The Girl with the Golden Spurs (23 page)

She began to relax a little. Maybe because she was alone and without a judgmental audience, Lizzy enjoyed riding for the first time in her life. As a child, she’d always had her father along, an instructor, or Mia, or someone else who constantly told her what she was doing wrong.

Always she’d been compared to Mia, who’d been fearless and show-offy. Mia, who’d always angled to ride the boldest horse instead of the gentlest. Mia, who’d been a faultless rider. Well, Mia was gone, and so was Daddy.

“It’s just you and me now, Star. We don’t have to compete with Mia or please Daddy. We can just be ourselves and ride the way we want to.”

Star plodded doggedly along the golf cart trail.

What if we went faster? What if we cantered? Could I?

Lizzy’s heart did a double backflip. She’d always hated to trot or canter.

I can do it!

Taking a deep breath, she dug her feet into the stirrups and Star surged forward. The mare trotted a short distance and then sprang into an all-out gallop. Fifteen seconds into the mad run, Lizzy remembered to breathe. Another fifteen seconds, and Lizzy’s fear evaporated. Instead of fear, she felt exultation.

She was flying on Star. They were floating, soaring, and Lizzy was grinning from ear to ear like a thrilled kid. Her hair came loose and streamed behind her. Her T-shirt plastered itself against her breasts even as it filled and ballooned up and down the length of her spine.

“I like to ride so fast, I get bugs in my teeth,” Mia used to brag.

Yes! Yes! I can do this! I’m doing it! Just like you, Mia!

Mesquite and live oak whizzed past Lizzy in a gray-green blur as the mare’s hoofs thudded against the hard earth. Instead of reining Star in, Lizzy let out a couple of Indian war whoops.

Then suddenly she heard the thunder of hooves pulsing on the trail behind them. Instantly Star’s head turned and her ears pricked backward. Then a terrified whinny rang out.

Someone was chasing her, probably Cole. No doubt Kinky hadn’t wasted a minute tattling on her on his cell phone, and Cole had come after her.

She swiveled in her saddle and shouted, “Cole?”

But he didn’t answer her, and she didn’t spot him because the brush was dense. Perhaps he wasn’t that close after all. She turned back around, feeling nervous suddenly.

What if it wasn’t Cole? For some reason the thought
spooked her. Leaning forward, she stood up in her stirrups and urged Star faster.

A shot rang behind her, and bits of bark burst from the trunk of the oak tree beside the path and hit her cheek, causing drops of blood to spatter on her T-shirt. Had she accidentally ridden onto Uncle B.B.’s hunting lease? Another shot hit a mesquite tree.

She splashed through a shallow creek, and Star rolled her eyes back and ran like the wind.

She heard the unmistakable crack of a gun a third time.

Terror zigzagged through Lizzy as she fought to hang on.

“Is that fried chicken I smell?” Cole said, forcing a smile into his deep voice as he entered the kitchen. The truth was he was worried. He didn’t know where he’d been or what he’d done since he’d left Lizzy and Sam at the museum. When he’d come to his senses he’d been sitting in his truck parked along the side of the private, rarely traveled ranch road near the Cameron pens.

He’d wanted to stay with Lizzy after he’d told her the bad news. Now he was glad he hadn’t.

“I’m so hungry I could eat a bear,” Cole said. He pulled back a chair and sat down at the table, staring gloomily at the checkered tablecloth. “Where’s Lizzy?”

Sy’rai came out of the kitchen and put her hands on her plump hips. “Don’t you have eyes in your head, Mr. Cole? Is that mud and sand I see on my freshly mopped kitchen floor?”

Cole frowned at the bits of mud and grass all over the glossy red concrete floor and got up.

It hadn’t rained in a spell. Where the hell had he been?
What had he done?

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I’ll get a broom.”

When he’d come to in his truck, his glove compartment
had been open, and he’d been staring at a ticket to Nicaragua with his name on it. According to the ticket he’d flown to the Central American country last April—six and a half months ago.

How could he forget something like that?

“No, I’ll get a broom,” Sy’rai was saying huffily as she slapped a knife on the table in front of him. “You’ll take this and go outside and scrape your boots.”

“Where’s Lizzy?” he asked again.

“Kinky said she went riding.”

“Riding? On a horse?”

Sy’rai stared at him. “What else?”

“
Alone?
And Kinky let her?”

Cole didn’t understand the sudden dread that consumed him, the same dread he’d felt when he’d stared at the ticket. It was like he knew something he didn’t know. “When?”

“Four o’clock. He offered to go with her, but she wouldn’t let him. She was pretty upset about Mr. Caesar.”

So the hell was he
, Cole realized, surprised. Joanne had said the doctor said it was weird the way Caesar had died. But she hadn’t elaborated.

He glanced at his watch. “And she’s not back?” He stared broodingly out the window. The last rays of the sun were pink in the clattering palm fronds. It would be dark soon.

Without another word, he stormed out of the kitchen, punching the number of Kinky’s cell as he went, not caring that he was leaving bits of caked mud and sand in his wake or that Sy’rai was shaking her head at him again.

When Kinky answered on the fourth ring, Cole barked, “Get to the barn and see if Lizzy’s back yet.”

“I can tell you she ain’t because I’m at the barn, and Star’s stall is empty. Funny thing, though, somebody took Ringo out and didn’t unsaddle him. He’s lathered up, too.”

“I don’t give a damn about Ringo. Just get as many men
to the barn as you can. I want some on horseback and some in trucks. We’ll need flashlights and floodlights. We’ve got to find her fast.”

“She’s on Star. Anybody can ride Star.”

“Then why the hell isn’t she back?”

A wind had come up that made crashing sounds in the brush. The palm fronds were rattling, the live-oak branches were crackling. Hell, even the long grasses murmured as they were flattened beneath the brute force of the gusts.

“Lizzy? Lizzy!” Cole had called her name so much he was hoarse. It was 2:00 a.m. and he was saddle sore, exhausted and starving, but he wasn’t going to give up looking for her if there was a chance he might find her. He kept on riding Ringo through the rough brush country, shining his flashlight in all the darkest places until he got Kinky’s call on his cell phone.

Cole’s heart stopped at Kinky’s shaken tone. “Mr. Cole…”

“You sound worse than death itself. What’s wrong?”

“Eli and me, we’re sitting in Eli’s pickup with our headlights shining.” His voice faltered. “W-with our lights shining on a saddle blanket and gray horse leg that’s sticking up out of the stock tank right behind The Cowboy Cemetery.”

A cold chill licked its way up Cole’s boots. “What about Lizzy?”

“The water’s too murky to see much.”

Cole turned off his flashlight and the roaring darkness seemed to close over him like a coffin lid. “Get everybody there,” he said in a low, muffled voice, even as horrible images he associated with the airplane crash in the gulf started to bombard him for the first time since the crash.

One minute that fatal day had been bright, the clouds powdery and the gulf blue and serene. Then the clouds had thickened until they were cliffs and chasms. Next the sun
vanished above him as did the waves below him, and they were lost in the suffocating swirls of turbulent black clouds that tossed them about as if the plane were a toy.

He remembered Mia had glanced at him worriedly as he’d struggled to fly the plane. Just when he’d begun to calm down, the plane had been jolted by two explosions. The engines had shuddered and missed. For the first time he had noticed that the fuel gauge was inexplicably low. There had been nothing for it but to go down through the clouds until he could see the waves.

“What’s happening?” Mia had yelled as the altimeter began to unwind inexorably.

“We’re going down!”

The clouds had swallowed them then. All he had seen were his instruments inside and the smothering folds of inky cloud outside. Down, down, they’d gone. Ten feet above the water, the clouds had broken, and he’d seen frothing white caps rushing up to meet them.

Mia had screamed.

“Give me your shoe!” he had yelled.

He remembered opening his door and wedging her fancy, red high-heeled boot into it, so he’d be able to open it again after they’d hit the water.

Then the plane had slammed into the dark, gray waves and rolled over.

When he had regained consciousness, water was pouring into the dark cabin. They’d been belted in and sinking fast.

Don’t let Lizzy be drowned like Mia!

“I can’t hear you! I can’t hear nothin’ but the wind!” Kinky screamed, bringing Cole back to the present.

“Call the sheriff. Tell him…hell, tell him he may need to send Jay and some men out to help us drag the pond.”

Cole remembered fighting his way out of the cockpit and dragging Mia after him.

But that’s all he remembered until he’d regained consciousness on that shrimp boat.

Working in the lights of ten pickup trucks, the cowboys and Jay, the sheriff’s deputy, speculated on how such a gentle mare that hated water could have let herself be ridden into the pond in the first place, let alone have thrown her rider.

“I could see one of our wild broncs doing it, maybe,” Eli said. “Maybe that youngster, Buster.”

“The hoof prints are carved mighty deep in the sand right where she went in,” Kinky said. “Hey, there were two horses. Looks like they was running at a hard gallop.”

Cole strode over to Kinky.

The wind had picked up some and had become a mad, howling gale. Cole removed his Stetson, so it wouldn’t blow away, and his hair whipped his brow.

“It was dark. Why would Lizzy be running her so hard?” Eli said. “Lizzy hated even a fast walk on any horse.”

“Star didn’t like water much,” Miguel offered. “Get her close to water, and every time she’d roll her eyes, turn and pitch.”

“Some horses that don’t take to water just turn on their sides and sink like a rock if you even try to make ’em swim,” Kinky added.

Cole’s throat tightened as he thought about Lizzy being in that deep dark water with her pale hair streaming about her white face, but he said nothing. He thought about Mia then. Had both sisters gone to watery graves—because of him?

Feeling tired and old, he knelt beside Kinky and shone his flashlight onto the hoof prints in the mud and wet sand and wondered who in the hell had been with her.

Where was the other rider?

Where had he been when this had happened?

The next couple of hours were filled with silent tension despite the screaming wind. Cole stood with a knot of cowboys along the muddy edge of the pond, waiting, waiting. Finally, at 4:00 a.m. there were excited shouts from the boat.

“Got somethin’, Jay. A woman I think.”

Cole stiffened.

Then the sheriff’s men dragged a woman’s body from the tank. Even from where he stood at the edge of the pond, Cole could see that she had long pale hair that shone like spun silver. She was slim, but her clothes made her body so heavy, it took three men quite a spell to pull her into the boat.

Lizzy. Dear God. Lizzy
.

Just like Mia
.

Guilt and self-loathing crept over him. Hadn’t the accident taught him anything? He should have been more careful. This was his fault. He should have kept Lizzy safe. He shouldn’t have followed her stupid rules and kept his distance.

He should have realized how upset she’d be over Caesar. He should have stayed with her.

Where the hell had he been to let something like this happen?

Where the hell had he been—period?

He’d been lost in another damn fool fog at best. He was a cripple, maybe not visibly, but he was a cripple just the same.

But at worst? Had he caused this deliberately? Was he some kind of monster?

Dread filled him at the thought of looking at her cold, dead face. He simply couldn’t. Not tonight when his grief and guilt and fear were too raw.

The body was bloated and unrecognizable as Lizzy, Eli warned him.

“What was Lizzy wearing?” someone yelled.

Their voices blurred as they began to argue.

“Shut up! Just bring her here,” Cole yelled. “You can work out the details later.”

When they brought her to him and laid her on the ground, he made them cover her with a blanket before he knelt beside her body. When he laid his Stetson on the ground, the cowboys hung their heads and backed away to give them some privacy.

Slowly Cole lifted her cold, bruised hand. He turned it over. Nothing about the swollen, lifeless hand, especially not its puffy shape, reminded him of his vibrant, sassy Lizzy. She’d had long, slim fingers. These fingers were bloated and yet somehow shrunken in death. But he went on holding her hand because it made him know for sure
his
Lizzy was dead and gone forever.

Maybe because of him.

The wind ruffled the blanket the cowboy had laid over her body, and Cole took great pains straightening and tucking it around her body before he got up and left without saying a single word to the others.

He turned and looked back once. Jay’s steady gaze was boring a hole through him.

Guilt washed Cole again. If he’d done this, there was no way out for him.

T
he speedometer on the dashboard hovered between seventy-five and eighty. Cole was driving the black pickup so fast over the rutted, caliche, ranch road he and Lizzy had toured together that he was jounced so hard his head hit the ceiling. Pain knifed down his neck. Not that he cared.

Ahead, the cruel, twisting road cut through open pasture land, gleaming like a sodden rope of silver.

Two horses. Why two horses? Who the hell had she been
with?

Where the hell were you when she died? Where were you,
you stupid, crazy, sick bastard?
His inebriated brain screamed questions, but the walls in his mind were up and shut tight.

Disturbing facts worried at his mind. Ringo had been ridden by some sick fool who hadn’t bothered to unsaddle him or even take the bit out of his mouth. Cole had left a trail of mud and sand on the kitchen floor.

He clenched the wheel tighter.

He would never have hurt Lizzy. He would have saved her. He wouldn’t treat any horse, much less Ringo, so badly.

How the hell do you know who you are or what you do
when you black out?

He took a long swig from his Scotch bottle. The truck veered off the road and bounced over rocks and cactus.

Hell. Without removing his foot from the accelerator, he maneuvered the truck back onto the road. The front wheel hit a rock, and the truck went into a wild, careening skid. He began to laugh as he struggled to regain control.

When the truck finally straightened itself, he was almost sorry. If she was dead, he wanted to be dead, too. He took another pull of Scotch.

He’d kill himself if he kept this up. So the hell what?

He stomped harder on the accelerator. When the truck sped up to ninety, it seemed to him that the road bucked beneath him more spastically than a crazed bronc.

Lizzy
. Staring at the bleached ribbon of caliche winding its way through the rough country, he remembered how she’d looked under him in her bed in New York when she’d climaxed. God, how she’d dazzled him in the shower the next morning. God, how he still wanted her.

She’d been so soft and sweet when she’d been outside the aviary, he’d almost begun to hope that someday they could have a normal relationship. That she could forgive him for the man he’d been in the past.

Everybody he’d ever cared about was dead or gone: His father, his brother Shanghai.
Lizzy
.

His memories were both sharp and vague, but it seemed to him he’d always loved Lizzy. Too bad he’d been such a damned pigheaded, hard-hearted fool. She’d loved him, too. At least Kinky and Sy’rai had told him so.

He slammed on the brakes and banged his forehead against the wheel again.

Ringo had been ridden and left in the barn with his saddle on. Lizzy was dead. Had the same person who’d ridden
Ringo been with her at the time of the accident? Had that person deliberately hurt her?

Cole didn’t want to believe he’d ever deliberately hurt Lizzy. So far whenever Cole had come out of a blackout, he’d found himself performing whatever task he’d been doing perfectly, with no one the wiser anything was wrong with him. Once he’d been roping wild bulls in the brush with Eli. He’d come to just as the noose had slid around the angry beast’s neck and Eli had let out a war whoop.

But if he hadn’t ridden Ringo, who had ridden him and left him in his stall like that?

What did it matter? What did anything matter if Lizzy was dead?

Slowly Cole opened his glove compartment and pulled out the envelope that he’d hidden there earlier. Ripping the envelope open, he glanced at the airline receipt for the flight to Nicaragua that had his name on it.

He shook his head as he jammed the cigarette lighter into the dash and waited for it to heat. When it sprang out of its socket, he yanked it out and pressed the livid orange coils the corner tip of the receipt until the paper curled and blacked as smoke and flame exploded. Before he could burn himself, he opened the door and threw it out. The wind caught it, and he watched it flutter down the road, shooting sparks and ash into the darkly ominous night.

Exhausted and sick at heart, he lay back on his seat and swigged more Scotch. Usually he never drank. He’d made a pact with himself because of his father’s problem. Since the accident, the last thing his brain needed was any extra dulling or confusion by a drug like alcohol.

What difference did his drinking or not drinking make now? As he lay there in a haze, a half-remembered memory flickered through the mists in his mind.

He was standing outside his crop-dusting office, and the
sun was so hot it burned him even through his shirt. He looked up and saw Lizzy riding down the runway toward him on Pájaro, whose hoofs were tap-dancing.

Lizzy’s hair was shining and she held herself erect, looking almost sure of herself on the horse.

“My hat’s not even mashed,” she’d quipped as she’d dismounted and handed him the reins.

“What are you doing here?” he grumbled.

“I heard you’d come home.”

“And what else did the gossips tell you?” he said as he tied Pájaro to a low mesquite branch.

“What else should they have told me?” she’d whispered softly.

“This.” He thrust his left hand in her face and brandished his gold wedding band.

Her lips went white.

“I’m your new brother-in-law, darlin’. Mia and I eloped.”

She was standing utterly still, staring up at him with huge, lost eyes, clouded over with pain. “But why? I don’t understand. Why’d you go and do a thing like that behind my back?”

“She’s pregnant. I had to marry her.”

The mists swirled around Lizzy, but he fought to hold on to the memory.

“Oh, God, Daddy was right,” she said, her voice raw with pain. “You know something…I hate that about Daddy, him being such a know-it-all. Don’t you just hate him sometimes?”

“I love
you
,” he growled.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

“It’s all that matters. Things aren’t the way they seem. I can explain.”

Before he’d known what he was about, his arms circled her and his lips fell hard on hers. She opened her mouth, yielding, her kisses filling him with a surging tide of warmth.

His tongue was inside her lips, and he felt her nails in his shoulders and the wild tremors in her young body.

“Lizzy, I love you. I love you. You have to know how much I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Her rapturous expression changed to one of self-disgust. “We’re a fine pair aren’t we—
brother-
in-law?
” She pushed him away, and her enormous eyes were wide and blazing. “Well, I can’t stay here now. That’s for sure.”

“Lizzy, you’ve got to let me explain.” He reached for her again, but she seized Pájaro’s reins, mounted him and ran.

Was the memory true? Their conversation had felt real, yet he couldn’t remember his feelings at the time. Had he loved Lizzy even when he’d married Mia? If so, why had he slept with Mia before he married her? Was it as Kinky and Eli said—that he’d wanted the ranch more than anything, even Lizzy?

With Lizzy dead, did that even matter now? When he didn’t know if he even wanted to go on?

Right before he passed out, Cole’s future loomed ahead of him like an empty, meaningless void. Nothing meant anything to him but sharing his life with Lizzy. And that dream had died when he’d touched that dead, bloated hand.

When he awoke, it was still dark outside and his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket. His head hurt. He ached all over, and his stomach felt queasy.

He wasn’t in his truck. For a second or two, he didn’t know where he was. Then Ringo whinnied, and Cole smelled hay and horses and sawdust. He was flat on his back on a cold concrete floor.

The barn
. But how in the hell had he gotten there?

In a daze he answered the phone.

A woman said, “Cole?”

Every nerve in his body buzzed. “Lizzy?”

No
, he thought numbly as he stared upward at bare rafters.
Lizzy’s dead. I held her horrible dead hand
.

“Cole, you’ve got to help me. Somebody chased me.”

Lizzy’s voice or the impersonator’s was badly garbled in static. But she damn sure sounded exactly like Lizzy.

“Lizzy’s dead! Who the hell are you? Speak to me!” He bolted to a sitting position.

His joints were stiff, and a pulse in his temple pounded so painfully he was afraid his brain might explode.

Ringo whinnied again. Cole realized he’d lost time—again. Only this time, the spell wasn’t over. He was hallucinating that Lizzy was alive.

The static on his cell phone cleared for a second, but the voice that sounded exactly like Lizzy’s kept on talking.

“I’m in the camp house you showed me on that tour. A hunter shot at me and spooked Star. I was thrown. I couldn’t call before because my cell phone kept saying no service or I’d get that awful busy signal. Oh, Cole, come quickly. It’s dark, and I’m scared out of my mind. I—I need you so much. I never needed anybody the way I need you now.”

He could barely hear her, but unless he was insane, Lizzy
was
alive.

In his excitement, he forgot everything except Lizzy. “Darlin’, Uncle B.B. called me the morning you left and canceled the hunt, so no hunter shot at you. But there’s a key under the flowerpot by unit four. McBride keeps the electricity and the hot water heater on in that unit, too.”

“Thanks, Cole,” she said. “But hurry.”

“You hold tight, darlin’. I’ll be right there.”

Lizzy was alive. But if she was alive, who was the dead woman they’d pulled from the tank?

Trying to calm her frazzled nerves, Lizzy stood in unit four’s shower, hot water streaming over her body as she
sponged herself with a washrag and bath gel. She’d rinsed out her dirty, damp clothes and hung them up on the towel racks. A door slammed, and she jumped, her heart racing in fright even though she was expecting Cole.

Still, just in case, she turned off the water and dried herself off quickly. “Cole?”

“It’s just me, darlin’.”

She took a couple of quick breaths and fought to get a grip. Winding a towel around her wet hair, she pulled on the thick white terry-cloth bathrobe she’d found in the closet. The sleeves fell over her fingers and the robe dragged the floor. Opening the bathroom door, she stepped into the living room because she wouldn’t feel safe until she saw him.

“You look like a lost, little waif,” he muttered gruffly, watching her from just inside the door as if he couldn’t believe she was real.

“Believe me, I feel like one, too. You don’t look too hot yourself.” The cold tile floor stung her bare feet and sent chills up her legs. The room smelled a little musty. “I—I thought you’d never come,” she whispered as she began to shake.

She wanted to run to him and throw herself into his arms and tell him scared she’d been. But his face was dark and grim. His white shirt and tight, threadbare jeans were wrinkled and dirty. No telling what he’d been doing when she’d called. He probably didn’t want anything to do with her. Now wasn’t the time to tell him how frightened she still was.

So, she bit her lips and clutched the edges of her robe together at the throat and said rather primly, if not nervously, “Thanks for coming. Unit Four is so charming and cozy I may never want to leave it.”

“I just can’t believe it’s really you,” he whispered, appearing to be somewhat dazed.

They were staring at each other from opposite sides of that
large sitting room that had a lovely stone fireplace flanked by a pair of brown leather sofas. Above the fireplace hung an immense portrait of Caesar, and it unnerved Lizzy a little that wherever she stood, her daddy’s eyes followed her just as they had when he’d been alive.

There was a bedroom, a bath and a small kitchen, even though most hunters probably preferred to be fed and waited on in the main lodge.

“I’ll try to find you something to wear home,” he said as he turned from her and began to open and shut all the drawers.

How could he be worrying about clothes—now—when she was so afraid? And so glad to see him? So glad to be alive?

“I—I don’t want to go home,” she whispered and felt herself flush all over when he glanced up abruptly to read her meaning. “Not yet anyway.”

That’s right. The rules have changed, cowboy. I want to
be here alone with you
.

Yesterday she’d learned for certain her brother was gay. Then she’d learned her father was dead. And when she’d thought it couldn’t get worse, she’d been chased and shot at. Cole’s presence was the only thing holding her together. Did she want to go home? Not hardly.

When he slammed the last drawer shut without finding anything, he turned, and she saw that his dark cheeks were as red as hers probably were. “You hungry then?”

“Starved.” How could he act so normal? She was looking directly at him, imploring him to read her mind, to care a little, to feel
something
.

If he did, he was loath to let on.

“Me, too.” His voice was hoarse.

“The only thing here is a jar of instant coffee,” she said shyly.

“Then I’ll go down to the lodge and find something to cook for us here.”

“Don’t leave me!” Like a terrified little kid, she scampered after him when he opened the door. Her eyes lingered on his face. She wanted so much to touch him, to be held and comforted, to feel safe.

“What the hell happened?” he whispered, reaching for her. Pulling her close, he brushed his hand across her cheek where the bark had hit her when she’d been shot at.

“I—I…” She stopped, clamping her teeth together. If she tried to tell him, she’d fall to pieces and maybe weep hysterically.

“Just hold me. Don’t ever let me go.”

“I thought you were dead,” he murmured gravely, hugging her. “I’ve been through hell. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“I nearly was dead. But just hold me.” She was still trembling as if she had the chills.

They stood together at the door for a long time, locked in a tight embrace.

“You smell a little funny,” she said.

“Sorry about that, darlin’.” Without further explanation, he turned his face from hers even as he pressed her even closer.