Page 11 of The Last Dance You Saved
Fallon looked down and away, crossing her arms over her chest in a defensive move. She was tall for her age, taller than most of the boys she’d be starting high school with in September. And she had curves to her I didn’t even want to consider. But her face…her eyes…still had the look of a child. Young and inexperienced and brimming with hurt.
Losing Spencer had been her first real loss. She’d loved him with the same absolute force she’d come to hate me. He’d been her true father, where I’d been a passing influence trying to give her a good life from a distance. Without my brother, she was floundering, and I didn’t know how to fix the bleeding. It wasn’t a dead floral arrangement I could simply toss out.
What was worse was the knowledge she didn’t want me anywhere near her emotions.
She’d turned from a toddler, ecstatic to see the person who showered her with gifts and adventures, to a teen who saw only the way I’d been absent from her life. She didn’t know it had nearly torn me apart every time I sent her back to the ranch, but I’d done it because I couldn’t stay there, and it would have been selfish to drag her with me.
In Rivers, she’d grown up swimming in the clear blue of Castle Lake, riding her horses through fields littered with bluebells, and watching the sun set over the icy peaks of the mountains. It had been a much better life for a child than drifting from apartment to apartment in ever-changing cities around the globe where she would have only caught glimpses of the sky in crowded city parks while I built my kingdom.
But maybe leaving her to be raised by my brother and Lauren hadn’t been my biggest mistake. Maybe it had been never setting foot on the ranch in the entire time she’d been alive and forcing Spence to bring her to me for our visits. Perhaps, instead of requiring her to leave the ranch she loved to spend a few weeks of her vacations in cold buildings where she could never run wild and free, I should have gone to her.
I certainly would have been more aware of the state of the ranch if I had. It wouldn’t have caught me by surprise.
But then again, neither Spencer nor I would have wanted me to witness his failure.
Now, I refused to let my daughter take on the burden of a legacy that only promised to drag her under like quicksand. I wouldn’t let her start her life with a dying albatross hanging around her neck just as she tried to spread her wings and soar. Any help, any money I might toss at the ranch, even if I wanted to, would only delay the inevitable.
“It doesn’t matter what happens to me.” Fallon’s shoulders slumped. “Losing the ranch will kill her anyway.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, face in her hands. It wasn’t until her shoulders started moving up and down that I realized she was crying.
A lump formed in my throat. I forced my feet forward and placed an unsteady hand on the top of her head. “You may not believe it now, Fallon, but I swear this is for the best.”
She jerked away from me, full of fire and loathing. “Losing our family’s heritage willneverbe what’s best. Spence would be disgusted with you.I’mdisgusted with you.”
Even though I’d always known she didn’t see me as the hero of her story, those words still stabbed and sliced their way across my heart, carving at old wounds that had routinely been broken open and scabbed over. They’d heal again.
“I have business here tomorrow I can’t get away from, but I’ll fly you home on Monday. In my jet. We’ll leave the Cessna in the hangar here until I can trust you not to take it out on your own again.”
“Don’t you even care that Spence was murdered?!”
That was what she’d come to tell me. Flew off on her own in a goddamn four-seater plane that was forty years old to tell me she thought my brother had been murdered by someone, maybe even her uncle—which was just as ridiculous as her flying by herself had been.
“The investigation ruled it an accident, Ducky.”
“Don’t call me that! I’m not some four-year-old who will think it’s sweet. Spence would never have overturned the tractor, because he would never have taken it up on that crumbling hillside!”
“We all make mistakes. Even the best of us.”
And Spencer had been the best of us, certainly the best of the adults in Fallon’s life. Far better than me, who’d fallen for my brother’s childhood sweetheart while he’d been away at college, and far better than her mother, who’d used my love as a way to get back at Spence for leaving her. Instead of holding any of it against the child we’d conceived in his absence, Spence had shown Fallon an unlimited supply of love.
And I’d detested him for being able to do it. For simply being able to be at my daughter’s side when I was forced to leave.
I was so tired of hate running our lives, but I didn’t know how to fix it. Spence would have accepted me back into the fold if I’d asked, but there was no going back for me. I couldn’t return to being the man who’d once dreamed of nothing more than spending his life breeding and training horses. That man had died at age twenty-one.
“Spence didn’t make mistakes like that!” Fallon insisted. “And Uncle Adam—”
“Has been there for all of you.”
Fallon shook her head, arms crossing over her chest again. “He’s up to something.”
I frowned, thinking of the calm and put-together Adam I’d seen in his expensive suit at Spence’s funeral. He’d seemed a far cry from the whiny boy I’d grown up resenting for his freedom and who’d resented me back because of the name on my birth certificate.
I sat next to Fallon, and when she shifted to put space between us, I tried not to let it wound me all over.
“Tell me what’s put this notion in your head about Adam,” I said softly.
She wiped her face on her T-shirt sleeve. “They were fighting that night, and Uncle Adam has been acting weird. He’s been going into the vault a lot and messing with the boxes stored there.”
