The Pretender (6 page)

Just that, and it pleased him way more than it should have. Why did he care one way or the other what
Sam’s granddaughter thought of the part of the world he’d chosen to make his home?

Because Sam cares.

Then, because he wasn’t in the habit of lying to himself:
Because it’s your home, too.

And because she reminds you of Heather.

Damn. There it was. And he had no idea why. This granddaughter of Sam’s with the improbable name of Sunshine Wells looked nothing like Heather Whitlock,
and there was no reason in the world why he should suddenly find himself thinking about the woman…

…that got away?

But she hadn’t “got away.” He’d let her go.
He’d
walked away. Big difference.

Broke your heart, then?

Had she? What did a broken heart feel like? It had hurt, sure, leaving her, but he somehow thought a broken heart would be a deeper kind of hurt, the kind that
couldn’t be gotten over as easily as he’d gotten over Heather. And he
had
gotten over her. Of that much he was certain.

Oh, yeah? Then why did this woman—Sunny—trigger all your old defenses? Guilt, maybe? Or…regret?

Guilt…maybe. Although, the last he’d heard, Heather had married her law partner and was living happily ever after in Boston, so evidently her heart hadn’t been broken beyond
repair, either. And as for regret…no. He’d made the right decision. Staying together would have been disastrous for both of them. He shook his head.
I did the right thing.

“What, you don’t think so?”

He realized Sunny was looking at him, her expression disbelieving.

“How can you not?” she went on, while he was bringing himself back from his unexpected stroll down memory lane.
“I’ve never seen anything like this—ever. It’s just…amazing.”

He gave a little grunt of apology. “Sorry…I was thinking of something else. Beautiful? Sure, I think it’s beautiful. It’s my home.”

Home.
She was silent for a moment, and the word seemed to echo in the space between them—as it had that day so long ago when he’d spoken it to Heather. The day he’d realized the place that was
part of him, body and soul, would never—
could
never—be
her
home.

“Have you always lived here?”

“Except for when I was away at college, yeah.” He braced himself for the next question:
Do you think you will always live here?
Prepared to answer her as he’d answered Heather:
It’s where I belong.

But she only said, “Where was that?”

“Yale, for a year. Then back to California.
Cal Poly—San Luis Obispo.”

“Yale? Wow.”

This time, her little gasp of surprise only amused him, since he’d expected it. “It was Sam’s idea, and since he was the one paying for it, I went along to please him. A year was enough, though. I was glad to get back to California.”

“So, what’s your degree in?”

“I have two, actually. Business and agriculture. That was Sam’s idea,
too. I was working on my master’s in business, but then Sam needed me, so…I came home.”

“Sam…um, m-my grandfather—you said he paid for your education? Why? That seems…”

“Well…he practically raised us—my sister and me.” He heard her waiting silence and hitched a shoulder. “My mom started working for Sam before I was born. My sister was just two…almost three. My mom runs the house for
him,” he explained, tossing her a glance.

“So…she lives there? At the ranch.”

He nodded, then waited for more, and he could feel her looking at him, all thought of focal points evidently forgotten. “You probably have questions,” he prompted gently. “It’s okay to ask.”

She gave a small laugh and faced the front again. “Yeah…okay. So…who all is there now? At the ranch, besides
your mother, and, I assume, your sister, and…”

“Not my sister. Cheyenne’s…away.” He shifted uncomfortably, because he knew what she was really asking.
Who will I be meeting? When will I get to meet my grandfather?
“At the moment,” he said on an exhalation, “there’s just Rachel, and—”

“Rachel?”

The eagerness in her voice made him smile. “Your cousin—another one of Sam’s granddaughters.
Then there’s her baby, Sean, and—” He glanced over at her then. “Okay, I don’t know how much Alex told you…”

“Not very much. Only that…m-my grandfather wanted to meet me, and that if I wanted to meet him, I should come to the ranch. That’s all. That…and the letter Sam wrote.”

He heard that note in her voice again, and wished he wasn’t driving so he could see if the fear he heard was
in her eyes, too.

While he was thinking how to begin to fill her in on what she was walking into, she burst out, “It’s not about the money. That’s not why I came. It’s
not.
”

“I believe you,” he said gently, and he could almost feel her vibrating with tension, clear across the width of the truck. He wondered if that’s all it was, that she was afraid he’d take her for a fortune hunter.
She had no way of knowing he wasn’t about to judge her, or any of the others, either. The way he figured, they all had their reasons for answering Sam’s summons—one way or the other—and whatever those reasons were, they were no business of his.

Chapter 3

A
bby settled back and once more focused her eyes on the twists and turns of the road ahead, willing herself to relax. Reminding herself that Sam Malone’s granddaughter, Rachel, was Sunny’s cousin, not hers. Sunny’s family, not hers.

More family, looking forward to meeting Sunny. And instead…I have to tell them she’s dead.

“So, tell me,” she said, clearing her
throat, “about Rachel.”

“It’s kind of a long story.” He glanced her way, then tilted his head toward the windshield as the asphalt ribbon of highway abruptly straightened and widened out to multiple lanes. “You can probably forget about focal points from here on in. It’s freeway from here—until we get to the valley, anyway.”

“Thank God.” She shifted abruptly in her seat, half facing
him as she prompted, “So…this cousin…”

“Rachel.” He nodded, then was silent for a moment as he seemed to gather his thoughts and absently massaged his right shoulder. He let out a huff of laughter. “Well, for one thing, she’s about as different from you as I guess it’s possible to be and still be related by blood.”

Abby felt a jolt of alarm.
Does he suspect? Am I that different?
“What…do
you mean?”

Again, he seemed to choose his words carefully. “Her grandmother was Sam’s first wife—Elizabeth. Their son, Sean, Rachel’s father, was killed in Southeast Asia when Rachel was a baby. Rachel’s mother was from Vietnam—a refugee. They’d met in the Philippines. After she died, too, Rachel’s grandmother, Elizabeth, brought the child to America—she was about four by that time—and raised
her.”

He paused, and Abby cleared her throat and nodded. The tension inside her eased a little as she saw where this was going. “So, that would make her half Vietnamese. I’m guessing she’s tiny and dark, and I’m—”

“Definitely not, yeah.” She heard amusement in his voice as he finished it for her, although the half of his face she could see remained impassive. “Don’t let her size fool
you, though.” He rubbed his shoulder again, and threw her a quick, wry smile. “Rachel is one tough lady.”

Which I’m not so much,
Abby thought.
Don’t let my size fool you.
Aloud, she said, “And she has a baby?”

Sage nodded. “Sean—he’s a little over a month old now. Cute little guy.”

“Is his father there, too? At the ranch?”

“No.” She saw the corner of his mouth tighten. “Rachel’s
husband was the son of a big-time gangster down in L.A.—head of the Delacorte Cartel. After the son got himself killed in a shootout with federal agents, the father—Carlos—kept Rachel pretty much a prisoner. She was pregnant and afraid her father-in-law was planning on killing her and taking her son. She managed to escape from him, but got stranded out in the desert. Then…she went into labor.”

“My God,” Abby breathed.

He nodded again. “Fortunately, a deputy sheriff from San Bernardino found her in time to deliver her baby in his patrol car.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Yeah. That’s what I mean about her being tough. Anyway, afterward…the sheriff—his name’s J.J. Fox, by the way—brought her and the baby to the ranch, thinking they’d be safe there.” Once more he paused, and the
corner of his mouth lifted intriguingly.

Gazing at him, Abby found herself fascinated once more by the play of muscles over the strong bones of his face. She said, “I’m guessing…they weren’t?”

“They are now,” he said softly.

He went on, then, to tell her about the day Carlos Delacorte had come for his grandson, leaving out the part Sam himself had played in bringing down Carlos’s
chopper and saving Rachel from being kidnapped—or worse.

“You were
shot?
”

The sting of horror in her voice brought it all back, but he didn’t like to talk about that. Didn’t like remembering the
thump
of impact that had spun him around and dropped him like a rag doll, and the fear he’d felt, the helplessness…but oddly, no pain. Not then.

“A flesh wound,” he said with a shrug,
resisting the urge to rub again at the still-healing scar on his right shoulder where a Delacorte gunman’s bullet had torn through muscle but miraculously missed hitting bones and vital organs. “J.J. was the one who got the worst of it.” He stretched his lips in a smile. “Not counting the bad guys.”

“J.J.—that’s the sheriff, right? So he was…what, protecting Rachel?”

“Well…it started
out that way, because she was a witness to the shootout where her husband and those two feds were killed. But…” He smiled, then, for real, the warmth of it going all the way down to his belly. “Let’s just say it’s a whole lot more than that now. He’s there with Rachel and the baby, in fact, and probably will be, for a while.”

“At the ranch?”

He nodded. “While his leg heals, at least.
High-powered rifle bullet took out a section of bone in his leg—they almost took the leg off, but Sam wouldn’t hear of that. Told the docs to do whatever they had to do to save it, no matter what it cost or whether insurance would cover it. J.J.’s had a couple of surgeries on the leg already, and looking at more before they’re done. They’re taking bone from his thigh to graft into the gap the bullet
left.”

“Wow,” Sunny said faintly.

Sage glanced at her. “I guess it’s a lot to take in.”

She gave an uneasy laugh. “It’s like something out of a movie. It doesn’t even seem real.”

“Yeah,” he said, with a soft laugh of his own, “sometimes it seems that way to me, too. Like it happened to somebody else, you know? A long time ago.”

She didn’t answer, although he could
feel her eyes on him. He didn’t look over at her; didn’t want to risk direct eye contact. He’d already given away more of himself than he ever did with strangers. Than he had in a good many years, anyway—since he’d learned better.

Since…Heather?

“Trust me,” he said dryly, “it’s not like that, most of the time. Normally, ranch life is pretty dull stuff.”

She settled back with a
soft huff of laughter. “To you, maybe. To me it’s like another world. I mean that literally—like an alien planet.”

He nodded. “I can see how that would be.”

Then she was silent for a long time. He’d begun to wonder if she’d fallen asleep when she suddenly said, “Are there any more? Besides Rachel, I mean.”

“Sam’s grandchildren?” She nodded. He could only throw her a quick glance,
not long enough to interpret the look on her face, only long enough to get an impression. What he felt was a sense of profound
hunger
that reminded him of a little kid looking in a candy store window. He smiled at that notion, because he could guess how hard it must be to get her mind around all this—finding out she had a bunch of relatives she hadn’t known about. “Besides you and Rachel, you
mean.” Again, she didn’t reply, and after a moment he went on. “Yeah, there are a couple more from Sam’s third wife, but we haven’t heard from them yet.”

There was another silence, not quite as long as before, and then: “Do you have a family?”

“You mean, am I married? Kids?” He shook his head. “No, but I’ve got a lot of family—on my mother’s side, anyway. Don’t know anything about
my father’s. More relatives on Mom’s side than I know what to do with—they have a big family reunion every few years. People come from all over, bring their campers…stay all weekend.”

He heard the hiss of an exhalation. “I can’t even imagine what that’s like. To have family. I’ve never—”

He threw her another glance but her head was bowed and he saw only the curtain of her hair. Something
twisted oddly inside his chest. He said softly, “But you do now.”

She’d been nervous, had butterflies before, of course she had. In her business, they came with the territory. She’d even been so nervous before a performance, she’d thrown up—oh, many times. Nearly every performer she knew got stage fright to one degree or another, whether they were rookies or old-timers. And not one of
them, including Abby, would trade the business they were in for something less stressful. It was like the song: “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

But this—this was something different. Exciting, yes, but not in a good way. This was feeling anxious and fearful and helpless and…small.

Small.
Yes, and as she sat beside Sage in his big white pickup truck, peering through the windshield
for her first glimpse of the place she was coming to, the place that was supposed to—that
might
—be her new home, it hit her. She was a child again.

She was…oh, maybe six, and she was riding in the backseat of the social worker’s car, being driven to yet another foster home. Shivering inside, trying desperately not to wet her pants, hands knotted tightly together in her lap, staring at her
feet in a brand-new pair of sneakers. Her feet were sticking straight out in front of her, jerking rhythmically up and down. And her thoughts were a pitiful prayer:
Please let them be nice… Please let them like me… Maybe this time they will keep me.

It infuriated her to be thrust back to such a time and place, to feel again like the wretched, miserable child she’d been then—except for the
part about wetting her pants, thank God. But as angry as it made her to feel such vulnerability when she’d thought she was long past that, she knew there was nothing she could do to change the way she felt. As a therapist had told her long ago when she was still in the system, angry and rebellious about the way it had failed her:
Feelings can’t be controlled, Abigail; only actions.

That
day, she’d set about learning how to control her actions—in a word, to
act.
It had probably saved her life.

She hoped it would save her now.

“Almost there,” Sage said, because it had been a long time since either of them had spoken.

She settled back with an exhalation, a breathy laugh. He glanced at her and she looked at him and smiled. And again he felt that odd turning inside
his chest. “Nervous?” he asked. And then: “You shouldn’t be.”

She gave a little snort of laughter. “Easy for
you
to say.”

He acknowledged that with a nod and a half smile. He felt her eyes resting on him. After a moment she asked, “Have you ever been to New York?”

“The city?”

She nodded, still intently watching him.

“Yes, I have—several times. When I was at Yale.”

“How did you feel the first time you saw it?”

He gave a soft laugh. “Overwhelmed.” He shook his head and added, “But it’s not the same. For one thing, I was with a bunch of friends.”

“Well, that makes a big difference.”

“It does.” He threw her another glance. “But on the other hand, I didn’t have people waiting for me with open arms, ready to welcome me into the family.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she looked away. “Maybe that’s part of the problem.”

“Why’s that?”

She gave another of those little snorts—laughter without amusement. “Oh, like, no pressure, or anything.”

“Pressure? Why? You don’t have anything to prove.”

“Don’t I?”

He glanced at her remembering she’d said she was a dancer. “It’s not like this is an audition.
You’ve got the job. You’re Sam’s granddaughter—nothing can change that.”

She fell silent, and in the silence was something he couldn’t name. It reminded him of the way the forest goes quiet when the predator walks. And it made him wonder about the woman sitting beside him…wonder why so beautiful a woman should be so insecure, so fearful. Made him itch to know the Sunny Wells she didn’t let
the world see, made him burn to ask questions his ingrained reserve would not let him ask.

He drove in silence as deep as hers, disturbed in ways he didn’t understand.

“So, this is it,” Abby said, as they turned left onto a paved but unlined road.

Sage nodded. “June Canyon Road. The ranch is a few miles farther up.”

She didn’t answer, but her heart quickened as she gazed
at the granite peaks that lay ahead, seeming to block their path. An illusion, as she’d already discovered. There would be a hidden canyon, a winding road leading to…what?

What lies ahead…for me? What will happen when I tell them about Sunny? Will they hate me? Blame the messenger?

Oh, God…I hope they’ll understand.

The paved road arrowed straight between barbed wire fences bordering
pastures where dark-colored cattle grazed, then entered a swamplike wilderness of trees Abby didn’t know the names of, many fallen and rotting, some half-submerged in water. They swept across a bridge over a small, sluggish river, and there were more fields, some freshly plowed, some filled with green grass and wildflowers. Then the road began to climb a slope covered with rocks and brush
and small rounded evergreen trees.

“Over there—that’s tribal land.” Sage pointed as the road wound upward. “Some of my mom’s family live there.”

“Tribal land.” She frowned with the effort to corral her wandering thoughts. “You mean like a…reservation?”

The side of his mouth lifted in what she somehow knew was not a smile. “No. The word
reservation
implies restrictions—kind of
has a bad history with us, if you can understand that. When I say tribal land, I mean just that. It belongs to the tribe. As it always has—it’s the site of one our historic villages. It was called
yitiyamup,
in case you wanted to know.” He nodded toward the windshield. “There’s another old village site where the ranch is now.”