A Rancher to Remember--A Clean Romance Read online

  Travis gripped Daryl’s shoulder. “There’s been an accident.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  CASSIDY WOKE TO the sound of her heartbeat. Strangely, it seemed to pulse outside her body, a synthesized, electronic pulse. She struggled to pry her eyelids open, but they weighed a thousand pounds. Even that small movement made her moan, but at least the sharp pain along her right side revived her. Through heavy lids, she made out the small room she lay in, and her mouth was so dry she felt as though it were stuffed with cotton. She had to sit up to find water, but the heavy blankets, tucked around the edges of a narrow hospital bed, imprisoned her.

  Hospital?

  Her thoughts and vision sharpened, along with the rest of her senses. She’d been hurled into a brick wall if the agonizing hurt racking her body was any indication. Each breath felt like fire, and she was pretty sure a few of her ribs were broken. She could barely see out of her right eye, her left eye was swollen shut and a collar encased her neck. What happened? Had the Filipino police found her? Beaten her? A chill spread through her chest. She had to get out of here.

  She nudged down her coverings and leveraged herself upright. The pain had her dry heaving into a pan beside her bed, seeing stars, fighting to remain conscious. She clutched the metal bed rail for several minutes until her cramping stomach eased. Three fingers on her right hand swam into view. They were missing nails. The smallest finger on her left was broken. When she drew in a shallow breath, the subtle scents of antiseptic, bleach and hand sanitizer crept into her nose. She was somewhere clean and modern. A wall-mounted TV looked new as did the IV pump dripping fluid into her arm and the monitor recording her heartbeat.

  This was no backcountry Filipino hospital. Not the kind they’d hide her in...a journalist preparing to expose government corruption. So where was she? She cocked her head, wincing, and strained to distinguish the language spoken by the health professionals conferring outside her doorway. She heard her name then—

  Concussion.

  Whiplash.

  Post-traumatic amnesia.

  Unrelated, recent gunshot wound.

  English. They spoke English with an American accent, which meant... She was stateside and had amnesia. A head injury.

  How?

  Last she remembered, she’d been typing up her notes halfway across the globe in Quezon City. Her editor had called. They’d talked about a stupid TV show and then...

  Brisk steps snared her attention and halted her thoughts. She stared in shock as a large, well-built man loomed in the doorway. A familiar cowboy. One she’d avoided these past ten years. He strode to her bed and his contorted features mirrored her anguished confusion.

  “Daryl?” she croaked.

  Was this another of her dreams featuring her first and only love? She’d had countless nights of them...except he’d never worn the beard now accentuating his square jaw. And he hadn’t had the crinkles flaring from the outer corners of his coffee-colored eyes. Thick, clipped hair still ended above dark, arched brows and framed his lean, handsome face. His cheekbones were as broad and high as she remembered, his nose straight and fine-boned. Those lips, with their fuller bottom, were parted. The C-shaped scar on his temple also looked the same, the one he’d never explained to her.

  “Cassidy.” His low, bass voice rumbled from his throat. A black T-shirt stretched across a chest that she knew was well-defined and a toned stomach—the kind of stomach that put six-packs to shame. Wranglers hugged slim hips and mile-long legs.

  “What are you doing here? Am I—?” Dead, she finished silently. Surely someone as otherworldly gorgeous as Daryl would appear to her at the pearly gates...not in this lifetime...not after she’d promised herself she’d never speak to him again. Right after she’d vowed to hate him for the rest of her life.

  Thinking about him, though, was another story. Her thoughts flew to him each lonely night, no matter the time or distance. He’d left her battered heart a crime scene, yellow “do not enter” tape blocking it off, his fingerprints everywhere.

  The bed dipped slightly as he sat on its edge and his large hands swallowed hers, gentle around her bandages. “Are you...are you okay?” His soulful eyes skated away from her face, then back, as if she were a magnet, attracting him against his will.

  She could only imagine how she looked—hair matted and tangled by the feel of it, her face bruised and swollen, the shapeless hospital gown smelling faintly of sweat and sickness. She wanted the floor to open and swallow her whole.

  Or maybe she just needed to wake up.

  This was a bad dream. A very bad dream.

  At her recoil, Daryl released her. This close, she made out the dark circles beneath his bloodshot eyes and the paleness of his lips. The urge to smooth the line cleaving his brow seized her but she swatted it away, welcoming the heated rush of anger toppling her concern. This was no dream. She might not know where she was or how she got here, but she knew she didn’t want to see him. Ever.

  “Get out.”

  An overhead PA system called out a Code Blue. Footsteps pounded in the hall outside her room.

  “Cassidy, I—”

  She gritted her teeth and turned her aching head in search of the call button. It took her a painful eternity to locate it. Code Blue. Code Blue.

  “Please,” he urged, and the plea in his voice made her finger hesitate on the remote’s switch. “I need to ask you about...about...” He stopped, and his mouth worked.

  She searched her memory as a word—no, a name—teased its borders. A white Jeep flashed in her mind’s eye. Whose? The familiar chorus of a Garth Brooks song echoed in her ears followed by raised voices, squealing tires... The call button dropped from her nerveless fingers. “Leanne,” she gasped.

  His anguished eyes flew to hers. They were red-rimmed and raw. “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?” The remembered sound of squealing brakes filled her ears followed by a thunderous boom. She knew something, a memory she couldn’t quite get to materialize. Something horrible. A dark fear crept up her spine. “Where’s Leanne?”

  “You were in a car accident.”

  She stared at him unable to speak. His tortured expression robbed her of words, drawing the air from her mouth so that she could barely breathe.

  “Together,” he elaborated when she remained silent.

  “Leanne and I were in a car accident?”

  He nodded slowly, as if his head might roll off his bowed shoulders if he moved too fast.

  “Where is she?” Her heart thrashed behind her ribs. She searched her mind for some recollection of what happened, but only the aroma of burning exhaust returned to her.

  His nostrils flared. He strove for control and his face was a mask of pain.

  “Where. Is. Leanne?” Cassidy reached for his wrist. She fought not to cry out as her shredded fingertips grazed his sleeve.

  “She’s—she’s gone.”

  “Gone?” Cassidy felt the cold-hot shock that came from being struck without warning. The wheels of a machine, pushed by a health professional, rattled past the door. It barely registered. In fact, everything receded save the harsh rasp of her breath and the thrum of her accelerating heartbeat on the monitor.

  “You were wearing a seat belt. She wasn’t. When you hit the guardrail...”

  “No,” Cassidy murmured. Numbness stole over her, anesthetizing her. Even her voice sounded distant, as though she were listening to a recording of it. Was she really speaking? Was Leanne truly gone? This was happening to someone else and she merely observed the unfolding tragedy as usual, ever the documenter of others’ disasters. Not her own.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I never lie.”

  She’d heard that vow before. Had believed it, too, before he’d chosen her sister over her... “You did once.”

  He swallowed hard and his voice, wh
en it emerged, was a hoarse croak. “She’s dead, Cassidy. I identified her remains myself.”

  “Her remains?”

  He didn’t elaborate and in the silence the reality of it all hit her. A tsunami of grief rushed through her, destroying everything, even the hopes she hadn’t known she’d harbored for reconciliation with her only sister, her one-time best friend. They’d survived their desperate childhood because they’d always had each other when they’d had little else.

  And now Leanne was gone.

  Dead.

  Cassidy trembled with the sudden, chasm-opening realization.

  Daryl’s wet lashes lifted, and his eyes searched hers. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. How am I in America?” She clutched her blanket. “In Carbondale?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  The image of Leanne’s number appearing on Cassidy’s cell phone flashed in her mind’s eye. “She—she called me.”

  A strangled noise escaped him. “When?”

  “What’s today?”

  He named the date and she froze. Six days ago. She was missing almost a week of her life. The conversation she’d heard outside her door returned: whiplash, concussion, post-traumatic amnesia. Short-term memory loss brought on by an injury. In her case, an unexplained car accident with her estranged sister.

  Her dead sister.

  Oh. God.

  “What did she want?”

  “I don’t remember. What happened to Leanne?” Cassidy had to know, had to understand her sister’s last moments, their final time together. Why couldn’t she remember?

  “The EMTs pronounced her dead on the scene. They said she didn’t suffer.”

  Cassidy swallowed painfully. She’d uttered this phrase to others during her hazardous career, but never saw its inadequacy before. Its emptiness. Dead was still dead. Suffering continued for the living, regardless, and she’d carry this grief, along with her unresolved anger, for the rest of her life. A dead, empty space opened inside her.

  Leanne.

  “Did she ask you to come home?”

  “She’d never... We haven’t spoken since...” Cassidy’s voice cracked. Her tongue swelled as if to block her from saying aloud the words she’d silenced long ago.

  “Since you returned home and discovered we’d married,” Daryl finished for her, his eyes hot with remorse.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She couldn’t breathe fast enough, not as the door inside her mind opened and closed, and the images of Daryl that Cassidy had made herself forget flashed before her eyes. She closed them, wishing for darkness.

  “We never talked about it,” he said, his voice as broken as her heart. “That was the problem.”

  * * *

  “IT DOESN’T MATTER.” Cassidy’s frail, damaged hand trailed an IV tube when she flicked it backward, as if she swatted the memory, their falling-out and Daryl, away. “Not that anyway. Not now.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t matter.” Only it did, Daryl realized, marveling at the powerful emotions the sight of an injured Cassidy stirred in him. Her bruises and bandages clenched his churning stomach. They set fire to his chest. Even though he hadn’t seen her in ten years, the strength of his reaction was overwhelming and disproportionate given he was married—had been married, he amended—to her sister. Loss swamped him with fresh grief.

  He bowed his head, trying to hide his tears from Cassidy, willing back the rush of guilt and pain when his eyes landed on her hand. The one that he thought would be bearing his wedding band—had she said yes so long ago.

  One of her fingers was broken, wrapped in a thick splint, while several fingernails were missing on the other. The outline of bulky bandages around her torso showed beneath her thin hospital gown, and a neck collar framed the beautiful face he’d never forgotten, swollen and discolored as it was. Seeing her hurt sent him right back to the day he’d hurt her...

  He fought the impulse to hold her hands again, to reassure himself that she was alive, whole and going to heal. If he could, he’d trade places with her in a heartbeat to take away her pain. Her suffering. Seeing her like this affected him more than it should. He was a widower, a man grieving the mother of his children and the wife he’d committed to for life, even if she’d emotionally left him long ago. She had stopped being a true partner in their marriage, but when a Loveland pledged himself to another, he meant forever. He’d imagined the rest of his life with Leanne.

  Yet the sight of Cassidy brought everything back, the love, the guilt, the loss, the regret... It was as if she’d never left and nothing had changed between them. The idea of her living her life in the abstract, following her dreams—he could handle that. But the idea that she could have died and not been here at all was unbearable... As devastated as he was over losing Leanne, he was equally relieved that Cassidy was still here, one of the most disturbing emotions of these past few days.

  He was wrecked. Not thinking straight. It had to explain his distorted view.

  Like Cassidy said, their history together didn’t matter. She was nothing more than his children’s aunt to him, his deceased wife’s sister. And as a responsible man, he’d do his duty to check in on her and ensure her care.

  That was the end of it.

  Daryl tore his eyes from Cassidy’s ashen face. “Leanne didn’t mention you were visiting.” In fact, they never spoke of Cassidy at all except when dropping their children off at their grandparents’ when she visited.

  “I was on assignment in the Philippines.” Her hand rose to feel the bandage covering what he’d overheard the doctors describe as a recent gunshot wound.

  “You were shot.”

  She shrugged. “Barely.”

  Barely? What kind of a life did she live where a gunshot didn’t register?

  Not your problem...

  “I need water.”

  “Be right back.” Relieved that he finally had an excuse to put space between them, space to think, he grabbed the pitcher beside her bed, strode down the hall. A nurse pointed him toward a utility room.

  Inside it, the machine ground and sputtered before spewing ice into the container. His distorted face reflected in the steel surface. He resembled the figure in the painting The Scream. Felt like it, too. Looking at Cassidy was difficult, comforting her near impossible. She was as beautiful as he remembered. Her electric-green eyes, despite being swollen, one nearly shut, still sparked with a restless energy. Her mouth, split and puffy, was just as expressive and her bruised chin square enough to take the many knocks life had given her...including the one he’d landed ten years ago...the worst of all.

  He slid the pitcher to the water dispenser and tapped the button. Her cheeks had lost their curve, though, and dark circles rimmed her eyes. Some of the changes might be from the accident, but he suspected hard living also played a role. It aroused his protective streak, the instinct to shield her from her worst impulses to fling herself into dangerous, unstable situations—the biggest points of contention in their former relationship.

  Clear liquid gushed over the ice, lifting it. When it reached the top, he replaced the lid, grabbed a stack of paper cups and strode back to Cassidy’s room. He paused at the sight of her, her head turned toward the windows, her shoulders shaking with silent tears, hiding her pain. It was the stronger, tougher side of her that Daryl remembered, loved and, at times like this, hated...his being protective and all.

  “Cassidy.” He set down the pitcher, grabbed a tissue and blotted the tears streaming down her face.

  “Stop.” She jerked away, and his hand dropped. “Did you have the funeral?”

  “Yesterday.” The fresh shock, the grief, the regret on her features echoed the emotions racking him. He’d had a few days to process, though. For Cassidy, this was all just sinking in.

  “How are the kids?”

 
Her concern for them tugged at his heart. Despite the way they’d parted ways, she’d been a devoted aunt. Presents and postcards and pictures arrived for them from every country she traveled through over the years. Whenever she’d visited her folks, the kids had begged to see her, and she excitedly brought home stories Leanne refused to hear. Leanne let them see Cassidy at her parents’ behest, not hers.

  “Emma and Noah are broken up. They’ve been sleeping with me.” They’d huddled under the covers every night, holding on to each other lest they lose another family member. But it wasn’t enough to ease their suffering. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t make this better for them, protect them from this pain, and it killed him inside.

  “Poor sweethearts. Tell them I love them.”

  “I will. Oh. Here.” He grabbed the homemade cards they’d begged him to deliver from the back pockets of his jeans and passed them over.

  Cassidy examined the construction paper missives carefully, her good eye brimming. “They’re beautiful kids, Daryl. You and Leanne did a good job.”

  Yes, they had.

  And what would he do now?

  Though he’d been struggling without Leanne for a while, he’d had faith it was a temporary separation... Now his single-fatherhood was official and terrifyingly real. “Thank you. They wanted to visit you today, but I thought it was best if I came alone first.”

  “First? Why come at all?” she demanded, her anger returning along with a rush of red into her cheeks.

  “I had to see you, had to know you’re all right.”

  Wanted to see you open your eyes...

  “I’ve survived this long without you,” she snapped.

  “I still needed to know you were being taken care of,” he insisted. Cassidy had never needed him. Not like Leanne... “I also wanted to ask you about Leanne...see what you remembered about the accident. I didn’t want the kids to overhear that.”

  Some of Cassidy’s anger seemed to dissipate. She closed her good eye briefly and her brow furrowed. When her thick lashes lifted, her eye had darkened to a forest green. “I—I can’t remember anything else.”