Killing Casanova (7 page)

Jake made no movement and his mouth fought back another sharp retort, as if Cassie had just accused him of something, but he didn’t know what.

Cassie tossed her hair, now copper in the sunlight, over her shoulder and turned her back to them. “You better take her home, Jake. She’s had a long day, and I think she needs you to hang onto her for awhile.”

Jake nodded, forgetting his ulterior motives for being there. That distant all-seeing look was in her eyes, and this was not the time to try and change her mind about who he was. He needed to reassure Heidi instead.

“Jake, what are you doing?” Cassie leaned her back against the corral’s railing. She had known Jake was behind her and Heidi before he had appeared. She caught a whiff of the faint hint of his soap and skin, mingled with the smell of the barn as it had drifted on the breeze. Her only concern had been his effect on the horse and Heidi if his sudden presence were to startle either of them. She had not predicted that artificial charm of his would drip from his lips, to bounce back and smack him in the face, though. Heidi was going to be fine, but now whatever Jake’s careful appearance had been arranged to accomplish, Heidi had distracted him from his purpose.

Cassie tossed her hair back from her neck, sticky in the burning afternoon sun, finally allowing herself a smile. She listened as Jake talked calmly and smoothly to his little sister. A pang of incredulity bit at her heart. His voice was different when he was sincere. She had heard the difference in the canyon that evening with Kirstie, and she heard it now as Jake talked with his sister as they approached the deeper recesses of the barn. It had been in every word he had said since his arrival. Though it may have backfired on him, he had been truly honest in his appraisal of Heidi’s newly developed skills with her horse.

Cassie mentally chastised herself for not intervening after Heidi’s misunderstanding. She could have at least encouraged his gentle and appropriate handling of the frantic young girl. With her mind racing, Cassie turned her face toward the sound of his car and grimaced darkly. Fear had never made for good decisions. Why did she have such a tenuous grip on her opinion of a guy who was about as deep as a puddle in the desert?

The depths of his voice poked in her thoughts as she listened to him calmly reassure Heidi. She could tell he was behind the barn and would not assume she could hear him, so she tuned her ears into his charismatic tones.

“Heidi, I’m going to put you in my car. I will tell Miriam we are going, and then we will drive back to the farm, together. I’m not leaving, I am going home too.”

Cassie smiled again as he carefully reassured Heidi. He did know how to be real; maybe he was just out of practice with other women.

Jake settled Heidi into the passenger side of his car, then strode quickly to the kitchen door of the house. Miriam frowned. “You okay?”

Jake smiled. “We’re fine, I just stuck my foot in my mouth with Heidi, and I need to take her home.”

Miriam nodded with sudden clarity in her brown eyes, turning back for the dishes. With a half-hearted wave she excused him, and Jake retreated the way he had come in, hoping to avoid any more entanglements. He jogged quickly to his car, slipping into the driver’s seat, persuading the ignition to life.

Backing out of the driveway, Jake saw a flash of auburn hair in the rearview mirror, and he watched it dance in the quavering wind. Grimacing as she turned toward the sound of his car, Jake took his eyes from the reflection of her icy glare in the glass. The look on her face was stern and disapproving, and he curled his upper lip in distaste as it prodded his guilt into irritation.

“I’m sorry about that, Heidi,” he said under his breath. “I think you and Cassie are doing great with Applesauce. I’m just sorry she had to be there to see me mess everything up.”

Heidi had been quiet now that her tears had subsided, and she suddenly turned to stare wide eyed at Jake’s unhappy expression.

“Yake,” she said, scowling. “You should not talk about the horses, but it doesn’t matter if you mess up with Cassie there, too.”

“I don’t think she likes me very much. I don’t like Cassie seeing me mess up. I want her to like me.”

Heidi wrinkled her brow, and Jake tried to think of what he had said that would have caused such confusion on her pretty face. “But Yake,” she said plaintively, “Cassie can’t see anything. She’s blind.”

Stunned silence filled the car as Jake drove the rest of the way home. Heidi wanted to know why he looked so funny, and why Cassie didn’t like him, and why this and why that, but Jake just shook his head, mumbling pacifying responses. His thoughts were numb, but his mind raced to understand what Heidi had said. Maybe she had just meant that Cassie was blind to his charms or good looks or ... ? Heidi didn’t know how to use the word blind figuratively. When she said Cassie was blind, she meant Cassie was physically blind.

Images from the few times she had met him coursed through his memory. Those pale blue eyes, almost haunting, the way she would look out into a room and see … nothing. How she could talk to him without looking at him, as if she were focused on someone else in the room. Jake shook his head slightly, and Heidi looked at him.

“Yake, why doesn’t Cassie like you? I tell her all the time how nice you are, and how much you work with the cows and the horses, and how I think you should live here with me and mom and dad. She always says I’m lucky to have such a good big brother, but I tell her there is no luck, just genes. We have the same genes.”

Jake listened with a halting smile as Heidi babbled beside him like a mountain brook. She had forgotten about the mustangs and was now completely focused on Cassie. She had a million things to say, and she told him all about Cassie. Cassie had come to work for Miriam because she was trained in equine therapy but specialized in mobility and independence for the blind. She was from Danbury, Connecticut, and had been on horseback since she had gone blind when she was four years old. She had gone to Missoula, Montana, for college where she got her psychology and sociology degree and had preferred the heartier Western stock to the blue-blooded horses on the expensive farms of Connecticut. She had lived in New Mexico and Arizona before coming to Lindley to work for Miriam.

“How did she go blind?”

“Her eyes stopped working,” Heidi said sleepily. Jake rolled his eyes and smiled at her as they pulled the car up to the ranch house.

“So do you know what made them stop working?”

Heidi shook her head.

“She just said that when she was four, her head got sick and her eyes stopped working.”

Jake frowned slightly. “Her head?”

Heidi yawned again, and Jake turned off the ignition switch.

“Her brain or something else in her head?”

Heidi was out of the car and halfway up the steps without an answer, and Jake sat still in the silence of the front of his car.
She’s blind,
he thought, mystified. He’d never known anyone before who … no, that wasn’t true. He had met blind people before. Met, kept a polite distance from, and respected from afar.

But Cassie? Jake was still thinking about all the misinterpretations of her he had made, his conscious thought fighting back the realization that it was selfish and cruel but the first thing about her he had understood since meeting her. She had no idea what he looked like. She was not swept away like the other women because the sheer power of his rugged good looks was lost on her.

Jake smiled broadly, feeling the sense of relief finally allowed a foothold. She wasn’t oblivious to his attraction, she just couldn’t see it. He laughed now, at her, at himself for being worried.

Jake reached for the car door as a second thought struck him just as powerfully as the relief. She didn’t like him, and without seeing his good looks and raw physical presence, she never would. Jake tossed the errant thought away and climbed out of the car.
Who cares?
he thought indignantly. There were plenty of women who would be more than happy to see him for who he was.

Maybe I just see through the masks people use to hide who they really are.

Her words to him that night in Mcgoo’s rang in his mind as he walked to the stables slowly. “Maybe if you were the man you are trying to convince everyone you are, I wouldn’t have to see anything at all.” Jake felt the sting of those words as if she were slapping him with them right now, the jagged tips of every one like a flogging in his heart. What did she see? Who showed up in her mind when she heard his voice, but couldn’t see his face? Jake thought back over his words, his abruptness with her, his comments about Natalie, and the way she had become more and more mistrustful in his arms as they danced.

She was misunderstanding; she could only hear and get the wrong impression. That guy who showed up at Mcgoo’s was empty and sweet, charming and stealthy.
Casanova.
The actor. Cassie knew Jake Caswell the Hollywood heartthrob, but she had never seen him. Jake stopped suddenly in the dimming light of the sunset.

They all knew Jake Caswell the actor. That was why the women cared nothing about anything but the way he looked. He didn’t have to show anyone else more than that, and he didn’t want to. Had she been right about him? Had she seen the man he was showing her, and without his looks that guy was a snake? Jake leaned against the doorway to the stables feeling tightness in his chest that made it difficult to breathe. Was that who he had become? Casanova?

• • •

Jake lost himself in the farm, the mustangs, and the women. Sustaining this complex juggling act kept his mind from sinking into deeper thought. In the weeks since Heidi’s revelation about Cassie, Jake found it took more energy than he had to avoid thinking about her and observing her every move. He noticed now the way she held out her hand to meet obstacles, the lift of her nose into the air when a slight breeze would blow, the tilt of her head toward a sound too quiet for most ears. The slight signs that gave away her disability had seemed quirky habits before. They were survival skills, he saw that now. And he wondered how he had ever missed them.

July was excruciatingly hot in the desert. The hard work and the distractions were loosening their grip on his mind, and a part of him thought he should go face Cassie again, but his pride over her rejection, and his stupidity about her blindness kept him trapped on the farm.

His father was growing annoyed with his restlessness and put him to work with the horses for distraction. The sleek black Arabian, Starlight, had been given to Caswell Farms when Miriam had gleaned her herd three years ago. The horse was a beauty, but her canter was far too spirited for therapeutic purposes, and The Rocking J had not had the resources to keep her. Now his father’s roan stallion, Ruiando, had taken possession of her, and Jake was going to need to move him and the other mares into the outer corrals before Starlight laid down to birth their colt. He admired her power and beauty and wondered what would be the result of foaling her with Deseo. The prospect of her spirit and Deseo’s sheer power intrigued him.

Jake’s lack of focus with the cattle was costing him, though. His father had hired Carter part-time, and Jake found himself in infuriating confrontations with the guy daily. As the wave of angry heat rolled from the barn that day, Jake was finished. Finished placating Carter’s mean streak, and finished trying to understand the guy’s attitude.

“You take the roan out to the paddock.” Carter snarled, his hands in fists and a sneer disfiguring his face. “I’ll stay with Starlight.”

“I don’t have time to argue with you about this. Just take the horses out.”

“I don’t take orders from you, Casanova, and I’ll do what I want … or whoever I want to. I’m surprised your little friend didn’t tell you that.”

Jake removed the halters and bridles from the wall and brought them back to Carter. “I have no idea what your problem is, or what you’re talking about. Take the horses; the filly is fragile, and I’m staying with her.”

Carter threw the bundle of gear to the dirt floor, kicking them back at Jake. “I’m good with fillies. Especially the sleek, high-spirited ones. No one knows how to teach them how to be rode better than me.”

Jake shook his head again, in an attempt to ignore Carter’s snide remarks. The hint of sinister in the other guy’s words suddenly pricked in the back of Jake’s heart, and his blood began to race. “Carter, if you think this is going to work, you’re dead wrong. Whoever you’re threatening or have threatened doesn’t change anything. Do your job or get the hell off my property.”

“Is that what Lilly was, your property? I was all over her, and there wasn’t a damn thing you could do about it.”

Jake was turning back to Starlight’s stall when the icy fingers of Carter’s words seeped into his heart. He whirled back toward Carter.

“Jake!” Robert Caswell’s voice was quiet and dark, and Jake automatically took a half step back from Carter’s enraged features. Jake’s hands uncurled from fists, and he relaxed his furious scowl. Carter’s expression only darkened with Robert’s appearance but he, too, stepped back from the boiling confrontation. Robert stalked through the swishing of mares’ tails to stand between the two young men. Robert’s black hair salted with sun and age caught dim lights from inside the horses’ stalls.

“I thought the two of you were moving the horses to the pasture. What’s the hold up?”

Robert did not dignify the hands with responses when their anger erupted in more shouting. He simply reaffirmed his instructions to them and turned his back to leave as soon as they had both responded with “Yessir.”

Heat and tension still hung heavy in the air, but Robert only glared at both of them, then left them to their jobs. Jake strode to the rear of the stable and began haltering the few sorrels that had not made the grazing pasture. Fighting with Carter was a losing proposition, but his dad was right. Carter’s problems would have to wait for Starlight’s needs to be met first. Carter was silently compliant as well, forking dry straw into Starlight’s stable while Jake released the horses into the pasture, turning back to choke on the brown cloud of dust Carter’s fancy Ford truck was leaving as he exited Caswell Farms.