The Rancher & Heart of Stone (15 page)

“You might get somewhere with him if you stopped dressing out of thrift shops and wore a little makeup,” Ella chided.

“On my salary, all I can afford are clothes from thrift shops,” Keely said.

There was a hot silence. “Is that a dig at me?” Ella demanded, eyes flashing. “Because I give you a roof over your head and food to eat,” she added curtly. “You only have to do a little cooking and housework from time to time to earn your keep. That’s more than fair. I’m not obligated to dress you, as well!”

“I never said you were, Mother,” Keely replied.

“Don’t call me ‘Mother’!” Ella shot back, weaving a little in her chair. “I never wanted you in the first place. Your father was hot to have a son. He was disappointed when you turned out to be a girl, and I refused to get pregnant again. It ruined my waistline! It took me years to get my figure back!

“I wanted to give you up for adoption when you were eleven and your father divorced me, but he said he’d take you if I’d loan him enough money to open that game park. So I loaned him the money—which he never repaid, by the way—and he took you off my hands. He didn’t want you, either, Keely,” she added with a drunken smile. “Nobody wanted you. And nobody wants you now.”

“Ella,” Carly interrupted uneasily, “that’s harsh.” Keely’s face was as white as flour.

Ella blinked, as if she wasn’t quite aware of what she was saying. She stared blankly at Carly. “What’s harsh?”

Carly winced as Keely got to her feet and began clearing the table without saying a word.

She carried empty plates into the kitchen, trying desperately not to let the women see her cry. Behind her, she heard murmuring, which grew louder, and then her mother’s voice arguing. She went out into the cold night air in her shirtsleeves, tears pouring down her cheeks. She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the front yard, stopping at the railing that looked out over Comanche Wells, at the rolling pastureland and little oasis of deciduous trees that shaded the fenced land where purebred cattle grazed. It was a beautiful sight, with the air crisp and the moon shining on the leaves on the big oak tree that stood in the front yard, making it look as if the leaves had been painted silver. But Keely was blind to the beauty of it. She was sick to her stomach.

She heard the phone ring in the house, but she ignored it. First Boone’s fierce antagonism and the argument over Bailey and the ex-fiancée’s taunts the night before, and then her mother’s horrible assertions tonight. It was the worst two days of Keely’s recent life. She didn’t want to go back in. She wanted to stay out in the cold until she froze to death and the pain stopped.

“Keely?” Carly called from the back door. “It’s Clark Sinclair. He wants to speak to you.”

Keely hesitated for a moment. She turned and went back inside without meeting Carly’s eyes or looking toward the dining room where her mother sat finishing her drink.

She picked up the phone and said “Hello?” in a subdued tone.

“The old girl’s giving you hell, is she?” Clark mused. “How about going out? I know it’s late notice, but I just got in from Jacksonville and I want to talk to somebody. Winnie’s working late at dispatch, and God knows where Boone’s off to. How about it?”

“Oh, I’d really like that,” Keely said fervently.

“Need an escape plan, do we? I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I’ll be ready. I’ll wait for you on the front porch.”

“God, it must be bad over there tonight!” he exclaimed. “I’ll hurry, so you don’t catch cold.” He hung up. So did Keely.

“Got a date?” Ella drawled, coming to the doorway in a zigzag with her highball glass still in her hands. It was empty now. “Who’s taking you someplace?”

Keely didn’t answer her. She went down the hall to her room and closed and locked the door behind her.

* * *

“I
TOLD
YOU
it was a mistake to tell her that,” Carly said plaintively. “You’ll be sorry tomorrow when you sober up.”

“Mistake to tell her what?” Ella muttered. “I need another drink.”

“No. You need to go to bed and sleep it off. Come on.” Carly led her down the hall to her own bedroom, pushed her inside and closed the door behind them. “How could you tell her that, Ella?” she asked softly as she helped her friend down onto the big double bed with its expensive pink comforter.

“I don’t care,” Ella said defiantly. “She’s in my way. I don’t want her here. I never did.”

“She does all the housework and all the cooking,” Carly said in one of her rare moments of compassion. “She works all day and sometimes half the night for her boss, and then she comes home and works like a housekeeper. You don’t appreciate how much she does for you.”

“I could hire somebody to do all that.” Ella waved the idea away.

“Could you afford to pay them?” Carly retorted.

Ella frowned. She was hard put just to pay utilities and buy groceries. But she didn’t reply.

Carly eyed her quietly. “If you push her, she’ll leave. Then what will you do?”

“I’ll do my own housework and cooking,” Ella said grandly.

Carly shook her head. “Okay. It’s your life. But you’re missing out.”

“On what?” Ella muttered.

“On the only family you have,” Carly replied in a subdued tone. “I don’t have anybody,” she added. “My parents are dead. I had no siblings. I was married, but I was never able to have a child. My husband is dead, too. You have a child, and you don’t want her. I’d have given anything to have a child of my own.”

“You can have Keely,” Ella said, laughing. “I’ll give her to you.”

Carly moved toward the door. “You can’t give people away, Ella.” She looked back. “You don’t really have anybody, either.”

“I have men.” Ella laughed coldly. “I can have any man I want.”

“For a night,” her friend agreed. “Old age is coming up fast, for both of us. Do you really want to drive your only child away? She’ll marry someday and have children of her own. You won’t even be allowed to see your grandchildren.”

“I’m not having grandchildren,” Ella shot back. “I’m not going to be old. I’m only in my late thirties!”

Carly laughed. “You’re heading toward fifty, Ella,” she reminded her friend. “All the beauty treatments in the world aren’t going to change that.”

“I’ll have a face-lift,” the other woman returned. “I’ll sell more land to pay for it.”

That was unwise. Ella had already sold most of the land her family had left her. If she sold the rest, she was going to be hard-pressed just to pay bills. But Carly could see that it did no good to argue with her.

“Good night,” she told Ella.

Ella made a face at her, collapsed on the pillow and was asleep in seconds. Carly didn’t say anything else. She just closed the door.

* * *

K
EELY
PUT
ON
a pair of brown corduroy slacks and a beige turtleneck sweater and ran a brush through her thick, straight blond hair. She hoped Clark didn’t have an expensive date in mind. She couldn’t dress for it. She threw an old beige Berber coat over her clothes and grabbed her purse.

True to his word, Clark pulled up in the yard in exactly ten minutes, driving his sports car.

Carly came out of Ella’s bedroom just as Keely was leaving.

“Is she asleep?” Keely asked dully.

“Yes.” Carly was worried, and it showed. “She should never have said that to you,” she added. “She loved you when you were a baby. You wouldn’t remember, you were too little, but I do. She was so happy...”

“So happy that she now treats me this way?” Keely asked, hurt.

Carly sighed. “She was different after your father left. She started drinking then, and it’s just gotten worse year after year.” She saw that she wasn’t getting through to the younger woman. “There are things you don’t know about your parents, Keely,” she said gently.

“Such as?”

Carly shook her head. “That’s not my place to tell you.” She turned away. “I’m going home. She’ll sleep until morning.”

“Lock the door when you leave, please,” Keely said.

“I’m leaving now. You can lock it.” Carly got her purse and stopped just as the door closed behind the two women.

“I’m as bad as she is, sometimes,” the older woman confessed quietly. “I shouldn’t make fun of the way you are, and neither should she. But you don’t fight back, Keely. You must learn to do that. You’re nineteen. Don’t spend the rest of your life knuckling under, just to keep peace.”

Keely frowned. “I don’t.”

“You do, baby,” Carly said softly. She sighed. “Ella and I are a bad influence on you. What you need to do is get an apartment of your own and live your own life.”

Keely searched the other woman’s eyes. “I’ve thought about that....”

“Do it,” Carly advised. “Get out while you can.”

Keely frowned. “What do you mean?”

Carly hesitated. “I’ve said too much already. Enjoy your date. Good night.”

* * *

C
ARLY
WALKED
OFF
to her small import car. Keely watched her for a minute before she went down the steps to where Clark was waiting in his sleek Lincoln. He leaned across and opened the door for her.

He grinned. “I’d come around and open it, but I’m too lazy,” he teased.

She smiled back. He was like a kinder version of Boone. Clark had the same black hair and dark eyes, but he was a little shorter than his brother, and his hair was wavy—unlike Boone’s, which was straight.

“Neither one of you resemble your sister,” she remarked.

He shrugged. “Winnie got our mother’s coloring. She doesn’t like that. We hated our mother.”

“So Winnie said.”

He glanced at her as they pulled out of her mother’s yard. “We share the feeling, don’t we, Keely?” he probed. “Your mother is a walking headache.”

She nodded. “She was in high form tonight,” she said wearily. “Drunk and vicious.”

“What was Carly saying to you?”

“That I have to learn to stand up to her,” she said. “Surprising, isn’t it, coming from Mother’s best friend? The two of them make fun of me all the time.”

Clark glanced at her, and he didn’t smile. “She’s right about that. You need to stand up to my brother, too. Boone walks all over people who won’t fight back.”

She shivered. “I’m not taking on your brother,” she said. “He’s scary.”

“Scary? Boone?”

She averted her gaze to the window. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

He was disconcerted by her remark, but he pulled himself together quickly. “Sure! I just heard that the Chinese are launching another probe toward the moon.”

She gave him a wry look.

“You don’t like astronautics,” he murmured. “Okay. Politics?”

She groaned out loud. “I’m so sick of presidential candidates that I’m thinking of moving to someplace where nobody runs for public office.”

“The Amazon jungle comes to mind.”

Her eyes narrowed. “If I went far enough in, I might escape television and the internet.”

“I can see the headlines now,” he said with mock horror. “Local vet technician eaten by jaguar in darkest jungles of South America!”

“No self-respecting jaguar would want to eat a human being,” she retorted. “Especially one who eats anchovies on pizza.”

“I didn’t know you liked anchovies.”

She sighed. “I don’t. But when I was little, I discovered that if I ordered them, my dad would let me have more than two slices of pizza.”

He laughed. “Your father must have been a card.”

“He was.” She smiled reminiscently. “Animals loved him. I’ve seen him feed tigers right out of his hand without ever being bitten. Even snakes liked him.”

“That animal park must have been something else.”

“It was wonderful,” she replied. “We all loved it. But there was a tragic accident, and Dad lost everything.”

“Somebody got eaten?”

“Almost,” she replied, unwilling to say more. “There was a lawsuit.”

“And he lost,” he guessed.

She didn’t correct him. “It destroyed him.”

He frowned. “Did he commit suicide?”

She hesitated. This was Clark. He was her friend. She knew that he’d never tell Boone or even Winnie without asking her first. “He’s not dead,” she said quietly. “I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing. He developed a...a drinking problem.” She couldn’t tell him the whole truth. She glanced at him worriedly. “You won’t tell anybody?”

“Of course not.”

She studied her purse in her lap, turning it restlessly in her hands. “He left me with Mother and took off. That was six years ago, and I haven’t heard a word from him. For all I know, he could be dead.”

“You loved him.”

She nodded. “Very much.” She moved restlessly.

“What is it?”

She felt the pain of her mother’s words go right through her. “My mother said that she never wanted me. I ruined her figure,” she added with a hollow laugh.

“Good God! And I thought our mother was bad!” He stopped at a traffic light heading into Jacobsville and looked toward her. “Isn’t it a hell of a shame that we can’t choose our parents?”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed. “I was just sick when she said it. I should have guessed. She didn’t like me when I left, and she liked me even less when Dad dumped me on her, and now I think she hates me. I’ve tried to please her, keeping house and cooking and cleaning, but she doesn’t appreciate it. She grudges me the very food I eat.” She turned toward him. “I’ve got to get out of that house,” she said desperately. “I can’t take it anymore.”

“Mrs. Brown runs a very respectable boardinghouse,” he began.

She grimaced. “Yes, and charges a respectable price for rooms. I can’t afford it on my salary.”

“Hit Bentley up for a raise,” he suggested.

“Oh, right, I’ll do that first thing tomorrow,” she drawled.

“You’re scared of Bentley. You’re scared of Boone.” He pulled out into traffic. “You’re even scared of your mother. You have to step up and claim your own life, Keely.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t go through life being afraid of people. Especially people like my brother and Bentley Rydel. Do you know why they’re scary?” he persisted. “It’s because it’s hard work to talk to them. They’re both basically introverts who find it difficult to relate to other people. Consequently they’re quiet and somber and they don’t go out of their way to join in activities. They’re loners.”