It was unnerving how tuned into her Deacon was. Nothing she did went unnoticed by him. She could have huffed, puffed, and blown the house down, and James wouldn’t’ have noticed she was having an asthma attack. If she slightly moved in her chair, Deacon would know her underwear had crawled up her butt. It was seriously as if from the moment their eyes met, when he came through those western doors at that bar, they were on the exact same frequency and their souls knew it.
“What happened to your parents again?” she questioned, already knowing the answer.
“It was a car accident.”
She nodded. She’d looked it up during the past week wanting to find out more information on the people who had kept such a huge secret from him. It was a strange accident. There was no other vehicle involved. Supposedly there were no drugs or alcohol, and the driving conditions were fine. It was night, but it wasn’t raining or snowing.
They hit a tree, and based on her online research, which she knew was not entirely reliable, there weresupposedly no skid marks to indicate Mr. St. Claire tried to brake. And several witness statements, which were later reportedly retracted, stated he had accelerated.
The reason she’d asked Deacon was to see if he thought there was anything fishy without her putting ideas in his head. From his expression, it looked as if he was accepting the crash at face value.
“Who told you about your mom, your birth mom, being dead?”
“My parents,” he responded automatically.
“Both of them?”
He hesitated, then said, “Yeah, both.”
The jet engine thrummed under their feet, a constant, low vibration like a distant heartbeat. Jenna watched him as he stared at his hands, at the way he picked at a loose thread on his dark gray thermal shirt.
He let out a soft, humorless laugh. “Actually, no, not both. Not at first. I guess it was my mom. She was the one who said it. My dad wasn’t home. When he came in, it was like…He looked like he’d seen a ghost. He didn’t even say anything. He just... stood there. Watching.” Deacon’s voice stretched, the words coming tougher. “I always thought he was just shocked. But now, I don’t know. Maybe he was scared.”
Jenna wanted to ask—scared of what?—but she let the silence widen. Sometimes, it was better to let people ask themselves questions.
“And then the crash was six months later.”
“Yes. Why?”
“Nothing. I was just… I was just wondering about the timing. Why then? What did they have to gain? Or lose? Or why did they feel compelled to tell you? I don’t know… my brain always goes soap opera orReal Housewives. It’s what happens when you spend twelvehours a day, six days a week, listening to your clients’ deepest, darkest secrets.”
Jenna could see that she’d made him think. She just wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“You don’t have to do this.” Jenna reached out and touched his arm—a small, grounding gesture, but his skin went tight over bone.
The sky above the valley seemed to have been calibrated specifically for Deacon’s mood, as if somewhere in the upper atmosphere, the weather gods had been keeping close tabs on the emotional state of a single human. It was gloomy and ominous. Ten o’clock in the morning, there was a was a gray, black dome threatening to split open at any second. Dark clouds pressed in from the mountaintop to tree line and pooled into the canyons covering the ten thousand acres in murky shadow.
Lockhart Ranch was a luxury dude ranch and vineyard that Selma Lockhart ran with her husband and four adult sons. She hadfoursons. None of them lived at home any longer and her husband went out of town the third Thursday of the month, he flew to Seattle for a standing board meeting, which was why Deacon had chosen today to fly up. Which meant Selma Lockhart was there, alone except for the ranch staff. And her fifth son, her first son, apparently.
Deacon had hired a private investigator last week, which is how he had all his intel, but hadn’t looked at the photos the P.I. had sent. He had not once internet-stalked the ranch, so this was the first he was seeing it. He told himself it was about protecting their privacy, but the truth was, if he saw her face, it would be real. He wasn’t readyfor real. Real would mean everything he’d ever believed about his parents was up for renegotiation. It would mean that there were versions of his own story that existed out there, parallel, waiting to be discovered.
As they idled at the foot of the quarter-mile drive, he rolled his thumb over the ridges of the steering wheel and forced himself to breathe in, breathe out, breathe in. Deacon could not remember the last time he’d been this unsure, this rattled.
Why had he decided that cold calling his birth mother was a good idea? He’d thought then he would know the truth. If she had warning, she could come up with a story, a lie. He was done with lies, all he wanted was truth.
He didn’t know if he’d find her at the main house or in the admin offices, but he knew she was there. His P.I. had eyes on her that morning. He knew the ranch spanned thousands of acres, with guest quarters, spa facilities, a gym, a theater, and more, but he could barely make out the shape of a house and a barn.
With nerves rioting, he pressed the accelerator and drove beneath the gate at the entrance of the ranch, the arched metal sign above read Lockhart Ranch with an emblem of a lock and flaming sacred heart. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly he could see the whites of his knuckles. He eased the SUV up the drive, each revolution of the tires scraping away at his resolve. The landscaping was aggressively curated, nothing as simple as a daisy or a dandelion. Instead, the drive was lined with violently trimmed topiary.
The main house came into view, a massive stone farmhouse estate with a wraparound porch and a copper roof that gleamed even in the flat light. The barn loomed farther back, hand-crafted to look like it had stood therefor a hundred years, but the sensors and cameras along the roofline gave away its actual vintage.
Deacon parked where the drive widened in front of the house, directly beneath the impressive, hand-carved doors. Time compressed, then snapped forward again. Everything went black for a few seconds. He blinked, and his sight was back.
Jenna’s hand shot to his leg, just above the knee. He flinched in surprise, then realized it was the only thing keeping his leg from physically vibrating off the seat. She squeezed, and instead of giving him another out, like she had at the gate, which truth be told, he probably would have taken, she encouraged him by saying, “You’ve got this.”
He nodded, and they got out and walked up steps that felt like walking a plank. As they made it to the porch, there was a crack of thunder, which caused Jenna to jump beside him, then look up at him and laugh. Seeing her smile and hearing her laugh did something to him. It soothed him, calmed him, it broke the tension. It wrapped around him like the hug she’d given him at the hospital and gave him the strength to face whatever was to come.
After taking a deep breath, he lifted his hand to knock. But before he could the door opened and a woman stood before him, looking scared, shocked and stunned.
