“Well, Daddy’s dead, isn’t he?” Roberta said pointedly, and she smiled.
“We could make it a threesome, if you like,” Bert offered, sitting up with his shirt half-off.
Michelle’s expression was eloquent. “If I speak to my minister...”
“Shut up, Bert!” Roberta said shortly, and her eyes dared him to say another word. She looked back at Michelle with cold eyes and got to her feet. “Come on, Bert, let’s go to your place.” She grabbed him by the hand and had led him to the bedroom. Apparently their clothes were in there.
Disgusted beyond measure, Michelle went into her room and locked the door.
She could hear them arguing. A few minutes later they came back out.
“I won’t be here for dinner,” Roberta said.
Michelle didn’t reply.
“Little torment,” Roberta grumbled. “She’s always watching, always so pure and unblemished,” she added harshly.
“I could take care of that,” Bert said.
“Shut up!” Roberta said again. “Come on, Bert!”
Michelle could feel herself flushing with anger as she heard them go out the door. Roberta slammed it behind her.
Michelle had peeked out the curtains and watched them climb into Bert’s low-slung car. He pulled out into the road.
She closed the curtains with a sigh of pure relief. Nobody knew what a hell those two made of her life. She had no peace. Apparently Roberta had been seeing Bert for some time, because they were obviously obsessed with each other. But it had come as a shock to walk in the door and find them kissing the day after Michelle’s father was buried, to say nothing of what she’d just seen.
* * *
The days since then had been tense and uncomfortable. The two of them made fun of Michelle, ridiculed the way she dressed, the way she thought. And Roberta was full of petty comments about Michelle’s father and the illness that had killed him. Roberta had never even gone to the hospital. It had been Michelle who’d sat with him until he slipped away, peacefully, in his sleep.
She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling. It was only a few months until graduation. She made very good grades. She hoped Marist College in San Antonio would take her. She’d already applied. She was sweating out the admissions, because she’d have to have a scholarship or she couldn’t afford to go. Not only that, she’d have to have a job.
She’d worked part-time at a mechanic’s shop while her father was alive. He’d drop her off after school and pick her up when she finished work. But his illness had come on quickly and she’d lost the job. Roberta wasn’t about to provide transportation.
She rolled over restlessly. Maybe there would be something she could get in San Antonio, perhaps in a convenience store if all else failed. She didn’t mind hard work. She was used to it. Since her father had married Roberta, Michelle had done all the cooking and cleaning and laundry. She even mowed the lawn.
Her father had seemed to realize his mistake toward the end. He’d apologized for bringing Roberta into their lives. He’d been lonely since her mother died, and Roberta had flattered him and made him feel good. She’d been fun to be around during the courtship—even Michelle had thought so. Roberta went shopping with the girl, praised her cooking, acted like a really nice person. It wasn’t until after the wedding that she’d shown her true colors.
Michelle had always thought it was the alcohol that had made her change so suddenly for the worse. It wasn’t discussed in front of her, but Michelle knew that Roberta had been missing for a few weeks, just before her father was diagnosed with cancer. And there was gossip that the doctor had sent his young wife off to a rehabilitation center because of a drinking problem. Afterward, Roberta hadn’t been quite so hard to live with. Until they’d moved to Comanche Wells, at least.
Dr. Godfrey had patted Michelle on the shoulder only days before the cancer had taken a sudden turn for the worse and he was bedridden. He’d smiled ruefully.
“I’m very sorry, sweetheart,” he’d told her. “If I could go back and change things...”
“I know, Daddy. It’s all right.”
He’d pulled her close and kissed her forehead. “You’re like your mother. She took things to heart, too. You have to learn how to deal with unpleasant people. You have to learn not to take life so seriously....”
“Alan, are you ever coming inside?” Roberta had interrupted petulantly. She hated seeing her husband and her stepdaughter together. She made every effort to keep them apart. “What are you doing, anyway, looking at those stupid smelly cattle?”
“I’ll be there in a moment, Roberta,” he called back.
“The dishes haven’t been washed,” she told Michelle with a cold smile. “Your job, not mine.”
She’d gone back inside and slammed the screen.
Michelle winced.
So did her father. He drew in a deep breath. “Well, we’ll get through this,” he said absently. He’d winced again, holding his stomach.
“You should see Dr. Coltrain,” she remarked. Dr. Copper Coltrain was one of their local physicians. “You keep putting it off. It’s worse, isn’t it?”
He sighed. “I guess it is. Okay. I’ll see him tomorrow, worrywart.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
* * *
Tomorrow had ended with a battery of tests and a sad prognosis. They’d sent him back home with more medicine and no hope. He’d lasted a few weeks past the diagnosis.
Michelle’s eyes filled with tears. The loss was still new, raw. She missed her father. She hated being at the mercy of her stepmother, who wanted nothing more than to sell the house and land right out from under Michelle. In fact, she’d already said that as soon as the will went through probate, she was going to do exactly that.
Michelle had protested. She had several months of school to go. Where would she live?
That, Roberta had said icily, was no concern of hers. She didn’t care what happened to her stepdaughter. Roberta was young and had a life of her own, and she wasn’t going to spend it smelling cattle and manure. She was going to move in with Bert. He was in between jobs, but the sale of the house and land would keep them for a while. Then they’d go to Las Vegas where she knew people and could make their fortune in the casino.
Michelle had cocked her head and just stared at her stepmother with a patronizing smile. “Nobody beats the house in Las Vegas,” she said in a soft voice.
“I’ll beat it,” Roberta snapped. “You don’t know anything about gambling.”
“I know that sane people avoid it,” she returned.
Roberta shrugged.
* * *
There was only one real-estate agent in Comanche Wells. Michelle called her, nervous and obviously upset.
“Roberta says she’s selling the house,” she began.
“Relax.” Betty Mathers laughed. “She has to get the will through probate, and then she has to list the property. The housing market is in the basement right now, sweetie. She’d have to give it away to sell it.”
“Thanks,” Michelle said huskily. “You don’t know how worried I was....” Her voice broke, and she stopped.
“There’s no reason to worry,” Betty assured her. “Even if she does leave, you have friends here. Somebody will take the property and make sure you have a place to stay. I’ll do it myself if I have to.”
Michelle was really crying now. “That’s so kind...!”
“Michelle, you’ve been a fixture around Jacobs County since you were old enough to walk. You spent summers with your grandparents here and you were always doing things to help them, and other people. You spent the night in the hospital with the Harrises’ little boy when he had to have that emergency appendectomy and wouldn’t let them give you a dime. You baked cakes for the sale that helped Rob Meiner when his house burned. You’re always doing for other people. Don’t think it doesn’t get noticed.” Her voice hardened. “And don’t think we aren’t aware of what your stepmother is up to. She has no friends here, I promise you.”
Michelle drew in a breath and wiped her eyes. “She thought Daddy was rich.”
“I see,” came the reply.
“She hated moving down here. I was never so happy,” she added. “I love Comanche Wells.”
Betty laughed. “So do I. I moved here from New York City. I like hearing crickets instead of sirens at night.”
“Me, too.”
“You stop worrying, okay?” she added. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“I will. And thanks.”
“No thanks necessary.”
* * *
Michelle was to remember that conversation the very next day. She got home from school that afternoon and her father’s prized stamp collection was sitting on the coffee table. A tall, distinguished man was handing Roberta a check.
“It’s a marvelous collection,” the man said.
“What are you doing?” Michelle exclaimed, dropping her books onto the sofa, as she stared at the man with horror. “You can’t sell Daddy’s stamps! You can’t! It’s the only thing of his I have left that we both shared! I helped him put in those stamps, from the time I was in grammar school!”
Roberta looked embarrassed. “Now, Michelle, we’ve already discussed this....”
“We haven’t discussed anything!” she raged, red-faced and weeping. “My father has only been dead three weeks and you’ve already thrown away every single thing he had, even his clothes! You’ve talked about selling the house... I’m still in school—I won’t even have a place to live. And now this! You...you...mercenary gold digger!”
Roberta tried to smile at the shocked man. “I do apologize for my daughter....”
“I’m not her daughter! She married my father two years ago. She’s got a boyfriend. She was with him while my father was dying in the hospital!”
The man stared at Michelle for a long moment, turned to Roberta, snapped the check out of her hands and tore it into shreds.
“But...we had a deal,” Roberta stammered.
The man gave her a look that made her move back a step. “Madam, if you were kin to me, I would disown you,” he said harshly. “I have no wish to purchase a collection stolen from a child.”
“I’ll sue you!” Roberta raged.
“By all means. Attempt it.”
He turned to Michelle. “I am very sorry,” he said gently. “For your loss and for the situation in which you find yourself.” He turned to Roberta. “Good day.”
He walked out.
Roberta gave him just enough time to get to his car. Then she turned to Michelle and slapped her so hard that her teeth felt as if they’d come loose on that side of her face.
“You little brat!” she yelled. “He was going to give me five thousand dollars for that stamp collection! It took me weeks to find a buyer!”
Michelle just stared at her, cold pride crackling around her. She lifted her chin. “Go ahead. Hit me again. And see what happens.”
Roberta drew back her hand. She meant to do it. The child was a horror. She hated her! But she kept remembering the look that minister had given her. She put her hand down and grabbed her purse.
“I’m going to see Bert,” she said icily. “And you’ll get no lunch money from me from now on. You can mop floors for your food, for all I care!”
She stormed out the door, got into her car and roared away.
Michelle picked up the precious stamp collection and took it into her room. She had a hiding place that, hopefully, Roberta wouldn’t be able to find. There was a loose baseboard in her closet. She pulled it out, slid the stamp book inside and pushed it back into the wall.
She went to the mirror. Her face looked almost blistered where Roberta had hit her. She didn’t care. She had the stamp collection. It was a memento of happy times when she’d sat on her father’s lap and carefully tucked stamps into place while he taught her about them. If Roberta killed her, she wasn’t giving the stamps up.
But she was in a hard place, with no real way out. The months until graduation seemed like years. Roberta would make her life a living hell from now on because she’d opposed her. She was so tired of it. Tired of Roberta. Tired of Bert and his innuendoes. Tired of having to be a slave to her stepmother. It seemed so hopeless.
She thought of her father and started bawling. He was gone. He’d never come back. Roberta would torment her to death. There was nothing left.
She walked out the front door like a sleepwalker, out to the dirt road that lead past the house. And she sat down in the middle of it—heartbroken and dusty with tears running down her cheeks.
Two
M
ichelle felt the vibration of the vehicle before she smelled the dust that came up around it. Her back was to the direction it was coming from. Desperation had blinded her to the hope of better days. She was sick of life. Sick of everything.
She put her hands on her knees, brought her elbows in, closed her eyes, and waited for the collision. It would probably hurt. Hopefully, it would be quick....
There was a squealing of tires and a metallic jerk. She didn’t feel the impact. Was she dead?
Long, muscular legs in faded blue denim came into view above big black hand-tooled leather boots.
“Would you care to explain what the hell you’re doing sitting in the middle of a road?” a deep, angry voice demanded.
She looked up into chilling liquid black eyes and grimaced. “Trying to get hit by a car?”
“I drive a truck,” he pointed out.
“Trying to get hit by a truck,” she amended in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Care to elaborate?”
She shrugged. “My stepmother will probably beat me when she gets back home because I ruined her sale.”
He frowned. “What sale?”
“My father died three weeks ago,” she said heavily. She figured he didn’t know, because she hadn’t seen any signs of life at the house down the road until she’d watched his truck go by just recently. “She had all his things taken to the landfill because I insisted on a real funeral, not a cremation, and now she’s trying to sell his stamp collection. It’s all I have left of him. I ruined the sale. The man left. She hit me....”
He turned his head. It was the first time he’d noticed the side of her face that looked almost blistered. His eyes narrowed. “Get in the truck.”
She stared at him. “I’m all dusty.”
“It’s a dusty truck. It won’t matter.”
She got to her feet. “Are you abducting me?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “Okay.” She glanced at him ruefully. “If you don’t mind, I’d really like to go to Mars. Since I’m being abducted, I mean.”
He managed a rough laugh.
She went around to the passenger side. He opened the door for her.
“You’re Mr. Brandon,” she said when he climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door.
“Yes.”
She drew in a breath. “I’m Michelle.”
“Michelle.” He chuckled. “There was a song with that name. My father loved it. One of the lines was ‘Michelle,
ma belle.
’” He glanced at her. “Do you speak French?”
“A little,” she said. “I have it second period. It means something like ‘my beauty.’” She laughed. “And that has nothing to do with me, I’m afraid. I’m just plain.”
He glanced at her with raised eyebrows. Was she serious? She was gorgeous. Young, and untried, but her creamy complexion was without a blemish. She was nicely shaped and her hair was a pale blond. Those soft gray eyes reminded him of a fog in August...
He directed his eyes to the road. She was just a child, what was he thinking? “Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Do you speak French?” she asked, curious.
He nodded. “French, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Russian, German and a handful of Middle Eastern dialects.”
“Really?” She was fascinated. “Did you work as a translator or something?”
He pursed his lips. “From time to time,” he said, and then laughed to himself.
“Cool.”
He started the truck and drove down the road to the house he owned. It wasn’t far, just about a half mile. It was a ranch house, set back off the road. There were oceans of flowers blooming around it in the summer, planted by the previous owner, Mrs. Eller, who had died. Of course, it was still just February, and very cold. There were no flowers here now.
“Mrs. Eller loved flowers.”
“Excuse me?”
“She lived here all her life,” she told him, smiling as they drove up to the front porch. “Her husband worked as a deputy sheriff. They had a son in the military, but he was killed overseas. Her husband died soon afterward. She planted so many flowers that you could never even see the house. I used to come over and visit her when I was little, with my grandfather.”
“Your people are from here?”
“Oh, yes. For three generations. Daddy went to medical school in Georgia and then he set up a practice in cardiology in San Antonio. We lived there. But I spent every summer here with my grandparents while they were alive. Daddy kept the place up, after, and it was like a vacation home while Mama was alive.” She swallowed. That loss had been harsh. “We still had everything, even the furniture, when Daddy decided to move us down here and take early retirement. She hated it from the first time she saw it.” Her face hardened. “She’s selling it. My stepmother, I mean. She’s already talked about it.”
He drew in a breath. He knew he was going to regret this. He got out, opened the passenger door and waited for her to get out. He led the way into the house, seated her in the kitchen and pulled out a pitcher of iced tea. When he had it in glasses, he sat down at the table with her.
“Go ahead,” he invited. “Get it off your chest.”
“It’s not your problem...”
“You involved me in an attempted suicide,” he said with a droll look. “That makes it my problem.”
She grimaced. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Brandon....”
“Gabriel.”
She hesitated.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not that old,” he pointed out.
She managed a shy smile. “Okay.”
He cocked his head. “Say it,” he said, and his liquid black eyes stared unblinking into hers.
She felt her heart drop into her shoes. She swallowed down a hot wave of delight and hoped it didn’t show. “Ga...Gabriel,” she obliged.
His face seemed to soften. Just a little. He smiled, showing beautiful white teeth. “That’s better.”
She flushed. “I’m not...comfortable with men,” she blurted out.
His eyes narrowed on her face, her averted eyes. “Does your stepmother have a boyfriend?”
She swallowed, hard. The glass in her hand trembled.
He took the glass from her and put it on the table. “Tell me.”
It all poured out. Finding Roberta in Bert’s arms just after the funeral, finding them on the couch together that day, the way Bert looked and her and tried to touch her, the visit from her minister...
“And I thought my life was complicated,” he said heavily. He shook his head. “I’d forgotten what it was like to be young and at the mercy of older people.”
She studied him quietly. The expression on his face was...odd.
“You know,” she said softly. “You understand.”
“I had a stepfather,” he said through his teeth. “He was always after my sister. She was very pretty, almost fourteen. I was a few years older, and I was bigger than he was. Our mother loved him, God knew why. We’d moved back to Texas because the international company he worked for promoted him and he had to go to Dallas for the job. One day I heard my sister scream. I went into her room, and there he was. He’d tried to...” He stopped. His face was like stone. “My mother had to get a neighbor to pull me off him. After that, after she knew what had been going on, she still defended him. I was arrested, but the public defender got an earful. He spoke to my sister. My stepfather was arrested, charged, tried. My mother stood by him, the whole time. My sister was victimized by the defense attorney, after what she’d already suffered at our stepfather’s hands. She was so traumatized by the experience that she doesn’t even date.”
She winced. One small hand went shyly to cover his clenched fist on the table. “I’m so sorry.”
He seemed to mentally shake himself, as if he’d been locked into the past. He met her soft, concerned gaze. His big hand turned, curled around hers. “I’ve never spoken of it, until now.”
“Maybe sometimes it’s good to share problems. Dark memories aren’t so bad when you force them into the light.”
“Seventeen going on thirty?” he mused, smiling at her. It didn’t occur to her to wonder how he knew her age.
She smiled. “There are always people who are in worse shape than you are. My friend Billy has an alcoholic father who beats him and his mother. The police are over there all the time, but his mother will never press charges. Sheriff Carson says the next time, he’s going to jail, even if he has to press charges himself.”
“Good for the sheriff.”
“What happened, after the trial?” she prodded gently.
He curled his fingers around Michelle’s, as if he enjoyed their soft comfort. She might have been fascinated to know that he’d never shared these memories with any other woman, and that, as a rule, he hated having people touch him.
“He went to jail for child abuse,” he said. “My mother was there every visiting day.”
“No, what happened to you and your sister?”
“My mother refused to have us in the house with her. We were going to be placed in foster homes. The public defender had a maiden aunt, childless, who was suicidal. Her problems weren’t so terrible, but she tended to depression and she let them take her almost over the edge. So he thought we might be able to help each other. We went to live with Aunt Maude.” He chuckled. “She was not what you think of as anybody’s maiden aunt. She drove a Jaguar, smoked like a furnace, could drink any grown man under the table, loved bingo parties and cooked like a gourmet. Oh, and she spoke about twenty languages. In her youth, she was in the army and mustered out as a sergeant.”
“Wow,” she exclaimed. “She must have been fascinating to live with.”
“She was. And she was rich. She spoiled us rotten. She got my sister into therapy, for a while at least, and me into the army right after I graduated.” He smiled. “She was nuts about Christmas. We had trees that bent at the ceiling, and the limbs groaned under all the decorations. She’d go out and invite every street person she could find over to eat with us.” His face sobered. “She said she’d seen foreign countries where the poor were treated better than they were here. Ironically, it was one of the same people she invited to Christmas dinner who stabbed her to death.”
She winced. “I’m so sorry!”
“Me, too. By that time, though, Sara and I were grown. I was in the...military,” he said, hoping she didn’t notice the involuntary pause, “and Sara had her own apartment. Maude left everything she had to the two of us and her nephew. We tried to give our share back to him, as her only blood heir, but he just laughed and said he got to keep his aunt for years longer because of us. He went into private practice and made a fortune defending drug lords, so he didn’t really need it, he told us.”
“Defending drug lords.” She shook her head.
“We all do what we do,” he pointed out. “Besides, I’ve known at least one so-called drug lord who was better than some upright people.”
She just laughed.
He studied her small hand. “If things get too rough for you over there, let me know. I’ll manage something.”
“It’s only until graduation this spring,” she pointed out.
“In some situations, a few months can be a lifetime,” he said quietly.
She nodded.
“Friends help each other.”
She studied his face. “Are we? Friends, I mean?”
“We must be. I haven’t told anyone else about my stepfather.”
“You didn’t tell me the rest of it.”
His eyes went back to her hand resting in his. “He got out on good behavior six months after his conviction and decided to make my sister pay for testifying against him. She called 911. The police shot him.”
“Oh, my gosh.”
“My mother blamed both of us for it. She moved back to Canada, to Alberta, where we grew up.”
“Are you Canadian?” she asked curiously.
He smiled. “I’m actually Texas born. We moved to Canada to stay with my mother’s people when my father was in the military and stationed overseas. Sara was born in Calgary. We lived there until just after my mother married my stepfather.”
“Did you see your mother again, after that?” she asked gently.
He shook his head. “Our mother never spoke to us again. She died a few years back. Her attorney tracked me down and said she left her estate, what there was of it, to the cousins in Alberta.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Life is what it is. I had hoped she might one day realize what she’d done to my sister. She never did.”
“We can’t help who we love, or what it does to mess us up.”
He frowned. “You really are seventeen going on thirty.”
She laughed softly. “Maybe I’m an old soul.”
“Ah. Been reading philosophy, have we?”
“Yes.” She paused. “You haven’t mentioned your father.”
He smiled sadly. “He was in a paramilitary group overseas. He stepped on an antipersonnel mine.”
She didn’t know what a paramilitary group was, so she just nodded.
“He was from Dallas,” he continued. “He had a small ranch in Texas that he inherited from his grandfather. He and my mother met at the Calgary Stampede. He trained horses and he’d sold several to be used at the stampede. She had an uncle who owned a ranch in Alberta and also supplied livestock to the stampede.” He stared at her small hand in his. “Her people were French-Canadian. One of my grandmothers was a member of the Blackfoot Nation.”
“Wow!”
He smiled.
“Then, you’re an American citizen,” she said.
“Our parents did the whole citizenship process. In short, I now have both Canadian and American citizenship.”
“My dad loved this Canadian television show,
Due South.
He had the whole DVD collection. I liked the Mountie’s dog. He was a wolf.”
He laughed. “I’ve got the DVDs, too. I loved the show. It was hilarious.”
She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I have to go. If you aren’t going to run over me, I’ll have to fix supper in case she comes home to eat. It’s going to be gruesome. She’ll still be furious about the stamp collection.” Her face grew hard. “She won’t find it. I’ve got a hiding place she doesn’t know about.”
He smiled. “Devious.”
“Not normally. But she’s not selling Daddy’s stamps.”
He let go of her hand and got up from his chair. “If she hits you again, call 911.”
“She’d kill me for that.”
“Not likely.”
She sighed. “I guess I could, if I had to.”