The Bridal Path: Sara (13 page)

“Okay, who’s the man?” Ashley asked, ignoring the pointed jibe about her unfamiliarity with the operation of Three-Stars.

The accuracy of Ashley’s guess was irritating. “Man? Who said anything about a man?” Sara demanded.

“That’s the only thing I can think of that would keep you up this late and cause you to call your baby sister at this hour.”

“Maybe I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”

“It’s Jake, isn’t it?”

The direct hit left Sara speechless. Ashley hadn’t even seen her for months now. Had she always been that obvious about her feelings for the ranch foreman?

“What’s he done to you now?” Ashley persisted.

“Why would you think this has anything to do with Jake?” Sara asked.

“Because not one single man other than Jake Dawson has caught your eye since the day he showed up at Three-Stars. Sooner or later, all that longing was bound to erupt. What happened? Did you finally lose control and make a pass at him?”

Trust Ashley to cut to the chase. “You could say that.”

“Well, hallelujah!” When Sara remained silent, Ashley quickly took the hint. “Uh-oh, did he reject you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, my.”

“Oh, my, indeed,” Sara said fervently.

“How far has it gone?”

“That’s personal.”

Ashley chuckled. “That far, huh? So, what’s the problem? You should be in heaven. Or wasn’t he all you’d anticipated?”

“Oh, no, he was exactly the way I’d imagined he would be.”

“So?”

“I’m playing in the big leagues and I’m afraid I only have minor league skills,” Sara blurted.

“Which naturally made you think of me,” her sister said dryly. “Thanks a bunch.”

“Come on, Ash, you’ve never let a man tie you up in knots. You stay cool and calm and collected no matter what.”

“Is that supposed to flatter me? Maybe that’s because no one like Jake has come along for me.”

To Sara’s surprise, Ashley sounded wistful. “What about that guy, the one back in high school that no one knew you had a thing for?” she asked.

“I can’t imagine who you mean,” Ashley said in a defensive way that suggested she remembered every detail.

An almost forgotten image promptly came to mind. Sara described what she recalled. “Dangerous. Rebel. Sexy. I believe those were just a few of the words associated with him. Miss Perfect and the bad, bad boy. It always had a nice ring to it, if you ask me.”

The laughter that greeted her comment sounded a little forced. “You have a wild imagination, big sister,” Ashley protested.

“No, I have a long memory. Tell the truth. Are you regretting the choices you’ve made?”

Her sister sighed. “No, modeling was my ticket out of Wyoming. It’s been very good to me.” She hesitated, then added, “At least up until now.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning nothing,” Ashley said, suddenly brisk and businesslike. “You didn’t call to talk about me. Let’s figure out what to do about Jake.”

Sara wasn’t about to be put off so easily. “You know this giving advice stuff cuts both ways. I may not know much about the modeling business, but if you need to talk, I can certainly listen.”

“Thanks, but this is one problem I have to resolve on my own.”

Sara seized on the slip. “Then there is a problem.”

“Drop it, Sara,” Ashley ordered impatiently. “Now tell me exactly what you’re worried about with Jake.”

Pestering Ashley with more questions was obviously going to be a waste of time. Sara forced herself back to the reason for the call. “I’m worried that I’ve gone and fallen in love with him,” she said.

“And that’s bad?” Ashley asked, not sounding the least bit surprised by the admission.

“It is, when Jake has done everything but spell it out in skywriting that he positively hates the idea of marriage.”

“It’s men like that who end up falling the hardest,” Ashley said. “Give him time.”

Of course, in time, it was true that they could wind up walking down the aisle, Sara conceded to herself. Their bet might assure that, but Sara knew with every fiber of her being that Jake had never meant his impulsive proposal to be taken seriously. Now it hovered over them like some sort of dark and threatening cloud.

She sighed. She couldn’t tell Ashley any of that. It would mean getting into all of the hurt and betrayal she’d felt when she discovered their father’s plans for Three-Stars.

“Can you make a man fall in love with you?” Sara inquired wistfully.

“You can’t make a man do anything he’s set against,” Ashley said. “But you can be patient and loving and understanding, so you’re the one who’s there the day he wakes up and decides it’s time to get married. If the chemistry’s there, you’ve definitely got a jump start on the process.”

“Patient, loving and understanding?” Sara echoed. “What about just plain driving him to distraction?”

Ashley laughed at that. “Better yet. You don’t need advice from me, sweet pea. If you’re driving Jake to distraction, it sounds like you’re doing just fine on your own.”

“Don’t say anything about this to Daddy or Dani, okay?”

“We made a pact years ago to protect our secrets from Daddy’s meddling. As for Dani, I haven’t spoken to her in weeks now.”

“How come?” Sara asked, then guessed the answer before Ashley could reply. “She’s too good at seeing through you, isn’t she? She’d know right off that you’re worrying about something and you don’t want to get into it, right?”

“Goodbye, Sara. Good luck with Jake. He’s a lucky man.”

“Ashley Wilde, don’t you dare hang up on me.”

The edict came too late. Sara heard the phone click before she could complete the sentence. She could call back, but she knew that Ashley would only let the phone ring unanswered.

Of the three sisters, Ashley appeared to be the most open, the most outrageous, the most unflappable. But Sara knew better. Her younger sister was the most private, the most mysterious and the most vulnerable of all of them.

That night the memory of Ashley’s unspoken pain vied with Jake for Sara’s thoughts as she drifted off to sleep. But once her dreams began, it was no contest. Jake was at the center of every one.

Chapter Nine

F
or the next week Jake drove himself until exhaustion took over and numbed his mind. It was the most effective way he could think of to keep his growing feelings for Sara from luring him into doing something he’d regret.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t come up with any way at all to keep her out of his dreams. She plagued him like the very dickens from the minute his head hit the pillow and his eyes closed. She didn’t let up until he dragged himself awake in the morning, exhausted and disgruntled.

Why Sara? He asked himself that over and over again. Of all the women he’d ever known, why had she been the one to nag at him like a tantalizing, once-familiar scent?

She was lovely, but so were dozens of others.

She was sexy, but he’d never been drawn to the demure type. His relationships—if they could be called that—had all been blatantly sexual.

Was it as perverse as the fact that she’d always been so far out of his reach? Surely he was too old to be wanting a woman just because he couldn’t have her. Besides, Sara was hardly unattainable. She’d made her availability abundantly clear and he’d happily taken advantage of it.

For some reason he couldn’t fathom, it wasn’t enough. He wanted more, but he couldn’t put a name to the unfamiliar yearning.

After a week of denying himself the pleasure of seeing her, of touching her, he realized that abstinence wasn’t doing a darn thing except to put a more demanding edge on his need.

He told himself it was only curiosity that drew him to Zeke’s place late one afternoon when he knew Sara would be there for her riding lesson. But the truth was, the minute he laid eyes on her straddling a very restless bronco in the chute, his heart slammed against his ribs and then wound up in his throat.

He wanted to yell to Zeke not to open the gate. He wanted to go over and haul Sara off the back of the horse and cradle her in his arms, but he did neither of those things. He stood in the shadow of the barn and watched while Sara bent down to listen to a last bit of advice from Mary Lou, then smiled confidently.

“Let’s do it,” she told Zeke with gumption to spare.

Damn, but she was fearless, Jake thought. Normally, it was a quality he would have admired, but at the moment, it didn’t seem like a particularly admirable trait.

The gate opened, the bronco shot into the ring, bucking and twisting to rid itself of the annoyance on its back. It didn’t take three seconds to send Sara flying into the air. She landed with a thud in the dust, disgust written all over her face. If she was in pain, she ignored it.

“How long?” she demanded.

“Two point three seconds,” Zeke told her.

“Damn.”

“That’s longer than last time,” Mary Lou consoled her. She draped a comforting arm over Sara’s shoulders. “Now here’s where you went wrong.”

Her voice dropped to a confiding level that prevented Jake from hearing what she had to say. He realized that his hands were clenched into fists and his heartbeat had slowed to a dull thud.

It was worse than he’d thought. Sara just wasn’t cut out for bronc riding and all the lessons in the world weren’t going to change that.

Unfortunately, no one would be able to get that message across to her. She had too much riding on trying to best him. Determination, desperation and pride would force her not to accept the only rational advice: that she drop out now.

“You saw?” Zeke asked in a low voice.

Jake hadn’t even heard him approach, hadn’t even realized that Zeke had noticed him in the shadows. “Every agonizing second,” he told him.

“I’ll give her one thing, she’s got heart.”

“A lot of good that’ll do her, if she gets herself killed,” Jake retorted. “What am I going to do? I can’t let her take this kind of a risk.”

“You don’t have any choice,” Zeke said. “Not unless you aim to turn Three-Stars over to her without a fight. I’m not even sure she’d accept that. She wants that ranch in the worst way, but she wants it on her own terms. That’s plain enough. She’s got something to prove, to you, to that fool daddy of hers, maybe even to herself.”

Jake shook his head. “Well, I’ve got to come up with something.” He met Zeke’s worried gaze. “Don’t tell her I was here, okay?”

“Not a chance. Knowing you’d seen her would be worse humiliation than taking that fall. She’s gotten to taking those in stride,” he added dryly.

The frightening image of Sara slamming to the ground stayed with Jake all the way home. He shuddered every time he thought about it. Yet not one single, solid idea for avoiding tragedy came to him.

Even so, he found himself watching for Sara to come back from Zeke’s. Maybe he’d be struck by some brilliant answer once he laid eyes on her.

Instead, the only thing that struck him as she limped out of her car and headed wearily toward the house was how badly he wanted to drag her into his arms and hold her. Maybe take her into his place and run a hot bath for her to soothe her aching muscles, then rub her down with some of Mary Lou’s special liniment.

And, then? Well, it probably wasn’t smart to go imagining what might follow. He leaned back against the fence rail and struck a match to light a cigarette. Despite his intentions to quit, there were times when nothing matched drawing that smoke deep into his lungs.

The tiny spark of the match apparently caught her attention as surely as if he’d turned on a pair of high beam headlights. She turned his way.

“Jake?”

“Hey,” he called back softly. “Rough day?”

She made a valiant attempt to straighten up and put a little spring into her step. His admiration for her fierce determination grew.

“No rougher than the rest of them,” she said.

Jake suspected that was the gospel truth. “It won’t be too much longer. You sure you’re going to be ready?”

“Absolutely,” she insisted.

There was a cocky, confident note in her voice that he recognized as pure bravado.

“There’d be no shame in calling things off.”

She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said simply. “It’s the only chance I have.”

Jake knew all about only chances. He’d spent a lifetime grabbing on to them to haul himself out of the morass that had been his childhood. Owning Three-Stars was yet another one of those, perhaps the last and most rewarding yet.

Recognizing that the ranch was just as important to Sara and knowing that it put them forever at odds came closer to breaking his heart than anything that had ever happened to him.

He met Sara’s bleak expression and felt the sudden, surprising sting of tears. What the hell was happening to him? Nothing had moved him to cry in years.

Maybe if he’d been a different man, he could have given Sara her dream and walked away to find another one for himself. It would be the right thing to do, the noble thing.

But his own dreams had been tied up in Three-Stars for too long. He couldn’t see beyond it to any other possibilities.

That meant one of them would win and one would lose. With stakes that high, it seemed unlikely that the loser would ever forgive. No matter which of them came out the winner, Three-Stars would stand between them, as impenetrable a barrier as any fortress ever built.

And that struck Jake as almost unbearably sad.

* * *

Standing next to Jake with the first shimmering rays of moonlight cutting through the night sky, Sara was almost certain she saw the sheen of tears in his eyes. But, of course, that couldn’t be. A man like Jake never cried, never even acknowledged his emotions, as far as she could tell.

Unable to stop herself, she lifted her fingers to his cheek and touched dampness. Proof positive that something of enormous import had happened. Even as she wondered what on earth it could be, Jake shuddered and stepped away.

“Jake, what is it?” she pleaded, stunned.

“Nothing, just a little dust in my eye, that’s all.”

Sara didn’t believe him, but knew that pursuing it would cost them both. She accepted the lie. Lying to cling to pride had gotten to be second nature to her lately. Jake had the same right.