Texas Redeemed (32 page)

At the ranch, Valerie shot upstairs, coaching herself to drag down her Jordan crazy-man temper to a boil—which would take some effort since rage plus fear usually equaled something explosive. But all rationale crumbled when she found her daughter’s bedroom vacant with nothing out of the ordinary … save for the glinting household scissors on top of the pool of softly curling toffee-colored hair on the floor.

Panic touching her like pinpricks, she thundered down the staircase, missing a step in her haste and gripping the banister to avoid a tumble. “Dinah!” she hollered, bolting to the family room and catching a nanosecond of a reality-television catfight before her aunt scrambled to press the power button on the remote control.

“TV these days. There’s just nothing to choose from.” Dinah’s light laugh died the instant she saw Valerie’s face. “Oh, no.”

“Where’s Lucy?”

“I’d say holed up in her room again—”

“Then you’d be wrong. Her
hair
is there, but she’s not.”

“She’s gone and cut her hair?” Dinah gripped her shoulders, then her brows crinkled and she seemed lost in thought. “Oh, that girl’s not all right. During the cattle drive I found her in the bathroom square in the middle of the night. With a pillow, like she’d been sleeping in there. She told me she had a bad dream and … well …”

With a pillow.
Just like when she was a little girl, mourning Anna.

Valerie stormed outside and, not taking the time to saddle her horse, rode bareback to the windmill. She spotted Lucy on the ground with her knees drawn up and a piece of elastic around her wrist. A few feet away her horse nibbled on blades of grass.

When Valerie dismounted, Lucy jetted to her feet, her striking blue-gray eyes drenched in anguish. Half of her hair fell in soft curls just past her waist; the other half had been unevenly chopped to about an inch above her elbow. “Please don’t freak out.” She hastily bundled it all with the elastic. “It’s
my
hair.”

Defensive. In a panic. Frightened. Valerie saw it all in the way Lucy trembled as she retreated to her horse. She felt like she was drowning in confusion, struggling to stay afloat on the clues in her daughter’s words and in her eyes. “Why’d you cut it?”

Lucy froze, then spun to face the windmill. “Uh …”

“Before you lie—again—I do know the Carews weren’t at Bud’s barbecue, and neither were you. So tell me where you went.”

“I can’t.”

Frustrated, Valerie pointed at her daughter’s horse. “Get on and let’s go home. Maybe a week of lockdown will change your mind.”

Lucy turned, her face crumpled. “I’m sorry, Mommy.”

Mommy.

The person she’d spent years trying to fiercely protect was slipping from her grasp. They were both in trouble, and needed to trust someone to help.

Valerie only hoped it wasn’t too late.

W
HAT IF SHE
could stay here forever? Fresh from the beautician’s chair—Dinah’s friend was a little arthritic and hummed Tammy Wynette repeatedly, but swore on her ’69 Camarro that she wouldn’t tell people about Lucy’s red eyes and half-shorn hair—Lucy now sat in her great-grandfather’s study with the old-time Big Band swing music he loved in the background and a scatter of colored pencils and charcoals and sheets of blank paper in front of her.

In here, with the distractions of design and music, she didn’t dwell on how pissed off her mom had been at the windmill earlier. Like always, she’d messed up—lying, doing stupid stuff and covering it up with more lies.

She had tried to be noble like her dad, and brave like her mom, but she totally wasn’t cut out to be heroic. A million times she’d scraped up the nerve to tell her parents about Marin Beck … but didn’t.

Now that they were mad at each other—about what, she didn’t know, much to her frustration—it was impossible to even get them in the same room.

The world was spinning too fast, and cutting her hair had somehow made things slow down and bend to her control. At least for a moment.

It was up to her to get herself out of this mess with her grandmother, who didn’t even care about Peyton the way she’d first pretended to. Then she’d help her parents realize that they were supposed to be together, and that being apart was ridiculous.

“Take one last thing, Lucy. Then I’ll go away and I won’t bother either of your parents. Be a grownup about this.”

Lucy paused with a magenta colored pencil poised over a sketch of a long vest over black trouser pants. Would Marin truly go away and stop messing with her head if she stole one last thing?

She put down the pencil and slowly revolved in the gigantic leather chair, scoping out the pictures and plaques and knickknacks decorating the room. There was the ashtray filled with coins, but how would she sneak coins out of the house without getting busted? There was a fancy-looking pen on the desk, but she’d already given Marin a pen, and she’d complained about not getting enough money for it from the pawn dealer.

Her stomach felt queasy, but she stood up and went to the polished display case in the corner. She picked up the object that caught her eye, recognizing it as the pocket watch her dad had told her about. It was one of the few things he’d kept when he left Texas, because it had belonged to his father.

Lucy found it hard to breathe as she slid the pocket watch into her hobo bag, then she hurried to the office chair and tried to draw. The music continued to play but she couldn’t hear anything over the screaming in her brain.

Be a grownup, right?
But she wasn’t a grownup at all. She was barely thirteen and was losing touch with everything she cared about: school, friends, family … and where she belonged.

A knock on the door made her jump so violently that she thought she’d hit her head on the ceiling. She scraped the magenta pencil over the paper.

“How’s the design coming along?” Nathaniel asked, his face forever serious-looking despite his smile as he came striding into the study with his cane tapping on the floor.

She held up the drawing for his critique. After he offered revision suggestions and listed ideas to consider in her next sketches, she started returning the pencils to their proper slots in the container.

Nathaniel sat in the chair opposite the desk, as if settling in for a long discussion. He gestured with his weathered, tanned hand to the display case … to the empty spot where her father’s pocket watch had been before she’d swiped it. “Of all the things in my study to take, you chose Peyton’s pocket watch. Any reason in particular?”

Lucy dropped the pencils, and they clattered onto the desk before freefalling to the floor. “Gramps, I didn’t …” There was a lie inside her somewhere, but she couldn’t get it to surface. “I’m sorry.”

“That I caught you?”

“Uh-huh,” she confessed, the raw honesty feeling a little strange. “I shouldn’t have taken it.” She retrieved the pocket watch from her bag and handed it to her great-grandfather. The displeasure in his steely gray eyes was plain. She could only imagine her parents’ reaction.

“How do you feel, Lucy?”

“Freaked out.”

“Now wasn’t that articulate.” Nathaniel waved his cane about the room. “Don’t Peyton and Valerie and I provide well for you?”

Lucy trembled as his booming voice seemed to bounce off the walls. “I said I’m sorry.” She returned to the leather chair, feeling like an ant sitting before a giant. “The pen you gave my dad for Christmas, and the antique you went crazy looking for? I took those, too. I want to get them back, but they were pawned and I don’t have enough money to buy them.”

“Pawned.” Nathaniel drummed his fingers on his knee and the signet ring glittered. “Who pawned them?”

“My grandmother.”

Nathaniel went completely still, and for a second she feared he was going to have a heart attack sitting in the chair. “Marin Beck?”

Lucy went on to explain Marin’s visits to the middle school and the threats and blackmail. “Everything she said was bogus. I thought she would love me and not see me as a screw-up, but she’s whack.”

“We’re all screw-ups in one way or another, my girl,” he said blithely, holding up the gold pocket watch. “Peyton told me he’d give this to you one of these days. It’s a sad thing if you don’t value it the same way he does.”

“But why would he give it to me anyway?”

“Tradition? Love?” Nathaniel opened and closed it. “Maybe he believes you’re capable of guarding it the way he has.”

Lucy frowned. “How come? I was so bratty to him when he first came back, and I thought he was a jerk.”

“And then he got to know you.” Nathaniel shrugged. “Furthermore, would I mentor you in fashion if I didn’t care about or believe in you?”

“You’re just being nice.”

“Rubbish. People describe me as many things. ‘Nice’ isn’t one of them.” He pointed to the drawings on the desk. “There’s talent there, and there’s potential in you. My boy, Anthony, rose and fell too soon in this business. Peyton’s a square peg in a round hole when it comes to fashion or fame—just as well, since his heart really is in medicine. But you can be a fit for this.”

“As a career? Not just some big dream?”

“It takes talent, brains … courage. You’re not tough enough. Not yet.” He stood, paced the room with a slightly hunched gait. “I revised my will a few months ago, wanted your father to meet you first and your mother to get used to the idea, so they’d understand my decision.”

“What decision?”

“To see to it that your skills are honed, that you’re educated in business and finance and are prepared for your future in fashion—in Turner Menswear. There will be changes to the brand, a women’s line incorporated. I want you to play a significant role.” Nathaniel stopped pacing, and now stood beside the desk. “I never imagined my grandson would be with a woman like Valerie. I never imagined you, Lucy. But you’re here and … well, I’ll be damned, I trust
you
with my legacy.”

Lucy leapt from the chair and made a beeline for him. She didn’t care what anybody said—he was nice in his own way. “Thanks, Gramps.”

“Your whole life is in front of you. But lying and stealing and betraying your people aren’t the ways to go about things. Sometimes you just don’t get a do-over.”

“I
T’S CALLED SURVIVOR’S
guilt.” Doctor Helene-Ming Fish, a therapist from Memorial, hefted the moving box marked Attic Junk into the U-Haul and crouched to pick up another. When Valerie had shown up at Peyton’s hotel room and admitted what had gone down with Lucy, he had hunted up the Memorial mental health department business card his emergency-room colleague Marlon Greer had given him months ago. He’d refused to call Helene-Ming for his own sake, had instead relied on training at Diego Aturro’s gym to keep his mind anchored. But he didn’t want Lucy to cope that way, or to eventually take up a “pack-a-day” habit … or to drown her problems in alcohol or avoidance or lies.

The therapist had responded to his page even though it was after-hours and she was very newly wedded and in the middle of moving out of the hideously colorful Victorian she had shared with two other single women.

“Essentially,” Helene-Ming said as Peyton handed off yet another box, “Lucy’s had these symptoms since the death of her sister. She either feels responsible for Anna’s death, or believes she’s the one who should’ve passed away.” She turned away from the truck to look at him and Valerie with sincerity in her almond-shaped eyes. “She’s a trouble magnet at school, forces herself not to cry and keeps secret the nightmares that send her to a bathroom for safety or escape. Peyton, you said the song she listens to the most often is ‘Tears in Heaven’ and that she would choose to be a bird just to fly away somewhere to fit in.”

Yet he’d done nothing about it, not even when he’d first been concerned about their daughter’s nightmares. How could a doctor miss the obvious signs that his own child was depressed?

He swore, and muttered something to that effect.

“This isn’t about anyone’s failure,” said Helene-Ming, reaching for a laundry basket filled with bonsai trees.

“Why would she choose now to chop off her hair and start sneaking off?”

“Any new upset or feeling of being out of control would intensify the condition.”

His child had a condition, and he hadn’t realized it through all the months of her strange behavior and his suspicions. “I came to town a few months back. We got close, the three of us. We were starting to be a—”

A family.

Beside him, Valerie inhaled sharply and busied herself touching the blooming flowers on the bushes flanking the Victorian’s old wrought-iron gate.

“But you’re not anymore? Is that it?” Helene-Ming inquired. At his nod, she continued, “Not getting what she wanted could’ve further fueled her problems, but I’d say the damage was really already done and there’s something more at play here. May I meet Lucy for an evaluation? I’d like to get her—and both of you—through this. I don’t usually do sidewalk therapy—” As if to punctuate her point, a loud trio of kids on ten-speeds zipped down the cracked, aged street. “—but knowing that a listener is readily available can help.”

The Lincoln was deafeningly silent as they rode to the hotel, but before Valerie could jump out and hurry off in her own car to pick up Lucy from his grandfather’s house, he said, “We need to talk—without a referee.”

Valerie shrugged. “Yeah. Fine.”

In his suite he tossed his keys onto the espresso-finished buffet in the sitting area and turned to see her just behind him, her gaze washing over his stacked suitcases on the sofa. “You’ve been here a while and haven’t unpacked. Tying up loose ends before you go?”

Are you asking me to stay?
he wanted to volley back. “What if I was?”

“Oh, you’re baiting me? That’s why you asked me up, to provoke me?” She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “Please, let’s quit here. Thanks for connecting me with Doctor Fish, but your job’s done now. Congratulations, you’ve got your freedom back. Goodbye.”

Goodbye wasn’t something he ever wanted to say to her, but …

“Are you turning this on me? You sent my mother out of town and were lying to me all the while I was falling in love with you. Damn it,
you’re
the one killing me—every time you look at me like I’m the enemy. Every time I think about you and know I can’t touch you. That’s killing me.”

“You never wanted any of this—love, kids, a future with me. You want to be a doctor without borders, right? A doctor without attachments.” Valerie snorted, crossed her arms over that old flannel shirt with its scratched snap buttons. “And Marin was right. The second you found out that I’m not perfect, you dropped me. So go to Africa. Go to hell, for all I care.”

“It’ll be hell without you.” Peyton curved his hands over her shoulders, even though he’d lost the right to be this close when he’d chosen to keep from her his choice to continue aid work … and when he’d hurt her with the demand for a paternity test. “What if I did go? You’d react like this? Get scared that I won’t come back? Are you that damaged?”

“I’m not damaged,” she seethed, skirting around him and encountering the buffet.

“You are.” He leaned close. “So am I. So’s our daughter, and everyone else roaming this planet. If they’re not, then they haven’t lived long enough yet. It’s called life, and we’ve got to deal with it.”

“That’s it? We hurt each other, you get the urge to take off, and we’re supposed to deal with it? Forget that.”

Peyton’s hands ended up in her hair. “It’s not an urge to take off, Val. It’s an urge to help people in need. And I would always—” he roughly kissed her forehead and temples “—
always—
want to come back to you. You think I want to throw away what we mean to each other? To give up the chance to touch you … and taste you?”

He did just that. His hands slid from her hair down to her hips, and he kissed her. There was no finesse, just the eager, frantic mating of mouths.

Peyton reached for the front of her shirt and yanked hard, and the sharp sound of the buttons unsnapping was music. Then his temperature spiked when she kicked aside her shoes and peeled off her jeans. “Why would I let this go?” he ground out between clenched teeth as his fingers drew the crotch of her panties aside and found the slick heat between her thighs.