Desperado: Deep in the Heart, Book 2 (26 page)

Sloan slapped Cody on the back as they walked over to shake Tate’s hand. “You did two good deeds today. You rescued me and Tate. And Pick and Curvy forgot all their turmoil in the excitement.”

He refused to reply to that. There had been no rescuing of anyone, as far as Cody was concerned. Just some things that had needed to be straightened out. They shook hands with the cowboy and kissed his intended bride, then headed toward Cody’s truck.

“My clothes have dried out,” Sloan said. “Don’t need to change after all.”

“Good. You’ve slowed me down enough for one day.” Cody started the truck and pulled away, his thoughts busy.

After a few minutes, Sloan said, “Hey, Cody, what are you going to do with that business card Hera found on Tate?”

Cody shrugged as if he could hardly remember taking it. In truth, it was burning a hole in his jeans pocket. “I have a bone to pick with her.”

“You’re going to call her?”

He nodded curtly. Most definitely he was going to call her and explain to her that Mary wasn’t setting foot in California for auditions of any kind. He’d warned Stormy before about putting weird ideas in the teenager’s head. Annie and Zach would set Mary on the right track about this matter.

He would straighten Stormy out once and for all, just as he’d straightened out these other matters this morning.

His cell phone rang in the truck. Cody switched it on. “Hello?”

“Cody? It’s Annie.”

“What’s happening?” He smiled at the sound of her voice.

“I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Another one?” A slight smile curved his lips.

“I know it’s a lot to ask of you. We’ve been calling on you a lot lately. But this is a big one.”

“Shoot.” He glanced at Sloan, his eyebrows raised in benevolent patience.

“I wonder if, now that you’ve gotten past the auction, you have time to take Mary out to California.”

His jaw dropped.

“It’s so much to ask, I know, but, Cody, Mary has simply blossomed since this movie came to town. I know you’ve seen it. Maybe she’s found her calling. I don’t know. Certainly it isn’t what I would have chosen for her. But you remember how painfully shy and unhappy she was. All that’s gone now. She’s happy, excited, enthusiastic. The way a teenager should be.” Annie’s voice turned pleading. “I hate to ask, I really do. I wouldn’t, if it didn’t mean so much. And I would do it myself, but I’m in no condition to take her right now. Oh, Cody, do you think there’s any way you could?”

Cody finally gained his voice. “Have you lost your mind? I can’t think of anything worse than allowing Mary to run around with Stormy Nixon.”

“Why, Cody? She’s been so good for her.”

“She’s pregnant! And not married! What kind of example is that for a young, impressionable girl?” He stopped the truck before he had a wreck. His hands were shaking. How in the hell would he fly out to California? Airplanes. Earthquakes. Stormy. Hell, no. It would be flying into the face of everything he secretly feared. Of course, a man such as he didn’t have fears. Wasn’t supposed to.

I can’t go to California.

“Is it yours?” Annie cut into his thoughts.

His insides felt queasy. “Hell, no. She’s engaged to some fellow she’s dragging around like a toy dog.”

“Oh.” Annie hesitated for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His tone was brisk, signaling that he wasn’t.

“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Stormy’s business is not mine, Cody. All I know is what she’s done for my daughter. Maybe if you think about it for a while, you can see your way clear to go. If not, I’ll understand.”

Her voice said she’d be very disappointed. Cody blew out a breath, a deep release of emotion that didn’t come near to venting the agony in his soul. “I’m sorry, Annie. I don’t need time to think about it. I can’t go to California. Nothing about the idea feels right to me. It’s just another one of Stormy’s impulsive gestures. I’m sorry, but I have to say no.”

“All right.” She, too, sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

The line clicked off. He turned the phone off, feeling terrible. “Damn,” he muttered.

“Family trouble?”

“Yeah.” He jerked his head in a curt nod. “As usual, it can be laid at Stormy’s door. She wants Mary to go to California. Annie wants me to take her.”

Sloan began whistling, which irritated the hell out of Cody. “You’re going to ride in the truck bed if you keep that up,” he muttered.

“Yep. California, here he comes,” he sang.

“I’m not going. I’m out of good deeds.” Cody eased the truck back out into the traffic. “Rest assured, there is nothing that could make me go.”

Mary sat outside the movie set, waiting for her mother and Zach to pick her up. They’d only been gone an hour—long enough for her to finish filming the last bit of her part. She was sad about that. So much about the movie had brought new excitement into her life. Uncle Cody had been so wrong to worry about her being in the movie. She hadn’t been afraid of anything.

Unfortunately, yesterday her mother had told her that Uncle Cody wouldn’t take her to California to audition for upcoming parts that Stormy thought had promise for her, and which could be worked around her school schedule. Uncle didn’t think she was old enough. Tears sprang into her eyes. No matter how much she’d grown up in the last few months, Uncle just couldn’t see that she wasn’t a baby anymore.

The stand-in from somewhere in Texas—she couldn’t remember where—ambled over to take a seat next to her. “How are you, Mary?”

She knew his name was Sam, and that was about all. It didn’t matter, though. Sam listened to her. He didn’t think she was a baby. Since the moment work had begun on the project, he’d been kind to her. Mary knew she could confide in him, and he would make her feel better.

Not like Uncle, whom she loved, but who just didn’t understand her. “I’m fine,” she sighed dramatically.

“You don’t sound fine.” He gave her an attentive look, which made her feel important.

“It’s just that I have this chance to go to California, but I can’t.” She raised her eyebrows at him and shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but he would know it did.

“Why can’t you?”

“My uncle doesn’t want me to. He doesn’t think I’m ready yet.”

“Well, now.” Sam reached out and gently stroked her back. “I think you’re ready, Mary. I sure do.”

Chapter Seventeen

Cody never dialed the number on Stormy’s business card. It didn’t seem right. She was marrying someone else. He couldn’t see himself calling up a woman who had proclaimed her love to someone else.

When he caught himself picking up a whisky bottle for a generous pour, he remembered Sloan’s tortured face and the picture he kept hidden in his desk. Cody put the whisky bottle back in the cabinet, untouched. In no way was he in as bad a shape as Sloan.

The phone rang, and he leaped to jerk it off the cradle, glad for something to do. “Yeah?”

“Hera’s over at my house breathing fire,” Sloan told him. “Wants to know where her groom has disappeared to.”

Cody’s eyebrows shot up. “I’m not hiding him over here.”

“I don’t think she’s worried about that. She thinks he may have gone to California to visit Stormy.”

Nausea curled in Cody’s gut. If Wrong-Way had done that, he’d kill him. He’d kill him for being that much of a sniveling coward to say he’d marry Hera and then run off to another woman. Of course, he’d get a few licks in on principle. How in the hell could Tate do something Cody wouldn’t do? “If you’re wanting my humble opinion, I don’t think he’s there.”

He heard Hera’s voice instructing Sloan in the background. “She says she knows you’ve got Stormy’s business card. Maybe you better give us the number where she can be reached, so we can ask her. That might simplify matters.” Sloan was silent for a moment, while Hera’s voice raged in the background. “’Course, Hera says she ain’t particular as to who calls her to find out if he’s there. She says maybe you oughta call Stormy, Cody.”

Something tingled inside him, making his stomach tighten and pitch with excitement that didn’t feel good. “No can do, friend. I didn’t even keep the card,” he lied, staring at it as it lay in two pieces on top of the trash where he’d tossed it. “Truthfully, I think Hera better search elsewhere for Tate. Stormy’s engaged to be married and would show that loser—I mean, her prospective bridegroom—to the door.”

“I thought you said you had a bone to pick with her,” Sloan said in a low voice.

“I did, but I decided it was in everybody’s best interest not to.”

“Did you chicken out?”

“Hell, no,” Cody retorted. “Just think I oughta stay out of the woman’s life when she’s hooking up with another man.”

“Well.” Sloan didn’t reply for a moment. “Once the ‘I do’s’ are said, you’re a casualty. Just a reader of the ‘Advice to the Lovelorn’ column.”

“Guess so.” Cody wasn’t going to get drawn into that. “Tell Hera if I see Wrong-Way, I’ll rope him for her.”

Sloan conveyed the message, but the phone line couldn’t disguise the crack of the front door as it slammed shut.

“She’s pretty put out with Tate,” Sloan said.

“I don’t know what she sees in that skinny, handlebar-mustached
vaquero
.” If he were Hera, he’d be looking in more profitable fields. He didn’t think Tate was ever going to do more than give lip service to his intentions. If she found him to drag him to the altar, Cody thought it’d be a miracle.

“You don’t think he went to California?”

“Naw. He’s hiding out. Going to lie low until Hera gets over wanting to marry him.”

“He’d better never show his face around here again. Hera won’t take well to being scorned. She’ll flatten him.”

It didn’t feel good to be scorned. Even though Stormy hadn’t really scorned him, Cody could sympathize with Hera’s feelings. What the hell did Stormy see in that old dude in a suit who’d been with her? His insides ran tight and prickly as barbed wire. “I don’t care what happens to Tate. I’ve gotta go.”

“Be seeing ya,” Sloan said cheerfully. “I’m gonna hang around here for a while. Ain’t got anything pressing on
my
mind like you do, such as whether some sidewinder’s gotten the guts up to visit the woman I love.”

“’Course, since you’re still celebrating your divorce, you don’t really give a damn who’s sleeping with the woman you love,” Cody snarled, goaded. He threw the phone down and exhaled a few choice curse words. He cared. He really did. He hurt so much he ached in places he hadn’t hurt before. But a man could only go where he was wanted. If Tate had gone to California, he would only succeed in making a fool of himself. Cody wasn’t about to do the same.

Throwing himself into a recliner on a wave of self-righteous pity, Cody tried to get his mind on his work. Absently, he wondered how his mother was doing. She certainly hadn’t bothered to send a shout his way. He’d heard from her once, a casual, brief call that set a record for world’s shortest conversation between two people who loved each other.

And Tate had gone missing. How could a man his age jump from irresponsible action to gutless action and wake up to look at himself in the mirror every morning?

Sighing, he got up and roamed through the house once aimlessly. It was too quiet, too empty. Ma had been right. When had it gotten so damn depressing around here? When had his life gotten so out of whack?

Since Stormy hit my porch.
He hated to admit that to himself. Sometime he’d become an empty, dried-out husk. “No wonder Ma bailed out on me.” The realization pained him deeply. Fortunately, he still had Mary. Maybe he’d call over to Annie’s and invite himself to dinner so he could see the only person left alive who cared about him at all.

Swiftly, he rang Annie’s number. “Hey, Annie,” he said, feeling immensely better now that he had a voice on the phone that was familiar and friendly. “Got enough for an extra mouth tonight?”

“Sure, Cody. If you don’t mind me trying one more time to convince you to take Mary to California.”

He’d forgotten about that. “I’m sure I can fend you off if the cooking’s good. What time is dinner?”

“In twenty,” she told him, “so you’d best hurry if you want it hot.”

“I’ll be there.” Hanging up, he stopped in front of the hall mirror to run a careless hand over his hair before slapping on his hat. He grabbed his truck keys and strode out the door, hurrying to his truck.

In the house, the phone rang and rang before the answering machine clicked on. There was shuffling in the background, then the caller’s phone slammed down before anyone could speak.

Twenty minutes later, Cody arrived at Annie’s house, hungry and ready to slide into the comfort zone of family. “Where’s Mary?” he asked, after shaking Zach’s hand and kissing Annie on the cheek.

Annie turned to him. “Is she not with you?” She glanced past him to his truck.

“No.” He shook his head. “If I’d known she was still at the set, I could have picked her up on the way.”

“She should have been finished hours ago. She said she was going to walk up to your house and drag you over here for dinner.” Annie frowned and Zach looked up from where he was going over papers. “Didn’t she call you?”