Secrets and Lies: He's a Bad Boy\He's Just a Cowboy (31 page)

Some men you never forget.
Turner Brooks was that kind of man—all bristle and gruffness with brown hair streaked with gold, a rugged profile too cynical for his years and eyes that saw far too much. A cowboy. A rodeo rider. A penniless no-good, as her mother would say.

Heather hadn’t seen him in six years. She couldn’t imagine his reaction when she showed up on his doorstep, trying to undo those cloying lies, and begging for his help. She knew that he hadn’t returned her calls, that her letter had gone unanswered. He obviously didn’t want her to be a part of his life. But he couldn’t reject his son.

Or could he?

Heather’s heart cracked, because she didn’t really know the man who was her son’s father, had barely known him six years before.

“Help me,” she whispered, refusing to break down. Pocketing her keys, she climbed out of the car and left the door ajar. A quiet bell reminded her that she should close and lock the Mercedes, but she didn’t care. Pine needles muted her footsteps as she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket and walked the short distance to the shore.

From the boughs overhead a hidden squirrel scolded brashly and a flock of quail rose in a thunder of feathers into the thin fog. The lake was quiet; there were only a few fishing boats in the misty dawn. Heather was reminded of the old legend about the waters of Whitefire Lake as she crouched down among the sun-bleached stones of the bank and ran her fingers through the cool depths. Her left hand mocked her. Naked, stripped of her diamonds when she and Dennis were divorced nearly two years before, it waved ghostlike beneath the clear surface.

She sent up a silent prayer for her son, then skimmed a handful of the lake water and drizzled it against her lips. She’d been greedy in the past and she’d taken too much from life—too much for granted. Her expensive car, her house in San Francisco, her studio and all her clothes and jewels meant nothing to her now. All that mattered was Adam.

She didn’t really believe in the legend of the lake, but she was willing to try anything,
anything,
to save her son’s life.

Even if it meant confronting Turner.

She shivered, feeling a tiny icicle of dread against her spine. As she stared into the clear waters of Whitefire Lake, she remembered the summer six years ago so clearly, it was almost as if she were still eighteen and working at the Lazy K Ranch… .

BOOK ONE

Lazy K Ranch, California
Six Years Earlier

CHAPTER ONE

T
HE AIR WAS THICK AND SULTRY,
filled with horseflies and bees that buzzed around Heather’s head as she shook the old rag rug. Dinner was long over and the guests of the Lazy K had broken into groups. Some had retired early, others were learning to play the guitar in the main hall and still others were involved in games of checkers or poker in the dining room. Laughter and music spilled from the windows, floating on a thin evening breeze.

Every bone in Heather’s body ached from the twelve-hour days she worked in the kitchen. Her feet were swollen and she smelled as bad as some of the ranch hands. Deep down, she knew she wasn’t cut out for ranch life, and yet here she was, kitchen maid at an obscure dude ranch in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. Well, things could be worse. She could be back in Gold Creek.

Shuddering at the thought of the sleepy little town where she’d been born and raised, she stared at the distant hills. There were too many painful memories in Gold Creek for her to ever want to stay there. Even though some families like the Fitzpatricks and Monroes seemed to spawn generation after generation of citizens of Gold Creek, Heather wasn’t planning on putting her roots down in a town so small…so full of gossip.

Her family, the Tremonts, had been the subject of the Gold Creek gossip mill for years. First there had been her father and his affair with a younger woman. Eventually her parents had divorced, her mother bitter and unhappy to this day, her father involved with his new young wife. And then there had been the incident involving Heather’s sister, Rachelle, and the boy she’d been involved with—

Jackson Moore.

Heather remembered all too vividly some of her mother’s “friends” and how they’d whispered just loud enough so that Heather could catch a few of the key words. “…Never believe…all their hopes on that one, you know…no scholarship now…so hard on Ellen. Poor woman. First that no-good skirt-chasing husband and now this…and the younger one doesn’t have a lick of sense…if there’s a God in heaven
that
one will marry the Leonetti boy and give her mother some peace!”

Heather’s cheeks had burned as she’d heard the wagging tongues in the checkout line at the Safeway store, in the dining area of the Buckeye Restaurant and Lounge, and even on the porch of the church after services. There was no way she was going to spend the rest of her life trapped in Gold Creek!

But ranch life? It wasn’t a lot better. Though she planned on staying only for the summer. Only until she had enough money to enroll in art school. Only so that she didn’t turn out to be one of those weak women who marry a man for his money, to get what she wanted. Only so she didn’t feel compelled to marry Dennis Leonetti, son of one of the wealthiest bankers in Northern California.

Heather tossed the old rag rug over the top rail of the fence and stared across the vast acres of the Lazy K. Horses gathered in the shade of one lone pine tree, their tails switching at bothersome flies, their coats dull from rolling in the dusty corral. Sorrels, bays, chestnuts and one single white gelding huddled together, picking at a few dry blades of grass or stomping clouds of dust.

A hazy sun hovered over the ridge of mountains to the west, and she spied a lone rider upon the ridge—one of the ranch hands, no doubt. Squinting and shading her eyes with her hand, she tried to figure out which of the hands had chosen a solitary ride along Devil’s Ridge. He was tall and wide-shouldered, though his broad chest angled to a slim waist. Against the blaze of a Western sunset, he sat comfortably in the saddle—as if he’d been born to ride a horse. She could see only his silhouette, and try as she would, she couldn’t recognize him. Her mind clicked off the cowboys she’d met, but none of them seemed as natural in the saddle as this man.

A breath of wind tugged at her hair and caused goose bumps to rise on her skin as the stranger twisted in the saddle and seemed to look straight down at her. But that was impossible. He was much too far away. Nonetheless, her heart leapt to her throat and she couldn’t help wondering who he was.

He kicked his mount and disappeared into the forest, leaving Heather with the impression that he hadn’t even existed, that he was just a figment of her healthy and romantic imagination.

Her palms had begun to sweat. Nervously she wiped her hands down the front of her apron.

“Heather—you about ready to help clean this kitchen?” Mazie’s crowlike voice cawed through the open window of the ranch house.

Heather jumped. Guiltily she yanked the rug off the fence and shook the blasted thing frantically, as if the fabric were infested with snakes. Dust swirled upward and caught in her throat. She coughed and sputtered and beat the life out of the rug.

“You hear me, girl?”

“In a minute… .” Heather called over her shoulder. “I’ll be right there.”

“Well, mind that you git in here afore midnight, y’hear?” Mazie insisted, mumbling something about city girls more interested in cowboys than in hard work. She slammed the window shut so hard the panes rattled.

Swiping at her sweaty forehead, Heather hauled the dusty rug back to the ranch house. She hurried up the steps, through the long back porch and into the kitchen where other girls were scouring pots and pans, washing down the floor and scrubbing the counters with disinfectant. No dirt dared linger in Mazie Fenn’s kitchen!

“’Bout time you got back here. Why don’t you take care of the leftovers—take those pails onto the back porch for Seth’s pigs,” Mazie suggested. Seth Lassiter was one of the cowboys who worked at the Lazy K during the day, but lived on his own place where he raised pigs and his own small herd of cattle.

Jill, a redheaded waitress who was one of Heather’s roommates, smothered a smile as she glanced at the two heaping buckets of slop. Carrying out the heavy pails was one of the worst jobs on the ranch, and it tickled her that Heather seemed to always inherit the job. Jill bit her lip to keep from giggling, then threw her shoulders into her own work of mopping the yellowed linoleum until it gleamed.

Heather gathered the heavy buckets of milk, corn bread, potatoes and anything else that was edible but for one reason or the other hadn’t been consumed by the guests and staff of the ranch. Without spilling a drop, she hoisted both pails to the porch and told herself not to linger, though she couldn’t help staring at the ridge where she’d seen the lone rider.

All her life her mother had accused her of dreaming romantic fantasies, of being “boy crazy,” of living in an unreal world of heroes and heroines and everlasting love. Her older sister, Rachelle, had been the practical nose-to-the-grindstone type, and time and time again their mother had shaken her head at Heather’s belief in true love.

“If you want to fall in love, then why don’t you let yourself fall for Dennis Leonetti?” Ellen had asked her often enough. “He’s cute and smart and rich. What more could you want?”

Heather sometimes wondered herself. But there was something about Dennis—something calculating and cold that made her mistrust him. Why he wanted to marry her, she didn’t know; she only knew that deep in her heart she didn’t love him and never would. Marrying him seemed like admitting defeat or becoming a fraud or, at the very least, taking the easy way out. Heather, despite her fantasies, didn’t believe that there were any free rides on this earth. She had only to look at her mother’s hard life to see the truth.

“Heather?”

Drat! Mazie again. Heather couldn’t afford to look lazy; she needed this job. She dashed back to the kitchen.

“I thought we lost you again,” Mazie said as she lit a cigarette at the little table near the windows. “Mercy, I’ve never seen anyone whose head is higher in the clouds than yours!”

“I’m sorry,” Heather said as she wiped the top of the stove to look busy. Most of the polishing and cleaning was done, and three girls were huddled together near the swinging doors that separated the kitchen from the dining room.

“It’s all right. Your shift’s over.” Mazie honored Heather with a rare smile. “Besides, you’re missin’ all the fun.” Taking a puff on her cigarette, she motioned to the girls crowded around the swinging door. “The boys are back.”

“The what?”

“…I told you he was gorgeous,” Jill whispered loudly.

Mazie chuckled.

“They all are,” another girl, Maggie, said, her eye to the crack between the two doors. She let out a contented sigh. “Hunks. Every one of them.”

“But they’re trouble,” Sheryl added. She was a tall, thin girl, who, for the past six summers, had worked at the Lazy K. “Especially that one—” She pointed, and Jill shook her head.

“What’s going on?” Heather couldn’t hide her curiosity.

“The cowboys are back for a while. Between rodeos,” Jill explained a trifle breathlessly.

Cowboys? Heather wasn’t particularly interested in the rough-and-tumble, range-riding type of man. She thought of Dennis, the banker’s son, and he suddenly didn’t seem so bad. But dusty, grimy, outdoorsmen smelling of tobacco and leather and horses…? Well, most of her fantasies were a little more on the sophisticated side.

However, she remembered the ridge rider and her heart did a peculiar little flop. But he was a man of her dreams, not a flesh-and-blood cowpoke. She didn’t bother peeking through the crack in the door. Instead, to atone for her earlier idleness, she hauled the sacks of potatoes and onions back to the pantry where she double-checked that the plastic lids on huge tubs of sugar and flour were secure.

Cowboys! She smiled to herself. If she were to believe the image on the silver screen, cowboys spit tobacco juice and tromped around in filthy scraped leather boots and tattered jeans. They loved the open range as well as horses and booze and country music and loose women in tight denim skirts.

And yet there was something appealing about the cowboy myth, about a rugged man who was afraid of nothing, about a man who would die for what was right, a man who disdained city life and health clubs and sports cars.

Even Rachelle—stalwart, sane, levelheaded Rachelle—had fallen for a rogue of sorts. Jackson Moore, the reputed bad boy of Gold Creek, the boy whom everyone believed had killed Roy Fitzpatrick. Rachelle had stood up for Jackson when the whole town had wanted to lynch him; Rachelle had given him an alibi when he had desperately needed one; and Rachelle had stayed in town, bearing the disgrace and scandal of having spent the night with him, while he’d taken off, leaving her alone to face the town.

And that short love affair had scarred her and their parents forever.

“I’m not going to sit around and watch you make the same mistake your sister did,” Ellen had told Heather as she’d nervously taken a drag from her cigarette. “And she was the levelheaded one! You, with all your fantasies and silly notions about romance…ah, well. Unfortunately, you’ll learn in time.” She’d stubbed out her cigarette, and concern darkened her eyes. “Just don’t learn the hard way. Like Rachelle did. That no-good Moore boy used her, he did. Spent one night with her, then left town when he was accused of murder. Left her here alone to defend him and mend her broken heart.” Ellen had shaken her head, her loose brown curls bobbing around her face. “You listen to me, Heather. Romance only causes heartache. I loved your father—was faithful to him. Lord, I had supper on the table every night at six…and what happened? Hmm? He flipped out. Wanted a ‘younger model.’” Ellen scowled darkly. “Don’t fool yourself with thoughts of romance. Make life easy for yourself. Marry Dennis.”

Heather frowned at the memory. Closing the pantry door behind her, she crossed the kitchen and headed up the back stairs to the room she shared with the other girls. She changed quickly, stripping off her apron and uniform and sliding into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt.