The Cowgirl in Question. B.J. Daniels
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hadn’t changed him much that Rourke could see. He was still large, rawboned, still looked strong even at sixty-eight. The hair at his temples was no longer blond but gray, the lines around his eyes a little deeper, the sun-weathered face still granite hard and unforgiving.
They stared at each other as Rourke slung his duffel over one shoulder.
“So they let you out,” Asa McCall said, his deep voice carrying across the wide porch.
Rourke said nothing. There was nothing to say. He’d told the old man he was innocent eleven years ago and hadn’t been believed. Not Rourke McCall, the wildest McCall.
“Don’t worry, I’m not staying,” Rourke said. “I just came by to pick up my things.”
Asa McCall nodded. Neither moved for a few moments, then Rourke mounted the steps and walked past his father and into the ranch house without a word or a look, torn between anger and regret.
As he stepped through the front door, he saw that nothing had changed from the Native American rugs on the hardwood floors to the western furnishings and huge rock fireplace.
He turned at a sound and was struck by the sight of a pretty young woman coming out of the kitchen. She stopped, her eyes widening. A huge smile lit her face as she came running at him, throwing herself into his arms.
“Rourke,” she cried. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re back.”
He stepped away to hold her at arm’s length to study his little sister. “Dusty? I can’t believe it.”
She’d been six when he’d left, a kid. Now she was a woman, although it was pretty well hidden. She wore boys’ jeans, a shapeless western shirt and boots. Her long blond hair was woven in a single braid down her back and a straw cowboy hat hung from a string around her neck. She wore no makeup.
“Dusty?”
Neither had heard the front door open. They both turned to find their father filling the doorway.
“We got fencing to see to,” Asa said, and turned, letting the door slam behind him.
Rourke listened to his father’s boots pound across the porch. “You best get going. We can visit later. I’ll let you know where I’m staying in town.”
“You’re not staying here?” Dusty cried.
Rourke gave her a look.
“Daddy is so impossible,” she said, sounding like the teenager she was. “I swear he gets more stubborn every day.”
Rourke could believe that. “Where’s everyone else?”
“Cash lives in town. You know he’s still the sheriff?”
Rourke nodded.
“J.T. is running the ranch now, but Daddy and I help. Brandon is hardly ever around. J.T. is probably still out riding fence this morning. Did Brandon leave?”
“He said he had business in town,” Rourke told his sister.
She nodded and frowned. “I hate to think what kind of business. Daddy says he’s headed for trouble and I’m afraid he might be right.”
Headed for trouble. That’s what Asa used to say about him, Rourke thought.
“I’m so glad you’re finally home,” Dusty said, and stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss on the cheek before closing the front door behind her.
He watched Dusty join their father out in the yard, watched her walk past the old man. Rourke had to smile, recognizing the familiar anger and stubbornness in the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head. The old man shook his own head as she sashayed past him, giving him the silent treatment just as she’d done to them all when she was mad as a child.
When Asa finally followed after her, he looked older, almost sad, as if another defiant kid would be the death of him.
Rourke’s smile faded as he watched his father follow Dusty to one of the ranch pickups. He stayed there at the window until they’d driven away, then he turned and climbed the wide staircase at the center of the room. At the top, the second floor branched out in two wings. Rourke walked down the wood-floored hallway to his old room at the end of the west corridor. He tried the door, wondering if his stuff had been moved out, the room used for something else.
But as the door swung in, he saw that his room was exactly the same as it had been when he’d left eleven years before. He expected the room to smell musty, at least be covered in dust. But neither was the case. Asa must have had the housekeeper clean it each week. What the hell?
He dropped his duffel on the log-framed bed and looked around, spotting the small straw cowboy hat he’d worn the day he’d won his first rodeo event at the age of seven. His first real chaps, a birthday present for his first cattle drive at the age of nine. His first baseball glove. All gifts from his father, placed on the high shelf Asa had built to store memories.
“In the end, that’s what life comes down to,” his father had told him the day he’d built the shelf. “Memories. Good and bad, they’re all you will ever really own, they’re all that are uniquely yours and ultimately all you can take with you.”
“You think Mom took memories of us to heaven with her?” Rourke had asked, looking up at his father.
Asa’s weathered face had crinkled into a smile, tears in his blue eyes. “She could never forget her kids,” he said without hesitation. “Never.”
“Or you, Dad. I’ll bet she remembers you.” It was the one time he’d ever seen his father cry, and only for those few moments before Asa could get turned and hightail it out to the barn.
Rourke walked through the bedroom, past the sitting room, to open the patio doors that led to the small balcony off the back. Stepping out, he gulped the afternoon air, the familiarity of it only making the lump in his throat harder to swallow.
As he looked out across the ranch, he spotted his brother J.T. riding in. Rourke watched him until J.T. disappeared behind one of the red-roofed barns, then he turned and went back inside.
Too many memories. Too many regrets.
He looked up again at the high shelf and all his trophies from first grade through high school for every damned thing from best stick drawing to debate, basketball to bull riding, baseball to target practice. And not a lick of dust on any of them.
He shook his head, not understanding himself any better than he did his father. He’d been wild from the time he could walk, bucking authority, getting in trouble, but somehow he’d managed to excel in spite of it. He got good grades without trying. Athletics came easy as well. In fact, he thought, studying the trophies on the shelf, maybe that was the problem. Everything had always come too easily.
He glanced around the room suddenly wondering why he’d come back here. Not to get his things. He hadn’t left anything here he needed. His grandfather had left all of them money, money Rourke had never touched. He could buy anything he needed for this new life the warden had tried to sell him on. He didn’t even need his old pickup. Hell, it was fifteen years old.
But he couldn’t leave without taking something. He went to the chest of drawers, opened several and took out jeans, underwear, socks, a couple of once-favorite T-shirts he knew he would never wear again and stuffed them into the duffel bag, zipping it closed.
Then he picked up the duffel bag and started to leave the room. His throat tightened again as he turned and spotted the faded photograph stuck in the edge of the mirror over the bureau.
It was a snapshot of Blaze and Cassidy.
He dropped the duffel bag on the bed and walked to the mirror. Blaze with her mass of long, curly fire-engine red hair and lush body standing next to her cousin at the rodeo grounds. Blaze nineteen and full of herself, he thought with a smile.
His gaze shifted to Cassidy and the smile evaporated. Cassidy looked plain next to Blaze with her brown hair and big brown