Can't Buy Me Love (9 page)

“Still—”

“Stop.” Ruby patted Tara’s hand and Tara looked down at Ruby’s dark fingers, her blunt nails. She barely felt it. It was as if her skin was dead and had been for years. She heard fire victims were like that. They couldn’t feel anything through the scar tissue.

Her past had built up enough scar tissue to keep every sensation at bay.

Except for Luc. She felt him. Which was disturbing.

She was glad he was leaving. Her skin could go back to sleep and she could resume the numbness that helped her wade through life.

“I like the kid.” Ruby’s soft tones hid an iron core,
forged from years of working for Lyle. “He’s very bright, and he’s been ill for so long.”

“Ill?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Very,” Ruby whispered, channeling the dramatic Mexican soap operas she lived for. “In the hospital and everything.”

Tara picked up the tray, reminding herself that she did not give a shit. At all. “Either way, you don’t have to babysit.”

“What do you think I do all day?” A wicked twinkle gleamed in her eye. “Lyle is nothing but a big toddler.”

“I won’t argue with that.” Tara headed up the back steps through the dark hallway toward the master bedroom.

The door was cracked, and she knocked softly before pushing it open with her shoulder.

“Dinner is served.” She tried to sound upbeat and not heartbroken by the sight of the big man laid so very low.

How much longer
, she thought,
can he last?
Even in the two days she’d been hiding in the greenhouse, it looked as if he’d lost weight. His skin hung like crepe paper after a Fourth of July party.

Lyle turned toward her, the oxygen mask absent from his face.

“You’re looking better,” she lied, sliding the tray onto his bed.

“Where have you been?” he panted.

“Making the samples. Getting ready for the winter line.”

“Good?”

“Very. And to celebrate, we’ve got something special tonight.”

“Porterhouse?”

“Better. Pudding.”

Lyle’s gasping laughter brought sharp, hot tears to
Tara’s eyes. She blinked them away as fast as she could and made a big show of stirring the applesauce.

“Let’s start with an appetizer, shall we? The chef has prepared a surprise.” She turned to Lyle only to find his eyes, clear and focused, right on her.

“You’re beautiful,” he said, and she smiled.

“Flattery will not get you a steak.”

“Tara.” Trembling, his hand hovered over the covers, reaching for her. She put down the sauce and curled her hand over his.

Please
, she thought,
please don’t go. Not yet. I’m not ready for you to be gone from this earth
.

“You’re more beautiful … than you know.”

“I don’t know about that.” She straightened the edge of his blankets with her free hand, looking everywhere but at Lyle. “I’m pretty aware of my charms.”

He squeezed her hand and she caught his crooked smile. “I’m so lucky you stumbled into my hospital room when you did.”

“I’m the lucky one,” she whispered. “You saved my life. Dennis—” The name stuck in her throat. Four years since she’d said that name, but not a minute had gone by without her wondering when he’d find her.

“He’s behind you. All of that is behind you.”

No wonder I can’t stop looking over my shoulder
.

“You saved the business. Those boots …”

“That makes us even?” she asked, knowing it was so far from the truth it could only be a joke.

“More than even. You brought my kids here. My grandson—”

“You paid me, Lyle,” she whispered, the shame of it, the necessity of it making her sick to her stomach.

“Doesn’t matter. It worked. They’re here.” Joy changed him, lifted the pallor of death and made him luminous.

That’s what children do
, she thought, glad at least that
they brought Lyle some pleasure, that they illuminated the dark places.

“Did you see my boy?” Lyle asked, as if Luc were ten instead of three years shy of forty.

Oh, I saw him
. But she just nodded, not wanting to tinge Lyle’s fantasy with reality.

“He hates me,” Lyle said. Apparently, reality didn’t bother him. “Proud and stubborn.”

“And that’s good?”

“He’s …” he tapped his chest with a hand covered in liver spots, “just like me.”

She shook her head, unable to agree. “Maybe on the outside. But on the inside he’s a different kind of animal. He doesn’t have your heart.”

Any heart, really.

“Oh, don’t be fooled. He’s always been a crybaby. Gets it from his mom.”

“What about your daughter?”

He shrugged, and the face he made said so much about how little his daughter was worth in his eyes that Tara felt bad for the woman. She truly did. That kind of damage handed out by your daddy could cripple you for life.

“She brought my grandson,” he said, as if she were a chauffeur rather than his only daughter. His heart monitor beeped, and Tara glanced at the readout before stroking his hand, trying to calm him down.

He would never forgive Victoria for keeping his grandson from him. Tara didn’t know much, but she knew that.

“What was the point of all this?” she asked, hurting for the people he’d hurt. “Nothing’s changed. Luc still hates you. Victoria hates you so much she hid her son from you.”

“Getting them back here was the point.” For a moment he seemed drained; the light, the fire, all that was
Lyle Baker dimmed and she clutched his hand, her eyes on the monitor. “I’m dying, Tara.”

“Don’t—”

He rolled his eyes at her. “And they may hate me, but they’re mine. My children. Flesh of my flesh.”

It was an ugly sentiment, proving what she knew too well to be true—that Lyle was far from perfect. “This ranch, the Angus, Baker Leather, Victoria and Luc. They belong together.”

“I don’t think they agree with you.”

“I was too hard on them when they were kids. Too clumsy. I know that … I see …” He stopped, his eyes bone dry, but wretched nonetheless.

“Luc is leaving tomorrow,” she said, smoothing a hand down his cheek. “You can’t make him stay.”

“He’ll stay.”

“Lyle—”

“For his sister he’ll stay. For his sister he’ll do anything. And she’ll stay for the money.”

She patted his chest. “All this conniving cannot be good for you.”

“You know what would be good for me?”

“You can’t have a cigar. Or a steak.”

“Scotch.”

“You can’t have that either.”

He lifted her hand and pressed dry, feathery lips to her palm. “Then let’s live dangerously and start with the pudding.”

Luc sat up, the dark night swallowing every detail of the room. A headache pounded hard behind his eyes.

Christ, where—

The pounding wasn’t in his head. It was coming from the door.

He was in Texas. His old bedroom. And it was the
middle of the night. The digital clock on the bedside table said four in the morning.

The knocking continued, growing sharper and harder.

“I’m coming,” he snapped, flipping the blankets off his body. He slipped into a pair of jeans, zipping them as he walked across the thick carpet.

“What?” He yanked open the door.

Tara Jean stood there. Diamond-bright eyes set in a face ravaged by tears.

“He’s dead.”

“What?” He blinked.

“Your father is dead.”

When Pauly Sovtka
, Luc’s Junior A coach, died, Luc had cried. He’d cried during the service, while carrying Pauly’s coffin out of the church with the rest of his teammates; he’d cried while they lowered the old man into the ground.

Like a child lost at a mall, he’d cried. And half his team cried right along with him.

His grief had been so deep, so consuming, he couldn’t pretend that his heart wasn’t breaking. There was nothing he could do to stop the tears and he didn’t care. Pauly was dead. And his world suffered for it.

His dad had seen the footage on ESPN and he’d made a special phone call just to tell Luc he was a crybaby. A disgrace to the Baker name, blubbering all over national TV like a girl.

It had been a real special father-and-son kind of moment.

Now, standing beside his father’s grave, his sister’s warm hand tucked into his elbow, he couldn’t care less. If he tried, and he wasn’t about to expend the energy, he doubted he could muster up the slightest bit of grief. A scrap of regret or sadness.

Maybe he shouldn’t have started the day with that whiskey.

He definitely shouldn’t have had the second one.

But Lyle Baker was only going to be buried once. A toast to the dawn seemed in order.

But now he was numb to the hundred people who were here to pay their respects and was instead totally preoccupied with Bimbo Barbie. Or rather her very conspicuous absence.

“Where’s Tara Jean?” he whispered into his sister’s ear while a white-haired minister kept calling Lyle a “complicated man of strong belief.”

That must be minister talk for “total asshole.”

Vicks shrugged, her pale face and thin body so perfectly suited to bereavement black, it hurt a little to look at her. To see all that his sister was, swallowed up.

“I haven’t seen her in three days,” he said, “not since she told me about Dad.”

“She probably left, since he died before they could get married.”

“Yeah, you’re—”

Beside him, his mother, Celeste, pinched him through the sleeve of his black jacket.

He glanced over, only to receive her steely blue-eyed censure. Victoria tensed and snapped her eyes forward, too quickly to absorb any of Celeste’s displeasure. And he stood between them, sweating in a thousand-dollar suit in the late-May Texas sun.

I should have made that last drink a double
.

The minister droned on and Luc, without being too obvious, tried to find Bimbo Barbie in the crowd. Why he cared, he wasn’t sure; maybe he just wanted to rub her face in all she’d lost, or watch her try to scramble off her back, having had her world turned upside down.

Or maybe he just wanted another look at that body as she walked away.

The sun steadily rose in the east, changing from a milky egg yolk behind clouds to a blazing ball over the poplars that shaded the family plot. Cows dotted the
hills to the south. The house, in all its mismatched glory, was just north. The sun caught the glass panes of the old greenhouse.

They were surrounded by Lyle’s neighbors and business associates, all their eyes shrouded by sunglasses. He wondered how many of them would really miss Lyle. And how many of them were beaming behind those shades.

Lord knows he was.

But nowhere was Tara Jean Sweet.

His pocket vibrated, and he dropped his sister’s hand to fish his phone out. It was a text, but before he could see who it was from, Celeste snatched it out of his hand and dropped it in her gray bag, without once looking at him.

It was probably Beckett. And undoubtedly important.

His mother tucked her hand into his, squeezing his fingers.

“He’s your father,” she whispered. “Be better than he was.”

Good Christ, he couldn’t fight that.

He took a deep breath and replayed, minute by minute, last season’s playoff win over the Quebecois.

An hour later the farce was over and Luc led Victoria, Jacob, and his mother into their wing of bedrooms. He beelined to the liquor cabinet in Celeste’s suite and poured himself whiskey. A lot of it.

“It’s a little early, isn’t it?” Celeste asked, unclipping her hammered-silver earrings and sitting down on the bed.

“And inappropriate,” Luc agreed and drank half the glass.

“I raised you better than that.”

“You did.” He pulled another tumbler from the cabinet. “Would you like one?”

“A double.”

“Can I have my phone back?” he asked, handing her the glass. His mother lifted her eyebrows. “Please,” he sighed, and she slipped the phone into his palm.

He turned away while Victoria busied herself with Jacob, undoing the suit jacket the boy had complained about all morning.

His mother watched Victoria and Jacob, her eyes hungry. It was no secret she wanted some grandkids to spoil.

It was too bad he was the only child Celeste had. Because grandkids weren’t springing from his loins anytime soon.

He shrugged out of his own coat and threw it over Celeste’s bed.

The text was from Beckett:

They are interested in Lashenko. No other word, yet
.

He finished his drink in one long swallow.

“Is there something wrong with your head?” Celeste asked, her soft voice made fluid by her French accent.

He realized he was rubbing that spot on his forehead, where it felt like a cattle prod was impaled above his left eye.

His mother’s hand curved over his shoulder, and her touch was like a web over the worst of his instincts and emotions, giving him fragile control over the seething, terrible mess that bubbled just under the surface of his skin.

He could tell her, she was his mother after all, and she’d made worse things better by sheer force of will, a perfectly raised eyebrow, and a kiss.