Chapter Four – Don’t We All
Chapter Four
Rafe
DON’T WE ALL
Performed by Elle Langley
As the elevator doors shut, a battle waged in me stronger than I’d fought in a very long time. Maybe since I’d stood at the gate of the ranch all those years ago and debated leaving. Because the idea of Sadie looking at some other man with those blue eyes sizzling with lust, the idea of some other man setting his hands on that soft silky skin, made every single fiber of my being revolt.
She was supposed to be mine.
For tonight only , I reminded myself.
I wouldn’t have kept her. I would have sent her on her way just as I’d sent every woman before her. Every woman since Lauren. So, it certainly wasn’t my business if she hooked up with some other guy.
And yet, the thought of her giving those mewls and moans and sweet mouth to someone else made me want to pound my fist through the wall. It made me want to step inside the elevator and knock down the door of whatever room she was in. I could find out. I owned the damned place.
I could and would finish what I’d started.
Then, my gaze landed on the door to the penthouse where my daughter sat waiting. A daughter I didn’t know how to connect with and who hated me as much as I’d once thought I’d hated her mother and my brother.
A teenager who’d done something unbelievably rash and a bit frightening.
Finishing what I’d started with Sadie was the last thing I had the ability to do at the moment.
I dragged my hand through my hair and tucked in my shirt before striding back into the penthouse and making my way to Fallon’s room. The door was open, even though I’d shut it, and my stomach fell, hoping she hadn’t seen me escorting Sadie out. I had no intention of explaining who Sadie was and why she’d been in our home. This was why I didn’t bring women here. My teeth ground together in frustration—at myself as much as at my daughter.
I watched as she paced in front of her bed, chewing her cuticles.
“What the hell were you thinking, Fallon?”
She glanced up with wide and angry eyes. My eyes. She had Lauren’s blond waves, but it was my brown irises and thick brows that stared back at me. For probably the millionth time since she’d been born, I thought it should be my brother’s gray ones filling up her petite face. She should have been his. Instead, this fiery girl, simmering with fury, was mine. She’d been born into a contentious love triangle that had nothing to do with her and yet impacted her every day.
She placed her hands on her hips and glared at me. “You’re the only one who can do something! And you won’t! I had to come and try to change your mind.”
“By flying a damn plane on your own?” When she’d told me she’d flown the ranch’s Cessna from California to Vegas by herself, I’d thought I was going to have an actual heart attack. The muscles in my chest had felt like they’d atrophied. I silently cursed Spencer for having taught her to pilot it to begin with. One more thing to hold against my dead brother. “You don’t even have your official license yet, and even if you did, no one should fly on their own, especially not a fourteen-year-old kid! What would you have done if something had gone wrong? What would I have done?”
She scoffed. “If something had gone wrong, then you’d finally be free of me. You could have continued to screw around with whomever you wanted without worrying about some kid interrupting you.”
Both statements hit like a dart to my chest and showcased just how shitty of a job I’d done as her father. Fallon’s very existence was a reminder of all the things I’d done right and wrong in my life, but I wouldn’t give her up just to undo those mistakes. She was the only person I allowed myself to truly love. Everything I’d done since Lauren got pregnant had been to ensure my daughter had the best life.
And to prove you were better than your brother , the devil taunted.
“It would have crushed me to lose you, Fallon,” I said, hoping she could hear the absolute truth ringing through my voice. “And it would have absolutely destroyed your mother. She’s just barely resurfacing after losing Spence. She would have drowned completely if she’d lost you too.”
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 will never be what’s best. Spence would be disgusted with you. I’m disgusted 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.”
As far as I knew, nothing overly valuable had been kept in the safe for years. It had originally been built to house the diamonds as they were mined from the kimberlite pipes on the property before they could be shipped off. Now, it stored an antique weapons collection that might be worth a few thousand dollars and piles of old files dating back to the ranch’s inception. Nothing worth killing over.
And as the manager of the ranch, there might be several reasons why Adam would need to look up an old legal document. But it was clear Fallon thought something underhanded was happening, and if I could ease her mind, if I could get her off this fixation of Spence’s death having been murder rather than an accident, I could at least ask Adam about it.
I needed to go back to Rivers anyway. I needed to finalize some things with the realtor and ensure Lauren was actually prepared to pack the mansion and sell off the horses and cattle. What Lauren did from there, whether she chose to go live on the acre of Hurly land with Adam or come live with me, was still up in the air.
I’d prefer them near me, and I’d offered to buy them a house here. I’d like to be able to visit my daughter whenever I wanted—every day if possible. I’d given up fourteen years. She’d had the best childhood I could offer her up until now, but I wouldn’t let her sink with the failing ranch. So if she couldn’t be in Rivers, she might as well be with me.
Dread filled me at the idea of going back to the ranch, even for a day, to see to all the things that had to be done. It was why I’d put it off for weeks. I was a coward, afraid to face the hurt that had sliced through me when I’d attended Spencer’s funeral. Simply stepping on the property had torn open all those scabs and scars I’d thought permanently healed, proving they weren’t. Proving some scars never healed.
Not like the pale ones that had been carved into Sadie’s thigh and hip.
She was only twenty-three. How old had she been when she’d been shot? How had it happened? It made me want to hunt down whoever had done it and end him. To destroy him financially, if not physically, for trying to squash her bright light.
It wasn’t my place. Sadie certainly wasn’t mine to protect. In fact, she might, this very moment, be with another man who was tracing his fingers over those scars and asking her about them. I didn’t know why that thought made me so furious. Made me feel achy and out of control in a way no woman had made me feel in a very long time.
But control was what had made me the man I was.
So, I pushed aside every thought I had of the blue-eyed vixen.
One thing was sure, if I was thinking about hunting down and destroying people for some woman I didn’t really know, then I could do more than that for the daughter I loved. I could help heal the wound my brother’s death had left in her. And maybe, in doing this for Fallon, I could find a new place in her life. Maybe I could start a fledgling relationship we could grow into something more. Something that would leave me with one less regret when my life was over.
Maybe, if I worked hard enough at it, someday my daughter would forgive me for taking everything she knew and loved and replacing it with only a father she despised.