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Which showed how Fate enjoyed a little kick of irony, didn’t it?
Chase slipped around the edge of the terrace. As the chatter of voices faded, he strolled to the front of the house, ignoring the small twinge of conscience at being absent from his own celebration.
All through his childhood, he’d been infamous for sneaking away from family parties. His parents had thrown the biggest balls and barbecues in the county. Anything was an excuse for a Clayton festival—Christmas, birthdays, Chase’s elementary school graduation, the full moon…anything. But Chase always found himself bored, drifting down to the riverbank to catch minnows, or into the stables to brush Captain Kirk, the lazy bald-face bay his parents had given him when he’d turned fourteen.
“You sure you’re a Clayton, son?” His father, a huge, happy man, loved to snag his young son by the feet. “You sure your mom didn’t slip the corral about nine months before you were born?” He’d check Chase’s heel, just for the pride of seeing the walnut-colored Clayton birthmark. “Yep, you’ve got the family brand, but I’ll be damned if I know where this antisocial stuff sneaked into the bloodline.”
It had sneaked in, though. Chase and Trent had been friends since elementary school, and Chase sometimes wondered whether they had been accidentally switched at birth. Trent was suave and well dressed, socially sought after, the ideal guest. Chase preferred blue jeans and hard work, and the company of horses.
“Hey, corporal, over here,” a voice said, and Chase looked toward the front porch. Trent stood in the shadows, leaning over the balcony, his shoulders oddly stiff. He hadn’t turned his head in Chase’s direction. Instead, he seemed half-frozen, staring out toward the road.
Chase wondered what Trent was looking at. The main house fronted pretty close to the street, so this view wasn’t the one that took your breath away.
The real beauty was from the back, where the party was going on right now. The Double C was substantial, but not grand—25,000 acres now that Chase had bought the Hillman land—and, behind the house, acre after acre of green pasture and ponderosa pines undulated down to the creek. Clayton land splashed right through the clear, pebbled water and then marched across another ten thousand acres of peach orchard, almost all the way to the Austin city limits.
Out here, though, there wasn’t much to see, unless you counted the bluebonnets on either side of the white fence that marked the half-mile driveway. But as Chase drew closer, he got a better view of Trent’s face. He realized his friend hadn’t been looking at anything. He’d just been staring blind.
Of course. This wasn’t going to be an easy day for Trent, no matter how you cut it.
Chase climbed the six steps and joined his manager on the porch, leaning his elbows on the banister, too. “So, what’s up? Is there really a hay emergency, or are you playing guardian angel, giving me a breather?”
Trent laughed. “Both. About the hay—we went with that new company you said you wanted. Old Joe’s daughter’s new business. She delivered a semi load today, and the first three bales were moldy.”
Trent’s educated voice was clipped, clearly irritated. He didn’t tolerate moldy hay, or any other kind of shabby work, which was what made him the perfect ranch manager. He was what cowboys used to call “square.” Completely on top of his job.
“Damn it.” Chase whistled through his teeth and scuffed a toe against the balustrade. “I really wanted to throw her some business. Joe asked me to, and you know he wouldn’t ask a river for water if he were dying of thirst.”
“That’s why I called. Ordinarily, I’d just send it back and get another hay company. We don’t give second chances. But since she’s old Joe’s daughter…”
“Yeah.” Hell’s bells. Chase knew he was without options here. Joe had been ranch manager for two generations of Claytons, and he’d reluctantly retired when Chase’s dad had died five years ago. But the old guy had dropped enough of his sweat on Clayton soil that Chase would always feel beholden. “Okay. Just this one time. She gets a do-over.”
Trent glanced at him, his mouth a one-cornered smile. “Somehow that’s what I thought you’d say.”
Chase smiled, too. Trent wasn’t kidding anybody. This little decision definitely hadn’t required a face-to-face. He’d just been saving Chase’s ass, and Chase appreciated it. Their business was done, but he didn’t move. He didn’t want to go back.
For a couple of minutes, they stood together in silence, watching the leaves of the sweet gum tree carve shapes on the front yard. In some intangible way, the silence wasn’t as companionable as it used to be, before Chase’s engagement.
He wondered if Trent was ready to talk about it. For the past month, they’d both pretty much pretended it wasn’t happening.
Finally, without taking his gaze from the grass, Trent spoke. “So. How’s it going back there? I saw her. She looks happy.”
Chase made a noncommittal sound. This was tricky territory they were stepping over, and he wasn’t sure of his footing. “I guess she is. That ranch means a lot to her. If it meant she could keep it, she probably would have married the devil himself.”
Shit. Two seconds into this conversation, and Chase already had a mouthful of foot. “Hell, Trent. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. She would have married anyone.” Trent straightened up and met Chase’s gaze. He shrugged in that elegant way that drove most women mad. “Anyone but me.”
It was so true, there was no way to contradict it. So Chase didn’t try. Every word he thought of had a “quicksand” warning sign posted all over it. Better, when you didn’t have the gift of gab, to shut the hell up.
He considered laying his hand on Trent’s shoulder, but that seemed patronizing, too.
Apparently Trent agreed. He took a deep breath, then began descending the porch stairs. He paused at the bottom. “You heading back now? You probably should, you know. If your mom was here, she would’ve had a fit if she saw you leave your own party.”
Trent was right there, too. Chase’s mother had come from Virginia, and she’d had very strict ideas about how her son should behave. She didn’t mind his quiet nature, but whenever he was rude she’d always “explained” his mistake to him so gently and sweetly he ended up wanting to shoot himself.
“In a minute,” Chase said. “I need a little time alone. Jenny Wilcox was talking my ear off.”
Finally Trent smiled. “Your mom always said trying to teach a Texan manners was like trying to teach a snake to tap-dance.”
“Yeah. But she never had to talk to Jenny Wilcox.”
Trent chuckled, but still hesitated.
“Look, Trent,” Chase said, feeling oddly defensive. “I don’t plan to saddle up and ride off into the sunset. I’m not going to back out on her. I just want a few minutes alone.”
“Okay,” Trent said. “Just don’t…” He frowned. “Don’t stay out here so long it ends up embarrassing her.”
Chase nodded. “Never,” he said solemnly. He held Trent’s gaze. “That’s a promise.”
After Trent was gone, the minutes stretched out quietly, interrupted only by the carrying-on of the robins and the wind flirting with the sweet gum tree. Chase let his tired gaze rest on the bluebonnets, which were blooming their hearts out today.
They should have held the party out here. Susannah had the terrace decorated like something out of a magazine, lots of cute ribbons and potted plants shaped like illustrations from geometry textbooks. But for his money you couldn’t beat the first big honest splash of spring flowers.
He felt his chest relaxing. His breath came deeper, from the gut, where it was supposed to. After a few more minutes, he was a little sun-stunned, and when he heard a strange noise in the distance he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t dreaming.
But then he transferred his gaze to the road and identified a foreign spot on the horizon. A car. Almost half a mile away, where the straight, tree-lined drive met the public road. He could tell it was coming too fast, but judging the speed of a vehicle moving straight toward you was tricky.
It wasn’t until it was about two hundred yards away that he realized the driver must be drunk…or crazy. Or both.
The guy was going maybe sixty. On a private drive, where kids or horses or tractors or stupid chickens might come darting out any minute, that was criminal. Chase straightened from his comfortable slouch and waved his hands.
“Slow down, you fool,” he called. He took the porch steps quickly and began walking fast down the driveway.
The car veered, from one side to the other, then up onto the slight rise of the thick green spring grass. It barely missed the fence.
“Slow down, damn it!”
He couldn’t see the driver, but he definitely didn’t recognize the automobile. It was small and old and hadn’t cost much even when it was new. It used to be white, but now it needed either a wash or a new paint job or both.
“Goddamn it, what’s wrong with you?”
At the last minute, he had to jump away, because the idiot behind the wheel clearly wasn’t going to turn to avoid a collision. He couldn’t believe it. The car kept coming, finally slowing a little, but it was too late.
Still going about thirty miles an hour, it slammed into the large, white-brick pillar that marked the front boundaries of the house. The pillar wasn’t going to give an inch, so that car had to. The front end folded up like a paper fan.
It seemed to take forever for the car to settle, as if the trauma happened in slow motion, reverberating from the front to the back of the car in ripples of destruction. The front windshield seemed to ice over with lethal bits of glassy frost. Then the side windows exploded.
The front driver’s door wrenched open, as if the car wanted to expel its contents. Metal buckled hideously. Small pieces like hubcaps skipped and ricocheted insanely across the oyster-shell driveway.
Finally, everything was still. Into the silence, a plume of steam shot up like a geyser, smelling of rust and heat. Its snakelike hiss almost smothered the low, agonized moan of the driver.
Chase’s anger had disappeared. He didn’t feel anything but a dull sense of disbelief. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. Not in his life. Maybe the sun had actually put him to sleep.
But he was already kneeling beside the car. The driver was a woman. There was no air bag. The frosty glass of the windshield was dotted with small flecks of blood. She must have hit it with her head, because just below her hairline a red liquid was seeping out. He touched it. He tried to wipe it away before it reached her eyebrow, though of course that made no sense at all. Her eyes were shut.
Was she conscious? Did he dare move her? Her dress was covered in glass, and the metal of the car was sticking out dangerously in all the wrong places.
Then he remembered, with an intense relief, that every good medical man in the county was here, just behind the house, drinking his champagne. He found his phone and paged Trent.
The woman moaned again.
Alive, then. Thank God for that.
He saw Trent coming toward him, starting out at a lope, but switching to a full run when he saw the car.
“Get Dr. Marchant,” Chase called. “Don’t bother with 911.”
Trent didn’t take long to assess the situation. A fraction of a second, and he began pulling out his cell phone and running toward the house.
The yelling seemed to have roused the woman. She opened her eyes. They were blue, and clouded with pain and confusion.
“Chase,” she said.
His breath stalled. His head pulled back. “What?”
Her only answer was another moan, and he wondered if he had imagined the word. He reached around her and put his arm behind her shoulders. She was tiny. Probably petite by nature, but surely way too thin. He could feel her shoulder blades pushing against her skin, as fragile as the wishbone in a turkey.
She seemed to have passed out, so he put his other arm under her knees and lifted her from the car. He tried to avoid the jagged metal, but her skirt caught on a piece and the tearing sound seemed to wake her again.
“No,” she said. “Please.”
“I’m just trying to help,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”
She seemed profoundly distressed. She wriggled in his arms, and she was so weak, like a broken bird. It made him feel too big and brutish. And intrusive. As if touching her this way, his bare hands against the warm skin behind her knees, were somehow a transgression.
He wished he could be more delicate. But he smelled gasoline, and he knew it wasn’t safe to leave her.
Finally he heard the sound of voices, as guests began to run around the side of the house, alerted by Trent. Dr. Marchant was at the front, racing toward them as if he were forty instead of seventy. Susannah was right behind him, her green dress floating around her trim legs.
“Please,” the woman in his arms murmured again. She looked at him, the expression in her blue eyes lost and bewildered. He wondered if she might be on drugs. Hitting her head on the windshield might account for this unfocused, glazed look, but it couldn’t explain the crazy driving.
“Please, put me down. Susannah… This wedding…”
Chase’s arms tightened instinctively, and he froze in his tracks. She whimpered, and he realized he might be hurting her. “Say that again?”
“The wedding. I have to stop it.”
CHAPTER THREE
CHASE ENDURED the next hour the way he’d endured most of the crises in his life—he kept busy.
He played host the best he could. He soothed the hysterical—Jenny Wilcox was hyperventilating and her husband, Pastor Wilcox, wasn’t far behind. He deflected the curious. He tried to get as many guests as possible to go home. This became much more difficult once the rumor began to circulate that the mysterious woman lying upstairs in the north guest room, being tended by Dr. Marchant, was Chase Clayton’s discarded, suicidal lover.
And he refused to dwell on worst-case scenarios. Josephine Ellen Whitford, twenty-five years old, from Riverfork—all information they’d learned from her driver’s license—was going to be okay. She had seemed dazed, scraped and bruised and maybe concussed, but surely not damaged enough to be in danger.
Whatever mischief she’d come here to start, he would face when it presented itself. If it ever did. He still hoped he might have misunderstood her last, slurred words.
He took a deep breath as he waved the Wilcoxes’ car down the drive, which was turning blue in the twilight. He shut his eyes for a minute, gathering his focus for the next job…probably finding a taxi for old Portia Luxton, who had stopped driving ten years ago.
He could handle it, whatever it was. He’d been through worse things than this. His parents’ deaths and the collapse of his first marriage, for starters. And of course the life of a horse breeder came with a hundred little agonies, from the liquid-eyed foals who take a few breaths and die, to the beautiful, doomed stallions whose wild streaks can’t be tamed.
“It’s going to be all right,” Sue said, appearing at his elbow. Her voice was soft. “It’ll be the talk of the town for a week or so, and then Elspeth Grimes will see Elvis in the oil stains on her garage floor and everyone will move on.”
“I know.” He appreciated Sue’s commonsense approach to things, which had been her trademark, even as a child. It was the main reason he’d agreed to this marriage. He could trust her to keep it clean. To carry their plan out to the letter. Marry him, satisfy her autocratic grandfather’s absurd will, then take the money and run.
No sticky emotional swamps. No tangles, no hidden agenda.
No last-minute complications, like sex. Or love.
“I know,” he said again. “I’m just sorry it spoiled your party.”
“It didn’t.” She smiled, but her mouth and her eyes didn’t match. She looked toward the house. “I hope she’s okay. She looked kind of…sick, don’t you think? I mean, not just hurt from the accident, but unwell.”
Chase nodded. He had thought exactly that. Miss Whitford didn’t look like a healthy woman. She was painfully thin, and so pale she might have been made of wax. She probably had beautiful eyes when she was rested, large and blue, with feathery black lashes. But right now they were dull, sunken into deep circles like river stones set in mud.
“I wonder who she is.” Susannah was still looking at the house.
Again, Chase merely nodded, trying to hide how much he, too, wanted the answer to that question. Susannah had no idea that the woman had spoken both their names and had even said she wanted to stop the wedding. He wasn’t planning to talk about those cryptic, disturbing words. Not until he had to.
But for the love of God, what could the woman’s motives be? No one had a problem with this wedding. No one wanted to stop it.
Everyone in Texas knew that Susannah Everly had inherited a raw deal from her grandfather, who had written his will while under the influence of alcohol, the leading edge of Alzheimer’s and one of his all-too-common rages.
It was only fitting, their neighbors believed, that her best childhood pal should help her out of it. A few romantics even dreamed that a butterfly of love might come winging out of the chrysalis of friendship, creating that storybook happy ending everyone craved.
No. No one wanted to stop this wedding. Not even Trent Maxwell. That’s how much the poor sucker loved her.
“Here comes Dr. Marchant,” Sue said. She put her hand on Chase’s arm. He glanced at her steady profile, and he wondered if she’d heard the rumors. What a mess. He remembered promising Trent, just an hour ago, that he’d never embarrass her.
He wondered how long he could keep that promise. Perhaps no longer than it took a seventy-year-old man to travel the few yards of oyster-shell driveway between them and the house.
He watched the old man striding toward them, his shock of leonine white hair glowing, even in this gathering gloaming. His face was unreadable in the dim light, but he’d taken off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt. Something in his movements suggested that his news would not be good.
When Marchant reached them, he didn’t waste time with a preamble. He had always given his diagnoses the same way he gave his medicines—nothing more than you needed, and nothing less. And he expected you to take it like a man, even if you were only four and frightened.
He didn’t believe in sugarcoating.
“She’s going to be fine,” he said.
