Gambling On a Heart (35 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well, well, if it’s not the happy couple.” Jake grinned and bracketed his waist with his hands, elbows out.

The gauze wrapped around Jake’s right hand looked fresh. How deep was the wound, to warrant such a bandage a week after the supposed accident with a broken wineglass? Wearing a dinner-plate-sized silver belt buckle, the boots and hat, Jake looked like he’d finished the day punching cattle and cleaned up for a night on the town. New York City wasn’t the only place with rhinestone cowboy-wannabes. Jake hated horses and grew up in the middle of town. At least Zack had earned the silver buckle he was wearing the old-fashioned way–by winning it. He’d bet Jake bought his at a pawnshop in Waco.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Tracy asked before Zack had the chance to.

Jake shrugged. “Decided to have a few beers. Question should be what the hell are you doing here? And where’s my son?”

“My business is my business. And
my
son is spending the evening visiting with his best friend.” Tracy stiffened in her chair.

“I wonder what Judge Delaney would think about you pawning our boy off to your friends so you can cat around town with your latest fling?”

Zack stood and glowered at the other man. “I think you should move along, Parker.”

Jake dropped his hands to his sides and sneered. “Or you’ll what? Arrest me on some other trumped up charge? I wonder if that dog and pony show yesterday in the courtroom was just so you and my whorin’ ex-wife could drag my reputation down and make me look bad in front of the judge? My lawyer thinks that might be enough to get another judge on the case.”

Zack didn’t want a bar brawl, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to throw the first punch, but he didn’t take to Jake calling Tracy a whore, despite his own concern over her relationship with his brother. He bunched up his fists and leaned toward Jake.

Tracy stood and touched his arm. “Zack, don’t. He’s not worth it.”

Jake snarled and his face turned red. As he stepped closer to Zack, he shook his left fist at him. “You fuckin’ Cartwrights and Fergusons think you own this county.”

Zack caught sight of Sam Larson moving from around the bar, billy club in hand. The Longhorn didn’t have a bouncer at the door. It didn’t need one. Sam could smell a fight and have the instigators out the door before the first punch was thrown–usually. If he couldn’t handle it, Julie pulled a sawed-off shotgun from behind the bar and backed up her brother with enough redneck grit to stop a freight train.

Zack felt every eye in the place on him, Tracy and Jake. Most of the patrons were quieter watching them than they had been watching Logan gyrate over the stage in the front, singing a cover of Johnny Cash’s
Ring of Fire
. The music abruptly stopped, but Zack didn’t take his eyes off Parker to see what his brother was doing. “Before you decide to throw any punches, Parker, just remember I’m still the sheriff. I’ll arrest you and throw the book at you.”

Jake grabbed the end of the table and sent it flying. Tracy screamed as she jumped out of the way. Zack blocked the punch and spun away, grabbing hold of Parker’s wrist. Jake landed with a
thunk
and a grunt face-first against the back wall of the bar. The memorabilia of old signed photographs of country singers and rodeo riders of long past rattled. Zack held Jake’s wrists behind his back. Too damned bad he didn’t have a pair of handcuffs.

Tracy stood back, glaring at Jake, and Logan moved in beside her. He slipped his arm around her shoulders, and she didn’t push him off.

“Zack, don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Logan said.

“Tell me, Zack.” Jake’s voice was muffled from being pressed against the wall. “Has Tracy told you just who she left me for, yet?”

“It’s a lie!”

Zack glanced over his shoulder at Tracy. Her face flushed, and her hands clenched into tight fists on her hips. Logan still had his arm on her shoulders, but he looked mad enough to eat his guitar.

“Why don’t you ask your little brother?” Jake asked. “They’d been goin’ at like jackrabbits for years. I bet she’s still fuckin’ him when you aren’t around. One man has never been enough for her–as you should know, old buddy.”

Zack didn’t want to react, but the stab in his heart was too much. He spun Jake around.

Sam Larson brandished his billy club. “Damn it, you boys take this outside, or I’ll bash both your fool heads in, and I don’t give a tinker’s damn that one of you’s the sheriff.”

Zack fisted his hand, determined to pound the smirk off Jake Parker’s smug face. Logan grabbed his arm before he could let the punch fly. “If you believe that pile of shit, Zack, you’re a fool.”

“Go on, ask him who paid the rent for her and got her a job in Waco when she filed for divorce. Hell, he even paid for the divorce!” Jake snickered.

Zack glared at his brother, shook him off, then looked at Tracy. Despite his best intentions, he’d fallen in love with her again, and she’d lied to him. Again.

She shook her head and tears ran from her gray eyes. “Zack...I never...”

The burn in his gut was too much like the first time she’d cheated on him. He let go of Parker with a shove and scowled at his brother. Too drained to do anything else, he grabbed his Stetson off the floor and pushed past his brother, leaving them and the stunned bar crowd behind.

* * * *

Tracy stared at the old-fashioned saloon doors as they moved back and forth from Zack shoving them open. A flash of movement and the patrons’ exclamations drew her attention to the men behind her. She turned, and Logan threw a punch knocking Jake into the same wall Zack had.

“Logan!” Tracy screamed the same time the crowd took sides and either cheered or booed. While Sam Larson rushed forward with his billy club held high.

Jake pushed away from the wall, pulled back his arm and let go with a left hook that landed on Logan’s jaw. He stumbled back, and Jake rushed him, using his shorter stature and bulk to ram Logan in the gut with a shoulder, linebacker style. The couple sitting at a neighboring table grabbed their Mason jars of beer a second before the two men fell onto it. The flimsy table crashed to the floor when its legs gave out on one side. Tracy was too upset to watch who got punches in.

Logan’s band members stood next to her watching and cheering on their lead singer. Sam Larson was yelling for the two men to stop or he’d bash in their brains and even got a few whacks in, but the men continued to throw punches.

The cocking of a shotgun in the midst of the fray was like flipping a switch. The room went quiet, and Julie Larson pointed a sawed-off shotgun at the men locked in battle on the sawdust and peanut shell littered floor. “That’s enough ruckus, or I’ll fill both your sorry asses with enough lead to sink y’all to the bottom of Gambler’s Lake.”

Logan was the first to move to his feet. His left eye would be swelled shut by morning, and his lip was split and bleeding; his jaw was already purpling. He moved his bloody right hand to his midsection. Guitar picking would be impossible for a few days.

Jake followed to his feet, and with his right hand, wiped at the blood on his mouth where his lips bled. The bandage was nearly torn off, and he shook the hand as if it was numb. His plaid Western shirt was torn, and he seemed to be favoring his right knee–the same one he’d injured the summer before his senior year of high school.

Sam tapped both men on the shoulder with the baton. “Now get the hell out of here.”

“Hey, we paid good money to hear Cartwright sing,” a cowboy shouted from somewhere within the crowd.

With shotgun still in hand, but now safely pointed toward the ceiling, Sam’s sister turned around. “Too damn bad. I’ll give y’all a beer on the house and call us even. He only had another half-hour anyways.”

“None of that cheap swill either,” someone else called.

“Y’all will take what you get or leave it,” Julie replied and turned back to Tracy. She shook her head. “Damn, woman, your love life’s more excitin’ than those soap operas I watch. I don’t care which one of these stallions you leave with, but get one of ’em the hell out of here.”

Tracy turned and headed for the door. She wasn’t leaving with either one of them. The one she wanted had already left. She fished her cell phone out of her purse to call Mary Estrada and ask her to come to take her home. When the doors swung open, she turned to Logan sucking on a cut on his bruised knuckles.

“Let me get you home, and then I’ll go talk some sense into that moron I call brother.” Not waiting for her response, Logan took her by the elbow and led her to his car in the back of the parking lot. He helped her inside the BMW Roadster and got in behind the wheel of the sports car.

“What about the band? Your equipment?”

“The band will take care of it.” He clipped his seatbelt. “You haven’t told Zack anything, have you?”

She looked over at him as he started the engine. “I’m not begging him to forgive me, Logan. Either he can figure out on his own I’m not the person he seems to think I am, or he can go straight to hell.”

Logan backed out of the space. “Y’all are two of the biggest pigheaded idiots I’ve ever known. You love him, and he’s got it so bad for you that he goes up in flames every time you’re around.”

“Yeah, but sex isn’t love.” She wrapped her arms around herself in a tight hug.

“That’s not what I meant.” He pulled out onto the street and headed southwest out of town. “He loves you, Tracy.”

She looked up at him and hated the hope his gruff voice sparked to life in her bruised and battered heart. Then she remembered Zack’s words from when they entered into this charade. “He still loves Lisa. All he wants from me is sex. He told me as much. I was foolish to agree, but told him we had to act like we were in a relationship.” She looked at her lap in the dark interior of the car, glad that the dim light from the dashboard wasn’t bright enough for him to see her tears. Not that Logan hadn’t seen them before. “I was foolish to believe I could make him love me again. That he’d forgive me because he loved me.”

She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. Despite her efforts to keep it inside, a sob broke loose from the depths of her being.

“Oh, T.C.” He reached over and laid his injured hand on her shoulder. She gently took it from her shoulder and held it in her lap. He let her cry as the miles between town and the turnoff for Oak Springs flew by her window.

He turned onto Oak Springs Road and glanced at her. “Tell Zack what happened, Tracy. Then ask him about Lisa.”

“What about Lisa?” She used the handkerchief he’d handed her to wipe at her eyes and blew her nose.

They passed the gate to Butterfly Ranch. Then the one on opposite side of the road, the Broken B Ranch, which was still owned by Buck Blackwell. Risking wrecking his fancy German convertible on the windy road, Logan looked at her, his expression solemn. “Ask him what happened before she died.”

* * * *

When Zack got home, he paid Amy Jackson for babysitting and walked her out to the old red Honda she drove. He turned off the movie she’d been watching and checked on Mandy. He stared at his sleeping daughter. How was he going to break the news about him and Tracy breaking up? Hard to believe only that morning he’d been fantasizing about them being a family.

He hit an open palm against the doorframe and pulled the door closed. Damn it all to hell, he’d known there was no future for him and Tracy from the beginning. Why hadn’t he left well enough alone and stayed away from her?

The front door opened while he headed toward the kitchen to snag a much-needed beer.

“You look like shit,” Zack said as Logan moved down the darkened hallway into the light coming from the living room.

“Yeah, so do you. Someone had to beat the hell out of that son-of-a-bitch.” Logan tossed his Stetson on the kitchen table and faced him. “You couldn’t afford the possible assault charge for police brutality or some other shit, but I could. Besides, I’ve wanted to pound on that bastard for a very long time.”

“What are you doing here?” Zack opened the refrigerator door and retrieved a bottle of Coors. As he popped the top, he said, “Go back to Tracy.”

“Tracy’s fine. Or she will be as soon as my big brother gets his head out of his ass and stops trying to come up with reasons to dump her.”

Zack lowered the bottle and took a step toward Logan. “Get out.”

Logan spread his hands and smirked. “Dear God almighty, Zack, do you really believe I’m having an affair with Tracy–or that I ever have? It would be like sleeping with our cousin Faith.”