Cowboy to the Rescue (17 page)

Sharing? No. He'd never been good at sharing his feelings. Not the deep ones, the ones that made him feel uncomfortable and vulnerable and even afraid. Was that what loving a woman was all about?

If it was, then Lex had just taken a mighty big fall.

T
rying his best to push away the deflated feeling that had suddenly settled upon him, he said, “C'mon. It's getting late.”

He nudged her shoulder, and the two of them began to wind their way through a maze of items, which had seemingly been forgotten. Layers of gray dust covered everything.

“It doesn't look as though anyone has been up here for a while,” Christina commented.

“Mom sends the maid up here every now and then to get rid of some of the dust, but that doesn't happen very often,” he told her. “They're always too busy with the regular household chores to deal with this.”

At the far end of the attic, next to the outer wall of the house, Lex spotted his father's old work desk, which was covered with a pair of old tacked denim quilts.

“This was his desk,” Lex told her as he removed the quilts and tossed them to one side. “There's still stuff in the drawers. And a few things in the boxes beneath it.”

“I'll go through the drawers in the desk while you pull out the boxes,” Christina suggested.

“That's fine with me.”

After a few moments, it was clear to Christina that there was a substantial number of notebooks and folders filled with all sorts of work projects pertaining to the Sandbur stored inside the desk drawers.

“This is going to take a while,” she said. “Do you think we could carry all of this down to my office? It would be much more comfortable going through it there. I have to go through each paper to be sure I didn't miss anything.”

“Sure. Let's put everything in boxes and carry them over to the ladder,” he agreed.

It took several minutes to get all the boxes safely down the ladder and into her office. Before Lex set the last one down in the corner of the small room, Christina was already sitting cross-legged on the floor, rifling through the paper material. And from the intense look on her face, Lex knew she wasn't planning on breaking for the night anytime soon.

“I'll go make coffee,” he told her.

Looking up, she gave him a grateful smile. “That would be great, Lex. But you don't have to stay up and help. This is my job, remember?”

He slanted her a wry glance. “I assured Mom that it was mine, too. And Paul was
my
father. I want to help.”

During the next half hour, Christina and Lex dug for anything that could possibly be connected to the list she'd found earlier this evening. But so far they'd found nothing but Sandbur papers.

“Here's a receipt,” Christina said as she ran her gaze over the yellow square of paper. “For seventeen hundred dollars. Looks like it's from a jewelers in Victoria. In one corner Paul's written ‘Keep hidden from Geraldine.'”

“What's the date?”

When she read the date, Lex chuckled. “That's two days before my parents' wedding anniversary. Dad probably bought her something in silver and turquoise. She loves the stuff, so he gave her a lot of it.”

“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully. “Everything I've discovered about Paul tells me he was a man who liked to make people happy.”

Funny that she could see his father so clearly from just a piece of paper and yet she couldn't see how much Lex wanted, needed her. Or maybe she did see and had decided that wanting and needing just weren't enough to make her happy, he thought miserably.

“You're right. Everything he did, he did for others. He was a very unselfish man,” Lex told her. “That's one of the reasons I never really suspected anyone of killing him. He was good to everyone. He didn't have any enemies.”

“Yeah,” she quietly agreed. “Just like I find it difficult to believe that Joel simply walked away from me—his only sibling.”

The husky note in her voice had Lex glancing over to see her head was bent, and as he studied the crown of her shiny red head, he realized the mystery of her brother was still affecting her, the same way the puzzle of his father's death was now tearing at him. Christina had been right those few weeks ago when she'd first arrived on the Sandbur. Finding the truth was always important.

Forcing his attention back on the plastic container jammed between his knees, he continued to rifle through the contents, most of which seemed inconsequential. Until he reached the bottom, where he discovered a flat cardboard tin box.

“Here's a box with something rattling inside,” he announced, with a bit of excitement.

Jumping to her feet, she hurriedly crossed the small room to where he was sitting. “Open it! It's probably the disk!”

Lex quickly opened the box, and Christina drew in a sharp gasp at the sight of several computer disks nestled inside the container. “Oh my! Let's pray that one of these disks will hold some clues, Lex!”

Lex began to sift through the disks. All of them had paper labels attached to the front, but most of them had either one or two words that meant little or nothing to Lex and Christina.

“Right,” he said. “Let's see if we can find anything important on them.”

She pulled out the desk chair and slipped into it. While she brought the computer to life, Lex shoved the plastic disk into the slot on the tower. The task forced him to bend close to her shoulder, and it was all he could do to keep from turning his head sideways and kissing her cheek, burying his nose in her fragrant hair. He'd told her he was no longer going to press her to go to bed with him. But he knew the bold promise was going to be hell to keep. Especially whenever he was near her like this.

Clearing his throat, he said, “These disks are nearly twelve years old. There's no telling what sort of program they were written on.”

“True,” Christina agreed. “But we might get lucky.”

Fifteen minutes later, Christina didn't feel lucky at all. Instead, she wanted to throw up her hands and scream. None of the five disks they'd discovered in the box would open.

“The frustrating part of this is that we don't even know if one of these disks is connected to the list your father made,” she grumbled.

“That's true,” Lex said from his perch on the corner of the desk. “That's why we've got to find a way to open and read them.”

Christina sighed. “It shouldn't be this difficult to convert the text on a floppy disk,” she said. “Do you have any more suggestions?”

He chuckled. “Me? Are you kidding? I keep track of my cattle sales on the computer, but that's the extent of my ability. What we need is a computer whiz.”

A thoughtful frown crossed Christina's face. “I know a good one, but he moved away from San Antonio, and I have no idea how to contact him,” she said glumly, then turned a hopeful look on him. “Do you know anyone? Some of your family?”

He searched his brain for a moment. “Mercedes. She's a whiz with computers.”

“She's also pregnant,” Christina added, “and suffering from horrible bouts of nausea and fatigue. It's already so late in the evening. She's probably in bed. Let's not bother her. Anyone else?”

Lex raked a hand through his hair as he tried to think. “Lucita. She uses them at school and at home.” He glanced at his watch. “It's getting a little late, but she won't mind if I call her. She and Ripp are probably up with their new baby girl, anyway.”

Pulling a cell phone from his shirt pocket, he searched until he found his cousin's number, then punched it in. After a couple of rings, Lucita answered it herself, and Lex quickly explained the problem to her.

“Do you have any suggestions for us?” he asked.

“The easiest way to make sure you can open the thing without destroying the contents is to use the same computer it was created on. Do you still happen to have Uncle Paul's old computer stored away somewhere?”

Lex glanced at Christina, who was watching him expectantly. “Yes. Mom put it away in a closet. Thanks for the suggestion, Lucita. And before I hang up, how's little Elizabeth?”

Lucita's soft chuckle was full of loving pride. It made Lex feel good to hear his cousin's happiness. She'd been through so much tragedy, it was time her life had changed for the better.

“Right now Ripp has rocked his daughter and himself to sleep. So all is quiet.”

“You'd better get off the phone and enjoy it,” Lex told his cousin. “I'll let you know tomorrow how we got along with the disks.”

The two cousins quickly exchanged goodbyes, and as Lex slipped the phone back into his pocket, Christina asked, “How is Elizabeth?”

Surprised that her first question would be about the baby rather than a solution to the disk, Lex said, “She's fine.”

A wistful smile touched her lips. “I'd very much like to see her and Nicci's daughter before I leave the ranch. Geraldine tells me they're both perfect little beauties.”

“Humph. She looks like Ripp. And I don't see him as a beauty. But I guess Mom knows about babies and how they'll look when they grow to a more human size. I sure don't.” He eased up from the desk and walked over to a window where lights from the bunkhouse flickered through the branches of a live oak.

Behind him, he could hear Christina pushing back her chair, and he glanced over his shoulder in time to see her standing behind the desk, stretching her arms above her head. The sight of her curvy silhouette struck Lex with desire, and he was amazed at how much he wanted to take her upstairs to his bedroom, to take her into his arms and forget everything else.

“This probably sounds crazy coming from someone with a mother who is unorthodox, to say the least,” she said quietly, “but I happen to think I'd make a good parent. I've already learned all the things
not
to do while raising a child.”

The dim lighting of the room left soft lights and shadows flickering across her face. As Lex looked at her, he could easily picture her with a baby in her arms, cuddling, loving, nursing.

“That night of the roundup, when we talked a bit about children, you seemed eager to be mother. But you also seem like a career woman to me. Which one are you?”

Clearly unnerved by his question, she glanced down at the disks scattered across the desk. “I am a career woman. Because that's—that's all I have, for now.”

The hollowness in her voice touched some place in him that was much too deep for comfort. He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked over to where she stood. “This Mike…did you want to have his children?”

Turning her back to him, she answered in a low, strained voice. “At one time. But I had no intentions of ever having a child out of wedlock.” Sighing, she glanced over her shoulder at him. “If I'm ever lucky enough to have children, I want their lives to be totally different from mine. I want them to have two loving parents, who will always be around.”

It was on the tip of Lex's tongue to tell her that he didn't want her having any man's child, unless it was his. Did that mean he wanted a deeper connection between them? One that would last forever? Did that mean he was falling in love with her? He'd never even imagined having children with any of the other women he'd dated.

The idea addled him, shook him right to the soles of his feet, and he was struggling to come up with some sort of reply to her comment when she thankfully changed the subject.

“What did Lucita suggest about opening the disks?”

He walked back over to where she stood. “I've got to fetch Dad's old computer from the closet. It should be compatible with the disks.”

Ten minutes later, Lex carted the computer to Christina's office. Thankfully, it fired to life, and Christina didn't waste a moment thrusting one of the disks into the proper slot and punching in the cues.

They both held their breaths as the machine made a few ratcheting clicks, then continued to rattle and whir.

“This is taking forever,” Lex complained after several moments passed without anything appearing on the screen. “Apparently, it's not working right.”

“Be patient. This is an archaic machine. It takes time for it to work.”

Nearly forty minutes later, after reading through three of the disks, they declared them totally unimportant and started on the fourth. By now, Lex was losing hope, but Christina was determined to keep searching.

“We have this disk and one more to examine,” Christina told him. “If we don't find anything here, there may be more information in the rest of the things we brought from the attic.”

Lex eased his hip off the edge of the desk and moved across the small room to the mound of things they'd carried down from the attic. “I suppose I could start looking for more while you read through that.”

She tossed an apologetic glance at him. “It's getting late, Lex, and I know you have to be up early for work. You don't have to stay and help. Unless you want to.”

He met her glance. “I want to,” he said simply.

Christina's heart winced with emotion. No matter what happened in the future, it was sweet to have him working by her side, as though they were a real couple with mutual goals.