Authors: Janette Kenny
Cowboy Come Home (11 page)
The wrangler nodded. “I told Weber what the boss wanted done. He told me to tell anyone who asked that the horses were gone by the time I came back from the JDB.”
So Sam Weber set himself up for that fall. Saved Galen Patrick’s hide as well.
“I want to know what this is all about,” Daisy said, looking from Galen Patrick to Hollis Feth before locking gazes with Trey.
He read the impatience in her eyes and was glad she wanted to know. That she wasn’t just letting the men handle the ugly part of this business.
“I suggest Hollis and Patrick join us at the house while the men see to Sam Weber’s burial,” Trey said. “The ranch have a plot for the hands?”
“Up on the ridge, alongside the family plot. I’ll put on coffee,” Hollis said, and started toward the house with the wrangler following suit.
Trey turned to the hands remaining. All were young, and more than a few were green about ranching. All looked like they’d rather do anything than bury a man.
“I-I’ll see to him,” Ansel said, surely the youngest and scrawniest cowpoke Trey had ever seen.
The boy from the JDB had made plenty of mistakes on the drive up here, but he had owned up to them. He didn’t back down.
Trey nodded. “I’ll leave you in charge then.”
That earned him a stiffening of bony shoulders. Might make a man out of the boy yet.
He turned to Daisy. “After you, boss lady.”
She spared the dead man one last look, then headed for the house. Trey heaved a sigh and fell into step beside her.
“Am I right to guess that this all started after Mr. Patrick delivered my mare to Daddy?” she asked.
“That’s the way it looks to me.”
“Ned Durant again?”
“Yep.” Trey grabbed her arm and stopped her, got her looking up at him again. “He’s dangerous, Daisy. Hard telling what he’ll take in his mind to do.”
“I can see that now.”
“You might think of moving ...”
“No! I’m not going anywhere.” She jerked free of him and continued on to the house, her pace quick and her back painfully stiff.
He scrubbed a hand over his chin and sighed. Damned stubborn woman.
But he thought more of her for digging in her heels and staying than if she had hightailed it. Surprised him too.
The curious and protected Daisy he’d known had changed. She had a backbone of steel and treated him with cool regard most of the time.
That should have been enough to douse any desire for her. But it didn’t.
As he trailed the inviting sway of her hips into the house, he admitted he liked and wanted her more than ever.
Daisy eased onto the big chair at the head of the kitchen table and waited for the men to file in and take their places. Hollis Feth went straight to the old cast iron stove and proceeded to make coffee. Galen Patrick hesitated a good spell before straddling a kitchen chair, looking uneasy about being in the house.
Trey had yet to walk through the door, which wasn’t surprising to her. That man danced to his own drumbeat and damned anyone who tried to change the tempo.
Just keeping that in mind kept the fire on her annoyance with him burning steadily. She couldn’t believe he’d planned to leave her all along. That he’d come back with a demand for his due and a brutal story of being nearly killed.
In the span of an hour she’d gone from being hopeful that she and Trey could work together to being outraged over his devil-may-care admission. She didn’t doubt Ned had tried to kill him. But it infuriated her that he insinuated that her daddy had ordered it done. That her daddy could torture a man to death without batting an eye.
She’d been ready to sever her agreement with Trey then. Until Hollis Feth had all but confirmed that her daddy wasn’t the gentle giant that she remembered. That he had a brutal side as well. That he could mete out Western justice to those who crossed him.
Hollis had been the first man she’d seen when she rode back to the ranch. When he asked her why she looked like she was hunting for bear, she told him. “I’m thoroughly disgusted with my foreman, who claims I’ve placed my daddy on a pedestal.”
“Now what brought this on?” he’d asked.
“I spotted a dead man half hidden behind an outcropping and Trey suspects the man was dragged to death,” she said, and right before her eyes Hollis changed from a laid-back ranch cook to a man who was as coiled and dangerous-looking as a rattler. “He insinuated that my daddy was capable of meting out such cruel punishment.”
“Which you don’t believe for a minute,” Hollis said.
“Daddy wouldn’t torture a man.”
Hollis shook his head and stared at the far horizon, his smile disappearing faster than the taunting promise of rain. “War changes a man, Daisy. Hardens him. Brings out something deep inside him that can shame him. Scare him too in the deep of night when he’s lying beside a good woman who’s tried to gentle him.”
A good bit of apprehension sank into her, for she’d never remembered her daddy being anything but gentle. Yet she’d known the men he employed feared him. That they walked the straight line he drew at the JDB. That none of them defied him.
None except Trey March when he tempted fate to romance her. Could her daddy have found out sooner than she knew about her and Trey? Had he ordered her lover punished? Who in the world was she to believe?
The scuff of boot heels at the doorway brought her gaze up to meet Trey’s. The air seemed to crackle around her, and she fought the urge to draw back from his knowing stare. But he gave her no more than a passing glance before taking the chair at the opposite end of the table.
And wasn’t that just what they were? Opposites whose lives had collided like two stars in the heavens, blazing with fire and energy before exploding apart.
The fire should’ve died. It should’ve withered in her heart for good, burning away the longing and the dreams.
Yet her body still remembered the passion. Still ached for his touch, even knowing now that given the chance he’d love her when it suited him then ride out of her life.
She couldn’t deal with that now. Wouldn’t give in to the wanting.
Her daddy owned two ranches that were different as night and day. His old life here seethed with memories of another family lost to him. A ranch rich with new thoroughbreds and old secrets.
His vast West Texas spread bore his brand. The only home she remembered. The fancy house he’d built for her mama, where Daisy had found love and loss. Where she’d grown from a little girl to a woman.
The JDB was Daisy’s home. Though her mama died here, she’d been brought back to the JDB. Daddy rested in peace beside her. Or did he?
That ranch had dried up along with her dreams this spring. She couldn’t hide behind her daddy any longer. She couldn’t rely on strangers to take care of business for her.
“If any of you know about any friction between my daddy and Ned Durant, I want to hear about it,” she said, determined to get the truth out on the table.
Trey hiked a thumb at Patrick. “Tell her what happened when you took the mare to Barton.”
The wrangler squirmed on the chair, but he maneuvered the matchstick he’d been worrying to the corner of his mouth and looked up at her. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she read a note of apology in his eyes.
“It was the damnedest thing,” Galen Patrick began, his gnarled fingers curled around a tin cup and his head bent so she couldn’t see his eyes. “Soon as I got to the JDB, Ned saw that I got the mare settled then fetched Barton. Your daddy was mighty pleased with the finish I put on that mare.”
“So am I,” she said, meaning it. “The mare is a joy to ride.”
Patrick lifted his chin, and she read the sincerity in his eyes that were the color of worn leather. “First thing Ned wanted to know was how many more I had in that condition. Before I could give him an answer, Barton flat out told him that this mare was the last of the thoroughbreds.”
“Daddy lied to him?”
“He sure did, and then he gave me a look that told me to keep my trap shut.” He hunched his shoulders. Frowned. “Ned just fired questions at him about what the hell was he running up here. Barton told him mustangs and longhorns. That he’d tired of dealing with the blooded stock and sold the lot of them to the fellow he’d outbid at auction.”
This was more confusing than before. “Why in the world would Daddy lie about the horses when Ned could’ve ridden up here any time and seen they were still here?”
“Barton had that covered,” the wrangler said, and took a long drink of his coffee. “As soon as I got back to the Circle 46, I was to handpick the men to help me drive those thoroughbreds north, but instead of taking them to a buyer, we were to hide them in a box canyon. Even left a man up there to keep watch day and night.”
It was just more proof that her daddy had lost trust in Ned Durant. In fact it sounded as if he feared Ned would rustle the horses.
“Why didn’t Daddy just fire that man?” she asked, not expecting an answer.
The chair creaked as Patrick leaned heavily on the back, flicking nervous glances at Hollis and Trey. Her stomach cramped, and her heart felt heavy. Troubled.
“Tell me the rest,” she said, her voice more strident than she’d intended.
Patrick sighed. “I think Barton just might’ve done that.”
“You aren’t sure?”
“I heard them talking low and heated but couldn’t make out what riled Barton so,” Patrick said. “It was after Ned stomped off that Barton told me to get back to the Circle 46 and hide the horses. That he was through with Ned. Didn’t say why. Didn’t tell me what he and Ned had been arguing about.”
My God, had Daddy fired Ned Durant?
She thought back to that day. A month had passed since her fall from the loft. She was still gripped with heartache over the loss of her baby, a crushing loss that was stronger than any shame she felt, worse than when she told her daddy the whole truth.
That month cooped up in the house gave her time to grieve and heal enough to function. So when he gifted her with the mare, she allowed herself to be a fanciful young girl again, if only for an hour.
She had ignored the prickle of unease that something bad troubled her daddy and the urge to ask what was wrong. He never would tell anyone. He’d never discussed the ranch business with her. Never.
Besides it was her birthday. She’d done as her daddy suggested and taken a quick ride on her new mare, no more than going out a couple of miles and back.
When she’d returned, Ned had met her at the barn, his face solemn. He’d told her then that her daddy had suddenly taken ill. That he’d collapsed. That he was dead. That he’d sent a man to town to fetch the undertaker.
The rest of that day was a blur, as was the one after it. She had run to the house and lost herself to grief while Ned continued to do his duty as foreman.
“Do you think Daddy fired Ned?” she asked, looking from her daddy’s oldest friend to the man who still took her breath away.
Trey thumbed his hat back and snared her gaze in his dark penetrating one. “Yep. I’m guessing he caught Ned up to no good.”
“That’d be my guess,” Hollis said. “Damned shame he didn’t tell Patrick here what was going on, but there ain’t nothing can be done about that now.”
“There is if we can prove Ned had a hand in what happened to Sam Weber.”
All eyes turned to Trey again.
Her thoughts tumbled back to his claim that Ned had dragged him near to death. That hateful act had been the reason he’d disappeared, even though he admittedly hadn’t intended to stick around the JDB and her for long.
If Trey was telling the truth ... If Sam Weber had died by Ned Durant’s hand, then her daddy’s old foreman was a far more dangerous man than she’d ever thought.
She’d fired him.
She’d put Trey March in his place. A man he’d tried to kill once before.
Ned would surely be out for blood this time. Their blood.
Chapter 9
A few hours later, Daisy gathered with the cowhands as they buried Sam Weber in a plot at the family cemetery. He hadn’t been the first cowhand to die and find eternal rest here, but years had passed since the last burial had taken place, with her mama and nanny being the last interred.
Each man paid his silent respects before going about his chores again. Everyone but Trey.
On the walk up here, she’d paid more attention to his gait. The way he held himself. The stiff rack to his shoulders.
He’d always walked with slow, masculine pride, his long legs seeming to measure each step, with his lean hips rocking a slightly jarred cadence and his broad shoulders shifting just enough to draw a woman’s attention.
She’d noted the change in him, but thought his movements were indicative of the anger bottled in him. That he was just holding himself in check around her. Now she wasn’t so sure.
If he’d been dragged and laid up as long as he claimed, the slight hesitation in his gait and his stiffer stance could be attributed to a near life-ending injury. And lingering pain?
She touched her left temple where a dull headache had begun to thrum. They always came when she concentrated too hard, like she’d been doing today.
A strong, warm hand splayed on her shoulder, and her head snapped up. Trey stared at her with dark eyes that had seen far too much agony in his young life.
“You all right?”
“A mild headache. I’ve been plagued by them all my life,” she said. “Or rather the life I remember.”
He canted his head to the side, those eyes of his probing hers now, tickling the fringe of a memory that was buried deep inside her. “How far back can you bring to mind?”
She frowned, testing her memory before speaking. “Eight. It was autumn and still hot, but my mother dressed me up in yards of petticoats and lace just the same for the harvest festival.”
His mouth quirked in a smile. “Bet you were a fetching little girl.”
“I’ve been told I was a spoilt child.”
“No doubt in my mind.”
Her cheeks warmed at his light teasing, the tension banding her slowly letting go and taking her headache with it. It’d been that way from the start with Trey. She’d felt drawn to him. Comfortable just being near him.
It was as if she’d known him all her life—loved him all her life. And that was pure craziness.
Just like of late when disjointed images flashed before her eyes of her huddling next to another little girl on the hard bench of a train filled with children. Of standing on a loading platform in the cold clutching each other’s hands. Of a stern woman grabbing hold of her and dragging her away.
And the last one, of her breaking away and running. Crying. Falling.
“What’s troubling you, Daisy?”
She shook her head, hesitant to voice her fears. He’d never asked before. Never seemed concerned, and she’d not been of a mind to unburden herself to him, not when there was another diversion, something that she’d far rather do.
But today it seemed right to tell him. It was something she’d never done, not even with Ramona, for the older woman would always shake her head and tell her to speak with her papa when she tried to remember her childhood.
“I get memories of myself that make no sense at all,” she said, and told him without embellishment about seeing herself on a train crowded with other girls. “Daddy said that I must’ve read a story and it stuck in my head.”
Trey frowned, as if recalling something unpleasant. “You believe that?”
“I don’t know what to think. I have never read a story where so many children were traveling together on a train, or heard tales about it either.”
She’d looked high and low when she got old enough to question her own mind. Ramona never told her such stories, and she was sure that her mama hadn’t either.
Her daddy must’ve tossed out that reasoning for lack of a better one. Yet, deep inside, that excuse bothered her on a whole other level.
“Sounds like those trains that carried unwanted orphans West,” Trey said.
Her gaze drifted back to the headstones of her daddy’s first family. He’d had a life here that he never talked about.
It was as if he was hiding something, maybe the pain of losing so much. Saying nothing about them was his way of keeping the past locked away where it wouldn’t plague him.
Would he have done something similar to her, thinking he was protecting her? It had always left her uneasy when she’d ask him about events that had happened to her before she’d lost her memory. His answers were always vague.
Even Ramona, who would wax on about events that had involved everyone at the ranch, couldn’t give her the details of her childhood. It was as if she was hiding Daisy’s past from her.
“I don’t know anything about the orphan trains.”
“Somebody must have told you about them,” he said, his voice oddly flat and his gaze far off now, as if he was caught in a memory that troubled him too.
She wanted to ask. Wanted to wrap her arms around him and just hug him, but that was too easy. And it brought back clear memories of them together that were best forgotten.
So she closed her mind to Trey and focused on carrying on a conversation, on getting past this awkward moment. “Those trains were horrible. The children had to cluster outside in the cold and rain and get picked over like cattle at market.”
“So I heard,” he said, and finally took his hand from her shoulder. “You just did it again.”
“What?”
“Gave details about something that you claim to know nothing about,” he said. “Only two ways you could know that. You either read about the trains and knew how things went. Or you saw it.”
She closed her eyes and saw a flash of children getting off a train, of the hiss of smoke filling the cold air. Of feeling the bite of the wind. The fear of having strangers gawk at her.
“I saw it,” she said. “My God, I was there.”
But she didn’t know how that could be. Didn’t know why she saw herself on that platform clutching the hand of another girl. Saw herself being dragged away and breaking free. Running. Crying for help.
That’s where the memories always ended and a new fear began.
Her daddy had told her she’d taken a bad fall when she was young. Nothing had been broken, but she’d cried for days.
Could the two be connected?
“Maybe you were in town once when the orphan train came through,” Trey said.
That was the logical answer, but she didn’t think it was true. There wasn’t a reason for her daddy to hide that from her.
She shook her head and stared into his eyes again as if searching for an answer, for somebody to finally see how much this troubled her. She wanted to lift that veil on her childhood, to talk to someone about the unknown that troubled her. To have someone listen for once.
“I see the children leaving the train.” She hugged herself, for the ideas swirling in her mind like a frigid, wet blizzard chilled her to the bone. “I can feel the cold and fear deep inside me. But I couldn’t have been there. I couldn’t have known what happened.”
“You’d know if you were one of them.”
She stared up at him again and shivered at the odd emotion banked in his eyes. “That’s impossible. I’m Jared Barton’s daughter. Everyone knows that.”
He looked away, his body so tight she could almost hear his nerves twanging like discordant fiddle strings. Surely he thought her crazy. Surely he believed that she was weaving a tale that had the substance of smoke, because to her it did.
A name, a place, a face would pop into her mind, then vanish a heartbeat later. They’d come to her sporadically all her life and were impossible to dredge up again at will.
Yet after the fall from the loft they’d occurred more often, the images lingering to haunt her. She could even recall tiny details about two of the strangers now.
The first was a young boy with a wealth of unruly brown hair and soulful brown eyes, a boy far too serious for his young age. The other was a girl her age. They slept together on a small cot in a huge, drafty building, and huddled together on a bench seat on a train. Clasping hands and crying silent tears together.
She clearly could hear the girl scream her name, scream “Daisy,” then the memory faded to black. It was those times that she was nearly numbed with the confusion, the pain, the fear.
Of course she’d told her daddy about these visions.
That’s some imagination you got, Daisy.
That’s some imagination you got, Daisy.
And that’s what they must be. These phantom vignettes had to be some quirk of her mind, perhaps something that was born from the accident that kept the first eight years of her life locked in her memory.
“As children, we tend to believe what we’re told again and again, whether it’s the truth or not,” Trey said, drawing her attention to him and those memories of them that remained crisp and vivid.
She blinked, stunned that the man of few words was actually attempting to engage in more conversation. Had they finally found something in common?
“I suppose that’s how we learn,” she said.
He slid her a quick sideways look that startled her, for she read the disillusionment in his eyes and saw it in the taut set of his jaw. “Or how we’re hoodwinked.”
She stared at this tall cowboy who projected a devil-may-care attitude, yet who was clearly a pessimist. “What would make you think that way?”
He stared at his boots, and for a moment she thought he’d share some more of his past with her, more of the deeper thoughts that troubled him.
Instead he shrugged. Squinted at the horizon again. She knew before he spoke that he’d shut off a part of himself from her again.
“Why’d you think your brother’s name was Dade?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It felt right.”
The name had popped into her head and settled in, like it’d always been there just waiting for her to open that door on her memory and let it out. Even knowing she’d been wrong hadn’t made it go away.
“But I was wrong,” she said. “I imagined it in my mind, just part of dreams that have no rhyme or reason.”
“Such as?”
She shook her head and cast an apologetic glance at Davis’s marker. “I dreamed about a boy holding me close when I cried in the dark, telling me everything would be all right. That he’d protect me.”
“Sounds like something a brother would do,” he said.
“Yes, if he’d lived,” she said. “But Davis was dead years before I was born. Maybe this Dade who I imagined was just my guardian angel sent to watch over me.”
He said nothing for the longest time, just stared at the graves with a frown pulling his brow. But she sensed the change in him—a tension that charged the air and set her nerves snapping like a flag caught in the wind.
Trey made a face that was as close to conveying guilt as she’d ever seen, then swiped a hand over his mouth as if erasing it, and cut her a curious look.
“How old were you when you took this fall that scrambled your memory?” he asked.
“I was told I was six or seven years old, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything at that age or before.”
“And you’re how old now?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, and frowned when he began quietly ciphering. “What are you doing?”
Again he fell silent, only this time her tension doubled. She’d never seen him act nervous. Never seen him be anything but assured. But right now he looked jittery as all get-out.
“You’re scaring me, Trey. What’s going through your mind?”
“Something I damned sure don’t like thinking,” he said. “I told you my foster brother had a sister. Daisy was her name.”
“Yes, I remember. It’s a common name.”
“Maybe so. But how many Dades with sisters named Daisy do you reckon are out there? How many Dade and Daisy Logans could there be?”
Just hearing the names together felt right. But they always had in her head and her heart, as if they held special meaning just for her.
And then she realized what he was implying. His foster brother’s sister bore her name.
She rolled the names over in her mind. Dade and Daisy. It sounded right. Familiar. Yet how could it?
A sudden chill whispered over her, as if a fierce storm was moving in from the mountains to trap her in its icy grip. “Dade and Daisy Logan? Your foster brother is my brother?”
He dipped his chin, his expression hard. Unreadable.
He thumbed his hat back and stared at her like she was a prime piece of horseflesh up for auction. “The orphanage had too many to care for, so they decided to send some west to find good homes.”
She swallowed hard. “The orphan trains.”
He nodded. “Dade’s sister had just turned six when they sent her west. She was a little bit of a thing. He worried that he’d lose the only family he had forever.”
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