In the Rancher's Arms

Nine



Two days after the blizzard, Tori was stir-crazy. She’d stayed in the bedroom she had used since her arrival and even waited to go downstairs for her meals and out to visit the calves until she was certain Eli had gone outside to help his men with some of the other chores.

She had asked Buck about the road and when he thought the men would get around to using the tractor to clear the snow, but he had just shrugged and told her they would get around to it eventually. It wasn’t that she was so anxious to leave the Rusty Spur. She wasn’t. But the longer she stayed, the harder it would be for her when the time came for her to go.

“Tori, could you come downstairs?” Buck called. “I need your help with something.”

She frowned as she walked out of her room and descended the stairs. It wasn’t like Buck to yell up the stairs for her. If he had wanted to talk to her or needed her help with something over the past couple of days, he’d climbed the stairs and knocked on her door.

“What can I help you with, Buck?” she asked when she entered the kitchen.

Buck was standing at the sink, and when he turned around she gasped at the sight of the bloody towel he had wrapped around his hand. “I was cutting up some steaks for a stew and the butcher knife slipped,” he said, clearly disgusted with himself. “It cut my finger.”

“How bad is it?” she asked, hurrying over to him.

“I’m gonna need a few stitches,” he said, holding his finger under the water to rinse the wound. “You’d better run and get Eli.”

“But the road isn’t cleared for him to take you to the doctor,” she said, rushing into the pantry to get the first-aid kit she had seen on one of the shelves.

“He’ll have to stitch it up for me,” Buck said, using the hydrogen peroxide she’d removed from the box of medical supplies.

“Where is he?” she asked, reaching for her coat. Seeing Eli again wasn’t going to be easy, but Buck needed help that she couldn’t give.

“Try the equipment barn,” he said. “Eli said something at breakfast about needing to do work on one of the trucks.”

Running through the snow, she went straight to the barn Buck had mentioned. She found Eli working on the truck he had taught her to drive the day she’d helped him take hay out to the pasture.

“Buck cut his finger,” she said when he looked up. “He needs you to stitch it closed.”

Nodding, he wiped his hands on a rag. “Go back to the house and have him hold it above his heart and apply direct pressure on it to help stop the bleeding. I’ll be right there.”

Eli looked so good to her that she thought she might burst into tears. She loved him so much that she ached from it, but he wasn’t willing to listen to her and she wasn’t going to grovel.

When she got back to the house, Buck sat at the table holding his finger up and it appeared he was applying pressure to the wound. “Eli’s on the way,” she said, hanging up her coat and removing her snow boots. “Has the bleeding slowed down?”

Buck nodded. “But it looks like you’re gonna have to cook supper tonight.”

Sitting down at the table beside him, she shook her head. “You heard what a disaster it was when I tried to grill steaks.”

“Don’t worry—I’ll talk you through it,” he said, smiling. “You’ll do just fine.”

When Eli entered the house, took off his coat and washed his hands, he walked over to where Buck sat at the table with Tori. “Let’s see what you’ve done this time.”

“What does it look like?” Buck snapped back. “I had a run-in with the butcher knife and lost.”

“That’s because you aren’t careful enough when you use it,” Eli shot back.

Their sniping at each other continued the entire time Eli was sewing up Buck’s finger and Tori didn’t like it one bit. The tension between them was even worse now than it had been the day she’d arrived at the ranch. And she knew she was the cause of their problem, again. Buck was clearly on her side and thought Eli should listen to her explanation and Eli was too stubborn to hear anything she had to say. But she couldn’t stand the thought that she was the reason for the deterioration of their relationship.

“Stop it, both of you,” she said suddenly, surprising even herself at her outburst. But once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “You’re the only family either of you have and no matter what your differences are, you care deeply for each other. So start acting like it.” She pointed at Eli. “You have something that I’ve never had—a father who loves you and wants the best for you. Believe me, not every father cares enough to want that for their child. You should cherish your relationship and show some respect for him.”

Turning to Buck, she added, “And you need to stop antagonizing your son because he doesn’t want me to be his wife anymore. I love him, but he doesn’t love me. You’re going to have to accept that things didn’t work out between us, and move on. Once I leave the ranch, I’ll be out of your lives, but you’ll still have each other. Take care of what you have together and never take it for granted or lose sight of how precious it is.”

Clearly rendered speechless by her uncharacteristic outburst, both men stared at her as if she had sprouted another head.

Deciding that she had said more than enough, she turned and left the room to go back upstairs. Why did men have to make something as simple as love so darned complicated? And why was it breaking her heart that she wouldn’t be around to remind them each and every day what a special bond they had?

* * *

As Eli watched Tori storm from the room, he looked at Buck. His father was just as startled by Tori’s lecture as he was.

“I guess she told us how the bread’s buttered,” Buck finally said.

Eli nodded. “She certainly had no problem sharing her opinion on the subject.”

They were both silent while Eli wrapped gauze around Buck’s finger, then secured it with tape.

“Family sure does mean a lot to her,” Buck said, his voice suspiciously gruff. He cleared his throat. “It reminds me of the way your momma always felt.”

“She lied to me, Dad,” Eli said, putting the medical supplies back into the first-aid kit. “How could I ever trust her?”

“Maybe you ought to hear her out before you decide one way or the other,” his father suggested. “She might have a pretty good reason for doing what she did.”

“I don’t see how she could ever justify lying to me about who she is,” Eli answered as he closed the first-aid kit.

“Other than telling you she had ranchin’ experience, what else did she lie about?” Buck asked.

Eli frowned. “I’m not sure. She wasn’t honest about her name, but she wasn’t exactly dishonest, either.”

Buck looked confused. “You wanna run that past me one more time?”

“She had her name legally changed, so technically when she told me her name was Victoria Anderson, she was telling the truth,” Eli said slowly.

Now that he had calmed down a little and given himself a couple of days to think about it, he had to concede that omitting the facts wasn’t the same as lying. But it wasn’t exactly being honest, either.

Buck seemed to ponder the information. “Well, as I see it, if you don’t give her a chance to tell her side of things, you’ll never know what the whole story is.”

Eli shrugged. “I don’t guess it would hurt.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” Buck pointed toward the upstairs. “That little gal up there is your wife, son. Be a husband and go talk to her. Find out what she has to say before you go throwin’ away somethin’ that you might never find again.”

Returning the first-aid kit to the shelf in the pantry, Eli hesitated for a moment. He was half-afraid her explanation wouldn’t be plausible. But if her reasons were solid and he let her leave without hearing what they were, he would lose the only woman he had ever truly loved.

He sucked in a sharp breath. When had he fallen in love with her? And how could he have abandoned his resolve to keep emotions out of their marriage?

He wasn’t sure how all that had happened. But he did know as surely as he knew his own name that if he didn’t listen to Tori, he’d never know whether he was protecting himself and the ranch or throwing away the best thing that had ever happened to him.

“Will you be all right for a while?” he asked Buck.

His father nodded. “I’m just gonna sit here and look through my seed catalog.” His father gave him a smile that reminded Eli just how lucky he really was. “Good luck, son.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

As Eli climbed the stairs, he wondered what he was going to say to Tori. Should he tell her he was ready to listen to her explanation? Or should he ask her why she hadn’t trusted him with her secrets when things had started getting more serious between them? Or maybe he should tell her about his college girlfriend and how her duplicity had left him with a few trust issues of his own.

Knocking on the bedroom door, Eli waited for a moment before he opened it. Tori was sitting on the window seat, staring down at the snowman they had made a few days ago.

“Tori, I think we need to talk,” he said, walking over to sit down beside her. He winced when she drew her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees, pressing herself into the corner away from him.

“Why?” she asked, sniffing. She had been crying and it caused a knot to form in his gut that he was responsible for her tears.

He stared across the room at the packed suitcase. “There’s something I should probably tell you about myself that might explain why I wasn’t willing to listen to you.”

“Why should I listen to you when you wouldn’t listen to me?” she asked, still staring out the window.

“Because you’re more reasonable than I am?”

“I’m glad you finally realized that,” she answered.

They were silent for several long moments before he cleared his throat. “When I was in college, I dated a girl and I thought we were pretty serious,” he said, deciding to tell her everything. “But it turned out she and her fiancé had a plan to swindle me and Buck out of whatever they could get.”

“Her fiancé?” Tori finally turned to look at him. “She was engaged and dating you, too?”

He nodded. “She told me he was her brother and that he was a land developer who was interested in building a resort or possibly a dude ranch somewhere in Wyoming. She tried to get me to partner up with him and put his name on the deed to part of the ranch. Had I fallen for their scheme I would have probably ended up losing at least part of the ranch and if not all of our money, a sizable amount of it.”

Tori frowned. “How did you get hooked up with these people?”

“I met up with her when I attended UCLA,” he said, thinking about how naive he had been at the time. “I didn’t know it, but they had researched my family and would have shown up at whatever college I attended.”

“They targeted you,” Tori guessed.

“Yup. They knew my family had land and money and they decided to go after some of it.” He shrugged. “To make a long story short, I figured out that things weren’t right when I brought her here for Thanksgiving. She hated the place and couldn’t seem to stop calling her ‘brother.’”

“So because of her, I’ve been condemned for the painful decisions I was forced to make,” Tori said defensively.

“Unfortunately, that just about sizes it up,” he said, taking a deep breath. He wasn’t proud of his condemnation of her without listening to her, but he was man enough not to try denying it. “If you’re willing and still want to tell me, I’m ready to listen. So, why did you need to wipe the slate clean and start over as another person? And why did you go so long without telling me, even after we made love?”

“Before I tell you what happened, I’d like to know how you discovered who I really am,” she said, meeting his gaze head-on.

“I hired Blake Hartwell’s brother, Sean. He’s a retired FBI agent and owns his own investigation agency. He was just about to close his investigation when he found your former nanny. She told him all about you.”

“How could Nanny Marie betray me like that?” she asked, her voice cracking.

Eli shook his head. “In her defense, Sean said she’s had a stroke and it’s affected her short-term memory. She might not remember even writing that letter of reference or having that conversation with me.”

She sighed. “I hope she’ll be all right. She’s the closest thing to a mother that I’ve ever known and I think she really did want what’s best for me. She even encouraged me when I told her my plans to change my identity.”

“I know who your father was and that you weren’t close, but why did you feel that changing your identity was the only answer?” he asked, hoping she had a reasonable explanation.

“After the reaction you had, you have to ask?” She rose from the window seat to pace the room. “What were some of the first words out of your mouth when you confronted me the other day?” Before he could answer, she told him. “You said you had a hard time believing that I worked for my father and had no knowledge of his illegal activities. You decided I was as guilty as he had been just because of the Bardwell name.”

The more he thought about it, Eli felt as guilty as hell. That was exactly what he had done.

“Yes, I discovered what my father was doing with his clients’ accounts,” she went on. “And I did become involved, but not in the way you think.”

“I’m listening,” he said, sensing that what she was about to tell him was crucial.

“After I learned what he had been doing, I confronted him and told him that he needed to turn himself into the authorities or I would.” Tears began to spill down her cheeks and she wrapped her arms around her middle protectively. “He refused and told me to do what I felt I had to do.”

“You turned him in,” Eli said, knowing that must have been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

She nodded. “Even though I knew it would kill any chance of us ever having a relationship, I didn’t feel I had a choice. He had stolen billions of dollars from his clients and I couldn’t ignore that. That’s why I met with the authorities and gave them the information to bring it to an end. I was promised that the name of the whistle-blower would remain anonymous.”

“But it wasn’t?” He could tell she was still haunted by the decision she’d been forced to make.

“It was, but he knew and...so did I,” she said, her breath catching on a sob. “When he had the heart attack from the stress of his arrest and the charges he was facing, I was called to the hospital, but he refused to see me.”

Eli didn’t think twice about going to her and wrapping her in his arms. “Honey, I am so sorry you had to go through that.”

“I wish that’s all I had to go through,” she said, sounding drained of energy.

“What else happened?” She had been through hell and he should be horsewhipped for putting her through more by not letting her explain the first time she’d tried.

“Even though I had been cleared by the authorities of any involvement, no one would hire me because of my last name. And because everything I owned was tied to my father’s business, I lost my condo, my car and all but a few mementos the authorities decided weren’t worth trying to sell off to repay the people he stole from.” She snuggled deeper into his embrace. “After I received a couple of death threats from some of his understandably furious clients, I petitioned the court to have my identity changed for reasons of protection.”

The thought that she might have been hurt or worse was almost more than he could bear. “But how did you find my online ad? And why did you feel compelled to answer it?”

“I ran across it by accident while researching areas of the country where I could make a fresh start on the least amount of money.” She leaned back to look up at him. “I have no explanation other than fate as to how I found your ad or why I felt I had to answer it.”

Staring down at her, he smiled. “Did you mean it when you said you love me?”

She hesitated a moment before she finally nodded. “Yes. But I realize you don’t love me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Tori,” he said, knowing that he wanted nothing but complete honesty and trust between them. “I love you more than life itself.”

He had tried to deny it, but he was pretty sure he had fallen in love with her the first time he had talked to her on the phone. Why else would he have based his decision to ask her to marry him on the sound of her voice?

“Can you find it in your heart to forgive me for all of the accusations? And for my stubborn refusal to listen to you?” he asked, praying that she could.

Her tearful smile was without a doubt the prettiest he had ever seen. “Yes. But I was at fault, too.”

“How do you figure that, honey?” he asked, happy to have her back in his arms.

“I should have found a way to tell you about myself when I realized how quickly we were getting close to making our marriage real.” She stared up at him. “And I should have told you the truth about not knowing how to ride. If I hadn’t lied about my experience with rural life, the accident would have never happened.”

“We were both to blame, Tori.”

Covering her mouth with his, he tried to kiss away the hurt he’d put her through and any lingering doubt she might have that he loved her. When he finally eased away from the kiss, they were both short of breath.

“Will you do me the honor of staying married to me, honey?” he asked, needing to know she wanted to be his wife for the rest of their lives as much as he wanted to be her husband.

“Yes.” There was no hesitation in her answer and her beautiful smile convinced him that he had to be the luckiest son of a gun to ever draw a breath if she still loved him in spite of his stubborn pride.

“Then I want you to start planning the wedding of your dreams,” he said, grinning. “And don’t tell me you don’t already have something in mind. From what I hear, most girls start planning their weddings in kindergarten.”

She laughed, and he didn’t think he’d ever heard a sweeter sound. “Now that you mention it, I might have had an idea or two about my wedding when I was that age,” she admitted.

“Set a date for some time this coming summer, honey,” he said, unable to stop grinning. “I love you and I damned well want everyone to know it.”

“And I love you, Eli Laughlin, with all my heart and soul.”