To Wear His Ring (24 page)

Lucy did look up at him then. His eyes glowed with regret. “All through this last week, I’ve thought only of you. Your loyalty and compassion, and how you’ve learned to cope. Your strength and your wonderful bond with this land. Made my goals seem petty and mean.” His voice softened. “And I was missing you bad and feeling like a heel because I’d run out on you, accusing you of something I knew you weren’t and could never be.”

He flexed and curled his hands. “I was a coward, Lucy. Easier to walk away, close a deal, blame you for something you didn’t do, than face the fact that I’m in love with you.”

Lucy’s heart stopped. She dug her nails into her palms to feel the scrape of something real. Forced her scurrying mind to slow, to comprehend. He loved her? Hope reared up again.

“Make me a better man, Lucy.” His smooth, dark voice curled around her, at once soothing and agitating.

“Give me some of that compassion and loyalty of yours. I don’t want my son not to talk to me for twenty years.”

Her heart jerked again. How was it possible to still be standing while racked with so many different emotions?

So she sat down with a plop. “You are a good man, Ethan,” she whispered. “You’re kind. You know how to get the best out of people. You understand how I feel about Summerhill, and you’ve helped me to stand and fight and actually believe I can do it.”

“You can do it. You have done it.” He pointed at the papers on Tom’s desk. “But you don’t have to do it on your own.” He squatted down in front of her and took her hand. “I’m not doing anything for the next fifty years. Let me help you. Let’s make this our business, Lucy. Do it with me.”

“I—I don’t know what to say.” She stared down at him, searched his face and found honesty and sincerity.

“Say you accept my apology. Say you love me, too. Say you’ll marry me.”

Her eyes blurred. When was the killer blow going to come? Things like this didn’t happen in real life.

“I was coming to tell you,” she blurted, “the other day, before you left, that I love you. That we’d work it out somehow.”

He pressed her hand to his lips. “I’m sorry I ruined it. Say it now. And say yes.”

She shook her head in wonder. “You would live here with me, without owning a bit of it?”

“You and Summerhill come as a package deal, evidently.” They smiled at each other. “Don’t care where we live. We could build up on the gorge, if you like.”

“No electricity. No water. No access.”

“It’s what I do, Lucy.”

She nodded, eyes shining.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I have property all over the world.”

“You do?” Her face fell when he nodded. “But then I’d be like a trophy wife.”

Ethan threaded his fingers through hers, kissed her hand again. “You own this incredible land. And if you say yes to the lease, soon you will own the best, most productive high-country station in New Zealand.”

She looked down into his eyes. There it was: a warmth and reassurance she could bathe in. A respect and admiration hope could flourish in.

He stood, taking her hands and pulling her up. “Say yes, Lucy.”

“What am I saying yes to again?” She could almost hear the iron chains around her torso shattering. Hope, love streaked through the ruins, making her giddy.

“Yes, you accept my apology?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, you love me, too?”

“Oh, yes!”

“Yes, you’ll marry me?”

She hesitated. “
If
you invite your father to the wedding.”

He nodded, smiling. “And yes to the lease. I need something to occupy my time while you’re off with your trophy wives.”

“I suppose I could put my X to that.” She sighed.

Ethan moved back a step. “Almost forgot.” He took something from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “For you.”

They were tickets of some kind.

“He is a world-renowned expert on learning disabilities. The seminar is in Sydney next month, which gives you time to organize an assessment beforehand.”

Really, she was touched, but old habits die hard. She gave a mock sigh. “Oh, Ethan. But there are lots more exciting things to do in Sydney than some boring old—”

He held up his index finger. “We’ll make it a brief stopover on the way to our honeymoon.” He slid his arms around her waist. “It’s time to front up, Lucy. Stop pretending it doesn’t exist and doesn’t matter.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay then. If you insist.”

She put her arms around him, too, laying her head on his chest. She felt oddly quiet, full—cherished. For the first time in a long time.

Through the window, she saw the line of trees, a guard of honor leading to the river. And beyond, the lofty ridges and steep spurs of the far off Alps, wreathed in snow.

She might not have the best business head in the world, but Lucy McKinlay knew a good deal when she saw one.

By

For Gail Springer, dear friend, who never let me give her a book, but rather bought every one I wrote and then mailed them to me to autograph – SAE enclosed! Your humour, support and encouragement was unfailing and will cheer me always. And for Brandi, Shawn and Jeremy Springer, Gail’s true loves.

C
louds hovered above the North Dakota prairie like a handme-down quilt—cozy and welcome at first, oppressively weighty if you’d been under them awhile.

Annette Owens lifted her face to the gunmetal sky and dared it to
do
something. Almost immediately, a brash wind rose in reply, whipping the dark curls back from her face.

Unclipping the barrette at the nape of her neck, Nettie shook her hair free and laughed. “Touché,” she commended, filling her lungs with the crisp, rushing air.

So often lately she felt just like this sky—heavy and stuck. There were times when the desire to change, to…
burst free
became almost unbearable.

Gazing across farmland as achingly endless as the unpatterned sky, Nettie frowned. What would happen, she wondered, if she mentioned the keen restlessness she’d been feeling to anyone she knew—to a friend in town, perhaps, or to one of her sisters?

A smile—wry, self-effacing and just a bit naughty—curved her lips.

“They’d call up Doc Brody, and he’d prescribe enough tranquilizers to sedate the World Wrestling Federation.”

A woman with her recent history could not go wild and crazy, after all, without the neighbors starting a phone tree. Not in Kalamoose, North Dakota, anyhow.

And that was, she supposed, understandable. For the past two years, she hadn’t stepped foot outside the city limits of her small town, and the city limits of Kalamoose were, to say the least, cramped. For a year before that, she had barely stepped foot outside the clapboard house that stood as a stalwart haven behind her.

Agoraphobia—secondary to post-traumatic stress—that was the official diagnosis of her “condition.” In layman’s terms, that meant she was afraid. Of everything.

Taking several steps forward, Nettie watched her feet make imprints in the tall grass and pondered the facts.

Everything.
Yeah, that about covered it.

She was afraid of what had already happened and might happen again and of things that had never happened and probably never would. She worried about her sisters and herself. She worried about her friends and their farms and about what would happen if the price of wheat fell. She worried about hurricanes in the east and earthquakes on the west coast.

And lately, she’d been worrying that she worried
too damn much.

She hadn’t always been this way. Once, she had been more like her sisters, with Sara’s courage and Lilah’s daring. There had been a time when the world beyond Kalamoose had seemed as tempting as an ice cream in the middle of summer, and Nettie had been ravenous for every delicious bite.

The wind stirred around her, its boldness invigorating. Nettie stood still, spreading her arms to the gathering gusts. When the first drops of rain pelted the ready earth, she began to run.

Her feet were bare, the grass was cool and tender and her summer skirt swirled around her legs as they pumped. She jogged the first steps, then picked up speed until all she could hear was the wind rushing against her ears and the echo-y pounding of her feet against the hard ground.

The rain began falling in slashes, mingling with her perspiration, and Nettie felt her skin cool even as her body continued to heat. She ran like a wild thing, like one of the antelope that roamed the Dakota prairie, refusing to stop even when the toll
on her body became uncomfortable, slowing only as she approached the rutted dirt road that marked the end of her property.

Bending forward, she put her hands on her knees. Her shoulders heaved; her breath came in staccato gasps that burned the back of her throat. Her heart pounded the way it did when she had one of those episodes her doctors in Chicago had told her were panic attacks.

For three years, if anyone had asked her what she wanted, Nettie would have answered, “to stop being afraid.”

But life, she had learned since, refused to be purchased so cheaply—with the absence of something. And that’s what she wanted again: Life. The rain on her face and the wind all around, and her body on fire.

She had no idea, anymore, how to make it happen, or if she even could. It had been so long…

As the rain softened to a drizzle, Nettie straightened and looked up. A pocket of sky was beginning to clear. Shimmying through the clouds were twin arcs of translucent color, as if someone had taken a paintbrush and slashed watercolor across the sky.

A wondering smile curved Nettie’s lips. Well, what do you know?

She laughed. A double rainbow. Now, who could ignore a sign like that?

Coffee and grease. Those were the first two aromas Chase Reynolds noticed when he entered the small country diner at quarter past eight Thursday evening…or was it Friday?

Having been on the road, driving, for most of the last three days, Chase was beginning to lose track of time and distance. At the moment all he knew was that he was in North Dakota, and he was starving.

The half-lit neon sign he’d spied from the road said Good Eats. If he’d learned one thing on his impromptu flight across the back roads of America, it was never to eat anyplace with “Grandma’s” or “Good” in its name. “Grandma” inevitably turned out to be an ex-mess-hall cook in a love affair with white gravy. Unfortunately, five cups of coffee and a stale chocolate
muffin from a gas station mini-mart outside Fargo had carried Chase as far as they were going to.

“Hi, honey. You want the counter or a booth?” A middleaged blond waitress, whose breast pocket read Gloria in threeinch-tall embroidered white letters, approached him with a menu in one hand and a glass coffee pot in the other.

Falling into habit, Chase took quick note of all entrances and exits off the dining area, pinpointing where he could sit to maintain a view of the door without being immediately noticeable himself. When he realized what he was doing, a wry quirk curled his lips. The art of defensive dining. It came automatically these days—a swift, clever assessment of his surroundings. It hardly seemed necessary in a backwater burg like this, however, which was, after all, why he had chosen to drive through backwater burgs: the blessed anonymity. Most of the tiny towns through which he’d passed hadn’t seen a major newspaper since Reagan beat Mondale.

Turning his smile on the waitress, he requested a booth, then followed her to a spot by the window. There was only one other party present, a pair of men who were, at the moment, studying the Porsche Chase had parked out front. Harmless. They could look at the car all they wanted as long as they didn’t recognize him. Choosing the side of the booth that faced the door, he sat with his back to the other men.

Accepting the laminated pink menu Gloria handed him, he ordered the first thing he saw, requested a cup of coffee and hunkered over it as the waitress moved off to place his order.

What he needed, aside from a hot meal, was about a week’s worth of uninterrupted sleep.

With the desire for sanctuary uppermost in his mind, he had decided to take an old friend up on a long-standing offer to visit a two-hundred-acre barley farm in the “wilds” of central North Dakota.

A wry smile quirked Chase’s lips. As hideouts went, the farm ought to do; so far even
he
couldn’t find it.

Selecting a package of soda crackers from a wicker basket on the table, he opened it neatly and ate. Once he fueled up—body and vehicle—he’d get back on the road. When he arrived at his destination, he’d sleep as long as his racing mind allowed, and
then, God willing, he’d be able to figure out the next step in a game plan he was, after all, making up as he went along.

“Hello!” Stepping over the threshold of the Kalamoose County Jail, Nettie attempted to close the heavy door while she balanced a china dessert dish, a steaming mug with The Fuzz written across it in gold lettering, and a bundle of newly laundered sheets that were folded and tucked under her arm. She glanced around. It was after suppertime on Friday evening, but the sheriff, who’d been at work since early that morning, was nowhere in sight.

“Anybody home?” Nettie called as she stepped farther into the room.

After a few seconds, a figure emerged from the storeroom. Arms full of files, the sheriff greeted Nettie with a pleased smile and a bald, “What did you bring me?”

Nettie shook her head. “No one will ever be able to accuse you of standing on ceremony.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” The files hit the desk with a thunk and slid atop other papers already obscuring the wood surface. “Everyone knows you got all the manners in the family.”

Clearing a space atop the desk, Nettie deposited the hot coffee and a healthy serving of peach pie. She grinned as Sara grabbed the dessert and took an unabashedly hearty bite, leaning against the edge of the desk to eat.

“Yum.”

Annette Owens’s eldest sister, Sara, had been the sheriff of Kalamoose, North Dakota, since their uncle Harmon Owens had passed away two years ago. Being Uncle Harm’s deputy had given their neighbors plenty of time to get used to Sara wearing a badge, and though she was only thirty—and a woman—no one in the otherwise conservative town seemed to have any complaints.

“Heaven,” Sara murmured, savoring the dessert. “Net, your baking is getting as good as Mama’s ever was.”

“Thanks.” Nettie accepted the compliment with a smile and a rueful shrug. She baked when she felt tense or blue. Since moving back to Kalamoose, she’d spent so much time with her hands in flour, she felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Nettie was five years younger than Sara, but eons different from her sister in both appearance and manner. While Nettie had inherited her grandmother O’Malley’s fall of black curls, fair skin and round curves, Sara took after the Owens side of the family. She was tall and reed-thin, with an approach toward life and people that was as bold and unabashed as her fiery-red hair.

Watching Sara purr over the dessert like a cat lapping cream, Nettie shook her head. “How is it you never gain weight?”

Sara’s slim shoulders lifted inside her khaki uniform. “Pact with the devil. Hey!” She stabbed the air with her fork as Nettie idly began stacking the lose pages scattered across the desk. “Don’t mess up those papers.”

Nettie raised the thin sheaf she’d collected. “These were in order?”

“Well, I know what’s there. I’m looking for something.”

“What?”

Sara reached for her coffee, blew and took a big swallow. “An all-points bulletin I got last week about—Wait a sec.” She cut her explanation short as a police radio crackled to life.

“Watchdog One to Red Sheriff. Come in, Red Sheriff. Over.”

The reedy voice of Ernie Karpoun, owner of Good Eats, the local diner, sputtered over the radio.

Nettie arched a brow. “Watchdog One?” Ernie was five-feet-four inches when he wore his lifts, and in all his seventy-two years he’d never weighed more than a hundred and fifteen pounds. Gazing pointedly at the copper hair Sara usually slicked into a low bun, she said, “And what did he call you? Red Sheriff?” She grinned. “Catchy.”

“Oh, knock it off! I told him a dozen times not to do that,” Sara grumbled. Taking her plate with her, she sat down in front of the radio and pressed a button. “What is it, Ernie?” No response. She rolled her eyes and hit the button again. “Tenfour, Watchdog, what have you got?”

Nettie laughed. She’d been back in town three years now, but there were still times when she forgot how small this place really was.

“What I’ve got is a pack of trouble ready to happen. I think you’d better warm up the squad car, Sheriff. Over.”

“Oh, yeah?” Meeting her sister’s eyes, Sara shook her head.
Trouble at the Good Eats generally meant someone had discovered the french fries came frozen. “What’s up?”

“You know that fella who’s been robbing banks out toward Fargo? Over.”

Nettie sat on the edge of the desk, glad she’d decided to venture over to the jail tonight. It beat hanging around an empty house. With Lilah in California and Sara at work most nights since her deputy moved to Minot, evenings gave Nettie too much time to think.

Sara leaned over to scoop up another bite of pie. “Yeah?”

“Our bank could be hit next. Over.”

“Really?” A tiny smile curved Sara’s lips.

Nettie swung her legs as she listened to the exchange. This was far more interesting than a rerun of “Law and Order.”

For the past several weeks, the evening news had been peppered with stories about a man the media had dubbed the “Gentleman Caller,” a tall, well-spoken male between thirty and forty who had robbed no fewer than twelve branches of the Bank of North Dakota, relieving them of hefty five-figure sums each time. According to eyewitnesses, the Gentleman Caller was polite, worked alone and never resorted to violence, at least not yet.

“What makes you think he’s interested in us, Ernie?” Sara asked, lining up another big spoonful of pie. “Far as I know, the Gentleman Caller prefers savings and loans in bigger cities. We’ve got a tiny branch of the Bank of North Dakota. I doubt he’s interested in us.”

“Yeah? Then what’s he doing in Kalamoose? Over.”

Sara nearly choked. “Explain that,” she ordered when she stopped coughing.

“That fella is sitting here in my diner right now!” Ernie’s excitement came through loud and clear. “He come in about thirty minutes ago. I wasn’t sure it was him at first, but…Uh-oh. Gloria just waved to me. That’s our signal for when he’s gettin’ ready to leave. He ordered the chicken fried steak platter. It comes with mashed potatoes and corn—it’s a lot of food, you know—but he’s a quick eater, I noticed that right off the bat. Probably got used to eatin’ fast because he’s always on the run and lookin’ over his shoulder. Bet he swallows a lot of air—”

“Ernie!” Sara snapped. Nettie had one hand over her mouth,
trying to contain her laughter. “Tell me exactly why you think your customer could be the Gentleman Caller. What does he look like?”

“He looks like that drawing they had in the paper a couple weeks back. Kinda normally-like, you know. Gloria says he’s good lookin’. Got a few days’ growth on his face, probably for a disguise.”

Nettie was surprised to see Sara actually taking notes. “You’re not seriously considering this?” She shook her head. “Sara, that composite in the paper was so generic it could have been you.”