Gambling on a Secret (6 page)

“I’m sorry.” Tracy furrowed her brow as if she knew she had avoided answering the entire question, but she didn’t press for more about her parents.

Done cutting hair, Tracy exchanged the scissors for some styling mousse. They grew quiet as Tracy blow-dried Charli’s hair, using a brush to style her new layered look. After she finished, Tracy turned the chair back toward the mirror. “What do you think?”

She didn’t know what to think. She never had her hair this short in the front, except when it had all been short while she was in prison. She hated bangs, and now she had them.

“You don’t like it?”

She ran her fingers through the back, liking the layers. “I don’t know what I expected. I’ll have to get used to the bangs.”

“You have wonderful hair. It just needed a style that works with your curls, but I’m sorry if I missed the mark.”

She met Tracy’s gray eyes and smiled. “Not at all. It’s just that I haven’t had bangs since…for a long time. Thank you. I’ll admit I only made the appointment to find out about Mr. Quinn. But I’m glad I sacrificed my hair for the information.”

“I figured as much when you called.” Tracy sobered, grabbed a vacuum broom, and swept up the hair clippings on the floor. “Dylan’s not a bad man, Miss Monroe. I think he’d be perfect for Blackwell Ranch.” Over the hum of the broom, Tracy went on, “He knows about starting up a ranch. He did it with his own place. As an officer in the Army he had to learn how to manage things and people. And you saw that he’s got talent when it comes to building. He’d know exactly what needs to be done and if the job’s being done right.”

Tracy met her gaze, love for her brother shining in the misty gray of her eyes. She wasn’t trying to pawn him off; she only wanted the best for him.

Charli’s heart fluttered as she made her decision. “Tell Mr. Quinn to come by the ranch on Friday. I think he’ll work out fine.”

“I’ll tell him. Thank you. All he needs is a chance.”

Chapter 3

If Charli didn’t soon take a break from cleaning the inside of the house to make the place livable, she feared she’d set a match to it. Why the hell hadn’t she given Tracy a time for Dylan to show up?

As she headed off the back porch to the potting shed, she looked up at the fluffy clouds dappling the mid-morning sky. On such a warm day, she itched to be in the garden again.

Mrs. Pratt had spent two whole evenings telling her all about the Blackwell clan after she had mentioned she’d bid on the ranch last month. Did every small town have a crazy mixed-up history? Who would have thought the Blackwells, Fergusons and Cartwrights were all distantly related? From what she could tell, the clans despised each other.

But according to Mrs. Pratt, the county was founded when Cole Cartwright and his two younger cousins–Dylan Ferguson and Elijah Blackwell–won the tract of land making up the county in a poker game just after the Civil War.

Whether she wanted to know or not didn’t matter to the landlady as she rambled on about the ending of the fifty-year oil partnership between the Blackwells and the Fergusons, spurring a feud between Jock Blackwell and Jason Ferguson.

However, what had interested her the most were Aida’s stories about Penelope Blackwell. Jock’s eccentric mother loved gardening and spent hours in the garden healing from her bouts with mental illness. An illness most people in town agreed had been passed down to Jock.

After Charli retrieved the tools from the shed, she placed them by the bed near the wraparound porch. She ambled around the six massive beds in the front yard and the weedy border along the tattered picket fence until she made her way to the small lake in the front. Maybe once she got rid of the neglect, the garden would be beautiful.

Wasn’t that the story of her life?

Horsetails, cattails, water cannas and sweet flags edged the lake created by damming the creek running in the front of her property. A wooden dock, rotted and covered with green slime, jutted into the water. Someday she’d replace it. She could imagine the girls who came to her home to heal from life’s hard knocks paddling around in small boats on the calm water, or fishing along the edge.

An old concrete bench sat on a stone patio near the water’s edge. With the ivy and weeds, she wasn’t certain the stone path wove through all of the large beds to the house, but here and there part of a path would materialize out of the overgrowth. For a half second, she considered sitting on the bench, until something slithered in the ivy and over the edge of the mossy rocks into the water by the lip of the lake.

Snake!

She shrieked and ran through the weeds and high grass to the porch steps, several yards away, clutching her heaving chest. Maybe a match wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hiring a bulldozer to level the place completely after the fire was an even better one.

She held her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. How many more snakes were in the garden? “Don’t think about it.” She gingerly made her way down the porch steps. “It was just a water snake.”

What if it was poisonous?

Don’t think about it!

She picked up the hoe and used it to poke in the weeds and ivy in a bed close to the house where she’d left her tools. Once she was sure there were no snakes hiding in the overgrowth to bite her legs off, she got busy pruning the shrubs.

With one eye on the lookout for another snake.

As she worked, a pang of grief sneaked up on her. She stopped for a moment and looked at the rosebush she was pruning. She missed her grandfather, not the man he’d been when she’d met him, not the man who worshiped his art and wealth, but the man he’d become after she’d run away. Pink roses would be a perfect reminder of him. She paused and stared at the new leaves unfurling on the stems. The day she’d ventured out into the garden at the Long Arrow for the first time soon replaced the vision of new growth.

When she had first gone to live with Hank, there hadn’t been even a flowerpot at the ranch house. But sometime between when she’d left with the rodeo cowboy who’d taken her to Las Vegas and the day she’d come home after being released from the correction center in Nevada four years later, he’d taken up gardening.

She had wandered around the mansion for three days after coming home from the rehab in which she’d been treated for alcohol poisoning. Bored and needing to get out, she’d ventured outside. She’d been surprised to find Hank bending over a purple daisy-like flower meticulously snipping off dead buds.

“
What kind of flower is that? It looks like something that would grow wild.”

He straightened his back and put a big work-roughened hand on his hip. “Echinacea purpurea. Purple coneflower, and it is a wild flower.”

Since when did the businessman have dirt under his fingernails? Had he retired from being CEO of his manufacturing business?

“When I lived here before, this garden wasn’t here.”

He looked down at the shears in his hand. “No, it wasn’t. I never liked flowers, but after you left, Tonja Crow gave me a rosebush and told me to plant it. According to her, as long as I nurtured it and it bloomed, you’d be all right.” He pointed the blades at a deep pink blooming rosebush in the center of the large bed. “It’s over there. I probably would have let it die, if it wasn’t for Tonja being an old Indian medicine woman.” He lowered his hand and shifted his feet, but still he didn’t look at her. “While I cared for the bush, I found myself enjoying taking care of it. That was the beginning, and I haven’t stopped since. She was right, as long as I kept it blooming, you were alive, if not okay.”

He wiped his brow with the back of his free hand. “Thing is, I found working with nature, along with finally opening up your grandma’s Bible, helped me realize I haven’t been very nice. I was a bastard to your momma and to you. I’m sorry, Charli.” He finally looked at her, his blue eyes fierce with an emotion she had never seen before. Was it guilt? Was it regret? Could she possibly hope it was love? “I hope we can start over, but I know I’ll never be able to make up for what has already happened to you.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Hank–”

“No.” He cut her off with a slash of his hand, but his voice was so gentle the shell around her heart cracked. “I hope you can forgive me, but I’ll understand if you can’t. Now, come here and help me. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

He held out his clippers and a pair of gloves he’d had tucked in his belt. She was surprised to find they were just her size. She stared up at him. He hadn’t been expecting her to come to the garden, had he?

His smile softened the hard angles of his face. “I’m going to teach you. Not just about the garden, but the ranch. Someday this place will be yours. You should know how to run it.”

That day in the garden with her grandfather had become the beginning of her healing and a beautiful friendship with Hank. And had set her on the path leading her here.

She wiped away a tear as she finished with the rosebush. As she lopped off sucker growth from the large weeping cherry tree at the center of the bed, her mind stayed in the past.

Hank Monroe had changed the last few years of his life. He’d mellowed and become regretful of disowning his daughter, LeAnn, and of not understanding Charli’s grief when she’d first come to live with him.

Damn, but it all didn’t change the way he’d treated her before she’d ran away.

She paused in her pruning and wiped at her damp eyes with the back of her bare arm again, shuddering at the old memory. Why had he treated her so bad? Why had Momma died? The answers didn’t come to her now any easier than they had nine years ago.

The sudden sound of a vehicle in the drive drew her back to the present. She lowered the pruning shears as Dylan Quinn stopped by the gate. He climbed out of the pickup and headed in her direction with a distinctive limp.

Shielding her eyes with a gloved hand, she smiled. “Hi. You’re here. Good.”

He stopped under the cherry tree and took in the entire yard with one sweeping glance. His inspection also included her, and something fluttered in her belly. “My sister told me you wanted to see me.”

“Yes. You’re hired, and I’d like you to start today.” She pointed behind her. “There’s a snake in the lake over there. It couldn’t be too far from the edge. I want you to kill it. Then I’ll show you around.”

His lips twitched in a ghost of a smirk. “It was probably a little blotched or broad-banded water snake. They’re harmless and common.”

“
Little
? The thing was a good four feet long. And no snake is harmless.” When the meaning of the rest sank in, she shivered as the blood drained out of her face. “Common?”

“Yep.” He pushed back his dark brown Stetson, revealing some of his similarly colored short hair. “Water snakes are very common in this part of Texas. When I was a kid, I’d catch them from here and let them loose over on my granddad’s place to torment his wife.” His eyes twinkled at the memory. “Jock loved to watch me. You sure it was four feet long?”

She glanced at the lake again. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t that long. Just kill it.”

He shook his head, and his lips twitched further into a genuine lopsided grin. Who cared if he was making fun of her? The guy was gorgeous when he smiled. The hard angles and planes still provided structure, but now small crinkles added life to his silvery eyes, and a small dimple formed in his left cheek. The flutter in her stomach his assessment of her had started just got worse.

“No. Unless it’s a cottonmouth.” He picked up a hoe from where she’d dropped it. “I’ll show you how harmless the water snakes are.”

He went to the edge of the water and prodded around in the overgrowth of cattails by the limestone lip.

She jumped when he pulled the snake out of the water. It twisted around the end of the hoe.

He looked over his shoulder at her. “This little guy’s a blotched water snake. I’m not killing it. Or any of his buddies in here either.”

“It’s a damned snake! Get rid of it. Now!”
Dear Lord, was the man nuts?

He chuckled, the sound more than a little rusty as it drifted to her across the yard. “You aren’t really afraid of this fella, are you? This guy’s as harmless as a frog.” He shook the snake off the hoe and probed around in the water for a few feet. Turning, he headed back toward her through the high grass and weeds. For a guy with a limp, he moved fast.

“Maybe it is as harmless as a frog, but I don’t like them much either.” When he stopped at the edge of the garden, she backed up a step, and her feet tangled in the vegetation. With an
ompff,
she landed on her backside in the middle of a clump of weeds, bluebonnets and, amazingly, yellow daffodils.

He laughed and held his hand out to her, which she ignored. With a shrug, he hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans. “When I was on a mission in the South American jungle, pythons the length of my pickup would come into camp. We didn’t have to worry unless we woke up in the morning with our feet in the mouth of one.”

She widened her eyes. Was he serious?

He snorted and shifted his stance. “Of course that was better than our heads being swallowed first.”