The Maverick's Return Read online

  “I had a feeling you’d say no to that if she was home. Besides, I took a chance that her father might have picked her up for the evening,” he confessed. “Turns out I was right.” Taking both horses out of their stalls, he led them outside the stable. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” she answered.

  Dan handed her the reins to her horse and Anne happily swung into the mare’s saddle. She hadn’t ridden in years. Not since she and Hank had been divorced. Once they had gone their separate ways, her access to horses and even to a ranch became a thing of the past. Although Janie still got to ride whenever she stayed over at Hank’s ranch.

  Hank had bought her a pony for her fifth birthday, just shortly before the decision to get a divorce had been made. The pony, Anne suspected, was Hank’s way to ensure that Janie would want to come over and spend time with him.

  As if he needed to bribe Janie, Anne thought. The girl worshipped the ground he walked on.

  Less than five minutes into the ride and it was as if she had never been off a horse. Anne was exhilarated and revitalized.

  Urging her mount into first a brisk walk, then a canter and finally a full gallop, she laughed with glee as the seductive feeling of freedom she always experienced on horseback surged through her veins.

  Dan was quietly relieved that she wasn’t asking any questions about where the horses had come from. He didn’t want her to know he’d arranged for Jamie to bring them over in his trailer to what was essentially an abandoned stable, and to get them saddled.

  The look on Anne’s face made all this worth it, Dan thought.

  He let her set the pace and kept up, happy just to see her like this, with the wind in her hair and nipping at her cheeks, turning them an enticing shade of pink.

  The ride was over all too soon. Daylight was beginning to fade. It would be dark before long. Dan called out, “We’d better head back.”

  Like a gleeful child, Anne wanted to ask for five more minutes. But at the last moment, she stopped herself. He was right. She couldn’t just ride off into the night the way she used to.

  For one thing, they weren’t on Dan’s family ranch and she didn’t know her way around. For another, she wasn’t the girl she’d once been. Freedom in this case belonged to the very young. She’d had her taste of it, but now it was time to go back home.

  They brought the horses back to the stable and returned them to their stalls.

  “Shouldn’t we take their saddles off?” she asked. She didn’t see anyone in the stable to take care of the animals.

  “That’s taken care of,” he told her, not going into details. “Come on, I’ll bring you back to your place.”

  Perplexed, Anne got into his Jeep, then waited until he had pulled the vehicle away and was heading to her house before she told him, “Thank you. That was really fun. I’ve forgotten what it was like to have fun,” she confessed.

  “You should always be able to have fun,” he told her with sincerity.

  She looked at his profile, wondering if he actually meant what he’d just said. And if he did, then why had he ever left her?

  Oh, she understood the basic reason that had supposedly compelled him as well as his older brothers to leave town. She knew all about his grandparents and their unwillingness to take in any of the Stockton siblings, much less the three older boys who were legally old enough to be out on their own.

  But if Dan meant what he’d just said, really meant it, and if he’d really loved her the way he’d told her that wonderful night they’d spent beneath the stars, then why had he left her? Why hadn’t he found some way for them to remain together?

  That question had been eating away at her for twelve years.

  “Why’d you leave me, Danny?” she asked quietly.

  “I told you why. You already know the answer to that.”

  “No, I don’t. Not really,” she said, then placed her hand over her heart. “Not in here.”

  He pulled up in front of her house. “You want me to go?” he asked.

  “No, I want you to come inside and talk to me. Really talk to me,” she told him. She felt that he needed to give her an explanation, a real explanation, just as much as she needed to hear one.

  Turning off the ignition, he began to get out of the vehicle, but then he wavered. “Maybe I’d better not,” he began.

  But Annie had anticipated Danny’s possible change of heart and she felt that she had gone too far out on that limb to allow him to make his way back to where it was safe.

  To where he could act as if their last night together—their only night together—hadn’t happened. Because it definitely had. Janie was living proof that it had.

  She took hold of Danny’s hand and tugged on it, drawing him to her doorstep.

  “Maybe you should,” she coaxed. “Remember,” she told him as she unlocked her door and held it open, “confession is good for the soul.”

  “That only works if you still have a soul,” he qualified.

  “Everybody has a soul, Danny.” Anne closed the front door behind them and then locked it.

  “No,” Dan contradicted. “Everyone starts out with a soul. That doesn’t mean that they still have it as time goes by.”

  Anne had no idea what he was talking about. All she knew was that something was apparently haunting Danny and she was convinced that he needed to get it off his chest in order to get better.

  Chapter Eleven

  He needed to talk to her.

  It was obvious that he had demons, despite his outward facade.

  “Would you like a drink?” she offered. Whenever Hank had been tense about something in the past, he always said that a little scotch and soda could always make him feel calmer.

  The mere mention of a drink brought that awful night back to Dan in vivid, chilling terms. He could almost feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.

  “Danny, what’s wrong?” Anne asked, reacting to the way the color had drained from his face. “You just turned pale.”

  It was a mistake coming inside, he told himself. He needed to get away.

  “Maybe I’m coming down with something. I should go.” He turned toward the door. “I don’t want to risk you catching anything from me.”

  But Annie caught his hand in hers. He found her grip to be surprisingly strong.

  “You’re not coming down with something,” she told him knowingly. “Danny, trust me. Please,” she implored. “You have to tell me what’s eating away at you, what kept you away from me all these years.”

  He fell back on his old standby. It was, after all, true. “I left because my grandparents didn’t want me. You know that.”

  Anne’s gut told her that wasn’t true. “You didn’t leave because of your grandparents. You left because something was wrong. I sensed it at your parents’ funeral. Just talk to me,” she pleaded. “You can’t keep running from whatever this is for the rest of your life.”

  There was no reason to burden her with this. It was his cross to carry, not hers.

  “There’s no point in talking about it. I didn’t deserve you then, and I don’t deserve you now.” It was crazy for him to have thought things could be different from what they were. “I should have never come back to Rust Creek Falls.”

  “Don’t tell me what I deserve or don’t deserve,” she told him angrily. “I’m the only one who can be the judge of that. And in order to be the judge, I need to know what’s at the bottom of all this.” Her eyes held his as she begged, “Talk to me, Danny. You owe me that much. If I ever meant anything at all to you, you owe me that.”

  Danny sighed as he stared up at the ceiling, searching for the right words to tell her about this awful segment of his life.

  There were no “right” ones, he realized. There were only the ones that described what had
happened and what he did that brought about the horrific chain of events. Words that he had kept locked up inside of him for more than a decade. Words he’d never shared with anyone, not even his brothers.

  Words that weighed so heavily on him that right now he felt close to the breaking point.

  “Please,” Anne whispered, squeezing his hand, her eyes silently pleading with him to tell her what had taken him away from her and what was still ripping him apart this way.

  Telling himself she was right, that he had to try to tell Annie about it, Dan took a breath and began talking.

  “The night of the accident, I went out with Luke and Bailey. They said they wanted to celebrate—I don’t even remember what it was that they wanted to celebrate,” he said. That memory had gotten lost. “But I didn’t realize they were talking about drinking until we walked into a bar.

  “Even so,” he continued, “I thought they were just going to have one or two drinks. But that turned into more and before I knew it, they were both drunk. Only Luke was old enough to legally drink,” he confided, “but Bailey had a fake ID. I asked them to stop, but they told me I was a mama’s boy and I needed to ‘man up.’”

  “Did you drink?” Anne asked.

  “No. They taunted me a little, but I knew it was just the alcohol talking. Pretty soon, they were too drunk to drive home and I knew that if I tried to drive them home, they’d both gang up on me and never let me take the wheel.”

  He pressed his lips together, hating what he was about to say because it just reinforced his feelings of guilt. If he hadn’t done what he did next, his parents would still be alive and everything that had happened in the last twelve years—all the pain, all the hurt, all the estrangement—none of it would have ever happened.

  Everything was his fault.

  Dan’s mouth felt like cotton and he could swear that his tongue felt like it was sticking to the roof of his mouth.

  “What did you do?” Anne asked gently, prodding him to talk.

  Dan took a deep breath, as if that would somehow shield him.

  It didn’t.

  An almost surreal feeling came over him as he spoke. “I called my parents. I told them what was going on and where we were.” He sighed, the guilt all but choking him. “I ratted my brothers out.”

  She wouldn’t allow him to see it that way, to blame himself. “You had to tell your parents. From what you’re telling me, neither one of them was in any condition to drive home. They could have killed themselves and you, or they could have killed somebody else.”

  She could see by the look in his eyes that what she was saying wasn’t helping him cope with the tragedy. But at least he was getting it all out.

  “What happened next?” she urged.

  Dan closed his eyes for a moment. Though he tried to distance himself from the event, he was reliving every moment of it.

  “Dad sounded pretty angry when I told him what was going on. He told me not to let Luke and Bailey out of my sight. Then he said that he and Mom were coming to get us.” He let out a long, shaky breath. The words all but stuck in his throat. “They never got there.”

  He looked up, expecting to see condemnation in Annie’s eyes. But there was only sympathy.

  She didn’t understand, he realized. “Don’t you see? If I hadn’t called my parents, they would have never been on the road, never been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Never been hit by that drunk driver.”

  Dan looked away from her, so guilt-ridden he could hardly breathe. “I killed my parents,” he told her in a hoarse whisper.

  “No, you didn’t,” Anne insisted fiercely. “All you’re guilty of was trying to look out for your brothers.”

  He’d been over and over this in his mind a hundred times in the last dozen years. “Maybe if I had looked out for my brothers and hadn’t let them drink, or maybe if I never called my parents and instead made Luke and Bailey stay put until they were sober again and could drive home, my parents would still be alive. Or what if I hadn’t gone out with my brothers? Then I wouldn’t have known they were drinking and I wouldn’t have had to call my parents to come get us.”

  “Then Luke and Bailey might have been killed trying to get home,” Annie pointed out.

  “Maybe not,” he countered. “But my parents would have still been alive.”

  She felt his desperation. “Danny, you’re going to drive yourself crazy with all these conjectures.” Her eyes searched his face and saw how tortured he was. “You have driven yourself crazy with all these what-ifs. Don’t you see? You’ve got to stop torturing yourself like this.”

  “But I’m the one responsible for their accident,” he insisted.

  “No, you are not. You didn’t make that drunk driver plow into them. Maybe if someone had called his parents or someone else to come get him, then he wouldn’t have been driving and he wouldn’t have killed anyone. All you were ever guilty of was trying to think like a responsible person.”

  Anne moved closer to him on the sofa, wrapping her hand around his. “Oh, Danny, I wish you would have told me about this right from the beginning. I could have been there for you, supported you. We could have faced this terrible thing together. And then you could have saved yourself all this useless pain and anguish that you’ve been going through all these years.”

  And spared both of us more than a decade of loneliness, she added silently.

  “I never told anyone,” Dan said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Because then they’d know that it was my fault that my family was destroyed.”

  “You didn’t destroy them,” Anne stressed. She had to make him see that. “And there was more than one family at stake,” she added quietly, thinking of Janie and the life the three of them could have had together.

  Danny met her gaze and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. He assumed that she was referring to them and the family they could have created if he’d remained in Rust Creek Falls.

  “I’m sorry, Annie. Sorry for everything. Sorry I left you,” he whispered.

  The compassion he saw in her eyes drew him in. Before he could summon all the reasons he shouldn’t be doing this, he did.

  He kissed her.

  Because after a whole decade with nothing but memories to sustain him, there was nothing he wanted to do more at this very moment than to kiss her.

  To show her how much he still cared about her.

  He was afraid that if he did, she would pull away from him.

  When she didn’t, when she returned his kiss, he automatically deepened it. Framing her face with his hands, he was suddenly propelled back in time. Back to that last night they’d shared.

  A myriad of urges and desires began to swirl through him like a twister picking up steam.

  He’d missed her. Oh Lord, how he had missed her.

  Missed this feeling.

  Missed feeling alive.

  He felt his blood surging through his veins, doing double time.

  Old desires reared their heads, begging that he make up for lost time.

  But as much as he wanted it, as much as he wanted her, he knew that he couldn’t push, couldn’t rush. Despite the temptation he felt through every inch of his body, this had to be entirely Annie’s call and he would follow whatever signals she gave him.

  Annie felt as if she was on fire.

  Kissing Danny was even more wonderful than she remembered. It was as if she’d been sleeping all this time and, like the prince in Sleeping Beauty, he had woken her up, brought her out of her hibernation.

  Every inch of her was tingling with desire. It was incredible that after all this time, she could vividly recall what it felt like to make love with him that one time. Every fiber of her being literally ached to do it again.

  The thought sliced through her, frightening her so much that
she found herself actually trembling. Not from desire, but from fear.

  Summoning as much strength as she could, she pushed Dan away. “I can’t!” she cried.

  To his surprise, Dan realized that she was shaking. Annie was afraid of him. He’d never wanted that, never wanted her to be frightened of him. Did she actually think that he was going to force himself on her? Did she really believe that he had changed that much? That he would just grab what he wanted, ignoring decency?

  “Annie, I never meant to—”

  “Please leave.” If she heard Dan out, she knew she’d succumb to him. To herself. And she couldn’t afford to do that.

  Dan wanted to talk to her, to explain that she had nothing to fear from him. To tell her what it meant to him to finally be able to open up to her the way he had.

  But it was clear that somehow, he had managed to shake her up. Clear that somehow, signals had gotten crossed. Though he didn’t understand why she felt this way, he definitely didn’t mean for her to feel threatened by him.

  He kept that to himself. Kept all his apologies to himself until he could find a way to deliver them without appearing threatening to her.

  Murmuring, “I’m sorry,” he let himself out the front door and left.

  What the hell had just happened back there? he asked himself. He thought he had read all of Annie’s signals correctly, but apparently he was no better at picking up signs now than he had been as a teenager. However, Annie was his best friend; she always had been. He didn’t want to risk losing her now that he had finally gotten up the nerve to return to Rust Creek Falls and confront all his demons.

  But maybe he already had lost her. Maybe Annie would be better off if he just went back to Colorado.

  It looked like he had a great deal to think about, Danny told himself as he drove back to his brother’s place.

  Jamie. What was he going to tell his brother when Jamie asked how the evening had gone? Jamie had been the one who had insisted on having his best horses there for them so that Dan could take Annie for a ride the way he used to.