“They will have enough help for all of the parties that are planned?”
Luke bit back a groan. “Consuela, you know perfectly well they will,” he said patiently. “The place is crawling with your very own nieces and nephews. My parents haven’t had to cook, clean or sneeze without assistance since you took over the running of that household forty years ago before they’d even met. When you came over here to work for me, you handpicked your cousin to replace you. Maritza is very good, yes?”
“Sí,” she conceded.
“This trip to see your family in Mexico is my present to you. It’s long overdue. You said yourself not sixty seconds ago that the holidays are meant for families. You have not seen your own for several years. Your mother is almost ninety. You cry every time a letter comes from her.”
“After all these years, I get homesick, that’s true. I am a very emotional person, not like some people,” she said pointedly.
Luke ignored the jibe. “Well, this is your chance to see for yourself how your mother is doing. Now stop dawdling and go before you miss your plane and before your brother busts our eardrums with that horn of his.”
Consuela still appeared torn between duty to him and a longing to see her mother. Finally she heaved a sigh of resignation and buttoned her coat. “I will go,” she said grudgingly. “But I will worry the whole time. You are alone too much, niño.”
It had been a long time since anyone had thought of Luke Adams as a little boy. Unfortunately, Consuela would probably never get the image out of her head, despite the fact that he was over six feet tall, operated a thriving ranch and had built himself a house twice the size of the very lavish one he’d grown up in.
“Ever since—“ she began.
“Enough,” Luke said in a low, warning tone that silenced her more quickly than any shout would have.
Tears of sympathy sprang to her eyes, and she wrapped her plump arms around him in a fierce hug that had Luke wincing. For a sixty-year-old woman she was astonishingly strong. He didn’t want her weeping for him, though. He didn’t want her pity. And he most definitely didn’t want her dredging up memories of Erik, the brother who’d died barely seven months ago, the brother whose death he’d caused.
“Go,” he said more gently. “I will see you in the new year.”
She reached up and patted his cheek, a gesture she dared only rarely. “Te amo, niño.”
Luke’s harsh demeanor softened at once. “I love you, too, Consuela.”
The truth of it was that she was about the only human being on the face of the earth to whom he could say that without reservation. Even before Erik’s death had split the family apart, Luke had had his share of difficulties with his father’s attempted ironclad grip on his sons. His mother had always been too much in love with her husband to bother much with the four boys she had borne him. And Luke had battled regularly with his younger brothers, each of them more rebellious than the other. Erik had been a year younger, only thirty-one when he’d died. Jordan was thirty, Cody twenty-seven. Consuela had been the steadying influence on all of them, adults and children.
“Te amo, mi amiga,” Luke said, returning her fierce hug.
Consuela was still calling instructions as she crossed the porch and climbed into her brother’s car. For all he knew she was still shouting them as the car sped off down the lane to the highway, kicking up a trail of dust in its wake.
Alone at last, he thought with relief when Consuela was finally gone from view. Blessed silence for two whole weeks. His cattle were pastured on land far from the main house and were being tended by his foreman and a crew of volunteers from among the hands. The ranch’s business affairs were tied up through the beginning of the new year. He had no obligations at all.
He opened a cupboard, withdrew an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey from the supply he’d ordered, ostensibly to take along as gifts to all the holiday parties to which he’d been invited. He pulled down a nice, tall glass, filled it with ice and headed for his den and the big leather chair behind his desk.
Uncapping the bottle, he poured a shot, doubled it, then shrugged and filled the glass to the rim. No point in pretending he didn’t intend to get blind, stinking drunk. No point in pretending he didn’t intend to stay that way until the whole damned holiday season had passed by in a blur.
Just as he lifted the glass to his lips, he caught sight of the wedding photo on the corner of his desk, the one he’d turned away so that he wouldn’t have to see Erik’s smile or the radiance on Erik’s wife’s face. He’d destroyed two lives that day, three if he counted his own worthless existence. Erik was dead and buried, but Jessie’s life had been devastated as surely as if she had been in that accident with him.
A familiar knot formed in his stomach, a familiar pain encircled his heart. He lifted his glass in a mockery of a toast. “To you, little brother.”
The unaccustomed liquor burned going down, but in the space of a heartbeat it sent a warm glow shimmering through him. If one sip was good, two were better, and the whole damned bottle promised oblivion.
He drank greedily, waiting to forget, waiting for relief from the unceasing anguish, from the unending guilt.
The phone rang, stopped, then rang again. The old grandfather clock in the hall chimed out each passing hour as dusk fell, then darkness.
But even sitting there all alone in the dark with a belly full of the best whiskey money could buy, Luke couldn’t shut off the memories. With a curse, he threw the bottle across the room, listened with satisfaction as it shattered against the cold, stone fireplace.
Finally, worn out, he fell into a troubled sleep. It wasn’t his brother’s face he saw as he passed out, though. It was Jessie’s—the woman who should have been his.
* * *
The sky was dark as pitch and the roads were icing over. Jessie Adams squinted through the car’s foggy windshield and wondered why she’d ever had the bright idea of driving clear across Texas for the holidays, instead of letting her father-in-law send his pilot for her. She wasn’t even sure how Harlan and Mary Adams had persuaded her that she still belonged with them now that Erik was gone.
She’d always felt like an outsider in that big white Colonial house that looked totally incongruous sitting in the middle of a sprawling West Texas ranch. Someone in the family, long before Harlan’s time, had fled the South during the Civil War. According to the oft-told legend, the minute they’d accumulated enough cash, they’d built an exact replica of the mansion they’d left behind in ashes. And like the old home, they’d called it White Pines, though she couldn’t recall ever seeing a single pine within a thirty-mile radius.
The bottom line was the Adamses were rich as could be and had ancestry they could trace back to the Mayflower, while Jessie didn’t even know who her real parents had been. Her adoptive parents had sworn they didn’t know and had seemed so hurt by her wanting to find out that she’d reluctantly dropped any notion of searching for answers.
By the time they’d died, she’d pushed her need to know aside. She had met Erik, by then. Marrying him and adjusting to his large, boisterous family had been more than enough to handle. Mary Adams was sweet as could be, if a little superior at times, but Erik’s father and his three brothers were overwhelming. Harlan Adams was a stern and domineering parent, sure of himself about everything. He was very much aware of himself as head of what he considered to be a powerful dynasty. As for Erik’s brothers, she’d never met a friendlier, more flirtatious crew, and she had worked in her share of bars to make ends meet while she’d been in college.
Except for Luke. The oldest, he was a brooder. Dark and silent, Luke had been capable of tremendous kindness, but rarely did he laugh and tease as his brothers did. The expression in the depths of his eyes was bleak, as if he was bearing in silence some terrible hurt deep in his soul. There