Walk Away Joe (19 page)

 
She smiled tentatively. “And you actually think I’d let you?”

 
He gave her a hard look. “I can’t promise that I wouldn’t try.”

 
“Tucker—that’s the most ridiculous crock of bull I’ve ever heard. In the first place, whether you choose to believe it or not, you’ve got too much integrity to do it. In the second, I’m strong enough to handle it if you did.”

 
His look turned deep and probing. “Tell me something. Did my father leave here without bringing up your daddy and the fact that I once worked for him?”

 
She all but flinched as the certainty she’d been clinging to was nudged aside by unease.

 
He let a cynical smile lift one corner of his mouth. “I didn’t think so. I didn’t think he’d leave without firing that parting shot. And I can see that you want so much to believe in me that you sifted through his words and picked out only the things you wanted to hear.”

 
“What I heard was an ugly and veiled accusation,” she said, coming so quickly to his defense that his heart clenched. “What I heard was a selfish man trying to minimize the existence of a son he can’t tolerate because he recognizes a better man when he sees one.”

 
He swore under his breath, shaking his head. “Will you listen to yourself? You barely know me. Yet you’re defending me without question. Just like my mother used to defend my father. Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

 
She walked a step closer, her dark eyes glistening. “It tells me that I believe in you. It tells me that there is more to you as a man than you’re willing to believe yourself.”
 

With a deep breath and a prolonged look, he searched her face. Then, hooking his hands on his hips, he stared past her, digging for the words that would make her see.

 
“Tucker, we’re good together,” she went on, ignoring his dark silence. “We’d be great together, if you’d give it a chance. What’s past is past. It has nothing to do with us now.”

 
His heart was as hard as the set of his jaw when he finally spoke. “You don’t want to hear the truth, do you?”

 
She drew a ragged breath. “I want to hear whatever you want to tell me.”

 
“I don’t think so—but you’re going to hear it anyway. You’re lying when you say the past doesn’t matter.
Your
past matters. It matters because you can’t find it in you to talk to me about it.

 
“I wanted you to talk to me.” He gritted the words out as the memory of that dark night came to him when, in the aftermath of treating the accident victim, she’d come apart in his arms but had refused to share her pain.

 
The cornered look in her eyes told him she knew exactly what he was talking about.

 
“I
needed
you to talk to me that night, Sara. I needed to know you trusted me. You couldn’t do it.”

 
She closed her eyes, hugging her arms tightly around her middle, the action an unconscious gesture of self-protection.

 
“You still can’t,” he added wearily. He hadn’t realized until that moment how much her inability to trust him had been eating at him.

 
“This isn’t about me,” she insisted defensively. “It’s about you, and how you feel about yourself.”

 
He shook his head sadly. “You’re wrong. You know you’re wrong. Just like you know you don’t really want to hear the truth about that ugly little story my father was dancing around.”

 
His face grew hard as memories he didn’t want to recall and truths he didn’t like owning up to staked a claim on his consciousness.

 
“The old man wasn’t blowing smoke. I was eighteen when I went to work for your daddy. I needed a job, and I was grateful as hell that he took me on. I learned about cutters that summer. How to read them. How to train them.” He stopped, grim-faced. “What I didn’t learn was how to stay clear of the boss’s wife.”

 
He watched her face as first denial, then unwilling acceptance, then weary revulsion, set in. She turned away from him, as if the very act could shut out his words. He snagged her arm and spun her around, making her face him.

 
“Your father’s new little bride, Saundra, was restless and selfish and, yeah, she came on hard.” He bit out the words, making her listen, driving the point home. “Pretty heady stuff for an eighteen-year-old who fancied himself a stud. That’s when I figured out I was destined to act out the old man’s legacy.”

 
The imploring look in her eyes almost made him confess the rest. That he had fought it. That Saundra had threatened to have him fired if he didn’t play her little game. That she had chased him and cornered him until finally he gave in and before long became drugged on the sex and the danger and her aggression, even as he hated himself because of his part in it.

 
“It was a lose-lose situation,” he continued ruthlessly. “When your daddy finally caught on, she cried rape, and he ran me off with the business end of a twelve-gauge.”

 
Her tears had begun to flow as the ugly truth took root. He made himself continue, knowing that every word was driving them further apart. Knowing that now she had to accept the extent of his weakness and the impossibility of any future together.

 
“Your father gave me a job, Sara. I repaid him by making time with his wife. Just like my old man. That’s the kind of man you think you want to pin your hopes on.”

 
His words had cut deep. So deep, he physically felt them rip through her slender body.

 
Feeling every inch the lowlife he was, he let her go when she pulled out of his grip. Feeling he deserved every wrenching twist that knotted in his chest and burned deep, he made himself watch as the best thing that had ever happened to him slowly walked away.

 
In the morning, when a grim-faced Tag drove her away from Blue Sky, he didn’t try to say goodbye. He went to work. He focused on the cutter and the calf and the futurity. And he told himself it would be enough. Convinced himself it was more than he deserved.

∙ ∙ ∙

Dallas was a lonely place. Sara stared out the window of Karla and Lance’s high rise at the lights of the city. Pressing her forehead to the glass, she crossed her arms around her waist, fighting a wave of loneliness so pronounced it made her ache. She missed Cody. And Lana and Tag. She missed the ranch and the horses.

 
She missed Tucker.

 
“Earth to Sara.”

 
She turned at the sound of Karla’s voice. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

 
Karla gave her a mock scowl. “It’s a good thing I’m secure with my sense of self, because you could sure convince a body in a hurry that they’re as boring as white bread.”

 
Sara forced a smile. “Sorry. Guess I’m a little preoccupied.”

 
Karla tilted her head. “Interesting word,
preoccupied.
Encompasses so many things. Care to narrow down the possibilities?”

 
It was girls’ night in. Lance was in New York on business, and after much pleading and cajoling, Karla had managed to convince Sara that she needed to come to dinner.

 
“Is it work?” Karla asked when Sara made no effort to elaborate.

 
Sara faced her squarely. “I handed in my resignation today.”

 
Karla’s face went pale before acceptance set in. “Well, I can’t say I didn’t expect it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you couldn’t work it out.”

 
“I’m sorry, too. But I’m also relieved. Maybe I’m weak. Maybe I’m wrong not to tough it out. But I’ve lost the stomach for ER. I’ve lost my nerve. I can’t count on myself to come through in a crisis anymore.”

 
“Weakness has nothing to do with it, Sara. It’s a matter of choice. At least it is for most of us. For you, I think, maybe it was a matter of proving yourself in your parents’ eyes. The cause was right. The reasons were wrong. It happens. And you can’t beat yourself up over it. Honey, if I ever said anything to make you think—”

 
“You haven’t,” Sara said, cutting her off. “You’ve never been anything but supportive. I was the one on the wrong track. It just took a while for it to sink in.”

 
“So, what will you do?”

 
She turned back to the window, her look speculative. “I don’t know. I do know that I’m a good nurse. I just need to get refocused on the reason I went into nursing in the first place. And I need a little more time.” She thought of Lana, and the pleasure she’d felt when she was able to help her through a difficult spot. “Maybe I’ll get into family practice. I think I can make a difference there.”

 
“Yes,” Karla agreed. “You can. But you aren’t going to be good to anyone if you don’t get this thing with Tucker settled.”

 
One thing hadn’t changed. She and Karla still shared everything. Karla knew the whole sordid story. Right up to the point when Sara had confronted her father with Tucker’s confession. She’d always wondered what had happened between her father and his second wife. Their divorce had been quick and quiet. Her daddy never talked about it. Her mother had seemed content to gloat in a martyred silence.

 
When she finally worked up the nerve to confront him last week, her father had reluctantly filled her in. As it turned out, Tucker hadn’t been Saundra’s first less-than- discreet liaison. He’d been one of a string of many, for a woman who was practiced and proficient in the art of seduction. Especially the seduction of younger men. In the final windup, while there was no love lost between them and never would be, Paul Stewart figured Tucker had done him a favor.

 
In retrospect, Sara saw a young man already questioning his self-worth and an older woman convincing him with her attention that she could give him value.

 
She still felt for the child who had witnessed all that was bad in a role model. She hurt for the man whose sense of self-worth had been diminished by his father’s example.

 
“Go to him, Sara.”

 
Karla’s voice was soft yet decisive, echoing the thoughts she’d battled in the two weeks since she’d left Blue Sky.

 
She remembered the look on Tucker’s face when he’d told her. His blue eyes had been hardened by guilt, focused on good-bye.

 
“Go to him,” Karla repeated when Sara met her eyes. “Lance was right. He needs you.”

 
“Seems he’s the only one who doesn’t know that,” she said brokenly.

 
Karla smiled. “Then give him a reason to figure it out.”

∙ ∙ ∙

The drive from Fort Worth to Blue Sky had been long and hot. After shooing Tag off to bed and checking with the new hand and making sure all was well with the stock, Tucker shut off the barn lights and stepped outside.

 
The moon was mellow and round. Like another moon on another night that his mind couldn’t let go of. He could still see Sara by moonlight. Sometimes he could even convince himself he caught a hint of that light, exotic scent that was only hers and had, for a short time, been his.

 
Tonight was one of those times. He breathed deeply of the night as memories of heated skin and honeyed warmth stole through his body, adding to the ache of fatigue.

 
He even thought that if he stared hard enough and long enough into the darkness rimming the white board fence, he could make out her silhouette. Her dark hair, her slim, supple body, the night breeze rustling the folds of her flirty skirt against her long legs.

 
He could even hear her voice murmuring his name.

 
Awareness shot through him like an electric current as he made himself stop and stare and finally realize that it wasn’t his mind playing games, or his eyes playing tricks.

 
She was there. In her tan bare feet, with her soft, uncertain smile, with her eyes aglow in the starlight and her heart balancing precariously on her sleeve.

 
“Hey, cowboy.” She walked slowly toward him, her bare feet whispering across the Texas dust. She stopped in front of him, her eyes glittering with anticipation and anxiety and a palpable fear that he’d send her away.

 
That was exactly what he should do. He didn’t have it in him. Couldn’t make himself. He wanted to look and touch and hold her to him, shutting out the past, starting over in the present, and to hell with everything else.

 
There was so much he wanted to say. Yet he stood there like a post and finally heard himself utter, “What are you doing here?”

 
Her voice was as soft as the night breeze. “I think it falls in the category of a last-ditch effort.”

 
He had to smile. If not because he was so damn glad to see her, then because of her tenacity.

 
“You were right about me, Tucker. I was asking you to accept the man I know you are, but I wasn’t fulfilling my part of the bargain. I wasn’t being up front with you. I was asking for everything and giving nothing back.

 
“I want a chance to fix that, if you’ll let me.”

He swallowed convulsively, wanting to take her in his arms so badly that he hurt with it. Wanting to believe she could mend all the things that were broken. But he had to face at least one unalterable fact.

 
“Some things can’t be fixed, Sara.” His past and her father’s presence in it were a case in point.

 
“We all make mistakes, Tucker.’ ’

 
He closed his eyes and shook his head.

 
“I talked to my father. I got the whole story. Tucker, there are pieces even you don’t know.”