From the back cover:
Native New Yorker Royce Arrendondo wearies of life on a Texas ranch and leaves. When her husband Paul sets out to look for her a month later, he comes to a dead end in Fort Worth—until meeting reclusive billionaire Fletcher Streiker:

"Paul, let me tell you a great truth: everybody gets what they truly want—not what they think they want, but what they genuinely desire in the depths of their heart. Ultimately, this is what they receive."

The question is, can Paul believe it enough to find Royce? Or is he too afraid to discover what he really wants?


CHAPTER ONE

Finally alone, Paul sat, elbows on his knees, hands clasped, in the elegant front room of the Grayson Homestead. He halfheartedly listened as the surviving homeowner, Jeannine, ushered out the last of the mourners: "Thank you. I do thank you so for coming. . . . No, really, I'm quite all right. Yes, I was sorry that we couldn't get hold of Buddy. I understand that he and his wife are somewhere in the Caribbean right now, but he loved his father and he'll come as soon as he gets the message."

There were some faint protestations, and Paul detected a trace of weary desperation as she insisted, "No, please, there's not a thing more you can do. Yes, I certainly will call. Thank you again. Have a good flight back."

He heard the front door close, then a moment later Jeannine dragged herself in and plopped onto the hard formal sofa beside him. He turned to eye her in companionable suffering. "I thought you might have to dynamite them out," he observed.

She expelled a tired laugh before insisting, "The Brodericks are good people. They just can't stand to miss out on any drama." Then she daubed at her eyes again, looking suddenly older than her 54 years. "Well." She straightened, smoothing her short frosted bob, then smiled gamely and rested a hand on Paul's clenched hands. "Thank you."

"Don't start on me; I live here," he retorted.

She laughed. "Paul, I mean it. I don't know what I would have done without you."

He groaned, falling back on the stiff cushion. He was thirty-six, tan and lean, with unremarkable features and dark brown hair that tended to hang in his eyes. "Lot of good I did Walt."

She bit her lip, still resting a hand on his. "If you hadn't seen it happen, we wouldn't have found him for a day or two."

Head back, he removed his hand from under hers to cover his stinging eyes. "I should've insisted we wait on treating the foot rot. He had no business out there with the herd in this heat." August in Texas was guaranteed to be broiling.

"Don't you start. You know good and well that he was doing exactly what he wanted to. Dr. Cargyle said he could've had that heart attack just as well sitting in front of the TV," she said.

"Yeah," Paul exhaled, uncovering his eyes to stare off into space.

A few minutes of silence followed—something rarely heard over the past three days. A young maid appeared at the entry: "Mrs. Ferring? I, um, finished the upstairs baths and the kitchen--"

"You can go, Shana. I know how much I've worked you this week," Jeannine said.

"Thank you, ma'am. Mr. Arrendondo," she nodded.

"Shana," he acknowledged, and she left.

He continued to lean his head back against the sofa, staring up at the ornate tiles on the thirty-foot-high ceiling. "Joe Salinas wants to buy the herd. He was going to try to make it out today to look them over."

She blinked. "I don't suppose you could handle them yourself, if we hired help . . . ?"

"No, Jeannine," he said. "I can't do what Walt did. I don't know how he did it for so long."

"And Buddy wouldn't want to," she murmured. That short sentence covered a wide disappointment, in that her son had always worked the ranch unwillingly with his father; when Paul came, Buddy took that for liberation and left. Guilt induced him back for a few months each year—until his marriage last summer.

Jeannine straightened in resolve. "Well, then, I'm sure Joe will give us a fair price for them."

Paul stirred uneasily at her use of the plural pronoun. The fact that he was still good friends with Buddy, and had worked for Walt for six years now, gave him no formal standing in this family. Nor did he wish to--formalize anything here.

A long silence followed as he struggled with what to say. Finally, he murmured, "I'll stay long enough to see that the herd is transferred to Joe."

She quickly looked at him. "Paul, you can't leave." He closed his eyes in reluctance. "When Royce comes back--"

He interrupted: "She isn't coming back. It's been almost a month and she hasn't come back, Jeannine. That's what women do: they walk out on me." His first wife, Kris, had left him for another man. He and Royce had been married for a little over a year when she left in mid-July.

"It's not anything you did, Paul," she argued. "Royce just—needed to get back to the city for a little while."

"A four-week vacation," he snorted. "Besides, at this point, what makes you think I'd take her back? She hasn't called; she won't pick up when I call."

Jeannine looked down. "What if she can't?" she asked quietly. "You don't know what has happened." He grunted skeptically, but it was with a newly troubled air that he looked through the large window to the rolling grassland.

To his relief, he did not have long to ponder the question. Jesse, the Ferrings' hired hand, stepped into the doorway to tell them that Joe Salinas had arrived. Paul, still in his suit, went out to meet him with outstretched hand: "Joe! Glad you could make it."

"Paul." Brown, habitually smiling Joe gripped his hand. "Sorry I wasn't here for the funeral, Jeannine," he said to her at Paul's back.

"That's all right, Joe; we wouldn't have had a chance to talk at all till now. Well. You want to have a look at them?" She gestured to the barbed wire fence, behind which a few Red Angus could be seen.

"Sure," Joe allowed, and the three of them headed toward the fence while the visible cows watched suspiciously. "The gate's where?" Joe asked, as two of his employees fell in behind them.

"There." Paul pointed to their right. "It's unlatched."

Extracting a pen, pad, and calculator from his shirt pocket, Joe nodded to his employees. They went to the gate to enter the pasture and examine a few of the herd. "Okay, then. How many head you got here?" Joe flipped open his pad.

Jeannine looked questioningly at Paul. "One hundred twelve," he replied.

"Oh. Lot less than when I was here last," Joe murmured.

"Yeah," Paul said despondently.

So Joe went on to ask how many there were specifically of bulls, cows, yearlings, and calves, which Paul answered off the top of his head. "Um hmm. Um hmm." Joe noted the figures on his pad. A few moments later, his employees returned from a cursory inspection of the herd, and one whispered in Joe's ear. "You don't say," Joe muttered, and Jeannine and Paul glanced at each other.

Whereupon Joe opened his calculator, entered a few figures, and said, "Well, then. Given their condition, and what all, I'm prepared to offer you sixty-eight thousand for the lot."

Jeannine looked to Paul for his reaction. "Is that a good price, Paul?"

He cleared his throat, glancing away. "Yeah, Jeannine. It's—probably the best you're gonna do, under the circumstances."

"Then it's a deal, Joe," she said.

Whereupon he pulled out a worn leather checkbook from his back jeans pocket and wrote out a check for that amount on the spot. He carefully tore it at the perforations, leaving a smudge on it as he handed it to her. "There you go, Jeannine. Now, you don't worry about a thing from here on out—we'll get them ready to transport and get the trucks out here."

"Fine, Joe," she murmured, holding the check.

He shook Paul's hand again, then went to his truck, extracting his phone from his pocket. As Paul turned back toward the house, he loosened his tie. "I'm . . . going to change." Jeannine nodded, accompanying him as far as the front foyer. From there, she went back to her office and he went up the stairs to his room on the second floor.

He shut the door and shucked his coat off onto the bed, then stood looking out the window with glassy eyes. San Angelo was just a few miles away, but from this window not even the highway was visible. Paul remembered when, at Buddy and Renetta's wedding last June, Royce had gotten it into her head that he wasn't going to marry her after he'd already proposed, so she accepted a ride from a con artist who told her he was taking her to San Angelo. Of course, he didn't; he took her to Big Bend, and Joe Salinas had to bring her back. But since Paul had gone after her, and was gone when she got here, she bolted again.

"She's so gullible!" Paul muttered, exasperated. "She's always getting spooked and running! If she'd just settle down--" It occurred to him to wonder what he had done to spook her into leaving for a month.

Heaving a sigh, he opened his cell phone and looked at the number display. Once again, he entered her number and put the phone to his ear. It had been several weeks since he last attempted to call. But this time, after the ring, he heard, "The number you have reached is temporarily out of service. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

Disquieted, Paul closed the phone. Had she changed her number? Lost the phone? Not paid her bill?

He fell back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Again, he was at a familiar impasse: he knew he needed to pray, but he just couldn't bring himself to do it. As long as he felt that God was jerking him around, he couldn't swallow his pride enough to come crawling back begging for help. Was that it? Yep, that's pretty much why, Paul thought. He couldn't shake the feeling that God was playing with him out of spite. Paul knew, theoretically, that it wasn't so, and he knew the warped impressions left on him from a stern theological upbringing that said: God does what He wants whether it makes any sense to you, you pitiful lump of clay, and you have nothing to say about it either way. But knowing that his premises might be faulty did not empower him to change them.

There was a knock on his door; Paul sat up. "Yeah?"

Jeannine leaned her head in. "There's a lot of ham and dressing left over. I'm going to freeze most of it, but I thought you might want some before I do."

"Sure," Paul nodded. What he heard her saying was, "There's no one else here and I don't want to eat alone." For which he really couldn't blame her. He just wished she had allowed a few of the many friends and relatives to stay so that he wouldn't have to fill the role of chief comforter. "Let me finish changing and I'll be right down."

"All right, then." She closed the door.

Paul got off the bed and whipped out his phone again, taking it to the attached bath. He selected Buddy's number from the list and put the phone to his ear. When Buddy's voice mail came on—again—Paul hissed, "Listen, a—hole, your mom needs you and I want you to get your butt out here yesterday!" He flipped the phone closed and threw it back onto the bed, then he sat on the closed toilet to take off his dress shoes.

After changing into jeans and t-shirt, Paul went downstairs to the spacious tiled kitchen with a bay window set in the breakfast nook. Jeannine glanced up from packing food into freezer containers. "I told as many people as I could collar not to bring anything, so I'm not sure how I wound up with all this." She gestured at a half-dozen casseroles ranging from hardly touched to mostly consumed.

"They all thought they were going to stay and eat what they brought," Paul said. He reached under the sink for the topmost paper plate on a stack.

"Oh, Paul, use a real plate," Jeannine chided.

"That I'll have to wash?" he said scornfully, spooning out dressing and sweet potatoes onto the paper plate.

She pushed the ham platter toward him, and he picked up a slice with his fingers to drop onto his plate. "Utensils are in the drawer to your left," she said archly.

"I know, Mom," he sighed.

"I'm too young to be your mother, remember?" she smiled, reciting his usual compliment.

"That you are," he agreed with the unsettling sensation of being tested.

He took his plate and the appropriate utensils to the glass-topped rattan table in the bay window, and sat. Jeannine opened the refrigerator. "I suppose you want one of your nasty beers."

He glanced up. "Sure. Thanks."

She brought it over to the table. "Do you want a glass?"

He eyed her. "Jeannine--"

"Teasing," she said, and he rolled his eyes.

She brought her plate (ceramic) and glass of iced tea to sit at the table with him. "Roger's still out of town," she noted as if continuing a conversation. Roger was the Ferring family lawyer. "So we won't see the will until he gets back. But I know Walt remembered you, Paul."

"I don't care, Jeannine," he muttered.

For a few minutes they ate in silence, then the telephone rang. Paul glanced up, taking a swig from the can, as she rose from the table to answer the kitchen extension. "Hello? Yes. Um, hold on, please." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "It's Susan."

He looked blank. Susan? he mouthed.

"Buddy's sister-in-law," she whispered. He still looked blank. "Renetta's sister," she clarified.

Whereupon he recoiled, taking up his plate as if to flee. Jeannine replaced the receiver at her ear. "I'm sorry; he can't come to the phone right now. May I take a message? . . . All right, I will. Goodbye."

Jeannine reseated herself, so Paul did too, warily. "She just wanted to say hi and see how you're doing," she related.

Paul's face contorted in a mixture of incomprehension and revulsion. "I haven't seen her since Buddy and Renetta's wedding. Why would she--" His face cleared. "Renetta told her that Royce left me."

The phone rang again, and he got up from the table to stand in the doorway, prepared to run. Exhaling, Jeannine rose to answer it again: "Hello. Oh, Buddy! Finally! Where have you been?"

Listening, she brought the cordless handset to sit back down at the table, as did Paul. "Buddy, he had a heart attack three days ago. He and Paul were out in the upper pasture, and he just went down, Paul said. He—Paul—called nine-one-one and put him in the truck, but there was nothing anyone could do for him. Dr. Cargyle said he must have died instantly."

She took a bite of dressing as she listened, then brought the napkin up to her mouth. "I see. Yes, I understand what happens when you get in those dead spots. I'm sorry we couldn't hold the funeral any longer—yes, it was today. Um, yes, Buddy, I wish you'd come as soon as possible. Paul is leaving, and we need to discuss what to do about the ranch. Right. Love you too, honey. Bye." She clicked the phone off and set it down to continue eating.

Paul briefly struggled with curiosity before succumbing. "He couldn't call back because he was in a dead spot for three days?"

"He says he didn't get any messages before today. You never can tell, with international roaming," she insisted.

"Suppose so," he conceded. "When will he get here?"

"Tonight. They're on their way," she said.

They continued to eat. Gradually, it began to dawn on Paul that something was amiss. Jeannine loved her husband, but she was acting like no new widow that Paul ever knew. He shrugged, mentally, then thought he'd better address it—at least find out why she was so cheerful, so to speak. "Um, Jeannine? I . . . I've got my hankie ready for the waterworks."

She eyed him, then smiled. "You're wondering why I'm not crying on your shoulder? I'm one of those people who grieve in private, Paul. I won't even cry in front of Buddy—I suppose it's a holdover from that 'strong pioneer spirit.' Besides which, if he had to die, it was the best way he could go. Quick and painless, doing what he loved."

"I'd agree with that," he nodded.

"Mostly, though, I don't think it's really hit me yet," she murmured. "I keep expecting him to appear at the back door, booming, 'Oh, hell! Take off the boots!'"

Paul ducked his head at the tears that suddenly spilled from his eyes. "Oh, Paul!" Jeannine whispered, and he waved it off, shame-faced. Walt's death had suddenly hit him like a wrecking ball. Having built his life around Walt, Paul was now left sitting on a pile of rubble. Even had he felt competent to continue to run the ranch as Walt had, his staying on in that capacity would provoke more gossip than he could deal with—only days ago he had overheard Shana on the phone speculating that Mrs. Arrendondo had left because Mr. Arrendondo was getting too cozy with Mrs. Ferring, which was ridiculous. But the worst of it was, Jeannine's comment had triggered the realization that he, also, was expecting Walt to come stomping through the back door . . . and Royce through the front door, tossing her purse on the kitchen counter as she always did. The finality of Walt's passing seemed to close the door on Royce's coming back, as well.

"I miss the old fart, too," Paul said to cover himself. He concentrated on finishing a plate of honey-baked ham that now tasted like straw.

Following the early dinner, he went to the den in the back of the house and turned on the TV. He wasn't looking for any particular show, but he had to do something to fill the quiet until Buddy arrived. Jeannine did not follow him back to the den, so he spread out on the couch to watch the baseball game between the Diamondbacks and the Astros, just getting underway.

Midway through the game, he thought he heard the front door open, so he raised the remote to mute the television. A moment later he faintly heard Jeannine talking to someone. Paul didn't bother to get up. A minute later, Buddy and Renetta came back to the den and sat down. "Hey," Buddy greeted him, and Paul nodded, eyes on the TV.

"I, uh, got my phone messages all at once when we got to Santo Domingo." Buddy, 32, had close-cropped, curly hair and a jawline that looked especially chiseled when he was tense, as now. His wife Renetta, a year younger, sat on the couch across from Paul and fixed him with large gray eyes. Her black hair had been professionally straightened and trimmed to fall just above her shoulders.

"Yeah," Paul muttered, aware that Jeannine had come to stand in the doorway. Buddy added, "What's up with the herd?"

Paul clicked off the television. "C'mon out and I'll show you." He could have related the situation without taking Buddy outside, but he wanted to get out of the women's hearing—well, specifically, Renetta's. He didn't dislike her, and he certainly didn't hold any grudges from her accidentally shooting him in the gut, but—he did kind of resent the way she had so thoroughly taken Buddy out of his life. Paul hardly ever saw him anymore.

So they two went out through the back door and crossed fifty feet of lawn to the gate of the pasture. A path had been worn by Walt years ago coming back and forth from the house to the pasture this way.

Reaching the gate, Paul leaned on it, looking over the shadowy heads of cattle in the evening darkness. "Okay, well, they're off their feed, and foot rot's going around. Joe offered Jeannine sixty-eight thou for the lot, and I recommended she accept it. She did. He's trucking them out probably tomorrow."

"Sixty-eight--!" Buddy sputtered. "For a hundred thirty head?"

Paul glanced at him. "There's only a hundred twelve now, Buddy. Walt just couldn't keep up with them like he used to, and he won't hire help. He doesn't—didn't—trust anybody but me and Jesse."

"Why wouldn't you stay on, Paul?" Buddy asked, with a glance back to the house. His mother's silhouetted figure could be seen in a window.

Paul sagged on the gate. "I couldn't, not with Royce gone."

"What--" Buddy shifted to lower his voice. "What happened with her? She just left without a word?"

"Kinda," Paul muttered. "We had another fight. She just . . . couldn't get used to down time on a ranch. Jeannine . . . must have noticed that something was wrong with Walt. He wouldn't go in for a checkup, or anything, of course, so she slowed down her work schedule quite a bit to be home more, until it seemed like she wasn't going anywhere. She stopped lecturing, and stepped down as chair of the symphony fund-raiser. Royce was supposed to be her assistant, you know, and so all of a sudden she didn't have anything to do, and the last straw was when I suggested she get a job at a dress shop in San Angelo. She hit the roof-- 'I'm going back to the city!' and she hitched a ride with Patricia into town. Who knows where she went from there--nobody's seen her in San Angelo. So, I call her cell about three days later, and she wouldn't pick up. Last time I tried to call, her number was out of service," Paul shrugged.

Buddy was silent for a while. "That doesn't sound like Royce. Something must have happened to her. Have you called the police?"

Paul blew a scornful raspberry: "She's twenty-six, which is an adult anywhere. I call the police, they're most likely to start investigating me for murder."

"Well—have you gotten any of her mail?" Buddy asked.

"No, nothing," Paul said.

"No credit-card statements that might tell you where she's spending money?" Buddy pressed.

"No. I know she had at least one card, but. . . ."

"Does she have any of your cards?" Buddy asked.

"I gave her one a long time ago, which she used exactly once. And I just checked my statement online day before yesterday—there are no charges that aren't mine," Paul said.

"Something's wrong, Paul," Buddy insisted. "Have you tried calling her parents?"

Paul rounded on him. "Were you there when her mother shredded me at our first meeting? After thirty minutes of pounding me into mincemeat, she turned around and left again."

"So? Why are you just rolling over and playing dead?" Buddy asked.

"That—that relationship is so yesterday, guy," Paul sneered, imitating Renetta's New York friends. "I can accept it when something's over."

"You owe it to her to at least find out if she's okay!" Buddy said sharply.

That hit home, and Paul lifted a hand from the gate in resignation. "I don't know where to start. New York City's a big place."

"Her parents still live there, don't they?" Buddy asked. "Start there."

"They're not going to talk to me," Paul said adamantly.

"Then maybe they'll talk to Ren. She and Royce are friends; they used to work at the same company. Do you have their number?"

"Why would I--" Paul broke off, suddenly extracting his phone. He murmured, "You know, she did use my phone for a while when hers was on the fritz, and she might have put her dad's number—yeah, there it is: 'Daddy.' She put her dad's number in my address book. Lowell Lindel."

"He'd talk to you, wouldn't he?" Buddy asked.

"For all I know, it's their home phone number, and if I call, Sue Anne is guaranteed to answer."

"Then we'll get Ren to call." Buddy turned back toward the house, and Paul followed.

They reentered the den, where Renetta and Jeannine looked up from the couch. "'Scuse me, Mom, we need to borrow Ren," Buddy said. Jeannine nodded, and Renetta rose to go with the men into the study. Buddy closed the door and turned to his wife. "Honey, we need a favor. Would you call this number—?"

"—on your phone, so my name won't show up," Paul interrupted.

"Yeah," Buddy said, gesturing to her purse. "It's Royce's dad. Would you call and ask him where she is?"

Paul objected, "Actually, it'd probably go over better if you just ask to talk to her."

"Yeah," Buddy agreed. Throughout this interchange, Renetta was glancing back and forth between them.

"Of course," she said. She set her purse on a nearby desk and took out her phone. Paul held his up so that she could see the number for "Daddy." This she dialed, and put the phone to her ear.

Shortly, she straightened. "Hello, this is Renetta Cleary Ferring. I worked with Royce at The Chocolate Conglomerate, and I was trying to get in touch with her. Is she there, please?"


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© 2007 Robin Hardy

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