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Debi could feel herself growing pale. The second this man said the words, she remembered the awful scenario and how it had drained her.
Her mouth felt dry as she asked, “How did you...?” Her voice trailed off as she looked at Jackson incredulously.
“Your ring finger,” he answered, nodding at her left hand. “There’s a slight tan line around it, like you’d had a ring on there for a while—until just recently.”
Debi nodded and looked down at her left ring finger. It still felt strange not to see her wedding ring there. She hadn’t taken the ring off since the day she’d gotten married, not even to clean it. She’d found a way to accomplish that while the ring remained on her finger. But now there seemed to be no point in continuing to wear it. If she did, it would not only be perpetuating a lie, it would also remind her that she had wasted all those years of her life, loving a man who was more a fabrication than real flesh and blood.
The John Kincannon she had loved hadn’t existed, except perhaps in her mind.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, she couldn’t help thinking. There had been signs. Why hadn’t she allowed them to register?
She supposed the answer lay in the fact that she just couldn’t admit to herself that she could have been so wrong about a person for so many years. A person she had given up so much for. A person who had inadvertently caused her to sacrifice her parents’ lives. So when warning signs had raised their heads, she’d ignored them, pretending that they didn’t exist. Whenever she found herself stumbling across another warning sign, she’d just pretended that it was a little rough patch and everything was all right. How wrong she’d been.
Debi cleared her throat and sat a little straighter in her seat.
“I don’t see how that would matter, one way or another,” she finally replied, sounding somewhat removed and formal.
Jackson pretended not to take notice of the shift in her voice and demeanor. “Oh, it does,” he assured her. “It does. I’m not trying to pry into your private life. I just want to identify all the pieces that make up your brother’s life. If your marriage broke up because of him, then Ryan might have that much more guilt he’s carrying around.”
The laugh that suddenly left her lips had a sad, hollow sound. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, Mr., um, White Eagle—”
“Jackson,” he corrected.
That felt easier for her. As if they were in this together.
“Jackson,” she repeated, then continued with what she wanted to tell him. “If Ryan feels responsible for my marriage falling apart, to him that’s a very good thing. He and John never got along and he never really liked him. The feeling, I’m sorry to say, was mutual. If anything, that’s the one thing Ryan feels good about,” she said ruefully. “Getting John to leave our house.”
She seemed very sure of that, Jackson observed, but for his part, he wasn’t, not at this point. “You might be surprised.”
“Surprised? Mr. Wh— Jackson, I would be completely flabbergasted if this didn’t thrill my brother to death,” she said, waving her hand dismissively as if literally pushing this subject to the side. There were more pressing things she wanted to get straight. “Exactly how does your program work?” she asked.
Jackson had always favored an economy of words. “Very simply, we put the boys to work.”
“In other words, free labor.”
“No, not free,” he corrected. “They earn a small salary. The exact amount depends on how well they do the job they’re assigned.”
Everything he was talking about was entirely new to her. “You grade their work?”
“Sure,” he freely admitted. Seeing that she was having trouble digesting what he was telling her, he decided to try to clarify things for her. “Let me give you an example. If the job is to clean out the horse stalls and he does the bare minimum, his ‘pay’ reflects that. If, on the other hand, the stall is clean, there’s fresh hay put out, fresh water in the trough, that kind of thing, then his pay reflects that. It gives them an incentive to work hard and do well. It also teaches them that doing a good job pays off. We want them feeling good about what they accomplish and, by proxy, good about themselves.
“What we’re hoping for, long-term, is that the guys get used to always doing their best and trying their hardest.”
“Why horses?” she asked.
The question seemed to come out of nowhere.
Jackson smiled, more to himself than at her. His first response was one he didn’t voice. He was simply passing on the method that his uncle had used with him. For the most part, though he dealt with tough cases and teens that came with extrawide chips on their shoulder, Jackson was a private person who would have been content just to keep to himself. But after his uncle’s death, he’d felt compelled to take his uncle’s lessons and methods and put them to use.
Still, that didn’t mean baring his own soul—or parts thereof—to someone he really didn’t know.
“Easy,” he answered. “I work with what I have. Besides, it’s been proven that people bond more easily with animals than they do with other people. Having a hand in the care, feeding and grooming of these horses brings order and discipline into the boys’ lives. It teaches them patience—eventually,” he specified, recalling that the horse Sam had given him to work with had seemed to be every bit as headstrong and difficult to deal with as he was at the time. It had been a battle of wills before he finally emerged victorious.
The greatest day of his life had been when he finally got Wildfire to respond to his key signals. He’d felt high on that for a week. After that, he no longer had any desire to seek out artificial ways of escape—he’d found it in working with Wildfire.
Debi leaned forward, folding her hands before her—making him think of an earnest schoolgirl. “Do you think you can help my brother?”
He didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, he had a question of his own first. “Is going along for a joy ride in the car his friend stole the worst thing he’s ever done?”
“Yes,” she answered with conviction, then realized that she had no right to sound that sure. “To the best of my knowledge,” she qualified in a slightly less certain voice.
“Then it’s my opinion that Ryan can be turned around,” he told her. “Since you’re here, I’ll need to have you fill out some forms. Nothing unusual, just education level, how many run-ins with the police he’s had, how long he’s had an attitude problem, any allergies, medical conditions, where we can get in contact with you, that sort of thing,” he explained, opening a deep drawer on the right side of his desk.
Digging into it, he found what he was looking for and placed the forms in question on his desk while he shut the drawer.
“To answer your last question, I’ll be close by while Ryan’s here at the ranch,” she told him as she accepted the papers he handed her.
For the most part, guardians asked to be called and then returned home, wherever home happened to be. “Define ‘close by,’” he requested.
It was Debi’s turn to smile.
Even the slight shift in her lips seemed to bring out a radiance, just for a moment, that hadn’t been noticeable before. Jackson caught himself staring and forced himself to look away.
An unsettled feeling in his gut lingered a little longer.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to be parked on some hillside, looking down and watching his—and your—every move if that’s what you’re worried about,” she told Jackson.
“I just thought it might be uncomfortable for you to sleep in your car,” he said. She had no idea whether or not he was kidding or serious. It shouldn’t matter whether or not she was uncomfortable or not. “If you need a place to stay, Miss Joan is always willing to open her doors and temporarily take someone in.”
“Miss Joan?” Debi repeated quizzically. The setup he mentioned sounded suspiciously like a brothel to her. When had she gotten so distrusting? she wondered. It had crept up on her when she hadn’t been paying attention.
Jackson nodded. “She runs the local diner and is kind of like a self-appointed mother hen to the town in general.”
There was a fondness in his voice whenever he mentioned the outspoken older woman. Miss Joan had a no-nonsense way of talking and a big heart made out of pure marshmallow. When Sam had taken him under his wing, his uncle and Miss Joan were seeing one another. The relationship continued for a couple of years before they unexpectedly just went their separate ways. At the time, he was curious as to why they had split up, but when he brought the matter up, Sam merely gave him a long, penetrating look and said nothing. Any attempt to get information from Miss Joan went nowhere, as well. Miss Joan wasn’t one to talk about herself at all.
Consequently, he’d never found out what had gone wrong, but whenever he did find time to stop by the diner for a cup of coffee, Miss Joan always told him it was on the house, adding that Sam would have disapproved if she charged him for it.
“Why would I stay with her?” Debi asked.
It didn’t make any sense to her. After all, the woman didn’t know her from Adam—or Eve. If she were in this woman’s place, she certainly wouldn’t take in a stranger. Things like that just weren’t done these days. There was trusting, and then there was being incredibly naive.
She had a feeling that if she said as much to this cowboy, she’d offend him, so she kept her comment to herself. But it didn’t change her opinion.
“I thought I saw a sign when I was passing by Forever that said something about a new hotel having a grand opening.”
He’d forgotten about that. In his defense, he didn’t get to town very often these days and the hotel was practically brand-new, having opened its doors less than five months ago. What he recalled was that building the hotel had been a huge shot in the arm for a lot of his friends on the reservation, providing many of them with construction work.
“It’s not just a new hotel,” he informed her. “It’s Forever’s only hotel, as well.”
“You don’t have any other hotels in town?” she asked in wonder.
That sounded almost impossible, Debi thought. Indianapolis had over two hundred of them. How could this town have just one—and recently built at that?
Maybe she had made a mistake in bringing Ryan here after all.
What choice did you have? she asked herself. And this wasn’t about how big or little the town was. This was about the ranch’s track record, which, according to Sheila, as well as the internet, was perfect so far.
“If you’d have come here a year ago, we wouldn’t have had this one,” Jackson was telling her. “The people in Forever don’t exactly believe in rushing into things,” he explained with a soft laugh.
Debi was unprepared for the sound to travel right under her skin, but it did, probably because she was vulnerable. Having the man she had once thought of as the love of her life walk out on her had sent her self-esteem crashing to subbasement level. It made her doubt all of her previous assumptions and had her feeling that she couldn’t trust her own judgment. Everything that she had believed she’d had turned out to be a lie—why would anything be different from here on in?
“Apparently,” she agreed, feeling as if she was moving through some sort of a bad dream—a dream she couldn’t wake up from.
She glanced down at the forms he’d just given her and tried to shake off her mood. “Do you want me to fill them out now?” she asked. It might be easier for her to tackle the forms tonight, after she checked in to this new hotel and went to her room.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like that, yes,” he told her. “I learned that it’s better not to put things off,” Jackson explained. Rising to give her some breathing room while she filled the forms out, he asked, “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”
Or me?
Now where the hell had that come from? Jackson upbraided himself. That had to be something he’d unknowingly picked up from a program that had been playing in the background, or that he’d seen as a kid. When his parents were arguing, he’d turn the TV up loud to block them out so he could pretend that everything was really all right and that they weren’t screaming all sorts of terrible things to and about each other.
Jackson looked a little closer at Ryan’s sister. There was something almost appealingly vulnerable about her that brought out the protector in him. He was going to have to be careful to keep that under wraps, he warned himself.
Debi stopped perusing the forms and looked up at him, clearly surprised. “You have tea?”
“Yes. We’re not entirely barbaric out here in Texas,” Jackson told her, amused by her surprised expression.
Realizing that she might have insulted the man, Debi did what she could to backtrack and remove her foot from her mouth.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything. It’s just that, well, I can’t visualize you actually drinking tea.”
“I don’t,” he told her, then answered the question he knew she was thinking. “I keep tea around for guests. I like being prepared.” He paused, waiting. But she didn’t comment or make a request. He tried again. “So, can I get you that tea?”
Debi shook her head. “No, that’s okay,” she answered. “I’m good.”
Yes, you are.
There it was again, he thought. Unbidden thoughts popping up in his head. This wasn’t like him. Besides, the woman wasn’t even his type. Any woman he had ever socialized with either came from the reservation, or had ties to it.
Maybe he’d been spending too much time with the horses in his off hours. Lately, he’d been devoting himself to the boys and the ranch to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe that had taken its toll on him and this was his body’s way of getting back at him. It was reminding him that he needed to get out and mingle a little bit with people who didn’t come with a list of problems and lives they needed to have turned around.
It was getting to the point that he was forgetting that there were people like that out there. People whose souls weren’t troubled.
Jackson forced his mind back to the woman who regarded him as if he was her last hope in the world. At this point in time, he probably was.
“We’ve also got a couple of cans of diet soda and then there’s always that old standby, water.”
But Debi shook her head to that as she started filling out the forms. “No, really, I’m fine. Nothing to drink for me, thank you,” she told him, sparing Jackson a quick glance before looking back at the questionnaire on the desk before her.
“Would you know of anywhere that I could get a job?” she asked.
If she needed a job, that was going to put an entirely different spin on matters, Jackson thought. Most likely, the woman wouldn’t be able to afford the down payment for her brother’s treatment.
Since he prided himself on never turning away anyone in need, he was going to have to come up with a way to fix that situation.
He approached the subject cautiously. “You’re out of work?”
Her head popped up. “What? Oh, no, I have a job waiting for me back home. I just took a leave of absence so that I could be close by if either Ryan or you needed me.”
Now that was a loaded sentence that he wasn’t about to allow himself to touch with a ten-foot pole, Jackson thought.
“What kind of work do you do?” he asked her. “Because Miss Joan could always give you work at the diner. She’s got a lot of part-time waitresses and a good many of them come and go, especially the ones who work at the diner just to get some extra cash that’ll supplement their regular income.”
“I’m a surgical nurse,” she replied. “You wouldn’t be hiding a regular hospital out here, would you?” She hadn’t seen evidence of one when she’d driven down the town’s Main Street, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a hospital around somewhere.
Jackson shook his head. “It’s a real pity, but we don’t have one,” he confirmed. “The closest hospital to Forever is in the next town, some fifty miles down the road.”
He made it sound as if it was just a hop, skip and a jump away—and it was a little more than that. She supposed it was all in how a person viewed things and where they grew up. Compared to where she came from—Indianapolis—Forever seemed incredibly tiny. Not only that, but the city had its share of hospitals, as well.
Why would anyone stay in a place like this where their options were so limited? she couldn’t help wondering. It was a surprise to her that everyone didn’t just pick up and leave town the minute that they graduated high school. She knew she would have. The pace here felt as if it had been dipped in molasses on the coldest day in January.
“We do, however,” Jackson told her after a beat, “have a medical clinic, and the doctors there are always looking for more help.”
A medical clinic. She could work with that. “They might just have found it,” she told him with a relieved smile.
Chapter Four (#ulink_a8f31580-0fa4-59b4-b486-a4f241b56641)
Jackson thought of Daniel Davenport and Alisha Cordell-Murphy, the two doctors who ran the clinic, and the overworked nurse at the desk, Holly Rodriguez. He’d had occasion to interact with all of them at one time or another. Not directly for himself, but he’d brought several of his friends from the reservation in to be treated there.
The clinic was definitely a godsend, seeing as how not all that long ago there hadn’t been any doctor within fifty miles of Forever.
However, godsend or not, the clinic was woefully understaffed. He wasn’t sure if Forever and its surrounding area was growing, or if the doctors had just become overwhelmed and slowed down. But it was clear that help was definitely needed.
The doctors would be thrilled at the mere thought of getting even temporary help for a short respite. He knew that for certain, recalling what Dr. Davenport had said when it had been just him running the clinic with Holly’s help, and Dr. Cordell-Murphy—she’d been just Dr. Cordell at the time—had arrived in response to an open recruitment letter he’d sent to his old hospital in New York.
“After you finish filling out the paperwork,” Jackson told the nurse, “I can have one of the boys take you to the clinic.”
Debi paused for a moment. “Is it in town?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
She winced at the word he’d used to address her. “Please, don’t call me ma’am,” she requested earnestly. “It makes me feel like I’m at least eighty years old.”
“Just a sign of respect, nothing more,” he replied. “And just for the record, you’d be the youngest-looking eighty-year-old on the planet,” Jackson told her with a wink.
Debi felt something in her stomach flutter in response to the wink. Whether the man knew it or not, that was an extremely sexy wink.
Even so, she had no business reacting like that. She told herself that it was just because she hadn’t really eaten in more than twenty-four hours.
