.

“Fine.” He pulled out his cell phone. “One more day. And then I’m gone. I’ll get a driver to take me to the airport so that I can leave you the car.”

She nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. It was a shit act. He could still see her fear and worry.

But for her sake, and maybe because he was so damn tired of trying to protect a woman who wouldn’t take the steps to protect herself, he pretended to buy it.

Tara Jean hung up the last of the nearly complete samples—the pink leather skirt with the fringe and the studs.

The demon purred with pleasure.

Tara looked at the rack of samples, finished but for the rough open seams down the back. They looked odd, so perfect in front but totally ragged in back, as if they’d been hurt, somehow. Victims of violent leather crimes.

But they’d stay unfinished until the final fitting in two weeks.

“Honestly, Tara Jean.” Edna looked sideways at her as she packed up her leather-working kit. “No one is going to buy a skirt that short.”

“I don’t know,” Tara said, mostly just to egg Edna on. “It’s pretty hot.”

“Hot,” Edna scoffed, tucking away the leather awls and skives. Edna wasn’t all that much older than Tara Jean, but with a name like Edna, the woman had been born old. Having twins didn’t seem to help. Edna constantly had foul-smelling crusty fluid on her shoulder from one of the babies leaking on her. And then there was the breast milk issue. She pumped. Like a cow. And wanted to talk about it.

It was like spending ten hours a day with a biology experiment.

And then there was the perm. Edna was the last woman under sixty sporting a chemical wave. Honestly, the eighties were over and no one had bothered to inform Edna.

But perm and leaking breasts aside, the woman was a magician with a swivel knife.

Edna and her husband ran a successful leather repair business outside of Fort Worth, and Tara Jean paid the woman a small fortune for her disapproval and incredibly delicate leather needlework. She made the seams look like cross-stitch.

“Thanks for the hard work,” Tara said. She’d pushed Edna and Joyce hard, choosing to hide out in the greenhouse rather than deal with the drama on the ranch.

But there was no more hiding.

She’d heard that Luc was leaving early tomorrow morning on the first flight out of Dallas. Victoria and the boy were staying, and Tara needed to see how Lyle was doing with those developments.

Because from where she stood, his elaborate plan to reunite his family under one loving roof was going up in flames.

“You know it would be so much easier if you’d have let me bring in the babies—”

Tara shook her head, her stomach twisting into a knot. “Hard to work with screaming babies.”

“I told you, they don’t scream. They’re very sweet. A little playpen in the corner—”

“Anyway,” Tara interrupted, ignoring Edna’s disapproving gaze. She tore Edna’s check out of the book and handed it over with a bright smile. Putting a whole lot of “no more chitchat” behind it.

“Thanks again.”

Edna took the check and smiled as she counted the extra zero.

“Until next time.” Edna folded up the check and tucked it into the front pocket of her hideous mom jeans.

See
, Tara Jean thought,
money can buy anything—even Edna’s approval
.

She cleaned up the last of the mess, sweeping up the leather scraps, putting away the mats and French knives. And when all was right in her kingdom, she locked up and headed into the ranch house to see what she’d missed.

In the kitchen, Ruby was putting together a dinner tray for Lyle.

“Applesauce and tomato soup?” Tara winced.

“Don’t forget the pudding.” Ruby lifted a little snack cup.

“Who could?”

“He keeps asking for a steak.” Ruby folded a napkin and put it under the spoon she would use to feed him. “I’m tempted to give it to him,” she whispered. “Just to see him happy.”

“A steak would probably kill him.” Tara took the tray from Ruby’s hands. “I’ll give him dinner. You have a rest.”

Ruby smiled. “I promised Jacob I would watch
Iron Man
with him. I think he’s a little scared, and I love me some Robert Downey Jr.”

Tara put the tray down on the table so hard the dishes rattled. “You do enough around here, Ruby. You don’t need to babysit that kid on top of it!” She shook her head. “I can’t believe the nerve of those two. Asking you—”

“Please, honey.” Ruby put a hand on her ample hip. “When have you ever known me to do something I don’t want to do?”