Walk Away Joe (18 page)

 
The older Lambert made a show of lifting his hands in supplication. “Whatever you say, boy. I was just trying to help.”

 
With a look that said, “Yeah, sure you were,” Tucker turned his mount back to Tag and the workout. And Tag, as usual, was caught in the middle wanting to please the only man who had ever looked out for him, wanting to win the favor of the man who never had.

∙ ∙ ∙

The sun was setting low against a backdrop of rust-red sky and a parchment-paper horizon when Sara slipped outside. She needed some time to herself. She had some thinking to do. Thinking wasn’t something that came easy in the Lambert household these days.

The tension around the supper table was thicker than sludge. Tucker was stone-faced and silent. Les was talkative and full of fatherly wit and grandfatherly advice. Tag was caught somewhere between them. Sara knew he wanted to believe in his father, yet he couldn’t discount his brother’s resentment of the man. She hurt for both of them. But, mostly, she hurt for herself.

Les Lambert’s appearance at Blue Sky had served to lengthen the distance between her and Tucker. Before he’d come, they’d been walking a precarious wire between hanging on and letting go. Since he’d arrived, letting go seemed the only option. Tucker had closed himself off from her completely.

 
It wasn’t that she hadn’t known up front, she reminded herself. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t warned her he didn’t have anything to give a relationship. Relationship? She wrapped her arms around the adobe arch of the courtyard and sagged against it. There had never been a relationship. There had been tentative friendship and delicious sex. Now, there wasn’t even that.

 
“That’s an awful sad face for such a pretty little girl.”

 
Sara straightened slowly at the sound of Les Lambert’s voice. She turned to face him as he sauntered toward her.

 
“Just enjoying the sunset,” she lied.

 
He smiled. “Right. Just like my oldest son is enjoying my visit. I don’t understand that boy,” he said, walking up beside her. “I guess I understand why he doesn’t want me around, but I don’t understand why he’s taking it out on you.”

 
She didn’t want to talk to him about Tucker. In fact, she didn’t want to talk to him at all. She forced a tight smile and made to step around him. “I guess I’ll go in now. It’s been a long day.”

 
His hand on her arm stopped her. His grip was both imprisoning and familiar. Far too familiar, as he ran his thumb in a slow caress along her arm. “You don’t have to run from me, Sara. And you don’t have to put up with that silent treatment Tucker’s been dishing out. One thing I know how to do is make a lady forget her problems.”

 
Her eyes flashed to his. She didn’t want to believe what she’d just heard. When she saw the dark spark of sexual interest in his eyes, however, she knew she hadn’t misunderstood.

 
Revulsion and disgust rolled in her stomach. “Please let go of my arm.”

 
“Now, Sara,” he said soothingly, moving closer when she tried to pull away. “No need to be that way.”

 
“Get the hell away from her.”

 
Sara’s head snapped around at the sound of Tucker’s voice. The stark, unharnessed rage in his words split the air like a bullet as his tall dark form emerged from the shadows of the covered courtyard.

 
With a slow, deliberate show of good-natured acquiescence, Les released her arm and turned toward his son, a nasty smile tilting his mouth. “Just trying to spread a little goodwill, boy. ’Course, that’s something you wouldn’t know nothing about, would you?”

 
Tucker’s eyes darkened with a dangerousness that frightened Sara.

 
“Get off my ranch.”

 
“You know,” Les said, propping his fists on his hips, “I’ve just about lost my patience with you. There’s something you seem to have forgotten, boy. I’m your daddy. I deserve a little respect.”

 
“You deserve? You
deserve?”
Tucker repeated, in a tone that seethed with bitter cynicism. “What you deserve has nothing to do with respect.”

 
Lambert turned to Sara, his eyes full of mocking appeal. “Listen to him, would you? Mr. High-and-Mighty. Such a flawless, respectable example.” He was baiting Tucker now, his good-ol’-boy facade finally breaking. “I suppose you think you deserve better? Well, maybe we ought to ask your little brother what he thinks you deserve. He thinks the damn sun rises and sets on your miserable carcass.” Venom soured his words, making Sara cringe.

 
“Better yet, let’s ask little Sara what she thinks, eh, boy?” He turned blue eyes glittering with vindictiveness to Sara. “What do you think, Sara? Do you think a man who plays around with his boss’s wife deserves any more respect than a man who’s simply trying to lend a supporting shoulder to his son’s current lover?”

 
Tucker’s fist came out of nowhere. The crack of knuckle connecting with bone made a sickening sound in the still Texas night. Les Lambert slammed against the adobe arch, then sagged to the ground.

 
Shaking his head to clear it, Lambert spit blood, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s the matter boy? Don’t the tale set too well when the nasty little story’s about you?”

 
Sara watched, unable to move, as Tucker loomed over his father. Latching on to him with a two-fisted grab of his shirtfront, he dragged him to his feet.

 
“What’s it going to take to get you out of here?” he snarled between clenched teeth.

 
The older Lambert eyed his son with an ugly, victorious sneer. “I thought you’d never ask.

 
“I want Tag,” he said with hostile indifference, then smiled when he saw Tucker’s stunned expression. “I want to be a daddy to that boy.’ ’

 
Tucker snorted. “You no more want to be a father to Tag than you want to work for a dollar.”

 
“Guess that don’t really matter much, now does it?” Lambert replied with a superior lift of his chin. “Because the boy wants a daddy. And he wants it bad enough that it wouldn’t take much for me to convince him you were the one that kept us apart.”

 
He let that thought settle, then, seeing by the stricken look on Tucker’s face that he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do, landed the final blow. “’Course, I suspect we could work us out a deal, if you really didn’t want him to go.”

 
Sara couldn’t stand to see the pain on Tucker’s face. She closed her eyes. She’d never hurt for anyone so badly in her life. His father. His own father had been using Tag to get to him, all the time waiting for the chance to take best advantage.

 
Stone-faced and solemn, Tucker had no choice but to play into his hand. “What’s your price?”

 
“Can’t put a price on a father’s love for a son,” Lambert said, sensing triumph and turning the screws.

 
“Don’t push it, old man.”

 
Seeing that he’d pressed Tucker to the limit, Lambert shrugged in concession. “Twenty ought to do—for now,” he added with a greedy smile.

 
“You’re out of your mind. I haven’t got twenty grand.”

 
“Then get it,” he ordered bluntly.

 
In that moment, as Sara searched Tucker’s face, she sensed that something snapped inside him. He seemed to age before her eyes as years of hatred, three decades of regret, caught up with him, too heavy a burden to fight any longer.

 
With a hunted look in his eyes, he turned to her.

 
“Do you see now why I can’t have a future with you? Do you see the kind of cloth I’m cut from?

 
“Take a good look, Sara. Take a good look at my old man. People say I look just like him. People say I act just like him. He’s a user, Sara. Take a good look!” he demanded, his voice rising to a pitch of raw humiliation and utter defeat. “Take a good long look, and remember—like father, like son.”

 
Swallowing convulsively, he turned and faced his father head-on. “You’re not getting one red cent from me. But you are leaving. If Tag wants to go with you, he’s welcome to leave. Just make damn sure you’re gone within the hour.”

 
Then he turned and walked away.

 
“Don’t you walk away from me, boy! I’m not through with you! You owe me, dammit! You owe me for that pretty-boy face you’re so hot to show the ladies. You owe me for planting my seed in your mama and then marrying her when I’d just as soon walked away,” Lambert yelled after Tucker.

 
His face had turned red and mottled with anger, his once handsome features twisted into an ugly caricature of a man who didn’t know how to care.

 
Sara closed her eyes against the picture he made. Closed her eyes against the pain Tucker had to be feeling. A firm, determined voice had her opening them again.

 
“You heard my brother,” Tag said, stepping out of the shadows. His face was haggard with sad acceptance, but his young man’s eyes were hardened by an old man’s failures. He shoved Lambert’s beat-up duffel into his hand. “You’ll leave here with what you came with, no more.” Wiping a trail of blood from his swollen lip, Lambert straightened his shoulders and smirked at his youngest son. “Thought you had more sense than him.”

 
Tag looked at him long and hard. “And I thought you were something worth hanging on to.”

 
A world of hurt clung to each precisely uttered word as Tag gave his father one last, empty look, then turned and walked away.

 
Lambert stood there, recovering his wind, rebuilding his swagger. When he turned to Sara, it was with venom in his eyes and acid on his tongue. “Has Tucker told you about the time he worked for your daddy?”

 
He snorted with ugly delight when her expression told him she didn’t know what he was talking about.

 
“Ask him what happened,” he said, with a hostile pleasure that had her insides churning with dread. “If he won’t tell you about it, I’d bet the farm that your daddy’d be more’n happy to.”

 
With one last vindictive look, he squared his shoulders, walked to his pickup and drove away.

10

………

S
ARA FOUND TUCKER IN THE SHADOWS
of the barn. He’d stripped off his shirt and was pitching hay with an aggressiveness that had the horses nickering with restless uncertainty.

 
Pale alley light gilded the glistening planes of his bare back, defining muscle and sinew—and the tangible defeat that bowed his broad shoulders.

 
“He’s gone,” she said quietly.

 
He paused for a moment, then dug a little deeper into the pile and pitched a little faster. “Good. It’ll save me from knocking the crap out of him.”

 
“I think you’d have had to stand in line to do that.”

 
He wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow with the back of a gloved hand and angled a look at her.

 
“Tag must have heard it all,” she explained. “He gave him a less-than-gentle suggestion that he head for higher ground.”

 
The relief in Tucker’s eyes as he sucked in a deep breath, then turned back to the haystack, was a palpable thing. She knew then that she’d done the right thing in coming to him. Despite the unease churning in her belly over Les Lambert’s cryptic parting words, she’d had to let Tucker know he was gone. Tag had gone off to lick his own wounds. Lana would see to him. Tucker, as usual, was on his own.

 
And she was left wondering if she soon would be, too.

 
Tucker felt the fist that had been clenching in his gut ease up. He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d been afraid of losing Tag. Tag and Lana and little Cody were as important to him as breathing. He didn’t want to see them hurt. He didn’t want to see them leave. But he would have let them go, because he loved them.

 
He had to let Sara go for the same reason.

 
“You were right about him.”

 
Her words brought his head up.

 
“You were right about him,” she repeated, when he remained silent. “But you were wrong about something else. You’re nothing like him, Tucker. Nothing like him.” Gripping the pitchfork with both hands, he stuck the tines into the soft earth of the alley and closed his eyes.

 
“I didn’t come out here to confront you,” she said, moving up beside him, the resolve in her voice tinged with a reluctance she couldn’t hide. “I came out here to ease your mind. But this can’t wait any longer, can it?”

 
A long, tension-filled moment passed.

 
“What’s happening with us, Tucker?”

 
The soft, searching look in her eyes was a grim reminder that he had to make her see he couldn’t be a factor in her life.

 
“What’s happening is that you need to let it go, Sara. Let it go,” he repeated, letting a weary acceptance take over.

 
She approached him as a shy mare would approach an untested hand. “Because you’ve convinced yourself you aren’t worth holding on to? Because you’re so certain you’re just like him?”

 
For the longest time, he didn’t say anything. For the longest time, he couldn’t. He just stood there, a muscle working in his jaw as he thought of his father, and his father’s blood, running through his veins.

 
“Because all my life, I’ve known what a user he was. I’ve seen the effect he has on women. I saw it feed his ego. I saw it break my mother. And I see in your eyes that I have the power to do the same to you. I don’t want the responsibility. I don’t want to end up using you.”