Can't Buy Me Love (3 page)

“And that I gotta see,” he said.

Relief that she didn’t have to be strong fizzed through her body like cheap, too-sweet champagne.

Luc picked up his phone. “But first we need to find out everything we can about this Tara Jean woman. You still have the number for that private investigator?”

The purpose in Luc filled her, too, and she shoved off the stool to go find her purse and Gary Thiele’s card. When the lawsuits started rolling in after Joel’s suicide, she’d hired a P.I. to weed out the fraudulent ones.

She handed the worn card to her brother, who grabbed her cold fingers in his warm palm.

His dark eyes, so like their father’s, were warm with affection and pity, a combination she hated but had grown used to. “We’ll get you your inheritance, Vicks. I promise.”

Thank God
.

Tara Jean Sweet
was driven by a demon. A white-trash demon standing in twelve-dollar stilettos.

Shorter!
the demon screamed, and Tara flipped her pencil and erased the hem on the sketch, redrawing it a few millimeters higher.

More pink. Pinker
.

And fringe! Lots of fringe
.

Oh
, the demon cooed, sucking on a Virginia Slim … 
bedazzle it
.

“Come on, really?” Tara muttered, staring down at the sketch of the last skirt for Baker Leather’s fall line. It was short, pink, and fringed. What’s more—

I said bedazzle it!

“Fine,” she muttered, amending the sketch and making notes in the corresponding notebook.

The demon, for all her faults, knew what the leather-wearing woman wanted, down to a very uncomfortable line of thongs.

As muses went, the demon was a bitch. But she was never wrong.

Tara spread out the sketches, the short skirts, the tight pants, the bustiers and feminine biker jackets. Boots and shoes. Belts and earrings. Purses. Bags. Fifty new products for the five hundred Baker Leather stores in Texas and Oklahoma.

They looked good. The demon earned her spot in Tara Jean’s head.

She took a handful of Mike and Ikes, picking out the yellows because yellow washed her out and she’d been taking the yellows out for over twenty years. One by one, she popped the rest in her mouth.

From the bottom drawer of her two-drawer filing cabinet, she pulled out three thick files and sorted through the sketches from the last three years, deciding which ones would be brought back for the fall line. She decided on the black duster with the red feather trim. Popular on Halloween. She also kept the suede mittens with the fur lining and matching hat—a perennial favorite. The blouse with the pretty heart cutouts on the collar. She imagined librarians who thought themselves edgy bought that one.

Her demon nodded in agreement.

The last sketch was an old one, three years according to the date stamp on the back. The paper was faded, the brown rim of an old coffee-cup stain on the top corner. Her first design. The one that had turned her life and Baker Leather all the way around.

The pink calfskin cowboy boot with the tooled leather, one-and-a-half-inch heel, and delicate metal toe.

She shook out the box of Mike and Ikes but there was nothing but yellow. So ugly, she thought, but she ate them anyway.

In three months, at the end of July, she had a meeting with the Region Four Nordstrom buyer about possibly getting her boots in Nordstrom all across the southeastern United States.

It would be … Tara blinked, trying to find a word for it. She hadn’t grown up with dreams of designing. She was utterly unmoved by pink cowboy boots.

But the money … that she had dreamed of. Growing up in a trailer on the far side of Nowhere, Arkansas,
she’d dreamed of money like it was Prince Charming coming to save her from the cigarette stink and beer-stained filth she’d been born in.

It was simple. The Nordstrom deal meant freedom. She’d sold her soul to cement it; now she just had to deliver.

Ya welcome
, the demon cackled.

“Thanks, Momma,” Tara whispered. The demon was a mixed blessing, here to help after a lifetime of neglecting Tara when she needed her mother the most.

She chose to ignore the deeply psychotic nature of it all.

Tara sighed and stretched, rolling her neck, staring up through the glass panels of the renovated greenhouse that she used as an office and studio. The bone-white moon was high and full in the cloudless sky. The small pool of light from the desk lamp threw deep shadows in the glass house and the moonlight made it all somehow spookier.

She was here way later than she liked to be. Night on the ranch was creepy. All that sky. The empty space. It wasn’t natural. It seemed as though all her secrets and ghosts waited for her under that moon.

Lyle insisted that she work from the ranch—it’s how it had always been. Since the turn of the century, when Lyle’s great-grandfather started making chaps and boots and selling them from the stables to every cowboy and rustler within a hundred miles.

Lyle’s granddaddy had bought Crooked Creek and since then, the land and the leather had gone hand in hand.

By the time Lyle’s daddy died, Baker stores were all over the Southwest. Their leather was being worn by teenagers, homemakers, even a few state politicians.

But when it fell into Lyle’s negligent hands, the stores and the brand started to nose-dive. He cared more about
raising registered Angus cattle than he did about selling their pink-dyed hides. But when Baker Leather was about to go bankrupt, he woke up to what he’d done to the family legacy.

Five years ago, hat in hand, Lyle went to his son, the successful hockey player, and asked him to get his photo taken while wearing a pair of Baker boots. Luc had refused. And while there was no medical proof, Tara believed that was the beginning of the end for Lyle’s health. A year later, he was admitted to the hospital after a series of strokes.

Lucky for all of them that she stumbled into his hospital room when she did.

Tara filed the drawings and locked the beat-up metal cabinet. Tomorrow would be an early day—Edna and Joyce were showing up at dawn to start making samples of the designs.

The demon loved that.

Uppity bitches
, the demon scowled, running pink fingernails through the black roots of her long blond hair. Edna disapproved of how short the skirts were.

Tara clicked off the light and the black-and-white topography of her office threw her off, damaged her depth perception. The headless tailor dummies seemed to shift in the shadows, as if they were coming for her, and she felt her heart beat hard in the back of her throat.

It’s not him
, she told herself, earning herself some credit in the freak-out department.

But someday she knew he would find her. And he would come for his pound of flesh.

Until then, however, it was just the moon, a couple of tailor dummies, and her own imagination.

She pulled on the tight purple suede boots with the black heel that went with the matching knee-length purple skirt she wore. The more demure of last year’s line.

You look like a librarian
, the demon whispered.

A beloved two inches taller, she hustled out of the office, locking the door behind her. Which was more than stupid considering the glass walls, but old habits died hard. The gravel of the path from the greenhouse to the parking area crunched beneath her feet and she hummed under her breath to fill the roaring silence.

So many animals out there. So many miles of nothing. Funny how nothing but flat land and a big starry sky could feel so damn suffocating.

She walked around the yellow blocks of light thrown through the kitchen windows of the big house, keeping to the dark shadows, hoping Ruby or, worse, Eli wouldn’t see her. She just wanted to go home tonight. Sleep in her own bed, drink her own coffee in preparation for her long day tomorrow. Was that too much to ask?

She dug through her deep purple hobo bag for her keys, feeling the guilty thrill that she might just make it off the compound without being noticed.

In the bottom of the bag she found ten pencils, an empty pack of gum. Two fuzzy Swedish fish.

“There you are,” she murmured, pulling out the necklace with the pretty key charm and the broken clasp she thought she’d lost.

Stupid big purses, it was too easy to lose everything.

Including her keys. Every damn day.

Ah ha! She wrestled them from the small pocket in front and glanced up.

Only to see a man waiting in the shadows by her car. Her heart thundered in her chest, trying to break free from her ribs.

It’s him
.

Fear paralyzed her.

“It’s only me, Tara,” a thick, deep voice said, and Eli stepped into the light, his face still hidden by the brim of his ever-present hat.

“Christ, Eli,” she panted, relief making her woozy. “You scared the shit outta me.”

“That’s what happens when you try to sneak off.”

“Come on, Eli, we both know they’re not coming.”

“We don’t know that—”

“It’s been nine days and we haven’t heard anything!”

Eli tipped up his hat and rested his long, lean frame against the car. “You agreed, Tara Jean,” he said, his voice a low, slow lick. What he meant, of course, was “he bought you, Tara,” but Eli was a gentleman and wouldn’t say such a thing.

Guilt shimmied in her stomach.

“Fine.” She threw her keys back into her bag. “But you get off on this jailer thing. I know you do, Eli.”

His chuckle warmed the night.

They turned and walked up the gravel path to the stone steps of the big house. Built from oak and stone, the heart of the big house was the same one that Great-Granddaddy Baker had bought with money from making all those chaps. But the generations had added to the home, until it was seven thousand square feet of “holy hell.”

A wraparound verandah, a sleeping porch, turrets, two two-story wings, a glass portico; it was like an architectural death match, and both architects had died.

The demon loved it.

So classy
, she sighed.

“He’s going to die all by himself, isn’t he?”

Eli, who over the last few years had become the totally secretive, silent ninja cowboy brother she never knew she wanted, just shrugged. Like it didn’t matter.

But she hated that. Lyle Baker was a son of a bitch in every sense of the word and probably a few that she wasn’t entirely aware of, but death wasn’t something anyone should meet by himself.

“He’s got us,” Eli said. Tara Jean’s smile hurt with bitterness.

Eli might just be a saint, for all she knew about the man. But she was a lying con-artist thief of wholly questionable roots who had sold herself and her vacant smiles to Lyle Baker in exchange for financial freedom.

Surely he deserved better than that.

“Do you know his kids?” she asked. “The ex-wife?”

All she knew was that in the four years she’d been in Lyle’s life, his family had never visited. Never written or called. Except for that disastrous meeting with Luc in Dallas that she’d only heard about from Ruby, the live-in housekeeper and gossip, there hadn’t even been a clue they existed.

He nodded, his square jaw rigid. Eli’s father had been foreman before him and Eli grew up on Crooked Creek.

She sighed and stopped on the top step. “Eli, do we really have to go through the process of me dragging your opinion out of you, or can you just tell me what you think?”

“Celeste is beautiful and I think she might have loved Lyle, but he took care of that.”

Tara nodded. Five minutes in the old man’s company and it was easy to see what he might do to someone who loved him. “The kids?” she asked, fearing the worst.

Eli opened the door, lamplight spilling across his hard face.

“Eli?”

“Mean,” he said.

“That’s it? Mean?”

“And spoiled.”

“Spoiled, like how? Like me?”

“No one is spoiled like you.” His lip twisted and it might have been a smile. Or gas. Hard to say with Eli.

“Eli—”

He blinked, something dark and different in his eyes, but then it passed. Vanished.

And he kept his mouth shut. Which was just the sort of thing that Eli did. All the time.

“That doesn’t bode well for them showing up here,” she said, feeling bad for Lyle, for all of them wrapped up in this crazy scheme.

He shrugged. “There’s a lot of money at stake and people will do just about anything for money.”

She felt his eyes on her and she forced herself to meet them, daring him to ask her, or better, to tell her what he knew about her. And not just the engagement—hell, that was a legitimate business deal compared to Tara’s past.

Say it
, something in her cried, raged actually. A deep well of fury that just got bigger and bigger, right there in the middle of who she was between her sugar tooth and naturally perky boobs.
Just say it
.

But as always, Eli was silent.

Tara brushed past him into the big house with its marble-eyed hunting trophies and cowhide rugs. It was like a Western-theme bar had barfed all over the place.