ONE
Five years later
“YOU GOING TO the wedding?” Chase McCullar asked his sister-in-law. His blue eyes were directed downward toward the coffee cup he held, rather than at Jenny, and his voice was almost innocent of inflection.
“Of course,” Jenny said, glancing at him over her shoulder. “Aren’t you?”
“You think I’ll get an invitation?”
“I think a better question might be, do you want one?”
“What makes you think I wouldn’t want an invitation?”
She laid the dishcloth she’d been using on the counter beside the sink and turned around to face him. Chase was sitting at her kitchen table, a table that had been in his family for three generations. He must have eaten tens of thousands of meals at its scarred wooden surface. Maybe that was why he looked so right sitting there, as if he still belonged here, living in this house instead of the one he had built on his half of the McCullar land.
Or maybe he looked so right, she acknowledged, because he always reminded her of Mac. They even had the same way of sitting, forearms on the table and broad shoulders slightly hunched, both hands wrapped around a mug, as if savoring against their fingers the warmth of the coffee it held.
She banished that memory as she had so many others in the past few weeks. She had even dreamed about Mac last night, dreamed about him making love to her, and that hadn’t happened in a very long time.
There had been too much upheaval lately, too many disturbances in her usually placid existence, she supposed. The kidnapping of Chase’s daughter and his belated marriage to her mother, Samantha Kincaid. Rio’s return from prison. Doc Horn’s brutal murder.
Apparently those things, as unlikely as it seemed, had somehow rekindled the memories of those nearly perfect days with Mac. Or maybe seeing Chase and Samantha finally together had made her remember her own marriage. Or perhaps that had been triggered by the way Rio looked at Anne Richardson, the two of them sitting at this very kitchen table, whatever had been in Rio’s black eyes so much like the way Mac used to look at her. Or, at least, she amended, the way she always remembered his look.
Most things were better replayed in memory than they had been in actuality. The reality of long-ago events faded, and the remembrance of them had a tendency to become more perfect with the passage of time, she reminded herself, trying to be fair to Trent. Anne Richardson’s brother, Trent, was the man she was fortunate enough to have in love with her now. A good man who wanted to marry her. A man who deserved not to have to fight against all those perfect memories.
Not that she minded having only good memories of her marriage, of course. However, she now admitted that savoring those had prevented her from moving on, from getting on with the business of living her life, and she was determined to change that. She had loved Mac McCullar with every fiber of her being, but Mac was dead. He had been dead for almost five years, and she knew it was time for her to begin living again.
She remembered that she had once accused Chase of doing that—of trying to crawl down into that grave with Mac. And instead she had discovered that she was the one who had been guilty of that sin. Once she had had the courage to make that admission, to face what her life had become, she had decided it was time to do something about it.
She realized suddenly that Chase was waiting for her answer, his blue eyes—eyes that were just like Mac’s—studying her face as she stood, lost in memory and regret.
“You and Rio haven’t exactly been…” She hesitated, searching for the right word, thinking about the strange relationship that existed between the half brothers.
“Not exactly bosom buddies,” Chase suggested caustically.
“Not exactly brothers,” she countered. “At least you haven’t acted like brothers.”
“I thought he killed Mac. At least had a part in Mac’s death. How did you want me to treat him?”
“You thought?” she asked, emphasizing the past tense, which was, to her, the pertinent part of that statement. “But you don’t think that anymore?”
“Hell, Jenny…” Chase began, and then he hesitated. “Sometimes even I don’t know what I believe anymore.” He shook his head, eyes lowering again to the steaming coffee. “It just doesn’t…” He shook his head again.
“Feel right to hate Rio any longer? Or to blame him for Mac’s death?” Jenny suggested.
Chase looked up. “You think I was wrong about that.”
“Yes,” she said simply.
Chase’s mouth tightened. It would be hard for him to make that admission, she knew. Almost as hard as it had been for her to make the unwanted one about her own life that she’d recently made.
“If that’s true,” Chase said, “then he probably hates me.”
Rio had tried to warn his half brother about what was going to happen to Mac. He had ridden across the river to tell Chase about a snatch of drunken conversation he’d overheard in a Mexican cantina. Only, he had made that ride the same night Mac’s truck had exploded, and the two events had become inextricably linked in Chase’s mind.
Chase hadn’t believed Rio’s claim that his mission that night had been a warning. Instead, he had interpreted his bastard half brother’s words as threat and had viewed Rio as the messenger of whoever had killed Mac. In the months following the murder, Chase had poured every ounce of his energy into seeing that Rio Delgado was punished for his part in that crime.
“You cost him five years of his life,” Jenny acknowledged. “If he is innocent, as he’s always claimed…”
“Then the wrong man got punished. And whoever killed Mac got away with murder,” Chase added bitterly. “I didn’t stop looking for them, Jenny. I always thought something would turn up. I never believed Rio was the mastermind. I thought he was just their damn messenger boy.”
“But he was the only one of them you could identify.”
Jenny understood all Chase’s motives in pursuing Rio. She had always understood them. She, too, had wanted somebody punished, but knowing Rio now, she had gradually come to realize that he hadn’t had anything to do with what had happened.
“Buck told me nothing else has ever come to light about that night,” Chase said. “There was never any indication that anybody was transporting drugs through this county. Or had even been planning to.”
Buck Elkins had been Mac’s deputy as well as his friend. He had been appointed sheriff after Mac’s death and had thoughtfully kept Jenny informed about the county’s progress, or in this case, its lack of progress, until she had finally asked him not to make any further reports to her about the investigation. There seemed no point in constantly being told that nothing else had been uncovered about her husband’s murder.
“Rio doesn’t seem to think too much of Buck’s detective skills,” Jenny reminded her brother-in-law.
“Couldn’t find his ass with both hands,” Chase said, repeating his half brother’s colorful assessment. Unconsciously, his lips moved, almost into a smile.
“Maybe
