Finding Stefanie (31 page)

The words, so incongruous with the surreal world around her, made her feel sorry, deeply sorry, for the people who determined their self-esteem by headlines. No wonder Lincoln had panicked, had felt lost.

The thought panged inside her. Wasn’t that exactly what she had done? Based her identity on who she wasn’t? Or, worse, who other people decided she was?

Ranch Hand. Defender of the Oppressed. Horse Whisperer. Leading Lady. As she stood there next to Macey and Haley, it hit her. These were God’s words of love to her. All these names told her what she had—a family, friends, a gift with animals, even the ability to care for someone. She was all these things . . . and more.
These names, blended together, gave her life meaning and purpose and told her she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Who
she was supposed to be.

She put her hand to her throat, watching Nick lean over and take Piper’s hand, watching Haley pull Gideon down to whisper in his ear.

Lord, I’m sorry I thirsted for something more when You’ve given me so much—all I needed, all I dreamed of, right here. I’m sorry I didn’t hear Your voice. Please forgive me. Thank You for calling me Beloved, whether I’m in jeans . . . or a golden dress
.

And with or without Lincoln.

She glanced at him. Tonight he had the world in the palm of his hand, not a hint of his disease showing. He looked like a bona fide hero with those wide shoulders and tailored suit. His whiskers were a perfect two-day growth, his smile whiter than she’d ever seen it.

He took her breath away, and as she watched the press shower him with questions, she understood the truth. She’d probably never get over Lincoln Cash. She’d always, in some small way, or maybe a large way for a long while, pine for him.

His friendship, however, had made her see what she had. Had made her look at her life, at her friends. While she didn’t for a second believe that Lincoln loved her, being courted for a moment by someone as amazing as Lincoln Cash had made her find herself again. He’d made her see that she was beautiful and special, and tonight, he’d showed her she could belong in both worlds.

And prefer hers.

Prefer the slow, honest work of training her horses, of tending the land, as she eked out a life each day with her family. Lincoln
had shown her the other side of the fence, and it had been a gift because she realized how much she liked it on her side.

The press lined up along the red carpet. Stefanie waved and smiled as she walked into the theater, following Macey, Haley, Gideon, and Libby. Music from
Unshackled
, a country song, played over the speakers as she took in the cool air of the theater. Gideon was just scooting into his row of seats, his hand on Libby’s back, when Stefanie’s stomach began to twinge.

“You okay, Stef?” Libby asked as she sat down.

“I don’t know. My stomach is queasy.”

Gideon nodded. “Mine too.” As if to confirm it, he shifted in his seat. “I’m actually starting to feel nauseous.”

“Should we go?” Libby asked, disappointment so clear on her face that Stefanie’s heart went out to her.

“Maybe I’ll go up to the house. Lie down for a while.” Gideon leaned over and spoke to Macey, who glanced at him with concern. Then he stood up and scrambled out of the row.

“I’m going with you,” Stefanie said. She winked at Libby. “No worries. I’ll bet we can talk to the theater owner and get another showing.”

Piper and Nick sat down beside Libby. Piper didn’t look so hot either.

“You okay, Piper?”

She nodded, but her expression didn’t reflect her words.

Gideon led the way from the theater, through the crowd. As he and Stefanie waited in the lobby, he looked ashen. She didn’t blame him. She suddenly felt as if someone had taken a scalpel to her insides.

“What was in those ribs?” Gideon said, his voice tight.

“You guys okay?” Lincoln had approached, as if he’d seen her and followed her out. “Are you not staying for the show?” The light dimmed in the lobby as one of the attendants closed the inner doors to the hall.

“Something we ate, maybe,” Stefanie said. She looked at Gideon. “You go ahead to the house. I’ll be right there.”

He didn’t need further permission.

And then Stefanie was standing there, alone with Lincoln. If she didn’t know him better, hadn’t seen him radiant and confident and knowing that he could act his way out of a ring of armed terrorists, she’d think he was nervous. He swallowed, watching Gideon leave, and every ounce of his confidence seemed to follow the kid right out the doors.

He turned back to her. His mouth moved a few times before words emerged. “Thank you for coming.”

“I had this cute outfit I was dying to wear somewhere,” she said, allowing a smile to creep into her face.

He actually looked more in pain. “Yeah. But you look pretty great in your jeans and Stetson too.”

She flushed but pressed her hands against her stomach, pretending it might be her illness.

Concern flashed across Lincoln’s face. “What’s the matter?”

“I have an upset stomach. Maybe from supper. Or . . .” She lifted a shoulder. “Nerves. I’ve never had my picture taken so many times.”

“You get used to it.”

Do you, Linc? Do you get used to smiling, hiding the man inside?
“I think I’ll sneak up to the house and lie down, if that’s okay.”

He nodded with an expression that looked like relief. Until she turned and he touched her arm. “Wait—”

“Lincoln, we’re starting.” Dex stood at the door of the theater, and Stefanie saw frustration pass over Lincoln’s face.

“Okay.” He lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, probably influenced by all the swooning heroines in the movie posters around him. “I’ll be up to check on you in a while.”

The timing couldn’t be more perfect if she had sent engraved invitations. Her audience was here, waiting, including the press. No one recognized her; no one even expected her.

No one would stop her.

And she would give them the story of a lifetime.

She stood on the porch of Lincoln Cash’s beautiful home, watching him disappear into the ostentatious theater, and waited.

Her star would come to her.

CHAPTER 22

L
INCOLN SAT IN THE
air-conditioned theater, watching himself on-screen, or rather ignoring himself, and thinking of Stefanie.

He’d experienced a slight panic when he saw her get up and start to leave. All he could think of was how he’d let her go, without telling her how he felt.

Only . . . despite the dress and the way she’d said she believed in him, right here in this theater, despite the way she flushed tonight when he told her she was beautiful . . . what if she didn’t want him?

With a whoosh, he realized it was this exact thought that kept the words glued to his chest.
I love you
should be freeing, not paralyzing. But maybe it took a special kind of strength to rip those words from inside, to lay out everything he wanted to be with her and let her write the ending.

If he didn’t tell her right now, he might never find that strength again. If she responded with even the faintest of smiles, he’d sort out the rest later. He wanted her with him. On Spotlight Ranch. Even as that truth sank in, another followed it. He wanted Haley
and Macey and Gideon here too. And horses, lots of them, and someday little dark-haired cowboys of his own.

He wanted it so badly, it loosened the words from the hard place inside him and they floated to the surface.

But what about his MS?

Lincoln watched himself on the screen, saw the smile that always seemed too brilliant, the stunts he knew were fake, and heard Stefanie’s words:
“You bring to life all the dreams and hopes of your characters so well that it makes us feel that we know you and that we can be like you. You make us feel that we, too, can overcome those things in our lives that scare us.”

Maybe it was time for Lincoln Cash to step off the screen and into life. To tell the world about the real-life challenges facing him and thousands of others every day.

“But God used the man’s blindness to bring him to Jesus. To healing. And He’ll do the same in our lives.”
Pastor Pike’s words from that first sermon filtered back to him, accompanied by the soundtrack on the screen.

God had used Lincoln’s disease—not to destroy his life but to make him stronger. To make him need God. Because, like the Bible said, when he was weak, that’s when God was strong inside him.

What had Libby said about doing good?
“The only good we do that counts with God is the good we do in faith, in cooperation with Him.”

Lincoln smiled. He wanted that—to do something good and eternal.

Something that would make him respect himself.

And he’d start by being honest. With himself. With Stefanie. With his heart.

He closed his eyes, blocking out the dialogue, the music.
God,
I see now that Stef was right. You’ve been answering my prayers for years. Maybe even now this is an answer—to show me that I can’t be strong without You, but in my weakness, You can use me, make me the man I’m supposed to be. Please forgive me for forsaking You—thank You for not forsaking me. Please use this disease—my triumphs and my defeats—for good in my life and others’. And—
he opened his eyes, smiling at the man he saw on the screen
—help me tell Stef I love her
.

Now.
He felt the press of urgency even as he prayed the words.

Now . . . yes. He loved her, and he wasn’t waiting another minute to tell her.

Getting up, he moved past Dex out of the row and ducked his head as he walked up the aisle. Piper and Nick were shuffling out of their row also. Piper had her hand on her stomach. Lincoln followed them into the lobby.

Nick looked like a man just taken out by a bull, pale and sweaty. “She’s in labor. We gotta get to Sheridan.”

“Oh.”
Good one
. He scrambled for a better response. “Do you need help?”

Piper grabbed his arm. “Find Stefanie. Tell her to meet us there at the hospital.”

He nodded as Nick led his wife toward one of the waiting limos. Lincoln opened the door. “Sheridan hospital,” he said as if he might be talking to a cabbie in NYC.

Nick helped Piper into the backseat and crawled in beside her.

Lincoln closed the door on Piper doing deep breathing. Someday maybe he’d be the one sitting next to a pregnant wife. He nearly ran to the house. “Stef?”

He knew Delia had gone to the movie, but he expected to see Karen in the kitchen amid the population of caterers in white attire
as well as another troupe in the backyard. “Anyone seen Karen?” he asked, thinking that she might have put Stefanie and Gideon upstairs.

He fielded a few negatives, then decided to check himself. The upstairs bedrooms were empty.

Returning to his office, he sat down at the desk. Stefanie had felt pretty bad. . . . Maybe . . . He lifted his phone and let the line at the Silver Buckle ring until he finally put down the receiver.

He dialed again.

She must have been either really sick or sleeping. He guessed an hour had passed since the start of the movie.

He wasn’t sure why, but he tasted a surge of panic. He picked up the phone and dialed the chief security officer. According to him, Stefanie and Gideon hadn’t left. He also reported that he hadn’t seen anyone resembling Gina.

The cell phone on his desk trilled, indicating a voice mail. He picked it up, hoping to hear Stefanie’s voice. But as he listened to the voice of his private investigator, Lincoln felt his heart begin a slow drop to his knees. Gina had been on a jaunt to Vegas and had returned to her home in LA last night.

Maybe Karen had seen Stefanie and Gideon. Lincoln passed the kitchen and climbed the stairs to Karen’s apartment. When he knocked on the door, it cracked open to reveal darkness. “Karen,” he called, feeling like a thief for the way he crept into the room. “Karen?”

He stood there, his heart thumping. Where had she gone?

Crossing to stand at the window, he looked out over his ranch. Dark shadows enveloped the hills, and he could barely make out the curve of the land from the sky.

He was about to go back to the theater when his gaze fell on
a scrapbook, wedged behind the Queen Anne chair next to the window. Remembering all those times when Karen had clammed up about her past, he picked it up.

He turned on the light by the chair. Obeying the sick feeling of panic inside, he sat down and invaded her privacy.

Wedding pictures. Karen and her husband, a good-looking man with a thin face and rectangular wire-rimmed glasses. Taken in the nineties, based on Karen’s Jennifer Aniston haircut. More pictures showed a honeymoon and a first house. Five or six pages later showed Karen with a pregnant belly.

What had happened to this happy couple to produce the quiet, sullen Karen who cooked a mean Denver omelet?

He found his answer near the end of the scrapbook, contained in a series of newspaper articles . . . about Gideon.

Gideon and his role in the accident that had killed Karen’s husband and child and put her in the hospital.

Lincoln shut the book, clicked off the light, and let the ice slide through him.

What was she doing here?

Their conversations rattled him as he remembered bits and pieces from the last couple months.

“I don’t have a family.”

“I needed a job, and this is what I was looking for.”

“I fixed up the leftovers for Stefanie to take home to that nice boy who lives with her.”

Karen had fixed the plate of food the night Stefanie came to dinner. For Gideon.

The vet said that Stefanie’s dog had been poisoned. . . . Could Clancy have eaten poisoned food meant for Gideon?

And the map of the ranch . . .
“Could I keep it? Just in case I might want to go exploring someday?”

Lincoln stood, dropping the scrapbook onto the carpet with a soft thud.

“I’ve always wanted to write a screenplay, maybe be a filmmaker.”

He walked over to the tiny desk, pulled open the drawer, riffled through the papers. The script titled
The Last Ride
lay buried beneath receipts and scraps of paper. He remembered reading it. Rough at best, it had spooked him with its violence, the hopelessness of a story starting with a man driving his car over the edge in a fiery death. An edge like Cutter’s Rock?

Oh, please, let me be wrong
.

But ten years of reading movie scripts based on real-life horror stories told him he wasn’t.
Please, God, help me get there in time. Please . . .

“Call security!” he shouted to the army of caterers as he hustled down the stairs and outside. The movie was still in full swing, a few photographers milling around. He stood at the base of his porch stairs, waiting, but no one came. He grabbed a caterer. “Tell security to meet me at Cutter’s Rock. Hurry!”

He raced to his four-wheeler and gunned it, praying that God would give him one more chance to save the girl.

“This is really kind of you, Karen. Thank you.” How Stefanie could talk with her stomach rampaging like a bull inside her seemed a miracle, but at least she’d had the good sense to take Karen up on her offer to drive her and Gideon home. After discovering him
sprawled on Lincoln’s sofa, she realized that they might as well suffer in their own house.

Lincoln probably wouldn’t notice her absence much anyway.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. He had come out after her and said he’d check on her. He had even told her she looked beautiful. In a Stetson and jeans.

Maybe someday they could be friends. After her heart figured out how to be in the same room with him without breaking.

She wanted to give Karen more than a feeble thank-you, especially after seeing how her own truck was caught in the snarl of cars parked below the house. Thankfully, Karen’s truck was by the service entrance of the house, and she was taking the back way through the fields to the Silver Buckle.

“No problem,” Karen said. She looked tired, her hair pulled back because of her long hours in the kitchen. “I’m just sorry you’re sick.”

“Me too,” Gideon said. He gripped the door handle and gulped air from the open window.

Stefanie stared ahead at the headlights cutting through the darkness. She couldn’t believe she was missing Lincoln’s premiere.

The truck went over a rut, and Stefanie braced her hand on the dash.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Gideon said.

When Karen glanced over at him, Stefanie noticed a strange look flash across her face. A . . . smile?

Gideon doubled over.

Karen hit the brakes.

“What’s wrong?” Stefanie said.

But Karen didn’t answer as she got out, went around to the back of the truck.

Stefanie wanted to crane her neck to watch her, but it was all she could do not to slink back into her seat and cry. She closed her eyes instead. Why, of all days, did she have to get sick today? How she wanted to see Lincoln’s film. But perhaps some things just weren’t meant to be.

She heard Gideon’s door open.

“Get out,” Karen said in a tone Stefanie had never heard from her before.

Stefanie’s eyes snapped open. The pain in her stomach couldn’t compare to the shock of seeing Karen holding a .308 rifle at them. Or Gideon’s face as any remaining blood drained from his expression.

“I said get out.” Karen was talking to Gideon, who had moved slightly in front of Stefanie. It didn’t matter whom she pointed the gun at—from this range, the bullet would tear through Gideon and end up hitting Stefanie.

Stefanie lifted her hands in surrender. “Karen?”

“Get out!”

Gideon was already complying. “Calm down. I’m getting out!” He slid out of the truck, still holding his stomach.

“I don’t understand—”

“Shut up.” Karen tossed Gideon a roll of duct tape. “Tape her hands behind her back.”

“What are you doing?” Gideon stood there as if caught in headlights, blinking.

“I said tie her up.”

Gideon stared at the tape, then looked at Karen. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because someone has to make sure you get what you have coming to you.”

Gideon stumbled, putting his hand out to catch himself on the door.

Karen reacted by pushing the barrel against his head. “Do that again, and I’ll have to rewrite my ending. And I don’t want to do that.”