The Cowboy (19 page)

On the other hand, in order for him to have Lauren Creed, Jesse had to be out of the way. Love was a powerful emotion, and an all-too-common motive for murder.

Owen thought a little more, then shook his head, rejecting her suggestion. “No. He wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Why not?”

“You’re forgetting something,” Owen said.

“What’s that?”

“My mother.”

Bay’s lips curved in a smug, secretive smile that reminded him of da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa.
“You’re awfully naive, Mr. Blackthorne, if you think your father can’t rid himself of your mother. There’s always divorce.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Because he’d have to give her back the land she brought with her as a dowry and half—maybe more, if she could convince the judge she deserved it—of what they’ve accumulated during their marriage
, Owen thought. He said, “My father doesn’t believe in divorce.”

“I notice you didn’t mention that your father would never divorce your mother because he loves her,” Bay pointed out.

“That goes without saying,” Owen said.

Bay smiled that infuriating, all-knowing smile again. “Of course.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Miss Creed.”

“Prove it.”

She walked away without another word. To his disgust, Owen found himself admiring the sway of her hips in the black sheath. She never looked back at him, never looked at him again, as she wheeled her brother toward the pickup they’d come in. He wondered why they didn’t buy one of those vans that were set up for folks in wheelchairs and realized the answer before the question was fully formed in his mind.

Sam didn’t go out much, and a van designed for his needs wouldn’t be as cost-effective on a low-margin ranch like Three Oaks as another pickup truck. He watched as Callie got on one side of Sam and her brother Luke on the other. He saw the struggle on their faces as they hefted Sam out of the wheelchair and levered him into the cab of the pickup. For a moment, he feared they would drop the crippled man.

They could have asked for help from any one of a dozen distant relatives or neighbors. He found it significant that they did not. It made a powerful statement: the Creeds took care of their own, without help from anyone.

He watched Sam take his weight on his arms as they edged him onto the seat. Callie’s boy, Eli, folded up the wheelchair, and Bayleigh hefted it into the back of the pickup. She was stronger than her diminutive size suggested. But she’d have to be, if she was going to be a large animal vet.

Owen was startled when he felt an arm laced through his own. He looked down to find his sister leaning her head against his shoulder. “What are you doing here, Summer?”

Instead of answering his question, she said, “What were you and Bayleigh Creed talking about?”

“None of your business.”

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Summer said.

“What does that have to do with the price of cattle?”

“Then you do think she’s pretty,” Summer said with a cajoling smile.

Owen laughed. “All right, she’s got beautiful eyes,” he conceded. “Now tell me what you’re doing here.”

She gestured with her chin toward the crowd of mourners. “I came because of him.”

Owen looked in the direction she’d pointed, seeking someone he could connect with his sister. The only people left at graveside were Johnny Ray Coburn and his wife and their two kids, the tall, skinny girl and the even taller son. Owen had reason to know the son, because he’d stopped Bad Billy Coburn for drunk driving. They were distant kin to the Creeds, since Lauren Creed had been a Coburn before she married Jesse.

“I give up,” Owen said as he turned back to his sister. “Who is it you came to see?”

“Billy Coburn.”

Owen frowned. “Bad Billy?”

“I’ve already had this conversation with Trace,” she said with asperity. “His name is Billy. Just Billy.”

“Stay away from him.”

Summer laughed. “You and Trace act like I’m some innocent virgin who—”

Owen caught her arm with enough force to cut her off. “Are you sleeping with that bastard?”

Summer’s eyes glittered with angry tears, and her chin tilted up. Once upon a time, the tears might have swayed
him, but Owen had seen her turn on the waterworks too many times to be moved by them. “I asked you a question. What’s going on between you and Billy Coburn?”

“That’s none of your business.”

Owen felt acid churn in his stomach. He looked down at his sister—barely twenty and with her whole life ahead of her—and sent his gaze searching for Bad Billy Coburn. The boy looked almost decent dressed up in a suit. But his black hair needed a cut, and his tieless shirt wasn’t ironed. The extra shirt cuff showing at each sleeve revealed that he’d long ago outgrown the suit jacket. His face was cut in hard planes, and there was a wild, feral look in his eyes.

“He’s going to wind up in prison, Summer. That boy’s no damn good. Look at his father. He comes from bad blood.”

“He’s not at all like Johnny Ray,” Summer protested. “Billy’s got hopes and dreams for the future.”

Owen made a dismissive sound in his throat. “From the looks of those purple bruises on his chin and that black eye, I’d say about all that boy’s got on his mind is fighting.”

Summer pulled herself free of his grasp. “Billy and I are friends. I like him.”

“Why don’t you find yourself a nice man and get married and have a houseful of kids?”

She stared at him as though he were a two-headed calf. “That’s the most chauvinistic, backward-thinking, Neanderthal remark I’ve heard in a long time. Ever hear of women’s liberation? A woman doesn’t need a man—”

Owen laughed. “Whoa. Whoa. I take it all back. Then why don’t you find yourself a nice career—”

“You would say that! Have you ever thought that maybe I’d like to manage Bitter Creek someday?”

Owen’s brows rose toward his hairline.

“I thought not,” she said scornfully. “Just because I’m a girl—”

“The baby girl in the family,” Owen pointed out.

“I’m not a baby anymore, I’m a grown woman.”

“You’re twenty. You’re not even old enough to sit at a bar.”

“No, but I’m old enough to get married to the ‘right man’ and have babies,” she said angrily.

“Uh-oh. Did someone else bring up matrimony?”

“That was mother’s suggestion. Daddy sees me as a piece of flesh he can barter to the highest bidder for more land!”

Owen saw the desperation in his sister’s eyes and felt sorry for her. He’d never been important enough to either of his parents to suffer their interference in his life. He put an arm around her shoulder, tightening his grasp when she tried to shrug it off. “Hey. It’s me. I’m on your side.”

“You’d never know it,” she grumbled.

“Just be careful around Billy Coburn, all right? Use some common sense.”

“Someday you’re all going to realize I’m right about Billy,” Summer said. “Someday—”

He gave her a comforting squeeze, and aimed her toward the dirt road where they’d left their cars. “Yeah. Someday we’re all going to live happily ever after.”

C
ALLIE WAVED HER
S
TETSON AT THE NOISY
helicopter overhead, the signal she’d prearranged to let her sister Bay know her work driving the herd of cherry-red Santa Gertrudis cattle from the north pasture to the loading chutes was done. At least they’d saved the cost of a pilot by having Bay fly the rented copter. Callie had hired a few cowboys to load the herd onto the tractor-trailer trucks that would take them to the auction house in Bitter Creek. Right now, every penny counted.

It was only noon, and the bulk of the work was done. But here and there, pockets of wiser cows remained hidden in the thick underbrush. It would probably take Callie, Luke, and Eli the rest of the day to flush them out on horseback and drive them to the loading chutes. Even four-year-old Hannah was helping with the roundup. The little girl had been riding horseback since she was two, and Callie figured her daughter was safer out on the range than she was at home with Sam, who’d spent his days since their father’s death drinking himself into a stupor.

The mesquite was thick and scraped across Callie’s chaps as she rode. She made a mental note to do a
controlled burn in the north pasture in January, when deer and turkey seasons were over, to get rid of the troublesome mesquite, which extended its roots as much as a hundred feet across the ground, competing with the grass for moisture. She watched a red-tailed hawk swoop down and grasp a mouse in its talons and felt herself identifying with the helpless mouse.

Predators were on the loose. There was no hiding from the disaster that loomed.

The government was allowing them to pay off the inheritance taxes in installments over seven years. Huge installments. The price of cattle was up, so Callie had decided to wean the calves early and sell her Santa Gertrudis cows. Their cow/calf operation was going to be sorely depleted with the sale of so much stock, but they had no choice if the government was going to be paid its pound of flesh on time.

Unfortunately, selling the cattle would provide only half the cash needed to pay the first installment of taxes. Callie had to find some way to earn the other $375,000. She could train and sell the horses she’d bought to replace the stolen fillies and come up with a hundred thousand. And the prize money in the NCHA World Championship Futurity in Fort Worth could be as much as $200,000 if she won on Sugar Pep.

But she couldn’t count on winning. She was going to have to eat some crow—and take Trace up on his offer to train Smart Little Doc. With the fees for training Trace’s horse, and with any luck, her share of the prize money he’d offered if his horse made it into the top ten, she might be able to pay off the government in time to avoid owing interest and penalties on top of the taxes.

Of course, she was going to have to eat a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches along with crow over the next year, but at least they’d still have Three Oaks.

But for how long?

Callie didn’t allow herself to contemplate the grim future that lay ahead of them. Her mother was still in the hospital, and though she was expected to recover completely, Callie was disturbed at how despondent her mother had seemed the last time she’d visited her.

“Maybe we should sell,” her mother had suggested.

“That isn’t necessary, Mom,” she’d countered. “We can come up with the money to pay the taxes.”

“For seven years? How are the two of us going to keep the ranch going and pay off that kind of debt?”

“We’ll manage. Bay will be done with school in a year and—”

“How can we afford to send Bay back to school next semester?”

“Bay can borrow whatever she needs to finish up. Don’t worry, Mom. Just get well.”

“How is Sam handling all this?”

He’s turned into a real pain in the ass.
“Sam’s having some trouble dealing with Dad’s death,” Callie said. “But we all have to find a way to go on.”

“Why?” her mother had asked. “Why keep fighting a battle we’re losing?”

“Because Three Oaks is our home. It’s where we belong.”

Callie never got to finish her speech. The nurse had interrupted her. So she never said to her mother, “Where else would we go? What else would we do?”

The truth was, Callie could probably get work training
cutting horses for somebody in California or Texas. And once Bay got her degree, she could get licensed as a large animal vet pretty much anywhere. But what would happen to Sam and her mother and Luke? Callie wasn’t about to abandon her family, and she couldn’t support all of them on what she would make working for somebody else.

And there was history to consider. The Creeds could trace their heritage back to the youngest of three sisters, Sloan, Bayleigh, and Creighton Stewart, who’d grown up on a cotton plantation called Three Oaks when Texas was still a Republic.

Creighton Stewart had married Texas Ranger Jarrett Creed, and they’d raised a family of four sons on a plantation called Lion’s Dare. During the Civil War, Cricket had gone to live with her widowed sister, Sloan, on her vast Southwest Texas cattle ranch, Dolorosa.

But everything the Stewart sisters owned was stolen by a conniving Englishman called Blackthorne. And when Creighton’s eldest son Jake came home from the war—the only survivor among his father and brothers—he’d built himself a home on the comparatively small piece of land along Bitter Creek that was all he had left of his inheritance.

Callie and her family lived in that house, which had been handed down from generation to generation for more than a hundred and fifty years. The family had struggled too hard to keep Three Oaks. Callie wasn’t about to be the one to give it up to somebody else, especially when that somebody would almost certainly be Jackson Blackthorne.

Callie had spent more than a little time contemplating Sam’s accusation that Blackjack had something to do
with her father’s death. Violence had always been a possibility between the two men. But why now? Had the incident at the Rafter S been the spark? Did Blackjack want Callie’s mother badly enough to kill her father in order to have her? But her mother would have to want Blackjack in return, and that was just plain crazy. And what about Eve Blackthorne? Callie hadn’t heard anything about an impending divorce.