At Home in Stone Creek (Silhouette Special Edition) (16 page)

He was about to hit the Delete button—writing the piece had been a catharsis—when two things happened at once. His cell phone rang, and somebody knocked hard at the front door.

Simultaneously, Jack answered the call and admitted Tanner Quinn to the house he'd soon be leaving, probably forever.

No more cherry crepes.

No more mutant cat.

No more Ashley.

“Mercer?” Lombard asked affably, “is that you?”

Jack shifted to the Neal Mercer persona, because Lombard knew him by that name, gestured for Tanner to come inside, but be quiet about it.

Ashley was still sleeping, and Jack didn't want to wake her. Leaving was going to be hard enough, without a face-to-face good-bye.

On the other hand, didn't he owe her that much?

“What?” he asked Lombard.

“I've decided on a place for the showdown,” Lombard said. “Tombstone, Arizona. Fitting, don't you think?”

“You're a regular John Wayne,” Jack told him.

Tanner raised his eyebrows in silent question. Jack
shook his head, pointed to his gear bag, waiting just inside the door.

Tanner picked up the bag, carried it out to his truck. The exhaust spewed white steam into the cold, bright air.

Leavin' on a jet plane
…Jack thought.

“Tomorrow,” Lombard went on. “High noon.”

“High
drama
, you mean,” Jack scoffed.

“Be there,” Lombard ordered, dead serious now, and hung up.

Jack sighed and clicked the phone shut.

Glanced up at the ceiling.

Tanner returned from the luggage run, waiting with his big rancher's hands stuffed into the pockets of his sheepskin coat.

“Give me a minute,” Jack said.

Tanner nodded, his eyes full of sympathy.

Jack turned from that. Sympathy wasn't going to help him now.

He had to be strong. Stronger than he'd ever been.

Upstairs, he entered Ashley's room, sat down on the edge of the bed, and watched her for a few luxurious moments, moments he knew he would cherish until he died, whether that was in a day, or several decades.

Ashley opened her eyes, blinked. Said his name.

For a lot of years, Jack had claimed he didn't have a heart. For all his money, love was something he simply couldn't afford.

Now he knew he'd lied—to himself and everyone else.

He had a heart, all right, and it was breaking.

“I love you,” he said. “Always have, always will.”

She sat up, threw her arms around his neck, clung to him for a few seconds. “I love you, too,” she mur
mured, trembling against him. Then she drew back, looked deep into his eyes. “Thanks,” she said.

“For—?” Jack ground out the word.

“The time we had. For not leaving without saying good-bye.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak just then.

“If you can come back—”

Jack drew out of her embrace, stood. In the cold light of day, returning to Stone Creek, to Ashley, seemed unlikely, a golden dream he'd used to get through the night.

He nodded again. Swallowed hard.

And then he left.

 

He was boarding a plane in Flagstaff, nearly two hours later, before he remembered that he hadn't closed the e-mail he'd drafted on Ashley's computer, spilling his guts to his father.

Ashley wasn't exactly a techno-whiz, he thought, with a sad smile, but if she stumbled upon the message somehow, she'd know most of his secrets.

She might even send the thing, on some do-gooder impulse, though Jack doubted that. In any case, she'd know about the damage the toxin was doing to his bone marrow and be privy to his deepest regrets as far as his family was concerned.

She'd know he'd loved her, too. Wanted to spend his life with her.

That shining dream could still come true, he supposed, but a lot of chips would have to fall first, and land in just the right places. The odds, he knew, were against him.

Nothing new there.

He took his seat on the small commuter plane, fastened his seat belt, and shut off his cell phone.

Tanner had been right there when he'd bought his ticket—he'd chosen Phoenix, said he'd probably head for South America from there, and gone through all the proper steps, checking his gear bag and filling out a form declaring that there was a firearm inside, properly secured.

What he
didn't
tell his friend was that he planned to charter a flight to Tombstone as soon as he reached Phoenix and have it out with Chad Lombard, once and for all.

Takeoff was briefly delayed, due to some mechanical issue.

During the wait, Jack switched his phone on again, placed a short call that drew an alarmed stare from the woman sitting next to him and smiled as he put the cell away.

“Air marshal,” he explained, in an affable undertone.

The woman didn't look reassured. In fact, she moved to an empty seat three rows forward. A word to the flight attendants about the man in 7-B and he'd be off the plane, tangled in a snarl with a pack of TSA agents until three weeks after forever.

For some reason, she didn't report him. Maybe she didn't watch the news a lot, or fly much.

Jack settled back, closed his eyes, and tried not to think about Ashley and the baby they might have conceived together, the future they might have shared.

That proved impossible, of course, like the old game of trying not to think about a pink elephant.

The plane lifted off, bucked through some turbulence and streaked toward his destiny—and Chad Lombard's.

 

Carly McKettrick O'Ballivan watched her aunt with concern, while Meg, who was both Carly's sister
and
her adoptive mother—how weird was that?—puttered around the big kitchen, trying to distract Ashley.

Meg was expecting a baby, and the news might have cheered Ashley up, but Carly and her mother-sister had agreed on the way into town to wait until Brad-dad was back from wherever he'd gone.

Unable to bear Ashley's pale face and sorrowful eyes any longer, Carly excused herself and wandered toward the study. She'd set up the computer, she decided. Use this strange morning constructively.

School was closed on account of megasnow, but nothing stopped members of the McKettrick clan when they wanted to get somewhere. Meg had told Carly they were going to town, fired up her new Land Rover right after breakfast, acting all mysterious and sad, buckled a squirmy Mac into his car seat, and off they'd gone.

Carly, a sucker for adventure, had enjoyed the ride into town, over roads buried under a foot of snow. Once, Meg had even taken an overland route, causing Mac to giggle and Carly to shout, “Yee-haw!”

Even the plows weren't out yet—that's how deep the stuff was.

To Carly's surprise, someone had beaten her to the computer gig. The monitor was dark, but the machine was on, whirring quietly away in the otherwise silent room.

She sat down in the swivel chair, touched the mouse.

An e-mail message popped up on the monitor screen.

Since Brad and Meg were big on personal privacy,
Carly didn't actually read the e-mail, but she couldn't help noticing that it was signed, “Love, Jack.”

She barely knew Jack McCall, but she'd liked him. Which was more than could be said for Brad and Meg.

They clearly thought the man was bad news.

Carly bit her lower lip. If Jack had gone to all the trouble of writing that long e-mail, she reasoned, her heart thumping a little, surely he'd intended to send it.

With so much going on—Carly had no idea what any of it actually was, except that it had obviously done a real number on Ashley, so it must be pretty heavy stuff—he'd probably just forgotten.

Carly took a deep breath, moved the cursor, and hit Send.

“Carly!” Meg called, clearly approaching.

Carly closed the message panel. “What?”

Meg appeared in the doorway of the study. “School's open after all,” she said. “I just heard it on the kitchen radio.”

Carly sighed. “Awesome,” she said, meaning exactly the opposite.

Meg chuckled. “Get a move on, kiddo,” she ordered.

“Are there snowshoes around here someplace?” Carly countered. “Maybe a dogsled and a team, so I can
mush
to school?”

“Hugely funny,” Meg said, grinning. Like all the other grown-ups, she looked tired. “I'd drive you to school in the Land Rover, but I don't think I should leave Ashley just yet.”

Carly agreed, with the teenage reluctance that was surely expected of her, and resigned herself to the loss of that greatest of all occasions, a snow day.

Trudging toward the high school minutes later, she
wondered briefly if she should have left that e-mail in the outbox, maybe told Meg or Ashley about it.

But her friends were converging up ahead, laughing and hurling snowballs at each other, and she hurried to join them.

 

Ashley both hoped for and dreaded a call from Jack, but none came.

Not while Meg and the baby were there, and not when they left.

A ranch hand from Starcross brought Mrs. Wiggins back home, and Ashley was glad and grateful, but still wrung out. She felt dazed, disjointed, as though she were truly beside herself.

She slept.

She cooked.

She slept some more, and then cooked some more.

At four o'clock that afternoon, Brad showed up.

“He's gone,” she said, meaning Jack, meeting her taciturn-looking brother at the back door. “Are you happy now?”

“You know I'm not,” Brad said, moving past her to enter the house when she would have blocked his way. He helped himself to coffee and, out of spite, Ashley didn't tell him it was decaf. If he expected a buzz from the stuff, something to jump-start the remainder of his day, he was in for a disappointment.

“Are Ardith and Rachel safe?” she asked.

“Yes,” Brad answered, leaning back against the counter to sip his no-octane coffee and study her. “You all right?”

“Oh, I'm just fabulous, thank you.”

“Ashley, give it up, will you? You know Jack couldn't stay.”

“I also know the decision was mine to make, Brad—not yours.”

Her brother gave a heavy sigh. She could see how drained he was, but she wouldn't allow herself to feel sorry for him. Much. “You'll get over this,” he told her, after a long time.

“Gee, thanks,” she said, wiping furiously at her already-clean counters, keeping as far from Brad as she could. “That makes it all better.”

“Meg's going to have a baby,” Brad said, out of the blue, a few uncomfortable moments later. “In the spring.”

Ashley froze.

Olivia had twins.

Now Meg and Brad were adding to their family, something she should have been glad about, considering that Meg had suffered a devastating miscarriage a year after Mac was born and there had been some question as to whether or not she could have more children.

“Congratulations,” Ashley said stiffly, unable to look at him.

“You'll get your chance, Ash. The right man will come along and—”

“The right man
came
along, Brad,” Ashley snapped, “and now he's gone.”

But at least, this time, Jack had said good-bye.

This time, he hadn't wanted to go.

Small consolations, but something.

Brad set his mug aside, crossed to Ashley, took her shoulders in his hands. “I'd have done anything,” he said hoarsely, “to make this situation turn out differently.”

Ashley believed him, but it didn't ease her pain.

She let herself cry, and Brad pulled her close and
held her, big brother-style, his chin propped on top of her head.

“O'Ballivan tough,” he reminded her. It was their version of something Meg's family, the McKettricks, said to each other when things got rocky.

“O'Ballivan tough,” she agreed.

But her voice quavered when she said it.

She felt anything
but
tough.

She'd go on, just the same, because she had no other choice.

 

Jack arrived in Earp-country at eleven forty-five that morning and, after paying the pilot of the two-seat Cessna he'd chartered in Phoenix, climbed into a waiting taxi. Fortunately, Tombstone wasn't a big town, so he wouldn't be late for his meeting with Chad Lombard.

Anyway, he was used to cutting it close.