Reclaiming the Cowboy

She looked down at her grimy fingernails, realizing the truth of his words. She could have put on sunscreen first, and she could have enjoyed her gardening without courting skin cancer. As it was, she’d be red as a watermelon by nightfall.

“You’re right, Fitz—I’m acting silly, and—” But she couldn’t complete her sentence. One of the maids was scurrying down the brick path toward them, her hand held up, waving urgently.

“Ms. Annabelle,” she said as she reached them. “I’m sorry. There’s a man, and he won’t go away. I told him you weren’t at home, and so did Mr. Agron, but the man says he isn’t leaving till he talks to you. He’s been here half an hour, and Mr. Agron said we should call the police, but—”

Annabelle’s heart hitched. Could it be Jacob?

The maid stopped to catch her breath and maybe to find the right words. “I don’t know if we should. He’s not doing anything, and he’s obviously not a reporter. He’s kind of like...a cowboy or something.”

Annabelle dropped her trowel and, without thinking it through, rose from her knees. She wiped her earthy palms on her jeans, then raised a hand to her hair, which was flyaway and tangled and probably littered with leaf debris and vermiculite.

“A cowboy?”

“Well, sort of. I don’t know exactly. He doesn’t have a horse or a hat or anything, but—” She shook her head. “Anyhow, he says you know him. He says if we’ll just tell you his name—”

“What is his name?” Annabelle’s voice came out tight, threaded with tension. She already knew the answer, of course. She knew because the maid was flushed with a pretty confusion, a heightened female awareness caused by a gorgeous young cowboy.

“Mitch,” the maid said, her lips curving into a small, puckering smile as she formed the word. “Mitch Garwood.”

* * *

MITCH HAD DECIDED he’d give her an hour. He’d wait out here, on one of the benches around the front fountain, till the sun disappeared behind the mansion’s fancy white colonnades.

If Bonnie hadn’t come out by then, he swore to himself, he’d go back to Silverdell and to hell with her.

But as the minutes dragged on, and it seemed likely he’d have to make good on the threat, he wondered whether he could really do it. Could he just hop on his motorcycle and head east, flipping the bird to Greenwood—and Bonnie—in his rearview mirror?

Because...if he did, what then?

He tried to imagine going the rest of his life without an explanation, without hearing from her lips what the whole crazy running thing had been for. He hadn’t been able to unearth anything that made sense, though he’d combed the internet and studied every single photo of the Annabelle Oils till he could probably paint one himself.

The prim, lace-draped Annabelle Irving was Bonnie, all right. But not his Bonnie. The Annabelle Oils girl was straight out of a fairy tale, with floating clouds of red curls so pale they were almost gold and huge blue eyes that looked haunting and strange, as if you’d never be able to see what she saw, not if you stared at the same spot forever.

His Bonnie wasn’t one bit strange. His Bonnie’s eyes were smart, clear and friendly. She didn’t wear lace, and she was too sexy to be allowed in a fairy tale. She was a normal, red-blooded woman. She hummed off tune and didn’t care who heard her. She ditched her shoes the minute she got inside, and sometimes her fuzzy socks didn’t match. She cooked a steak so tender it melted between your teeth. She bit her fingernails and looked killer in blue jeans.

So if he never found out what had happened—if he never found out how Annabelle became Bonnie, and then, like an evil magician’s cabinet trick, turned back into Annabelle again...

Well, if he never found out, he’d be so angry and bitter inside he’d rot like a wormy apple.

On the other hand, he wasn’t sure getting an explanation would make much difference. He might be doomed to sour from the inside out, no matter what.

He kicked the oyster-shell driveway beneath the bench and glared at the mansion, as if it were to blame. As if it had swallowed his Bonnie whole and was refusing to spit her out again.

But then he saw the big carved front door opening. He was on his feet in a flash. Even if it was just the stuffy butler coming out to warn him the police were on their way, anything was better than sitting here stewing.

A woman emerged. At first, in the shadows of the portico, she was barely visible. White shirt, long pants... Not the maid, then...

When the sunset caught her hair, he knew. Bonnie. His heart did that reflexive thing it always did, and his thighs flooded hot, thrumming with the urge to run toward her.

But he shoved his hands into his pockets and forced himself to wait. Not Bonnie, really. Not anymore. Annabelle.

She walked slowly. Carefully, as if she balanced an egg on her head. Her pace was measured, ceremonial, like a princess pacing down the wedding aisle. Or a queen walking to the guillotine.

Maybe she was buying time so that she could get her story straight.

Or maybe she was waiting for him to close the distance first.

He dug his heels a little deeper into the powdery shells of the driveway. Not going to happen.

“Hi,” she said as she reached him. Her voice sounded rusty, as if she didn’t use it anymore. Her eyes raked his face, clearly searching for clues to his mood.

He didn’t respond. “Hi” seemed laughable, and everything else he could think of felt as if it came from some entirely inappropriate script. From a melodrama where people yelled things like “How could you?” or some slapstick comedy where the dumb cowboy went all “Shucks, ma’am” around the elegant lady.

Or, even worse, from that pathetic script where someone gushed, “You had me at hi.”

He set his jaw and refused to let any of that spill out. Let her do the talking. She was the one who had the explaining to do. She was the one with the secrets.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “How did you find me?”

He raised his shoulder. “Fingerprints.”

“Fingerprints?” Her eyes widened, and he realized they did look a bit strange, now that they were set against the fantasy rose-gold of her real hair. The size of them, and the color... Nothing in the natural world should be that mesmerizing mix of blues, as if robins’ eggs and sapphires and summer skies had magically melted together.

“Fingerprints,” she repeated, her voice dropping slightly, as if she were disappointed in him. “Of course. The water glass.”

He could have defended himself. He could have explained that Rowena had been the one to supply the fingerprints, not him. Technically, that was true. But it would have been a lie in its heart, if not in its facts.

He hadn’t come all this way just to have another useless conversation laced with lies. So he simply stared at her, calmly defiant.

“I see.” She clearly had taken the measure of his anger, and she now knew he hadn’t come in peace. “All right, then maybe the more pertinent question is...why did you find me?”

He laughed harshly. “Come on.”

“I mean it.” She raised her chin. “You said you never wanted to see me again.”

“No, I didn’t. I said I was tired of thumping my head on the sidewalk while you used me like a yo-yo. I said I wasn’t interested in being your quickie next time you snuck into town.”

Her pale cheeks flamed red. To tell the truth, he felt a little flushed, too. He hadn’t intended to sound quite so nasty.

“But I never said I didn’t want answers, Bonnie. Because I damn sure do. And what’s more, I deserve them. I think you owe me that much, after—”

After what? After she’d broken his heart? He swallowed those words and gave her another hard, unblinking stare instead.

She was breathing fast. Her lips were parted a fraction of an inch, and he noticed suddenly she had a smudge of dirt right where a movie star might put a beauty mark. He glanced down, realizing she held a trowel in her left hand, its gleaming silver tip speckled with mud, too.

So at least that part hadn’t been a sham—she really did love gardening. Back at Bell River, she’d always wanted to be outdoors, always wanted to be rooting around in the dirt. Once, before they’d fled from Silverdell, they’d planted a white fir sapling on the abandoned Putman property, partway up Sterling Peak. They didn’t have the right—the property was in some kind of divorce dispute and couldn’t be sold or occupied—but they’d liked to hike out there and dream of owning it someday.

He’d talked about the house they’d build, complete with his ridiculous inventions. She’d laid out the fantasy gardens, describing them so clearly he might as well have been looking at a painting.

He’d swallowed the dream whole, fool that he was. He was surprised he hadn’t choked to death on it. She’d just been playing a game, playing house, as if she’d love to be the queen of the simple log lodge he was happily designing. Ha. All the while, she’d been keeping the secret of—he glanced at Greenwood, its marble arches slightly pink-gold in the sunset—the secret of this.

“I guess we should sit down,” she said. “If you really want to hear the whole story, it’s going to take a while.”

She didn’t seem to have any intention of inviting him into the mansion, so he dropped onto the garden bench where he’d been waiting the past half hour. He leaned against the scrolled iron back and waited some more.

She sat, too, and stared down at the trowel, which she’d rested in her lap, for several seconds. Then she looked up, met his gaze and shook her head slightly.

“I’ve thought about telling you all this so many times you’d think I’d have a speech ready. But it’s complicated. The whole thing is so weird, so convoluted...”

“And I’m just a simple cowboy who couldn’t possibly understand?”

Her eyes narrowed, and he saw her fingers close tightly around the trowel. “That’s cheap, Mitch. You’re not simple, and you’re not even really a cowboy. And I’m not a snob. You can be angry, but you can’t pretend we’re strangers. I won’t let you act as if all those months we spent together weren’t real. I won’t let you pretend we weren’t real.”

“We?” He shrugged, tapping his hand against the bench’s cool wrought iron armrest. “Who exactly is we? Do you mean me and Bonnie O’Mara? Problem is, I don’t see Bonnie here—not a shred of her. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t quite know what’s real and what isn’t.”

She flushed again—and he, who knew every nuance of her face, knew that shade of mottled red meant anger. Her flush of embarrassment was seashell-pink, and the flush of sexual desire was...

He tightened his jaw, trying to force those memories away. Forget all that—this look was pure anger. Well, fine. He might not be turning red, but he was mad, too. They were both mad as hell. Desire was a thing of the past.

She took a long breath, as if to steady her voice before she spoke. “Look, Mitch, if you want to tell me off, you should go ahead and do it. You have every right, and I won’t stop you. But if you want to know the truth, you need to let me talk.”

He nodded tightly. “Go ahead. I won’t interrupt again.”

She looked skeptical, but after a cautious second she started again. “As you can see, my grandmother, Ava, had a lot of money—some from her painting and some from her family. She left everything tied up in a life estate for my mother’s use.”

“Why? Why tie it up?”

“My mother had...problems.” Bonnie looked away briefly. “She wasn’t terribly responsible, and my grandmother obviously didn’t trust her to inherit outright. But she did want to provide for her, so the lawyers suggested the life estate. I was the first remainderman. That meant if I outlived my mother, I would inherit everything.”

Mitch shook his head without really meaning to. How complicated could you get? Rich people were nuts.

Or maybe it was the lawyers who were nuts. He thought of his patent applications and the documents Indiana Dunchik had drawn up so he could sell his chore jacket to the highest bidder. The papers provided for every imaginable contingency and some that Mitch could never have imagined, not in a million years.

So of course the lawyers for the rich Ava Andersen would provide for the remote possibility that a perfectly healthy young woman might get hit by a bus or a meteor and die before her mother did. If Bonnie was the first “remainderman,” there probably were ten other remaindermen behind her, just in case...

And then, finally, the lightbulb went on.

He got it. He felt like an idiot that he’d been so dense.

“Ahh,” he said slowly. “So who was the second remainderman?”

“My cousin Jacob.” She leaned back, as if she were suddenly tired. “I assume you know who Jacob is, since you found me through my fingerprints. He’s my first cousin. His mother, my mother’s sister, died giving birth to him, and his father, a lawyer in San Francisco, worked himself into a heart attack when Jacob was only twelve. That’s when Jacob came to live at Greenwood and began to make my life hell on a regular basis, instead of just in the summers.”

Mitch took a breath, but he didn’t say anything.

“And—this is the part I assume you found when you looked up my prints—when I was eighteen, I was arrested for stabbing him with the pruning shears.”

She didn’t even glance at the trowel she held, so Mitch tried hard not to do so, either. But it wasn’t easy. It was weird, almost freaky, to be sitting here with this woman who was half stranger, half lover and to be talking about wealth and violence.

Wealth and violence. He supposed those two things fit together in some sick way. People did crazy, terrible things over money. But neither word fit with Bonnie.

She paused, as if she expected him to interrupt again, probably to demand an explanation of the arrest, but he didn’t. He was itching to know the truth about that, but right now he wanted her to finish telling him why she’d been on the run.

“Anyhow,” she continued after a minute, “the will stipulated that if I died before my mother did, Jacob would inherit everything. No one expected that to happen, of course. My mother wasn’t old, but she was very, very sick. Everyone knew she didn’t have long to live. So it was almost impossible to imagine any way I would go first. Not naturally, anyhow.”

Not naturally, anyhow. How calmly she said such a thing.

“And if you didn’t die first, Jacob got nothing.” Mitch took a breath, still sorting it out. His mind balked at the implications. “Are you saying your cousin wanted to kill you so he’d inherit your grandmother’s fortune?”

She didn’t answer for a long second. Finally, she looked him directly in the eyes. “Yes.”

“Bonnie.” He raised a hand, correcting himself. “Annabelle. Look, how much money are we talking about here? For a man to kill...”

“Enough. More than enough.” Her voice dropped low and took on a harsh edge. “For pity’s sake, Mitch, people kill each other every day. Over a bar tab, over a pair of sneakers, over a purse, a cash register, a car. Why is it so difficult to imagine that a man would kill to inherit thirty million dollars?”

“Thirty...” His jaw dropped, and he had to tell himself to shut it. “Okay. It’s a lot of money. Still. Your cousin isn’t exactly a pauper. And he’s not a thug. I looked him up. He’s a big-time lawyer, doing just fine for himself. Why would he risk all that—”

“So you don’t believe me, either.” The angry flush had drained entirely from her cheeks, leaving a chilled porcelain ivory behind. She sat so still she might have been a wax figure, not a woman.

“I didn’t say that.”

Her lips curved slightly. “You didn’t have to. I know that look. I know that tone.”

Of course she did. He mustn’t forget that she was as familiar with every square inch of his skin as he was with hers. “Well, it does sound kind of...” He tried to think of a nonjudgmental word. “Kind of extreme.”

“Crazy, you mean?” She lifted her chin. “Don’t worry. You aren’t the first to hint at the possibility. He is, as you say, a big-time lawyer. I’m just this spoiled, troubled heiress, the daughter of a suicidal drug addict. And I’ve already tried to stab him once, so it’s obvious I have some paranoia issues.”

“No, I don’t mean crazy. But maybe...maybe just exaggerating the danger? I’m sure he was envious you got everything, and he probably gave off some fairly hostile vibes.”

She laughed darkly. “Yeah. He tried to overdose me with barbiturates, so I’d say hostile is a fairly accurate description of his feelings for me.”

“He did? How?”

“New Year’s Eve. Jacob always gives a big party, and of course he had to invite me—otherwise people would talk. He must have slipped the drugs into my drink somehow. I woke up the next day in the hospital. On a ventilator.”

Mitch’s body temperature had dropped about ten degrees in ten seconds. The balmy California air moved over his skin like ice. “Are you sure? I mean...how do you know he was the one who did it?”

“Well, I knew I didn’t do it. And, contrary to popular opinion, I’m not paranoid enough to think I have two different people looking to get rid of me.”

Mitch frowned. “But how did he expect to get away with it?”

“Oh, that would have been easy. No one would have doubted it was suicide. It was public knowledge that my mother had tried to kill herself. Twice.”

He made a low shocked sound, but she ignored it.

“And it wasn’t as if he expected me to be able to deny it. He gave me a huge dose. If I really had been drinking alcohol, as everyone assumed I was, I would have died that night.”

Mitch stared at her, speechless. Her own cousin didn’t even realize she wasn’t a drinker? He remembered all the times she’d carried a glass of soda water around at the Bell River events. She never made a thing of it, never got sanctimonious in front of people who did drink. He’d always figured it was simply a healthy-living kind of decision. Now he knew better.

The child of an addict would obviously avoid taking any risks. And her caution had saved her life, though not in the way she’d expected.

“What about when you did wake up? Did you tell anyone? Did you tell the police?”

“No.”

“For God’s sake, Bonnie. Why not?”

“Because I’d been down that path before. Accusing Jacob. And I ended up in a mental-health clinic. No one was going to believe me this time, either, and while I was trying to convince them, he would have tried again. Eventually, he would have succeeded. So I ran.”

“But...” He couldn’t wrap his mind around any of this. “Surely the police...your friends...other family members. Hell, even a lawyer—”

“No.” She shook her head implacably. “No one. There was no one I could trust.”

He felt himself stiffen. “Not even me, apparently.”

The sun had almost touched the western horizon, and he suddenly realized her face was almost entirely in shadows. Now, when he wanted desperately to be able to read her expression, he could hardly see a thing.

“No,” she repeated. “Not even you.”

It shocked him, the hot knife blade of pain that sank into him when she spoke the words. It shouldn’t have been a surprise—couldn’t have been a surprise. He wasn’t a fool. He knew that if she’d trusted him, she would have confided in him months ago.

And yet, hearing her dull monotone confirm it...

“Well, that’s direct.” He leaned back, trying to project a detachment he didn’t come close to feeling. “Guess there’s no point in sugarcoating anything, not now.”

“Mitch, be fair. How could I trust you? How could I trust anyone? My life was at stake. Even more importantly, my mother’s life was at stake. Once he’d gotten rid of me, how long would he have let her stand between him and the inheritance? How long would he have let her live?”

“Did it ever occur to you,” he asked slowly, “that I might have been able to help?”

She hesitated, then swallowed and shook her head. “No.”

Heat radiated across his shoulders and down his arms. He couldn’t decide whether it was anger or shame coursing through his buzzing veins. No? No? Damn it...he would have died for her. Literally. He would have killed for her.

But she hadn’t believed him capable of providing any security. She hadn’t seen him as up to the task of protecting her.

“Jacob is ruthless,” she said, bending forward as if she could close the emotional distance between them by shrinking the physical gap. “He’s vicious and such an expert liar. You have no idea—you can’t imagine. And I’m glad you can’t. You’ve lived with love all your life, surrounded by a family that adores you. You’re sunny, and you’re kind, and you think the world is good. You aren’t consumed by ambition and greed. Those were the things about you I most...”

She stopped, swallowing the next word oddly. “I mean...that’s what drew me to you in the first place. You were light, when all I’d known before was darkness. You understand laughter and joy. You don’t understand cruelty and greed.”

He made a harsh scoffing noise. “You make me sound like the village idiot.”

She straightened up, as if scalded by his sardonic tone. “I’m sorry you take it that way. That isn’t even remotely what I meant.”

“Sure it is.” He was so angry he could hardly keep his voice steady. He was doomed, wasn’t he? He would eternally be the dopey younger brother. The likable goof. The good-time Charlie. He was used to being written off as a gadfly by Dallas, but he’d imagined that Bonnie was the one person who saw him differently.

Wrong again, moron. Maybe that just proved how naive and gullible he really was.

“Mitch, that isn’t what I meant at all—”

“It’s exactly what you meant. You meant that I’m good for a few laughs. I can provide a little comic relief on a boring road trip. And I’m not bad in the sack, of course, so that part was fun, too. But I’m not the kind of guy you take seriously. I’m not the person you’d trust with your secrets, your problems.” He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not the man you’d trust with your life.”

She was shaking her head. “No. You’re twisting my words. This struggle with Jacob doesn’t have anything to do with my real life or my real feelings. I just had to get through this one dangerous moment, and then—”

“And then what? Don’t be so naive. Do you really think this is the last terrible thing you’ll face?”

He stood. Coming here had been a mistake. There wasn’t any such thing as “closure.” There was only loss and more loss. If he’d never seen her here, with her Titian-red hair and her backdrop of opulence, he could at least have kept the memories of his Bonnie intact.

Now Bonnie and Annabelle would be forever tangled in his mind. And he would always know that neither of them had really respected him. Neither one of them had loved him. Not the way he’d dreamed.

“Mitch.” She didn’t move, but she looked up at him with those complicated, beautiful, haunted blue eyes, overflowing now with unshed tears. “Mitch, please.”

“Troubles come to everybody, Bonnie,” he said roughly. “If you live long enough. People, even careful people, occasionally end up in dark places—in a courtroom, in a wheelchair, in chemotherapy, in disgrace. In tears, in therapy, in pain—all that’s part of life. And it should be part of love, too.”

“Yes. And it is.” She held out one slim lily-pale hand. It trembled. “It will be.”

“No, it won’t. You don’t think of me as a partner. You think of me as a plaything. And I have no interest in settling for that role in any woman’s life.”

She made a choking sound. He shrugged, thankful that, finally, numbness had set in and the pain had eased off, allowing him to come up with one final smile.

“Goodbye, Bonnie.” He cast one last glance at the purpling sky, lowering itself over her mansion like a shroud. “Have a good life.”