A Conard County Baby Read online

  He sighed. He was going to do this. In his heart of hearts, he knew he couldn’t send this woman on her way at least until he knew the truth. He’d have the weekend to see how she interacted with Angie, and he’d make a point of being close by for a while after Angie got home from school.

  “I guess,” he said, “that there’s no one I can call to ask about you?”

  “Not even my best friend knows what happened. I’m sorry. I’m wasting your time.” Her lower lip quivered.

  “I’ve got an idea. But before we go over to the sheriff’s office to check out your license, why don’t you eat some of that pie? Looks to me like you need the energy.”

  He hated treating her suspiciously, but he had a daughter to consider, hellion though she was. The sheriff could find out if she had any warrants or past crimes. Then he was going to hit his computer and see what he could learn about Hope Conroy. If she came from the kind of family she claimed, he’d bet the Dallas newspapers would mention her more than once. And certainly they’d announced this engagement.

  Satisfied he wasn’t being a total fool, he worked on finishing his pie.

  * * *

  Although Hope knew she had nothing in her background to worry about—as it was, she’d been allowed to do little enough in her life—she still felt nervous walking into the sheriff’s office. What if this somehow revealed her whereabouts to her family? And how could she ask about that without having to once again explain her situation?

  To her surprise, she and Cash were immediately taken to the sheriff himself in his back office. She guessed that meant her would-be employer had some pull around here.

  Cash made the introductions. The sheriff immediately aroused her interest. Gage Dalton moved stiffly as he rose from his chair, wincing faintly, and a burn scar covered one side of his face. She wondered what his story was, but not for long. She was too nervous about all of this to think of much besides herself.

  “I’m thinking about hiring Ms. Conroy to help me with Angie,” Cash said. “I wondered if we could get a background check.”

  Gage nodded as he resumed his seat. “Of course.” His dark gaze shifted to Hope. “You have ID?”

  Here it was. Gathering her courage in her hands, she said, “This won’t allow anyone to find me, will it?”

  For an instant she thought she’d completely blown it. Her stomach turned over and she felt almost sick enough to vomit.

  “Depends,” Gage said. “If you have any wants or warrants from law enforcement it will.”

  “But not my family or friends?”

  “Not unless they have an inside line at the DMV or the national criminal database. Is there something I need to know?”

  Cash stepped in, saving her. “Ms. Conroy is on the run from a shotgun marriage is all.”

  “Well, this sure won’t help them find you. But you know they can trace you other ways?”

  She nodded, her insides now feeling like a leaf shaking in the wind.

  “Credit cards, things like that,” the sheriff continued. “A good private detective wouldn’t take long. Would they send one?”

  Now her stomach quit doing somersaults and fell off a cliff. “They might,” she admitted.

  “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” Cash said. She darted a glance at him because his voice had turned steely. His jaw looked a bit tight. What had she said?

  God, she just wanted to get up right now and run. But she needed this job so badly. She had a child to think of now, and that had to come first. With trembling hands, she once again pulled out her driver’s license and turned it over to Gage.

  “I can check on this in about ten minutes,” Gage said to Cash. “If you want me to go in depth, that might take a couple of days, and Ms. Conroy will have to sign a release.”

  “Let’s just start with this,” Cash said. “I can probably find out more of what I need to know online.”

  Hope looked down at her hands, feeling like a bug under a microscope. But what had she expected? This man was talking about trusting her with his daughter. It wasn’t enough to meet over a piece of pie, with her telling a crazy story, and assume everything was copacetic. No way. She understood that.

  But she also wasn’t used to this. She had come from a world where everyone who mattered knew who she was. She had never had to prove herself in this way. Or in most ways, she realized. Not for the first time in the past few weeks she faced how sheltered she had been. Now all the shelters were gone.

  Time to grow up, she thought as they waited for the results of her record to come back. She had a child to think about now, and there was going to be no support from any direction as far as she could tell. Escape meant freedom. Freedom meant responsibility. Simply running wasn’t, and would never be, enough.

  Ten minutes later, as Gage had promised, a deputy returned her license announcing she was clean, not so much as a parking ticket.

  Gage and Cash had been talking generally about people they knew, the local economy and ranching. With a start she realized she hadn’t even remotely paid attention.

  Not only was that rude, but they must be wondering what was wrong with her. All she knew was that she was tired, frightened, alone and embarking on a task she wasn’t sure she could handle.

  But then she stiffened herself internally and told herself to stop being a wuss. She’d had three paths out of that situation, and two of them led directly to hell as far as she was concerned. Flight was all that was left to her...and to her child.

  Cash rose and shook the sheriff’s hand. “Thanks, Gage.”

  Remembering her manners, Hope summoned a smile and offered her own hand for a shake. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Good luck to you,” Gage said. “Both of you.”

  Cash laughed, but didn’t sound quite happy. “We shall see, I suppose.”

  Hope guessed they would.

  * * *

  Hope’s sporty little silver car looked out of place on the street where she had parked it. It might have had a sign flashing Outsider on it. She couldn’t even sell it because it was in her father’s name. Entirely too dependent, she thought. Dependent on that man for everything, about to be handed off to a man who had a streak of cruelty she never would have imagined until that night when he took her virginity against her will. A bubble of anger burst in her, but she held it back. Not now. Maybe never. There were more important things than indulging fury about how she had been treated.

  Cash had driven her to her car and he climbed out to help her. A gentleman’s manners in one who looked like anything but a gentleman. Of course, gentlemen weren’t always, were they.

  “You won’t get to drive that much around here,” he said after she climbed in behind the wheel. “You probably won’t want to, anyway. It’ll take a beating on the roads, especially out toward my place. Speaking of which...”

  She looked up, waiting, gripping her keys until they bit into her hand.

  “My ranch is pretty isolated. I’m serious. You might go a week or longer without seeing a soul but me, my daughter, my housekeeper and my hired hands. Can you handle that?”

  Tension suddenly let go. Isolated. “Right now that sounds wonderful.”

  “Right now it probably does. Anyway, I’ve got an old pickup you can use so you won’t be stuck out there when Angie’s in school. You can run on into town if you need to. But most of the time—” he shrugged “—I hope you like horses and cows.”

  “I love horses. I haven’t been close to too many cows.”

  “Now’s your chance. Well, if you’re not changing your mind, follow me. We should get home a little before Angie gets off the bus, so you’ll have a chance to settle in and look around.”

  “Thank you. Sincerely.”

  His eyes crinkled in the corners. “Tell me that again after you’ve
met my daughter.”

  That almost sounded like a threat, Hope thought as she turned on her car and pulled out to follow his truck. Then her mood shifted abruptly. It had been doing that a lot lately, but all of a sudden she felt almost giddy. Relief for starters. She had a job.

  A bubble of laughter escaped her, and a genuine smile softened her face for the first time in months. And for the first time, she actually noticed that it was a pretty September day.

  * * *

  Leading the way, Cash wondered if he’d lost his marbles. On the other hand, asking this woman to be a companion to Angie seemed better than having Angie racketing about all by herself too much of the time. All that seemed to do was heighten her hostility.

  But if her anger with him had a dial to turn it down a notch or two, he hadn’t found it.

  He was, he admitted, totally at a loss. When Sandy had left him, Angie had still been in diapers. In one fell swoop, he’d lost wife and daughter to distance. He couldn’t make as many visits as he might have liked because of the demands of work, and Sandy had moved all the way to Arizona. He still felt guilty about that, but over the years as Angie had distanced him, even during his visits, the guilt had become easier to live with. Now she was in his house and broken connections, or at least damaged ones, stared him in the face.

  He quite simply didn’t know how to reach her.

  Which brought him to this moment in time. Leading a strange woman, a pregnant runaway, home in the hopes that she might be able to at least keep the girl safer. That maybe she could reach Angie at least a bit.

  That she could somehow find a way around all his screwups as a father. Because he really did hold himself responsible for this. Clearly he’d failed in some essential way, and blaming it on distance didn’t excuse him. He wondered if he was missing some basic instinct or knowledge. Wondered what he could have done differently, how he could have changed things. No answers arrived.

  He reminded himself that his daughter was still grieving her mother. That was killer all by itself. But in the meantime, he had to do something. He couldn’t just leave her alone for long stretches of time to brood and hurt and fuel her anger. She needed someone, and he was working long hours. The ranch demanded almost all he had in these hard times and didn’t leave a whole lot of room for so-called bonding experiences. Not that Angie would let him get that close.

  His life had turned into a snarled mess. He wasn’t blaming his daughter for it, but she was a problem he couldn’t evade. He had to help her somehow.

  Hence a young woman from Dallas. He just hoped he hadn’t misjudged Hope Conroy, because she was the first person to answer his ad who wasn’t even older than he was. He felt he needed someone closer to Angie in age, someone who might actually be able to be her friend instead of her guard.

  Although Angie probably wouldn’t note the difference. He could hear what was coming already.

  * * *

  The ranch was beautiful, Hope thought. As they at last turned into what she supposed must be his driveway, she took in the wide-open space with its backdrop of high mountains. They were turning purple as the afternoon sun sank toward them.

  There weren’t a whole lot of cattle in sight but she still saw clusters of them scattered like a natural blessing in the open fields. They looked fat and happy.

  The house itself rose two stories amid a stand of tall trees. White clapboard gleamed in the sunlight and a wide porch covered the entire front side. Wooden chairs dotted the porch and to one side hung a wooden bench swing.

  Inviting. More inviting than the perfect showplace in which she had grown up with its manicured lawns and tall pillars, as if it were trying to imitate an antebellum plantation.

  This house looked as if it belonged, and apart from it, the fences provided the only sign that man was here.

  She pulled up on the gravel beside Cash’s truck and climbed out. No sound greeted her except the soft sigh of the breeze. It was chillier here than at home, but she found it invigorating.

  Cash approached her. “Welcome,” he said. “Let’s go inside and get you settled. You have bags, I presume?”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “I’ll help.”

  Hope opened her trunk, revealing her set of matched Louis Vuitton bags. She thought she saw his eyebrows lift, but it was hard to be sure under that battered cowboy hat.

  She’d never thought about that luggage before, but she thought about it now. Those bags shrieked status and money as they were intended to do. She actually felt embarrassed by them. Boy, her worldview was undergoing some radical shifts.

  She followed him willingly up the steps, across the porch and in through the front door. She tugged her rolling carry-on and hung her personal care bag over her shoulder. Cash hefted the two larger ones as if they weighed nothing at all.

  Inside she was surprised by a large foyer with heavily polished wood floors and a wide wood staircase leading upstairs. Clearly this ranch had known some good times. Either that or someone was very much into carpentry. He led her up the stairs.

  “My housekeeper comes three times a week so I’m not asking you to clean or cook.”

  Hope was glad to hear it because she’d never seriously cleaned or cooked in her life. Yeah, she’d done bits of both, especially when she wanted to try out her baking skills in high school, but mostly all of that had been taken care of. Something else she was going to need to learn. She wondered if the housekeeper would help her.

  At the top of the stairs, they turned right and he showed her into a spacious but simply furnished room. There was a bed, a rocking chair, a bureau with mirror. Small rugs scattered the floor with color, while everything else was fairly plain, even the curtains.

  “This is yours,” he said, putting her bags down. “Take your time. The bathroom is that way down the hall, and Angie is right across from you. I’m at the other end.”

  He glanced at his watch. “She’ll be home in an hour.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  “She won’t be.” Then he flashed a crooked smile and vanished, closing the door behind him.

  She sank onto the edge of the bed, looking around herself, thinking about how rapidly life could change. The rape, her escape and flight, and now her first real job. Until this moment, the majority of her thoughts had been focused on getting away and trying not to think about the horror Scott had inflicted on her. Now, in a strange room in a strange place, she realized her challenges had only just begun.

  Relief at having this chance to prove herself gave way to determination to succeed. Somehow, some way, she was going to do this job right.

  In the meantime, she decided to scrub the makeup from her face, put her hair in a ponytail and don one of her few pairs of jeans. The rest of her clothes would be useless here, utterly out of place. Regardless, pretty soon nothing would fit. It was getting hard to button her jeans. She’d have to do something about that.

  It was time to make the rest of her transformation.

  * * *

  Downstairs, Cash went into his office and started his computer. He closed his financial files and began to search the internet for Hope. If any of her story was true, he’d find the important pieces here.

  It didn’t take him long. Hope Conroy was a well-known name in the Dallas newspaper. Her engagement photo with a handsome man only a few years older than she was blazed across nearly the entire top of one page. Beneath was a detailed and saccharine description of her, her fiancé—definitely touted as a man with a bright future in politics—and their families. In one swoop he picked up enough information to get a pretty clear picture that she wasn’t exaggerating about scandal. These folks wouldn’t put up with it.

  She was mentioned surprisingly often, appearing at charity balls, participating in various volunteer activities, none of which had much to do with the underside of
life except for one large homeless charity where she sat on a board.

  There was more, raising his eyebrows with each revelation. Money, more money than he could imagine, colored every word. He knew girls who wanted to be barrel riders, not girls who participated in dressage. But Hope had, for a while.

  He nearly put his head in his hands when he finished reading.

  He had hired a twenty-four-carat, hot damn, for real Texas princess.

  Chapter Two

  Just about the time the school bus would drop Angie at the end of the driveway, Cash emerged from his office. He discovered Hope standing nervously in the foyer, dressed in clothes that looked better in these parts even if the designer label on her jeans didn’t. No makeup, which to his way of thinking made her prettier, and the ponytail at least softened the too-perfect hair.

  A damned Texas princess. The thought was still rolling around in his head, and he was wrestling with the possibility that he had just made a big mistake. He’d picked up that she’d come from money, he just hadn’t guessed what kind of money. If she started filling Angie’s head with stories of trips to ski in the Alps and parties on private yachts, he didn’t know what he was going to do. His daughter already owned enough discontent to fill half the Pacific Ocean.

  Unfortunately for Angie, she was a rancher’s daughter, not the daughter of a billionaire. She had to make peace with that somehow, at least until she could leave for college. Of course, it would be a state college, not some place like Radcliffe or Vassar, but it would give her a leg up if she didn’t want to stay here. He suspected she wouldn’t, and that was okay. But he had to keep her expectations and dreams on enough of a leash to at least get through high school in one piece.

  He seriously doubted that Hope would be the one to do it.

  As she turned to him, he spoke without preamble. “Angie’s going to walk through that door any minute. So I want something clear.”

  She questioned him with a look from moss-green eyes.

  “I read up about you in the papers. Not many people enjoy the advantages you had, and my kid never will. I don’t want you filling her head with fairy-tale dreams she can never have.”