Renegade Father

Colt severed the connection before she could argue with him. She had barely returned the phone to the receiver and put more coffee on when she heard the crunch of truck tires on snow out front, followed by a vehicle door slamming.

She opened the mudroom door before he could knock and was pleased to see Colt helping his very pregnant wife up the walk.

“What did you do, call from the mailbox?” she teased when they were safely inside.

“Just about. Aren’t cellular phones something?” He grinned and pulled her into a quick hug.

When he released her, she turned to his wife. “No office hours today, Maggie?”

“I don’t have any patients scheduled until this afternoon since I had my own appointment with Dr. Marcus.”

“And what did he say?”

“Everything’s fine. He moved my due date up to mid-April. It won’t be a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned. I feel as big as one of those Herefords out there.”

Annie smiled. Colt and Maggie had married just weeks after her divorce and in the time since, she had come to love Colt’s sweetly elegant wife almost as much as she did him. There was a bond between the two women, forged of shared pain and rare understanding.

“You look absolutely radiant,” Annie said.

“Everybody always says that to fat old pregnant women.”

“Because it’s true.” It was. Maggie’s eyes were soft, serene, and her skin glowed with an inner tranquility that had to come from knowing her husband adored her and was thrilled about the child they had created together.

For just a moment, Annie tasted bitter envy in her mouth. She hadn’t experienced that contentment with either of her pregnancies. Instead, she had known only that trapped, powerless fear.

Dammit. She wanted to pinch herself, hard. Couldn’t she even be happy for two of her closest friends in the world over the upcoming birth of their child without this blasted self-pity taking over? She had two beautiful children, a ranch some men would kill for, and good friends like the McKendricks. Why couldn’t she let that be enough?

“Where’s Joe?” Colt asked.

She swallowed the envy and poured coffee, black the way he liked it. Maggie, she knew, was staying away from caffeine for the baby’s sake, so she put water on to boil for herbal tea.

“We lost the roof on one of the hay sheds in the wind last night,” she answered. “The men are doing their best to patch it together. What about the Broken Spur? How did you fare in the storm?”

“Lost three calves but it could have been a lot worse.” He sipped his coffee. “Now suppose you tell me what burr Joe’s got in his britches about taking some fool job in Wyoming.”

She busied herself rifling through the cupboard for the tea bags. “It sounds like a good opportunity for him.”

“What does he think he’s going to find at some stranger’s ranch in Wyoming that he can’t get in Madison Valley?”

“You’ll have to ask him that,” she said quietly.

“I’m asking you. What happened between you two?”

“Nothing.” She shut the cupboard door with a little more force than necessary. “Absolutely nothing. Why would you think that? Things are just fine between us.”

Unless you count the way he couldn’t stand to touch her and the way he sometimes went out of his way to avoid even looking at her.

“So why is he in such a big hurry to leave?”

She thought of those moments in the barn the day before and that rare vulnerability she had glimpsed in Joe.

Would she be breaking a confidence to talk to Colt about it? No. Colt cared about Joe. The two men shared a friendship closer than blood. Maybe if he knew the truth, Colt wouldn’t push him to stay against his will.

She almost laughed. Was she really going out of her way to defend Joe for taking a new job? Yes. She wanted him to stay, but she wanted him to find peace more. “He has a chance to start his own herd and to buy land of his own. I can’t match this Waterson’s offer, and I’m not sure I would even if I had the means.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Colt, he told me he wants to start over some place away from Madison Valley.” She paused. “Somewhere he can be just another rancher, just like everybody else.”

He was silent for a moment, his mouth set in a hard line, then he swore softly, pungently. “How can we argue with that?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t understand,” Maggie interjected with a frown.

Colt turned to his wife. “You know what it’s like for him in town. How people talk. He tries to pretend it doesn’t matter, but it obviously affects him more than any of us thought.”

The kettle whistled suddenly, shrilly, and Annie rose from the table to pour water for Maggie’s tea. “It just makes me so mad,” she muttered. “Why can’t people forget, just stop judging him for what happened years ago, for heaven’s sake? Why can’t they look at the man he’s made of himself?”

“We don’t have all that many murders around here, Annie. Of course people are going to remember it.”

“It wasn’t murder and you know it! And so does everybody else in town.”

“Not everybody. There are a lot of people who think Joe killed his father in cold blood and got off easy.”

In cold blood. It was an odd term to use for something as violent as taking the life of another human being.

“It was an accident.” She couldn’t help her vehemence, even though she knew she was preaching to the choir. “That’s why he pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The only reason he served prison time at all was because he had alcohol in his system, even though it was under the legal limit, and because he was already on probation for that stupid bar fight when he was just a kid. Everybody with a brain in his head knows Joe was trying to protect his mother after Al beat her half to death.”

“You’ve heard the rumors that there was more to it than that.”

Yes, and she knew exactly who was behind them. She frowned. Charlie had kept his promise after he married her and hadn’t gone to his boss at the sheriff’s department with his version of events that night. But he hadn’t had any qualms whipping up the rumor mill in town.

Just another sin to lay at the door of her ex-husband.

She knew Joe hadn’t meant to kill his father when he had delivered that fateful punch. But even if he had, Albert Redhawk deserved everything he got and more.

He had spent his whole life and two marriages physically and emotionally abusing his entire family, turning one son into a mirror image of himself and the other into a stoic little boy who buried all his emotions so deeply it took nothing short of a cataclysmic event to ever bring them gushing out.

“It’s funny what people choose to remember of the dead.” Colt’s low voice jolted her back to the conversation. “Selective memory, I guess. Al was a real son of a bitch to just about everybody, but if you listened to some people in town, you’d think he was the next best thing to Santa Claus.”

“Is it any wonder Joe wants to make a fresh start somewhere else.”

“I guess.” Colt sipped his coffee glumly. “So what are we gonna do about it?”

She rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing we can do. Just miss him, I suppose. Just miss him.”

Colt and Maggie didn’t stay long after that, only long enough to finish their coffee and tea. When she had the house to herself again, she forced herself to stay in the office until she could make inroads toward finishing her paperwork.