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“Every great adventure, planned right here.” Lincoln looked at the photograph still clutched in his hand. “Even the last, the one that would destroy our friendship as we knew it.”
Wearily Lincoln stood. Making note of the step in need of repair, he crossed the overgrown yard to Diablo. Speaking quietly to the grazing horse, he mounted. Hesitating, he watched as light warming the walls of the house faded and darkened, leaving it in shadows. A lonely derelict, waiting.
“For what?” Lincoln wondered aloud. But he didn’t need to wonder. He knew.
“For want of love and laughter, a home becomes a house,” he whispered, quoting his beloved Frannie. “For want of life, a house becomes a hovel.”
Frannie Stuart had been dead nearly seven years. Lucky, for three months. He couldn’t change the past, but as he turned Diablo from the Stuart farm, Lincoln vowed that no matter how long it took, he would repay a debt incurred six years before.
A debt called in today, by a letter from the grave.
“Let’s go home, Diablo,” Lincoln murmured hoarsely. “I have work to do, a lady to find, and promises to keep.”
Two
“Special delivery.” Basket in hand, Haley Garrett stood in the open doorway, waiting for Lincoln to abandon his intense study of the evening sky. As she’d spoken, his shoulders tensed. When he turned, a pallor lay over his sun-darkened face.
“Lincoln?” Alarm threaded through Haley’s voice. “Is something wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Blinking, clearing his vision, Lincoln denied her concern. “Nothing’s wrong. My mind was wandering, I thought…”
“That I was her?” Troubled by his mood, Haley stepped into his office uninvited. “Yes, Lincoln, her. Linsey Stuart, the woman for whom you’ve searched for weeks.”
“How do you know about Linsey?”
Setting the basket laden with food on his desk, she smiled ruefully. “It would be hard not to know, since your search has been conducted by telephone and our office isn’t exactly soundproof.”
Lincoln moved to his desk. “I never meant to disturb you.”
“You didn’t. I haven’t said anything before because it was none of my business.” Haley tilted her head, negating the great difference in their size as she held his gaze. “As your veterinary partner and friend, I’m making it my business now.”
Lincoln grasped a pen, tapping it on his desk. “I haven’t held up my end of our agreement?”
Catching his hand, she stopped his drumming. “Just the opposite. You’re driving yourself. Take today, for instance. You were called to Petersens’ to deliver a breech colt at 3:00 a.m. To Hank’s dairy at 6:00 a.m. to deal with a sick cow.”
Releasing him, she ticked off more stops. “You admitted skipping breakfast, then lunch. If Miss Corey hadn’t worried and sent this basket, I suspect you would skip dinner.”
“How does skipping meals affect our partnership, Haley?”
“Partnership.” Haley emphasized her point. “That’s the key word. I could have made some of those calls. Given how hard you’ve been working, I should have made all of them.”
“Today was too much for me,” he drawled. “But not you?”
“Yes. Because I’m not consumed by a problem.” Taking a tarnished frame from his desk, she asked, “Is this Linsey Stuart?”
Lincoln’s gaze turned to the photo plundered from the Stuart farm. Where a step awaited repair. “Linsey, Lucky and me. In Montana, our last year at smoke jumpers annual training.”
“Linsey Stuart parachuted into forest fires?” The woman in the photograph was small, with an aura of elegance. Haley could believe an adventurous sportswoman, but not smoke jumping.
“No one believed she could do it then, either.” Lincoln’s mouth quirked in a melancholy smile at Haley’s disbelief. “But she did. We all did. That’s where our paths crossed— the first summer of jumper training. Lucky and I had been friends all our lives—the moment we met her, she fit.
“Linsey grew up in an orphanage, we became her family.” He glanced at the photo of three figures dressed for a jump, exhilarated by the challenge. “We were a team— Lucky Stuart, Linsey Blair, Lincoln Cade. We were called the Three L’s.”
“This was taken the last year—was it your last jump?”
Lincoln struggled to ease the constriction in his chest. “After the photograph was taken, Lucky was called home. His mother was ill. Two months later he came back. We jumped one more time.”
Haley wondered why only one. Lincoln loved jumping. It was in his voice. Even now. “What happened?”
Lincoln’s gaze lifted to Haley. But his mind, and perhaps his heart, had stepped back in time. Memories couldn’t be hurried. Keeping the gaze that saw another face, she waited.
“We were in Oregon.” His voice was distant, as if it came from the faraway place of his thoughts. “The fire had burned for weeks, with jumpers fighting winds as much as the blaze. We were backing each other, as always, when the current shifted and the fire turned, cutting us off from the rest of the crew.”
He fell silent; she waited. Again her wait was rewarded.
“Lucky had a knack for maps—he recalled a river. We ran for it and into a slide. Our radios were broken. A head injury left me confused, unsteady on my feet. I couldn’t walk out.”
“But Linsey and Lucky did?” Haley dared comment into the staccato retelling of a life-and-death drama.
“Only Lucky.” Lincoln turned to the window, seeing wind-fanned flames and falling earth beyond its panes. “The fire turned again, and we stumbled on a shack on secure ground. By then it was clear I’d suffered a concussion at the least. Lucky calculated that with burned ground, the slide, and the river as fire breaks, we had a little time before the blaze circled around. Leaving Linsey to look after me, he walked out alone.”
“Through the fire, Lincoln?”
“Through burned paths that could reignite at any time. If they had—” Halting, he turned a bleak face to Haley, then away again. “Lucky risked his life for mine.”
“And for Linsey,” Haley murmured, studying his profile. Seeing heartache he’d hidden from the world.
As her classmate in veterinary studies, he’d revealed nothing personal. He wouldn’t now, if he weren’t exhausted and hurting. Yet, because she knew Lincoln, she knew there was more. Something left unsaid. Haley went where intuition led. “You loved her.”
“We both did.”
“So you stepped aside.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Where is Lucky now?”
“Lucky died.” He looked away. “Four months ago.”
Haley blinked back tears for a grieving friend, for a stranger called Lucky. For a rare friendship. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” A hand briefly shielded his eyes. “So am I.”
“And now you’re looking for his wife. To help.”
“For Lucky’s sake. I wasn’t there when he needed me, but I thought…” He seemed to lose himself in a mood. In a moment he spoke again. “Shortly after he died, Linsey left Oregon and dropped out of sight. With no family and no roots, she could be anywhere. Nobody I’ve hired has found a trace of her.”
Lincoln said nothing more, and Haley wouldn’t question his search for Lucky Stuart’s widow. Whatever his reason, it wouldn’t be to trade on the past, nor because he loved her still. Lincoln Cade wasn’t a man who would barter on grief.
No matter what prompted his search, Haley hoped he would find Linsey Stuart. If it was right, she hoped they would find love and peace together. But that was for another time, another place. And, she suspected, for reconciled lovers to discover.
“It’s late, Lincoln. You’re exhausted, and I’m famished. Shall we share this thoughtful repast and call it a day?”
He smiled at her ploy to entice him to eat. But as he accepted the sandwich she offered, Haley saw the laughter left the silver of his eyes untouched.
Lincoln considered the wire and the tuft of brown fur caught on a barb. For the third time in a week he’d checked the deteriorating west pasture fence and the second time he’d found evidence of an animal passing near or through the wire. His first thought was deer. Closer inspection suggested dogs.
Among the mongrels of Belle Reve, some were white, some blond, some black. None were brown.
The west pasture was isolated, bordered by two rivers, the sprawl of Belle Reve, and Stuart land. No inhabited houses or farms were close enough for straying pets or working dogs. That left the threat of a pack of lost or abandoned pets. Dogs that would run a horse to death for the joy of the chase.
The Black Arabian stock his brother Jackson kept in pastures at the plantation were far too valuable to dismiss suspicions of a pack gone wild. He decided he would warn Jackson and enlist his aid in trapping the animals. Catching the pommel of his saddle and stepping into the stirrup, Lincoln mounted Diablo.
His inspection complete, he sat for an indecisive moment, trying to resist the lure of the path beyond the fence. The path that would lead to the Stuart farm. In the end he succumbed to a need he’d battled for weeks.
“Won’t hurt to check the property.” As Diablo’s black ears flicked at the sound of his voice, with his palm Lincoln stroked the stallion’s mane. “Could be the pack settled in the barn. And there’s a step to measure for repair.”
Glancing at the sky, gauging the position of the sun, he tapped the horse with the reins. “A couple of hours of daylight left, Diablo. Time enough.”
Diablo was eager to run. Lincoln himself enjoyed the rush as the Arabian topped the fence and raced over the corridor that a century before had been the Stuarts’ wagon route to town.
Beyond sight of the farm, Lincoln slowed to a walk. If the dogs had made their den on the property, they would be gone before he could find it, if he came riding in like the Lone Ranger.
“Easy, boy. No sudden moves.” He walked the horse slowly, barely rustling the grass that grew knee high. “Don’t want to spook them if they’re here.”
With a grunt hardly stifled, he jerked to a startled halt. “What the devil?”
Bending in the saddle, peering through a copse of massive trees, he saw light. Light where there should be no light, gleaming through windows of the Stuart farmhouse.
Illusion? A trick of the sun glinting off glass? Intruders or looters after all these years of the farmhouse standing unlocked?
Maybe. He could persuade himself to accept that. But the creak of rusty hinges was neither a trick nor an illusion. Nor was the woman who pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch. With her hair gleaming like spilling gold, as she shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, she was familiar and very real.
“Linsey?” Her name was a raw undertone lost in the prattle of breeze-stirred oaks. Yet, spoken in his own voice, it resounded in his mind. Like a man too long in the dark catching a glimpse of the sun, his gaze moved over her. With incredulous care, he committed to mind a memory, seeking first the differences imposed by time and living. Then the unchanging qualities six long years couldn’t sweep from his mind.
Her hair was still long. Still a mass of curls gathered brutally into a topknot by a clasp that never had a chance of holding it. The hand that pushed tumbling strands from her cheeks was still absently impatient.
Her chin still tilted in eternal determination. While her mouth curved in a smile that seemed joyfully childlike and sensual at once. Lincoln wondered if she still caught her lower lip between her teeth when she concentrated or when she worried.
Drawing himself from the aching study of her mouth and face, he matched this Linsey of flesh and blood to the woman he’d turned away from…for Lucky.
She stood tall, shoulders back, making the most of those few inches by which she topped five feet. And as the breeze that sent tiny oak leaves spiraling around him swept across the clearing, molding her supple shirt against her, Lincoln realized her breasts were rounder, fuller. A girlish innocence had given way to an earthy maturity, a beguiling voluptuousness. A metamorphosis making her jean-clad waist and hips seem slimmer.
He’d lost a girl six years ago. Today, he found a woman in full bloom.
To the rest of the world she’d always been a pretty girl full of life and courage. To Lincoln, she was breathtaking from the first. But not so beautiful as now. Never so beautiful he could hardly believe she was real, not illusion.
Just as he could hardly believe that, after hiring investigators to search all of Oregon, Montana, and as many locales in between as possible, he had found her here. Exactly where she should be, in Lucky Stuart’s South Carolina home.
The last place he’d thought to look in a month. The last place he would ever think to look, if the search hadn’t ended.
How long had she been here? One week? Two? How soon after his last stop by the farm had she arrived? “How long before you were going to let me know, Linsey?”
As relieved as he was that she was here, like a battering ram striking out of nowhere, Lincoln was filled with anger bordering on rage. Anger laced with bitter self-disgust that any of it should matter. That she should matter.
For years he’d struggled to put the past in perspective. From a passionate and desperate interlude in a shack in an Oregon forest surrounded by fire, to the day he walked her down the aisle—giving her, in an unknown father’s stead, to Lucky—he thought he’d finally succeeded in putting it behind him.
Until the letters. Then he knew his struggles and all he believed he’d accomplished had been a farce.
Farce or not, his life was on an even keel, he didn’t want it disrupted by old wounds torn open. He hadn’t stopped to think of this moment when he’d begun the search. He hadn’t thought of anything but the wishes of a dying friend. But now, after the month and a small fortune spent searching for her, after the anguish of every minute of each of those days, he was tempted to ride away as if he’d never seen her and never loved her.
Dear God, he was tempted, but he’d never broken a promise to Lucky. He wouldn’t now. Raking an arm over his face, wishing he could wipe the anger from his heart as easily as he could from his features, he lifted a hand to hail the house.
“Cade.”
Lincoln froze at the sound, hand uplifted, lips parted in a greeting he wouldn’t utter.
“Cade? Where are you, tiger? Better come inside before it gets dark.”
Shocked that she could know he was there in the shadows that deepened with every increment the sun sank, Lincoln didn’t respond. He couldn’t respond as her voice flowed over him filled with love, driving out the anger.
In that moment of stunned silence, he heard the bark of a dog, a peal of laughter, then the voice of a child. “I’m here, Mom. In the barn with Brownie.”
Before he could make sense of it, a small boy appeared at the barn door. A boy called Cade and his dog.
“Brownie.” Lincoln didn’t know why it was that name he muttered. He didn’t understand why barbwire streaming with brown dog hair twice in three days should flood his mind. But he was glad for a small boy’s simple name for a brown dog and for the mystery of the barbs’ trophies solved.
Mind candy, a mental dodge. A name and a mystery more easily understood and resolved than the one Lincoln confronted in gathering darkness beyond the clearing of the Stuart farm.
His mouth was dry, his head hurt, his heart pounded so hard he thought it might explode. He didn’t want to stay, but he couldn’t drag his gaze from the boy as he raced across the yard and skipped over the broken step into his mother’s arms.
He was a small boy, but too big for Linsey to pick up. Yet she did, crushing him to her as she spun him round and round, planting nibbling kisses on his neck. The boy’s laughter escalated to squeals and giggles, while the dog jumped in circles, trying to join in.
Breathless and panting, Linsey stopped spinning. When she was still again, Lincoln watched as the boy plucked the clasp from her hair, letting it fall beyond her shoulders.
Catching a strand in his grubby fist, he laughed in delight. “Pretty.”
Linsey laughed, too. “Ah, shucks, kind sir. I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“Nope.” The boy giggled and squirmed, and giggled that much harder when she tickled him. “Just you.”
“That will change in a few years.” Linsey’s laugh faded as she hugged him again. “You like it here, don’t you, Cade?”
“Yep.” The boy’s head bobbed. “But I was wondering.”
“Yeah?”
“Can I have a horse?”
“Hmm.” Linsey tilted her head, considering. “I suppose one day. What kind of horse would you want?”
“A humongous black one, like the tall man.”
