Undeniable (3 page)

He reached for his hat brim, pulled it low. “I figure… sixteen years? It’s about time.”

Oh, who was she kidding? He knew. He knew everything. And he’d known it all along. That left her with only one thing to say.

“My truck or yours?”

D
ARCY
C
AMPBELL YANKED
off her sunglasses that were little help against the white hot June sky and blinked to adjust to the interior of the Hellcat Saloon. She scanned the room, breathing deeply of flame-seared beef and fresh-baked bread and the fire-roasted
chiles
that went into Arwen Poole’s famous salsa.

Finding her favorite corner table empty, she didn’t wait for the hostess but headed that way, the heels of her navy pumps striking the glossy concrete in a rhythmic and angry click. She dropped into the chair that put her back to the wall and tossed her satchel into the seat at her right.

Screw it being noon. She needed a pitcher of margaritas. Extra salt, double tequila. Unfortunately, Campbell propriety—and Mrs. Kyle’s three o’clock deposition—determined the only liquid she’d be imbibing at lunch was iced tea. And that with artificial sweetener—another bit of Campbell propriety.

Not that she was bitter.

Much.

Getting out of the Campbell and Associates law office for lunch should’ve helped her mood, but didn’t. She was eating alone while the firm’s two men dined on grass-fed Angus and drank Prairie Rotie from the family’s favorite hill country vintner. Because only potential
associates
dined with The Campbell at the Crow Hill Country Club.

And Darcy, a daughter, a girl, a disappointment, would never make partner. Especially with Greg Barrett and his penis working the same partner-track hours and now landing the Trinity Springs Oil account for the firm.

“Hey, sweetie.” Luck Summerlin set a tumbler full of ice and Darcy’s lunchtime drink on a Hellcat logo coaster. “I heard the news. How’re you doing?”

Wow. Crow Hill was small, but Greg had only announced the Trinity Springs news this morning. She reached for a packet of sweetener, tore it open, and poured. “Who told you?”

Luck propped a knee in the empty chair on Darcy’s left, her long legs bare between her boots and her denim shorts, and shrugged. “The Kittens were all over it earlier. Lots of ribald chatter.”

The chatter part Darcy got. But ribald? Greg? “Then their imagination’s way better than mine. Ribald’s not exactly the word I’d use.”

Luck looked aghast. “Considering he’s your brother, I hope not.”

Her brother?
“Wait.” She stopped stirring her tea, glanced up. “Who are you talking about?”

“Dax? The only brother you have? Unless you’re keeping family secrets about an even badder bad sheep.” Luck narrowed her eyes, braced her hip against the chair back. “Who are
you
talking about?”

Darcy waved off answering, the acid in the pit of her stomach simmering. “Why are you talking about Dax?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“He’s here.”

“Here where?”

“Jeez, Darcy. Here. In town. Well, at the Dalton Ranch, anyhow. Boone and Casper, too.”

She knew about the others, but not her brother. The Dalton Gang. Together again. Their inheritance made it inevitable, but still… She really needed to stop working under a rock and pay attention. And then it hit her. Dax. He was back. After all these years, he was back. And she felt… nothing more than a simmer of emotion.

And then a scalding rush of resentment sent her temperature soaring.

Probably not the reaction Campbell propriety called for. “Dax is here? Are you sure?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sure. And you didn’t have a clue, did you?”

When Darcy shook her head, Luck let out whooping, hollering Hellcat roar, and across the dining room, the Kittens working the lunch shift responded in kind. Customers joined in, slamming bootheels on the floor, banging beer bottles on the bar, drumming hands on any surface until the racket rattled the walls.

It was a Hellcat Saloon tradition Darcy’s headache could’ve done without. Flipping the bird at propriety, she braced her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands. First Greg. Now Dax. The son her father had never had and wanted, and the one he’d had and disowned. She might as well get a rope.

Chair legs scraped across the floor as Luck pulled out the one she’d been leaning on and sat. “Seriously? He hasn’t let y’all know?”

Darcy left her pity party and reached for her tea, thinking she should be anxious to see him, curious how deep her anger at his abandonment ran. “He hasn’t let
me
know. I can’t speak for Mom, and The Campbell wouldn’t tell me if he had. I knew about the will so I assumed he’d show his ass sooner or later.”

“Lotta girls out there hoping to see it.”

“Ew. Luck. He’s my brother.”

“Then you’ll just have to trust me. Dax does wicked things to a pair of jeans.”

“Can we change the subject? Please?” Though at Luck’s words, the image of Josh Lasko wearing Wranglers came to mind. As did the image of Josh Lasko wearing nothing at all.

Funny about chemistry and attraction. She’d never pictured Greg in anything but the suits he wore to the office each day—Italian, designer, Manhattan appropriate. She still hadn’t figured out what he was doing in Crow Hill, though she knew The Campbell’s reputation had tempted many a young lad.

But Josh Lasko… He was kind and strong, silent and shy, and wholesome in ways that made her want to ignore their twain never meeting disparity. Not that her spending her days in her family’s law office while he spent his in his family’s feed store meant anything to her. Her parents on the other hand…

“How ’bout we change the subject to lunch?” Luck pulled her pad and a pen from her apron. “Do you know what you want to eat?”

“Grilled chicken salad. Fat-free ranch on the side.” She thought of returning to the office without having dined on grass-fed Angus or drinking Prairie Rotie. “Garlic toast. With extra garlic.”

“Got an afternoon appointment with a vampire?”

Ugh. Mrs. Kyle’s deposition. “Just the salad, I guess. The garlic would’ve been of more use warding off the morning’s bad news.”

“What happened this morning?”

“Nothing.” Darcy sighed. “Greg.”

“Daddy’s little protégé still looking to become partner?”

“Something like that.”

“You know…” Luck tapped the end of her pen to her chin, head cocked, ponytail swinging. “The best way to get your mind
off
your troubles with one man is to get
into
trouble with another.”

Josh Lasko again. In his Wranglers. Out of his Wranglers. In her bed. Darcy squeezed the muscles of her sex until the tingles there had her aching.

Luck went on. “Or, considering how hot Greg is, you could keep it all in house, if you know what I mean.”

She knew, but no. She was not going to dip her nib in the company ink. Or… whatever. “Really? You think he’s hot?”

Eyes rolling, Luck returned her pad and pen to her apron. “I swear, Darcy. It’s like you live in a cave. He’s tall and he’s built and he’s all kinds of rich. Not to mention being totally
GQ
.”

“Then what was all that about Dax and his jeans?”

“Jeans are every day, every man, and everywhere. Greg Barrett is an exotic. And a yummy one at that.” Luck popped up to turn in Darcy’s order, leaving her with a quick wink.

Leaving her wondering, too, if Greg was so yummy, why she’d never seen it. Why it was Josh Lasko, not the exotic, who tumbled through her fantasies. And how soon her brother’s return was going to turn her pretty nice life upside down.

Because it would.

I
N THE END
, Dax took his truck and Arwen hers. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the idea of her sitting up against him, his arm around her shoulders, his fingers in her hair. Finding a back road, an empty barn, pulling into a pasture to warm up for the main event.

But since a truck bed quickie wouldn’t be enough to hold him, and since he hated the idea of rousing her after exhausting her to drive him back for his wheels, and since he’d
have
to rouse her because he had a hell of a long second half of the work day ahead, two trucks it was.

Then there was the fact that they were driving into town, not out of it, and that left them with few off-the-beaten path places to get naked and party. It also meant that when they got to where they were going he’d be ready to blow.

Arwen Poole. Who’d’ve guessed it?

The girl who’d been raised in the back of a bar had turned into
an amazing example of Mother Nature’s best work. He remembered her from school, but that was more about her name and her widowed father than her appearance sticking with him all this time.

He’d listened for years to his mother bemoan the sorry conditions the girl lived in. Because instead of devoting her time to her family, Patricia Campbell had served on all sorts of boards of all manner of charities sworn to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves.

But the courts had never deemed Hoyt Poole an unfit parent. And Wallace Campbell had finally put his foot down. No more talk of the Pooles. If his wife was so gung-ho to be charitable, she could damn well begin her charity at home and get him another drink.

Dax had never understood why his father guzzling Glenlivet from the La-Z-Boy in his library was any different than Hoyt Poole downing Bud at the Buck Off Bar. Both men were drunks, making Dax and Arwen adult children of alcoholics.

And wouldn’t Oprah have a field day with that?

He shook off the memories and trailed Arwen through town, past the First National Bank, Nathan’s Food and Drug, the Municipal Plaza. The long squat building housed the city manager, the water district, the volunteer fire department, and the county sheriff’s substation—just as it always had.

To be fair, he hadn’t done much looking around, being tied up with work since setting foot back on the ranch. This was his first time to cruise the main strip. He’d yet to take a trip out to the mansion on the hill, the one where he’d spent his first eighteen years, the one where Patricia Campbell worked to save the world, where Wallace Campbell drank himself into a nightly stupor.

The one where Dax was no longer welcome.

He ditched his thoughts of the past as quickly as he could,
preferring to think of the immediate future as he followed Arwen onto a quiet side street and into a small, private, shell-and-gravel lot. They parked side by side in front of a six-foot cedar privacy fence that had him frowning.

Huh. What was she doing, bringing him to the Buck Off Bar’s rear entrance? He knew he hadn’t misread her intentions. Was she thinking he needed a few drinks to loosen him up? And, if so, was she kidding? He pocketed his keys, tugged his hat down low, leaned against the truck’s cab, and waited for her to join him.

But she didn’t join him. She circled his truck and kept on walking, her ass in those jeans making it really hard for him to wait for an answer as to why they were here. Then she tossed him an over-the-shoulder look full of good times, and he forgot the question. He pushed off his truck, headed for the gate she’d unlocked, and walked through.

The bar’s covered back patio, now scattered with picnic tables instead of rusty junk, sat on his left. Huge commercial ceiling fans stirred the heavy noonday air, but still the place was empty—a curiosity satisfied when he saw the evening hours for the outdoor service printed on the chalkboard listing the labels of imported beer.

Wondering when the Buck Off Bar had started selling more than Budweiser, he glanced to the right. A small frame house, its postcard-green yard ringed by beds of yellow flowers, sat on the other end of the lot. Baskets of ivy and fern hung from the front porch where a big orange tabby took him in from the pillows on the swing.

He gave the place another once-over. Cozy. Homey. Seriously out of place. Someone thought a whole lot more of Crow Hill than he ever had, planting flowers in a place where he’d never seen them grow.

“Mind telling me what we’re doing here?” The sun beating
down on the top of his head, he looked from the house on one end of the block, to the vacant patio on the other, back to Arwen where she stood in between.

She sighed the sigh of patient saints, shook her head, and turned for the bar. “If by
here
you mean why did I bring you home with me, then we must’ve crossed signals somewhere.”

Like the dog he was, he shadowed her steps. “Wait. I’m confused. You still live in the bar?”

“I never lived in the bar, Dax. And if you’ll look at the sign, you’ll see it’s now called the Hellcat Saloon.” She hopped up onto the patio and made a beeline for the covered ice chest in the corner. “I own it. And across the yard, that’s my house.”

The burgers she’d brought to the feed store. The sign on the side of her truck. The logo he’d noticed on her T-shirt when not looking at her tits. Seemed Arwen Poole was full of surprises.

“Want a beer?” she called to him, one hand holding open the top of the ice chest as she rummaged for two longnecks with the other.

“Sure.” Though first he had to regain the upper hand he’d held when they’d left Lasko’s because something about her had him seriously off his hell-raising game. He wanted to get into her pants and she wanted him there.

Yet here he was, thinking about her father bringing her with him to the bar so often the news reached Dax’s mother in the mansion on the hill.

“A beer would be great,” he said, coming up behind her as she closed the chest. He took the bottles from her hand and set them on the lid, trapping her against it with his body when she turned. “I could use a burger, too. It
is
lunchtime. And I
am
hungry.”

“You’re in luck then because burgers are our specialty.” Eyes downcast, she toyed with his denim shirt’s mother-of-pearl snaps. “We use local beef, and offer the standard pickles, lettuce, onions,
and tomatoes, along with your choice of cheese. Or you can go with grilled onions and mushrooms, fried onions and jalapenos, avocado slices and sprouts, or bacon and a fried egg. We also have a veggie burger that’s as good as it gets.”