Outlaw Cowboy (7 page)

Sometimes better.

“Me too.” Making each movement graceful and easy, she turned. She waved an arm to encompass the room. “How do you live like this?”

“Don't screw with me right now, Delia. I don't have it in me to rein in my temper, and you have seen the aftereffects when I lose control.” His eyes nearly glittered, and every muscle in his body appeared tense, poised to enact just what he was threatening.

She raised her eyebrows at him, and she didn't even have to feign the look of utter shock. “Are you physically threatening me?”

Her incredulity spread between them, something like a glove thrown. For a few moments the anger blazed in his eyes, and his clenched fists stayed tense. For a brief flash, she thought he might
not
back down, that he'd finally snapped.

But before fear could ice her insides, everything in Caleb's posture slumped. “I'm not threatening you.” He inhaled raggedly. “I won't
hurt
you,” he said, his voice sounding pained and torn. She wanted to comfort him, the bastard. “But I'm not going to play your games. I want an explanation, and I will have one.”

She blew out a breath, attempting to affect bored condescension, but really she'd needed to release her fear.

She turned away from him and all the
emotions
radiating off of him. She doubted he knew that was what all the tenseness and clenched jaw impressed upon her. He probably thought he looked tough and manly, but in reality…

The tornado of conflicting, lost feelings in his eyes made her want to cross to him. It would be a kind of strategy, to try and comfort him into acquiescence, but she didn't trust herself. Caleb was one of the few men on the planet she knew she couldn't find the upper hand with. Her best bet was even ground, which meant distance.

“I can kick you out. I can call the cops and say you're trespassing,” he said. “I can go tell your father exactly where you are.”

He could do all those things. Like every moment of her life, someone else had all the power and she was nothing but a mistake, a burden, a devil. The best she could ever hope to be was someone's diversion.

“What are you? A child? Do I need to count to three?”

She stared blindly out the window, willing herself to find some power, some fortitude, some rejection of the self-defeating thoughts. All she felt was her chest closing in on her, and the simple truth she'd always known.

She was alone.

Steph needs you.

Then what?

After that it didn't matter, did it? But until then, some things had to matter. “He fell.” She hated that her voice was weak.

“Fell?”

“In the yard. I stepped outside to get some air and, well, you know how sound carries out here. I heard someone in pain. So…” The rest should be self-explanatory, shouldn't it? She didn't want to talk anymore, and she didn't want to hear the exhaustion and betrayal in her voice.

Why should she feel betrayed? Just because Caleb was possibly the only person who'd ever shown her consistent kindness, no matter how reluctant it was.

“What was he doing outside?” Caleb demanded.

She kept staring out the window, even though she could hear him,
feel
him move closer. “He wouldn't tell me.”

Silence choked the air out of the room before he finally spoke. “What was he
laughing
at?”

She glanced at him over her shoulder, surprised that the question seemed so emotional. Why was he so baffled that his father would laugh with her? It took a few seconds to untangle, but it seemed to have more to do with his father than with her.

“He was ordering me around like a slave, so I told him to fuck off and find some other stranger to nag.”

“You told my father to…” He shoved shaky fingers through his hair, which was getting too long and dark from the lack of summer sun. “And he…”

Baffled didn't begin to cover his response, but then again, she'd been a little baffled at Mr. Shaw's response herself. Which was why
she'd
laughed.

“Why were you letting him order you around at all?”

She shrugged and turned to face Caleb fully now, because he felt safe again. Because
she
felt safe again, and because it was so hard to deny the stupid affection she felt for him. “He was hurt. He was embarrassed and…” She probably shouldn't say it, probably shouldn't offer a piece of herself like this, but something about the day was wreaking havoc on her good sense. “He reminded me of you.” She'd seen that goodness both men seemed so determined to keep hidden and deny.

Caleb looked at her for the longest time, and she couldn't begin to make sense of it. A kind of surprised bafflement, mixed with hurt and fear and pain and… Oh, the poor idiot was so damn lost, and she wished she could help him.

Which probably made
her
the poor idiot.

“I have work to do,” he said, abruptly turning away from her. “Go back to the cabin and stay there.”

“Can I help?” she blurted before she had time to swallow it down, to temper the panic at being alone again. She hated the silence and the dark and the lonely depression that skittered along the edges of everything. She'd prefer him threatening her. She'd prefer Eddie. She'd prefer any damn thing if it meant not being alone anymore.

“Help?” He said the word like it was so foreign he didn't know the meaning of it.

“A payment of sorts. If there's a chore or work I can do…” She felt stupid for offering, both because he was looking at her with such baffled suspicion and because offering help would only give him the impression she owed him, and even if she did, she didn't want him thinking she thought she did.

If that made
any
sense.

“You're supposed to be hiding. To be keeping out of sight.”

“I can do all that. If your dad and Summer already know I'm here…” That's when it all dominoed in her head. Who Summer looked like. Mel. An uncanny resemblance, really, and if Delia had spent any time around Mel recently, she might have recognized it right away. “She's
related
to you?”

Caleb jerked a shoulder. “Yeah. So?”

“How?”

“I don't have time for this. I have work to do.” He stalked out of the room, and against every sensible thought in her head, Delia scrambled after him.

Caleb shoved his feet into his boots. He ignored the way Delia stopped on the last stair and simply watched him.

He hated the way she did that. Because unlike Mel or Summer, he wasn't sure he was fooling her at all. It felt like she could see beyond the bravado, the anger, the intimidating looks, and see all the fear and confusion underneath.

Worse, every once in a while he felt compelled to lay it at her feet, half convinced she'd know what to do with it.

Luckily, he wasn't a total fool—just half of one—and he kept it to himself.

“Why won't you tell me who she is to you?”

He was relieved the smallness in her voice was gone. The wavery way she'd spoken to him after he'd… Fuck, he'd threatened her like some kind of monster. Proving yet again what he was. “What does it matter?”

“I don't know.” She sounded genuinely confused. He shoved his arms into his coat. He was an hour off schedule, and cows waited for no man's problems. The last time he'd tried that, one had escaped and Mel had stopped speaking to him for days.

He threw the door open and pointed outside. “Go.”

“So…” Her dark, wide eyes stared at him. “I can't help?”

She made it sound like he was denying her water, when he was providing her shelter and had given her food and money. She was still making him feel like it wasn't enough. He was risking everything just by having her here—Tyler certainly would consider Delia Rogers a “person he used to associate with”—and she was acting as though he weren't doing enough.

“What are you trying to do, Delia? What do you want from me?”

She didn't blink, didn't move from that bottom stair. Still and wide-eyed, she didn't respond. He wanted to shake her. Except that was a lie. If he touched her shoulders, the last thing he'd want to do with his hands would be shake her.

“I guess I don't know.”

“Then go back to the cabin. Figure how to get the hell out of my hair, and leave me alone. Got it?”

She lifted her chin and finally moved off the stair, her expression regal and icy. The too-thin woman in the too-thin coat. Why did he have to notice shit like that?

She sailed past him and out the door, the kind of silent fuming that could never be good. His assessment proved accurate when she turned abruptly, so he had to come to a skidding halt or run right over her.

It was tempting.

“I want to help. I'm going crazy in that place, and I need to think. I need something to do to help me think.”

“Not my problem, sweetheart.” He tried to walk around her, but she grabbed his arm. He glared, and she stared at her hand clutched to his forearm as if she wasn't quite sure how it got there.

Slowly, her gaze traveled up to meet his, but she took her time. He wasn't sure what she was doing, or what she was about, and he knew that the smart thing would be to jerk his arm away and drive to the farthest part of Shaw to get as much distance from her as possible.

Instead, he met her gaze.

“Do you
hate
me?” she asked on a whisper, and he knew it cost her something to ask that.

Hate her? Was she screwy in the head?

“I only want to help. To be of some
use
.” Her fingers clutched reflexively tighter before she seemed to force herself to release him. “It seems as though you
need
help, based on the way you're stomping about, always in a foul mood. It only stands to reason, I'm that
horrible
to have in your sight you won't even accept help from me?”

“That's the only possible reason?” He shouldn't have said that, shouldn't have hinted there might be a second, far more dangerous reason for treating her like he couldn't stand to be around her. She was the worst kind of temptation. The visceral kind, the kind he'd never been any good at resisting.

Except, by some miracle, when it came to her.

So. He wasn't going to touch her, kiss her, sleep with her. He wasn't going to give into the relentlessness of this shitty day. Not with Delia. In some strange way, she seemed like the last sacred thing. If he touched her, what virtue did he have left?

It's in you.

Yeah, well, he was here, and the woman who'd uttered those words to a five-year-old wasn't. So.

So.

He started walking. “First up, we check the feed.” The chances of Tyler stopping by today were slim, since Caleb hadn't given him an answer. Besides, Caleb would see and hear anyone coming onto Shaw before they got to them. Help would be nice, and he wasn't risking anything as long as he was careful.

“I thought cows just ate grass.”

He flung an arm to encompass the vastness of snow. “We have to feed them until there's enough grass. Slowly, over the next few weeks, the grass will come back, and we'll feed them less as they graze more on their own.”

He stomped toward the barn where they kept the feed, Delia managing to match him stride for frustrated stride.

Still, the walk across the slushy snow, which had turned muddy from sun and the many trips between house and barn, did what it always did. It seeped into his clothes, his skin, his soul. Something about the clear air and the hard ground always smoothed away the hard edges of the day.

For a few seconds anyway, until the reality of responsibility reminded him he was still learning
how
to be responsible,
how
to care. That everything this was to him rested on somehow making a failing ranch solvent in a few months.

Nearly six years since Dad's accident, he should have found it by now, but it seemed there was some illusive ingredient to peace somewhere outside his reach. All he could do was keep going and hope someday it would be enough. Hope he wasn't destined to always fall into his weaknesses, his vices, his bad blood.

Caleb reached the barn and pushed the door open with its usual screech of metal rod against metal guide. He opened his mouth to explain how she could help, though he doubted she had the strength for half of what he needed to do.

Delia stopped though, not entering the darkness of the barn. She slowly turned her face to the sky, and breathed.

“I thought you wanted to help,” he demanded. Her stillness now was different than when she was frightened or startled. This stillness was something closer to…peace, and he envied it—a sharp pain of longing hit his gut.

“It's…” She inhaled, the gray clouds parting to let a hint of sun land on her face. For a second it highlighted all the sharp angles there, both natural and produced by what he could only imagine was hunger and being on the run.

Then she smiled, and he was taken in by the way she inhaled, by the way she seemed to drink in that weak ray of sun, the way it infused her with light and hope and softened all the razor-sharp edges.

“Maybe I
would
miss Montana if I left.”

“It'll keep you going on a bad day,” he muttered, looking away when she met his gaze. It was a thought he was familiar with, because every time he'd ever thought of running away, he'd remember what it felt like to know the land beneath him was Shaw, for centuries, and the sky above him would always be there.

But why was
she
thinking about leaving? He couldn't resist another peek at her any more than he could resist the question. “Are you planning on leaving?”

Some of the simple joy leaked out of her expression as fast as it had appeared. “I ca—” She shook her head, clearly irritated by whatever it was she'd been meaning to say. “Not yet, anyhow. Maybe someday.”

There was a strange note to her voice, something akin to wistfulness, but not quite. She turned away from the sun, and to him. Why did that seem so symbolic?

“What can I help with?”

There were probably a lot of ways he could answer that question, but he turned to the feed and lectured her about cattle instead.

* * *

Delia's muscles hurt by the end of an afternoon following Caleb around. He'd been surly, blunt, and hadn't gone easy on her.

She grinned and drank in the sinking sun. It had been the best afternoon she could remember in…forever. There was a certain way she had to live—head down, work hard, get one sister out and then the next—that didn't lend itself to a lot of drinking-in-the-sun introspection.

It didn't get Steph out of Dad's clutches either, which was a problem, but she had all night to obsess over that.

For right now? She was going to go take a low-water-pressure shower and eat what would likely be unfulfilling canned pasta. And she was going to treasure a few hours of…

What could she call that feeling? Working side by side with Caleb, feeding cows, checking fences, refilling water tanks. Hard work. Sweaty and sometimes gross work, and yet…

She'd been at peace. Partly because of the work and partly because of being outside. And partly even because of the company.

Which she would admit to not one living soul. She started admitting that sort of thing and she was going to do something
really
stupid, and there wasn't time for that.

But that didn't mean she wasn't going to let the little aura of warmth keep her spirits up as she slipped back into the dark and dusty cabin. She was going to hold on to it, nurture it, and let it soothe her.

When you grew up with nothing, you learned how to hold on to the good without letting it make you soft. A sip of the good stuff tasted all the sweeter for its rarity. If you got ahold of it all the time, you'd get drunk on it and ruin everything.

But a sip? A sip could be everything you needed to tide you over to the next.

She hummed to herself as she went through the pitiful shower and heated up the pathetic meal, both to ward off the silence and the loneliness and—worst of all—the bitterness creeping in.

Okay, maybe a sip was a bad idea, because it reminded her of all she didn't and couldn't have.

She pushed out a breath. Pessimism didn't save Steph, so she had no time for it. School was how she'd gotten Billie out; she'd picked her up in the back parking lot of Valley County High School after bribing a couple of underage kids with booze to get a message to her.

Not her finest moment, but Billie was free.

Still, that meant she couldn't get Steph out that way, as Dad probably ruled drop-off and pickup with an iron fist—if he was even letting her go. Every way she'd managed to liberate her sisters had immediately come under Dad's control. Extracurriculars, hanging out with friends, school.

Really, all that was left was the house, and before Delia could even think about going to the house, she needed to know more. More about their routines. It meant spying and not getting caught—to, from, or around Dad's place.

All the way across the valley. How the hell was she going to get herself around?

She heard the rumble of an engine, and despite every atom of common sense she'd ever honed, her heart took a leap. Not the scared the-cops-might-have-found-her kind. The
I hope it's someone
kind. And…well, there was a certain someone in that hope, but maybe if she didn't acknowledge that it wouldn't grow.

But when she glanced out the window, it wasn't Caleb's truck. It was an old junker that bounced and wheezed across the hill, past the cabin and toward where Summer had appeared from the other night.

Driven by untamed curiosity—and stupidity, really—Delia slid out the door into the dark night. She watched the taillights bump past a line of trees, keeping her eyes trained on the path they cut, and followed it.

Why? She had no idea. There was something mysterious about this Summer girl—from the way Caleb refused to talk about her and who exactly she was, to the way she was hidden back on Shaw property.

It was none of Delia's business, and she knew better than to stick her nose where it didn't belong. Of course, keeping her nose out of things, like Eddie's drug ring problem, had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

The icy cold of a spring night slithered through the dark, attacking the thin fabric of her jacket and shirt with a kind of evil glee.

Okay, obviously she'd been spending too much time alone if she was giving the air evil intent.

She lost sight of the taillights, and the world went eerily dark. Cloud cover hid any moon or starlight. Everything was just black expanse, and Delia had to count and breathe through the panic that seized her.

She'd never been a fan of the dark. Monsters lurked in the dark, and not the kind you could grow out of believing in. Real monsters with fists and guns and pure evil behind their eyes.

She clenched her hands into fists, stomped harder on the ground with every step. She dug deep to find the mantra she'd repeated through fear since she had been a little girl bolting a rickety bedroom door against a father's unnerving gaze.

My bones are steel, my heart is stone, I will survive this world alone. I am here. I can win. I can survive anything.

Quite an impressive bit of poetry for a seven- or eight-year-old. She'd probably gotten it out of a book or a movie, but it had become a piece of her. A talisman that couldn't be taken away or fall to pieces like her boots were in danger of doing. It could get her through the dark that always seemed to creep up when she was least expecting it.

A little light winked to life in the distance. Delia had to clutch her fists at her sides to keep from reaching out for it.

She took a deep breath, repeated her mantra a few more times, then headed for the light. In for a penny and all that shit.

It took longer than she expected, and the chill invaded every last defense she had against it. By the time she saw the odd little caravan in a clearing surrounded by fir trees, she was shivering and hugging herself.

“Hello.”

Delia screeched and jumped what had to be at least a foot, but almost as soon as the insane jolt zapped through her, she recognized the sweet, feminine voice as Summer's.