Lone Star Lonely (6 page)

Don’t leave town. We’ll be wanting to talk
to you again, real soon.

She told her mind to be silent and she headed
for the stairs, sobbing hard, barely able to see through the blur
of the tears in her eyes. A good thing, too, she thought as she
moved through the huge house, because the study doors were open,
and she didn’t want to see what was in there. The blood on the
floor. The marks of her bare feet drying in it.

But the images kept replaying over and over
again in Kirsten’s mind as she ran to her room, closed the door
behind her and brushed the wetness from her face. She dragged a
suitcase from under the bed, opened it, then went to the
closet.

He changed his will, Kirsten. Named you his
sole heir.

“Shut up!” She rapidly tossed clothes onto
her bed.

Don’t leave town….

As if they really expected her to sit here,
just sit here, waiting for them to show up at the door with an
arrest warrant. She didn’t know how, she didn’t know why, but
somehow Joseph was responsible for this. All of it.

And he was thorough. If he wanted her
destroyed, she would be destroyed. There would be no stopping
whatever hideous wheels the bastard must have put into motion. He
was capable of anything. Anything. She was scared. She was as
scared as she’d been at fourteen when she’d first met Joseph Cowan,
right after the horrible accident she’d caused. Joyriding in her
daddy’s car without permission. Without a license. Without a
freaking brain! The one stupid, foolish act that had sealed her
fate for good.

Joseph Cowan had owned her, body and soul,
from that day on, even though she hadn’t known it then. She hadn’t
known it until her wedding day, years later. Or…it would have been
her wedding day. But the bastard had shown up to claim what she’d
unwittingly sold to him long ago. Just like Satan claiming a damned
soul.

She had to run.

“Kirsten?”

She spun so fast she almost fell over her
feet. Adam Brand stood in the bedroom’s doorway, looking from the
pile of clothes on the bed to the open suitcase beside them…then
focusing on her face. That was when his expression changed. His
brows went up, and his lips thinned. She turned away fast. “I told
you to stay away from me, Adam. I meant it”

“Yeah. I remember. You also told me you were
fine, but you look like you just picked a fight with a hurricane
and lost. So I’m thinking maybe you’re not so fine, after all.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It is if you’re planning to skip town,” he
said. “That is what you’re planning, isn’t it?”

She straightened, but didn’t face him.
Instead she strode into the bathroom, leaned over the sink and
cranked on the water. She didn’t bother closing the door. He would
come in if he wanted to. He had obviously made quick work of the
locks on the doors downstairs. Or had she even thrown them?

“Kirsten, you don’t have to run. We can
figure this out.”

Bending over, she splashed water on her face.
Then she lathered a cloth with cleansing lotion and began to scrub.
Nobody was going to look at her with mascara streaks running over
her cheeks, no matter what the circumstances might be.

“Figure this out, Adam. The bastard left me
everything he had. And the minute the rangers learn that, I’ll be
taken out of here in handcuffs. I don’t plan to wait around for
them.”

Adam stepped right into the bathroom. She
heard his booted footsteps, and when she reached for the towel, he
handed it to her. “So you lied about the will?”

“No, I didn’t lie about the freaking will. He
changed it.” She snatched up a brush and began tugging it through
her hair.

“I see.”

“You don’t see a damn thing, Adam Brand. Go
home. Leave me alone.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

She paused with the brush in midair. “Why the
hell not?”

“Because my brother gave the rangers his word
he’d see to it you didn’t leave town. He trusted you not to make a
liar out of him, which is, apparently, just what you’re about to
do.”

She drew a deep, calming breath. Time to lie.
And she’d better make it good. It shouldn’t be hard. Hell, she’d
had years of practice. “I wasn’t leaving town. Just this house.”
She finished her brushing, set the brush down and reached for the
makeup case she kept in there. “I decided you were right about it
not being safe. I thought I’d go to a hotel.”

“Come to the ranch.” He said it so fast she
wasn’t even sure he’d planned to.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No. Actually, the more I think about it, the
better the idea seems. Penny’s worrying herself sick about you,
chomping at the bit to get over here—”

“You keep her away from here, Adam.”

She’d whirled on him and gripped his arm, and
she hadn’t meant to. Closing her eyes, she relaxed her grip, but
not before she felt his warmth, the tensing of his bicep, the
shiver of awareness that moved through him. And something familiar,
something precious, shimmered through her body and her mind. It
left her shaken. She let go of him, but her hand still tingled with
warmth and awareness. “I don’t want Penny getting involved in this
mess.”

“I told her pretty much the same thing.”

She swallowed hard. “If I go to the Texas
Brand, I’ll be dragging all this trouble there with me.”

“We’ve done trouble before,” he said. “We can
handle it.”

“Well I can’t. It’s bad enough I have to live
through it. I’m not going to drag you…and Chelsea and little Bubba
and Penny…no. I can’t go to the ranch with you, Adam. And to tell
you the truth, I’m a little surprised you even asked.”

“To tell you the truth, so’m I.” He shrugged.
“Okay, then, what hotel?”

Frowning until her brows touched, she
searched his face. “What?”

“What hotel?” he repeated. “Better call, tell
‘em to make it a double room. Two beds.”

“For God’s sake, Adam, you can’t possibly
think you’re going with me.”

“If I’m not going with you, then you aren’t
going.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the
door frame.

Sighing, she lowered her head. “Okay. Okay,
I’ll bite. I have to admit, you’ve got me damned curious. Why are
you doing this, Adam?” When he didn’t answer, she lifted her head
again, met his eyes. “You hate me for what I did to you. And you
have every right to. You ought to be crowing like a rooster to see
me finally getting my just deserts.”

He drew a deep breath that made his chest
expand, then blew it all out again. “Maybe I should. But I’m not.
Nobody deserves this.”

“You don’t know the half of what I deserve,”
she said slowly.

“No? Well, I know a couple of things. You
didn’t shoot Joe Cowan.”

It felt so good to hear those words—someone
actually believing her, after facing the skepticism in the faces of
everyone else she’d seen today. Every cop who’d questioned her.
Even her own lawyer. She almost melted on the spot. And then he
went on.

“And you didn’t marry him for the money,
either.”

She went still. “How do you know that?”

“Because up until today, you thought you
weren’t getting a dime of it. I know you well enough to know when
you’re lying, hon. And I don’t think you were lying when you told
me and Garrett that. So the big question on my mind is, why did you
marry him?”

She shook her head, faced the mirror, fumbled
in the makeup bag and pulled out some powders and brushes.

Adam came closer and stood behind her, hands
on the back of her chair, looking at her in the mirror. She
couldn’t look back at him, and she dusted makeup over her face as
fast as she could.

“What made you decide not to show up for our
wedding, Kirsten?”

“You shouldn’t ask a question like that,
Adam. Because you sure as hell don’t want to hear the answer.”

“I think I do. I think I need to hear the
answer. So go on. Give it to me, Kirsten. I’m a big boy. I can take
it.”

She still didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m not
going to discuss this with you.”

“Did you love him?” The question seemed to
have been tugged out of him almost against his will.

She flinched when he asked it. She could
pretend all she wanted. She could hide the truth and keep her
secrets better than anyone she knew. But there was no way in hell
she could look Adam Brand in the eye and tell him that she’d loved
another man. A man she’d hated with every breath she drew. She
couldn’t do that. So she pressed her lips together and tried to
pretend he wasn’t there. She focused on her own reflection in the
mirror, and slowly, methodically, she put her mask on and hid her
dark truth away from those prying blue eyes.

Adam watched her face. It was amazing, the
transformation. Her hands flew from one brush to another, and bit
by bit the woman he remembered, the woman he’d loved, disappeared.
She literally painted a new woman over her. She didn’t answer his
question. Not until she looked as if she had just stepped off the
cover of some businesswoman’s magazine. Not until she gathered her
beautiful brown hair up into a tight little knot and stuck pins
into it so viciously it seemed like she was stabbing the old
Kirsten to death in the process. Not until she’d sprayed it stiff,
and he’d had to turn his head to get a breath of air that didn’t
choke him.

When she faced him again, she was the ice
queen he hated. Not the vulnerable girl in the fight of her life
who needed him. And she said, “I had my reasons for marrying
Joseph. And none of them are any concern of yours.”

“Did you love him?” he asked her again. He
knew the answer before he asked the question. The woman sitting
there with her painted-on face was incapable of loving anyone. But
the girl underneath had been…once. Was she still?

“I really think,” she said, rising slowly
from her little stool like a phoenix from the ashes—trans-formed,
strong, stubborn—”one interrogation a day is more than enough for
me.”

He only nodded. But he’d thought of
something, and he couldn’t stop until he probed just a little
deeper.

“How’s your father, Kirsten?”

She went utterly still. A doe caught in
somebody’s high beams. She blinked, averted her eyes. So she was
still as firmly, even wildly, devoted to her father as she had
always been. It was one of the things he’d loved best about her.
And he’d never understood how even that could have changed. How she
could have shipped him off to a home when she’d vowed to keep him
with her always, no matter what. She’d even made it a condition
when she’d accepted Adam’s marriage proposal. She would marry him
only if her father would always have a home in their household.

“Is he still in that nursing home in Dallas?”
he asked her.

She nodded, her motions jerky as she turned
her back to him and pretended to straighten the colorful containers
and tubes on the countertop. “It’s the best facility in the state.”
Her hands were shaking. The makeup stood in neat rows when she
finished.

“I always wondered why you decided to ship
him out there. I mean, it’s not like there wasn’t plenty of room
right here. And God knows, you could have paid for a nurse to come
in.”

She stilled again, her head bent, her back
still toward him. “Don’t you dare question my love for my father,
Adam Brand.”

“I’m not questioning it. But I imagine he
is.”

She spun around, her hand slamming across his
face so fast and so hard that he rocked back on his heels. He felt
the sting. The surprise. Saw the fresh tears welling in her eyes.
Felt an odd surge of relief that her feelings for her father hadn’t
turned to ice like everything else about her seemed to have
done.

“I’d die for my father, you bastard. He’s
where he is because it’s the best place for him to be. And it’s a
good thing he is, because a shock like Joseph’s murder would
probably have killed him.”

Adam stood there and saw raw honesty in her
eyes, blazing bright. It was good to see it there for a change,
instead of all those deceitful shadows he’d been trying to see past
all day. “His heart’s still that weak, is it?”

“His heart is shot,” she said slowly, a
little of the anger fading, a little of the stiffness easing from
her body. “He’s been on the transplant list for over a year
now.”

That knocked the wind out of his sails. Adam
swore softly. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what
I did.”

“No,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”

He drew a breath and sighed, not knowing what
the hell to say or do next.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said finally.
“I’m not going to a hotel. I’m going to stay right here. You can go
home, Adam.”

He shook his head. “Wish I could oblige you,
Kirsten. But I can’t. If you’re staying here, I’m staying, too.
I’ll try to stay out of your hair.”