Texas Redeemed (26 page)

His hand settled on her knee, and she felt his heat
through the denim. “I didn’t say I don’t want you. I want
all
of you.”

“No. I can’t give you that.”

“You won’t,” he clarified, and when his hand withdrew she
felt at a loss. “I’m going outside to wait for Lucy. For the record, my
answer’s still wait and see.”

F
REEZING
RAIN HAD
been predicted for this part of
Texas, but the general public hadn’t put much stock in it since any truly
wintry weather didn’t normally touch the area. Valerie had though, and spent
much of the previous night surfing news programs, weather channels and radio
stations, gathering information about the harsh winter advisory that would hit
as a result of brutal blizzards pushing down from northern states.

Now, twenty-four hours later, the cold, needlelike rain
had arrived, shooting out of a sky thick and dark with overcast. It had hit
suddenly, and hadn’t reached its peak yet.

Flicking off the radio in the barn, she grabbed her
flashlight and aimed it around the interior, taking a head count of the barn
cats she’d come to think of as her pets.

Coldness bit into her fingers and the tip of her nose.
“Will, is the generator in shape, in case we lose electricity tonight?”

The man adjusted the hood on his jacket. “Good to go.
Everyone accounted for?”

“In here, yes. Inside the house, yes.” Peyton had come over to take Lucy to
a museum in Meridien, but the weather had killed
those plans, and now he was helping Dinah herd Mimas
and Titania into the main house. “I need to do a
count in the stables. Double-check the pens, will you?” Will strode off, his
shoulders hunched against the assault of the freezing rain, and Valerie shut
the barn doors and hustled to the stables.

All the stalls were filled, except one.

Brute.

“Will!” Valerie whirled around, squinting into the night
that was still too dark to see through despite the outdoor lighting near the
stables. But he was gone, too far away to hear her over the howl of wind.

She took off toward the bunkhouse, furious enough to fire
Coop on the spot for not only taking the gelding out again after her strict
orders not to, but for doing it on an unusual night of sleet and ice and
dangerous winds.

Halfway there she saw him, flailing his arms and
hollering her name. The horse was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s Brute?”

“She never brought him back.” There was something strange
in his voice. Panic.

“She?” It dawned then that Lucy
hadn’t joined the others to help secure the ranch and check on the animals. She
didn’t consider that her daughter might not be in the house. The icy fear seemed
to pierce right through her. “Lucy?”

“Cordelia.”

“Cordelia took Brute out? When?”

“Over an hour ago.”

“Oh, God.” Valerie’s stomach
roiled. “Why did she take him? I was going to.”

Coop cursed. “She left before the weather took a turn,
said the sky looked good and she’d do you a favor, since you were tied up with
other chores. She swore up and down she could handle that horse. The two of you are the same that way, stubborn as the devil about doin’ stuff how you see fit.”

Valerie shivered, changing direction and heading for the
stables. “I’m going out to find her then. There’s no one else to do it. Only
Will could make it over tonight, and I don’t want you riding out in this
weather, Coop. And yes, it’s because you’re too old and I can’t worry about
both you and Cordelia.”

“Jack ain’t coming till
tomorrow, right?”

“Right.” Jack. How would he
react once he found out what Cordelia had done? “I
have to find her, and I will.”

Coop managed to keep up with her determined strides.
“What about the doc? Let him come with you, Val. What if Rhys’s girl is hurt or
somethin’?”

Valerie didn’t want to entertain the thought, but knew it
was a strong possibility. Chances were Cordelia
hadn’t gotten turned around and lost with Brute. But there was one problem with
Coop’s suggestion. “Peyton’s no good on a horse.”

“Not as good as you and me, but
he’s learned how to stay upright on one and that’s well enough.”

Within twenty minutes Valerie and Peyton were on
horseback, drawing near the trail that parted the dense, sloping wood that
climbed into the mountains. In some patches the ground was already coated with
ice and hard as concrete, making it unsafe for the horses to move faster than a
walk. The trail felt unfamiliar now—pitch-black, loud with quivering tree
branches and the cry of brutal wind and sleet, coated with slick danger
underfoot.

Despite her gloves, Valerie’s fingers felt frozen to a
state of nearly total numbness. She held the reins in one hand and a flashlight
in the other. She led the way, desperate to quicken her horse’s speed but
afraid to take the risk.

She doubted Peyton could handle anything faster than the
cautious walk. Behind her, he gripped his horse’s reins with both hands as the
animal navigated through bitter-cold darkness that was, in the light of a clear
day, scenic with wildflowers and yucca and trees that seemed as high as heaven.

“Are you holding up okay?” she called behind her as the
horse panted, its breath rising like twin shots of smoke into the cloudy night.

In answer, Peyton swore viciously and then there was a
thud and a splash and the sound of branches snapping.

Valerie turned her head so quickly that her neck pulled.
Wincing, she angled her horse around and saw that Peyton had lost his seating.

“Stop!” she shouted at his horse, springing down from her
saddle. With the reins of both horses and the flashlight in hand, she went to
Peyton and found him sprawled on his back in a bed of mud and foliage. “You
hurt?”

“Maybe a bruised ass,” he grunted, shifting to all fours.
His entire backside was coated in wet grime. Mud had splashed across his chest
and splattered his face on impact. “Which makes me look
forward to getting in that saddle again.”

“Do you want to walk?”

“We’re riding. Even going at a slow pace, the horses can
get us to Cordelia faster.”

They returned to the horses and continued another mile,
calling out Cordelia’s name but getting no response.
Then, finally, from somewhere up ahead on the mountainside came a moan. Slumped
against a pine, shivering and cradling her belly, was Cordelia.

Valerie dismounted quickly, almost dropping her
flashlight. She passed the light over her cousin, seeing smudges of dirt but no
blood. “What the hell happened? Can you speak?”

“Brute,” she whispered with chattering teeth. She
sniffled into her sleeve and fresh tears mingled with the dried tracks on her
cheeks. “Got spooked. Th-threw
me and ran. My baby.”

Peyton crouched beside them. “We can’t get back to the
ranch on horseback. I need to have a look at you, Cordelia,
okay?” He jerked his head at Valerie. “Do you have a satellite phone?”

“Damn it. No.” In her rush to search for her cousin she’d
forgotten to bring along the phone. “I have my cell.”

“See if you can get reception to call an ambulance. If
not, I’ll drive her to the ER myself.”

The surroundings combined with the harsh weather made it
impossible for her to get a call through to anyone. “This thing’s useless in
this area. We should start heading down the trail, but … is it safe to move
her?”

“Give me the flashlight,” he said, and when he passed the
beam over Cordelia’s face, paying special attention
to her eyes’ reaction to the light, he braced his free arm around her
shoulders. “I need to check you, Cordelia. Lie back,
but tell me if it hurts too much.”

Valerie waited, grasping the reins with her breath held,
unable to look away from the sight of her cousin so frightened and small.

Peyton proceeded gently, searching for signs of bleeding
while asking Cordelia a series of questions about
headaches and nausea. “Probably a fractured rib,” he deduced, when he found a
particularly painful spot on her torso.

“I can walk,” she said when he suggested carrying her to
the ranch.

“No!” Peyton and Valerie objected.

“There’s a difference between being brave and being
stupid, Cordelia,” Valerie went on, ignoring her
cousin’s shocked, combative expression. “I know this isn’t the best time to say
this, and I know you think I’m being shitty. But I don’t care. When I told
everyone on the ranch to leave Brute in my care, that
included you. But you took him out on this trail, tonight of all nights. You’re
not invincible, and it’s not just your life you’re playing Russian roulette
with. It’s your baby’s, and Jack’s, too.”

“Let me worry about my family, Valerie,” Cordelia said with a grunt of pain.

“Your family is my family. You’re my family. And I’m
scared out of my mind right now.” Valerie swallowed back a sob. “Just let
Peyton help you.”

Peyton deftly lifted Cordelia,
buckling a little as her weight aggravated his own injuries from his earlier
fall, and started walking in the direction of the ranch, with Valerie leading
the two horses.

The continuing onslaught of freezing rain that felt like
needles to the skin had only heightened the hazard of tramping through the
wood. The trail had become icy and to avoid having to pick balled ice from the
horses’ hooves, Valerie guided them slightly off the path and through the snarl
of trees, stumbling and slipping and struggling to aim her flashlight toward
Peyton and Cordelia.

And then the unmistakable flutter of snow began to drift
down, eliminating what little visibility remained.

“T-too far,” Cordelia mumbled,
crying out when Peyton tripped over a branch and jerked her in his arms.

“It’s not,” Valerie protested, shaken to hear her sound
defeated. “We’ll get you to the ranch, damn it.”

Once they did emerge from the trail, everything happened
in fast forward. It took two vehicles to cart Cordelia
to the hospital, because both Dinah and Lucy insisted on going along. Certain that he could be of no use at the ranch until the light of
day and, hopefully, calmer weather, Will left with a vow to locate Brute when
he returned.

Valerie, left at home with Bowie, the dogs and her own
fears as company, picked up the phone and called Chase’s room at Blue Longhorn.
After sixteen unanswered rings, she hung up and dialed the landline at Coop’s
bunkhouse.

“You were right about Brute.”

The old man sighed over the line. “Val, this time it
doesn’t feel good to be right. That girl’s baby.”

Valerie closed her eyes, not wanting to think about Cordelia losing her child. She knew that brand of hell, and
she didn’t want that for her cousin. “I should’ve let that horse go. I didn’t
want to admit it before … didn’t want to accept that you knew better. I felt …
threatened.”

“Battle Creek’ll always be
yours, Val. It was yours when you were growin’ up
here, ’cause you loved this land and this business.”

Was that part of the reason her uncle had even bequeathed
it to her? It had seemed obvious at the reading of his will, when she’d first
met Rhys’s estranged wife and children, that he’d given Battle Creek to Valerie
to show the malice he’d felt toward them hadn’t died with him. He had kicked
her off the ranch and never cared to respond to the letters she’d written him
from San Antonio. Had his decision simply meant that he despised her just a
little less than his own children? Or had he known that she’d devote herself
completely to this place?

“This ranch has always been home, Coop.”
She remembered being seven years old and having to leave the little apartment
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because her parents’ car had crashed and they were
gone—weren’t ever coming back—and she’d have to go with her daddy’s brother,
Rhys, a Wild West type of cowboy who lived in Texas. She remembered missing her
mommy and daddy but being a little bit happy that Night Sky was green and
quiet, not noisy with police sirens wailing all the time. There was hardly any
money when they’d been alive, and none at all left over when they died, and
Uncle Rhys hadn’t been happy about that. But he’d promised her that as long as
she was good and tough and worked hard, she’d get to stay here forever.

“Nobody’s gonna take what’s
yours. I’m sure not. See, Rhys wasn’t the best of men, but he gave me a job
when no one else would. I owe it to him to look out for his people. Y’all don’t
like it much, especially the way you got it in your head that you’re too tough
to let somebody help you, but it’s what I gotta do.”
He sighed again, wearily. “Call me when you get word from the hospital.” And
then he hung up.

Hours later, she’d fallen asleep on the family-room sofa
with the phone in her hand. It hadn’t rung once, so she’d been startled awake
to hear the doorbell and find Peyton on the porch with snow dotting his hair
and shoulders.

“Cordelia?” she said, letting
him in.

“Is going to get through this.
The OB-GYN on call said the baby has a steady heartbeat and wasn’t hurt when Cordelia was thrown. She did fracture a rib, and was
sitting out in the elements for a while, so she’s going to be at Memorial for a
few days.” Peyton shrugged off his jacket, but it was, along with his jeans and
shirt, grimy from his tumble on the trail. “Dinah and Lucy want to camp out at
the hospital with her tonight. I told Lucy she could, but if you want me to go
back and get her—”

“It’s fine.”

A heavy beat of silence passed before Peyton gestured
upward. “Could I steal the hot water for a bit and scrub off the grunge?”

“Okay.”

Valerie vaguely remembered directing him to the master
bathroom, offering him a towel and washcloth in exchange for his dirty clothes
which she immediately dropped into the washer on a quick-wash cycle. Then she
called Coop with an update and fixed herself a cup of hot chocolate.

She dropped a single marshmallow into the mug and while
waiting for it to dissolve, she transferred Peyton’s clothes to the dryer.

Cordelia and her baby were
going to be okay.

And the man in her bathroom had endured a hellish
horseback ride and then carried a woman over three miles through muck and
treacherous weather to ensure that outcome.