Can't Buy Me Love (6 page)

“He needed his inhaler,” Ruby said. “Twice.”

“I always need my inhaler,” Jacob said, his voice too old. Too over it all. “It wasn’t bad.”

“And …” Ruby pulled a pink rubber pancake out from the back pocket of her jeans. “This. Boy about gave me a heart attack.”

The whoopee cushion. She was going to kill Luc for giving that to Jacob.

Jacob laughed and Victoria arched a silencing eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she muttered, taking the toy. “My … father seemed to have had some kind of … attack,” she added, thinking Ruby should know, since she seemed to know everything that happened on the ranch.

“Is he okay?” Ruby’s panicked sadness stunned Victoria. Silenced her. How in the world did that man inspire such warmth in other people, in
servants
, rude ones at that, when his children were left shivering in the cold?

“I … I don’t know.”

Just like that, Ruby disappeared back into the house. “Grandpa okay?”

Grandpa
. That word out of her little boy’s mouth made her teeth itch. Her heart burn.

“I think so,” she hedged. “What do you say we take our stuff out of the truck—”

“I thought we weren’t staying long.”

They’d taken only their overnight bags into the ranch house last night, but their suitcases—for their worst-case scenario—were still in the car. “Well, we’re going to be here awhile, pardner. So help me out.”

Luc’s giant SUV rental crouched in the parking area like a big black monster. Same kind of car Joel would have driven—the kind of car that made every other person on the planet seem small. Insignificant. Something to be rolled over.

Luc liked it because he was a big man, with big shoulders and long legs.

Joel liked it because he was a small man.

With a tiny penis.

“You need some help?” a rough voice like steel wool asked over her shoulder. She spun, startled to find a man, tall and thin, standing far too close. He wore a dusty denim shirt, unbuttoned at the neck to reveal collarbones and damp skin.

He smelled like sunshine and horse.

“Excuse me,” she said, her voice sharp, and the man
shifted back. He wore a big cowboy hat and the sun behind him made it impossible to see his face.

“Sorry.” She didn’t know if he was smiling, but something in his voice sounded like he was mocking her.

She tried to see beneath the hat, but he shifted away, reaching past her for the bag. His arm was inches from her face, and she could smell the sweat of him. Earthy and masculine.

“What … what are you doing?” She sounded affronted, which wasn’t entirely what she intended. She was just so off balance.

“Getting your bag.” Now, when he turned she could see under his hat.

Green eyes stared holes through her. A thick, full mouth smiled, but again, the emotion behind it didn’t seem kind.

“You don’t recognize me?”

She blinked, feeling somehow suspended by his gaze. Removed from the hard-packed earth, the sun-baked metal of the car at her back.

“Should I?”

She felt his hot breath against her cheek; his eyes touched every part of her face. “I guess not.” He pulled the luggage down and set it on the ground, popping the handle up. He turned slightly and tugged his hat at Jacob, who stood slack-jawed with delight.

“Y’all have a good day,” the man said, and then he was gone and she crashed back into her physical reality.

“Who was that?” Jacob asked as if they’d just been visited by Superman.

“I have no idea.”

The door to
Lyle’s room opened a sliver and a very different Tara Jean slipped into the hallway. She was limp, exhaustion like a blanket over her shoulders, dimming her impressive wattage.

Luc’s heart spiked hard and he stood up from the chair he’d been waiting in.

“Is he okay?” She jerked at the sound of his voice, her hand covering her throat in surprise.

“You spooked me.” Her hand stayed at her chest, covering the bare skin at her neck as if she were suddenly too naked. It was a nice act, as far as suddenly demure tramps went.

He didn’t apologize and they stood there in a simmering silence. Two feet and a thousand miles of differences between them.

The sun from the window at the far end of the hallway highlighted both her beauty—the perfect skin and the lush lips—and her flaws. The small lines around her eyes and mouth. The spray of freckles across her nose. She looked almost normal—well, as normal as a woman that beautiful could look.

“Is he okay?” he repeated, and she nodded.

“Good.” He pushed past her for the door. But she got her tiny body right in the way.

“He’s resting,” she said, each word enunciated
through her teeth. A guard dog with a push-up bra. Honestly, he was nearly charmed.

“I’ll wake him.”

“I don’t think you understand what’s happening here,” she said. “He’s dying. And it’s not a matter of months. You go in there and it might not even be days.”

He smiled, leaning close. “We can’t have that, can we? Not until after the wedding, right?”

It looked like she was chewing her tongue, but then her smile spread across her face, as bright and empty as a pickle jar.

“That’s right, sugar,” she said. “Try not to kill him before I get my hands on all that money.”

“You’re a piece of work,” he said, disgust slipping over him.

“And you’re going to kill him if you go in there worked up like you are. Cool your heels and try again later.”

Her eyes raked him, stripping off his clothes and a few dozen pounds, and then she left as if trusting her good sense to have swayed him, or maybe she just didn’t care all that much.

Either way, it was a mistake for her to leave, because when she turned the corner he slipped into the room.

The skeleton was unconscious on the bed, so still it was as if his body were held in suspended animation.

Is he dead?
Luc’s ribs were an empty net.

Then he noticed that Lyle’s chest rose and fell in time with the gasping machine beside the bed. The mask over his mouth fogged and then cleared with every breath.

Not dead. Yet.

Luc stepped closer. Closer again. Close enough to see the old man’s big hands hidden among the hills and valleys of the blue blanket thrown over him.

He stopped. It was an old ingrained habit: staying
close enough to see his hands, but just out of reach in case the old man got it in his head to take a swing.

Seemed unlikely at the moment, but Luc wouldn’t count Lyle out until they had six feet of dirt over his coffin.

Luc’s heart pounded hard in his neck and he tilted his chin, stretched his throat, trying to make the pounding go away. Years ago he’d dealt with this crap. His fucking daddy issues. They were gone. Sliced to ribbons under a hundred pairs of skates.

He was known for his cool on the ice. He played without emotion, with total control. A machine.

Ice Man.

But here he was with one eye on the old man’s hands, his other on the door, as if he were ten years old. And scared.

Growing up, Luc had been small for his age. Something that used to infuriate Lyle, as if Luc were refusing to grow just to spite him. Those beatings … it had been as though he was trying to force Luc’s bones to comply to his will.

But when Luc turned fifteen, everything changed. In four months he’d gained fifteen pounds and five inches.

He remembered, because for the first time he’d been excited to go down to Texas and show Lyle that he couldn’t be pushed around anymore. That he wasn’t puny. Or chicken shit. An embarrassment.

That winter, awake at night with growing pains, Luc had nursed dreams, elaborate and extensive visions of kicking the ever-loving shit out of his father.

But his mom must have caught wind, because he didn’t go to Texas that summer. Instead, Celeste had signed him up for hockey camps and touring leagues. And then hockey took over his life. His love for the game, his natural affinity, the home he found among the guys—it became the fire that fueled him.

Visits to the ranch became fewer and farther between. He stopped going down during the summers. Never went at all during the winter. March break had been about it.

On the bed, Lyle coughed and then wheezed, his head shifting against the pillow. The oxygen mask slipped, revealing thin, pale lips, and Lyle gasped. Gasped again.

Luc watched, waiting to be moved. Waiting to care.

Your father is dying. Right now. In front of your eyes
.

But it didn’t happen. The dying or the giving a shit about it.

Part of Luc’s shit-kicking fantasy had involved a little speech he’d give Lyle while the old man was lying in the dirt, his nose broken and his lip bloodied.

It was a good speech, changed and tweaked some throughout the years. And it was a shame Lyle had never heard it.

Luc had given that speech once to a woman, the night the Canadian Juniors won the World’s. That night he’d watched teammate after teammate get hugged by fathers with tears in their eyes. Teammate after teammate invited their dads to come celebrate, and so he spent the whole night surrounded by so much fatherly pride it ruined the victory. Turned the whole night sour.

So, he’d picked up one of those puck bunnies who’d been waiting for a shot to add his sweater number to her list of conquests. Surly and poisonous, he’d gotten drunk and laid.

And when the girl asked what he was so angry about, he gave her the speech.

Weaving at the foot of the bed, wearing his boxers and clutching an empty bottle of vodka—a champion with nothing but a bright future to look forward to—he told Lyle Baker what a shit father he had been. How every single good thing Luc managed to accomplish had nothing
to do with being a Baker. That in the end, Lyle would die. Alone. Unloved.

The words of that speech were burned into his brain. Unforgotten. After all these years. After Olympic Gold. Stanley Cup Finals. He was an elite athlete. Paid a fortune. Respected by the world.

And he couldn’t let go of those words.

His body twitched with adrenaline, and he couldn’t outrun it or even slow it down.

He stepped closer to the bed, where Lyle’s gasps were fast and shallow, the plastic edge of that oxygen mask cutting into his chin.

Get up!
he wanted to shout.
Wake up, you coward!

Let me tell you what a shitty father you were. Let me tell you how much I hate what you’re putting my sister through. Let me tell you how much it sickens me to even think of you even looking at Jacob
.

He told himself that he was just here to protect his sister, but part of him was here for another shot at his dad. Another crack at the speech. The split lip. All of it.

But, looking at the gasping dying skeleton, he realized it wasn’t going to happen.

He was never going to get satisfaction from Lyle. Even if the old man were healthy and whole, he wouldn’t care what Luc thought of him.

Why the realization always came as a surprise, he couldn’t say.

You’re better than this
, he told himself, the way he had year after year. Disappointment after disappointment.

You don’t need this man in any way. You never did
.

Brick by brick he rebuilt the wall he kept in front of the red-eyed temper he’d inherited from his father. Brick by brick he made it stronger. Thicker. Impenetrable.

His control had to be complete if he was going to take
care of his family. Get rid of the bimbo and get back to his life on the ice.

The adrenaline deflated and the cold air that filled him every other day of his life returned, pushing the anger back into the corners and crawl spaces, where it had lived for the last twenty years.

He was Luc Baker, leader of the Cavaliers, and he had nothing to do with the corpse on the bed.

At long last, Luc lifted his hand and shifted the oxygen mask back over his father’s mouth and nose, allowing him to breathe.

Tara Jean pushed another yellow Mike and Ike through the barbed-wire fence. Right into the sloppy mouth of one of the cows.

Please
, she thought, wiping off the cow slobber on her jeans.
Please let me have done the right thing
.

Telling Luc not to go into his father’s room seemed like the most surefire way to insure he would go into the room, like waving a red cape in front of a bull.

And granted the plan had all the sophistication of a Hallmark Special, but she had to hope that once he was in the room Luc would take a good look at what his father had become and if there was a working heart inside that big ol’ chest of his, it might be moved.

She had to pray that Luc would see his father for the lonely, pained man he was. So desperate to see his family he’d concocted this ridiculous scheme.

Lyle was dying. Only an animal would look at his flesh and blood and not care. Right?

All the shit her mother had done to her and Tara still managed to sob like a child in the hospital when her mother died. And Lyle may have been a doozy of a parent, but he had nothing on Rayanne.