Amanda (32 page)

“Why not?”

She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked at him gravely. “Unless You’ve told him, Jesse doesn’t know about us yet. I’d rather he didn’t find out by me not showing up for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“Somebody’s bound to tell him,” Walker said.

“I know. But I’d rather it was me.”

He nodded finally, accepting.

“it’s getting late.” Amanda sat up with obvious reluctance, and reached for her clothing.

Walker followed suit, but said seriously, “Tell Jesse soon, will you?”

“I will.”

After they were dressed, Walker said he intended to walk her back to Glory, and they set out together. The thirsty ground had soaked up the rain greedily, leaving only damp earth rather than mud, so they had no trouble on the path, and since the rain had dropped the temperature considerably, the stroll back was cool and pleasant.

The path ended in front of and to one side of the house at the edge of the yard, and when they reached that point they had a clear view of the garage. Jesse’s Cadillac was home.

“I’ll come in with you,” Walker said.

She looked up at him, a little amused. “Why? To explain why my blouse is missing a button?”

He was momentarily distracted. “Is it? Did I do that again?”

“It is, and you did.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “And I can handle Jesse alone, thank you very much.”

“Amanda—”

“Good night, Walker.”

He watched her crossing the damp grass of the yard toward the house, and it took a surprising effort of will to keep from either calling her back or else going after her. He didn’t know if it was because something remarkable had taken place between them in the gazebo or simply because odd things were happening at Glory and that made him apprehensive, but for whatever reason, he didn’t like the idea of her going into that house without him.

Not a bit.

“Amanda?”

She went into his study to find Jesse working at his desk, despite the late hour and his extremely long and
no doubt exhausting day. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?” she asked, gesturing to the paperwork he was engaged in. “it’s after nine, Jesse.”

“I know what time it is.” He was looking at her, unusually grim. “I got home over an hour ago. Where have you been?”

“With Walker,” Amanda replied without hesitation, certain that someone had already told him—since outrage was written all over his face—about Walker’s very public display of passion this morning.

For a moment, Jesse didn’t say anything at all. He just stared at Amanda, perhaps waiting for her to blink or stutter nervously or cower in guilty dismay. If so, he waited in vain. Amanda merely stood there, relaxed, meeting his gaze with a little smile.

Finally, Jesse said, “Am I to understand that you and Walker are …”

“The phrase,” Amanda supplied helpfully, “is ‘consenting adults.’ And we are.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Not long.”

“And I suppose you don’t give two hoots about my opinion?”

Amanda shook her head. “I care very much about your opinion, Jesse. But I’m a grown woman, and when it comes to my sex life, I make my own decisions.”

More irritable than outraged now, Jesse said, “you’ll only threaten to leave again if I protest, won’t you?”

Her smile widened. “It is a handy bit of leverage, I admit. But I don’t know why you’d protest anyway. You trust Walker to handle all your legal affairs, and he’s as welcome in this house as one of the family—so why not trust him with your granddaughter?”

“Are you going to marry him?”

“Jesse, I have trouble making up my mind what to wear every morning; big decisions generally take me a
long
time. Getting involved with Walker just sort of happened, and I’m not really thinking very much about it.”

After a long moment, Jesse almost visibly turned from an affronted grandfather to a pathetic one. “I’d like to see you settled before I go,” he said.

Unimpressed by that piteous declaration, Amanda put her hands on the desk and leaned toward him. “If,” she said, “you say one word to Walker about him marrying me, or even hint at the subject, I
will
leave. So fast it’ll make your head spin. Stay out of it, Jesse.”

Frustrated, the old man snapped, “Hussy!”

She straightened again and smiled. “I’m a Daulton, remember? We manage our own affairs.”

After scowling a moment longer, Jesse finally barked out a laugh. “All right, all right, I’ll keep my nose out of it. What’s this I hear about the dogs missing?”

Amanda wasn’t surprised that he mentioned the dogs before Victor’s death. Jesse’s priorities, though peculiar, were at least consistent; his personal property was generally uppermost in his mind.

“Haven’t seen a sign of them all day,” she replied, sitting down in one of the chairs in front of the desk. “Maggie, Kate, and I looked, but couldn’t find them. We tried the whistles, walked all over—nothing. Do you think someone could have stolen them?”

“Not likely. And they wouldn’t have taken food from anyone, or eaten anything they found, so poison’s out.”

Amanda hadn’t considered that lethal possibility, and it made her acutely unhappy to contemplate it now. “Then where could they be?”

“I don’t know. We’ll organize a more thorough search in the morning. For tonight—and just in case it was some lowlife’s bright idea to get rid of the dogs to make the house vulnerable to a break-in—I’ve asked J.T. to send a couple of his boys over to keep an eye on the place.”

Amanda nodded. She couldn’t help feeling that theft had not been the point if the dogs had indeed been deliberately removed, but the only other reason that came to her mind was so unnerving she hadn’t let herself think about it until now.

After the seemingly accidental poisoning at the party, she had believed that anyone who
might
have tried to poison her must have been dissuaded after Jesse announced he wouldn’t, after all, change his will. But what if that someone had been unwilling to gamble on the chances of the old man again changing his mind? What if that someone had only waited a bit to avoid the suspicious circumstance of another misfortune striking Amanda so soon after the party?

Most everyone had remarked on the fact that the dogs seldom left her side, and no one could doubt that they would have protected her from any threat. So— the first step in arranging another “accident” to befall Amanda would have been to get the dogs out of the way.

“Amanda?”

She blinked and looked across the desk at Jesse. “Oh—sorry. I must be more tired than I thought. What did you say?”

“I asked if you got the chance to talk to Victor before he was killed.”

Amanda blinked again. “Talk to him?”

A bit impatient, Jesse said, “After he’d gone on the buying trip, Maggie mentioned that you’d wanted to talk to him about the way things had been twenty
years ago, since he was here then. I just wondered if you got the chance.”

“No. No, I never did.” She hesitated, but then asked as casually as possible, “Did Maggie tell anyone else I wanted to talk to Victor?”

Jesse had returned his attention to one of the papers spread out on his blotter, and replied abstractedly. “What? Oh, we were all there, honey. It was in the front parlor one night, after you’d excused yourself early.”

Staring at his intent face, Amanda wondered for the first time if it was possible that the threat she posed to someone who wanted Glory might not be nearly as dangerous as the threat she posed to someone who wanted whatever had happened twenty years ago to remain locked in the past.

But what was it?
What had happened?

And who could be threatened, now, by exposure? Reece and Sully had been boys, so it seemed unlikely they had been involved. Not impossible, Amanda supposed, but surely unlikely. Kate had been barely twenty—and what could a young woman have been involved in that required deaths twenty years later to keep the secret hidden?

Jesse? Maggie? Both were old enough; they’d been adults twenty years ago. But could Jesse possibly want to harm the granddaughter he so obviously—and genuinely, Amanda believed—adored? And could there possibly be such violence in Maggie’s brisk and practical nature?

Or was it someone not a part of Glory at all, someone whose connection to the still-unknown events of that last night was so elusive Amanda had not yet discovered it? And might never now, since Victor had been killed.

Dammit, what happened that night?

“It was terrible about Victor,” she heard herself say.

“He was careless, Amanda,” Jesse responded in a hard tone. “No excuse for that.”

She looked into those dynamic tarnished-silver eyes and felt an uneasy little chill. On the other hand … maybe Jesse was ruthless enough to destroy what he loved in order to protect something he valued more. But what? To a dying man, what could be so important?

“You do look tired, honey.” He was smiling. “Why don’t you go on up to bed?”

“You should too,” she murmured.

“I will. In a little while. Good night, Amanda.”

Amanda got up slowly. “Good night, Jesse.” She left his study and made her way upstairs. She met no one along the way, so she didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t have to paste a smile on her face and act as if God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Didn’t have to make believe it wasn’t true that for the first time since coming to Glory, she was deeply afraid.

Pulling up her horse, Leslie Kidd said to Sully, “We’ve covered miles with no sign of them. Do you really believe the dogs would have gone all the way out here?”

Halting his own horse, Sully passed a hand down Beau’s glossy black neck and then shook his head. “No. Not unless somebody brought them this far.”

“Somebody?” Relaxed in the saddle as only an expert rider could be, Leslie regarded him thoughtfully.

They were on one of the trails that crisscrossed Glory, this one at the extreme end of the valley to the north, and they were, in fact, some miles from the
house and grounds. It was Saturday morning, and most everybody at Glory was engaged in the search for the missing dogs, either on foot or on horseback.

All the search teams on horseback were paired, and Sully had assigned Leslie to be his partner even though he usually rode alone. However, if Leslie had expected conversation from Sully during the outing, casual or otherwise, she had been disappointed. He’d hardly said a word.

Asked two direct questions, Sully looked at her, frowning. “What I said was clear enough, wasn’t it? The dogs wouldn’t be out this far unless somebody had brought them.”

Leslie smiled. In her unusually gentle voice, she said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have an extremely short fuse?”

To his complete astonishment, Sully felt a tide of heat creep up his face. “Did I snap at you? Sorry.”

“You snapped—not necessarily at me. The dogs being gone has you worried, doesn’t it?”

Again, Sully felt surprise. He knew all too well that he had as much chance of hiding his emotions as the sun had of hiding in a clear afternoon sky, but it was rare that anyone could so exactly pinpoint the cause of his unease. He looked at her ordinary face with its remarkable eyes, and heard himself giving an answer he’d had no intention of giving.

“I don’t like it, no. Guard dogs don’t wander off to chase rabbits.”

“Then somebody got them? Took them off somewhere, maybe to sell, because they’re valuable?”

“Guard dogs don’t let themselves be taken. It’s part of their training. They’re also registered and have their numbers tattooed inside their ears, so no reputable buyer would touch them without transfer-of-owner-ship papers.”

After a moment, Leslie said, “You don’t expect to find them alive, do you?”

“No.”

When he urged his horse on after that flat denial, Leslie guided her own horse to follow. But her thoughtful gaze remained fixed for a long time on Sully’s broad, powerful back.

The search for the dogs continued most of the day Saturday, but by afternoon it seemed obvious the animals had vanished without a trace. Jesse was more angry than upset about it, and talked about ordering another pair of dogs on Monday—as if they were a pair of shoes or some other inanimate objects to be sent for because the old ones had been mislaid.

That cavalier attitude disturbed Amanda, particularly since she had felt affection for the silent animals and since they had given her a sense of safety she had not fully appreciated until they were gone. But she said nothing about it.

Walker had come over late that morning, ostensibly to help with the search, although he told Amanda it was really curiosity that brought him; he’d wondered how Jesse would greet him.

“And how did he?” Amanda asked.

“Characteristically. He said if I hurt you he’d have me tarred and feathered, and then hanged.”

Amanda smiled. “Well, at least now you know the potential price of sleeping with the boss’s granddaughter.”

“I knew that before he told me.” Without explaining that abrupt statement, Walker added in a lighter tone, “I told him I intended to take you back to King High with me for supper—and the rest of the weekend.”

She eyed him with amusement. “A little highhanded, aren’t you?”

“Always.” He put his hands on her shoulders and drew her against him, and kissed her.

They were standing together in the foyer near the foot of the stairs, having just left the front parlor, where a critical evaluation of their search methods was being offered by Jesse to the others, and Walker didn’t seem to care that anyone might have walked out of the parlor and observed them.

Not, Amanda thought dimly, that she cared, either.

“Come with me, Amanda,” he murmured, cupping her face in his hands now and looking down at her. “I want to wake up tomorrow morning and see you in my bed.”

“Let me go change,” she said, giving in without argument and barely stopping herself from inviting him up to her bedroom.

She told herself that she went with him only because she needed to get away from Glory, but even though that was partly true, she couldn’t pretend even to herself that it was entirely true. The truth was that she wanted to be with Walker, especially now that there was so much to think about, so many things to consider.