“I don’t like being lied to,” she said.
“I know.” Josh came over to her. He reached up as if to touch her, then pulled his hand back.
“Look, why don’t you just sit down for a bit, make yourself comfortable,” he said. “Alex and I will go out back, grab some wood, get a fire going in the fireplace. Or look around, if you like. This is a nice place.”
“Yours?” she asked.
“The family’s. It’s where we come when we want to have a long ride on horseback, and a destination with no outside interference. It’s really a very nice place to decompress.”
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Penelope wasn’t certain what she’d do next, but she would appreciate some time alone to pace and think. “It is chilly in here. A fire would feel good.”
Josh and Alex looked at each other, each with an expression somewhat akin to panic.
“Here.” Josh peeled out of his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “You sit tight, sweetheart and we’ll be back inside before you know it with enough wood to get the fire going. I don’t want you to be cold.”
He bundled her up and set her down on a kitchen chair. Then the men went outside, and Penelope gave them just long enough to go around the house. She got to her feet and reached to lift Josh’s jacket off of her. Oh, God, she could smell him on it, and having the leather wrapped around her was nearly as good as having him enfold her in his arms.
This will never do.
She needed to get her head straight, to deal with this…this manipulation. How dare Kate Benedict lie to her and presume to rearrange her life without so much as a by-your-leave?
Penelope shook her head. She couldn’t believe that Kate would leave her stranded out in the middle of nowhere. There had to be more of a trick to it than that.
“Well, hell. I’ve got my cell phone.” She wanted to kick herself for not thinking of that straight off. She pulled the device out of the small fanny pack she’d borrowed from Susan. Flipping it open, she looked at the display.
“No signal. Maybe if I move outside.” She opened the door and stepped back out into the afternoon sunshine. It was cooler here than it had been in Lusty. How far did one travel if one spent twenty minutes in a helicopter? She shook her head and looked down at the cell phone’s display. Still no signal.
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She couldn’t see any high ridges anywhere that would impede the cell phones operation. In fact, she thought they were
on
a ridge of some sort.
The ground wasn’t too hard, and she thought there’d been rain in the last day or so. Had it rained in Lusty before she’d arrived?
Penelope shaded her eyes as she scanned the area. Twenty minutes by helicopter could put her some distance from civilization, but surely Grandma Kate wouldn’t really have done that, would she?
Then Penelope closed her eyes and envisioned that flight, filtering out her nerves. They’d taken off, headed toward the north, then a gentle curve to the east, then south, and finally west.
That had to mean she wasn’t very far from Lusty, at all. Likely only a few miles away, she’d bet.
All she had to do was walk south east, and she’d be back in town in no time at all. In fact, if she set off immediately, she’d bet she would make it in time for afternoon tea.
She imagined the look on Kate Benedict’s face when she waltzed in and asked for a cuppa. “Strand me, will you? Rearrange my life.
Treat me like a flaming chess piece.” Penelope closed her mouth, the sound of her British accent echoing in her ears.
She hadn’t felt this upset in years. Right at the moment, she couldn’t see past the emotions roiling through her, the same emotions she’d felt that long-ago summer day when her mother had taken her to Heathrow airport and turned her over to the airline staff.
Penelope inhaled deeply. “Right. Let’s get walking. I bet we have a cell phone signal in ten minutes, tops.” She turned and gave one last glance at the lovely-looking cabin, then resolutely turned and, using the sun and time of day for reference, faced southeast.
Putting one foot in front of the other, she headed off to take back control of her life.
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Chapter 21
Alex whipped his head left, then right, and then cursed.
Usually a stack of wood awaited just out back of the cabin, piled against the western wall. Not this time. Alex knew there’d be some in the shed. He’d helped fill the damn thing the last time he’d been up there.
Of course, the cabin wasn’t in the middle of good bush land, which meant any wood for the fireplaces had to be purchased commercially and brought in. It was, he thought, one of the few extravagances his family indulged in.
Josh touched his arm just as he took a step toward the shed. “This was taped under the instrument panel in the copter,” he said, holding an envelope up.
“Read it,” Alex urged.
He’d been a little slow on the uptake today. It hadn’t been until Henry was setting the helicopter down by the cabin that he realized where they were and that they’d been set up.
Here he’d been worried when he’d arrived at the Big House that morning that Grandma Kate would blister their ears for taking advantage of Penelope, and all along, apparently, she’d been hoping that they would. Grandma Kate had played matchmaker with them all!
He’d be mad as hell about that if he didn’t love Penelope so damn much.
Josh opened the envelope and pulled out a single sheet of paper.
He looked at it then gave one surprised bark of laughter.
“Well?”
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Josh smiled up at his brother. “It says, ‘I’ve gone to considerable trouble to engineer this second chance for the two of you with Penelope, when I’d had such a good plan for your first chance with her in the first place. For heaven’s sake, boys, don’t blow it.’ It’s signed, ‘Love, Grandma.’”
“I’ve begun to think that this so-called ecological emergency wasn’t the only thing she’s engineered for us,” Alex said.
“Me, too. I’ve been putting several things together in my head in the last hour.” Josh laughed. “And here I thought we’d escaped Kate’s scrutiny when she didn’t ask us if we were seeing anyone or poke around in our private lives at the restaurant the day she came home.”
“I think we both seriously underestimated her,” Alex said.
“An understatement if ever I heard one,” Josh agreed.
“Let’s go get a couple of armloads of wood and get back to Penelope.”
“She didn’t like the flight,” Josh said. “We’ll have to make other arrangements to get back home. I don’t think she should fly again, under the circumstances.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Alex agreed. “When we decide we’re ready, we’ll use the shortwave in the master bedroom’s armoire and ask Grandma to send someone with a Jeep.”
It only took a short time to trek to the shed. The building was locked, of course. Alex fished out the key from the secret compartment built into the window ledge. Inside, the firewood was stacked high and deep and dry, just as he’d left it. Alex loaded up on logs, and snagged a bundle of kindling, too. Josh also grabbed a good armful of wood. The cabin would be cool at night and in the morning this time of year. It was a little chilly now from having been closed up for the last few weeks.
As Alex headed back toward the house, his gaze sought out the propane tank, just visible at the other side of the house. It took considerable effort and expense to fill the thing, which the family used only for heating water. The small gas generator they’d installed
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provided just enough electricity to operate the water pump and the fridge. The generator chugged away, and the propane hissed from the tank into the house.
“Must have sent the men from the ranch yesterday to get things going,” Alex said. “I wonder how long Kate expects us to stay up here?”
His brother just shook his head. “I’m glad Grandmother is as detail oriented as we are. It means there’s likely food in the fridge, too. And I think she expects to stay here until we straighten things out with Penelope.”
“I hope it doesn’t take long to do that,” Alex said. “It’s been hours since we’ve held her or kissed her, and seriously, I think I’m going into Penelope withdrawal.”
Josh chuckled. “You’re not the only one, brother. Come on, let’s go inside and grovel at the feet of our woman.”
They opened the door and carried the wood into the living room, dumping it into the wood box beside the fireplace. Alex set the bag of kindling on the hearth. It didn’t bother him that Penelope wasn’t in the kitchen where they’d left her. She’d likely gone exploring. Still, he was anxious to start groveling. The sooner she forgave them, the sooner they could have make-up sex.
“Penelope?” He listened, but she didn’t answer him. He glanced over at Josh. His brother looked as curious and concerned as he felt.
Alex headed for the downstairs bathroom, worried that the nausea he knew she’d suffered during the short flight had come back with a vengeance.
The bathroom was empty.
“Penelope?” Josh’s call told him she hadn’t found her way to the upstairs bathroom, either.
“Penelope, where are you?” Alex began to go through the downstairs rooms even as he could hear Josh doing the same thing upstairs.
Josh came down the steps two at a time. “She’s not up there.”
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“She’s not in the
house
.” Alex headed for the front door, not even bothering to close it behind him when he ran outside. He cupped his hands on either side of his mouth as he called Penelope’s name. Then he listened, waiting.
There was no response.
“Damn it, where could she be? She couldn’t have gone far. We only left her alone for a few minutes,” Joshua said.
“Actually it was closer to twenty minutes,” Alex said. “And at least another five while we searched the house.”
“Shit.”
Alex reached out and stopped his brother before he could begin pacing. “Let’s think. She wasn’t very happy about being ‘stranded’
here. So what would she do?”
“She’d leave.” Josh looked at him. “I think Grandmother may have underestimated
her
.”
Alex nodded. “That little bit she threw at us in the restaurant, about not being good enough? It got me thinking. She acted very matter-of-fact when she told us about being sent to live with her granny—about her mother not wanting her.”
“But it’s still a raw and gaping wound for her,” Joshua said. “I picked that up, too.”
“Take that and the dousing she gave us when she read the file on the Legacy Project, I think she’d react first and think later.” When Alex and Josh put their minds to the subject of Penelope, Alex realized they understood her probably better than she thought they did.
“And she’s very smart,” Josh said.
“So she would have figured out that to get back to Lusty, she’d need to head southeast,” Alex said.
“But not smart enough to realize how far it actually is, or all the dangers she could be walking into.”
Alex nodded. He and Josh were usually on the same page when it came to important things. “You’re thinking of the arroyo.”
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“The arroyo, the coyotes, the bears, the jaguars…” Josh said. “It rained last night, over this entire area. I don’t know if it was enough to cause a flash flood, but still, it’s a worry.”
“Okay, new plan,” Alex said. He scanned the ground, walking slowly toward the southeast as he did. About a hundred yards from the house, he saw a footprint in the slightly damp earth. “She
is
heading southeast.”
“New plan?” Josh asked.
“First, we’ll go back inside and grab a couple of rifles. Then we go find her. Then we give her hell for scaring the shit out of us this way.
Then
we grovel.”
“Good plan. Let’s move.”
“Moving,” Alex said.
* * * *
Penelope stopped walking and opened her cell phone. She couldn’t believe it. There was still no signal. A quick check of her watch told her she’d been walking nearly forty minutes. An even quicker check of the sky told her what she’d really hoped not to confirm. The clouds that had moved in about twenty minutes ago were still there, more solid than ever, and she could no longer judge her direction by where the sun was sitting.
The athletic shoes she’d borrowed from Susan were a pretty good fit, but they weren’t her shoes, and her feet were getting a little sore wearing them.
Her grandmother used to scold her that her temper would one day get her into deep trouble. She didn’t want to think that she’d made a huge mistake storming away from the cabin the way she had. Yet the idea niggled.
Penelope pushed the thought aside. This was the new millennium, for goodness sake. It wasn’t as if she was stranded, lost, in the Wild
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West of two centuries past. Surely if she kept walking, sooner or later she’d come upon a road. Or a ranch. Or
something
.
A sound broke the late-afternoon stillness, a high-pitched, funny kind of a sound that could have been a dog in distress but that sent shivers down her spine.
Penelope scanned the area. She’d come down a long gradual hill when she’d left the cabin, but in the last fifteen minutes the ground had leveled out some. And looking around, she could see slow, gradual rises of land in two different directions.
She felt reasonably certain she hadn’t gotten turned around since the sun deserted her.
Just ahead and to the right, a large boulder poked out of the ground. It looked like as good a place as any to sit and let her feet rest.
Would Josh and Alex have discovered her missing by now? More to the point, would they come after her?
She really should have just stayed put. When she’d discovered there was no ecological accident, her emotions had taken over. She’d been so ticked off with the idea that Kate had deceived her, manipulated her so that she’d be left alone with Alex and Josh. That she’d manipulated her just like her mother had done oh, so many years before.