Backlash Tender Trap Aftermath - Lisa Jackson Page 0,3
the fire. Tessa tried to run forward, but Mitchell’s arms tightened around her waist.
“Maybe you don’t want to see this,” he said.
“Let me go!”
“It might be Denver—”
“Then I have to be with him!” Her heart pounding with dread, she shook him off and started running.
The paramedics reached the rescued man first. They were already working over him, forcing oxygen into his lungs when Tessa recognized her father, his face black, his white hair singed.
“Thank God,” she whispered, falling to the ground near him.
“Hey, lady, give us a break! We need a little room,” one paramedic snapped, and she backed away on her knees, her eyes glued to her father’s face. Gray beneath the streaks of soot, his skin looked slack and old. His thick white hair had been singed yellow and he was coughing so hard he nearly threw up.
But he was alive. Closing her eyes, she prayed silently.
Her father blinked rapidly, still coughing, his eyes unfocused.
“Get him into an ambulance,” the fire chief ordered. He glared grimly at her father. “You see anyone else in there?”
“I—I don’t know,” he mumbled, still coughing.
The paramedic glanced at the fire chief. “He wouldn’t know. He’s three sheets to the wind.”
Tessa swallowed back a hot retort as she leaned over her father and smelled the familiar scent of whiskey on his breath.
A pickup roared down the drive and slammed to a stop. The driver, Denver’s younger brother, Colton, jumped out of the cab and started forward, his boots crunching on gravel as he ran faster and faster toward the fire chief. “What the hell’s going on here?” he asked, his face white as he stared at the stables. Orange flames shot out of the roof and heat rippled in sickening waves from the inferno.
Curtis coughed loudly and stirred, his red-rimmed eyes focusing on his daughter. “Tessa, gal?” he murmured, cracking a weary smile.
“Thank God, you’re all right!” She wrapped her arms around his grimy work shirt, buried her head in his chest. “Did you see Denver?”
“You were with him,” Curtis said. He shook his head. “No one—”
“But Denver’s in there! So are his parents,” she protested, her head snapping up.
“Oh, God!” Colton cried. Without thinking he started for the stables.
“It’s too late!” Mitchell yelled. “Colt—stop! Damn him!”
“Stay back!” the chief commanded through the horn. “Christ! Somebody stop him—”
A blast ripped through the stables, and the building exploded in a fiery burst. Glass shattered, spraying out. Timbers groaned and crashed to the ground. Flames crackled and reached to the sky in hellish yellow fingers. The earth shuddered.
Tessa fell to the ground sobbing, knowing in her heart that Denver would never survive.
“Come on, Tess,” Mitchell whispered, picking her up and carrying her to his old, battered truck as the firemen and hands recovered and scurried toward the stables.
As if in a dream, Tessa saw her father being loaded into the ambulance, felt the scratchy denim of Mitchell’s jacket against her cheek. “There’s nothing more we can do here,” Mitchell said softly. “I don’t think there’s anything anyone can.”
“But Denver . . .”
“I know, Tess. I know.”
Chapter One
Helena, Montana
Seven Years Later
“I don’t want it!” Denver McLean declared as he dropped into a tufted leather chair close to Ross Anderson’s desk.
“We’re talking about the entire ranch,” the young attorney reminded him. Ross was serious, his watery blue eyes steady behind thick lenses, his narrow features pulling together. He smoked a twisted black cigar.
The old-fashioned Western cheroot smelled foul and seemed completely out of place in this modern chrome-and-glass office building, Denver thought. He rubbed the scar on the back of his left hand. “I guess you didn’t hear me. I don’t want it. Sell the whole damned thing!”
“We can’t do that without your brother’s consent,” Ross said in that soothing lawyer tone that irritated the hell out of Denver.
“No one knows where Colton is. I haven’t heard from him in years.”
“Nonetheless, half the ranch is his—half yours. Split fifty-fifty. That’s the way your father wanted it, and your uncle saw fit to carry out his wishes.”
“I wish John had talked to me first,” Denver said flatly. If his uncle weren’t already dead, he gladly would have wrung the old meddler’s neck.
“Too late now,” Ross said succinctly.
Denver’s lips twisted at the irony. Though he’d been away from the McLean Ranch for seven years and had ignored his uncle’s repeated pleas to visit, the old man had gotten him in the end. “Okay,” he decided, flopping back in his chair. “Just sell my half.”