The Heart Breaker (39 page)

The muscles in his jaw knotted. “I apologized for the cruel things I said.”

“I know. And you were sincere, I don’t doubt it. But you can’t say the one thing I need to hear.”

“I want you to stay.”

“You want my body, perhaps… but I’m not a whore. I’ve got more to give than that.” She swallowed thickly. “That has always been the trouble, hasn’t it? You don’t want my heart. You were honest about that from the first, at least.”

Her voice was on the edge of breaking. With effort, Heather strove to collect herself. “I think you’ve made your choice, Sloan. You love your dead wife, and you can’t let her go.”

He made no reply. His face was set like flint, yet she saw the dark, anguished look in his eyes.

“I can’t be Doe,” she murmured hoarsely. “I can’t live up to her image. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“I don’t want you to be Doe.”

“You do. You can’t help it, but you do. You insist on clinging to the past—” Heather dashed the tears from her eyes, but she couldn’t banish the relentless ache. “You won’t let go of your guilt, and until you do…”

There can be no future for us.

She left the words unsaid, but she saw the muscles in Sloan’s throat work convulsively. She had affected him, Heather knew. The truth had cut deeply… But not deeply enough.

“I’ll tell Cat you said good-bye.”

Pain lashed through her at his toneless utterance. She couldn’t reply.

Without getting up from the table, Sloan took Janna from her. His own throat was achingly tight as Heather choked back a sob and fled the kitchen. A moment later he heard the shutting of the front door.

Unable to stop himself, Sloan rose from the table and carried Janna into the parlor, where he stood
before the window. His jaw clenched rigidly as he watched Evan Randolf handing his wife into the closed carriage.

Yet as the vehicle drove out of sight, he couldn’t explain the panic that twisted like a knife in his gut. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Heather out of his hair, out of his life, out of his heart. Yet he felt as if a vital part of him had been torn away. The way he had when Doe had died.

He locked his jaw against the tearing grief. The past years had hardened him, like steel tempered by fire. He would survive this loss, as he had others.

Janna started whimpering just then, as if she somehow understood her new mama was leaving her for good. With a raw curse, Sloan turned away from the window.

“Want Hever,” Janna murmured plaintively.

“So do I,” he whispered. “But it’s just us now, sweetheart. Just like before. But we’ll get on. We’ll comfort each other.”

Still holding his daughter, Sloan wandered the empty, silent rooms, keenly aware of Heather’s absence, of his aloneness. She had been gone only a short while, and already the house felt haunted by her memory.

Heather claimed she couldn’t bear to stay, and after the way he’d treated her, Sloan reflected with bleak honesty, he really couldn’t blame her. She deserved so much more than he could give her—a life filled with harsh challenges and grueling work. She deserved love.

Almost to his surprise, he found himself in his bedchamber, the one he had shared with his first wife. He tried to picture Doe as she’d been in life, with her quiet features and gentle brown eyes, but all he could remember was the last time Heather
had visited this room, when he’d spurned her love. And later… when he’d offered her gold for sex, making a mockery of the tender passion that had been the mainstay of their marriage for the past few months.

He sank heavily onto the mattress. He felt numb, except for the burning in his eyes, in his heart.

He didn’t protest when a squirming Janna crawled off his lap and made herself a nest among the pillows. Instead Sloan lay back on the bed, exhausted from the turmoil of the past few weeks, from the constant war between feeling and trying not to feel.

Wearily he shut his eyes, trying to summon Doe’s face. All he could see was a pair of golden eyes shimmering with tears … Heather’s beautiful features torn by despair and anguish as she said a final farewell.

She was wrong, Sloan reflected bleakly. She was wrong to think he didn’t love her.

If he didn’t, then why did it hurt so god-awful much to lose her?

H
e was running, his heart pounding in desperation as he chased an ephemeral vision across the sunlit meadow. Doe’s shining raven hair rippled behind her in the wind as she ran from him through the columbine.

It was a game, a lover’s game.

He called her name, but she refused to stop. He shouted, pleading with her to come back, but she wouldn’t hear. He followed, his legs churning, his lungs laboring for breath.

She led him to her grave. When he arrived, chest aching, she was sitting cross-legged on the grass, weaving stems of delicate blue columbine together.

She lifted her dark gaze to him, and her sad smile tore at his heart. “You have come to say farewell.” It wasn’t a question.

He could answer only with the truth. “Yes.”

The flowers slipping through her fingers, she held her hands up to him.

His own hands were shaking as he took hers and dropped to his knees before her. Her touch was so faint, she seemed more spirit than flesh.

“My love,” she whispered, her image wavering before his eyes.

“God, Doe, I’m sorry. I let you die.”

“No, the blame was not yours.”

“I wish …” he began helplessly.

“No. No regrets.” She shook her head in sadness.

“Doe … there is something I must tell you.”

“I know. The woman … your new wife… She loves you.”

He bowed his head, unable to dispute her.

“And you love her.”

“Yes…” His throat was tight. “I love her.”

“Then I must go.”

When he felt her grasp waver, he looked up. Her likeness was fading. “Doe,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, raw.

“Farewell, my love. Care well for our daughter…”

He gripped Doe’s hands, trying desperately to hold on, but they dissolved in his grasp. He cried her name in anguish, but her spirit faded in a wisp of smoke and shadow.

He woke with a start, his cry echoing in the darkness, the wetness of tears chilling his face.

It had been a dream. Bittersweet, heartrending. A final good-bye.

His eyes burned with scalding tears. The muscles of his throat locked tight against the effort of holding them back, Sloan turned his head to find his baby daughter snuggled against his arm. He drew Janna into the curve of his body, seeking comfort. It brought no ease.

A sob caught in his throat.

Struggling against the fierce ache, he buried his face in the soft down of her hair. His chest heaved once, twice, before he finally surrendered to the wrenching despair. Helplessly he let the relentless pain and grief out, his young daughter’s hair muffling the broken, wracking sound of his weeping.

* * *

It was a long while before he found the energy to stir. Amazingly Janna still slept soundly beside him.

Feeling limp and drained, Sloan rose slowly from the bed and carried his daughter to her cradle. After kissing her forehead, he turned and left the room. He made his way downstairs, through the darkness of the kitchen and out into the chill night, where the shadowed mountains stood sentinel.

Silence greeted him. Silence and healing.

Sloan took a shuddering breath. Something had eased inside him during his paroxysm of grief tonight. He’d felt a loosening, a melting. The black ice that had encased his heart since Doe’s death had cracked and fallen away.

He could let her go now. He could let his grief go. There was still—and would always be—a haunting sense of loss, but it was bearable now. Because of Heather.

He raised his gaze to the rugged mountains, as always feeling a sense of his own insignificance. The Rockies would always be there, strong and immutable. Unlike life. Life was so fleeting, over so suddenly....

Was that what Heather had pleaded with him to see? That he needed to accept the past and move on with his life? To make the most of what he had now, at this moment? With her?

A haunting memory, dark and sweet, swept over him, this time of Heather. Heather warming him, welcoming him into her body, filling the bleak void in his soul. Offering her love.

He hadn’t wanted her love. He’d been afraid to feel again, to let her too close. Afraid to care, to need too much, for fear of losing her like he had Doe. He’d tried to keep his heart safe from Heather by keeping his distance. But it hadn’t worked.

He had loved her for months and lied to himself about it. She’d made herself a vital part of his life, whether he’d wanted her to or not. After Doe’s murder, he had retreated deep inside himself to heal his wounds, indulging in an orgy of guilt and suffering. But Heather had slipped beneath his defenses, insinuated herself into his heart… making him breathe again, hurt again, feel again. Love again.

He loved her.

Sloan squeezed his eyes shut. Against his will, love had seeped into his heart and into his blood, into every nerve and pore of him. He hadn’t thought it possible for him to feel such emotion again. But Heather made him yearn for things he thought he’d lost forever.

An image of her cradling Janna in her arms, the golden woman and dark child, drifted into his mind.
Heather. Warmth and light and healing.

Since she’d come into his life, the bleakness had lifted. Since her coming, he’d been alive.

But he’d driven her away.

She hadn’t deserved his cruelty. How could he have hurt her so? She was giving and caring, strong and brave, everything he’d tried to reject. Sloan bowed his head, his chest aching with a fresh pain.

He stood there for a long while. Dawn stretched silver-rose fingers over the eastern sky, yet he remained where he was. Brooding, lonely. Missing Heather with a fierceness that hurt.

He had driven her away. And it might be too late to get her back.

The sun had barely risen when Sloan received unexpected visitors. He’d just finished dressing and feeding Janna when his brother drove up with family in tow and Wolf Logan riding beside the buggy.

Wolf must have returned from Denver last night, Sloan realized as he went out to greet them.

He received a chilly response from his sister-in-law at least.

“Heather’s gone, isn’t she,” Caitlin demanded accusingly before he could say a word. The martial light flaring in her blue eyes could have sparked a brushfire. Refusing assistance, she climbed down from the buggy with her baby daughter, her jaw set with determination.

“I think a family conference is in order,” she announced, brushing past Sloan unceremoniously and heading for the porch steps.

Quizzically, he met his brother’s gaze, but Jake shrugged, as if to say he had little voice in the matter.

They settled in Sloan’s study, with the children playing near the hearth.

“We are here to discuss finances,” Caitlin began resolutely. “Wolf has a plan, Sloan, and you
will
hear him out. We’re not leaving till you see reason.”

Sloan looked at his friend and brother-in-law expectantly.

Wolf leaned back against the leather couch and said more gently, “Cat’s right, Sloan. She told me about Lovell trying to take over the Bar M and about Randolf providing the money to settle the mortgage. Well, enough is enough. It’s time you accepted Doe’s share of my claim. You can finish buying out Jake’s half of the Bar M and get the ranch back in prime condition. Make it profitable again.”

Sloan ran a hand down his face. “You know it sticks in my craw to take your money.”

“It’s not my money. It belongs to Doe—and now to you and your daughter. You can accept for
Janna’s sake, for her future, if nothing else.”

When Sloan hesitated, Cat broke in angrily. “I can’t understand why you insist on being so stubborn! You can’t possibly enjoy being at the mercy of men like Lovell or Randolf.”

“No, I don’t particularly enjoy it,” Sloan admitted dryly.

Her tone turned pleading. “Then you can swallow your pride and take the money. It isn’t as if it’s charity. We’re family, Sloan. And if there’s one thing you should have learned from that terrible range war, it’s that families have to stick together. We
have
to!” When he still remained silent, her frustration exploded. “Merciful heaven, you should be grateful you have family who cares enough about you to come to your aid when times are rough!”

Sloan sighed. “I am grateful.”

“Then you’ll accept?”

He nodded. It would be Doe’s final gift to him, to their daughter. With a share of a gold mine, he could give Janna a better life. And he could get on with his own life. Heather would approve, he knew.

“For Janna’s sake, yes,” he answered.

“Heaven forbid that you should accept help for yourself,” Caitlin retorted with cutting sarcasm.

Sloan’s mouth curved in a faint grin. “I take it you’re mad at me, Cat.”