Cassidy Harte and the Comeback Kid (7 page)

She didn't give him a chance to explain. “I find it unbelievably arrogant that you think you can blow back into town like nothing happened and start ordering me around,” she snapped.

“I don't think that.”

“Don't you?”

“No!”

“Let's see.” She ticked off his shortcomings on her fingers. “In the thirty-six hours since you showed up again, you have blackmailed me to keep me from quitting my job, you have once more dredged up old, painful gossip about me all over town and you have commanded me not to go out with a man I've known most of my life. Seems to me you're working pretty hard to control me.”

Put so bluntly, he could understand why she would be more than a little annoyed with him. Maybe he
had
been a little heavy-handed since he'd seen her. What other choice did he have, though?

“I didn't come to fight with you, Cass. We need to talk. I'd like to clear the air between us.”

“I really don't think that's possible.” Her voice was small and maybe a little sad, which gave him some hope.

“Will you let me at least try?”

She remained silent, which he took as assent. Where
to start? he wondered, gazing out at the mountains. At the crux of the matter, he figured.

“I didn't leave town with Melanie.”

She froze, stopping the swing's motion mid-rhythm. “We went over this earlier. I don't want to hear it again.”

She started to rise but he held a hand out to keep her in place, brushing the denim of her jeans as his hand covered her leg. She jerked away from his touch but stayed in the swing beside him, which he took as a good sign.

“Please. Listen to me. I know you're going to find this an amazing coincidence—hell, I have a hard time believing it myself—but I left alone. I swear it.”

“So how did Melanie leave town? Teleportation?” A thin shear of skepticism coated her voice. “Her car was left in the parking lot of the Renegade. She was last seen climbing into your pickup truck, then the two of you were observed going at it inside the cab like a couple of minks. Are you saying everybody else who saw you two drive off together was lying?”

“No. They weren't lying. We did drive off together.”

She made a
hmmph
kind of sound and folded her arms across her chest. He sighed. This was going to be much harder than he expected.

“You know what Melanie was like. She was wild. Out of control. That night she was drinking like a sailor with a three-day pass and throwing herself at anybody in sight. I offered to give her a ride home because I knew she was too drunk to be safe behind the wheel of a car. When she climbed into my truck, she attacked me.”

“Oh, you poor helpless man. I'm sure that was just terrible for you.”

“It was, dammit! I couldn't stand her. I was engaged to marry the woman I loved and didn't want to have anything to do with someone like Melanie Harte.”

Cassie remained stubbornly silent, her arms folded tightly, and he knew with grim certainty that she didn't believe a word he was saying.

“She kissed me,” he tried again. “Started grabbing me as soon as she climbed into the truck. I told her to stop. I thought she was going to behave herself but as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot, she started all over again. Eventually I told her I would just leave her on the side of the road if she didn't cut it out. She laughed and said I wouldn't dare, that if I did, she would tell you I put the moves on her.”

His memory of this was hazy because of what had happened later that night but he tried his best to reconstruct it. “I laughed at her. I told her you'd never believe it. She was crazy that night, though, and wouldn't stop. About the third or fourth time she tried to grab my crotch, I pulled over just outside the city limits, yanked her out of the truck and drove away, to hell with being a gentleman. That's the last time I ever saw her. I swear.”

She didn't answer for several moments. When she spoke, her voice was subdued. “And somehow in the middle of all that, you just decided to keep on driving, right? Tell me, Zack. When did you decide you weren't really in love with me? When did you realize you couldn't stomach the idea of being married to me and decided running was a better option?”

Was that what she thought all these years?
Of
course,
he answered his own question, his heart aching. What else could she have thought?

“It wasn't like that, Cass,” he murmured, wondering how much to tell her about the other events that had unfolded that night. Ten years later it all sounded so inconceivable, even to him.

Who would she be more willing to believe the worst about? People she has known and cared about all her life or the man she had spent years believing had betrayed her in the worst way possible?

He didn't want to make her have to choose. Truth was, he was afraid where he would stack up. But he had to give her some kind of explanation. If he didn't, the past would remain an insurmountable wall between them and she would never let him through.

“After I dropped Melanie off, I drove back to the Diamond Harte, then started to feel a little guilty about dumping her out like that in the middle of nowhere. Once I cooled off, I realized I couldn't leave her alone in the dark to find her own way home. I imagined her falling into the river or something else terrible happening to her, so I turned around to go look for her.”

“And did you find her?”

“No. I just figured somebody else must have given her a ride. But while I was looking for her, I stumbled onto something else. Something illegal.”

“What?” She sounded every bit as skeptical as he expected.

“When I didn't find her on the main road, I thought she might have wandered off in the wrong direction so I decided to look along this gravel road near where I dropped her off. I was feeling pretty guilty by then, when I saw a little puddle-jumper Cessna landing in a field a mile or so down the road. I figured they must
have had to make some kind of emergency landing so I went to investigate.”

“And?”

“It wasn't an emergency. It was a planned drop site. The plane was delivering a large shipment of cocaine. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and stumbled on a crew transferring it from the Cessna to a truck.”

She was silent for a moment then she began to laugh, low and rich and full of disbelief. “Okay. You might have had me going there for a moment but this is too much. What kind of idiot do you take me for? This is Star Valley, Slater. I'll admit, I'm not naive enough to think we don't have any illegal narcotic use in the valley but certainly not enough to make it some drug smuggling hub.”

“Maybe not here. But I imagine there are plenty of tourists and movie stars just over the mountains in Jackson Hole who wouldn't care how their drugs arrived as long as they had a ready supply.”

“Assuming I believe you—which I don't—it still doesn't explain why you just decided to take off. Why not go to the police? Someone would have helped you.”

Oh, yeah. Salt River's finest would have helped him, all right. Helped him right into a five-to-life prison sentence for drug smuggling. He doubted Cassie would believe the depth of corruption in the small-town police department. Hell, he still had a hard time believing it and he had witnessed it firsthand.

Trying to figure out the best way to answer, he gazed out at that sliver of moonlight on gravel and the shadows beyond.

She wasn't ready for the whole truth, he thought, so
he slipped her something a little more palatable. “Back then I didn't trust a man in uniform the way you did. Call it cynicism or whatever you want. I suppose I could have gone to someone, but I really didn't think anyone would believe me.”

“Why not?”

“I knew what people said about me. What everybody in town was saying. That I was some kind of gold digger after your share of the ranch.”

“Nobody really thought that.”

He studied his fist resting on the armrest of the swing, not willing to shatter that last illusion of hers. She had been a sweet, loyal eighteen-year-old girl in love who hadn't wanted to see what everyone was saying behind her back.

He suddenly missed that girl fiercely.

“Maybe not. Maybe that's only how I interpreted things. Like I said, I guess I was too cynical. I thought I would end up in jail if I came forward. That I would take the fall.”

Not that such a conclusion had just sprung into his head out of the blue. After he'd been beaten so badly he could hardly move by four masked police officers wielding billy clubs and pistol butts, he'd been given the message loud and clear. Leave town or go to prison for drug smuggling.

What else could he have done?

“So you decided it would be easier to just leave, to hell with me and all our plans.” Her voice was low, bitter, and ripped through his heart like a ricocheting bullet.

“Either way you would have despised me, whether I walked out or whether I stayed and ended up in jail.
I figured leaving would be the best thing I could ever do for you.”

“How thoughtful of you.”

This time her bitterness made him wince. “Cassie—”

“Let me ask you one question. Why on earth would you want to marry a woman you thought so little of?”

“I thought the world of you! I loved you!”

She was the one shining light in a life that had been gray and colorless before their paths collided.

“You couldn't have loved me. You didn't even know the first thing about me.”

“Sure I did.”

“If what you say is true—if you really did stumble onto some drug ring and were afraid of taking the fall for it—you should have known that you didn't have to run. I would have stood by you, no matter what happened. No matter what anybody said about you.”

He tried to see her expression in the dim porch but her face was just a pale blur in the moonlight. “I thought I did the right thing. I didn't want you to have to endure the shame of having your fiancé arrested the week before the wedding.”

“What do you think would have been worse for me?” Her voice was just barely audible above the sighing wind. “The shame of you being arrested on some trumped-up charge that any good lawyer could have beaten? Or the shame I've lived with for ten years, of believing you preferred my brother's wife to me?”

Aw, hell. He closed his eyes against the pain lodging thick and heavy in his chest.

“If I'd had any idea everyone thought I jilted you to run off with Melanie, I would have come back and
faced any consequence. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that.”

“And that's supposed to mean something to me now, after all this time?”

“I don't know. I hope so.”

She rose from the rocking chair and stood over him, a slender shadow in the night. “You still left, Zack. Whether you left with Melanie or not. You still left without a note or a phone call or anything. You owed me that much, at least.”

She was right. He had wanted to call her a thousand times that first year but had always stopped before dialing the number. A clean break would be best for her, he had rationalized. She would move on with her life and forget about him.

Find someone better.

It sounded good in the abstract. Noble and selfless, even. But he had faced some fairly ugly truths about himself a long time ago. He hadn't refrained from making contact with her out of some high-minded desire for her to heal. He'd been a coward. Pure and simple. Afraid that the moment he heard her soft voice, he would turn around and head back to the Diamond Harte like a compass finding north.

“I'm tired, Zack,” she finally said into the silence. “As I told you, it's been a long, hard day.”

She moved past him for the door, and he felt his last chance with her slipping through his fingers. He stood and reached out to grab on to something—anything—and found the soft, bare skin of her forearm.

“I'm sorry I hurt you, Cass,” he murmured. “I never wanted to do that. I thought I was protecting you.”

Now that they were face-to-face, he could see the
fatigue on her face, the purplish circles under her eyes. He wanted to smooth a hand over that tousled cap of hair. To hold her on his lap and tuck her head close to his chest and listen to her breathe against him while she slept.

His gaze locked with hers, and he realized some of what he was feeling must have shown in his expression. Her mouth opened just a little, and a breathy little sound escaped.

He could no more keep from bending toward that mouth than he could yank the moon from the sky.

If he'd been thinking at all, he would have expected her to jerk away when his mouth met hers. Knowing Cassie, he might have expected at least a slap or a knee to the groin. Heaven knows, he deserved all that and more.

She didn't lash out at him, though. Instead she whispered another of those little sighs and her lips softened under his.

He kept the kiss gentle. Slow and tender. Nonthreatening. A shadowy remembrance of other kisses.

She leaned into him just for a moment—just enough for his blood to begin singing and his body stir to life—and then she wrenched away from him so abruptly her elbow caught the door frame with a hard whack.

S
he wasn't sure exactly when awareness slipped over her like a chilling mist.

One moment she wanted to weep from the tenderness of his kiss, from the unbelievable wonder of being in his arms once more. Of tasting his lips and feeling his skin and absorbing the taste and smell of him that had haunted her dreams for so long after he left.

The next, her spine stiffened, her muscles tensed, and she wrenched away. The impact of her elbow hitting wood jarred her completely back into reality.

Damn him for kissing her like that.

And damn her right along with him for allowing it.

“Don't touch me again.” She meant to sound strong and determined, but she heard the quaver in her voice and cursed herself for her weakness.

“Cassie —”

“I'm serious, Slater. You want me to stay and work here, fine. I'll stay. We made a deal, and I, for one,
always try to keep my word. But I don't want you near me.”

She didn't wait for him to answer, just opened the door to the cabin and hurried inside before she did anything else stupid. Inside she slammed the door and stood for a moment, then slumped to the floor, one trembling hand covering her mouth that still burned from his kiss.

She felt stunned, immobilized by shock. As if every illusion she had ever had about herself had just disintegrated into a fine, chalky dust.

What just happened here?

Had she really just let Zack Slater kiss her? Not just let him, she corrected herself with dawning horror. She had been a willing participant, had wanted to dissolve in his arms like sugar in warm water.

She closed her eyes, remembering the heat of his mouth, the strength of his arms around her. The overwhelming sense of rightness, of belonging, that had seeped through her skin—through her bones—like spring sunshine.

As if she were home again after a long and treacherous journey.

What the bloody blazes had come over her? She blew out a shuddering breath. There was nothing
right
about kissing Zack Slater. It was wrong in every single definition of the word.

Her hands trembled as she pressed them over her face. Where was her pride? Her self-respect? Her sense of self-preservation, at least?

She meant what she said. She couldn't allow him to touch her again. Especially now that she realized her body still responded to him with all the enthusiasm of dry tinder to a match.

She wouldn't let him do this to her again. She had worked too hard the last ten years to become someone she could like and respect again. Now, when she finally felt as if she could hold her head high again, that she was a strong and capable woman—not that needy, trusting girl who had given her heart so completely—Slater had to turn up again.

She thought of the unbelievable story he had told her, sick to realize how desperately she wanted to believe him. It would still sting to know he chose to leave her rather than give her the opportunity to prove to him she loved him enough to stand behind him, no matter what happened.

It would still hurt, yes. But at least she wouldn't have to live with the constant, deep, burning shame of knowing he had preferred a woman like Melanie to her.

She let her hands drop and shuddered out a breath. She wanted to believe him, but she couldn't. The story was too outlandish. Too contrived. He and Melanie must have been carrying on a sordid affair, just as everyone had said. Melanie made no secret of her desire to leave Star Valley, and she had finally found someone willing to take her.

Cassie leaned her head back against the door. She couldn't believe him. She had to stand strong and solid as the mountains she loved. Ten years ago Zack Slater had left her bruised and broken, had nearly destroyed her and her family and had turned her into the laughingstock of Star Valley. She couldn't forget all that just because of a few self-serving words of explanation and a soft, tender kiss that left her yearning for something she could never regain.

She wouldn't let her heart be vulnerable to him.

This time she might not survive.

 

“So are you going to tell us how you're really dealing with all of this?”

In the big, comfortable kitchen of the Diamond Harte, Cassie looked up from the potato salad she was throwing together. Though her sister-in-law, Ellie, had been the one who asked the question, she and Jesse's fiancé Sarah were both watching her with identical expressions of concern on their faces.

She knew exactly what they were talking about but she wasn't at all in the mood to get into it right now, so she pretended ignorance, even though she knew it wouldn't fly with them for long. “Dealing with what?”

“Come on, Cass,” Ellie muttered. “You know what I mean. With that man showing up again after all these years!”

Here it comes. She sighed. She should have known she couldn't get through the regular Sunday afternoon Harte family gathering without Zack Slater starring as the main topic of conversation.

Trying to avoid the question as long as possible, she looked out the window where her brothers, beer bottles in hand, went through the strictly male ritual of manning the steaks on the grill. She almost wished she were out there with them.

But whose inquisition was she more willing to face? Her stubborn brothers' or that of their equally persistent women?

Finally she turned back to the table, pasting a smile on her face that probably fooled nobody. “I'm fine. Really. I can't say I'm thrilled Slater has the gall to come back and I'm not crazy about everything being dredged up again, but I'm coping.”

Sarah's green eyes darkened with sympathy. “This must be so difficult for you. I can't even imagine it.”

A quick image of their soft, late-night kiss of earlier in the week flickered through her mind.
Difficult
didn't even come close to describing the tumult shaking around her psyche since Zack Slater had shown up at the Lost Creek Ranch, rich and self-assured and as gorgeous as ever.

“I'm coping,” she repeated, as blatant a falsehood as she had ever uttered.

She was fairly certain her friends saw through it, but they loved her too much to call her a liar to her face.

Instead Ellie stuck her chin out with a pugnacious tilt. “I know I, for one, would love to spend an hour or two locked in a room with the man, giving him a piece of my mind. Turning up again after all these years as if nothing had happened! How does he dare show his face around here?”

She remembered the regret she thought she'd seen in those eyes that night on her porch as he had told her his version of events. If he were telling the truth—that he hadn't left with Melanie—he had been judged unfairly.

It was one thing for a man to get cold feet about his wedding and decide to bolt. Better before the wedding than after, most people would say.

It was quite another if he took off with someone else's wife in the process.

But he couldn't have been telling the truth. Where else would Melanie have gone?

She looked out the window again at her brothers. Matt stood at the grill ready to turn the steaks, smiling at something Jesse must have said.

She adored both of her brothers, but she and Matt
shared a special bond. After their parents' death when she was twelve, he had been the only authority figure in her life and she loved him deeply for taking on the responsibility of a young girl when he could easily have handed it off to someone else.

Deep in her heart she had always suspected he'd married Melanie in the first place to provide Cassie with a more normal home life than just that of an impressionable girl living with her two young bachelor brothers, one of them a wild hell-raiser.

He had never said as much—and he never would, she knew—but deep down she had always feared she was the one responsible for his disaster of a marriage.

Guilt washed through her as she realized she had given very little thought to Matt and how
he
must feel to have Slater back in town.

His marriage to Melanie had been over a long time before Zack Slater entered the picture—that much had been glaringly obvious—but it still couldn't be easy for Matt to live in the same town with the man everyone believed had run off with her.

No, she corrected herself again, angry at the part of her still clinging to that wild, foolish hope. The man who
had
run off with her brother's wife. She couldn't forget that. She wasn't ready to give up ten years of betrayal just because Zack claimed their mutual disappearance on the same night had been strictly coincidental.

“What has Matt said about Slater coming back?” she asked Ellie, her voice subdued.

Her sister-in-law shrugged. “Not much. He's upset about it of course, but mainly I think he's worried about you.”

“Still, it must sting his pride a little bit to have all those old, ugly bones dug up.”

Ellie's mouth tightened. “I don't think he had much pride left when it came to Melanie.”

She couldn't dispute that. Cassie knew there were plenty of folks around Salt River who thought Slater did them all a big favor by taking away Matt's wild, troubled wife.

The silence in the kitchen was broken by Sarah ripping open a bag of chips and pouring them into a serving bowl. “What puzzles me,” she said with a thoughtful frown, “is why the man would come back to Salt River at all. I would think anyone with a kernel of sense would stay as far away from here as possible. He had to know he wouldn't exactly be Mr. Popular. Not with all the lives he hurt when he left. He must have a very good reason to come back. Either that or he's crazy.”

“Maybe that's it,” Ellie said, crunching on a chip. “Maybe he's bonkers. Or maybe he's just a heartless bastard who doesn't care about who he's hurting by coming back.”

Cassie remembered that flash of vulnerability she thought she'd seen as he had kissed her, and had the sudden, insane urge to defend him. He wasn't crazy or heartless. She opened her mouth to say so, then clapped her lips shut again.

She wouldn't defend him. Anything she said was bound to be misinterpreted by her family.

Why
had
he come back, though? It was a darn good question. One she was ashamed to realize she didn't have the courage to explore.

“Can we change the subject?” she finally asked. “Those steaks out there smell delicious, but I'm afraid
I won't have much of an appetite if we keep talking about Zack Slater.”

Sarah was quick to apologize. “Don't mind us,” she said softly. “We're just a couple of nosy old busybodies.”

“Speak for yourself,” Ellie said with a teasing grin. “I'm not old.”

The conversation quickly drifted to other subjects, especially Sarah and Jesse's upcoming nuptials. But even while Sarah described the dress she had finally picked out and the shower Cassie and Ellie were throwing her in a few weeks, Cassie couldn't shake the memory of that breathless moment on the porch right before Slater had kissed her.

They were discussing the menu Cassie planned to serve at the wedding dinner when her nieces burst into the kitchen, dusty and sunburned from their favorite activity, horseback riding.

The girls were a contrast in appearance—Dylan red-haired like her mother, with freckles and a snub nose, and Lucy with curly dark hair and big gray eyes. But they were partners in crime in just about everything. They'd been best friends since Ellie and Dylan moved to town the summer before and had connived and schemed to bring their parents together.

Cassie had a feeling they also secretly took credit for bringing their fourth-grade teacher, Sarah, together with Jesse.

She shuddered to think what would happen if they ever decided to turn their fledgling matchmaking skills in her direction.

“We're starving,” Dylan moaned dramatically. “When are we gonna eat?”

“Yeah,” Lucy chimed in. “I'm so hungry I could eat my boots.”

“From the looks of it, those boots have been in places I don't even want to think about,” Ellie said. “Why don't you take them off in the mudroom and then scrub all that barn grime off your hands and faces?”

They groaned but quickly obeyed, then both reached for the potato chip bowl at the same time. Before they could reach it, Cassie whipped the bowl behind her back with a grin. “Nope. Neither one of you is getting anything to eat until you give me my hug.”

This time they obeyed without the groaning. She put the bowl back on the table and gathered them close. Dylan was quick to return to the chips, but Lucy lingered in her arms and Cassie planted a kiss on the top of her dark curls, smelling shampoo and sunshine.

All too soon Lucy pulled away and Ellie stepped into the breach. “Why don't you girls help carry some of this food out to the picnic table and tell your dad and uncle to hustle with those steaks?”

Cassie watched the girls obey, trying hard to ignore the sharp little niggle in her heart.

It shouldn't still bother her. Not after all these months. Everything had changed now that Matt had married Ellie. Lucy had a different family now—a stepmother and a sister. The four of them had forged a loving family and she couldn't be happier for them.

But she still couldn't help an aching sense of loss that pinched her heart every time she was around her niece now.

After Melanie left, she had taken over caring for Lucy. What else could she have done? There was no
way Matt could handle a three-month-old infant by himself and run the ranch, too.

And giving up her college plans and devoting herself to her niece hadn't been completely unselfish on her part. She had needed the distraction, a firm purpose, something to help restore her shattered self-esteem. She found it in mothering the poor lost little baby.

For nearly ten years she had been Lucy's mother in everything but name. She had held her chubby little hands when Lucy took her first fledgling steps, she had cuddled her at night and read her bedtime stories, she had nurtured her when she was sick. She had given the little girl all the love in her heart and had it returned a thousandfold, with sticky kisses and tight hugs and whispered secrets.