The Circle Eight: Tobias (3 page)

Rebecca forced a smile. “I didn’t expect to see you all here.”
 

“Too bad, hm?” Matt continued to stare at James.
 

“This is James. He works at Donovan’s ranch. One of the hands was injured and they need me to come tend to him.” Rebecca hoped James would forgive her for not mentioning his last name.
 

“Donovan’s?” Caleb’s gaze narrowed. “What happened?”
 

James tipped back his hat and she silently thanked him for not mentioning he was a Gibson. “Tree. We were clearing some land and it fell the wrong way. Busted his leg and head.”
 

Rebecca didn’t know the extent of his injuries, but knowing Will had a head injury concerned her a great deal. “We can’t stay to chat. It’s at least a four-hour ride. Caleb, can you saddle Ocho for me?”
 

Caleb looked startled. “Um, sure.”
 

Hannah got to her feet. Matt’s wife was closer to a mother than a sister and she had been influential in Rebecca’s life. A supporter, a strong woman who took what she called her plain brownness and became an amazing rancher and wife.
 

“Can I help?” She held a chaparejo in her hand. As someone who was gifted with a needle, Hannah was called upon to perform miracles when sewing was required.
 

“No, thanks. You should finish what you’re doing. I can pack quickly.” Rebecca was usually ready for anything and kept her life simple. That meant she could be ready to leave in minutes, not an hour. The basket of herbs would be transferred to her tapestry bag with the medical supplies and they could be on their way.
 

“Eva, can you get some coffee for James?” Rebecca was grateful he didn’t go by Jeb anymore or Matt might recognize it. She didn’t think the two of them had met before. Only Elizabeth, her older sister, and her husband, Vaughn, knew all the Gibsons. Fortunately they lived elsewhere.
 

“
Sí
,
hija
.” Eva who had aged gracefully into her fifties, got to her feet and went to the stove. She cooked for the Grahams and their ranch hands, who happened to be Eva’s sons. But she was much more than that. She was the heart of the home. As she set the tin cup of steaming brew on the table, Eva gestured to James to sit.
 

He looked as though he’d rather bolt for the door, but he sat. Rebecca gave Eva a grateful smile and ran to her room to pack with all due speed. Matt would interrogate James but if she worked fast enough, it would only be a few minutes of questions.
 

“I’ll hurry.” She dashed to her room. Will could be bleeding to death while she worried about what her brother would say to James. Ridiculous of course. She needed to focus on the patient who needed her.
 

Rebecca’s steps quickened. Now was the time to put a fire under her and move like the wind. She couldn’t think about their stop along the way and seeing Tobias again. If she did, she might have to scream. Or vomit. Or both.
 

Tobias had spent the day trying to pick up the mess he lived in but he managed to nap and lie on the grass longer than he worked. The sun had started to drop low in the sky before he roused himself to stand again. Now he leaned against the tree he now thought of as the outhouse and took a piss.
 

“Shit you stink.” James’s voice startled Tobias and he managed to piss on his own hand.
 

Tobias tucked his cock back in his trousers and buttoned them, ignoring the tremble of his fingers. After he wiped his hand on the grass, he straightened to look at his brother.
 

“What do you want?”
 

James had grown into a big man, muscles hewn from hard work. His boyish face was now darkened with a few days’ growth of his beard. Four years ago, he stopped answering to Jeb and would now only answer to James. “Came to tell you that Will got hurt.”
 

Tobias was suddenly very alert. His gut tightened. “What happened?”
 

“Tree fell on him. Busted his leg up pretty bad, broken ribs maybe.”
 

Tobias digested that information. “What else?”
 

“He hit his head too. Hasn’t woken up since.” James folded his arms across his chest and looked off into the distance. “I don’t know what you can do for him but I know he’d have wanted me to tell you.”
 

“But I reckon you didn’t want me to tell me.” It wasn’t a question.
 

“No. You don’t care about nothin’ but getting drunk. But Will still thinks you’re good for something.” James shrugged. “Boss sent me for the Doc and we’re on our way back there now. I decided to come tell you and now I did.”
 

His brother turned to leave and Tobias stumbled after him. “Wait. Lemme clean up and come with you.”
 

James’s gaze narrowed. “I don’t think you can sit on a horse. Besides, I don’t want to smell you all the way there.”
 

Tobias deserved every word of it, and more. “C’mon, James. Gimme a chance. I can wash up and be ready in ten minutes.” He swallowed the lump of fear in his throat. Losing one of his brothers hadn’t occurred to him. He expected to die long before them, considering he was thirty and a pitiful fool. Will was a young man in his prime who didn’t deserve to die such a senseless death. “Please.”
 

James let out a sigh. “Ten minutes and we’re riding away. Since you can hardly find your way out of a whiskey bottle, I’m sure you couldn’t find the ranch we’re working at without me.”
 

It was achingly true. Tobias knew nothing of Donovan or what Will and James did for the rancher. There was no excuse for it.
 

Tobias ran for the cabin, although instead of actual running, it was more like a stumbling gait. He splashed tepid water from a pitcher on his face. The towel he dried off with couldn’t rightly be called clean but it was dry. He glanced around, embarrassed by the state of his house. If no one knew he lived there, they would think the cabin had been abandoned and vandalized. Pops would be ashamed of him.
 

Tobias shook his head, telling himself to stop thinking about a man dead more than five years. He threw a change of clothes, although dirty, into saddlebags and paused. His last bottle of whiskey sat on the table amidst the dirt and crumbs. His mouth watered.
 

He told himself not to take it, to leave it behind, but his hand picked up the bottle of its own volition and jammed it into the saddlebag. His hands shook when he walked back out of the cabin. His ramshackle hovel could stay as it was until he returned. No one would notice or care he was gone.
 

“Gotta get my horse—” Tobias stopped in mid-step and mid-sentence, his boot poised above the scrubby ground. James had already saddled the old gelding, but that wasn’t what stole his breath and made his heart stutter to a stop.
 

Rebecca Graham sat atop a horse beside his brother.
Rebecca goddamn Graham
.
 

Holy shit. Just holy shit.
 

As a seventeen-year-old young woman, she’d been pretty. Now, as a grown woman, she was stunning. Exquisite. Her thick, brown hair was swept off her head into a fancy twist on the back of her head. Her cheekbones were more prominent, accentuating those damn blue-green eyes.
 

Fucking hell.
 

She arrived at the lowest point in his life, when he was not only in a shitty barrel, he existed at the bottom of it. Tobias was a mess in so many ways. He wondered what he looked like to her, dirty, unshaven and in filthy clothes. Foolish man. He sucked in a much-needed breath and pushed the notion away. His appearance didn’t matter. She wasn’t for him and he wasn’t for her. That was obvious five years ago but it still didn’t stop his body from tightening in shock and arousal.
 

Holy ever-loving shit.
 

“What in the hell is going on?” His tone and words were sharp, but he wasn’t angry. He was surprised and scared that he couldn’t control his emotions. Five years of living in a dark hole of failure had turned him into a person he didn’t recognize. Less than a man.
 

“I told you I got the Doc to help Will. If you don’t want to come with us, then stay here, but we’re leaving.” James dropped the gelding’s reins and wheeled his horse around.
 

“Wait. I’m comin’.” Tobias scowled at Rebecca, whose expression remained calm. Damn her. She was the Doc? He didn’t understand what was happening and that notched up his discomfort more.
 

“Good afternoon, Tobias.” Her voice sliced through him, husky and rich. Where had the young, trembling girl gone? In her place was a confident, beautiful woman.
 

He tipped his head in greeting but didn’t trust himself to speak yet. With more confidence and sense than he possessed, he threw himself up on the horse. The gelding sidestepped at the abruptness of its master’s movement. Tobias gentled his actions and the horse shook his mane in displeasure. He patted the equine’s neck with apology.
 

“Let’s get a move on then.” Tobias didn’t recognize his own voice. Hell, he didn’t know who he was. How could he expect anyone else to?
 

James glanced in annoyance and then dug his heels into his horse’s flanks. Rebecca followed with Tobias at the rear. They rode single file across the craggy ground. Tobias wanted to ask a thousand questions about Will and Jeb, who was now James, and more urgently, about Rebecca.
 

Was she married? Did she have children? How was she a doctor? Women weren’t allowed to be doctors. Did she still live at the Circle Eight? So many unanswered and unspoken. For now he had to ride behind her and watch the round cheeks of her ass snuggle the saddle beneath her.
 

Dear Lord Jesus. It was going to be a very long ride.
 

Rebecca was going to vomit. Imminently. Embarrassing herself beyond measure. Her body shook with confusion, shock and something darker. She knew James was taking her to Tobias’s cabin, but she’d convinced herself it wouldn’t bother her. Until they’d arrived. The trees and bushes had changed in five years. However, as soon as she saw the cabin, her heart had slammed into a gallop. The structure was dilapidated but she recognized it nonetheless.
 

Then she spotted Tobias.
 

He had changed even more than the landscape. Gone was the man she had dreamed of. The rugged, intense man had been replaced by a shadow of him, one with a grizzled face, haunted eyes and the stench of liquor. Her grand plans to find the prince of her dreams had never been so deflated. She almost heard a “pop” as her fantasy bubble burst.
 

She wanted to talk to him and find out what happened. Where were the three younger boys? Why was Jeb calling himself James and acting so openly hostile to Tobias? How had Tobias become such a slovenly shadow of himself? Why? A thousand other questions battled to escape from her throat.
 

Rebecca bit her lip to keep quiet. Not only would an interrogation be impolite, but she might start an argument between the brothers. Losing Pops must have started a downward spiral for Tobias, one she wished she had been aware of so she could have stopped it. Yet another fantasy, but as someone who spent her days helping others, watching a tragedy unfold and not acting to stop it galled her.
 

She’d been angry for a long while after Tobias disappeared from her life. They had shared something incredible and he walked away. She’d told no one about what happened, but the memory of it lingered within her, curling around her heart. Rebecca closed her eyes at the sudden memory of the feel of Tobias’s lips and hands. Sweet heat made her body clench.
 

She had to forget it. Completely. Forever.
 

It was easy to tell herself to do so, but quite another to actually do it. Her mind knew it was the right thing to do, but her body’s memory could not erase itself. Not hardly. Too many dreams, and nightmares, had danced through her unconscious mind on a regular basis to pretend nothing happened. He had changed her and she had let him. Rebecca had been a foolish young woman. She was no longer that girl.
 

Rebecca had been angry for quite some time. She had let that anger go, with Eva’s help, four years earlier. The Graham’s housekeeper was more
of second mother who loved all the eight siblings as if they were family. She had held Rebecca as she wept, never asking why, but offering comfort when it was so desperately needed.
 

At seventeen, Rebecca had been full of herself and her dreams for the perfect man. Now they seemed foolish and childish. As a grown woman, she recognized what and who she was. Her actions were worse than her thoughts and feelings. The only consequences of her decision five years ago were her pride and a hard-won lesson in what not to do. Her heart had been a casualty, but keeping it secure from all outsiders had become her way. No one could hurt her if she didn’t let them close enough to peer into her deepest depths. She bore the scars of her love for Tobias, inside and out.
 

She straightened up in the saddle, as though someone had strapped a poker to spine. She would not think about Tobias any longer. He was simply someone riding next to her.
 

“You a doctor now?” His voice startled her and she in turn squeezed the horse with her knees. Ocho skittered to the side and tossed his head.
 

“Easy, boy.” She petted his neck and silently apologized for her foolish behavior. Rebecca didn’t look at Tobias when she answered. “No.” It was a curt response but she didn’t care. Or at least she told herself not to care. Not that her foolish behavior would endear herself to anyone.