CHRISTMAS AT THE CARDWELL RANCH (16 page)

Chapter Sixteen

While Hud went to the hospital with his wife, a deputy marshal by the name of Jake Thorton took Tag’s and Lily’s statements. By now it was almost daylight.

Tag felt numb. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. So much had happened that he couldn’t imagine celebrating the holiday now. Camilla Northland was dead. His cousin Dana was in the hospital in a coma. Both Angus and Harlan were tying up the loose ends of the murder list case.

“I almost got you killed,” Lily had said on the way to the marshal’s office. She looked and sounded exhausted. There was a haunted look in her eyes that Tag had desperately wanted to exorcise, but nothing he’d said or done had.

“No,” he said, and touched her arm. She flinched and tears welled up in her eyes.

“I couldn’t pull the trigger. I just...couldn’t.”

“It’s all right. We’re all right. It’s over.”

She shook her head. “It was all so...senseless.”

He knew that she came from an ordered life, one where things always added up and made sense. One and one were always two. She was shaken and remorseful and he would have done anything to change that. But just the sight of him was a reminder that she’d failed herself, and no matter what he said...

He recounted everything that had happened for the second time to the deputy marshal, and then signed the paper that was put in front of him. Lily was being questioned in a separate room. He could see her through the window. She was crying.

His heart ached and he wanted desperately to go to her. But when she happened to look up, her gaze met his and she quickly looked away.

As he left the room, he saw that Ace was waiting for his sister.

“You saved her,” Ace said, and shook Tag’s hand.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Yeah, it was. You found her and got her out of there.”

“I almost got her killed because of a stupid flash drive with useless names on it.” Lily was right. It had all been for nothing. “Take good care of her.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back to Texas. I’m the last person your sister wants to see right now.”

Ace looked sad about that. Not half as sad as Tag. He told himself it would never have worked out anyway. He lived in Texas. She lived in Montana. Even if she wasn’t going back to her ex... And yet he kept thinking of her hand against that dirty pane of glass and her face in the faint moonlight.

The ache was like a hard knot inside him. He and Lily had never stood a chance. That was all it had been. A chance encounter doomed from the start. So why did it feel as if he was losing something he would yearn for for the rest of his life?

As he looked out into the faint light of daybreak, he heard Christmas music playing somewhere in the distance. Colorful lights glittered across the village of Big Sky. He hoped he could get the first flight out. He’d had all he could take of Christmas in Montana.

* * *

“Y
OU
’
VE
BEEN
THROUGH
a lot,” Ace told Lily on the way back to his place. The sun was just starting to come up; the sky behind the mountains to the east was silvery with sunrise.

The day was cold and frosty, a misty fog hanging low in the snowcapped pines. Lily watched the landscape slide past and hugged herself even though it was warm in her brother’s Jeep.

“I always thought I could take care of myself.” She felt her brother glance over at her. “I’ve never thought of myself as helpless or weak.”

“You are neither. I’m not sure I could have pulled that trigger, either.”

She shot him a disappointed look. “We both know better than that.”

“Come on, Lily. It’s over. Cut yourself some slack. You were abducted. You could have been killed. You survived.”

She nodded and looked out at the passing wild country. She’d survived but at what cost?

Ace reached over and squeezed her arm. “I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t hired Mia in the first place—”

“You sound like Tag. He blames himself for finding the thumb drive when I was there. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just that it was all for nothing. The names were of no use. Everyone was killing each other for
nothing.
The list was of no use because half the names were wrong on it, I heard at the marshal’s office. Apparently, Mia either messed up or they were onto her and gave her a fraudulent one.”

Ace drove in silence the rest of the way to his apartment over the bar.

“I’m going to my own house,” she said when she looked up and saw that her SUV was parked in the lot behind the bar.

He started to argue, but she cut him off. “All the bad guys are locked up. It’s over. I want to go home. Need to go home.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being alone,” her brother said.

She smiled at him. “I need to be alone. I’ll drive down tomorrow. We can talk then. Right now—”

“I know, you just need to be alone,” he finished for her, and smiled. “You’ve always been like that. I need people when I’m upset. You need solitude.”

“Thank you for understanding.”

“The marshal had your car picked up at Gerald’s motel and brought here,” he said. “Gerald stopped by earlier to say he was flying back to California. Does that mean you didn’t take him back? You aren’t reconsidering, are you?”

“Would that be so bad?” She held up a hand as her brother started to tell her again what he thought of Gerald. He didn’t understand. Gerald offered her a quiet, safe life. Right now that sounded like just what she needed. She opened the passenger-side door of the Jeep and climbed out. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

With that she walked to her SUV, beeped open the driver’s-side door and climbed in. She needed familiar right now, her own things around her. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life.

Her brother stood at the front door of the bar, waving as she left. She could tell he didn’t like letting her go—letting her even consider going back to Gerald.

The past twenty-four hours were like a bad dream. Gerald showing up, making love with Tag, being kidnapped and held hostage and then Tag’s rescue and, ultimately, her own part in it.

She could still remember the feel of the gun in her hand, the weight of it, the touch of the trigger. She’d let herself down. Let Tag down and almost gotten them both killed.

Her phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID. Tag. She couldn’t bear to pick up. He would be flying home to his life in Texas. She’d heard him telling the deputy marshal of his plans.

“I need to go back to Houston,” he’d said in response to the marshal’s question about where he could be reached. “My brothers and I own a barbecue business.”

“You’re not staying for Christmas?”

Tag had glanced in her direction, and then said, “No, I don’t think so.”

He’d come over to her then and tried to talk to her, but she’d already put that cold, unemotional wall back up—the one Gerald had always admired about her. She could tell that Tag had been hurt and confused. He’d wanted to help her through this.

She shook her head at the thought as she pulled into her drive. There were tracks in the snow. But she didn’t think too much about them. Everyone had been looking for her. Someone must have checked her house after the snow quit falling.

Lily pressed the garage-door opener and watched the door slowly rise in the cold mountain air before she pulled in. She’d just cut the engine, the door dropping behind her, and gotten out when she realized she wasn’t alone.

* * *

A
S
T
AG
WAS
getting ready to leave the marshal’s office, his father walked in. Tag wasn’t up to seeing anyone right now, still stung from the rebuke Lily had given him. She’d acted the same way the morning after their lovemaking. In those moments earlier, she’d made it clear that there was nothing between the two of them.

So it wasn’t surprising that he felt a lethal mixture of emotions at just the sight of Harlan Cardwell right then.

“Well, if it isn’t my father the agent.”

“Retired CIA agent,” Harlan said.

“Whatever.” He started to walk past him, but his father caught his arm. “We need to talk.”

“Really? I flew all the way up here hoping that you might have five minutes for me.
Now
you want to talk? Let me guess. You want to talk about this case—not about you and me. You really don’t know how to be a father, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Harlan said. “I still need to talk to you.”

Tag shook his head. He couldn’t help the well of anger that boiled up in his belly. When he’d flown up here for Christmas, he’d told himself he’d had no expectations. That had been a lie. He’d come hoping to find the father he’d never had.

“Why don’t we step into Hud’s office?” his father said.

“Are you ordering me?”

“I’m asking.”

They stood with their gazes locked for a few moments, before Tag relented and stepped into the office. “Okay, let’s get this debriefing over with,” he said as Harlan closed the door behind them and motioned his son into one of the two chairs in front of Hud’s desk.

“I’m sorry,” his father said as he sat down. “You’re right. I know nothing about being a father.”

“And you never tried to learn.”

“I did at first, but I let my job get in the way. It seemed more important.”

Tag saw how hard that was for Harlan to admit. “It still is.”

Harlan shook his head. “I only got involved because I used to work with Mia’s father. I’ve known her since she was a baby. I could see that she was in over her head and yet...” He raked a hand through his hair. Tag noticed the streaks of gray he hadn’t before. He saw the lines around his father’s eyes. Saw how much he’d aged as if it had all been in the past twenty-four hours.

He’d seen his father as a guitar-playing, beer-drinking good ol’ boy who just wanted to have fun. Now he saw the man behind that facade.

“Stay for Christmas,” Harlan said.

“Was the computer thumb drive really worthless?” Tag asked. “Or is that just another lie?”

His father looked sad and disappointed for a moment that Tag had turned their conversation back to business, but finally said, “The original drive was corrupted.”

Tag frowned. “Corrupted? Well, at least you have the list that Lily provided you.”

“The names Lily McCabe decoded were incorrect. Useless, since there was no way to match up those ex-cons with the deaths of the law officers on the list.”

Tag let out a curse. “Lily was so sure—”

“Some of them were right. I don’t know why she wasn’t able to get the rest of them. But whatever the reason, it probably saved her life,” Harlan said.

Tag felt his heart bump in his chest. He and Lily had tried so hard, but ultimately, they’d both failed. “So now what?”

“I’m retired again. That’s why I’d like you to stay for Christmas.”

A cheer came up from another part of the office. The dispatcher gave a thumbs-up and mouthed that Dana was going to make it.

“I’ll think about it,” Tag said, and rose to his feet. His father did the same and held out his hand. Tag shook it, feeling his father’s strength in that big hand. “Did Mother know?”

Harlan nodded. “She couldn’t live with never being sure if I was going to make it home for dinner.”

Tag nodded.

“I hope you stay for Christmas, but I’ll understand if you don’t.”

At the cabin, he packed up his things, realizing he couldn’t leave without seeing Lily one more time and saying goodbye. He swung by the bar to find it closed. After a few minutes of pounding on the door, Ace appeared.

“Is Lily here?”

“She was determined to go to her place. I tried to talk her into staying with me, but my sister is one stubborn woman.”

Tag smiled. “Determined and strong.”

“Well, she’s not feeling all that strong right now. She feels she let herself down and almost got you killed. I’m not sure she can ever forgive herself.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Tell her that.”

“I’ve tried.”

Ace glanced toward the old pickup Tag was driving. “You’re leaving.”

“I am, but I don’t want to go without seeing her again.”

“She says she needs to be alone. Sorry.”

“Okay.” Tag turned to leave.

“I suppose you won’t be back.”

“Not likely,” he said as he walked to his father’s pickup and climbed in. The sun had come up behind the mountains and now washed the countryside with cold winter sunlight.

As he drove out of Big Sky, Tag found himself mentally kicking himself. If he hadn’t gone to the bar that night and Mia hadn’t stumbled into him... If he hadn’t found that stupid thumb drive in his coat pocket and let Lily see it. If...

His heart began to pound as he remembered something. He turned around to head back toward Lone Mountain and called his father. “About those names. You said the thumb drive was corrupted and so was the copy Hud made, right? Lily told me that she had decoded some of them, but hadn’t had a chance to finish. It was her former fiancé who gave us the list.” Tag swore. “I let him use the original flash drive.”

Harlan instantly was on alert. “What’s his name?”

“Gerald Humphrey.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Nothing. Nothing except that it took him six months to show up after he’d stood Lily up at the altar. He supposedly already left on a flight from Bozeman to Los Angeles, California, today.”

He heard his father clicking on a computer keyboard. “I’m showing that he was on the flight.”

“Is there any way to verify that?” Tag turned onto Lone Mountain Road and headed toward Lily’s while he waited.

“I can try to contact the airport.”

“But why would Gerald corrupt the thumb drive or give Lily the wrong names?” He could hear his father clacking away at the computer keyboard.

“He recently left his job in Montana to take a lesser one in California at a small private school,” Harlan said. “Wait a minute. Next of kin. Gerald Humphrey has a younger sister who was recently sentenced for embezzlement. She got fifteen years and is serving time in a prison in California near the private school where he is now teaching.”