Page 57 of Wyoming True

He turned, grimacing. “Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

She smiled. “It’s okay. My reputation follows me around. It was really a stupid idea, but I was so desperate to keep men at bay when I came back here. I didn’t go out with anybody except girlfriends when I was at MIT. They thought I was nuts.” She drank coffee and sighed. “I guess I’m out of touch with the modern world. I was sheltered all my life, then I married a man who sheltered me just as much. Then there was Bailey.” She made a face.

“We all make mistakes,” he pointed out.

“Some of us make more than others,” she returned. “I was afraid I’d meet somebody else and go nuts over him and end up like I’d already done, twice. I have no sense about men, apparently.” She didn’t add the journalist she’d avoided, because he’d attracted her, too, before he died overseas. He might have been a good choice, but she didn’t trust her own judgment anymore.

“You have to take into account that you were naive,” he said. “Being street-smart takes time and hard experiences.”

She cocked her head and studied him with vivid dark blue eyes. “Are you street-smart?”

“About women? Yes.” He sighed. “I got rich all too quickly. When my mother died,” he said, “I was left with a fortune.”

“It didn’t go to your father...?” She stopped dead, grinding her teeth. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.”

But he wasn’t offended. He looked at his coffee cup. “He was in prison by then.”

She hadn’t moved. She just sat there, staring at him.

“He was like your ex-husband, only he didn’t get out for good behavior. He took a shiv and tried to kill a fellow inmate. He died instead.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said gently.

He sipped coffee, burning his lip to stop the pain of memory. “We didn’t mourn him. My mother had a little over two years of peace and serenity before she died, at least. Her father had died soon after she married my father. It wasn’t until my father was arrested and convicted that her mother died, leaving her the only heir to the family fortune. So she became an heiress. Up until then, we were poor. Grandmother would have helped, but my father refused any offer of it. He hated my mother’s wealth. The money was on her side of the family, not his, obviously. When she died, I inherited the works.” He smiled sadly. “I’d rather have had her.”

She drew in a long breath. “I loved my mother like that,” she replied. “But my father was just as special to me.” She smiled. “I loved him very much.” She sipped coffee and stared at him. She wanted to ask why his father had gone to jail, but she didn’t want to pry.

Nevertheless, he saw the question in her eyes. The pain he felt pulled his face taut, kindled anger in his eyes. “My father was beating one of our horses with a hammer,” he said through tight lips. “I had an older brother, Dan. I’d tried to stop my father and been knocked down for my pains. Dan was furious. He loved me, but he also loved the horse our father was trying to kill. Dan went after Dad and got hit in the head with the hammer. He died on the spot.”

“Oh, Jake,” she said, wincing. “I’m so sorry!”

“So we had two family traumas at once. I had to testify. Not that I minded,” he added curtly. “It was an absolute pleasure when the prosecuting attorney brought out the many 911 calls my mother had made to the local police because of my father’s brutality to both her and her sons. But I lost my brother. That was the purest hell I ever knew, until my mother died not quite three years later.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked at him, with soft, sad eyes.

“You’d know how that feels,” he added, forcing a smile. “You’ve lost both your parents, as well.”

She nodded.

“So I got rich overnight and I was already traumatized from losing my mother, not to mention what had come before it. I went wild. I bought a small jet, purchased a couple of mining companies, invested in growth stocks with an eye to the long haul, not short-term profits, and I got even richer.” He laughed. “Women, some women,” he qualified, “go nuts over rich men. I guess I found my share of them. Beautiful, cultured, talented—brains the size of a pea,” he added with a grin. “But you know what? After a while, they—”

“All look alike,” she finished for him. “That’s what Cort said. He got tired of being wanted for what he had, not what he was.”

“That’s me, too,” he confided. “I’m tired of being a wallet with legs. I’m thirty-seven,” he added quietly. “I’ve got everything. Except somebody to come home to. I thought Mina might fill that spot in my life.” He grimaced. “But the Texas cattle baron beat me out.”

“She loves him,” Ida said gently. “It’s not like you lost a competition. She fell in love.”

“Were you ever in love?”

“I thought I was,” she said after a few seconds. “But what I felt for Charles was gratitude, and what I felt for Bailey, at first, was just physical and mental infatuation.” She looked up at him. “I don’t know what love is. And I don’t want to know. Not ever again.”

His face was quiet and sad. “Neither do I.”

“Two lost souls, drowning our sorrow in coffee,” she mused, and her blue eyes twinkled. “What a pair we make!”

He chuckled. “Both of us alone and rich as pirates and nobody to talk to at midnight when the walls start closing in.”

She nodded sadly. “I know just how that feels. Walls. Nightmares.” She closed her eyes. “I used to think it would get better, that I’d get over it.” She sighed. “You never get over trauma like that.”

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