A Lady For Lincoln Cade

“So you stepped aside.” When he didn’t respond, she asked, “Where is Lucky now?”

“Lucky died.” He looked away. “Four months ago.”

Haley blinked back tears for a grieving friend, for a stranger called Lucky. For a rare friendship. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” A hand briefly shielded his eyes. “So am I.”

“And now you’re looking for his wife. To help.”

“For Lucky’s sake. I wasn’t there when he needed me, but I thought…” He seemed to lose himself in a mood. In a moment he spoke again. “Shortly after he died, Linsey left Oregon and dropped out of sight. With no family and no roots, she could be anywhere. Nobody I’ve hired has found a trace of her.”

Lincoln said nothing more, and Haley wouldn’t question his search for Lucky Stuart’s widow. Whatever his reason, it wouldn’t be to trade on the past, nor because he loved her still. Lincoln Cade wasn’t a man who would barter on grief.

No matter what prompted his search, Haley hoped he would find Linsey Stuart. If it was right, she hoped they would find love and peace together. But that was for another time, another place. And, she suspected, for reconciled lovers to discover.

“It’s late, Lincoln. You’re exhausted, and I’m famished. Shall we share this thoughtful repast and call it a day?”

He smiled at her ploy to entice him to eat. But as he accepted the sandwich she offered, Haley saw the laughter left the silver of his eyes untouched.

Lincoln considered the wire and the tuft of brown fur caught on a barb. For the third time in a week he’d checked the deteriorating west pasture fence and the second time he’d found evidence of an animal passing near or through the wire. His first thought was deer. Closer inspection suggested dogs.

Among the mongrels of Belle Reve, some were white, some blond, some black. None were brown.

The west pasture was isolated, bordered by two rivers, the sprawl of Belle Reve, and Stuart land. No inhabited houses or farms were close enough for straying pets or working dogs. That left the threat of a pack of lost or abandoned pets. Dogs that would run a horse to death for the joy of the chase.

The Black Arabian stock his brother Jackson kept in pastures at the plantation were far too valuable to dismiss suspicions of a pack gone wild. He decided he would warn Jackson and enlist his aid in trapping the animals. Catching the pommel of his saddle and stepping into the stirrup, Lincoln mounted Diablo.

His inspection complete, he sat for an indecisive moment, trying to resist the lure of the path beyond the fence. The path that would lead to the Stuart farm. In the end he succumbed to a need he’d battled for weeks.

“Won’t hurt to check the property.” As Diablo’s black ears flicked at the sound of his voice, with his palm Lincoln stroked the stallion’s mane. “Could be the pack settled in the barn. And there’s a step to measure for repair.”

Glancing at the sky, gauging the position of the sun, he tapped the horse with the reins. “A couple of hours of daylight left, Diablo. Time enough.”

Diablo was eager to run. Lincoln himself enjoyed the rush as the Arabian topped the fence and raced over the corridor that a century before had been the Stuarts’ wagon route to town.

Beyond sight of the farm, Lincoln slowed to a walk. If the dogs had made their den on the property, they would be gone before he could find it, if he came riding in like the Lone Ranger.

“Easy, boy. No sudden moves.” He walked the horse slowly, barely rustling the grass that grew knee high. “Don’t want to spook them if they’re here.”

With a grunt hardly stifled, he jerked to a startled halt. “What the devil?”

Bending in the saddle, peering through a copse of massive trees, he saw light. Light where there should be no light, gleaming through windows of the Stuart farmhouse.

Illusion? A trick of the sun glinting off glass? Intruders or looters after all these years of the farmhouse standing unlocked?

Maybe. He could persuade himself to accept that. But the creak of rusty hinges was neither a trick nor an illusion. Nor was the woman who pushed open the door and stepped onto the porch. With her hair gleaming like spilling gold, as she shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun, she was familiar and very real.

“Linsey?” Her name was a raw undertone lost in the prattle of breeze-stirred oaks. Yet, spoken in his own voice, it resounded in his mind. Like a man too long in the dark catching a glimpse of the sun, his gaze moved over her. With incredulous care, he committed to mind a memory, seeking first the differences imposed by time and living. Then the unchanging qualities six long years couldn’t sweep from his mind.

Her hair was still long. Still a mass of curls gathered brutally into a topknot by a clasp that never had a chance of holding it. The hand that pushed tumbling strands from her cheeks was still absently impatient.

Her chin still tilted in eternal determination. While her mouth curved in a smile that seemed joyfully childlike and sensual at once. Lincoln wondered if she still caught her lower lip between her teeth when she concentrated or when she worried.

Drawing himself from the aching study of her mouth and face, he matched this Linsey of flesh and blood to the woman he’d turned away from…for Lucky.

She stood tall, shoulders back, making the most of those few inches by which she topped five feet. And as the breeze that sent tiny oak leaves spiraling around him swept across the clearing, molding her supple shirt against her, Lincoln realized her breasts were rounder, fuller. A girlish innocence had given way to an earthy maturity, a beguiling voluptuousness. A metamorphosis making her jean-clad waist and hips seem slimmer.

He’d lost a girl six years ago. Today, he found a woman in full bloom.

To the rest of the world she’d always been a pretty girl full of life and courage. To Lincoln, she was breathtaking from the first. But not so beautiful as now. Never so beautiful he could hardly believe she was real, not illusion.

Just as he could hardly believe that, after hiring investigators to search all of Oregon, Montana, and as many locales in between as possible, he had found her here. Exactly where she should be, in Lucky Stuart’s South Carolina home.

The last place he’d thought to look in a month. The last place he would ever think to look, if the search hadn’t ended.

How long had she been here? One week? Two? How soon after his last stop by the farm had she arrived? “How long before you were going to let me know, Linsey?”

As relieved as he was that she was here, like a battering ram striking out of nowhere, Lincoln was filled with anger bordering on rage. Anger laced with bitter self-disgust that any of it should matter. That she should matter.

For years he’d struggled to put the past in perspective. From a passionate and desperate interlude in a shack in an Oregon forest surrounded by fire, to the day he walked her down the aisle—giving her, in an unknown father’s stead, to Lucky—he thought he’d finally succeeded in putting it behind him.

Until the letters. Then he knew his struggles and all he believed he’d accomplished had been a farce.

Farce or not, his life was on an even keel, he didn’t want it disrupted by old wounds torn open. He hadn’t stopped to think of this moment when he’d begun the search. He hadn’t thought of anything but the wishes of a dying friend. But now, after the month and a small fortune spent searching for her, after the anguish of every minute of each of those days, he was tempted to ride away as if he’d never seen her and never loved her.

Dear God, he was tempted, but he’d never broken a promise to Lucky. He wouldn’t now. Raking an arm over his face, wishing he could wipe the anger from his heart as easily as he could from his features, he lifted a hand to hail the house.

“Cade.”

Lincoln froze at the sound, hand uplifted, lips parted in a greeting he wouldn’t utter.

“Cade? Where are you, tiger? Better come inside before it gets dark.”

Shocked that she could know he was there in the shadows that deepened with every increment the sun sank, Lincoln didn’t respond. He couldn’t respond as her voice flowed over him filled with love, driving out the anger.

In that moment of stunned silence, he heard the bark of a dog, a peal of laughter, then the voice of a child. “I’m here, Mom. In the barn with Brownie.”

Before he could make sense of it, a small boy appeared at the barn door. A boy called Cade and his dog.

“Brownie.” Lincoln didn’t know why it was that name he muttered. He didn’t understand why barbwire streaming with brown dog hair twice in three days should flood his mind. But he was glad for a small boy’s simple name for a brown dog and for the mystery of the barbs’ trophies solved.

Mind candy, a mental dodge. A name and a mystery more easily understood and resolved than the one Lincoln confronted in gathering darkness beyond the clearing of the Stuart farm.

His mouth was dry, his head hurt, his heart pounded so hard he thought it might explode. He didn’t want to stay, but he couldn’t drag his gaze from the boy as he raced across the yard and skipped over the broken step into his mother’s arms.

He was a small boy, but too big for Linsey to pick up. Yet she did, crushing him to her as she spun him round and round, planting nibbling kisses on his neck. The boy’s laughter escalated to squeals and giggles, while the dog jumped in circles, trying to join in.

Breathless and panting, Linsey stopped spinning. When she was still again, Lincoln watched as the boy plucked the clasp from her hair, letting it fall beyond her shoulders.

Catching a strand in his grubby fist, he laughed in delight. “Pretty.”

Linsey laughed, too. “Ah, shucks, kind sir. I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“Nope.” The boy giggled and squirmed, and giggled that much harder when she tickled him. “Just you.”

“That will change in a few years.” Linsey’s laugh faded as she hugged him again. “You like it here, don’t you, Cade?”

“Yep.” The boy’s head bobbed. “But I was wondering.”

“Yeah?”

“Can I have a horse?”

“Hmm.” Linsey tilted her head, considering. “I suppose one day. What kind of horse would you want?”

“A humongous black one, like the tall man.”

In the shadows Lincoln tensed, waiting for Linsey to look into the falling night. The air had grown unnaturally still; every sound carried as if it were magnified. He found himself holding his breath and keeping Diablo under a tight rein as he awaited discovery.

“A tall man with a humongous horse? I don’t know who you mean, tiger.” The porch lay in shadow now, obscuring Linsey’s features. “Is this a character from TV?”

The boy shook his head with the emphatic impatience of the young. “Nope. A real man.” A finger pointed. “He was over there.”

“He was?” Linsey’s chin lifted sharply. Frowning, she concentrated on the area her son indicated. “Do you see him now?”

“Nope. I could see him from the loft, though.” The boy, whose hair was as dark as his mother’s was fair, gestured again toward the bit of deserted trail visible from the porch.

“You climbed to the loft?” Linsey’s smile faltered. Even to a watcher, hovering and hidden, her demeanor changed, though she spoke kindly to the boy. “We discussed that we had to go carefully here. The house and barn are old, they’ve been empty and neglected for a long time. Do you remember what else I said?”

“There could be rotten boards to fall through, and spiders, and snakes,” the boy finished for her. “I remembered, Mom, and I was careful. Real careful.”

“Why did you go there?” Linsey wasn’t yet pacified.

The boy lifted both shoulders in a vague response. “I dunno, ’cept I just wanted to look. It’s pretty, Mom. I could see the river and the trees, and almost to Oregon. But I won’t go again, if you don’t want me to.”

“Promise? Just until I can get around to repairing it?”

Solemnly the boy drew a sweeping cross over his chest and stomach. “Cross my heart.”

“Promise accepted.” A loving finger tapped his nose, signaling his trespass was forgiven but not forgotten. “What do you say we finish the chocolate pudding left from supper?”

“Can I have my horse, too?”

“The humongous one?”

“Yep.”

Linsey hugged him again. “We’ll see. Good enough?”

“Yep.”

“Can you say anything but yep, tiger?”

“Yep,” the boy answered gravely, then dissolved into giggles at the repartee that was obviously a long-standing game.

In a dancing step Linsey took her son to the door. Pausing there, she turned back. For a sinking moment, though he knew she couldn’t see into the dark cave of trees, Lincoln could feel her gaze strafing over him.

For too long she stood in the doorway, looking from the treeline to the stream, then toward the end of the trail. But Linsey was new to the area—she wouldn’t know this was the passage she’d heard Lincoln call the escape route. She wouldn’t know the long-abandoned trail had led a traveler back to the farm again.

Lincoln’s tension telegraphed to Diablo, the stallion whickered and tossed his head. With a soft click of his tongue and a soothing touch, Lincoln quieted him. As quickly as the small rebellion was settled, there was still the dread of being discovered skulking among the trees like a voyeur.

But Linsey didn’t hear. She didn’t see. Satisfied there was no one about, she passed through the door into the light of a house that had been too empty and too dark for too long.

When the house was quiet and only a light in the bedroom that had been Frannie Stuart’s still burned, Lincoln steered the stallion toward Belle Reve. After bedding Diablo down for the night, enduring a short command-visit with his father, and refusing the dinner Miss Corey had prepared, he drove to his small pied-à-terre on the outskirts of Belle Terre.

The small city, deeply steeped in old Southern traditions, was the hub of this part of the South Carolina lowcountry. Lincoln’s home, situated in a sleepy cul-de-sac on a little-traveled street, was uniquely antebellum, with many of its historic treasures still intact. A single, as the narrow houses with walled and private courtyard gardens were called. In these days when he divided his time between Belle Terre and Belle Reve—with considerably more at the plantation since his father’s strokes—the tiny house was all he needed.

An hour later, as he wandered the moonlit courtyard, he realized how much he’d missed the quiet, the solitude. A place that was his alone. Yet the familiar pleasure of it escaped him. His mind was too full, too chaotic. Too filled with memories of Linsey and the boy.

“The boy.” Ice clinked against an heirloom crystal glass as he took it from a wrought-iron table. Draining it, he poured another drink from a decanter he’d brought into the garden with him.

“Linsey, the boy, and Brownie.” His voice was strained even to himself, and he wondered if one drink had made him drunk. “If it hasn’t,” he muttered as he lifted the glass before the blaze of an ancient gaslight, “hopefully the next one will.”

The boy. The words slashed endlessly through his mind like a broken record he couldn’t shut off. The boy. It was always that, never more. The child’s name was Cade. Yet, for reasons he wouldn’t define, Lincoln couldn’t bring himself to call Linsey’s son by his own name.

Dropping into a chair by the table, he lifted his drink again, watching the play of flames reflected in amber liquid and delicately etched crystal. Fire, the force that changed all their lives. Fire and Oregon. Abruptly Lincoln crashed the glass down with such ferocity it should have shattered, as most of the scotch splashed over the rim.

“Who is he, Linsey? Why is his hair dark when Lucky’s was fairer than yours? Who gave him my name?” Drawing a shuddering breath, he whispered, “Why? In God’s name, why?”

Burying his head in his hands, he didn’t speak again. As darkness gathered, beyond the babble of the fountain, the tap of footsteps along the street, and the clink of glass against glass as he poured another drink, the garden was silent.

When he roused, putting away memories he kept locked in the nether regions of his mind, Lincoln didn’t know how long he’d sat in the gloom. As he nursed a rare third drink, he didn’t care.

Time didn’t matter tonight. He was too restless for it to matter. Too confused. Pain lay in his chest like an iron weight. Whatever he did, or didn’t do, emotions he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to deal with tore at him. And with the better part of those three scotches in him— the most he’d had to drink since he and his brothers had given up their carousing, brawling ways—he shouldn’t, by damn, be feeling anything.

“Hell,” he grumbled, and took another sip, more melted ice than alcohol. “I’m the serious, pragmatic Cade. The logical Cade with all the cool-headed answers. Or so they tell me.

“Yeah,” he mocked in harsh sarcasm, “sure I am. Sure I do.” Fingers curled into an impotent fist. “So, why not now?”

He was the second of Caesar Augustus Cade’s four sons by four wives. The son born of a Scot. Surely she passed along some fine Gaelic practicality in her genes, even if she had died too young to instill it with her teaching. A handsome mouth quirked in a grim smile. “Yep, Gaelic practicality, that’s Lincoln Cade.”

Yep. The boy said that, he remembered.

“The boy.” The glass banged down a second time and still survived. Skidding back his chair, Lincoln rose, and from his great height stared down at the perfect haven he’d created. As the Stuart farm had been, this was his place to come when life with a father like Gus became too much. Or when the world weighed too heavily.

“Where do I go now?” he wondered aloud as memories he couldn’t exorcise and questions he couldn’t answer filled every corner of his heart and mind. When bitterness, black and ugly, joined grief and guilt, how did he deal with them?

“What about the boy?”

His whisper seemed to echo in the small space. Surrounding him, engulfing him in his own voice, asking over and over, what about the boy?…the boy?

Laughter from the street broke the illusion. Adult amusement, but in it Lincoln heard the haunting laugh of a child.

But whose child?

Turning to the house, forsaking the garden and his search for peace he knew would elude him for a long time to come, Lincoln knew what he must do. He knew what he would do.

For Lucky, for Linsey, for himself.

For the boy.

Three

“Look, Mom. Look.”

Chuckling, as she made another entry on her growing list of things to do, Linsey wondered what new marvel Cade had discovered. She’d spent the morning taking inventory of needed repairs in the house and barn. Prioritizing each, she balanced their importance against her limited budget while her son resumed an exploration cut short the night before by dinner and bedtime.

Clipping her pen to the small tablet, she smiled again. Recalling that, as he’d drifted off to sleep each of the three nights they’d spent in the old house, Cade had declared the Stuart farm “the bestest place ever,” Linsey went to see what new bounty had been added to the exuberant child’s list of “bestest” things.

“What is it, Cade?” Blinded by a flood of light, she stepped from the barn. “What have you discovered now?”

Grubby fingers pointed toward the stream. “Company.”

Shading her eyes with a hand at her forehead, Linsey stared at a truck fording the shallow part of the stream as if it weren’t there. Who would come calling so soon? she wondered. Only the utility companies knew Lucky Stuart’s widow and her son had taken up residence in the old Stuart farm. Even if the linemen were gossips, it was unlikely word could spread so fast. She hadn’t even stopped in Belle Terre for groceries.

Cade moved a step toward the house and the truck, eager for the adventure of meeting someone new. “No, Cade.” Linsey’s fingertips settled on his shoulder. “Wait.”

“Who is it?” A friendly, fearless child…only her touch kept him from running to greet the visitor. “Do you know?”

“No, and I can’t think of any reason we might have a caller so soon,” she said. “Unless…” Speculation died on her lips as she remembered the horse and rider she’d dismissed as a creation of Cade’s vivid imagination. As the truck drew nearer, with a fleeting glimpse and a sense of the inevitable, she recognized the one man she’d hoped to avoid.

At least for a little time. Until she had mind, body, and heart settled and steeped in Lucky’s past and in his home.

“Unless what, Mom?” Cade glanced curiously at her.

Linsey had no ready response. But she was saved the effort as the truck halted before the front steps, its door swung open, and a tall, dark man emerged. With a sinking heart, she waited, held motionless by the man, by his magnetism. By memories.

He was tall. Taller than most men, and slender. But when he reached into the truck for a pair of gloves, the startling width of his shoulders strained against the seams of his shirt. His legs were long and provocatively molded by sensible jeans riding low at his waist. Equally sensible low-heeled boots added an unneeded inch or so to his already considerable height. His hair, barely visible beneath the broad brim of his Western hat, was dark and cut short. Yet it grew in an all-too-familiar defiant swirl over the back of his neck.

When he turned from the truck, his solemn gaze found her as he drew on the supple gloves. Refusing to flinch beneath his wintry stare, even as countless questions raced through her mind, Linsey realized he was as handsome as ever. And, a glance at Cade proved, as singularly charismatic. As fascinating.

Don’t, she wanted to cry out. Don’t like him too much. Don’t admire him too much. Don’t love him, or he’ll break your young heart, too, she wanted to warn her son. But with all that had gone before in her son’s young life, she knew it was too late. It had been too late from the moment this stalwart, cold-eyed modern-day knight errant emerged from his gleaming metal steed.

Cade had been taught to love and adore the mystique of this man all his short life. Now, with his simple act of walking toward them—gloved, booted, bigger than life with a tilted Stetson that seemed to touch the sky—Linsey knew her son would love and adore the flesh-and-blood Lincoln Cade even more than the image Lucky Stuart had deliberately created.

“Linsey.” Her name spoken in his quiet voice and a touch at the brim of his hat was Lincoln’s only greeting as he halted before her. Eyes dispassionate and as gray as a rain-washed sky settled on her face, seeking out every nuance of change. With no altering of his expression, his study moved on, lingering on hastily banded hair the color of sunshine, a shirt worn precariously thin, and jeans faded and more white than blue. Then finally her boots, whose best days had passed miles before.

His silent perusal complete, his attention flicked down to Cade. The same dispassion catalogued the sturdy body, the bright, intelligent face. And hair as dark as Lincoln’s own, grown too long over arching brows. When gray gaze met gray gaze, one remained steady, unreadable. One stared unabashedly, filled with the first of youthful wonder.

A nod and another touch at the brim of the Stetson accompanied a softly drawled recognition, “Boy.”

“Sir.” Cade smiled courteously, Linsey’s rigorous training not deserting him even in awe.

“Do you know who I am?” Lincoln addressed the spark of recognition in the boy’s face. To Linsey, who had never forgotten the cadence of his voice, it held the whet of strain.

“Yes, sir.” Cade’s head bobbed, confirming Lincoln’s speculation as dark hair fell over his eyes. With curled fingers, he brushed it back. “You’re Mr. Cade. Once upon a time, when trees burned, you and Lucky jumped out of planes with my mom.”

Lincoln visibly relaxed, but didn’t turn his attention from the child. “Yes, we did. Once upon a time—a long time.”