Ryan's Hand (19 page)

“That's as may be, but there won't ever be another Cara Martin.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” And why had he brought that coat? she wondered irrelevantly, looking up at the unforgettable face. He stood very near to her, and she saw that he didn't look nearly as ferocious as she had first thought. Jeth tossed the coat on a nearby chair.

“You'll need that,” he said, pushing back his Stetson. As she waited for him to explain, he very calmly slipped his arm around her waist and drew her to him to kiss her.

“Mr. Langston, why are you here?” Cara sighed in resignation after the long, deep kiss. Naturally she had responded in spite of herself, as he had known she would, from the small, self-satisfied smile playing about his lips. She had been too surprised to struggle, and after a while she hadn't wanted to. “If you have any ideas about making hay with me, you'd best forget it. Harold St. Clair will be here any minute.”

“No, he won't. I spoke to him a short while ago. Fortunately for me, he was working late. I managed to convince him that we wouldn't need his company tonight. He's a nice fellow. I'm afraid I've misjudged him, as I misjudged you, Cara.”

“So that's why you came all this way,” Cara said, the light dawning. “To tell me you had misjudged me.” And maybe to get in a little dallying to boot, she thought scornfully, noting that the lean, wolflike face showed not the slightest trace of remorse. “Harold told me he had sent you a letter written by Ryan shortly after his will was altered. I am assuming you got it. It must have explained everything.”

Jeth's brows rose innocently. “You mean this?” He reached inside his jacket pocket for a long envelope. An arm still around her, he yielded enough space for her to examine the envelope. She recognized Ryan's handwriting, then with a little catch of breath saw that the envelope was still sealed.

“But you haven't read it!” she exclaimed, looking up at him in puzzlement.

“I didn't have to. I know what it says. In a little while we'll read it together. I have an idea it's to both of us.”

“Jeth, what are you saying?” Cara asked in confusion.

Jeth led her to the couch in front of the fireplace and sat her down. “We need a fire in here,” he said, laying wood in the grate. When a crackling blaze was going, he took off his jacket and hat and joined her on the couch. Resting an arm on the back of it behind her, he searched Cara's face with a baffling scrutiny. “You still haven't figured it all out, have you? You still don't know why Ryan sent you to live on La Tierra?”

Cara stared at him. “How do you know he sent me? You haven't read the letter.”

“Didn't he, Cara?”

Cara hesitated, then nodded slowly. The year was over now. Her promise had been kept. There was no reason now for Jeth not to know the truth.

The rancher reached for her hand. “He asked you to go, didn't he? Probably as he was dying, he got you to promise that you would live there for a year after his death, from the first day of spring to the next. Don't you know why?”

“Well…I have thought that maybe…he wanted us to—to care for each other. That's insane, of course. He knew you could never care for a woman you thought to be a—a whore, and especially since you were engaged—”

“Cara—” Jeth pressed a kiss on a soft wave at her temple. “He knew us both so well. Even though he knew he was sending you into a year of hell, he knew us well enough to know that we'd come through intact.”

“Speak for yourself, Jeth Langston,” Cara said bitterly.

“You aren't intact?” With a sharp glance, Cara saw Jeth's brows raise in irony, his lips twist in amusement. “Why not?”

To hell with my pride! Cara thought stormily. What comfort is it to me now, anyway? She looked Jeth full in the face, obstinately. “Because I did come to care for you, Mr. Langston. Lord knows why. You are the most overbearing, arrogant, intimidating—
man
I'll ever know, but as you say, Ryan knew us both better than we knew ourselves. The caring became—well, here is a collector's item for
your
vanity! The caring became love. I am now,
Mr. Langston
, in love with you—and that should be punishment enough for all the trouble I've caused. Don't think, however, that's the reason I restored the land to you. I planned to, anyway, from the very beginning. It wasn't mine. Ryan should never have left it to me. I can't imagine why he did.”

“Because it was the only way he could set us up to fall in love. If he hadn't left you the land, how could he have gotten you on La Tierra? When would our paths have ever crossed?”

Cara blinked at him, trying to keep a tight lid on the hope that was trying to bubble up inside her. “But you're not saying that you—love me?” she whispered.

“Of course I am. I told you last night after I brought you your cocoa.”

“But you were speaking of your fiancée!”

“I was speaking of you,
querida
, though you obviously didn't realize it. Of the woman I am going to marry.”

“What about Sonya Jeffers?” she cried.
Querida!
He called her
querida
, sweetheart!

“I haven't been engaged to Sonya Jeffers since I left you in your sickbed to go to Dallas to break our engagement. At the time, I still hadn't figured out all the puzzle, but I wasn't going to marry any other woman feeling the way I did about you.”

“Jeth…” Cara's arms flew around his neck. Tears shone in her eyes. “That's what you meant that night in the car when we were on our way back from the hospital. I asked you what you thought of a man who tried to seduce one woman when he was engaged to another, and you said…you said…”

“I remember what I said,” Jeth said with a wry smile. “And naturally you took the opposite of my meaning.”

“But you had just told me I'd been a prisoner at La Tierra!”

“That was a desperate move to keep you there. You'd just said that you were homesick for Boston, and I was scared that you'd leave before I could undo all the harm I'd done. By then I was head over heels in love with you, and I had to keep you there to somehow salvage the damage. I should have known I couldn't scare you into staying.”

“It wasn't Boston I was homesick for. I was sick about having to leave La Tierra, which by then was home to me. But you became so cold to me after that, Jeth. I thought…I thought…you'd just been kind to me during a time when there was no one else to help you. When I was no longer of use to you, I thought you had rejected me.”

“Oh, honey—” Jeth pulled her tightly to him as if he were afraid she might disappear into thin air. “That was sheer self-preservation. You told me that night you hated me. I believed you. I couldn't imagine how you could even like me after all I'd done to you, much less love me. Then I began seeing some signs, and remembering others, that told me otherwise.”

Cara said in a muffled voice against his chest, “Probably one of them was that time you heard me crying my heart out in the cemetery. I knew you had heard me.”

“There was a message in your torment, Cara. You left me messages all year, had I chosen to read them—like that discarded calender of yours that I found a few months after you'd been at La Tierra. You had marked the days very black at first, with heavy crisscrosses that reflected your anger and desire for the year to be over. Then gradually the marks had become fainter, almost reluctant. After a while, you hadn't marked the days at all. Then you threw away the calendar.

“But the final proof I had of your feelings was the despair I heard in the way you played ‘MacArthur Park.' I'd just brought Devil's Own down from the mountains. That's why I was in the study at that time of day. And then this morning when you set Devil's Own free after giving me that little speech about him, when you got so hopping mad at me for capturing him, I knew then, lovely lady, that I had you, that you were mine. You identified with that horse. You wanted him to be free, unbranded, as you never would be again. I intended telling you all of this tonight when I proposed—”

Wide-eyed, Cara looked up to interrupt him. “Do you still plan to?”

“Try to stop me. Try to say no.”

“You kissed me while I was sleeping last night, didn't you?” And cried, too, thought Cara. Imagine: Jeth Langston crying!

“Yes, just like I'm looking forward to doing when you are sleeping, and I want to wake you to—” His arms tightened. “I have loved you, Cara Martin, since the day I first saw you in my attorney's office. You were exactly—the very image of the woman I had always dreamed of—the woman I wanted to marry. I thought I
was
dreaming. After I'd held you, kissed you, touched you, you were like a fever in my blood. It nearly destroyed me to think that, as much as I loved Ryan, he had gotten to you first.”

“But he didn't!” Cara protested.

“Shh, I know that now, sweetheart, though it took me longer than it should have to realize it. Once I did, everything else fell into place. Even as late as the evening we were driving back from the hospital, I still couldn't believe you hadn't been Ryan's mistress. By then, I didn't care anymore. I just knew that I loved you and that after you there would never be anyone else for me.”

“When,” Cara asked, “did you believe the truth about me?”

“I'm ashamed to say, honey, that it was only yesterday when you were playing ‘MacArthur Park.' I was sitting in the study thinking how everything I felt about you was in that song. Then it hit me like the kick of a mule that you were playing it to express how
you
felt about
me
! In that moment, I think, I saw the whole picture clearly. All along there had been two conflicting points that I could never reconcile: Ryan, I knew, would never have loved a tramp—not enough to leave her half of La Tierra. But Ryan, I also knew, could never have kept his hands off you. Being a man myself, I just couldn't let go of that idea. But then when I looked at that part of the equation from the viewpoint of a
brother
, then I knew what Ryan had done…”

Cara lifted her head to look at him inquiringly. “What exactly
had
he done?” she asked softly.

“Shortly after he found out he was dying, he met you, Cara—”

“In the library,” she offered, “a little over two years ago.”

“He saw in you the woman he knew I'd always wanted, needed, would especially need after he was gone. He decided you would be his gift to me, his final gift of love, to ease the pain of his death.”

“Of course…” Cara whispered sadly, thinking of all those times she had wondered at their relationship, all the conversations in which Ryan had tried to defend and explain his older brother to her.

“So he spent his remaining time setting the scene, so to speak. He bought you beautiful clothes to make you even more appealing to me. He arranged a will that would force us to be together and keep us together in spite of the obstacles. And then he extracted that promise from you that would finish setting us up—”

“He told me I'd need courage,” Cara murmured.

“Which you had, honey, plenty of it. God, when I think of what I did to you—how I made you suffer! But if you hadn't, Cara, I would have been without some other pieces to the puzzle. Why, I kept asking myself, would a girl like you take such abuse to simply stay at La Tierra for room and board? Why didn't you ever throw your weight around as half owner? Why didn't you ever ask to see the land, the oil, the water rights you'd inherited? Why, I asked, if you hadn't been Ryan's mistress, did he leave you half of La Tierra?

“By the time the roundup was over, I had just about decided that Ryan and you had made some sort of contract. I was willing to believe that you were telling me the truth about your never having been lovers. You were so damned innocent looking, and I was already so gone over you, and I wanted so desperately to believe you. Then you threw me that curve that day in the garden—”

“I had to, Jeth,” Cara interrupted. “I had to make you not want me; otherwise, you'd have made love to me. According to the newspaper article, you were just waiting for the estate to be settled to be married. I thought you only wanted to make love to me so that you could get me to sign the papers so you could marry Sonya. I knew that I'd sign those papers. And then I couldn't have stayed at La Tierra. I couldn't have fulfilled my promise to Ryan.”

Jeth let out a short, incredulous whistle through his teeth. “We called an awful lot of the shots wrong, didn't we? Still, I should have figured out the whole puzzle at Christmas when you told me that during the summer you'd read of my engagement to Sonya. I spent most of the holidays searching through the summer editions of the Dallas
Morning News
trying to find that damned article. When I did, I pinpointed its release to the day that you put on that very convincing performance for me in your garden. I hoped, of course, that it had been more than hurt pride that had made you behave that way—confess to being Ryan's mistress. But by that time, I'd abused you so…I didn't think I had a snowball's chance in hell of ever winning you again.”

Cara reached up to stroke his hard cheek. “Sonya was one of the casualties you were referring to when you told me that Jim had been a minor one, wasn't she?”

Jeth nodded. “I'm afraid so. She's a fine woman. I've known her family all of my life, and I've always known how Sonya felt about me, how she was hoping someday to become mistress of La Tierra. When Ryan died, I was suddenly so—so alone. She was there. Someone I could trust, someone I could take for granted…If you hadn't come along, I would have married her. Ryan knew that, too, of course. He knew I would have turned to her for solace.”

Cara buried her face in Jeth's shoulder, feeling a surge of sympathy for the girl who had come so close to marrying the man of her dreams only to lose him in the eleventh hour. “You know now,” she said gently after a while, “why Ryan didn't tell you he was dying, why he didn't go home to be with you in his last days…”