Because that was what he intended. He didn’t care what her qualifications were. He’d train her himself if he had to—he wanted to see Virginia again. He wanted her back in Glory.
When had he seen her last?
Graduation night. Her graduation. He’d come back to Glory with one thing on his mind—to show the town that had never had time for the Indian kid from the south side of the tracks just how wrong they were. He’d had a freshly inked bachelor of arts degree in one pocket and a letter accepting him to one of the country’s top law schools in the other. He’d planned to ask the doctor’s daughter to the dance—the one girl in town who’d been considered completely beyond his reach. All she could do was turn him down, right?
But she hadn’t turned him down. She’d said yes, and Lucas wasn’t sure his life had ever been the same again.
He’d had his eye on her all through high school, although she was several years behind him. She’d been wild. Crazy and wild, and it seemed there wasn’t anything she and that boyfriend of hers, Johnny Gagnon, wouldn’t get up to. She was the bane of Doc Lake’s life. His only daughter. His and that stiff society dame. As if there was any society in the town of Glory!
But Doris Lake did her best to pretend there was. Only, it was extremely difficult with a flame-haired daredevil of a daughter who drag-raced her daddy’s Oldsmobile on the abandoned airfield five miles out of town and thumbed her nose at every convention in the book.
Maybe that was why she’d accepted his invitation to the senior prom. Because he was hands-off. A half-breed. A no-good with a drunk for a father and a brittle, worried, worn-out mother who somehow kept the family together by cleaning houses in the fancy district up on Buffalo Hill. Doc Lake’s wasn’t one of them. Lucas didn’t think he could have borne the shame at eighteen, no matter how proud he was of his mother now, at thirty-five. The old man was dead finally, of a rotten liver and a broken heart, a salmon-eating Fraser River Sto:lo dead in prairie Blackfoot country, home of the buffalo-eaters. And a few years ago, Lucas had bought his mother a retirement apartment in south Calgary, which she shared with her older and only surviving sister. Family was a part of his life Lucas rarely talked about. The truth was, nobody asked.
Or maybe Virginia Lake had accepted his invitation becaue her boyfriedn was in jail.
Johnny Gagnon had a string of petty charges against him by the time he quit school at sixteen. Joyriding, public mischief, shoplifting. He had a laughing, darkly handsome face and a devil-may-care attitude to match Virginia’s. Even when he went to work as a grease monkey for the local mechanic, Walter Friesen, he hung around the high school, revving up his old Thunderbird in the parking lot, waiting for Virginia to finish class. When Virginia was out of town, Lucas would see him driving up and down Main Street with any number of other female companions. Or steaming up the car windows with some girl at the Starlight Drive-in.
The day of Virginia’s graduation, Johnny was in jail for grand larceny. Car theft. He wasn’t a young offender anymore and the Glory Plain Dealer didn’t call it joyriding in their “This Week in Court” column. He got six months, was out in three, but by then Lucas had taken his girl to the senior prom and earned Gagnon’s enduring enmity.
Not that Lucas Yellowfly gave a damn. Where was Johnny Gagnon now? Ha. Lucas hadn’t thought of him in years. Probably in a maximum-security pen somewhere. Dorchester or Kingston. Well out of society’s hair, anyway, he presumed. Lucas had grown up and dedicated his life to the law. He’d put the violence of his own youth behind him. The bar fights, the rodeo brawls, the lies dreamed up to protect his no-good father and tired mother from the town’s scorn—all of it behind him. He believed in the law now. In the power of justice.
And his profession had been very, very good to him. He had an excellent income, a knockout wardrobe, savings in the bank, a stockbroker on retainer, holidays in the south every January, a BMW—he’d achieved all the trappings of success. And, best of all, he’d come back to Glory to do it. He’d shoved his success in the town’s face and they’d had to take it. Now he could accompany any single woman in Glory to any dinner party, anytime. He was in demand. Fathers brightened when they saw him arrive with their daughter on his arm. Where were the scowls of the old days?
Lucas enjoyed every minute of it. Revenge, they said, was sweet. Indeed, it was.
He frowned slightly as he examined the facts on Virginia’s resumé. Thirty, diploma in office management and legal research, past experience... He ran his eye quickly down the list and frowned again. It seemed she’d had an awful lot of short-term jobs in a lot of different towns. He glanced at her cover letter.
Then his eye stopped. His heart stopped. She had a child. A boy, five years old.
Lucas pushed back his chair and put his feet up on the desk, hands behind his head. He stared out the window.
Single. With a child. Coming back to Glory. What had happened in Virginia Lake’s life?
Lucas told himself he’d do everything right. He’d let Pete handle it; otherwise, she might remember that prom date and the night they’d spent together and maybe change her mind. When he saw her, in person, it would be different. There’d be no embarrassment on either side. She’d know he cared. The way he always had. She’d know he’d never do anything to hurt her. She’d know she’d come to the right place. If he could help her, he would.
Yes, he’d let Pete take care of things. Lucas couldn’t afford to blow it. He’d been waiting for Virginia for a very long time.
CHAPTER TWO
Six years earlier
VIRGINIA PAUSED at the spring-loaded door to the Bragg Creek Grocery with an odd feeling that something was wrong.
What could be wrong?
It was a glorious morning, the trees were in full leaf and the wild roses were in bud. She’d just heard good news about a summer job at the Banff Springs Hotel and now she had a place to live, too, at the Prescotts’ summer cabin just down the road. She didn’t have to go home to Glory, didn’t have to deal with her parents, after all. She could take care of herself.
Virginia frowned. Maybe the feeling had something to do with the shiny late-model Jeep that stood outside the store with its engine running. In winter, yes, people sometimes left their cars and pickups running, but on a beautiful May morning? She pushed open the door and stepped into the gloom of the old store.
“Well, well.”
“Johnny!”
“Will you lookee who’s here?”
Virginia was tongue-tied. She hadn’t seen Johnny Gagnon since the summer her father had packed her off to Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, four thousand miles away.
“Haven’t seen you in a while, babe. Man, what a sight for sore eyes!”
She’d have recognized him anywhere. Handsome as ever, maybe even more so now that he was a man, fully grown. He wore a mustache, which suited him, and his hair was fashionably long. His teeth flashed white in his swarthy face when he grinned at her, and, as always, she found it hard not to grin back.
Johnny Bandito.
But what was he doing here?
Then she noticed his right hand stuffed awkwardly in his jacket pocket and, slung over his shoulder, a stained and worn canvas cash bag that was stenciled faintly with “Bragg Creek Grocery.” He was sweating profusely and his dark eyes were all over her and all over the store at the same time. Where was Mr. Gibbon? Where were the other customers? The old guys who gathered every morning in the country store to shoot the breeze with the proprietor?
Virginia heard a muffled thump from behind the high wooden counter. That was when