Gambling On A Secret. Sara Walter Ellwood
heard. Was the oil business also your grandfather’s?”
Tracy laughed, but it sounded a bit shaky. “My goodness, no. It came from Leon’s grandfather on his mother’s side. Leon changed the name and moved it to Dallas from Houston. Without having a son, Leon’s granddad taught him the business and left it to him. But my grandfather was a major stockholder in the company when he and his father-in-law were business partners.”
Tracy turned the chair until she faced her. As Tracy worked on the front of her hair, Charli looked up at the stylist. “What happened to Dylan?”
Tracy stopped cutting again and met her gaze. “He was in a bad situation in Afghanistan during his last deployment.”
“I know he was injured.” She remembered Leon’s comment about Dylan having comrades who had died in the bombing. “He has PTSD.”
His sister swallowed and nodded. “He’s not suicidal or dangerous.”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
Tracy stared at her. However, instead of confirming or denying the statement, she turned the tables on her. “I heard you lived in Las Vegas before moving in with your grandfather. Must have been something, growing up in Vegas. Are your parents still there?”
Her guts twisted into a frozen knot. How had anyone learned about her life in the city? Her life in Vegas was a closed book. No one could ever know what she’d done when she’d lived there. After finding her voice, she said, “No, my mother is dead.”
“I’m sorry.” Tracy furrowed her brow as if she knew she had avoided answering the entire question, but she didn’t press for more about her parents.
Done cutting hair, Tracy exchanged the scissors for some styling mousse. They grew quiet as Tracy blow-dried Charli’s hair, using a brush to style her new layered look. After she finished, Tracy turned the chair back toward the mirror. “What do you think?”
She didn’t know what to think. She never had her hair this short in the front, except when it had all been short while she was in prison. She hated bangs, and now she had them.
“You don’t like it?”
She ran her fingers through the back, liking the layers. “I don’t know what I expected. I’ll have to get used to the bangs.”
“You have wonderful hair. It just needed a style that works with your curls, but I’m sorry if I missed the mark.”
She met Tracy’s gray eyes and smiled. “Not at all. It’s just that I haven’t had bangs since…for a long time. Thank you. I’ll admit I only made the appointment to find out about Mr. Quinn. But I’m glad I sacrificed my hair for the information.”
“I figured as much when you called.” Tracy sobered, grabbed a vacuum broom, and swept up the hair clippings on the floor. “Dylan’s not a bad man, Miss Monroe. I think he’d be perfect for Blackwell Ranch.” Over the hum of the broom, Tracy went on, “He knows about starting up a ranch. He did it with his own place. As an officer in the Army he had to learn how to manage things and people. And you saw that he’s got talent when it comes to building. He’d know exactly what needs to be done and if the job’s being done right.”
Tracy met her gaze, love for her brother shining in the misty gray of her eyes. She wasn’t trying to pawn him off; she only wanted the best for him.
Charli’s heart fluttered as she made her decision. “Tell Mr. Quinn to come by the ranch on Friday. I think he’ll work out fine.”
“I’ll tell him. Thank you. All he needs is a chance.”
Chapter 3
If Charli didn’t soon take a break from cleaning the inside of the house to make the place livable, she feared she’d set a match to it. Why the hell hadn’t she given Tracy a time for Dylan to show up?
As she headed off the back porch to the potting shed, she looked up at the fluffy clouds dappling the mid-morning sky. On such a warm day, she itched to be in the garden again.
Mrs. Pratt had spent two whole evenings telling her all about the Blackwell clan after she had mentioned she’d bid on the ranch last month. Did every small town have a crazy mixed-up history? Who would have thought the Blackwells, Fergusons and Cartwrights were all distantly related? From what she could tell, the clans despised each other.
But according to Mrs. Pratt, the county was founded when Cole Cartwright and his two younger cousins–Dylan Ferguson and Elijah Blackwell–won the tract of land making up the county in a poker game just after the Civil War.
Whether she wanted to know or not didn’t matter to the landlady as she rambled on about the ending of the fifty-year oil partnership between the Blackwells and the Fergusons, spurring a feud between Jock Blackwell and Jason Ferguson.
However, what had interested her the most were Aida’s stories about Penelope Blackwell. Jock’s eccentric mother loved gardening and spent hours in the garden healing from her bouts with mental illness. An illness most people in town agreed had been passed down to Jock.
After Charli retrieved the tools from the shed, she placed them by the bed near the wraparound porch. She ambled around the six massive beds in the front yard and the weedy border along the tattered picket fence until she made her way to the small lake in the front. Maybe once she got rid of the neglect, the garden would be beautiful.
Wasn’t that the story of her life?
Horsetails, cattails, water cannas and sweet flags edged the lake created by damming the creek running in the front of her property. A wooden dock, rotted and covered with green slime, jutted into the water. Someday she’d replace it. She could imagine the girls who came to her home to heal from life’s hard knocks paddling around in small boats on the calm water, or fishing along the edge.
An old concrete bench sat on a stone patio near the water’s edge. With the ivy and weeds, she wasn’t certain the stone path wove through all of the large beds to the house, but here and there part of a path would materialize out of the overgrowth. For a half second, she considered sitting on the bench, until something slithered in the ivy and over the edge of the mossy rocks into the water by the lip of the lake.
Snake!
She shrieked and ran through the weeds and high grass to the porch steps, several yards away, clutching her heaving chest. Maybe a match wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Hiring a bulldozer to level the place completely after the fire was an even better one.
She held her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. How many more snakes were in the garden? “Don’t think about it.” She gingerly made her way down the porch steps. “It was just a water snake.”
What if it was poisonous?
Don’t think about it!
She picked up the hoe and used it to poke in the weeds and ivy in a bed close to the house where she’d left her tools. Once she was sure there were no snakes hiding in the overgrowth to bite her legs off, she got busy pruning the shrubs.
With one eye on the lookout for another snake.
As she worked, a pang of grief sneaked up on her. She stopped for a moment and looked at the rosebush she was pruning. She missed her grandfather, not the man he’d been when she’d met him, not the man who worshiped his art and wealth, but the man he’d become after she’d run away. Pink roses would be a perfect reminder of him. She paused and stared at the new leaves unfurling on the stems. The day she’d ventured out into the garden at the Long Arrow for the first time soon replaced the vision of new growth.
When she had first gone to live with Hank, there hadn’t been even a flowerpot at the ranch house. But sometime between when she’d left with the rodeo cowboy who’d taken her to Las Vegas and the day she’d come home after being released from the correction center in Nevada four years later, he’d taken up gardening.
She