The Ranch She Left Behind (10 page)

He tilted his head. “But a kind of a prison nonetheless?”

She almost protested. Not a prison, she almost said. A sanctuary. A harbor.

But for the first time she realized there might not be much difference.

“Ruth never intended that. But yes, a prison, nonetheless.”

“And now you’re not eager to exchange one…cocoon for another. That’s why you won’t stay with your sisters.”

She nodded. “I’ve promised myself I’ll do this on my own. I know it’ll be hard. I haven’t lived in Silverdell since I was eleven—the year my mother died. Even being back here, where so many of my memories are unhappy ones, is difficult. But you can’t run away from the past forever, can you? You can ignore it. But that’s not the same thing as making it go away.”

His smile had faded, leaving his handsome face quite serious. He looked, for the first time, like the label Jenny had given him: a widower. A man who had lost his wife, maybe had his heart broken and his future shattered.

“No.” He shook his head. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”

Perhaps she shouldn’t have let the conversation turn so melancholy. She tried to smile a little, to move past the strange emotion that had seemed to pass over him like a shadow.

“So anyhow…I’ve made a solemn vow to myself. For one year—or for as long as it takes to check off everything on my list—I’m doing this alone. No family, no sisters, no men. No crutches.”

He didn’t respond. He still seemed lost in his thoughts.

“Anyhow,” she said again, “that’s why I bought the duplex. And it’s why I kissed you this morning. I had just finished making my list as you came in. When you were so good to your daughter, I…”

The flush returned. She felt it inching up her neck. “I just thought, why not cross that one off right now?”

His pensive mood suddenly lifted, and he looked at her with that easy smile. Then he chuckled. “Why not, indeed?”

He shifted, leaning one trim hip against the railing. As he moved, the moonlight slid across his face, tracing the bow of his mouth and the strong angles of his jaw. She caught her breath. He was magnificent, and she remembered with startling clarity exactly how those lips had felt against her own.

A warmth bloomed deep inside, and she had to look away or she would be as easy to read as a book.

A dirty book.

“I know you’re probably wondering what kind of crazy landlady you’ve gotten stuck with,” she said quickly. “But I want to assure you it’ll never happen again.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” One corner of his mouth tugged up. “Why? Because you’ve finished everything on your list?”

“No.” She shook her head, laughing. “I’ve hardly checked anything off yet. It’s just that it’s not exactly the professional way to act with your tenant. And besides, the rest of the list is…”

“Less exciting? Less…interactive?”

She scanned his face, grateful for his lighthearted tone. How did he seem to know exactly what to say so that she wouldn’t feel like an idiot? Laughing was the perfect response. Her behavior had been ridiculous. She knew it, and he knew it, and this way it became a silly joke they shared—not a source of embarrassment that would stand between them, making even a quick hello in the driveway awkward.

“Relatively boring,” she said. But then she remembered number twelve.
Make love in a sailboat.

No way was she going to share that. It would probably scare him so badly he’d move out in the morning, leaving her with no one to pay the rent.

“Well, if there’s any way I can help…” His eyes were teasing her. “I know some great places to stay near Mount Everest, if that’s on your list.”

“Absolutely not!” She tried to imagine herself tackling such an adventure. She, who was struggling to handle one night in a comfortable living room in her own hometown. “This is the baby steps list. I’m starting very small. Unless you know how to juggle, or where to get a really good tattoo of a bluebird.”

“Just so happens I do,” he said. He lifted a hand sadly. “Unfortunately, it’s near Mount Everest.”

They both laughed softly, and Penny thought maybe, in spite of the difficult start, things would work out. She also thought maybe she could sleep.

“Dad?” A stripe of lamplight fell across the deck as Max’s daughter opened the door to the kitchen. For both units, the kitchen was at the back. It had probably been one big kitchen, once upon a time.

“Hey, Ellen.” Max turned toward his daughter with a smile. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”

“I can’t sleep.” The girl still sounded angry. Her posture was stiff, her face deliberately averted from her father. Her tone implied that her insomnia was his fault.

She gripped the doorknob so hard it swayed, making the stripe of light contract and expand, then contract again. “What are you
doing
out here, anyhow?”

“I’m talking to Ms. Wright. You haven’t properly met, have you? You were out playing when she came home.”

“I know her,” the girl said sullenly, scraping her bare foot against the threshold as if she had gum on her sole. “Dad. It’s really late.”

And then, with just enough noise to show her irritation, but not enough to invite Max’s wrath, she retreated inside and shut the door. The deck fell back into silvery moonlight.

Max groaned softly under his breath.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Ellen lost her mother last year. She hasn’t…she hasn’t found her way out of that yet.”

“I understand.” And Penny did. She understood so well she could almost feel the knife that was still lodged in Ellen Thorpe’s broken heart. “How old is she?”

“Eleven.” He rubbed his eyes. “Eleven going on eighteen.”

“I was eleven when my mother died,” Penny said. “But because I had two older, protective sisters, I was more like eleven going on six.”

He lowered his hand, smiling. “I wish. Ellen’s an only child, and I haven’t been around enough these past few years to be much help to her now. All her friends are back in Chicago. She basically thinks I’m the devil, dragging her down to Living Hell, Colorado.”

Poor Ellen. She should meet Rowena. Ro had been that same kind of kid—eternally angry, always defiant, always asking for trouble. Ro would know what to say to her, so that Ellen would know she wasn’t alone.

But Penny didn’t want to suggest a meeting between Ellen and Rowena—or anything else, for that matter. She’d already overstepped the boundaries of professional interaction between landlady and tenant. By about a mile.

It was time to go in, time to face that blow-up mattress.

“The first night’s the hardest,” Penny said, talking to herself as much as to him. “It’ll get better from here.”

CHAPTER FIVE

P
ENNY
WASN’T
ORDINARILY
the suspicious type, but she had a bad feeling as she arrived at Bell River for the emergency lunch Rowena called a couple of days later.

Something smelled fishy—and it wasn’t just the outdoor cookout underway for the guests. Why today? What was the rush? Her sisters knew she was crazy busy. Her furniture had arrived yesterday, and it would probably be another two days, at least, before she was fully settled.

But Ro had insisted. Couldn’t wait. That’s when Penny knew she had an agenda. As she let herself in the back door, smiling at strangers she passed on the porch, she crossed her fingers and hoped she wasn’t in for another argument about why she wouldn’t move back to the ranch.

She had to ask three of the college-kid servers where to find Rowena or Bree before someone was sure. “In the back, in the new wing. They’re working through lunch, I think,” the final young man said as he hauled a huge tray of lemonade pitchers out to the cookout.

The new wing. That had been added since Penny was last here, though of course she’d been sent the plans for approval. The wing was where Rowena, Dallas and Alec lived, and it had been closed off from the rest of the house for privacy.

She imagined the blueprint, mapping it in her head to be sure she could get there without going into the front foyer. Oh, of course she could. If she just went back outside, then around the side…

She didn’t try to talk herself out of taking the long way. Someday, maybe, her Risk-it List would include “walking into Bell River through the front door.”

But not today.

When she reached the private quarters, the small dining table was already set for lunch. It glowed festively, all blues and yellows, with a little autumn orange tossed in. It looked more like a party than a business meeting, and her suspicion index rose another notch.

When she saw Ro and Bree, whispering together as they studied a large triptych display—something Alec might have used to enter the science fair—she knew she’d been set up. They were quite clearly plotting something. Pictures and index cards and charts had been taped to the board, and one of the columns was conspicuously labeled
Penny.

“Okay, you two.” Penny paused in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. Her sisters looked so much like naughty children, with their heads bent, whispering and giggling, that she didn’t have the heart to be angry, but she tried to sound as if she were. “What is going on?”

Ro and Bree looked over their shoulders, twin guilty smiles on their faces. And then, with a grand sweep, they separated, revealing the board.

“Tah-dum!” Bree’s voice sounded about fifteen, and almost breathless. “Behold…I have a wedding date!”

“What?” Penny rushed in, so that she could see the board up close. Sure enough, the columns included items like “pictures,” “flowers,” “food” and “favors.” “You’ve set the date? When?”

“Saturday, September seventh. Almost exactly one month from today.” Bree widened her eyes, as if the idea slightly frightened her. “I figured, now that you’re here, and we can all be together, maybe I should just break down and let it happen.”

Ro laughed, plopping onto one of the chairs. “And thank heaven she did! He’s been going crazy, and frankly, he’s been driving me crazy, too. If she hadn’t set a date pretty soon, we planned to chloroform her, stuff her in the trunk and let her wake up in Vegas.”

Bree looked sheepish—a vulnerable expression Penny had almost never seen on her ultracool sister’s face. Bree had always kept her feelings on ice—she’d earned the nickname “Ice Queen” as far back as junior high.

“But this is a good thing, right?” Penny smiled. “I mean, you love him, so…”

Ro groaned. “Don’t get her started. To listen to her, the man is a god. Apparently, every superlative in the dictionary is listed under Grayson Harper, and—”

“Oh, whatever. You should talk.” Bree’s fair skin showed every blush, and she was burning pink now. “Anyhow, that’s not the point. I just felt…I don’t know…as if I should spend more time getting to know him first. It’s only been a few months.”

She glanced at her sisters. “No one knows better than we do how dangerous a bad marriage can be. After all, Mom must have loved Dad at first, too, and see how that—”

“No, she didn’t.” Penny shook her head firmly. She wouldn’t let Bree lump her upcoming marriage in with the disaster that had belonged to Moira and Johnny Wright. “Not like you and Gray. You know why Mom married Johnny. It wasn’t because she’d fallen madly in love.”

A small silence blanketed the room. After a quiet second, Penny and Bree sat, too, and the three sisters stared at each other numbly. Penny knew they were all thinking the same thing.

A few months ago, Rowena had discovered that her DNA and Johnny Wright’s had nothing in common. Their mother, Moira Wright, must have been pregnant when she married Johnny. Pregnant with another man’s child. And that child had been Rowena.

Even though they’d always understood that their mother wasn’t in love with their father, and that she wasn’t faithful to him, either, this extra bombshell had been profoundly shocking. It forever altered their own biological relationship to one another. Rowena wasn’t technically a full sister.

Thank goodness, it hadn’t taken them long to realize that DNA didn’t matter. They had grown up together, and they loved each other, needed each other and trusted each other, as only sisters can do. Rowena had been the hardest to convince. All her innate insecurities had kicked in big-time, to the point that she wasn’t even sure she had a right to claim any of Johnny’s inheritance—the very ranch they all called home.

But eventually Ro, too, had understood that it didn’t matter to either Bree or Penny who her biological father was. In fact, they were happy for her, because this meant she didn’t have to continue living under the curse of sharing a murderer’s genes.

Whose genes she
did
share, though, seemed destined to remain a mystery. When Ro was reluctant to pursue the information further, Bree had hired a private detective to find out who Moira’s secret lover could possibly have been.

Bree had meant well, hoping only to provide her sister with the sense of belonging she’d never known. But Ro had taken her interference badly—at least at first. With difficulty, they’d mended that fence. Still, Ro hadn’t ever opened the packet containing her birth father’s identity.

At least as far as Penny knew.

“Did you ever—” Penny wasn’t sure how to ask. She wasn’t sure she
should
ask. “I guess if you’d looked at the report, you would have mentioned it…”

“I haven’t looked,” Rowena said quietly.

Penny took her hand across the table. “You will, Ro. When you’re ready.”

Once, Rowena would have snatched hers away rather than admit she needed comfort, but the new Rowena gripped back with warmth and gratitude. “I know I will,” she said. “It’s just that the idea of knowing, for sure, is…absolutely terrifying.”

“In case he’s…”

“In case he’s no better than Dad.” Ro shrugged. “Or no more interested in knowing his daughter. No more interested in
me.
”

Penny nodded. Though it was hard to imagine a gene pool worse than that of a murderer, she knew that, after a lifetime of rejection from Johnny, Rowena was afraid to risk more disappointment and pain.

Watching her sister closely like this, Penny realized that Ro looked terribly tired. Dark circles had formed under her intensely green eyes, and she was even thinner than usual, her personal giveaway that something was wrong.