Taming Rafe Read online

  What had come over her? She’d never talked that rudely to anyone in all her life.

  “I spent part of the afternoon arguing with my insurance agent and issuing a press release about the damage to the hotel. Then I joined the board for two hours of recriminations. I’ve inherited six stone-faced men who apparently think I have the brains of a goldfish.”

  “I take it your grandfather’s not extending your loan?”

  Never had Katherine imagined the dressing-down or the ultimatum delivered by her grandfather over speakerphone via his office in London. “Raise half a million dollars by next quarter or dissolve the Breckenridge Foundation.”

  “Ouch,” Cari said. “Three months to dig up a small fortune?”

  If Katherine were thirty, she’d tap into her inheritance. But Walter Breckenridge had an iron grip on her trust fund, and Katherine wouldn’t see a dime more than her monthly allowance for five more years—or until she married, whichever came first. Apparently her grandfather still belonged to the Neanderthal Club.

  “Even better, Bradley and I went to The Water Club for lunch, and he not only ordered salmon for both of us but told me again how I was in way over my head.”

  “Again, I know you think he’s perfect, but—”

  “I’m not in the mood to defend him, so stop. He’s a good man. Just overly concerned about me traveling and spending every waking minute worried about where I’m going to scrape up money. And . . . he told me that he wants us to think about our relationship. I think he’s going to ask me to marry him.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t a proposal, but knowing Bradley, he wants violins and an Italian restaurant and red roses. And photographers.”

  Cari said nothing.

  Katherine sat on the bed, putting on her running shoes. “Safe isn’t a negative trait, regardless of what you think.”

  “Honey—”

  “I don’t want to fight about it.” Katherine stood, walked to the window, and stared at Central Park. “My focus has to be on getting that money.”

  Rafe Noble might run, but he couldn’t hide. Not from her. She didn’t care what he threatened—he hadn’t heard the last of Katherine Breckenridge.

  However, at this moment, she had no idea how to talk Rafe into seeing beyond himself and his current tragedies. Yes, she could agree she’d been impulsive on the phone with Noble. What would she say to someone who called and asked—no, demanded—five hundred thousand dollars? Then again, she hadn’t crashed her pickup into any large, historic buildings. He had the money; she knew it. And probably wouldn’t even miss it—okay, maybe a little, but she certainly missed both the foyer of her grandfather’s hotel and a positive balance in the Breckenridge Foundation investment account. Even so, perhaps she should approach him with her request from a kinder, gentler angle.

  “We’ll think of something, Katherine. Don’t worry,” Cari said, as if reading her mind.

  “Thanks, Cari.” Katherine hung up, tossed her phone on the bed, and let herself out of the apartment. She took the back stairs of the hotel down all nine flights.

  The hot air hit her like a sauna as she stood on the corner, waiting for the light to turn, barely hearing the city traffic or the rush of water from the fountain in the plaza. The light changed, and she crossed into Central Park. The stress began to slough off her as she watched ducks paddling in the pond, as the breeze cut through the heat radiating from the paved path toward Hallett Nature Sanctuary.

  She passed Wollman Rink and the Chess and Checkers House and headed for the ancient carousel. An old Karen Carpenter tune met her before she topped the hill, and the stress further uncoiled inside her.

  She needed just one ride to sort out her current dilemmas.

  The smells of cotton candy, popcorn, and aging wood greeted her as she bought her ticket to the carousel. Only one child joined her, and he waved to his mother, who stood just outside the ringed circle. Katherine chose her favorite horse—the black one with the wild tail, red saddle, and prancing feet. She had been Wild Kat on that horse. Cari was right—she did have a wild side. After all, she’d lit out on Rafe’s trail, her guns blazing. Except she hadn’t exactly rounded up that outlaw, had she?

  The carousel started, and as she floated up and down, she hung on to the pole and remembered her childhood daydream. Hornet—her horse—galloped through the fields, her father’s laughter mingling with the wind in her ears. Not the father in her mother’s autographed eight-by-ten glossy professional photos but the father in the cheesy photo strip taken at a photo booth. He was laughing, half kissing her mother, and she was smiling into the camera, her eyes shining, looking so deliriously happy in his arms.

  Had Katherine ever looked like that when Bradley held her? Surely, yes.

  The ride slowed, and Katherine tried her old silly trick, imagining that if she closed her eyes and wished hard enough, the first person she’d see when she opened them would be her father smiling at her, waiting to collect her from the ride.

  Seeing only the darkened, shadowed carousel building, she forced a harsh laugh at the way she backed herself into these moments of pain.

  She would never ride a real horse. Never live out West. Never know her father. Only the picture of them—him crouching behind her, one hand on a lasso in her hand, the other on her shoulder, their smiles matching as she posed in a turquoise cowgirl outfit, a pair of red boots, and a red hat—made her believe that she had in any way been connected to the rough-and-tough cowboy who had won her mother’s heart.

  “Another ride, miss?” the attendant asked as she dismounted.

  “No, thanks.” Katherine walked up the path, out toward Fifth Avenue, looking for a cold drink. She bought a Bomb Pop from a vendor. Next to him, another sidewalk salesman sold stacks of books. She picked up the new B. J. King novel. The cover featured a silhouette of a man in the distance, watching a woman who stared out at a harsh background of prairie land. “Unshackled,” she read aloud as she paid the vendor for the book. She knew all about shackles. . . .

  “Go on vacation.” Cari had probably already booked her ticket for the San Francisco spa. Yet the last thing Katherine needed at the moment was a group of attendants fawning over her, especially while her grandfather’s leeches gobbled up her books, sucking her organization dry.

  I don’t know what to do, Lord.

  Katherine sat on a bench, staring at the sky feathered with cirri. She had been a Christian for so long—thanks to those early days when Angelina had dragged her to church—that praying felt as natural as taking a breath. She’d begun her dialogue with God in boarding school when the loneliness pressed through her pores, consuming her breath. Even then, it had been spaces with sunshine and blue sky that had called to her, a window to the divine.

  I let my mouth run off with my brain. I should never have spoken to Noble that way. I don’t know what to do next, how to get through to him. Or even if he can even help . . .

  An in-line skater whipped by, scaring the little mutt leashed to the woman sitting next to her, and he barked, jumping up on Katherine, knocking her book from her lap.

  “Sorry,” the woman said.

  Katherine nodded, smiled at her, and picked up the book. She traced the cover of the B. J. King book. Unshackled.

  She stared at the woman on the cover, her posture containing such an aura of desperation, it shook Katherine.

  Except . . . what if . . . ?

  Nothing would pry her from New York. Nothing but . . . a business trip. No, a rescue mission. To rescue her organization. Children like Eva . . .

  Maybe . . .

  Returning to the hotel, Katherine took the elevator up, aware that she looked like she’d just run a marathon, sweat darkening her blue tank top, glistening on her forehead. Despite her fatigue, she felt something alive inside her. Hope, maybe. She’d forgotten the feeling.

  She closed herself in her room. Taking the framed photo of her and her father from the bureau, she freed it. The scrawled handwriting
on the back had faded, but she could still read: To Kat, with love from Aunt Laura.

  Aunt Laura. Mysterious Aunt Laura, whose name had once made her mother cry. Who had written below her name, Phillips, Montana, where Katherine’s uncle Richard Breckenridge, the family rancher, still lived and ran his herd of prize-winning bulls.

  Phillips, where Rafe Noble’s family lived and ran a dude ranch, according to last fall’s edition of Montana Monthly. She’d bet anything that he would head home to family for healing and hiding from the media instead of his ranch in Texas.

  Maybe if she just got close to Rafe, helped him see the children who needed his help, he’d reconsider. However, she could lay bets that he’d run her off the ranch the second he recognized her name. What had he said—call the cops?

  Unless she approached him on his terms—in a cowboy hat and a pair of jeans. Katherine stood at the mirror finger-combing her hair out of the ponytail, imagining herself with a cowboy hat. She didn’t have to be the snooty society princess he expected.

  Maybe she’d disarm him just long enough to make him hear her out. To rally to her cause. Wasn’t that what fund-raisers did?

  She’d give herself two weeks—the duration of her stay in San Francisco. Possibly she’d even be able to tap into the cowgirl inside, who had her father’s brain and bravado to stand up to an arrogant bull rider and make him see that, contrary to his belief, he could help her.

  And that maybe, in fact, deep inside, he wanted to.

  John sat on the front steps of his ranch house, cradling a steaming cup of coffee as he briefed his foreman. “Check the fences on the southern end of Butter’s table. This winter I caught a bull on Silver Buckle land, and I think he must have gotten through near the southeastern corner.”

  Crockett, a thin man with graying whiskers and a ponytail under his straw hat, had been with John for three years after he’d stumbled into Phillips, down on his luck. John had hauled him out of the Buffalo Saloon a time or two, but the taste of trust, the smell of hard work, and the feel of a paycheck in his pocket had kept Crockett away from the bottle and turned him into a dependable hand. The fact that he stayed on made him valuable.

  “What about the water tank in the heifers’ field?” Crockett chewed on a toothpick, then used it to pick at his teeth. “The windmill’s still not workin’.”

  “I’ll use the water truck and fill the tank manually.” John didn’t add that he had no intention of spending hundreds of dollars fixing the windmill that ran the tank. He’d let the next owners do that.

  The next owners. As soon as he signed the papers in Sheridan to put the ranch on the market, he would feel as if a thousand-pound bull had climbed off his chest.

  And with the crew from Tumbleweed Productions due to arrive later next week, the price would skyrocket. He hadn’t yet figured out how to explain Lincoln Cash’s presence on the Big K Ranch. But how could John turn down the production company’s request to shoot location shots at the Big K?

  He took a sip of coffee, his enthusiasm fading at the memory of Lolly’s mocking of B. J. King’s newest book. Unshackled had been John’s biggest seller yet. Probably because it had been written from the raw and painful places inside his own heart. He intimately knew what it felt like to pine for a woman who didn’t return his love.

  The best books were the ones that cost the author a piece of his soul. That much he had learned years ago when he wrote the story of a man trying to stand up to his abusive father. It had been the first time he’d confronted the pain inside, and it had probably taught him everything he needed to finally write the book of his heart, Unshackled. But the Book of the Year Award he’d won for his first novel had been worth the pain of remembering the past, and for the first time, John had glimpsed freedom.

  If only John Senior had seen it. But then again, John might never have had the courage to write it had the old man been around to read over his shoulder.

  John only regretted that he’d never told the people he loved the most—namely, the good folks of Phillips and most particularly Lolly Stuart—about his success.

  But he wasn’t stupid. Big, tough cowboys didn’t write love stories. They loved their horses, their trucks, and then their women. He would have been laughed clear out of the county. Lolly certainly hadn’t made him feel anything but silly when she rolled her eyes at his kind of books, calling them romantic rags.

  She might feel differently now. Not only had his book been optioned for a movie and put into production, but Lincoln Cash agreed to play the part of Jonas.

  Which meant the time had come to finally say good-bye to this life.

  John loathed herding cattle; fixing fences, trucks, and tractors; mending saddles; making ends meet—or not meet as the case had been for the past ten years. Without his book income, the Kincaid ranch would have folded the year John Senior died. Perhaps he would have been more thankful for the forty thousand acres and thousand head of cattle if his father hadn’t also left him with thousands of dollars of gambling debts.

  “Anything else, sir?” Crockett asked as he pulled out a tin of chewing tobacco. He wedged a pinch into his mouth and talked around the bulge. “The truck’s running rough. I’m thinking it needs a new fuel pump.”

  “Leave the truck,” John said. He’d ordered a new car—a black BMW Z4 convertible. Yes, he had this dream of driving up to Lolly’s Diner and seeing the expression on her face when she saw his wheels. He’d definitely turned into a teenager.

  A desperate teenager, especially two days ago when he’d spontaneously asked Lolly to accompany him to Sheridan. He kept thinking that when he signed his intent to sell the ranch, then took her out for dinner and gave her flowers and a ring and got down on one knee, she’d see that he hadn’t given up on them.

  But she’d squashed those hopes, and he’d had to face the raw truth. Lolly didn’t want his name, his life. He wasn’t so stupid as to get kicked in the teeth again.

  John took a sip of coffee, letting the bite soothe him. Maybe it would be better all around if he just left without saying good-bye.

  Only what if . . . what if he went in right when Lolly was closing shop and slipped Cody the cook a crisp Benjamin Franklin to clean up the place. He’d wait while Lolly changed, then take her out to the divide, where his land met the Breckenridge place, where the stars seemed to fall into the horizon, where he’d told her he loved her the first time. And there, he’d get down on one knee . . .

  “Did you hear about that Noble kid?” Crockett’s question brought John back to now and his cooling cup of coffee. “His brother’s bringing him back to the ranch. Guess he made a real mess of that fancy hotel there in New York.”

  John nodded. He remembered Rafe from way back, when he was a gangly kid with big ears trying to stay on a steer. He especially remembered the day he’d been fooling around with his daddy’s truck while waiting for Nick to pick up supplies at the hardware store and driven into the plate glass of the Buffalo Saloon. John had watched from Lolly’s as Nick dragged his kid brother out by the scruff of his neck, kicking and screaming all the way home.

  Yeah, that Rafe had a wild streak, something that branded him as trouble. John hadn’t rightly kept up with his shenanigans, but he’d heard he’d become a big-time bull rider. Probably trying to find the one thing tougher, wilder than himself.

  Perhaps in a way, all of them were trying to find something bigger than themselves.

  John had found it in Lolly—or his love for Lolly—worked out on the pages of his Westerns. But unless he found a way to tell Lolly the truth before Lincoln Cash showed up, the pages of his books were where his feelings were likely to stay. She wasn’t the type to let this oversight—his author status—go with so much as a shrug.

  Then again, he couldn’t exactly label her Miss Tell-It-All, could he? She kept her past locked up tighter than a bank on a Sunday. He’d stumbled onto her secrets purely by accident. Although he’d never breathed a word, never gone probing where he wasn’t invited, he knew h
er wounds still pained her; he saw the shadows of hurt range occasionally through her gaze. Yes, Lolly had secrets. And he hoped the fact that he’d helped protect those secrets counted for something when he came clean about his pen name.

  John grimaced, thinking again of her laughter at the B. J. King book. Would she laugh when she discovered that his “romantic rags” had purchased them a new life?

  He threw the now cold coffee out on the ground and placed the empty cup on the stoop. “I’ll get to that water truck,” he said to Crockett, who spat on the ground and followed him to work.

  No, he wouldn’t miss this life at all.

  “The Mercy Doctors grant proposal this year is requesting funds to open three more traveling clinics—”

  “I know, Cari. I read their new budget proposal. I’d sell a kidney on eBay if it would help keep even one clinic open. Which is why we need to get the Breckenridge Foundation back in the black.” Katherine adjusted the cell phone headpiece as she hightailed it west. She felt a small smile, despite the panic in Cari’s voice.

  “I don’t know where we’re going to dig up the money. But I’ll go over our donor sheets, see if we forgot to contact anyone.”

  “Did you go over our short list?” Katherine hoped that the Rafe Noble she’d read about in the newspaper so many years ago still had a soft spot for the hurting. In fact, she had poured all her plans into that idea.

  “I have a call in to a couple of other foundations that might be willing to cut us a one-time check. But we’re down to the dregs.”

  “I’m not giving up. Not yet.”

  “I can’t believe you’re driving in San Francisco. Who drives anymore? What’s wrong with going first-class?”

  It wasn’t exactly how she was traveling but where that Cari should be asking. She’d be shocked to know that in the last three days, Katherine had planned her flight to Nowhere, South Dakota, where she rented a car and started driving to Montana. She’d read an interview a year ago about how Rafe had rented out his ranch while he went on tour this year. Please, please let her hunch be right and let him be in Phillips.