Undeniable (13 page)

Too much, too soon. “We’ll see.”

“We make time for one, we can make time again.”

She took a different tack. “And what are we going to do? Because I can’t think of anything that won’t require leaving town.”

“Ah, I’m the man,” he said jabbing an index finger into his chest. “You leave the date planning to me.”

Oh, good Lord.
“That sounds awfully male chauvinist.”

“Just taking the bull by the horns, baby. Taking the bull by the horns.”

“T
HAT DIDN’T LOOK
like a host just walking a guest to her car.”

Still thinking over his conversation with Arwen, Dax wasn’t exactly ready to get into anything with his sister. He dropped a kiss on Darcy’s head where she stood at the back door, and returned to the table to graze. “What, not only are you the lawyer I was supposed to be, you’re a spy, too?”

“I’m nosy.”

“Same thing.”

“If I were a spy, I’d be reporting on you to the parents,” she said, following him across the kitchen and wrapping her hands around the top rung of a chair.

He sat, and his jaw grew taut. “Do they want you to?”

“Mom’s hinted at it but won’t come right out and ask. Just wonders if there’s any news from town. And The Campbell just guzzles his Glenlivet and snores.”

The Campbell.
That always made him laugh, Darcy taking their Scottish heritage so seriously here in the middle of the wild wild west. He was surprised she hadn’t had them all wearing kilts instead of jeans and spurs.

“I’m still waiting.”

“For what?” Gnawing on the end of a rib, he gave her a lazy glance.

She circled the table, turning the chair next to him sideways to sit. “What’s going on with you and Arwen?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, continued to gnaw.

“But you’re sleeping together.”

He nodded. “Kinda came out of nowhere.”

“I knew it,” she said, punching his shoulder and laughing. “Bet Mom would have a coronary if she found out.”

That drew a snort. There was some really bad joke here about dipping his wick in the wrong Poole, but he was too tired to make it. “No reason for her to.”

“Is your affair a big secret?”

Good question. Better question. Was it an affair? Or just wick dipping?

It had been like pulling teeth to get Arwen to agree to a date. And why the hell was he insisting on buying the cow when he was getting the milk for free?

He reached for another rib, thinking not for the first time that he was off his game. He couldn’t decide if it was the years away or the coming back to blame. “The boys know. Now you know. Can’t think of a reason anyone else needs to.”

“Do you like her?”

He gave Darcy a side-eyed frown. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean? I hope I like her. I get naked with her.”

His sister rolled her eyes. “Yes, she’s hot. Even I can see she’s hot. Every guy in town knows she’s hot. I doubt many wouldn’t
like to get naked with her. But getting naked with someone and liking that someone are not mutually exclusive, as I’m sure you learned during the Dalton Gang’s younger years.”

“What do you mean, every guy in town knows she’s hot?” And then he remembered Bubba Taylor and his crew eyeballing Arwen at Lasko’s. A memory that had him feeling mean.

“You’re not really that dense, are you? Or wait.” Darcy leaned closer, her eyes wide as she studied his face. “Are you jealous?”

He shooed her away. “No, I’m not jealous. I’m in her bed. They’re not. Why should I be?”

“Because they want to be there?”

“Wait,” he said, changing the subject. “What did you say about our younger years?”

“That you three boinked like indiscriminate bunnies.”

“Huh.” And then he went silent because there wasn’t much to say. She was right. He and Boone and Casper had made a lot of bets while doing a lot of drinking, and bedding the girls they put on their lists didn’t have much to do with liking them.

He’d been a hell of a jerk. He hadn’t been alone in it, but that didn’t relieve him of the responsibility of owning up to it. Which he supposed he’d be doing on a regular basis—whether he liked it or not—if he didn’t keep his hat brim pulled low.

He tossed his last rib bone back in the pan, licked his fingers, and wiped them clean on his thighs, then rubbed his gut that was overstuffed and aching. “I guess we should get this trash out of here.”

But Darcy ignored him, picking at loose cotton threads puffing out of a crack in the tablecloth. “What are you going to do with the house?”

“What do you mean?”

“Casper said y’all haven’t felt right being in here. That it feels too much like trespassing.”

He let that settle, looking from his sister to the sideboard and Tess’s collection of salt and pepper shakers covering the surface. He knew if he opened the top drawer, he’d find the expensive silverware she’d never used but polished every other Saturday.

If he opened the door on the left, he’d find clipped recipes she kept meaning to try filed in big black binders. One for cookies, one for cakes, another for pies because she knew he and Boone and Casper all had a thing for desserts. But she’d kept baking their favorites instead, and that had been just fine with them.

The door on the right was where Dave had stored the bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Jose Cuervo he rarely had occasion to use, so he never noticed how watered down the booze had become over time. Dax leaned an elbow on the table, rubbed at his jaw. He wasn’t sure it was trespassing keeping them out of the house as much as missing what they’d never known they had.

They certainly knew it now.

“Do you want help going through the Daltons’ things?” Darcy asked, nudging him back to today. “I’m happy to do it. Nora Stokes might take some of the furniture on consignment. I’m pretty sure several pieces are antiques.”

Nope. “We’re not selling the furniture.”

“Okay. What about their personal effects?

He sat back, scrubbed both hands through his hair. “I don’t want to talk about this, Darcy. Not right now.”

“I get that, Dax, but I’m in a bind.”

“How so?”

“Because I really need a place to stay. I thought if it wouldn’t be a problem, I could use the house for a while, maybe help y’all sort through things, make the house yours so you’d be comfortable here. The bunkhouse is a wreck.”

“It’s worse than that,” he said, before his mind kicked back
to something else. “Wait. Why do you need a place to stay? The folks boot you out for consorting with the enemy?”

“Not exactly,” she said, looking away, her mouth twisting.

Now this was interesting. “You crossed the big man?”

She leaned forward, her arms on her thighs as she worried one of her nails. “Remember the other morning with Henry Lasko? When I asked him to come to the office to talk to me?” Dax nodded and Darcy went on. “The Campbell heard about it and gave me my walking papers.”

What the hell? “He fired you? Over that?”

“Not really. Not yet. But he threatened to.” She looked up, shrugged. “And so I walked.”

“Darcy, shit.”

“Yeah. Shit.

“So, what? Are you done there? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure I could go back. But…”

Ah, the elephant in the room. Or in this case, in clan Campbell. “You don’t want to go back. You’re there because I’m not.”

“Someone in the family has to take over the family firm.”

He didn’t think it was possible to dislike his father more than he did, but the old man screwing over Darcy had Dax’s blood pressure rising. “What about his partner? I heard he has a new hotshot in the office.”

Darcy shrugged, looked down, went back to picking at the crack in the time-and-sun-dried tablecloth. “Greg’s not a partner, though not for lack of putting in the hours. Odds are he’ll be The Campbell’s choice, even though I’m family and he’s not. For one thing, I’m a woman. For another—”

“You’re not me.”

“Sad, but true.”

“Hey, now. It’s not so bad being me.”

Darcy’s only response to that was an arched brow.

“C’mon. Give your worn-out brother a break.” When she still said nothing, he added, “I hear I look really good in jeans.”

“Jesus, Dax,” she said, punching him again. “Bad enough I have to hear that crap from other women.”

“Yeah?” He rubbed at his shoulder. “Women talk about me?”

“You’ve got Arwen. What does it matter?”

“Just keeping my options open,” he said, the words choking him like a big fat lie.

“You’re a pig. Look what she did for you.” She waved her hand over the spread of leftovers needing to be stored in the fridge. “She sure didn’t bring all this out here for me or the boys.”

Which reminded him. “Why are you driving Josh Lasko’s truck?”

“My car’s at the office. I wasn’t in the mood to go back.”

“Hmm. So, you’re out a job, out a vehicle, and out a place to live.” He reached for her hand, lifted her arm into the air. “Ding, ding. We have a winner. At least I have a piece-of-shit ranch to my name.”

Growling, she jerked her arm away. “Like I said. You’re a pig.”

God, he had missed this girl. Missed her sassy mouth. Missed her way-too-solid punches. Missed her growing up. And that was a shame he’d be a long time getting over. “Is that any way to talk to the brother you’ve just asked to get you out of a jam?”

“Does that mean I can stay?”

He feigned a careless shrug. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

“Seriously?”

“As long as the boys don’t object.” He raised both palms, staving her off before she landed in his lap. “But don’t touch anything. Not until I check with them.”

And then he hooked a boot around the leg of the table, bracing himself as she launched into his arms.

“You’re the best, Dax. The absolute best.”

Yeah, the best at abandoning a sixteen-year-old girl to fend for herself in a family where selfishness seemed to be the one Campbell trait he’d embraced. “Not a pig? Not an ass?”

“Not today,” she said, taking his face in one hand, squeezing as she dropped a kiss to his cheek, then exhaling and letting him bear her weight as if she’d been waiting for sixteen years for someone to lean on.

At that moment she could’ve called him any part of any animal’s anatomy and he would’ve felt like a king.

A
RMS CROSSED ON
the corral’s top rail, one boot braced on the bottom, Dax looked out at the wide-open spaces and watched the shadows shift with the setting sun. The last of the rays cut across the prairie, doing their best to convince him there were greens and yellows out there when all he saw was brown.

He wasn’t that easily fooled. The light was a trick, playing with his imagination, making him remember what this place had looked like before Mother Nature had fucked the Daltons, leaving them with little more than a penny to their name. Now it was his penny, his name, Casper’s, Boone’s.

They were broke as old horses, poorer than dirt, strapped like beggars needing pencils. But hey, they owned a ranch. Acres and acres of fenced land, horses and cows, a flatbed truck and a tractor, a bunkhouse and a barn. Both of those could use tearing down and rebuilding. And a whole lot of the fencing wire was
hanging on creosote posts approaching the end of their days. Then there was the big rambling house they’d left sitting empty since settling in.

Nothing about this homecoming was turning out like he’d expected. Not that he’d thought he’d come back to a ticker-tape parade, but neither had he expected… brown. From where he stood, things were looking pretty well screwed. For him, for Darcy. For the boys. Arwen was about the only one who seemed to have it together, and that in itself was fucked up.

Casper’s upbringing had been a dismal mess of alcohol and abuse, but compared to Arwen’s home life, it was almost as good as Dax spending his childhood in the mansion on the hill. Now here she was, a business owner like him, hers thriving in a town that wasn’t, his waiting for the right time to draw its last breath.

The fact that he’d gone running like Remedy stung by Casper’s spurs when he’d heard she needed him in the kitchen was still giving him hell. Running for Darcy was one thing. She was blood, true family.

Arwen wasn’t. The sweetest piece of ass he’d had the pleasure to know, yeah, but that was it. Except that didn’t explain his asking her for a date, if the roundabout way he’d gotten there could count as asking. And dating was just one step away from letting her in, so yeah. Whatever he was doing, he needed to stop. He could fuck her, lose his troubles while he did, but he could not lose his head.

“Nice of Arwen to bring the food,” Boone said, stepping up beside him, draping his arms over the railing, a longneck dangling from one hand.

“Wouldn’t happen to have an extra, would you?” The words were barely out of his mouth before Boone handed over the bottle he’d shoved into his jeans pocket, taking Dax’s mind off his worries as beer usually did. “Thanks. And, yeah. She’s a good one.”

“You two working on getting out of the bedroom?”

Dax didn’t answer. He didn’t know what he and Arwen were working on, and that bothered him more than was smart. “Darcy asked if she could stay here awhile.”

“Yeah?” Boone brought the beer to his mouth, drank deeply, gestured with the bottle. “She still living in the big house?”

“Still there, though not feeling the love,” Dax said, twisting the cap from his. “Guess she and the old man got into it over Henry Lasko.”

“He can’t think his claim’s got any teeth. Lasko or your old man.”

Dax shrugged. “All I know is she got chewed out for blowing off Henry at the Blackbird the other morning.”

“Tough break.” Boone was silent for a minute. “You talk to Casper about the house? Darcy using it?”

“Not yet. Just came up after supper.” And Casper had left not long after for parts unknown.

Boone looked down, kicked at the corral’s bottom rung. “Where’s she now?”

“Cleaning up, I think.”

“Taking her time about it considering we finished eating a while ago.”

A prickle of possessiveness had Dax bristling. “Like I said. She doesn’t want to go home.”