so? You were right. I needed to hear him say what he said. I needed to hear from his own lying mouth what a dirty low-down rat he is. You had it right, that’s all. If he hadn’t said those things, I just might have wrecked my life running after him.”
“But you didn’t run after him,” Tess said with a rueful kind of smile half curving her mouth. “And since then, you’ve pretty much turned your life around, haven’t you?”
“Well, yeah.” She made a humphing sound. She had been flunking school the year before, running pretty wild down in San Diego, with the money her mother threw at her to keep her out of her hair—and no supervision at all. “Okay,” she admitted. “I guess in a twisted sort of way, Beau did me a favor. Those rotten things he said made me want nothing to do with him. And since he landed himself in jail not long after that, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I set my mind on making my life something better than it was then. So, okay. If you look it that way, he did me a big favor.”
Tess’s smile stretched a little wider. “He did, didn’t he?”
“But it doesn’t make him any less of a creep. Yeah, he helped me, in a backhanded way. But it wasn’t like he said those things for my sake or anything.”
Tess wasn’t smiling by then. “But Starr. What if that’s exactly what he did? What if he hurt you because he knew it would set you free?”
Starr blinked and scooted back a little. She had a shivery feeling down inside, a kind of giddy strangeness in her stomach. “No. You don’t really think…”
“Yes, I do. I suspected it then. But now, after seeing the way he’s managed to make something of his own life against near-impossible odds, I’m pretty much positive he said what he said for your sake. He knew he was in big trouble, Starr. His brothers were up to no good, and they’d been battering and abusing him for so long, he had a real hard time standing up to them. He was headed for trouble with the law, and he knew it—and he didn’t want to drag you down with him.”
The hurt, cold place at the center of her heart felt somehow a little bit warmer right then. “You think?”
“I do.” Tess reached out and pressed a loving hand against the side of Starr’s face. “So. Maybe you can find it in your heart to forgive the guy a little?”
Starr took Tess’s cradling hand and gave it a squeeze before letting go. “You know, you are…a real mom to me.”
Tess’s lower lip trembled just a little. “Why, honey. What a beautiful thing to say.”
“It’s only the truth—and I know how you are. So respectful of my mother’s place in my life. So I want you to know it’s nothing against my mother’s memory, I promise.” Starr’s natural mother had lived in San Diego with her much-older, very wealthy second husband—until she’d died in a freeway pileup two years before. When Starr thought of Leila Wickerston Bravo Marks, it was always with a feeling of sad regret—that they’d never shared the kind of closeness that Starr had with Tess, that her mother had never understood her and never had much time for her. Leila had lavished money on Starr, but love and attention were always in short supply.
“My mother was my mother,” Starr said, trying not to sound as grim as the subject always made her feel. “I know that—and about Beau…”
“Umm?”
“I’ll think about what you said. I can kind of see the sense in it. And I do know that Beau has worked hard to make a life for himself after the mess he started out with. I guess he doesn’t need to have me staring daggers at his back every time he comes around.”
Tess leaned close enough to brush a kiss right between Starr’s eyes. When she pulled back, a tear was trailing down her soft cheek. She swiped it away with the back of a hand. “I am so proud of you. And so is your dad.” She reached out again and smoothed a hank of Starr’s hair, guiding it back behind her ear. Then she grinned. “But I have to say, I kind of miss that rhinestone you used wear in your nose.”
Starr gave her a sideways look. “Hey. I’ve still got the navel ring—and a tiny ladybug tattoo right on my—”
“Don’t—” Tess put up a hand “—mention that to your dad.”
Starr wiggled her eyebrows. “He doesn’t ask, I don’t tell…”
Tess laughed at that, a happy, trilling laugh. Starr thought how good it was to know her, that Tess was not only the mother she’d always needed, Tess was also a true friend. Tess jumped off the bed. “Come on.” She brushed at the front of her jeans, as if they’d managed to get wrinkles in them somehow. “There are beans to snap, potatoes to peel—and tonight, if you’re lucky, you, Jobeth, Edna and I will fight to the death in a brutal game of Scrabble.” Jobeth was Tess’s daughter by her first husband. She was eleven now, and right where she wanted to be—out with Zach, who had adopted her that first year he and Tess got together. Jobeth loved every aspect of ranching, from pulling calves to branding to gathering day.
Starr groaned. “It’s a thrill a minute around this place.”
Tess was already at the door. “Coming?”
Starr smiled then. “You know what? It’s great to be home.”
Chapter One
Three years later…
Blame it on that sliver of moon hanging from a star in the summer sky. Blame it on the two beers he had that he probably shouldn’t have. Blame it on the sight of her—that black hair shining like a crow’s wing by the light of the paper lanterns strung overhead, those eyes that unforgettable heart-stopping amethyst-blue. Blame it on the yearning inside him, the yearning that, after all those years, still remained with him, tender as an old wound that never did heal quite right.
Blame it on…
Hell. Blame it on whatever you damn well please.
At the annual Medicine Creek Merchant Society’s Independence Day dance, out under the stars in Patriot Park, after six endless years of keeping strictly away from her, Beau Tisdale decided he would ask Starr Bravo for a dance.
It was no picnic mustering the courage to do it. He stood for a while under the night-shadowed branches of a cottonwood a ways from the bunting-draped temporary dance floor, nursing a third longneck, watching her as he worked up his nerve.
Twice, she danced with Barnaby Cotes, the sneaky weasel who ran Cotes Clothing and Gift on Main Street and was too old for her by half. Then Tim Cally, a hand on the Rising Sun for decades, led her out on the floor. Beau smiled at that. Tim was nearing sixty and a little stiff in the joints, but he could still do a fair two-step. He held Starr lightly and not too close. Beau didn’t mind watching that—not that he had any right to mind or not to mind where Starr was concerned.
He tipped up the longneck and took a deep drink. Just one damn dance, he was thinking. What can it hurt?
Stupid question. It’d hurt plenty if those violet eyes went to ice on him, if she turned him down flat. A man does have his pride, after all.
But he didn’t guess she’d begrudge him a dance. She’d seemed civil enough to him in the last few years. When he’d pass her on the street or see her on the Rising Sun, she’d give him a cool smile and a nod, anyway. If he was lucky, he’d even get a plain, politely spoken, “Hi, Beau.”
She never seemed overjoyed to set eyes on him, but it wasn’t near as bad as it had been those first couple of years after he got off the honor farm. In those years, when she looked at him, he felt knee-high to a skunk and twice as foul-smelling. She’d hated him then, pure and simple, for the hard and heartless things he’d said to her that day in the yard at the Rising Sun.
But she didn’t seem to hate him anymore. Maybe she’d figured out a few things. Or maybe it was just a long time down a dusty road and what some cowboy had said to her six years ago when she was still a girl didn’t mean a thing to her now.