Heartstealer (Women of Character3 (24 page)

"Us..." She shook her
head. "I'll never forget the look on your face that day in the hospital,
the way you didn't come back. I guess I'm not a forgiving person."

"Do you think this cowboy
you're hooked up with would be any different?"

Without hesitation, she said,
"Sloan would never leave me hurt and alone in a foreign country. He would
do his best for me no matter what he felt personally. I have to know one last
thing. Did you use that last scene in the movie?"

He had a harried look on his face.
He spun around, rubbing the back of his neck. "Come on, Jacie, grow up. I
had a lot riding on that film...it could make or break me. It was a chance to
pay off those loan sharks, get out from under that debt. I couldn't just throw
the scene away. Like it or not it was great footage."

"That was me in that tree,
Brad. It was real, a situation gone wrong. I always did my skydiving drops to
make them look like something more than what they were, but I never took
chances until that last day."

"You worked with your
brothers. Of course they wouldn't want you taking chances. But if you're in
this business and you want to succeed, you have to stand out and sometimes that
means taking a chance."

"You don't do jumps that leave
the end result to fate. That's where I made the mistake. I got sloppy that
day."

"Come on! You're the one who
was always willing to go that extra bit."

"That's right, after I'd
determined the risk and weighed everything in. I don't get a thrill putting
myself in unnecessary danger."

"Working with me brought your
temperature up, you can't deny it."

She admitted softly, "No, I
don't deny it. I liked working with you in the beginning. There's one flaw,
though, all you wanted was the money."

"What else is there?" he
fairly shouted in exasperation. "We could have a great life
together."

"I guess that says it all.
Maybe that's why you're on the run," she said sadly, walking away.

"Jacie!" he called
angrily. "I won't let you walk away!"

She shivered, even though the air
was warm. "I already have." There was nothing else to say. She was
finally free of the past. Free of her own demons.

The afternoon was almost gone when
Sloan drove the last of the cattle through the gate. He rotated his shoulders
back, trying to ease an ache that had grown steadily throughout the day. He
figured he could finally call it quits. The entire herd was in the pen and
everything was under control.

Everything except his life.

He’d had a lot of time during
the night and the long day to think. A lot of time to reflect about Jacie. It
irked him that Carlton had checked himself into a room at the lodge. Sloan
didn't know for how long.

"I was right on one
account," he muttered, his voice causing his horse's ears to twitch.
"That Jacie is trouble." He pulled his hat off and dropped it onto
the saddle horn. "She's trouble," he drawled, "but damned if I
don't care. I'm not letting her go."

He knew he couldn't let her walk
out of his life. It had taken him a while to come to that conclusion, but he
had to at least give them a chance.

He unsaddled his horse, fed him and
turned him out into the corral. He left the fading sunlight of the day and
entered the barn. His eyes adjusted slowly to the shaded interior. He spotted
Jacie sitting on a chair against the wall. Could he hope she was waiting for
him?

"Hi," he said, resting
his saddle on one hip, thinking how good she looked. His temperature soared as
her glance ranged over him head-to-toe and a slow smile appeared as if she
liked what she saw.

"Hello, Sloan, I was hoping
you'd come by."

He dropped his saddle on an empty
saddletree, then turned toward her, eyes narrowed. "Really? Where's
Carlton?" he asked casually.

"Gone, I hope," she
replied idly, tipping back her chair to rest her feet on a bale of hay.

He moved in closer. "He
checked into the lodge last night." He sat on the bale next to her feet
and encircled one of her slim ankles above her sneaker. "It was him,
wasn't it, the guy who hurt you?"

She nodded, touching the toe of one
foot against his leg. She let her attention drift to the right where the open
doorway let in the last bit of sunlight. "The sun's setting. From where I
sit, this is a front row seat on the world. The mountains seem on fire."

"It's the same most
days," he told her. "This scene never changes. The season's maybe,
but not the mountains. A person could get bored seeing the same thing day after
day." He had to issue the warning. If anything came of a relationship
between them, she had to know these were his roots.

She met his gaze unflinchingly. He
knew what she was seeing. He had been out all night, hadn't shaved and dark
stubble covered his cheeks and jaw. He saw her eyes change, almost sensed her
breath quicken. Wanting curled inside him. He needed to wrap her in his arms
and not let go.

He slid his hat from his head and
rested it on his lap. He put his arm up to wipe the sweat from his forehead as
he continued to watch her. For the first time since he had met her, he thought
she looked relaxed, as if her life was finally on the right course. He wondered
if Carlton showing up had brought about the change he sensed in her.

"Is Carlton an old
boyfriend?" he finally asked.

"Yes. But it’s been over
for a year." She hesitated, then added slowly, as if for emphasis. "I
wasn’t sure it was over, even though I kept telling myself it was. I was
afraid I might still love him. Today, I finally put it all to rest.
There’s nothing I want or need from Brad. I’m free."

He digested that. "He brought
your friend Bonnie with him," he said.

She nodded. "Actually, Bonnie
let Brad thumb a ride off her."

He frowned. "Is she trying to
get you and Carlton to patch things up?"

"I disabused both of them of
that notion. We didn't part on the best of terms―but he knows where I
stand."

He stood up and turned his back to
her as he looked toward the empty paddocks. "What's her stake in any of
this?" he asked flatly.

She came to stand beside him, close
but not touching. He could feel the heat of her body, smell the scent of the
flowery fragrance she wore.

"Bonnie's the one who
introduced me to Brad last year. She thinks we should try to at least talk but
I told her she's wasting her time. She left right away."

"Tell me about last
year," he said.

"About a year and a half ago
my family did business with a new car rental company owned by Bonnie.

"Back then my contact with her
was casual at best. About that time Brad rented a vehicle from her. When he
mentioned he was looking for a skydiving company to do aerial jumps, Bonnie
told him about our business."

He was highly aware of her fingers
playing with the snap placket on his shirt.

"I usually work with my
brothers, but they were out of town on a long-term job. I let Brad persuade me
to work for him. He had some backers to produce an adventure film. The initial
shots were done in New York. I guess I pushed to the back of my mind that his
methods sometimes bordered on carelessness."

Her fingers began to knead the fabric
of his shirt. It was driving him crazy so he caught her fingers with his.

"You were seeing each
other?" he asked.

She nodded. "Yes. I soon found
out Brad had everything tied up in this movie. It wasn't long before people
came on the set hounding him for money. He was banking on it being a
success...literally.

"Things went okay until the
last day of filming...the last scene..." Her voice grew hoarse.

He touched her cheek. "Listen
Jacie, just go easy, if it's too much..."

She cleared her throat. "No,
it's okay." She threaded her fingers together and looked up at the
ceiling. "The scene was shot in Venezuela. It took us four days to reach
the site. It was hot, almost steamy...the bugs were terrible." She
grimaced and rushed on but he could feel the tension emanating from her.
"I felt...uneasy." More softly, she added, "I had a bad feeling,
although I couldn't pinpoint why. The night before I couldn't sleep."

"You said it took you four
days?"

She nodded. "An entire day to
travel by canoe, then we had to scout the falls, check out the terrain."

"Angel Falls?"

She nodded. "We were dropped
by helicopter on a practice run. It was a thirty-two hundred foot parachute
drop from the top of Angel Falls. A freefall. Strange as it sounds, even with
what happened afterwards, I can still feel the initial rush as I leapt from the
cliff top into the mist.

"I had done it a few years
back with my brothers. It's the extreme in skydiving freefall. Anyway, Brad was
getting in deeper and deeper. Two men followed the crew to Venezuela."

She drew a heavy breath. "Brad
wanted a really dramatic, heart-stopping shot." Her voice dropped, grew
husky. "I must have overlooked something. I waited until the last possible
moment to open my chute."

He began to get that sick feeling
in his gut, the same feeling he’d had watching the video of her jump.
"But something went wrong," he said.

She frowned. "Some of the
parachute lines failed. To this day I don’t know what happened. Sometimes
I think I should have gone over everything again. I packed the chute myself,
checked it."

"Did someone sabotage the
chute?"

"I don’t know."

"Maybe Carlton rushed
you..." he said tightly.

"Con said much the same thing.
When I worked with my brothers, they always inspected and double-checked
everything after I had checked it out.

"Brad told me we were off
schedule, the light was failing. I shouldn't have jumped without checking my
pack again. My brothers had drilled the rules of survival into my head. I was
as much at fault."

"Your chute never
opened?"

"The pilot chute―that's
the first small one, it pulls the larger chute out―it opened, but the
shroud lines holding it to my harness broke free. It collapsed. I had to
manually open the main chute. When you’re in a freefall, you can do
acrobatics. That was the plan, a course of acrobatics to make it look like I
was out of control.

"When the chute opens, you
pull on the shroud lines, they call it spilling air, and you can control the
direction of your landing. I think some of the lines on my main chute were
faulty, too, but everything happened so fast.

"I had the barest minimum of
control, just enough to land in a belt of trees. I must've slammed my leg on
the way down, but I don't recall. My chute held me fast. I was up there awhile
before they airlifted me out."

"Take it easy, Jacie."

As tears spilled down her cheeks he
pulled her down with him onto the bale of straw. He wiped her face with a handkerchief.
She gave a loud sniffle and drew away from his chest. "Sorry, I guess it's
still a bit close to home."

"Don't apologize."

She took a deep breath.
"Actually, I feel better. I haven't talked much about it, not even to my
family." She leaned her head against his shoulder, a grimace contorting
her face. "God, I've shut them all out."

"Sometimes when you're hurt,
you shut out the ones who want to help."

"While I hung in the tree all
I could think about was how Con was going to get on my case big time. He's
always the first one to say 'I told you so.' My family didn't care much for
Brad."

"And did he?"

"Get on my case? No. He never
said a word. One day I woke in the hospital in Venezuela and Con was there. He
held me and didn’t say anything."

"What about Carlton?"

"He came to the hospital once.
He was scared worse than anyone. I could see it in his eyes. He was sweating
bullets." She took a shaky breath. "I understood some of that fear, I
felt it myself. I was hurt pretty bad, I was in a foreign country. No one spoke
English. Brad never came back. He wiped out any trust I had in him. When I
returned to the States, the production manager of Brad's company sent a lawyer
to my parent’s house. They wanted me to sign a release saying I wouldn't
sue."

He muttered a curse.

"I didn't sign it." She
smiled sadly. "I guess I was trying to get back at him. I thought if I
made him think I might sue, I'd pay him back. The company's insurance carrier
settled a sum on me. It sits in the bank."

He hesitated, then let out a long
breath. "Who else knows about the money?"

She shrugged. "My family, the
insurance carrier and Brad."

"Maybe that's where we should
look."

"Brad would have nothing to
gain. If something happened to me, everything would go to my family, my
parents. My settlement would pay off the debt hanging over Brad's head, but I
can't believe he'd hurt me."

"There's something else you
should know," he told her. "I spoke to the vet who was here last
week."

"Is Dandy all right?"

"He seems fine, but
they’re monitoring him for liver damage." He paused, clenching his
jaw, knowing he had to tell her the rest. "The horse was given a chemical
which affects the central nervous system."

"They could have killed
Dandy―"

"Or you," he added
grimly, running a hand over the back of his neck. "Someone knew what they
were doing."

She twisted around and lifted her
fingers to his cheek and rubbed the stubble there. He pulled back with a groan.
"I'm a mess," he said. "I've been out most of the night. The
weather-casters were predicting a big storm and I wanted to make sure the
livestock were sheltered. Besides that, I needed time to think."

"I wish you had let me
know," she told him softly. "I'd have ridden out with you."

He raised a brow. "After what
happened last night, I wasn't sure what to think. It wouldn't have been much
fun for you, it drizzled on and off all night and the cows were pretty
spooked."