Heartland (3 page)

He held out his hand. “Your driver’s license, Ms. Kendall.”

She reached for her purse, setting on the passenger’s seat, and pulled out her license, then rummaged through the glove box for her registration and insurance papers. As she handed the items to him, she smiled the sweet, breathtaking smile he’d seen splashed on magazine covers and award shows, but it never entered her hard eyes. “Fine. Here you go, Sheriff Cowley.”

* * * *

Emily glared at the retreating backside of EJ Cowley as he sauntered to his SUV, but her ire at the McAllister County sheriff was soon replaced with an appreciation of the way his ass filled out the tan pants. The scrawny teenage boy who’d pulled on her pigtails and chased her around the Double K when John Kendall wasn’t watching had grown up into a good-looking man.

Too bad he’d turned into a jerk.

She shook her head and rested her hand over the slight swell of her belly. Even if he was the nicest, sexiest man in the world, he was the last thing she needed. She wasn’t looking for a man. Didn’t want one. Her divorce had been final for almost two months, but she wouldn’t ever be completely free of Fabian McPhee despite her not wanting him to be part of her child’s life and his lack of paternal acknowledgement. The only way to escape him was to never let her baby know about him which she wouldn’t--
couldn’t
--ever do. Regardless of the pain of abandonment and the questions the knowledge of her little girl’s famous father would cause her, Emily could never do to her daughter what her parents did to her. The not knowing and finding out later was worse.

Emily closed her eyes and rested her head on the seat behind her. As she rubbed over the baby growing inside her, she smiled as the memory of when she’d found out she was having a girl entered her mind. Twelve weeks into her pregnancy, the OB/Gynecologist, Dr. Summers, performed an amniocentesis. The test results came back perfectly normal and revealed the baby’s sex.

Every test the doctors performed had come back showing her baby was healthy. Dr. Summers accredited the good news to the fact Emily found out about her pregnancy early and stopped taking drugs.

“Emily… Miz Kendall? You okay?”

At the sound of EJ’s deep Texas twang, she jerked her eyes open and stopped massaging her belly. No one outside of Trish Russell, Fabian, and her doctors knew about the baby, not even her parents. If he suspected her secret, he showed no signs as he held out a sheet of pink paper--her speeding ticket.

She snatched it out of his hand and tossed it on the seat beside her. “I’m fine. Tired. I’ve been driving for thirteen hours and want to get home to my family.”

He straightened and the buttons on his uniform shirt strained across his chest as he took a deep breath. Did he lift weights? Without warning, she imagined him without the shirt and envisioned a broad chest rippling with muscle.

Irritated at the fantasy as much as by the man, she put her sunglasses back on her face and glared at him. “Are we done?”

He gave her a devilish smile, which turned his ruggedly handsome face superstar gorgeous and sent a tingle through her nervous system. “Yeah. Say hi to your mama and daddy.” As she turned the key in the ignition, he tapped the top of her car. “And drive within the speed limits.”

Her response was to hit the gas hard enough to send up a cloud of dust from the side of the road, but she didn’t speed past forty-five. As she looked at him through her rearview mirror, she grinned at him shaking his head and standing with his arms crossed as the fine, Texas grit settled around him.

* * * *

Emily pulled into the driveway and stopped to gaze up at the wooden sign framed by a wrought iron arch over the paved tree-lined lane leading to the house her ancestors built over a hundred years ago. On the right side of the wood a bold black-painted
K
with another
K
formed from the bottom leg mimicked the brand of the seven-hundred-acre ranch. Beside the symbol, in the same bold lettering was the name:
Double K Ranch
. Below that read,
Seth and Abigail Kendall, Owners
. Despite having the four years she’d lived in the large Victorian house broken up by staying in Nashville with her dad or being on tour with him, she considered this place home.

A sensation of fluttering in her lower belly had her gasping as it did every time she experienced it. With a racing heart, she glanced down as she pressed both palms over her baggy t-shirt and held her breath. When the movement tickled her insides again, almost as if a butterfly was caught beneath her skin, she exhaled and laughed.

“You’re happy to be home too, aren’t you, baby girl?” She sat there for a long time waiting for the quickening again, but nothing happened. “Okay, maybe you’re as nervous as I am.”

She had no idea what to expect from her parents. Although, they’d voiced their worry and disapproval of her marriage to Fabian, they had never pushed her away. If anything, at first, her dad had tried to keep her close. But after he’d found her unconscious on her tour bus and had her admitted into Fernwood, she refused to speak to her mother or father again. Fabian had fueled her anger by accusing her parents of wanting to control her life.

Oh, how wrong she had been.

With a sigh, she stared into the distance at the large white house with its dark green shutters and gingerbread trim, then turned the key in the ignition. “Well, baby girl, let’s go and admit they were right.”

She parked the car to the side of the three-car semi-detached garage and got out. As she stretched her back, she looked around at the old familiar buildings. The barn across the lane from the house must have been recently painted and a new stable and training facility had been built in the middle of a pasture she used to ride through. Her mother had mentioned a few years ago she’d like to try her hand at raising and training horses. She must have decided to go for it.

With a deep breath, Emily headed toward the house.

“Emily?”

At the sound of her father’s deep voice, she turned toward the man standing at the open barn door. “Hi, Daddy.”

Her childhood idol stared back at her as if she was a mirage. Wearing a beat-up tan Stetson, faded jeans, scuffed boots, and a plaid western shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, he looked more like a ranch hand then a famous superstar country singer. Her heart stuttered over a few beats as both love and admiration filled her. She may not have known Seth Kendall was her father as a little girl, but he’d more than stepped up to fill the job during her teenage years, even making her dreams come true.

Dreams she destroyed with drugs and hard living.

She swallowed as the silence stretched. Maybe she shouldn’t have come home. “I hope you don’t mind me being here.”

He ran across the wide driveway, and before Emily could process what was happening, he wrapped her up in a tight bear hug which she returned with equal fervor.

“This is your home.” He placed a kiss on her forehead and held her far enough away to meet her gaze. She was shocked to see a tear form at the corner of one of his bright green eyes, the same shape and color as her own. “You’re always welcome here, sunshine.”

At the use of the nickname he’d given her when they’d first met, she wrapped her arms around him and let the relief flood over her as she rested her cheek on his chest. The spiced sandalwood scent of him surrounded her, comforting and forgiving, and she closed her eyes as tears stung her sinuses. She feared if she started crying, she wouldn’t ever stop. “I’m sorry, Daddy. For everything. I’ve made such a mess of my life.”

He rubbed her back and rested his chin on her head, like he’d done since they’d first met eight years ago. At times like this, she wished she’d known him all her life. Mike Ritter--the man she’d believed to be her father until she met Seth--and she had been close, but they’d never had the relationship she and Seth shared.

“The important thing is you’re here now.” His deep voice trembled as if he was holding in a massive wave of emotion. He swallowed and slowly stepped back, but didn’t completely let her go as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “C’mon. Let’s go find your mother.”

She sniffed and wiped at the stray tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “Is Johnny home?”

He squeezed her shoulders and his smile beamed as bright as the morning sun. “You just missed him. Your momma took him to preschool. He’ll be home in a few hours.” He stopped at the steps leading to the wraparound porch. “You’re going to make the kid’s day when he gets home. He idolizes you.”

She shook her head. “He shouldn’t. I’m one messed up woman these days.”

Dad brushed at a stray strand of her hair lying on her forehead. “No. You’re a strong woman trying to get her life back on track. I knew you were on your way to healing when I heard about the divorce and that you were in rehab for longer than a week.”

She glanced away. The hope in his voice nearly broke down the damn holding back her tears.

Chapter 3

EJ was logging into his computer when the office door he’d left ajar opened. He looked up and swallowed a curse. Dealing with his brother-in-law today wasn’t at the top of his to-do list.

Trevor Marshall stood in the middle of his office. Dressed in a pair of black designer slacks and a pale pink dress shirt that matched the wine, pink, and black tie, the metrosexual law student looked as out of place in the ranch town of McAllister as a pile of cow shit on Fifth Avenue.

“Mama wanted to know if you were coming over to dinner tonight. She’d like to see Austin,” Trevor said, referring to EJ’s two year old son.

EJ sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. He didn’t understand Glenda’s insistence of having a memorial dinner for Raquel every year to remember her life. None of them needed reminding she was dead. He’d made the mistake of attending last year and had to leave early. His memories made the day depressing enough; he didn’t need to sit around looking at photo albums and telling stories of what an angel Raquel had been. He’d loved his wife--once--but she had never worn a halo. “Tell her I have other plans.”

Trevor narrowed his brown eyes. “What about Austin?”

EJ shrugged. “I’ll bring him over this weekend. But tonight, we have plans.”

If eating the leftover pot roast his brother’s wife had given him, watching the Rangers game, and drinking a beer or two after he put the baby to bed at eight o’clock justified as plans.

“What’s more important than family?”

His brother-in-law’s tenacity matched that of the Marshall’s bulldog when he was on one of his mother’s errands. Glenda had babied her only son as if he was a crown prince, and although, Trevor was twenty-three years old, he’d never let go of his mother’s skirt. “I never said family wasn’t important, but frankly, I’m not interested in revisiting the picture-perfect life your mother insists on painting for Raquel.”

Trevor’s eyes widened as he gasped. “How dare you say such a thing today?”

EJ had enough. He stood and leaned over his desk. “Look. I loved your sister, but life with her had never been perfect for me. She thought she was a princess, and I’ll admit at first I treated her like one, but she was lazy, demanding and at times a down-right bitch on wheels.” This time Trevor’s face paled and he thinned his lips. EJ didn’t care that everything he said would, no doubt, be relayed to the queen of bitchdom, his mother-in-law. He was on a roll. “The last straw for me was when we brought our baby home from the hospital and she refused to even look at him.”

“She was depressed!”

“I get that.” And he did, kind of. The doctor explained her postpartum depression was caused by her hormones returning to normal more quickly than she could become accustomed to and a predisposition to depression. But he knew it went deeper. She’d hated being pregnant, despite having a trouble-free time and an easy delivery. He’d caught her staring in their bedroom mirror when she was about eight months and telling their baby how much she hated him for making her fat and ugly. The memory sent a stab of pain into his heart. How could a mother hate her own baby, a child she’d created with a man she’d claimed to love? Sure, the pregnancy hadn’t been planned, and wasn’t at the ideal time in their renewed relationship, but he thought she wanted a family. Until she got pregnant. Had she suffered from postpartum depression, or was she depressed because now she had a baby she’d despise taking care of? Or was she angry because she married him because she was pregnant? After all, they had sex the first night they were together after a long breakup. Maybe she’d never intended to have a future with him.

He kept those thoughts to himself. “But instead of seeking help, she refused and started using drugs.”

He stopped before he went any further. Before he admitted he’d dealt with depression, too, but couldn’t understand why Raquel killed herself. No one knew the bottle of Zoloft she’d emptied belonged to him. He’d never taken more than three of the antidepressant pills the VA doctor prescribed for him to help with the PTSD he developed after a mission he’d commanded had gone terribly wrong. As he sat in his leather chair, he buried the memory of the five soldiers, who lost their lives under his leadership, and the dead American ambassador and her advisor he’d been sent to save in the back of his mind.