Chapter 12

Tori rushed home from work on Friday evening to find a white service pickup parked in front of the barn, Sanchez Trucking lettered on the door. Delon had come through with a mechanic. When she stepped out of the car, Fudge cantered in from the pasture, trailing a stream of low, desperate nickers.

She paused at the fence to scratch under his jaw. “Oh, come on. You have the roping steers for company now.”

He did something that looked very much like an eye roll.

“Shawnee’s coming tonight, so we get to rope. That’ll be fun, right?”

Fudge snuffled grimy snot onto the front of her jacket in response, which pretty much summed up how Tori felt about it, too. She rested her forehead on his and closed her eyes, absorbing the musky scent of horse, the silken prickle of his hair against her skin. God, what she’d give to just curl up in her blanket nest on the couch…

An unearthly screech sent Fudge wheeling away, snorting in alarm. There was a shouted curse, followed by a series of thuds from inside the barn. Heart thumping, Tori jogged across the yard, cut around the back corner of the barn, and slammed into a hard male body.

He stumbled backward. “Ouch! Shit!”

“Delon?” She shook her head, dazed by the collision. “What were you doing in my barn?”

His hair stuck up in tufts on one side and his jeans were unbuttoned, gaping open. One earbud dangled loose. He cast a baleful glare at the barn. “I went in there to take a leak and something jumped me.”

Oh, hell. Tori reached inside the door and flicked on the light. Sure enough, a pair of malevolent eyes gleamed from under the hay manger.

“What is wrong with you?” Tori demanded.

The cat curled a paw and gave it an insolent lick.

“What is it?” Delon asked.

She switched off the light. “A cat.”

“Like…a bobcat?”

“Like Garfield,” she said. “Only with homicidal tendencies.”

Delon brows lowered. “And you own this thing because…”

“Pest control.” She let her gaze slide down to his waist. “You might want to close up shop.”

He muttered another curse and wheeled around. As he bowed his head to zip and button, she saw the punctures on the side of his neck. Damn and double damn. The hellcat had drawn blood. She stepped close, lifting her hand just as Delon turned around. They came face to face, nose to nose. Surprise made her suck in a breath—and a lungful of warm, healthy man. Clean and spicy, with a chaser of engine grease, a combination so uniquely Delon it made her head spin.

She should have stepped back. Instead, she touched his neck, feeling the sharp rap of his heartbeat under her fingers. “You’re bleeding.”

“It smarts.”

He raised his hand to cover hers. For a long moment they stood, locked in place, as tension revved like an engine from a low hum to a scream. She’d had her hands on him dozens of times at the clinic while she put him through his paces. Why should this be so different? But she felt the matching catch in his pulse, saw the heat build in his eyes. They were so close, and so alone, in this alley between the barn and the arena where no one could see. One step and Delon could have her pressed up against the wall, the way he’d done the night he showed up fresh off a win at San Antonio, so fired up they barely got the front door closed…

She jerked her hand free and stepped back. He stared at her for a beat, his rumpled hair falling over his forehead, those amazing eyes dark in a way they hadn’t been back then. Full of shadows and storms—and desire. Current, or remembered? Best not to wonder.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Fixing your tractor, remember?”

She gave an impatient shake of her head. “You said you’d send a mechanic.”

“I did.” He spread his hands to say Here I am, and the gleam in his eyes sharpened, as if he sensed how her body clenched at the view. “As long as you’re here, you can give me a hand.”

Her mind slipped again, into the quicksand of memories. Oh, she’d given him a hand, all right. And a mouth. And… She ground her teeth, irritated. Damn him, invading her space this way. She wouldn’t have accepted the offer if she’d known he planned to do it himself.

He paused at the door to the arena and glanced over his shoulder as he tucked the earbuds into his pocket. “Coming?”

Not lately, her body whispered. But if you’ve got a few minutes…

Tori growled under her breath but had to follow him. Inside the arena, the tractor hood was open, its innards exposed, a toolbox and a portable battery charger on the ground next to it.

Tori lingered by the door. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing some basic maintenance won’t fix,” he said, shooting her an accusing glare.

She returned it in kind. She’d only owned the thing for a month—it wasn’t her fault if the previous owners had neglected it. “Can you get it running tonight?”

“I said I would.” He wiggled his fingers. “I’m almost done working my magic.”

Her breath hitched at a new explosion of memories. She knew what those hands could do. Could feel the soft rasp of calluses against her skin as his palms slid over her…

For God’s sake, stop! She resisted the urge to stomp her foot in annoyance. What had happened to her little cocoon? One touch, one steamy look from him, and the damn thing just up and disintegrated, leaving her as trembly as a newborn colt, and just as clueless. Letting those eyes and that body get to her again was beyond stupid.

“Here.” His voice became abrupt, his expression shuttered as he handed her one end of an extension cord. “Plug this in. I don’t know where the outlet is.”

She did, then planted herself safely on the opposite side of the tractor as Delon popped rubber, cup-shaped connectors onto the spark plugs. “So…this is your place,” he said.

“Yep.” Though he hadn’t phrased it as a question, there were half a dozen embedded in the casual statement. She ignored all of them.

“Why Dumas?”

“Property is cheaper out here.”

He worked in expectant silence for a few beats. When she didn’t further enlighten him, he shot her a glance over the tractor. “Did your family disown you?”

“No.” If only it was that simple to become a non-Patterson.

Delon popped the last spark plug connector into place, then straightened. “Then why not live at the ranch?”

“It costs too much.” A price wrung out of her soul, drop by drop, in guilt and failed obligations. With great fortune comes great responsibility. The Patterson creed. She alone had walked away. Call her selfish, but she’d let the rest of her family bear the burden of moral duty to mankind and country. She’d vowed to avoid being extraordinary at all costs. So far, so good.

“Live in our house, play by our rules?” Delon bent to adjust the settings on the battery charger. The view did not suck. He glanced over his shoulder. “You said your mother was upset that you dropped out of medical school.”

Tori dragged her attention back to the conversation. “Is.”

“Excuse me?”

“Is upset. My mother’s ambitions for me don’t have an expiration date.”

Delon shot her a baffled look. “She still wants you to go back to medical school after all this time?”

“At this point she’d settle for a PhD.” Tori shrugged. “If one angle doesn’t work she tries another, and another, until one day you find yourself doing what she wants.”

“Doesn’t she care what you want? If you’re happy?”

Tori gave a dry laugh. “She deals in survival rates. Functional capacity. Measurable outcomes. Happiness cannot be calculated, so is therefore irrelevant.”

Delon shook his head. “That’s messed up.”

“That’s my mother. Relentless. But not evil. That’s what makes her scary. She truly believes she’s doing the right thing. She’s convinced that someday, I’ll wake up and regret that I didn’t take advantage of my opportunities to have a bigger impact.”

And she might be right, at least about the impact part. Tori helped one patient at a time. Her mother’s technical advances and her sister’s research could benefit thousands. But Tori couldn’t imagine regretting her chosen path. She liked digging into each individual case, watching her patients improve, day by day, reveling in every small victory.

Now if she could just find a way to count Delon among those victories.

“What about your mother?” Tori asked. Tit for tat and all. “You said she was gone.”

Delon gave the battery one last swipe before tossing the rag on top of the tractor engine. “She lives on the Navajo reservation.”

In Arizona? Or New Mexico? Both, maybe. Tori’s brain sifted and shuffled images—Delon so dark, his dad so fair…

Delon jumped to the conclusion for her. “My grandfather took his stepfather’s name. We have no Hispanic blood.”

“Oh. That must be weird, people assuming…” That he was different than what they expected from his last name? Huh. Sounded vaguely familiar. “How long has she been gone?”

He rummaged in his toolbox for a plastic, cylinder-shaped gizmo and screwed it down over the nearest battery terminal, twisting it back and forth to scrub the metal post clean. “Her father had a stroke when I was four. Her mother already had severe diabetes. They couldn’t live alone, so she went home.”

Her father. Her mother. Not my grandparents. A telling distinction.

“Did she try to take you with her?”

He shook his head. “They lived way out on the mesa. No electricity. No running water. We would have had to go to a boarding school. She thought we were better off here.”

“Did she come back to visit?”

He paused, then said, “At first.”

“It didn’t go well?”

“It was fine, until she had to go.” He reattached the battery cable and tightened the bolt with a quick jerk of the wrench. “Every time she left, I threw screaming fits, my brother would yell that he hated everyone, and Dad would sit up all night for a week staring at the television.” He hitched rigid shoulders. “The visits got farther apart, until finally it was just phone calls on birthdays and holidays and a week with my mother in the summer.”

God. It sounded like an extended version of hell. “Your dad hasn’t remarried?”

“They aren’t divorced. Never got around to it, I guess.”

“Oh. That’s…” Sad. Her heart ached, imagining a child trying to understand his mother’s repeated abandonments. “It’s hard to picture you throwing tantrums.”

“It never did me any good.” The corner of his lip curled. “I get a lot further being the nice one.”

He twisted nice into an insult, and the depth of his bitterness set Tori back on her heels. Whatever had scraped him this raw was fairly recent. His anger was ragged, an uncomfortable fit, as if he hadn’t had time to grow into it. Probably just about four months.

“I watched the video of your wreck. Violet ran you down.”

His hands stilled for an instant. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“I suppose she did the best she could, given the situation.” But agreeing didn’t take the acid out of Tori’s voice. “Still part of the family, I take it?”

Delon stared at her for a long, charged moment. Then his eyes narrowed. “You don’t like Violet?”

“Violet never liked me. None of her crowd did, from the moment I walked on campus.”

He fiddled with the cables so long she thought he wouldn’t respond. “Do you know Krista Barron?”

Tori blinked at the unexpected tangent. “Her daddy and mine were elected to the Senate the same year, and we went to the same private school in D.C.”

But Krista was three years older than Tori and very…adventurous, so they’d never been more than casual acquaintances. Odd that Tori turned out to be the true rebel. Nowadays, Krista Barron-Tate was the very proper wife of an up-and-coming Oklahoma politician. “What’s Krista got to do with me?”

“Besides being a rich, sexy blonde? She bailed on law school to come slumming in the Panhandle.”

“She’s from Oklahoma. I was born and raised here.” With the exception of those excruciating prep school years in D.C., separated from the land, the sky, and especially her horses.

Delon only shrugged. “Krista hooked up with one of the local boys for a few months. She got pregnant. He wanted to marry her, but the Barrons weren’t having some no-account cowboy for a son-in-law. They tried to cut him out of the kid’s life. He wouldn’t let go and the custody battle got ugly. So when you showed up…”

They all saw another spoiled brat, looking to sow some wild oats and wreak havoc. “This cowboy…is he a friend of yours?”

“Nah.” Delon gave a hard laugh. “Just my brother.”

And pow! The lightbulb finally turned on. She tucked her arms tightly around her waist to contain the slow roll of her stomach. God, she’d been such a fool. “You had no idea who I was the night we met.”

“No.”

Shit and damn. When she’d dropped Delon off that next morning, Tori had been so sure he would call her before the end of the day. Maybe pop by before he left town for the first rodeo run of the season. She’d waited. And waited. While he’d gone to the Jacobs ranch for New Year’s dinner, where goddamn Violet had poured poison in his ear. And Delon had soaked it up, because wasn’t a woman just like her already making his brother’s life hell? Of course, he’d listened. The miracle was that he’d ever come near her again.

Well, at least now Tori understood exactly why Violet’s attitude toward her had gone from amused contempt to palpable animosity after that New Year’s Eve.

He hopped up onto the tractor, pulled out the choke knob, and turned the key. The engine groaned, coughed, then sputtered to life. He adjusted the throttle until the tractor settled into a steady roar. “There you go,” he yelled over the racket. “Let it run for at least ten minutes before you turn it off.”

He climbed down and unclipped the charger cables. She coiled up the extension cord as he gathered his tools.

She followed him, pausing at the arena gate to hand him the cord. “Thanks. For coming out on a Friday night and all.”

“I’ll send you a bill.”

As he stepped out the door into the darkness, she said, “Hey, Delon?”

He looked back, eyes wary. “Yeah?”

“If it makes you feel any better, I never thought you were all that nice.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then gave another of those hard smiles. “You didn’t really know who I was, either.”