“Yes?” He made his gaze and his voice gentle. It wasn’t her fault things were the way they were. If he wanted something with her, he’d have to become a different man. Since he wasn’t able to do that, he needed to turn his frustration inward.

  “It’s going to hurt when I leave.” Her eyes had gone light again, the color of ocean shallows. “I don’t want to make it worse.”

  He set his hand over hers, holding her over his heart for a moment. “Me too.”

  Hank squeezed her hand, then gave it back to her before heading off to find what she needed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lale was circling in on it, she could just tell.

  She shifted in the chair, read over the letter again. Okay, she wasn’t exactly circling in on it—Isabel and Sebastian were.

  Something had happened the night Sebastian had been wounded. Something beyond that, something they were growing bolder and bolder at hinting at.

  This letter, about halfway through the stack, kept referring to the people of Cabrillo wanting another crack at McCade, most particularly Isabel’s brother. Sebastian was reassuring her that once McCade was captured, he was going straight to LA. That there was no chance of a repeat of the “incident.”

  It wasn’t direct evidence, but Lale was willing to bet that the “incident” referred to Isabel’s brother trying to kill McCade as revenge for what she’d suffered. But something closer to a smoking gun would be nice.

  There was nothing more on Don Enrique, or how he might be related to Isabel’s mother, or how Isabel’s mother might be related to Dolores Bannister. It had been a long shot, but one that Lale had been hoping would come in, the betting ticket clutched metaphorically in her sweaty little hand.

  She made one last note about the letter, copying down the most important lines, then set it aside and went for the next one.

  Hank hadn’t been around all morning. She assumed he was going through boxes for her, or doing chores, or anything that would take him far from this office. Which was fine and good and for the best. She could get stuff done without him distracting her, and she was here to work. Not kiss him.

  Speaking of which, she needed to get moving on this next letter. She squared it up on the desk and raised herself on tippy toe to get the best angle with her camera phone. The letter was written in Sebastian’s precise but bold hand. There was a sense of great pressure, very tightly controlled, in his penmanship.

  She checked the pictures, took a few more after checking the angle of the light, then skimmed the letter itself.

  “…Your brother has great cause to hate me…”

  Lale’s lips pursed in a silent whistle. Oh, this was good stuff. Sebastian’s only contact with her brother had been when he’d first captured McCade in Cabrillo. Unless they somehow met again after the first trial.

  There was a knock at the open door behind her. She spun, breath caught in her throat, to find Hank propped in the doorway.

  If there was ever a man meant to prop himself against things, it was Hank. He looked damn good with his length set against the doorframe, his feet crossed at the ankle and his arms crossed over his chest. All he needed was a cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes and he’d be ready to star in a Western.

  Her heart did a kind of fluttery backflip at the sight of him. Boy, she had it bad.

  “Want lunch?” he asked.

  “Oh, is it time?” She gestured to the letters spread across the desk. “I was caught up in these. There’s some good stuff in here.”

  “Yeah?” He left the doorframe to peer over her shoulder. “Like what?”

  Now her whole body wanted to do a fluttery backflip thing as he leaned over her. She cleared her throat delicately and told her body to settle down. “Well, I’m starting to put together a timeline of what might have happened, although there’s still a lot of speculation. Several of the letters refer to a secret incident that Isabel fears people will discover. And Sebastian here says that her brother has reason to hate him. I think I might know why.”

  She stared at the notes she’d sketched out about what might have happened. There were still so many holes, so many leaps of logic there… If only she could find some direct reference to what had happened, even a small one…

  “What do you think happened?” Hank prompted.

  She blinked at her notes, then gave him an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I got lost in my thoughts. So here’s what we know: McCade is acquitted of attacking Isabel and Sheriff Obregon. She heads back to Cabrillo after. Somehow, Sebastian and McCade encounter each other and McCade shoots him. Isabel was definitely involved in that incident—although neither of them ever say exactly how—so it most likely happened in Cabrillo. After he shoots Sebastian, McCade flees to Mexico. Sebastian recovers and chases after him, exchanging letters with Isabel the entire time.”

  Hank set his hand on the desk, his arm only inches from her. Then he seemed to catch himself, pulling his arm back and crossing them over his chest instead. “Makes sense. But why would McCade be back in Cabrillo?”

  She set her chin in her hands. “That’s the part I can’t explain at all. He’d already been found not guilty. He had nothing to gain by following her. But…” She drummed her fingers on her cheeks. “Here’s where I start to make educated guesses. What if he did follow her, and her brother”—your ancestor, she didn’t add—“decided to hang McCade? As a way to avenge her?”

  Hank scratched his chin with his thumb. “And Sebastian somehow got caught up in this and was shot?”

  “Maybe. It would explain why she wouldn’t want anyone to know that her brother attempted to murder McCade. Maybe Sebastian tried to stop him, which is why her brother has cause to hate Sebastian.” She twisted in the chair, the better to look up at him. Up and up at him. “Are there any family stories mentioning anything like that?”

  “No. In every telling I’ve ever heard, McCade is found not guilty and in the next sentence he shoots the marshal. There’s never any explanation about why that is. And I never thought to ask. It was just how the story went.”

  She smiled to herself. “That’s always how the story goes. That’s how stories become legends.”

  He shifted, resettling his arms across his chest. “I never thought much about questioning the stories that have been handed down. After so many tellings, they become a kind of scripture. Never to be questioned, never to be rewritten.”

  Now it was her turn to shift and resettle herself. “I’m not… I’m not rewriting anything here. I only want to find the truth, or at least as close to the truth as I can.”

  He set a hand on the back of her chair. If she leaned back, she’d be pressed against those fingers, only the thin cotton of her shirt separating her skin from his. She ran the tip of her tongue along the seam of her lips, trying to cool her suddenly dry skin.

  “I don’t think you’re trying to rewrite anything.” His dark eyes were solemn, his voice low and resonant. “It’s just… I can’t help but think about why they might have wanted to keep it secret. And if we ought to honor their secrets even though they’re gone.”

  She took in the letters, tucked neatly into their envelopes. Who saved envelopes? Most people wouldn’t have even saved the letters themselves.

  She passed her hand above the desk, encompassing the letters, the envelopes, and the entire act of saving them in her gesture. “From the way all this is arranged—so careful, so precise—I think they wanted someone to find these and read them. They wanted someone to discover the truth they couldn’t speak aloud.”

  He set his other hand on the chair back, his entire upper body braced above her. His shirt strained against his biceps and chest. “Maybe. But maybe that’s what we tell ourselves to justify going through their things and assuming that we’ve learned something about them from it.”

  That was… She blinked at him. Was he calling into question everything about her career? Or was he only referring to his own situation as the caretaker of the family artifacts?

  She didn’t know how to begin to ask that. Because if he thought everything she was doing was meant as a violation of his ancestors…

  He shrugged. “I suppose it’s pointless to speculate on what they might have wanted.”

  It clearly mattered to him, so why was he brushing it off like this? Was it for her sake?

  “After all,” he went on, “they could have destroyed the letters if they really wanted to keep it secret. So maybe you’re right.” He forced a smile at her, one that cracked her heart. “Those diaries you mentioned? I think I may have found something.”

  “Really?” She half rose out of the chair, stopping herself before she smacked into his chin.

  He let go of the chair and leaned away from her, his smile breaking into something more real. “Yeah. But don’t you want lunch first?”

  Silly man. Of course she didn’t. “No, I want to see what you found!”

  He bit the tip of his tongue, looking younger and roguish. “But I already fixed some sandwiches. Egg salad, made from scratch.”

  “Oh.” She did like egg salad. “Wait, how did you know I like that?”

  “Took an educated guess.” A corner of his mouth tipped up, a dimple appearing. When had he gotten those? Had he always had dimples? “And Lil brought me a bunch of eggs yesterday that I needed to use up.”

  “Ah. So you aren’t psychic.”

  “Sadly, no. It would make social interactions a lot easier though.”

  “You would hate hearing other people’s thoughts all the time. Privacy is important to you. Yours and other people’s.”

  More than important—it was probably vital to him.

  His smile went wistful, and he set one shoulder against the wall, taking up that dead-sexy lean again. Only this time the sadness in his eyes kept her from fully appreciating the show.

  “Yeah,” he said slowly. “You’re right: I’d hate it.”

  She fiddled with her notebooks on the desk, trying to occupy her hands as she searched for something to say. “Well, good job on guessing that I like egg salad. But I’d rather see what you found first.”

  He pushed off from the wall, his mouth flattening out. No more happiness, no more wistfulness. Just… neutral. “Let’s go then.”

  The boxes were sitting where Hank had left them, outside the closet in the guest bedroom. Lale said nothing about being back in the room where he’d first kissed her, not that he expected her to.

  He hadn’t spent the entire morning looking for the boxes for several reasons. One, the moment she asked for some kind of diary or other personal writings, he knew exactly where to look. Two, he needed to get his head right after kissing her again.

  So he’d spent the morning cleaning out every animal pen on the place—which was a hell of a lot of manure—repairing the latch on the chicken coop, weeding the garden, spraying his trees, and then finished off his orgy of wearing himself out by building a new frame for a window in the guest bedroom.

  When he was finished, he wasn’t entirely sure his head was fixed—he still couldn’t shake the sensation of her hand over his heart—but he was worn out. So he pulled the boxes he wanted out of the closet and went to find her.

  “Here they are.” He gestured to the boxes. “This is everything that was on the desk. I haven’t gone through it, and Franny wasn’t the type to keep a diary—she was a pistol, as they say—but maybe Tío Felipe did and it’s in here.”

  She knelt before one of the boxes with easy grace, tucking her legs under her with the soles of her feet peeping up at him from under the swells of her ass.

  That image was not going to help with the Getting His Head Right project.

  Hank stretched out next to her on the floor, letting his limbs sprawl. Tucking himself into her pose wasn’t going to happen—he wasn’t that graceful or bendy.

  Her hands remained folded in her lap, her pose one of reverent pause. “I love this moment,” she said, her voice quiet enough to slip along the floor and through the cracks, if there had been any. “Anything could be inside. Everything could be inside.”

  He’d known these things were like treasure to her—but he’d thought of it more in terms of plunder, things she might use to get ahead in the world. Seeing her curled over the box, taking this moment to savor it, he remembered the other meaning of treasure: something precious, cherished. Beloved.

  Slowly, she raised her hands and fit her fingers under the lip of the box lid. There was a ritual to the way she eased off the lid, ceremony and sacredness in the motions of her limbs.

  He found himself caught in the way she moved, in the moment she created, his own limbs heavy with her mood.

  Once the box was open, she set aside the lid with the same care she’d removed it with. The first thing she did was take a deep breath.

  “I love that smell.”

  Although he’d opened over a hundred of these boxes himself, he leaned in to smell with her. Must and age and memory met his nose. He loved that smell too.

  She tilted her head to turn her smile on him. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

  The first thing she pulled out was—

  “Spurs?” She frowned at them as if she’d never seen them before, keeping the sharp rowels away from her fingertips.

  He took them from her, the leather straps brittle with age while the silver was clouded with tarnish. “These must be Tía Franny’s.”

  “Not Felipe’s?”

  He shook his head. “In most of the pictures, she’s wearing spurs, not him.”

  The designs embossed into the metal were abstract swirls and whorls. No flowers for Tía Franny. Hank would have to polish these up, see if he could find someone to make replicas of the leather straps—there was no way to save those.

  Lale was already diving back into the box, her movements deliberate as she retrieved a sheaf of papers. “Hmm.” She flipped through them. “They’re all receipts of sale for cattle. From the thirties.”

  She passed them to him and he took a look himself. Nope, there wasn’t anything other than bills of sale and nothing beyond the 1930s. Hank wondered why only these receipts had been saved—maybe as a reminder of hard times they’d survived?

  Whatever the reason, Hank would file them away with all the other paperwork he’d found, continuing to save them for the next generation.

  “Oh!” Lale clapped her hands together, and he had to turn his head to laugh. She was worse than a kid on Christmas. “There’s like, so much sheet music here.” She gathered the papers up in her arms. “All of it from the turn of the century. Look.” She shoved them at him with wide, bright eyes.

  He flipped through them if only to make her happy. He couldn’t see what was so exciting about old sheet music, although the cover designs were pretty neat. “I guess the radio didn’t come in so well back then.”

  It still didn’t, to be honest. You had a choice of country or… country up here. Hank wasn’t a snob about music, but he sure as hell didn’t listen to the music on the country radio.

  Lale had risen up on her knees and was rooting in the bottom of the box. “There’s not much more here.” Her voice was muffled as it bounced its way out of the box. “Just these.”

  She handed him several small, canvas-bound books, all battered at the edges and wearing smudges of dirt.

  Hank turned the top one over to read the cover and had to smile. “These are brand books. Every brand had to be registered, and you could use these books to figure out who a loose cow belonged to.”

  “A maverick cow?”

  Hank shook his head. “You city folk. A maverick is a cow without a brand.”

  “Huh.” Clearly Lale found the brand books much less interesting than she had the sheet music.

  But these were right up Hank’s alley. He flipped through the first one, looking for his grandpa’s brand. It wasn’t there—this book was probably too early for that—but he found his great-grandpa’s and great-great-grandpa’s brand. And Tía Franny’s. She had her own brand, separate from Tío Felipe’s, which tickled Hank to no end.

  He saw several other names he recognized as he went through the book. He should talk to Sasha at the library about donating these for the local history section.

  Lale was already moving on to the next box. She did her ritual of waiting a moment, then easing off the lid, only quicker this time. When she saw what was inside, one corner of her mouth lifted, then the other.

  “Pay dirt,” she said under her breath.

  He leaned over to see what had her so excited, nearly bumping his head into hers when he did. She didn’t flinch away though.

  Inside, there were over a dozen leather-bound notebooks, each one tied up with twine, each one unlabeled. Hank frowned. He didn’t remember putting those into the box, not that he’d been very methodical when he’d cleaned out the desk. There had been too much stuff to linger over any of it.

  Lale leaned in, a single wisp of her hair brushing his cheek and catching on his stubble. He thought to pull it away, then decided against it. When she moved again, she’d take her hair with her. It wouldn’t hurt him to have that little bit of her hair stuck on his cheek for a while.

  She pulled out the first book and tugged apart the knot in the twine. It crumbled into tiny fragments as she did, releasing a wispy cloud of dust. She flicked the bits off her fingers, then opened the book.

  He put his face next to hers, the better to read along. Which made two wisps of her hair tangle in his stubble. He tried not to think about it, or the smell of her shampoo, or the rhythm of her breathing. Instead, he focused on the markings in the book.

  It was a careful, thoughtful hand that had written that, was his first thought. Somehow he didn’t think it was Tía Franny’s writing.

  The book held a list of animals—horses, maybe?—their dams, sires, dates of birth, distinctive markings, and notes on their soundness and temperament. That must have been the start of Franny and Felipe’s horse-breeding operation.

  “I’ll give that to Penny,” he said. “She’ll be interested in it.”

 

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