Faith Leigh had a habit of speaking her mind and taking him by surprise. Based on the speed and force behind the punch, she’d been saving it up for six long years—suddenly all those months away seemed an eternity and seeing her again was a balm to his soul. His laughter was a bark, filled with pain and a bit of self-loathing. “I deserved that.”
“I wouldn’t have hit you if you didn’t. Why’d you leave, Rawley?”
“You know why, Faith.”
Her cheeks flamed red. “I was drunk.”
Shaking his head, it took everything within him not to drop his gaze to the toes of his boots. “I wasn’t.”
Thank God for that, because otherwise a hell of a lot more friction would exist between them now.
“I hadn’t expected anyone to be meeting me here,” he added. Had he realized she’d greet him, he could have prepared himself a little more, although he’d known eventually they’d cross paths. He’d hoped for later, at the ranch, without witnesses and gawking strangers. For some reason, he’d expected tears, but the woman standing before him now wasn’t the girl he’d walked out on.
She wore a dress of navy blue with a narrow skirt that didn’t leave him guessing at the width of her hips. They’d broadened a bit during the intervening years, but then she had a little more meat on her everywhere. Suddenly the awkwardness was back because he shouldn’t be noticing all that, shouldn’t notice how maturity had added a grace to her features, or how grateful he was that the buttons went clear to her throat and that her puffed sleeves narrowed at her elbow and traveled down to her wrists, so he couldn’t skim his gaze over her bared flesh. At a jaunty angle, she wore a small bonnet with light blue flowers, and he didn’t want to think about removing it and unpinning her ebony hair to see if it was as long as it had been when he’d left.
“The buggy’s over here,” she said, as though acutely aware of the discomfort threatening to resettle between them.
“Let me get my horse. He’s in the cattle car.”
“Trust you to go to the trouble of bringing your horse when Uncle Houston could provide you with one easily enough.”
Houston Leigh had made his living breeding, raising, and selling horses. Rawley figured few in the state didn’t have at least one stallion, mare, or gelding that came from Leigh stock, including the one that was waiting for him. “Why leave good horseflesh behind?” Especially when he and the stallion were comfortable with each other, knew each other’s quirks. He bent down to retrieve his saddle—
“Rawley Cooper!”
He barely had time to plant his feet and prepare himself before Maggie May Leigh had launched herself at him. He caught her and swung her around, relishing the tight band her arms made as they circled his neck, sent his hat flying. Houston’s oldest daughter had taken after her mother, small and petite. If he hadn’t known how stubborn and determined she could be, he might have feared he could break her, towering over her as he did.
“Put me down, you fool. I’m not a little girl anymore.”
She certainly wasn’t, but he’d known that before he left. He did as ordered, then reached down, snatched up his hat, and settled it back on his head, grateful some things never changed. Based on what he thought his age was, she was five years younger than he was, had clung to his shirttails until Faith had come along and become their little shadow.
“Brat,” he groused, teasing her with the pet name he’d bestowed upon her when they were kids, gamely taking the smack to his shoulder she delivered before stepping back.
The hem of her slim black skirt dusted her ankles, and a neat black bow was knotted at the collar of her white shirtwaist. Atop her pinned-up blond hair sat a small, undecorated black hat, that of a woman with a mission. Her green eyes twinkled. “I was afraid I was going to miss you.”
“How’d you even know I was coming in?” A stupid question in retrospect. The members of this family kept no secrets from one another, which was the reason he always held close his own.
“I’m a reporter. It’s my business to know what’s happening around here. The family is going to give you a chance to settle in tonight, then we’ll all be over for dinner tomorrow.”
“I’m looking forward to it.” And he meant it. The Leigh clan was an immense, rowdy, rambunctious group of people who knew how to make a person feel right at home.
Reaching out, her brow furrowed, sadness mirrored in her eyes, she clutched his arm, her fingers creating shallow dents in his jacket. “I’m so sorry about Uncle Dallas.”
His gut clenched as though she delivered the words along with a solid blow to his midsection. A cold shiver of dread skittered up his spine. He hadn’t experienced this level of trepidation since he was a boy and had been unable to defend himself. “Dallas? What happened to Dallas?”
Her eyes widening with alarm, she looked at Faith. “Y’all didn’t tell him?”
“Ma didn’t want him worrying when it wouldn’t change anything,” Faith said, her face a mask of guilt.
“What the hell is going on, Faith?” he demanded, watching as emotions warred over her features—whether to be belligerent because of his tone or sympathetic to it—but he also spotted the worry, the concern, and maybe even a measure of fear. She crossed her arms over her chest as though needing to gird herself against whatever was going to roll off her tongue.
“Pa’s been having some pains in his chest. You know they have to be bad for him to mention them to anyone. Doc thinks it’s his heart. Pa thinks it’s something he ate. But he passed out on the range a few days ago. Doc says he has to take it easy.”
Which was the reason he’d been sent the telegram—because he was well and truly needed here. Suddenly he was hit with guilt for ever leaving in the first place. “I’ll get my horse.”
He said his good-byes to Maggie before reaching down to snag his saddle. With long strides that ate up the distance between him and the rear of the train, he approached the pinto that had already been unloaded for him. He’d always been partial to the spotted ponies ever since the Leigh brothers gave him one the first Christmas he spent with them more than a quarter of a century earlier. This latest, Shadow, he’d gotten from Houston shortly before he left. He flipped two bits to the station attendant before taking hold of the bridle. “Thanks, Charlie.”
“Good to have you home, Rawley.”
“Good to be home.” A bit of a lie as he wished the circumstances were different.
He caught up with Faith, already sitting in the buggy tugging on her gloves, tossed his saddle and saddlebags in the compartment at the back, and secured Shadow there. The vehicle rocked as he climbed up onto the bench seat beside the girl who had constantly trailed after him when he was a boy. Without thinking, he reached for the reins, his hand brushing against hers as she did the same. They both froze. He hated their twin reactions because a time had existed when she’d nestled her hand snugly in his, when all he’d ever wanted was to protect her.
“I can drive,” she said tartly.
“I know you can. I’m just being a gentleman.”
She turned her head and held his gaze. “I’ve gotten used to doing for myself.”
“You’ve always done for yourself, Faith. You’re the most stubborn gal I ever met. You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
Fire darted out of those dark brown eyes and was quickly extinguished. She primly folded her hands in her lap. “Go on then.”
He didn’t argue further, didn’t want to take time for it, but simply snatched up the reins, slapped them against the rumps of the two horses, and felt the tension ease a little as they got under way. “I’m anxious to get to the ranch. How bad is Dallas really?”
“Why won’t you call him Pa?”
Because the man he’d known as Pa when he was a boy had been a mean, vindictive son of a bitch who had taken advantage of his mother, abducting her from the Shawnee people and getting a child on her that he hadn’t wanted. Even after all these years, even knowing the man was dead, Rawley would still recoil and feel sick to his stomach when memories of him and that time in his life surfaced. Dallas might have raised him, but Dallas wasn’t his pa. In Rawley’s eyes he’d always been too big, too bold, as majestic as the land. Rawley had never felt worthy of acknowledging the man as his father. “He’s not my pa,” he said simply.
“But you call our mother Ma.”
For the longest he’d simply known her as the pretty lady. When she’d opened her arms and heart to him, he’d gone to her with all that he was, desperate to fill the ache that lingered after his own mother—a kind, gentle soul who had loved him—died. “That’s different.”
“Care to explain how?”
“Not really. How bad off is Dallas?” he asked again.
She sighed heavily, obviously not pleased with his response or dogged determination to get back on topic, and he almost smiled because she’d always had far less patience with him than he’d had with her.
“Mostly he’s just ornery because the doc doesn’t want him doing anything strenuous. You know Pa. I don’t think he’s ever sat still for a moment in his life.”
Except for the time when he’d almost died, but that was before Faith had come along.
“Is he sitting still?”
“Mostly he’s wandering through the house, but at least he’s not riding the range. He was by himself when he toppled from his horse. We don’t know how long it was before someone ran across him.”
Once more his gut tightened. He didn’t want to think about Dallas passing over to the great beyond. As though sensing the direction of his thoughts, Faith patted his knee. “He claimed it was just the heat and maybe it was. To look at him, you wouldn’t know anything had happened.”
But something had happened, and Rawley hadn’t been there—because of the woman sitting beside him, someone for whom inappropriate thoughts and feelings had blossomed, and he hadn’t been sure he could keep them in check. When she’d challenged him one night, he’d realized his restraint was thinly tethered and could easily snap. Where would they be then?
He’d grown up in the bosom of her family, knew himself not to be worthy of her. So he’d left. To protect her, to protect himself. Yet he couldn’t tell her all that. Instead, he settled into mentally berating and beating himself up for making himself even more unworthy by not staying and being the man he needed to be, the man Dallas Leigh had raised him to be.
Glancing over at her, he was struck by how much he’d missed her, how very little he knew about what had transpired with her since he’d left. It seemed no matter how far or fast he traveled, she was always there. During the years he’d been gone, he’d only ever written letters to Ma, received news from her. Whenever he arrived at the next town, he’d send her a telegram to let her know he was doing all right and a postcard to give her a sense of his surroundings. It became easier three years ago, when Congress authorized using half of the back of the postcard for scrawling notes. He no longer had to sit down and write out a lengthy letter to her. A few lines, short and sweet, was all he needed to keep her apprised of his situation.
“What are you doing these days, Faith? Your oil wells come in?” After Spindletop, she’d been optimistic they might find oil on some of the Leigh spread and had begun working with oilmen who had the skills to help her locate it.
“They never amounted to much,” she said. “I lost interest in them. These days I’m mostly just looking after the ranch.”
He wasn’t surprised she was in charge of the spread. She was the logical choice, would inherit all of it someday. “How’s that going?”
She latched on to the opportunity to talk about something other than themselves, to wax on about the cattle, the goings-on with the men, the ones who had passed, the ones who had retired. Listening with interest, absorbing the sound of her voice, warmed him in ways nothing else did.
The road from town hadn’t changed much. Barbed wire lined both sides of it, wire he’d restrung and repaired countless times, wire that had changed the cattle industry. The days of the long cattle drives were behind them. They just had to get the cattle to a train. He wondered if a time would come when there wouldn’t be any cowboys at all. Sometimes he felt like a dying breed.
He turned the horses from the road onto a narrower path that passed beneath an archway bearing the two D’s that marked the brand Dallas had begun using when he’d married Cordelia McQueen, known as Dee among her family and friends. Not that Rawley had ever called her that. From the moment she’d made him hers, she’d been Ma.
Eventually the house came into view. “Just as hideous as I remember,” he said with fondness. It was a monstrosity, had the look of a castle on the prairie. Dallas had built the massive structure more than thirty years earlier in anticipation of the arrival of his mail-order bride. Only destiny had found Amelia Carson falling in love with Houston Leigh when he’d been sent to Fort Worth to fetch her on Dallas’s behalf.
“When I was younger, I always felt like a princess living there,” Faith said quietly.
“Dallas sure spoiled you like you were one.”
“You did your fair share of spoiling. It’s a wonder I learned to walk the way you carried me everywhere.”
Surprised, he glanced over at her. “You remember that?”
She shook her head. “No, but Ma told me often enough. ‘That Rawley Cooper would never let you out of his sight.’ Apparently I ensured it by constantly holding my arms up to you.”
Her voice held teasing, but his watching out for her had been a serious thing. He’d been responsible for Cordelia Leigh losing her first baby—no matter that everyone said it wasn’t his fault. He knew the truth of it and had been determined that nothing was going to happen to take her beloved daughter from her.
As they neared the house, he could see the outbuildings, all the activity going on. Work on the Leigh spread never seemed to slow or stop. He imagined he’d be able to pick up the rhythm as though he’d never been away.
Then he spotted Dallas and Ma sitting on the front porch on the bench swing, moving slowly, lazily, an unfamiliar scruffy hound resting nearby. He barely had time to realize that a coverall-clad little girl in boots was sitting between them before Ma had shoved herself to her feet. He brought the buggy to a halt—
Everything seemed to happen at a speed that made it impossible to comprehend.
The child was rushing down the steps. “Mama!”
Racing after her, the dog bounded off the porch.
Faith quickly clambered out of the buggy, dashed forward, snatched the girl up before she got too close to the horses, and swung her around, their laughter echoing joyously on the air.
Setting the brake, Rawley climbed off the bench, his feet hitting the ground with a thud, stirring up the dust, his body no longer seeming connected to his brain, moving independently of any thoughts he might have.
Suddenly arms were around his back, squeezing tightly, holding him close. His ma. His ma was there, welcoming him home. Damn, but he’d missed her, which he figured was probably obvious to her since his hug was a little too strong. He’d always loved the fragrance of her, the warmth of her. She was all that was good and clean in his life.
Wrapping her hands around his upper arms, she leaned back and smiled at him. Her face contained a few more wrinkles, her dark hair a few more strands of gray, but damn if she wasn’t a sight for sore eyes. “You’re looking good,” she said, so much tenderness woven into her voice that if he wasn’t a grown man, he might have wept.
When she released her hold on him and stepped back, Dallas moved in, his dark hair and mustache sprinkled with white, but he still looked capable of commanding the world as he pumped Rawley’s hand, slapped his shoulder. “Welcome home, son.”
Son. Dallas had called him that through the years more times than he could count, his throat always tightening as the truth bombarded him: He wasn’t the man’s son. Dallas’s son was lying in a grave beneath a nearby windmill because of Rawley’s cowardice. Still, he responded with a brusque nod, grateful Dallas appeared more robust than he’d expected.
A corner of Dallas’s mouth shifted up. “Faith give you that bruise coming up on your cheek?”
He’d hoped her punch hadn’t left a mark, but considering how tender his cheek felt, he figured it would look worse tomorrow. “Seems she took exception to the way I left.”
“She did indeed.”
“She told me about your ticker but, Dallas, you’re not that old.”
Dallas laughed. “Son, I’m the oldest man I know.”
He was sixty-three, which was fairly ancient for the life he’d lived, but Rawley couldn’t help but believe—hope—he had a few more years left in him.
Rawley might have offered more words but he was distracted, his attention focused on Faith and the imp perched on her hip who reminded him of Faith when she’d been about that size. The child was talking nonstop, words he couldn’t hear, but Faith merely nodded and smiled, her eyes occasionally widening as though she were impressed.
Faith must have felt his gaze boring into her, because she finally looked over at him, and a deep scarlet blush crept up her face, peaked at her cheeks. Her smile withering as she began sauntering over alerted him that he hadn’t seen a true grin from her since he’d arrived, not that he’d really expected one. The last time they were together he could have handled things better. He realized that now.
The dog sniffing his legs grew bored and wandered off. Her parents parted like they were the Red Sea and she was Moses. She angled up that pert little chin of hers. Her brown eyes held a challenge and a threat—as though she feared he might do something to cause harm to the child she held, the one who had called her Mama. When the hell had she gotten married, and why the hell hadn’t anyone told him?
“Callie, this is your uncle Rawley.”
Even knowing what the introduction would entail hadn’t prepared him for the way the words battered him—a series of uppercuts to his heart. Then the sprite smiled at him and his chest threatened to implode, the tightness of it making it nearly impossible to draw in a breath. She was her mother all over again, sweet, innocent, pure. Waving her fingers at him, she nestled her head against Faith’s shoulder.
“This is my daughter.”
“I gathered as much.” He hadn’t meant for the words to come out so terse, but a thousand questions bombarded him. “Congratulations. I didn’t realize you’d gotten married.”
“I didn’t.”