Elly: Cowgirl Bride (2 page)

But was John Walker Cody an adulterer after all?

Tears stung her eyes. She had to get out of the too-small room, away from the idea that her father had broken his most sacred vow. She hated the idea that Will, someone outside the family, knew what might end up being the ugliest of all secrets.

“Goodbye, Will.” She headed out the door before he or Jesse could say anything. Long, angry steps took her to her bedroom, where she grabbed her camera before turning to leave again.

Jesse stood in the open doorway. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Where?” he demanded.

She met his eyes. “For a ride, to clear my head.” She shoved past him and out the back door so she wouldn’t have to see Will again. The chill soaked through her shirtsleeves, but she wasn’t about to go back inside for her coat. She’d grab one of the work jackets belonging to the hands. The cold was what she needed. Maybe the purity of the air, its bite, would help clear the awful images from her mind.

Once inside the dimmer confines of the barn, she stopped outside Pepper’s stall and allowed the horse to nuzzle the top of her head as she leaned her forehead against the wooden door.

“Don’t worry, girl. I won’t interrupt your break.”

Elly patted Pepper, then grabbed Slim’s lined ranch coat as she moved down to where Jasmine was already saddled. She mounted and headed out into the bright sunshine, intent on finding beautiful images to capture.

Beauty to block out the ugliness.

Her gaze found the newer, more elaborate house on a distant hill. What were her parents doing right now?

Were they arguing, filling the large, open spaces of their dream house with their anger? Was her father regret ting letting Jesse believe the preposterous claim by not denying it? Or was he out riding fence lines at the far reaches of the ranch, leaving her mom alone with the pain of betrayal?

She shuddered to think how her father would react if he found out Jesse had launched an investigation.

Why had Jesse done so? Did he not trust their parents to take care of the family? The ranch? Did he have a point? Did he fear losing his place as the eldest heir or having to share his inheritance with yet another person—one with whom he hadn’t even grown up?

Or was this just him striking out against Mark because of their long-standing, and stupid, rivalry on the rodeo circuit? God, she couldn’t even remember when it had started or why. Could they? She’d thought it was finally over when they’d shaken hands after the rodeo in Oklahoma, but that must have been too much to hope for.

Tears pooled when she thought of what this might do to her friendship with Janie. She absolutely could not lose her. Janie was more than a best friend. She was the sister Elly had never had.

But if it came down to picking sides, Janie would have to side with her brother, wouldn’t she? Did Janie have any inkling that she and Mark might not have the same father?

So many questions pressed in on Elly that she felt she had to escape or howl. She pointed Jasmine to the west and urged the horse into a gallop. Maybe she could outrun everything threatening to make her world disintegrate around her.

W
ILL RESISTED THE POWERFUL
desire to follow Elly outside, to somehow offer her comfort. At least an ear or shoulder. A friend.

Who was he kidding? He cursed himself for wanting to be near her. Her long, blond hair and blue-green eyes, the shape of her face made her even more beautiful now than she’d been as a teenager when she’d occupied way too many of his thoughts. Despite his seven years away from Markton, despite the fact that she was the cause of the biggest humiliation of his life, Ellen Anne Cody still made his heart beat triple time.

“Sorry about that,” Jesse said as he walked back into the foyer outside the office.

“No need to apologize. Understandable that it was a shock.”

Jesse glanced toward the back door, through which Elly had disappeared, before extending his hand. “Thanks for stopping by. I’d appreciate it if you kept everything quiet.”

“I’ll be discreet.” A twinge of inferiority straight out of his past hit Will, a voice telling him that real men, men like the Codys, didn’t use words like
discreet.
Only bookish nerds like him.

Only he was more than that now.

He gripped Jesse’s hand in a firm handshake while berating himself for letting the old doubts surface. It was something about being here on the ranch, where he’d once longed to be like the cowboys who filled Elly’s life. But he wasn’t the boy he’d been at sixteen anymore. He no longer judged his worth based on what a Cody thought of him.

Was he now the type of man who could interest Elly Cody?

Not that he planned to find out anytime soon. She hadn’t been interested before, so he told himself it didn’t matter if she was now. Plus, now was not the time to investigate his chances with her, even if he wanted to. Rather, he had to investigate whether she had yet another brother. Nothing like diving into the deep end with his new practice, representing one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Wyoming.

He headed for his Yukon and stopped beside it when he noticed Elly riding away from the barn, her braid bouncing against her back. He sighed. One look—that was all it had taken for him to realize the years away and the memory of her killing his hope of being with her still hadn’t managed to get Elly out of his system.

She was a disease, one for which he had to find a cure before he did something stupid like ask her out again. Maybe the passage of time would lend a hand.

Elly might be seeing someone. Damn, she might even be married for all he knew. That thought made him sick to his stomach. Should he have returned to Wyoming sooner and not taken no for an answer a second time?

Or should he have just stayed away and not chanced renewing old feelings?

Jesse stepped out onto the porch. Not wanting to get caught ogling the man’s sister, Will opened the SUV’s door and tossed his leather folder inside.

“I’ll call as soon as I know something.”

Jesse nodded. Will slid into the driver’s seat and headed down the ranch’s entrance road. His training kicked into gear as he started mentally mapping out the tasks before him. He eyed the elder Codys’ house on its hilltop perch a couple of miles away. He’d first seen it in a magazine, not surprised it was a masterwork of stone, gleaming logs and glass. A testament to the wealth attached to the name Cody.

Though he’d never been close to J. W. Cody, he found himself wanting to make sure everything turned out as well as it could for him. Not for the man’s sake, especially if he’d committed adultery and fathered a child with another woman, but for Elly’s. Despite the lingering sting of that long-ago rejection, he didn’t want to do anything that would hurt her unnecessarily. Rather, he wanted to do his job to help his client and hoped she respected that.

And if he was lucky, Elly would see him as someone other than that ridiculous Billy the Kid, a moniker that belonged to someone who didn’t really exist anymore.

He was a mile or so down the highway that ran adjacent to the ranch’s northern edge when he noticed movement on top of a ridge. He slowed, then pulled over to the side of the road.

Elly sat atop a gold-colored horse as she stared in his direction. At least he told himself she was looking at him. Even after all that she’d heard minutes before, was she as curious about the adult him as he was about the adult her?

No matter which way she turned, Elly couldn’t get comfortable. She tried going to sleep on her back, on her side, on her stomach. With the thick comforter on, with it tossed to the foot of the bed. Counting sheep didn’t help. Neither did mentally going over her to-do list for the next day—all the tasks she had planned to tackle today but had abandoned after the news about her father and Mark.

She couldn’t even call up Janie and talk, like she normally would when something was bothering her. Elly’s parents weren’t on the conversation list, and her brothers weren’t exactly the “let’s talk out our feelings” type of guys.

The image of Will Jackson filled her mind. The Will of today, not the young boy who’d worn gawky glasses and been allergic to just about every animal on the ranch. She realized he hadn’t been wearing glasses earlier in the day. Nothing had obscured her view of his dark, beautiful eyes. Had he always possessed the type of eyes that drew a woman in? Had she just not noticed?

Elly closed her eyes and slowly went over what she remembered of Will’s appearance when he’d stood to face her in the office. He’d been tanned, so he must spend time outdoors doing something. Though he’d been wearing a suit, he’d filled it out nicely without seeming to bust at the seams. The face of young Will had grown into a more masculine version of itself, making the angles of his jaws and planes of his cheeks much more attractive.

Yes, Will Jackson as an adult was as sexy as the summer nights were long. And that felt odd to admit.

Elly’s skin heated, and she gave up any hope of sleeping. She swung around to sit on the side of the bed and wished her brain had an off switch. She shook her head and meandered out of her bedroom into the middle of the quiet house. She didn’t know where Jesse was. Maybe instead of lying in bed sleepless, he was out knocking back a few to dull his thoughts.

TV wouldn’t keep her attention, either, so she decided she might as well make productive use of her time and headed for the corner where a new supply of photo matting stood. She grabbed a couple of pieces and the rest of her tools and placed them on the dining room table.

Next, she chose two prints she wanted to mat and frame. If she could finish several of her framed prints—ones that captured the people, places and seasons of the Cottonwood Ranch—she’d make a trip into nearby Cody to deliver them to the gallery that sold her work.

She chose a shot of falling rain taken from inside the barn and another of her brothers on horseback silhouetted against a pink twilight sky. She ran her fingers over their images and wondered if it was possible there should be a fifth horseman in the photo instead of the four she’d known for all of her twenty-five years.

With a shake of her head, she got to work. As she was finishing the second framing job, the sound of Jesse’s boots against the front porch brought her out of her meandering thoughts. She turned around in the dining room chair, curious just how inebriated her brother might be.

But he didn’t act drunk as he came in the front door, slowly hung up his coat and trudged in her direction. No, he appeared more drained than anything. He looked five years older than he had a few days ago. Only then did she realize he’d been looking extra tired recently—ever since the rodeo in Oklahoma. There had been an awkward moment after the rodeo was over when he and Mark had shaken hands with the Cody clan watching. When her father had congratulated Mark on his win. It all held so much more significance now.

She’d figured he’d just been pushing himself too hard lately, as he was wont to do. After all, he had a lot of ranch responsibilities in addition to his bull-riding practice and travel to rodeos.

She felt bad for biting his head off earlier, for running out when she should have stayed to lend her support. But she still wasn’t sure how she felt about him hiring Will behind her parents’ backs. Yes, she understood his desire to protect the family, but it just felt…wrong somehow.

Which now made her wonder why Will had taken the job. He’d always seemed like a good guy. It’d be sad if law school had changed that about him.

Jesse sank into a chair at the end of the table without making eye contact. She didn’t say a word as she rose and went to slice him a piece of the red velvet cake her mother had dropped off while they’d been away from the homestead.

Now that she thought about it, she realized her mom had been baking a lot over the past several days. The number of desserts floating around the ranch should have been the first, calorie-laden clue that something was wrong. Everyone in her family had some unique way of dealing with stress. Anne Cody’s was to bake—a lot.

Evidently, she’d formed the habit early in her marriage when she’d had a breakdown after miscarrying her first child. Nobody talked about that fragile time, and over the years the baking had just become a normal stress reliever, nothing to cause the rest of the family to watch her closely.

Unless she was baking enough to open her own bakery.

As Elly slid the hefty piece of cake onto a saucer, she now attached new meaning to her father’s absence from the main part of the ranch the past couple of days.

Normally, employees rode the fence lines, but she hadn’t thought much about it when her dad had done so. Some times he still liked to get out and ride the far reaches of the Cottonwood to be alone with his thoughts. Maybe this time, he’d gone to reflect on his mistakes.

Elly placed the cake and a glass of milk in front of Jesse and returned to her own seat.

“Thanks,” he said, sounding as tired as he looked.

So many questions begged to be voiced, but she didn’t know how to start a conversation about the torpedo that had slammed into their lives. But the silence pressed in on her more than the dread of what Jesse might say.

“What made you hire Will?”

She hadn’t expected that to be the question to come out of her mouth. But it wasn’t really a surprise when she considered how much she’d been thinking about him earlier, how curious she was about where he’d been, what he’d done since he’d left Markton. And why he was back in the area.

Jesse sighed. “I told you. I need to see how this could affect all of us and the ranch if it’s true and it comes to light.”

Elly shook her head. “No, I know that. I meant, why Will instead of another lawyer? He must only barely be out of law school.”

“He was familiar with the ranch, with our family. Had always seemed like a friend.”

“And it didn’t bother you that you were revealing this ugly secret to someone who knows us?”

Jesse set down the fork he’d just picked up. “Of course, it did. But it was better than the idea of laying it all out for some outsider.” He tapped the tines of the fork against the edge of the saucer. “And Dad might have admitted to the affair, but I want proof of Mark’s paternity before I believe it.”

“If Mark were to make such a claim, why would he lie about it?”

“I don’t know. Money maybe.”

Elly stared at Jesse, wondering where the bitter person in front of her had come from. “You’ve known Mark your entire life. I know you have some sort of stupid testosterone rivalry thing dating back to before either of you had to shave, but the idea of him lying to get his hands on our money is just ludicrous. And you know it.”

Jesse shoved the cake away. “I don’t know what to think. Do you?”

She let out a breath before shaking her head. “No.”

She glanced around the kitchen where she and her brothers had grown up. “God, how are we supposed to act around Mom and Dad?”

“Like we always do.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“It has to be, at least until they say something to you or I figure out what this all means for us.”

How was she going to look at her mother without pity in her eyes? At her dad without anger and resentment?

“Elly?”

“Fine.”

Elly stared at Jesse. “Do you think Mark even knows?”

Jesse shook his head a couple of times. “Don’t know. One of the things we’ll need to find out if it turns out to be true.”

With an exhale that spoke of a fatigue for the ages, Jesse rose from the table and headed for his room. Elly didn’t attempt to stop him or pull him deeper into conversation. She doubted he could shed light on her foremost question anyway—why would her father cheat on her mother when they’d had a long, happy marriage since? At least she’d always thought they had.

Elly grabbed the abandoned slice of cake and shoved a giant bite in her mouth. Her mother baked when she was upset, and Elly consumed the results when she found herself in a similar state. She had to force herself not to bite down too hard on the fork when a second bite followed the first in a vain effort to make her feel better.

If the situation wasn’t resolved soon, she was going to end up the size of Wyoming.

W
ILL REVIEWED THE NOTES
he’d made about the Cody case then sat back in his office chair. How ironic that one of his first cases after moving back to the area involved Elly’s family. He closed his eyes and thought back to the moment he’d seen her the day before, more beautiful than even his vivid memories had prepared him for. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind since their gazes had connected.

But being with her was no more realistic now than when he’d been a geeky, allergy-ridden teen. Only this time it was his work that stood in the way—not the fact that she wouldn’t look at him as anything other than a casual friend. And there was his pride. And the promise he’d made to himself on the heels of her rejection to never let himself get that attached ever again. Besides, the current situation with her parents likely didn’t foster romantic notions in her mind. He tried to imagine how she must feel, how he would have felt if he’d ever found out his dad had cheated on his mom.

He couldn’t help that part of him wished he’d bumped into Elly under different circumstances. He now knew that Elly wasn’t married. Delia Barstow, his secretary, had filled him in with a lot of details. Elly and Jesse were the only two unattached Cody siblings, and word was neither of them was seeing anyone.

It had taken a monumental effort not to react with excited possibility when Delia had imparted the news about Elly.

Damn, he was pitiful. Still stuck on the same girl he’d fantasized about since he’d developed hormones.

The one who’d actually laughed when he’d offered to take her to prom.

He glanced at the clock and decided to take a break to pick up some lunch and look for a birthday present for his mom. Maybe getting outside and walking would help him settle on his next move in the case and stop thinking about Elly.

“Delia, I’m headed out for bit.”

“Okay.”

“Need anything while I’m out?”

“A winning lotto ticket and a good man would be fab, if you can swing it.”

Will laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He was still smiling when he reached the sidewalk that led into the downtown area of Cody. Delia was as funny now as she’d been when they’d gone to high school together. That was part of why he’d hired her, to ease his clients’ anxiety.

Plus, they worked well together. Mrs. Threadmiller’s biology lab had proven that when they’d been lab partners. If you got out of that class without murdering your lab partner, that was a very good sign it was a working match made in heaven.

Another bonus was that she hadn’t demanded a huge salary. And just starting out, without a lot of experience to recommend him, he needed to watch his bottom line until he saw how things would shake out. Especially when he was trying to make a go of it in a small town where the other attorneys had been there since he was a toddler.

He slowed when he reached the line of shops showcasing gift options in their front windows—everything from T-shirts to high-end artwork. At the Tangled Antlers Gallery, he noticed a painting of the area’s red-rock cliffs he thought his mom might like. Movement inside the store caught his attention, and he glanced up. Elly stood talking to another woman. He blinked, wondering if his imagination had gone three-dimensional. But no, she was still there when his eyes reopened.

Curious what had brought her to Cody, he headed for the door. Damned if he didn’t wish that he was the reason for her visit to Markton’s bigger neighbor, but her current location said otherwise. Still, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say hello, to stand near her again, maybe even have a chance to catch up a little without Jesse’s large presence looming. He could allow himself to be around her without making a fool of himself or getting in too deep, right?

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” the woman talking to Elly said when she spotted him.

Elly glanced his way. “Will.” Surprise filled her voice and widened her eyes.

He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought her cheeks pinkened in embarrassment. Great, he was going to be forever associated with her father’s infidelity. Not exactly what he’d been going for when he’d walked through the gallery’s door. But he was inside now, and he couldn’t just leave without making the situation even more embarrassing for both of them.

“Doing a little shopping?” he asked.

“Uh, no.”

The older woman brightened. “Elly is quite the talented photographer. And she’s just dropped off some of her newest work.” She spun a large, framed photo around to show him. The scene was of a mother duck leading her brood out onto bright green grass. The captured moment was so lifelike. He imagined he could hear the little quacks of the ducklings and smell the damp scent of early morning depicted by the dew on the grass leaves.

“That’s really good.”

The gallery lady, perhaps smelling a sale, directed him toward a corner where several framed prints hung on the adjacent walls. A larger one sat displayed on an easel. As he moved closer, he noticed the bigger piece was of a giant bull moose chomping on his latest meal as he stood in the shallows of a stream.

On a rectangular sign hanging from the ceiling above the display, a stylized script read, “The Cottonwood Collection, One-of-a-Kind Prints by Ellen Cody.”

“I’m impressed,” he said as he turned to meet Elly’s eyes.