Victoria forced herself to eat. All she wanted to do was lie down on that bed and sleep. How could she still feel so tired? How could she think of getting on that bed? Nick hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they had arrived. He had finished his sandwich now and had simply leaned back in the chair to watch her, to smile at her.
“Eat more, Vic. I want you strong and healthy real soon. When we go back to Glory Town, we’ll run it together. We’ll tell that new guy to hit the road. We don’t need him. You and me. We can do it together. Annie and me, we planned and planned. Someday we’d do this or that. But that day never came. I’m not going to waste time again. Not now that I’ve had a second chance to love someone. You’re so beautiful, Vic. You treat me so nice.”
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“You’re a nice man, Nick.”
When you’re not spaced out like this. Dangerous.
She couldn’t be sure. It was there. It had always been there. Lurking just beneath the surface. She had felt it sometimes. Sensed it.
The human mind was at once fragile and steely. Nick seemed to be in some sort of a balance mode. When he was tipped one way or the other, she couldn’t trust what would happen.
He had said he was going to take her back to town, hadn’t he? Maybe she should be cool and try to relax. Wait him out. Cooperate. To a point, she decided.
To a very fine point.
Licking mayonnaise from her finger, she put a hand to her stomach and sighed. “I’m full. It was nice of you to think of all this, Nick.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot, lady. You make me happy. The way you smile at me. The way you listen when I talk. After we’re married, we’ll have lots of babies. We’ll spend a lot of time just like we are now. Sitting together, talking.”
Married? The stage of his fantasy was much wider than she had imagined.
She had to find some way to pull the curtain on this play, but at the same time she couldn’t force it. “You have it all planned out. Nick, you never even asked me what I want.”
His eyes darkened and he leaned forward. “I know what you think you want. You think you want J. Weston Cooper, super cowboy.” The tone of his voice became slightly menacing. “He has you fooled with his sharp good looks and his skills. I’ve seen you two with each other. He has you fooled. That’s what it is. Women don’t know what they want. Just like Luke had Annie fooled. But I fixed him and then I fixed her.” Satisfied, he sat back.
Words flew around in her head like insects blinded by flame. Fixed. Luke.
Annie. His wife was dead. She had never heard how she died. She had just assumed she had been ill. And Luke, she never heard of him. She wanted to
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scream. Had he killed his wife? No, impossible. Someone would have found out.
He’s crazy, that’s all. And crazy people say crazy things.
Oh God,
she prayed.
Let
that be all this is. Nick is too nice a man to have committed murder. Isn’t he?
“Yep,” he began again and looked directly at her. “I made it look like Wes set the barn on fire by his carelessness. Left a pack of his cigarettes out there. It was easy.
And just like leaving the feed door open. People will find out and they won’t want Wes in town anymore.”
Ice formed in her veins followed by a flash fire of anger. Nick did it. Nick caused her horse to die a slow and painful death. Nick set fire to the barn. It was his fault that so many people were hurt. In his mind he justified his way to get to her. Oh God. The room seemed to twirl. Nausea filled her stomach. She tried to concentrate on his words.
“You’d turn to me. Come to me. I knew it. See, now you’re here. It was easy.
It was hard to undermine him with the other men. Given a little more time, I would have. But it doesn’t matter anymore. We’re together.” He reached over to toy with the collar of her shirt.
He was sicker than she guessed. He would stop at nothing. She had to figure out a way to get out of here. No one was coming. No one knew where this place was. Desperate, she looked around. She’d have to time it right and make another dash for the door. It was the only way. Maybe after he fell asleep, she could get the keys to the truck. It was something to hold on to. And she needed something, crucially.
Pushing her chair back slowly, she smiled. “Can we get some air, Nick? I like to sit on porches. We can sit on the step and watch for the sunset.” Playing along was the only answer right now. She had to act out the game. Drawing on all the strength she had left, she rose. She felt a bubble of laughter catching in her throat.
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Not once since she arrived at Glory Town did she wish she were back home in Virginia, propped up on her feather bed reading a good book and waiting for Ginger, her maid, to bring tea. She did now.
It was as if he had never spoken the dark words. His eyes brightened and he came around to assist her from her chair. When he clasped his hand around hers, it was dry and steady. Hers wasn’t. Together, they walked to the sloping porch and sat, side by side, on the top step.
The fresh air revived her somewhat. Where was Wes? What was he thinking? How would he ever find her? Birds twittered in a nearby tree. Rustling in the brush suggested some wild, free thing ran there. Victoria envied it.
The view from here wasn’t all bad. The old shack sat atop a knoll with a line of trees at the far end. Soon the sun would be setting behind those trees. First a pale gold, then as the sun sank lower, a hazy red. It would appear the woods were on fire. She almost wished they were. What would happen after dark?
Would he expect her to stay here with him…in the one bed cocked in the corner?
She shivered and he mistook it for a chill. He put his arm around her shoulder and rubbed his hand along her arm to warm her. She studied the swirling stitch pattern on the toe of his boots. Felt the too familiar brush of denim against her thigh and was reminded of the strength this man possessed. It would almost be easier to lean into him and give up. But she straightened her shoulders; that wasn’t her style.
“It’s almost dark,” Wes raged and paced the jailhouse and ignored Buck’s sputtering.
“Sit down, boy. You’ve called in his tag number and they’ll send Sally down here the minute she gets back from town. There’s nothing else you can do but wear a hole in the damn floor.”
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“Not enough. Not damn-well enough. In the few short weeks we’ve known each other we’ve been to hell and back.”
“You’ll get through it. You both will. You have to.” The aging man wiped his brow.
Wes’s head flew up and he laughed nastily. The sound of it scared Buck.
“Words of wisdom from you. I could almost be really ticked off with you, Buck. If…Damn.”
“Don’t worry, I’m taking my share of the blame here.
It was a harebrained idea, bringing you two together. Two hotheaded, stubborn people. How’d I know all this was going to happen? Now stop that damn pacing.”
“I can’t. If sit down, I’ll take off like a rocketship.”
“What else can you do? They could be anywhere. You want to be headed off in another direction when we do get word? Sit down.”
Wes stalked even faster.
“I don’t think he’ll hurt her. No, I don’t think he will. I figure he fancies himself in love with her. She’ll be able to handle him if she’s careful.” Buck offered consoling words in his own way, not believing one of them. He had made a bad judgment call. Keeping Nick at Glory Town might just prove to be the worst mistake he had ever made. And he had made plenty in his lifetime.
“Careful,” Wes exploded. “Careful. Lord, she was half dead just three days ago. Where the hell is Sally?”
“Shopping. You know these dames when they get it in their heads to shop, they shop. All day. Calm down. The shells in your belt will go off. Here. Take a slug of this.”
Wes downed the whiskey without tasting it and set it back on the table only to watch it teeter and fall to the floor. He should never have left her alone in that 190
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hospital. But how the hell was he ever supposed to dream up a kidnapping?
How was he supposed to know that Nick would take her away? The woman he loved was in the hands of a madman. Pictures formed in his mind that tore at his gut. Pictures that scared a man who couldn’t be scared.
If he couldn’t do something soon, he would blow apart. His fingers itched to get around Nick’s throat and squeeze. But it was his fault. Wasn’t a man who loved a woman supposed to keep these things from happening to her?
Buck got up and looked out the door. The tourists milled around the dusty street and up and down the shady boardwalks. Happily, they watched and looked around. They experimented with roping and riding.
The children seemed all round-eyed and a bit overwhelmed with the reenactors who were at this moment portraying the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Billy and some of the boys were giving kids rides on their horses at the other end of town. Everything seemed normal. Nothing was.
He saw Sally hurrying toward the jailhouse. He hesitated telling Wes she was on her way for fear he would rush into the street and start shaking the information out of her. And what if she didn’t have any that would help?
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Chapter Twelve
Wes heard Sally before he saw her.
“What’s all the fuss about? Wendy said for me to get up here right away.
Some kind of emergency.” She held her new hat on her head with one hand and picked up her long skirt with the other.
Wes pushed past Buck and grabbed Sally by both arms. Buck pushed them inside the jailhouse. He didn’t need the whole of Glory Town in on this. God forbid anyone would figure out what an old fool he was. What havoc his good intentions had wreaked. He understood Wes’s panic and fury, for it matched his own, but Glory Town had to go on as usual.
Wes waited, impatient while Sally arranged herself in a chair and looked up expectantly. And a little annoyed.
“Victoria. Victoria’s missing from the hospital. Since earlier this afternoon.
From what information we can get, Nick picked her up. But they’re not here.”
Sally’s eyes grew grave. She heard the restrained panic in Wes’s voice. She reached up and grabbed at her new red hat as it slid from her head to the floor.
Idly she picked it up and began rotating it in her hands.
Testily, Wes grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “What?”
“You’d better sit down, Wes.” When she realized he was still standing in front of her waiting, she used a sterner tone of voice. “Wes. Sit down.”
Irritated, he jerked a chair over and straddled it, pulling it up close to her.
“Talk,” he ordered, none too gently.
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“I was going to say something to you about all of this but with everything that’s been going on…and I thought I could be way off base with this… Haven’t things become complicated? First that child’s horse dies and then the barn catches on fire with poor little Katie and Joe inside. It’s almost as if fate isn’t smiling on us anymore. Maybe if you and Victoria got married and started raising a passel of kids. You know we’ve all been talking about that and…”
Wes growled low in his throat. “You’re rambling, Sally. Get on with it.”
“Okay. Okay. My bet is that Nick took Victoria out of the hospital with the idea that they would set up housekeeping together.” She sat back a little to be better able to gauge Wes’s reaction to that bit of news.
His eyes widened and then narrowed to dangerous slits. She rushed on with her story. “Ever since that nasty business with Annie, well, I told you Nick has a hard time sometimes…”
She paused. She felt as if she were somehow betraying Nick.
“Well, he has a hard time telling the difference between reality and fantasy.
It’s never been serious before. Almost a joke really. Thinking he really is a cowboy and this is really 1870. That things can simply be settled with a gun and without regard for the law. That he can just do whatever he wants without using logic. When he’d talk like that, I would just listen and pat his shoulder. What else was I supposed to do? He’s harmless.”
“Harmless?” Wes roared. “He took her.”
“Was harmless,” she corrected herself and then looked to Buck for help. She didn’t like the edge to Wes’s looks or the way he seemed ready to spring into action and choke something. “I hardly think he dragged her out of there stuffed inside a laundry bag or anything as dramatic. Surely then the hospital would have seen something weird going on. She probably went with him willingly enough.”
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Buck asked Sally as gently as he could, “Do you have any idea where he could have taken her?”
“Sure. But I can’t tell you till you hear the whole story. I don’t want that man hurt. He won’t hurt her. And Nick’s become, well, sort of like my kid and he trusts me. He tells me things. Some I don’t believe. Some I fear are true.”
“You’ll tell me where they are or…” Wes controlled his temper only because he knew he would get nowhere fast if he didn’t. He’d have to trust Sally’s judgment. He’d have to wait.
“All right, but I have to start from the beginning. Move back, both of you.
You’re smothering me.” Both men exchanged an exasperated look and gave Sally some space.
She looked at Buck. “Years ago, when Nick and Annie first came here, I liked them instantly. With our trailers backing up to the same lot, we became friends and neighbors as well as co-workers. There’s a life all its own on the back lot that neither of you knows exists. Family.” She eyed him squarely and added in a near whisper, “You know how important family is.”
Buck grunted and shrugged his aging shoulders. “I know you all are close out there. That’s exactly the way it should be. Go on.”