The Invitation (22 page)

About two minutes after I had decided that I was going to leave this state forever, a blue pickup came screeching to a halt in front of us. I mean “us” euphemistically. The pickup stopped so the driver could look at Ruth. The rest of us—hot, tired, bored, sitting on Ruth's suitcases—were staring at the tires and the scraped paint of the truck bed.

I looked up at Ruth, and when I saw her face change, I knew the driver must be somewhere between puberty and male menopause, because that frown disappeared immediately and was replaced with a flirtatious look as she leaned into the passenger side of the truck.

“Are you Mr. Taggert?” she purred.

I wish I could purr. Had Mel Gibson Himself driven up, I still probably would have said, “You're late.”

A male voice rumbled out of the truck, and even I could feel the masculinity of it. Either the driver was a heap-big male stud cowboy or they'd trained one of the bulls to drive.

Ruth batted her eyelashes and said, “No, of course you're not late. We're early.”

Gag me with a spoon.

“Of course we forgive you, don't we, girls?” Ruth asked, looking at us with adoring eyes. I hadn't been called a girl in so many years I almost liked it.

The driver's door opened, and I saw the big tire in my face—truck tires, mud tires,
man
tires—relieved of weight. They had sent the big one. Still bored, wondering if there was any place in this podunk town that took American Express so I could get out of here, I watched his feet as he walked around the truck. He was wearing cowboy boots, but they weren't made of exotic leather, and they looked as though they'd been used a great deal. Kicking cow pies?

Just as he walked around the tail of the truck, I sneezed, so I got to see him last. What I saw first was the open-mouthed speechlessness of Maggie and Winnie—or was it Winnie and Maggie?

Great, I thought, blowing my nose, they sent some pretty cowboy to bedazzle the city ladies.

I am ashamed to say that when I finally did look up at him, I reacted as badly as the duo and worse than our fearless leader. His name was Kane Taggert, and he was gorgeous: black curly hair, black eyes, sun-browned skin, shoulders an elk would envy, and a sweet, gentle expression on his face that made my knees weak. If I hadn't been sitting down, I might have fallen.

Ruth, still fluttering her lashes, introduced us, and he held out his hand to shake mine. I just sat there looking at him.

“We're all a little tired,” Ruth explained and glared at me before grabbing her largest suitcase and attempting to toss it in the back of the truck. She'd learned long ago that the fastest way to make most men notice you is to start to do man's work.

Instantly, Cowboy Taggert left off staring at me as though trying to remember his sign language skills and turned to help dear Ruth with her bag. Personally, I was surprised she knew where the handle was—before then I hadn't seen her touch it.

It was at that moment that we all heard a sound we'd heard a million times in movies but had never wanted to hear in real life: the rattling of a rattlesnake. Mr. Taggert had the big heavy suitcase in his arms, and Ruth, standing so close to him I hoped she was using some sort of birth control, was to his left. Six inches away from her foot was a coiled rattler that looked as though it meant business.

Very slowly, Mr. Taggert spoke to me because I was farthest away from the snake and nearest the truck door. “Open the door,” he said calmly, patiently. “Under the driver's seat is a pistol. Get it out and very slowly come around the far side of the truck and give it to me.”

If I do say so myself, my mind works quickly in an emergency. I'm not one of those people who freeze, and right now I saw lots of things wrong with this plan. One, how was this man going to shoot if his arms and hands were full of Ruth's seventy-five-pound suitcase? And two, it would take me a long time to walk around the truck, longer maybe than the snake intended to give Ruth.

Slowly, I opened the door to the truck. I was the only thing moving except the rattles of the snake, which sounded awfully loud on that windswept field. Also slowly, I leaned into the truck, and when I pulled out the pistol, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was hoping it wasn't one of those heavy revolvers that take the hands of a lumberjack to fire. It was a nice, neat little nine-millimeter, and all one had to do was pull the slide back, aim, and shoot.

Which is what I did. I was shaking some, so I didn't quite blow the head clean off the poor snake—after all, it'd probably only wanted the warmth of Ruth's suitcase—but I certainly killed it.

Everything happened at once then. The cowboy tossed the suitcase to the ground just in time to catch Ruth when she fainted into his big, strong arms, while Winnie and Maggie fell sobbing onto each other.

I was left standing there with a smoking revolver in my hand. Looking at Ruth draped aesthetically across the cowboy's sun-bronzed arms, I did my best Matt Dillon imitation, legs apart, and blew on the end of the revolver, then stuck it into my skirt pocket. “Well, Tex,” I drawled, “there's another one for Boot Hill.”

It didn't take a degree in psychology to see that the cowboy was angry. In fact, he was looking at me as though he wanted to wrap his hands around my throat and squeeze, but since his hands were so very full of Ruth's swooning body, he could do nothing but glare meaningfully. In spite of his encumbrances, when he started walking toward me, I stepped aside. I don't think they allow public murders in Colorado, but I didn't want to press my luck.

But he just slipped his precious burden onto the truck seat—Ruth was still doing her dying swan act, but from the flicker of her eyelashes I knew she was as wide awake as I was—then told the skinny follower to get in with her. I think he would have slammed the door shut, but the noise might have disturbed Sleeping Beauty.

Winnie—Maggie?—and I stood to one side while he tossed suitcases, four at a time, into the back of the truck.

“Get in,” he said to Ruth's minion, and she obeyed with the speed, if not the grace, of a gazelle.

He turned to me next, his face blazing, and right then I decided that I was
not
going to get into that truck and let him drive me off to heaven knew where.

“Look,” I said, backing up, “all I did was shoot the snake. I'm sorry if I offended your masculine sensibilities, but…” Maybe this wasn't the way to talk to a cowboy. There's a reason why big, beautiful men are jocks and little, wimpy men are brains. It's as though God tried to even things out, as though he said, “You get beauty but no brains, and you, over there, get brains but no beauty.” So talking to this scrumptious-looking creature about the finer points of psychology might not be the best thing to do. Could he read and write? I wondered.

“When I give an order, you are to obey it. You understand me?”

Suddenly I wasn't in Colorado anymore. I wasn't an award-winning author; I was again a little girl whose father controlled everything. As fast as I was transported backward, I returned to the present, but all the rage that little girl had felt was still with me. “Like hell I will,” I said and started to walk around the truck.

When he put his hands on me I went berserk. No one had touched me in anger since I escaped my father's house, and no one was going to now. I kicked and bit and fought and scratched my way away from him. I don't know how long I fought before I came back to the present reality and realized he had his hands on my shoulders and was shaking me. Ruth and her skinny follower were gaping at me out the back window of the truck, and the one in the back was cringing behind Ruth's suitcases, as though she was afraid I'd attack her next.

“Are you okay?” the cowboy asked.

There were three bloody streaks on his beautiful cheek, and I had put them there. I couldn't look at him. “I want to go home,” I managed to whisper. Home to my own lovely apartment, away from Ruth and her cowboy. Away from my embarrassment.

“Okay,” he said, sounding as though he were speaking to a dangerously wacko person. “When we get to the ranch, I can arrange transportation back, but there's no one here now. Do you understand me?”

I hated his patronizing tone, and when I looked back at him I didn't think he was as beautiful as I'd originally thought. “No, I don't understand you. Maybe you should speak a little slower, or maybe you should call the men with white jackets.”

He didn't seem to find that funny as he picked me up at the waist and threw me into the bed of the truck with all the finesse he'd used with the suitcases. I was halfway out the back when he stepped on the gas and knocked me backward. Fortunately I landed unhurt on the very soft form of Winnie/Maggie. I didn't bother to ask about her.

I was an internationally successful writer sitting in the back of a dirty truck. A heavy suitcase was starting to crush my ankle, and four people were thinking I was a crazy. Did Mary Higgins Clark go through this?

W
hat happened to you?” Sandy asked, looking up from the kitchen table and seeing the fury on Kane's face as well as the three bloody scratches.

Kane didn't answer until he'd poured himself a healthy shot of MacTarvit whisky and downed it in one gulp. “I got these marks from being a fool,” he said, refilling his glass as he turned to the older man. “Have they written any books on this mother-son thing?”

Sandy smiled, making his face fold into thousands of wrinkles caused by many years of being in the high-altitude sun. “A few hundred, maybe thousands,” he said. “What's Pat done now?”

“Talked me into taking a bunch of idiots into the mountains. She made me feel guilty about the kids and—” He broke off as he drank more of the whisky. “Have you met these women?”

“No,” Sandy said. “Why don't you tell me about them?”

Kane shook his head in disbelief. “One of them put her hand inside my shirt and felt me up, another one asked me questions about blockage of my bowels, and the other one…”

Sandy frowned when Kane took another drink, for he knew he wasn't much of a drinker.

“The other one nearly shot me, and afterward she turned into a raving lunatic. If she doesn't kill us in our sleep, she's at least going to terrify the horses.”

“And what about the fourth one?”

Kane smiled. “Ah, now, that would be Ruth.”

Sandy had to turn away so Kane wouldn't see his smile. Pat had made it clear that romance was the motive for coercing her widowed son into taking the women on this trip, and it looked as though her plan was working, if the silly expression on Kane's face was any indication of what was happening.

“I've got to get back to them. No telling what that crazy one will do. There are rifles in the main house, and she might decide to be Annie Oakley and see if she can shoot the barrettes off the heads of the other women.”

“That bad?” Sandy asked, frowning.

“Worse.” Kane finished his drink. “I want you to radio home and have Dad send the helicopter here to pick her up. I don't want to be around her; she's dangerous.”

“Frank took the copter to Washington State. Something to do with Tynan Mills.”

“Damn!” Kane said under his breath. “Look, radio Dad and tell him to get some transportation here fast. If nothing else, tell him to have a truck meet us in Eternity. If I have to spend the entire two weeks with that woman I may kill her.”

“You'd better hold off on that. Your mother might not like a dead greenhorn.”

“It's not a laughing matter. You haven't met her.” Kane took a deep breath. “I will do my best to get along with her until I can ship her out of here. All right? Will you radio Dad now?”

Nodding in agreement as Kane left the cabin, Sandy went to the radio to call.

When Kane entered the big two-story main house, the first thing he saw was the little blond mystery writer, and his first thought was to wonder if all her stories were based on people trying to kill
her.
If they were, he could understand why they'd tried to do it. In spite of what he'd told Sandy about trying to get along with her, when he saw her there alone, he tried to tiptoe out before she saw him.

“Caught!” she said, seeming to be highly amused at seeing him trying to escape undetected.

Turning back to her, Kane tried to force himself to smile at her. She was a guest of his, or, more correctly, his neighbor's, and he was going to try to be a good host to her. The bottom floor of the big log house was all one room, with the bedrooms upstairs, and she was sitting at the bar, looking amused. He couldn't explain what it was he disliked so much about her, but it was something. She was pretty enough, and if he'd seen her on the street he might have been interested, but she seemed so smug, so sure of herself, that all he could think of was getting away from her.

He forced himself to smile, and moved behind the bar. “Would you like a drink? You must be thirsty after your long flight.”

“Aren't you worried about what I'll do if I get drunk?”

That thought had been uppermost in his mind, and when she seemed to guess it, he could feel his face turning red.

“Don't worry, Tex,” she said in an exaggerated drawl as she put her foot up on the bar stool next to her. “I can handle my liquor as well as the next man.”

Kane's hand tightened around the bottle of whisky. Something about the woman more than annoyed him: everything she said, did, insinuated, hinted at, made him furious. Without bothering to ask her what she wanted, he fixed her a weak gin and tonic with no ice, and when he handed it to her, he couldn't bring himself to smile.

She looked down at the drink, and for the first time he saw a human expression cross her face. The first time she'd looked at him, she'd stared at him as though he were something in a circus and he'd wondered if she was retarded. Minutes later she was shooting the snake, and minutes after that she was screaming and clawing. Now she looked a little sad, but the expression went away and she looked back at him with a smirk.

“To you, cowboy,” she said, but he put his hand on her wrist and wouldn't allow her to drink.

“The name isn't ‘cowboy.' ”

Lowering the glass, she frowned at him. “What was it that ticked you off so much this afternoon? That I didn't do what you ordered me to do or that you didn't get to play the hero and save Miss Ruthie yourself?”

Very slowly he walked around the bar to stand in front of her. Then, his eyes never leaving hers, he put his foot on her stool right between her legs. When she saw the hole that her bullet had made in the toe of his boot—had it been even a fraction of an inch to the right, it would have taken his toes with it—she did have the courtesy to look a little shocked. But the expression didn't last long. The next minute she stuck her finger into the hole and touched his toe—the bullet had taken away a patch of his sock—and said, “This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy…”

Even as a child Kane had never hurt a girl. His eldest brother, Frank, had given him a lecture once when he came home from first grade with two black eyes that Cindy Miller had given him. Kane hadn't fought back but had stood there and let her slug him until the teacher came and pulled Cindy away. His teacher had said she didn't know if Kane was a fool or a hero in the making. Frank hadn't been ambivalent: he'd said Kane was stupid.

But right now Kane wanted to hurt this girl. He wanted to strangle her, and before he knew what he was doing, he went after her, his hands extended.

“There you are,” Ruth said, floating down the stairs in a lovely dress of red silk.

Abruptly, Kane came out of what he was sure was a waking nightmare, and when he straightened up, he saw the little mystery writer scurry off the stool and run to Ruth as though for protection. Kane had to turn away, horrified at himself at what he'd been about to do.

“Am I glad to see you!” Cale said to Ruth. “We were having the most boring discussion about pork bellies. You want a drink? Cowboy Taggert makes a very nice warm, weak gin and tonic.”

“I'll get you anything you want, Ruth,” Kane said, calming his racing heart and refusing to look at the horrid woman standing so near her.

“A little chilled white wine,” Ruth said demurely, and Kane smiled at her.

“Lovebirds already,” Cale muttered, but Kane resolutely refused to acknowledge her presence. Maybe if he ignored her, she'd realize she was unwanted and leave him and Ruth alone.

When he handed Ruth her glass, he looked into her dark eyes and thought about her hair spread out on a pillow.

“Gee, I guess three's a crowd,” Cale said and made Kane turn away so Ruth couldn't see his expression turn to one of rage.

When he'd recovered himself, he walked to the window, hoping Ruth would follow him and when she did, he thought how natural it would be to slip his arm about her waist. She was so like his wife that he knew his arm would fit perfectly, but the presence of the blonde on the other side of Ruth kept him from touching her. He couldn't be himself around that woman.

Outside the window, Kane could see Sandy coming toward the house, leading two saddled horses.

“Who's he?” Ruth asked.

“Sandy. Actually, he's J. Sanderson.” Kane smiled at her, noting the way the evening light touched her hair. “No one knows what the
J
stands for, so we've always called him Sandy. He's a distant relative of mine.”

Cale peered around Ruth and looked up at Kane. “And which one is your relative? The one with the brown saddle or the one with the black saddle?”

Without thinking what he was doing, Kane went for her. He leaped over a chair back while she, after one gasp of fright, climbed up on the couch, then jumped over the back and headed for the door. Kane caught her just as she ran smack into Sandy as he entered the room. With one bounce, she was behind Sandy, her hands on his hips as she used him as a shield.

Kane was too angry to comprehend what was going on. His one goal in life was to kill this woman. Reaching around Sandy, he made a grab for her, but she evaded him, so he pushed Sandy to one side.

“Kane!” Sandy bellowed in his ear, and it was the voice of a man who had changed Kane's diapers.

Once again Kane felt as though he were waking from a trance. For a moment he stood there blinking; then he realized what he'd been about to do. The woman, half his size, was smiling at him from behind Sandy, looking like the school tattletale who'd just done her bad deed for the day and was glorying in it. Sandy was disgusted and shocked by him, and Kane didn't dare look at Ruth. Too mortified with embarrassment to move, Kane just stood there.

With one more look of reproach at Kane, Sandy slipped his arm about the woman's shoulders and escorted her from the room, and she left with him, her round little tail twitching in triumph as she left the house.