What kind of lowdown cheap shot was that from a girl? How many times had he turned her question over and over in his mind when he thought about her and Cole and their kid?
His rational mind did hate her.
He’d left his home and kin to get clear of the Kembles, stayed away, too. Only she’d tracked him down just like she’d promised.
As if going to bed with him was nothing, she’d married his brother and had a baby. When she’d gone and gotten herself killed, conflicting feelings he hadn’t known he’d stored a mere one layer under his thick skin had burst inside him. The pain had been like claws shredding his heart. He’d thought he’d bounce back, but apparently without her on this earth, his world had permanently darkened.
He would have retired from bull riding but for her accident. Hell, he’d needed to do something to forget.
Ever since her plane had gone down, he’d ridden bulls with a death-defying vengeance. He was looking forward to riding in Vegas way more than he was to proposing to Abigail.
Damn her hide. Mia was a Kemble through and through. She’d hopped in his bed and stolen his heart—without him even knowing it until it was too late. Before he’d figured out what was eating him she’d had the bad taste to call him and taunt him that she could have gotten pregnant.
Just about the time he’d faced his feelings and had decided to go lookin’ for her, she’d up and gotten herself hitched to his brother.
Hell. Somehow she’d made him care.
He wasn’t supposed to love her. They’d never really dated. For most of their lives, she’d been too damned young for him. Then there was the not insignificant fact she was a Kemble.
She’d been a fixture in his young life. He wasn’t sure when annoyance and affection had changed to love.
She was dead.
Love or not, he had to move on.
“Then why doesn’t she feel dead?” he whispered, clenching his longneck a little tighter and hoping she wouldn’t choose to haunt him tonight while Abby was here.
Sometimes he woke up at night with the strangest feeling that she was screaming his name and begging for him to come. He’d pace for hours whenever that happened.
The fact that she didn’t feel dead was another thing that didn’t bear dwelling on because it made him worry he was crazy for real.
When Shanghai heard what he thought was Abigail’s gentle footfall behind him, he deftly moved the steaks to one side and shut the lid. Then he turned around, hoping to take Abigail into his arms and steal a kiss. Not that her kisses needed stealing any more than Mia’s had.
Abigail had a big job in Austin. She sold creativity, whatever that was. People came to her with ideas and she would invent concepts for them and name things so they could market their ideas. She was so successful that she had an apartment in Austin as well as the small ranch next to his.
Lucky for him she had a weakness for cowboys.
Abby had ridden over on her golden palomino, Coco, and had thrown herself at him right after he’d bought this place. She’d brought him a chicken casserole. Hell, hadn’t he been running from females for just about as long as he could remember?
Shanghai… Mia’s voice seemed to whisper from the trees.
When he turned, no one was there. Unless you counted the flying squirrel that leapt from his deck to the ground, he was the only mammal within shooting range.
He picked up his beer and took another long swig as the wind sighed in the pine trees. Then he grabbed a handful of the peanuts Abigail had set out and munched a few.
Mia was dead. Abigail and he were alive.
For a month, hell, ever since he’d bought the ring, he’d been trying to work up his nerve to ask Abby this one little question. His bull riding buddies thought this was as big a hoot as Wolf did.
“Damnation, Shanghai, you ain’t scared of gettin’ in a coffinlike chute with the rankest bulls professional rodeo can throw at you, but you’re scared to ask a shy, blue-eyed, little girl to marry you,” Matt had taunted him last night at the Stampede Bar while all their bull rider buddies had laughed.
“Consider her asked,” Shanghai had said. “And her eyes are hazel. Not blue.”
“Consider yourself hitched then. Your skinny ass is hers.”
He’d thought of Mia, and his chest had tightened with aching regret.
The last light of the evening flared above the fringe of cedar, pine and oak along the fence line of Shanghai’s Buckaroo Ranch, painting the sky until it was as bright as the flared match he’d used to light the gas grill. The air smelled sweetly of pine, which was a change for Shanghai.
Born and bred on the vast, hot, humid, mesquite-covered plains of south Texas near the Golden Spurs Ranch, it had taken a spell for this place he’d bought acre by acre with his rodeo winnings to feel like home, set as it was twenty miles south of Austin among Bastrop’s lost pines. Not that he ever wanted to go back to south Texas. He’d given up his foolish plans for revenge a long time ago.
Other than his ranch, his rodeo buddies, Wolf and Abigail, he had no family. None at all. Family could cut you like nobody else in the whole damned world. When a boy was raised by a drunk who didn’t even claim him, and he had a mother who’d run off, should it come as a surprise if the grown man didn’t feel connected to his blood kin?
Not even to his brother? He hadn’t kept up with Cole. He hadn’t kept up with anybody.
Sometimes he felt a little guilty about Cole—mainly because he blamed himself more than he should have for the loss of Black Oaks. Still, Shanghai had decided long ago, he wanted nothing to do with his past and that included Mia.
He set his beer down. Where the hell was Abigail? Usually she was all over him by now.
Just like Mia used to be.
Don’t think about her.
Impatient suddenly, maybe because he was so damn nervous at the thought of marriage—not that Abigail wasn’t perfect—he stomped into his ranch house to find her. Finding the kitchen empty, he strode through his high-ceilinged den, past the glitter of twelve championship gold buckles. When he shouted her name, he was a little surprised that she didn’t come running.
Curious now, but determined, because there’s nothing like a chase to whet a man’s appetite, he headed for the back of the house, thinking maybe she’d gone to the bathroom.
He frowned when he found the bathroom empty but saw a strip of gold glowing along the oak floor beneath his closed bedroom door. Curious, he pushed the door open. With a startled cry, she jumped from where she’d been kneeling beside his bedside table. The little velvet box with the engagement ring he’d bought for her spilled to the floor and glittered.
“Abigail?”
Her butterscotch-colored hair glistened in the lamplight. Her large, hazel eyes flashed with guilt. Flushing, she hurriedly crawled away from him on her knees toward his bed. Her shrink-wrapped white halter top and tight white jeans were way sexier than her usual clothes.
Not that he was in the mood to notice the way her breasts bulged so enticingly. He was focused on his ring that had rolled to a stop right in front of the pointed black toe of his alligator cowboy boot.
Slowly he leaned down and picked up the ring and velvet box. With a gasp, her frightened eyes lifted to his.
“Shanghai—I—I didn’t mean…I—I was looking for a fingernail file.” Her cheeks flamed.
“Sure.” Even though he hated liars more than he hated snakes, he kept his voice soft. He slid the ring inside and snapped the lid shut.
“In the bathroom,” he said tightly.