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This time Sylvia’s cup clattered impatiently when she returned it to its saucer. “For heaven’s sake, Karen, why didn’t you tell me you were short on time? You know I leap at any opportunity to shop. I’m sure I could have found you something appropriate.”
“And expensive, no doubt,” Karen returned with a rueful shake of her head.
Sylvia arched a graceful brow again as she said airily, “Of course. After all, you’re the wife of one of our area’s most successful ranchers. You deserve the best, my sweet. Something with enough sizzle to make that tall, dark and handsome husband of yours want to rip it right off you when he sees you wearing it.”
Karen nearly choked on her coffee. “Mother!”
“Don’t ‘Mother’ me, Karen McCormick Moore Sloane. As you just said, Vicki is going to be nine at the end of April. It’s time she had a baby brother or sister to spoil. Otherwise, she might end up as set in her ways as you are.”
“If only it were that easy,” Karen muttered, dropping her gaze. She would not cry. She simply would NOT.
There was a weighty silence before her mother said softly, “Darling, I was just joking. I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“I’m not offended.” Karen closed her eyes against the sudden sting of hot tears.
“Karen? What’s wrong?”
Her mother’s soft cry shredded Karen’s brave front “Oh, Mom, I’m so scared. I think my marriage is in terrible trouble, and I don’t have a clue what to do to fix it.”
Sylvia uttered a soft sound of dismay. “Oh, dear.”
Karen lifted a hand to dash away the tears trembling on her lashes, then steeled herself to meet her mother’s gaze.
“Cassidy blames me for Vicky’s accident. He’s been punishing me for it ever since.”
Sylvia’s disbelief was almost palpable. “You must be mistaken.”
“I wish I were,” Karen declared with weary vehemence before repeating Cassidy’s words to her on that awful night in June. “I thought it was just a form of shock, that he’d lashed out because he was hurting.”
“Your father was like that,” her mother stated firmly. “So was my father. I’ve often thought it must be some kind of a defense against feeling things too deeply.”
“Oh, Cassidy feels things, all right. Resentment, anger, contempt.” Karen wiped the tears from her cheeks with quick angry strokes of her cold fingertips. “These days he scowls more than he smiles, and the hands are threatening to force-feed him patience. As for me, I can’t seem to do anything right anymore.” She drew a breath. “And the only time he smiles is when he’s talking to Vicki.”
“Karen, Cassidy’s never been a man to smile easily, which isn’t surprising, given the fact that he’s virtually been on his own since his father killed himself.”
That was certainly true enough, Karen reflected with a frown. Cassidy had been barely seventeen and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when he’d come home from football practice to find his father dead by his own hand. Since his parents had been divorced for many years by then, the grim details of his father’s burial had been left to him. As soon as he’d graduated, he’d sold the house and the few other possessions his father had left him, put the money and a small insurance settlement into a savings account, and enlisted in the army.
She knew very little of Cassidy’s family history—only the names of his parents and a few sketchy details of his growing-up years. He’d had a brother who died before the age of five and a mother who’d left ten-year-old Cassidy and his father shortly thereafter. All of which had given him a deep-seated need to be in control of his own destiny. Very early in their relationship, she’d realized that she was wasting her time trying to pry open a door to his past that for reasons of his own, he’d locked and bolted tight.
“There are other changes, too. More…intimate ones.”
Karen felt her face growing hot. Though she and her mother had always been close, they had only discussed sex in impersonal terms. To her credit, Sylvia had always been quite open about what she called bedroom romps, the hotter the better. Karen had been the one to shy away from the explicit details.
“In other words, you’re not sleeping together?”
Karen hated the wave of weary bitterness that passed over her. It was becoming as much a part of her as the indecision about her marriage.
“Oh, yes, we’re sleeping together,” she admitted, watching a cloud drift across the frame formed by the living room’s large bay window. “On our own separate sides of the bed.”
Karen mentally cringed at the memory of the last time she’d tried to snuggle up to Cassidy while he’d been sleeping. He’d jerked away from her violently, as though she’d attacked him.
“Forgive me for asking, darling, but have you considered that the problem might be…physical?”
“If you’re asking me if he’s impotent, he’s not.” The idea was laughable. Cassidy was an intensely virile man with a strong sex drive. “We still have sex now and then, but it’s mechanical. A quick, impersonal screw when he’s horny. Nothing more than physical relief.”
“And you believe Cassidy is to blame for that?”
“He resents my career and I resent him for resenting it.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “How’s that for complex?”
“But typical of you, my darling daughter. You always were able to see two or three layers deeper than anyone else. It’s part of your physician’s gift, I think.”
“I’m beginning to think it’s more like a curse.” Karen lifted a hand to rub at the beginnings of a headache behind her eyes. “Tell me the truth, Mom. If you were in my place, would you give up medicine in order to save your marriage?”
Sylvia inhaled a quick, nervous breath. “Surely it hasn’t come to that?”
“Not yet, but I have a terrible feeling that’s where we’re headed.” Karen sat forward, her hands wrapped tightly around the delicate Spode cup. “You haven’t given me your answer. Would you give up part of your soul to keep the man you love?”
“I don’t know, Karen. Thank goodness that was one particular dilemma I never had to face. And before you tell me that’s not an answer, I agree. Mostly because there is no one answer.”
Karen sighed. “Coward,” she grumbled.
Laughing softly, Sylvia glanced down at the worn gold band she had never once removed since her nervous groom had slipped it onto her finger almost thirty-five years ago. “Darling, forgive me for saying so, but I really think you should be having this conversation with Cassidy, not me,”
“I’ve tried, Mother. But the moment I bring up a topic that remotely has to do with his feelings, he just ices over.”
“Perhaps if you persisted. Gently, of course.”
“It’s difficult to persist when the person you’re talking with gets up and leaves the room.”
“And you let him get away with that? Tsk, tsk, Karen, I’m surprised at you. You never used to be so tractable.”
“Mother, there’s no ‘letting’ Cassidy do anything. Once he’s gotten it in his head to do something, nothing will stop him.”
“Do what, exactly?”
“Put me through hell until I agree to give up medicine.” She exhaled angrily. “But I won’t be blackmailed like that, Mother! I love him with my whole heart and soul, but a part of me is so angry, so…so disappointed that he’s behaving like some kind of feudal throwback.”
“Hmm, lord of the manor. Or in this case the ranch he loves so much. That does rather describe Cassidy, doesn’t it?”
Karen nodded, her burst of temper ebbing as quickly as it had come. She drained her cup before putting it aside. These days she always seemed to be running behind. As for catching up, forget it.
“I have to go,” she said, flexing her shoulders.
“I’ll see you Saturday night, then.” Her mother rose as well. “If you need anything before then, just call.”
“I will,” Karen promised, giving her mother a hug. “And I apologize for unloading my problems on you. I know I have to find a way to solve them myself.”
Her mother’s still-pretty face took on stern lines. “Karen, asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, just the opposite.”
To placate her mother, Karen smiled. “Don’t worry. If I need you, I’ll holler.”
“Sure you will,” her mother said with a little shake of her head as they walked out to the car together. “Mind how you go,” she said as Karen climbed into the driver’s seat.
“I will,” Karen said before reaching for her seat belt. As she drove off, she prepared herself mentally for the hours ahead. At the end of this shift, she would be one day closer to the end of her residency. Eight more months of brutal hours and unending stress before she could take a few months off to rest, and maybe make a start on another baby, then ease into a private practice where her time would be her own. Things between her and Cassidy would be better then.
They had to be.
Chapter Two
Cassidy had started his day in a decent enough mood, mostly because the tattered feed-store calendar hanging inside the barn doors said it was the first day of spring and there was a hint of warmth in the morning air. The land was coming alive again.
By the end of the day, his good mood had soured. Early spring thaws had left his beautiful ranch a sloppy, ugly mess, and everywhere he’d ridden, he’d seen wind-toppled scrub oaks torn from the ravaged earth as though by some angry hand. With a resignation born of ten winters in this part of the west, he calculated he had miles of fence to repair. Worse, the melting snow had turned the pretty little creek meandering across the north pasture into a frothing torrent of muddy water. At last count the Lazy S had lost six prime heifers to the flood, with the tally far from finished. And if the fat black clouds hugging the treetops let go, it was bound to be a rotten night to be on the road. But in a couple of hours that’s exactly where he and his ladies would be, heading for the fairgrounds on the far side of Grand Springs where tonight’s so-called celebration was being held.
Much as he hated the thought of hauling out his party manners and shining the almost new boots that still pinched his toes, it suited his sense of irony that the party to celebrate the town’s recovery from the June blackout was occurring on a night when the weather was nearly as brutal.
He’d been saddle sore and weary when he rode in from the pasture, a long list of urgent jobs for his men already taking shape in his head. As he hurried toward the house, he’d been desperate for a hot shower, a gallon of steaming coffee and, maybe, just maybe, a quick bout of loving from his wife. Tired as he’d been, he’d gotten hard at the thought. He and Karen hadn’t had sex for weeks, and he was about as frustrated as the wild stallion he’d glimpsed racing the wind on the horizon a few hours earlier.
But, when he reached the house, he found Vicki in tears, Wanda June at her wit’s end and Karen running late—as usual. It had nearly torn him apart to see the disappointment in his little girl’s big brown eyes when she’d come racing out of her bedroom at the sound of the back door closing, only to find him standing. According to Wanda June, Vicki had been waiting for the better part of an hour for her mother to get home.
It had taken him five harrowing minutes to narrow the problem to a hem that needed to be pinned up and sewed in place. Wanda June had offered to help, but Vicki had wanted her mom to do it. Like they’d planned, she kept telling him, her eyes flashing with impatience at his failure to understand.
He’d wanted to smash a fist into the nearest wall. Instead, he swallowed the anger that flared inside him like a familiar stab of pain and offered himself as a substitute. Which was why he was presently standing like an awkward, barefoot idiot in his own dining room, one hand clamped on a patch of flimsy cotton skirt, the other awkwardly trying to retrieve yet another tiny dressmaker’s pin from the small plastic box on the table. He’d rather eat dust and wrestle fifty terrified calves on branding day than pin up a damned skirt hem.
“Darn it, Vick, hold still.”
Vicki stood ramrod stiff on the tabletop, her small pixie face screwed into a knot of worry. He winced as she let out yet another long-suffering sigh. “How much longer till you’re done, Daddy?”
“Couple of minutes,” he mumbled, all thumbs and masculine frustration.
“You keep saying that.”
He drew a steadying breath. “Cut me some slack here, peanut. I’m doing the best I can.”
One pin later she was scowling at him again. “Your hands are too big.”
“Luck of the draw, peanut.” Damn pins were slippery, too.
“My hands are puny, like Mommy’s.” She lifted her hands and glared at them. “I can’t throw a rope worth spit.”
“Little girls aren’t supposed to throw a rope worth spit—or otherwise.”
Looking down, Vicki traced an imaginary pattern on the shiny tabletop. “Did your daddy teach you how to rope?”
“No, and hold still.”
“If your daddy didn’t teach you, who did?”
“I taught myself.” Cassidy felt sweat sliding between his shoulder blades, and his head hurt from squinting at the striped fabric. “Son of a—buck,” he all but shouted when the wickedly sharp sliver of steel pierced the ball of his thumb.
“Daddy, be careful! You’ll bleed on my beautiful dress and ruin it.”
His thumb stuck in his mouth, Cassidy regarded his daughter over the tops of his callused knuckles. “I’m bleeding to death, and all you care about is your dress?” he muttered.
Vicki’s dark eyes danced with mischief. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” She reached up to catch hold of his hand. After giving his injured thumb a quick appraisal, she wrinkled her nose. “It’s only a little prick.”
Cassidy turned his thumb to assess the damage. “That is not a prick. That’s a wound. Probably get infected and ruin my roping for a solid month.”
He stuck the smarting digit into his mouth again to stop the bleeding, his indignant gaze locked with his daughter’s laughing one. At least she was no longer worrying that her pretty new dress might not be finished in time for the party tonight, he congratulated himself.
Maybe he wasn’t much of a seamstress, but he could still tease a smile out of his little girl, even if she did seem more grown-up and femininely unpredictable with each passing day.
“After you pin it, you have to sew it by hand,” she informed him, her small mouth twitching suspiciously at the corners. “With a needle and thread, so no one can see them. Mommy said.”
“So you’ve told me about a dozen times already.”
Vicki nudged her chin down far enough to direct an imperious little-girl frown his way. “Just so you know.”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
Cassidy gripped the blasted hem and braced himself for another attempt. At the same time, he cast another hopeful glance at the window. At the sight of the hovering clouds, which appeared to grow more threatening minute by minute, a nagging unease gripped him.
Karen had a reliable four-by-four and the best cell phone money could buy. Come winter, he always made sure she had new snow tires. Nevertheless, he hated the idea of her driving back and forth to town alone at night or when the weather was bad. One more reason to hate that frigging job of hers.
“Make sure it’s pinned real even, okay?” Vicki ordered with a worried frown as he tightened his hold on the material. “I don’t want to look like a loser in front of my friends.”
Eyeing the scrape on his daughter’s right knee, Cassidy bit off a sigh. Yesterday, she’d been happily running wild on the ranch in dusty jeans and a cowboy hat. Tonight she was as haughty and poised as a princess about to depart for a fancy ball. Was this yo-yoing back and forth normal for little girls? Or was he just inept at parenting? Either way, he was as worried as a greenhorn facing his first branding.
“Look, I have an idea,” he said with a forced heartiness. “Why don’t you wear your jeans and a nice shirt tonight? Maybe that blue one with the fancy buttons you wore to church last Sunday?”
Vicki managed to look both offended and impatient. “Because tonight is special, Daddy. All my friends are going to be there. And some important people from town are going to give Mommy a certificate. I can’t go wearing an icky old pair of jeans.”
It was special, all right, he thought sourly. Half the town would be showing up to honor the folks who’d helped out in last June’s massive storm—rescue workers, firefighters and hospital staff. Grand Springs’s own heroes and heroines. Since the invitation had arrived last month, Vicki had talked about little else. Her mom was a genuine heroine, just like in the movies or in the games on her Xbox.
A man had to be blind not to notice how proud Vick was. The more she talked, the more Cassidy bit his tongue. Okay, so Kari was good at her job. He respected that. But dammit, her patients weren’t the only ones who needed her care and compassion—and love. What about a little girl who spent more time with a sitter or hanging around the corral talking to the hands than she spent with her mom? Or a husband who was beginning to wonder if his wife would even miss him if he suddenly up and disappeared?
“Stop fidgeting, Vick,” he muttered, his temper almost as frayed as the ragged edge of the pink-and-white material he was trying to hide under a little fold the way Vick had ordered.
“I wish I was as pretty as Mommy,” Vicki murmured with a wistful sigh.
Seeing her shoulders slump dejectedly, Cassidy felt something tear inside. Before he could shore up his defenses, he was all but overcome by an urge to wrap her up in silk and sunshine and keep her safe from all the hurts he knew waited for her in the world outside the cocoon he’d tried to weave around her. But even as he fought it off, he knew he would always feel protective toward this marvelous little miracle in pink and white.
“Trust me on this, peanut,” he drawled past the lump in his throat. “You’re as beautiful as the dark-haired princess in that book you read under the covers when you think Mom and I are asleep.”
Vicki wrinkled her nose. “I’m way too skinny.”
“No way! I’m already dreading the day when the boys start lining up outside that door there.” Summoning a decent enough grin, he playfully tugged on one of her long fat braids, hoping to win a smile. When he saw a frown instead, he bit off a sigh.
“You’re willowy,” he assured her. “Just like those ladies on TV.”
