The Devil in the Saddle Page 4

  An hour later, Hallie emerged, feeling much better and suddenly ravenous. She pulled on a pair of yoga pants and a cashmere hoodie over a T-shirt, and piled her hair on top of her head in a loose bun.

  She went downstairs to the kitchen, where, much to her unmitigated vexation, she found her entire family assembled for Sunday lunch. The only person missing was Ella, Luca’s fiancée. Even Nick had come out of the woodwork and was at the kitchen island with Luca, munching on a sandwich and drinking a beer. Her grandmother and mother were seated in the upholstered chairs near the fireplace.

  “Wow,” Nick said as Hallie walked in. She tried to skirt past him, but he caught her in a bear hug. “You’re so pale.”

  “Shut up,” she said, but she was smiling when she pushed him away. She looked at Luca. “Where’s Ella?”

  “Work. Jesus, Hallie,” Luca said as he looked her up and down. “Are you, like, okay?”

  Hallie sighed heavenward. This family made having a personal crisis impossible. “I’m fine,” she said with a flick of her wrist. “This is all much ado about nothing. It so happens that I discovered, in the worst way, that the thing with tequila is you don’t know you’re getting drunk until you’re completely blotto.” She opened the fridge and examined the contents, hoping for a cheeseburger to magically appear. When none did, she pushed aside a head of lettuce and discovered a pie dish containing a half-eaten quiche. She pulled it out, grabbed a plate, and cut a piece of it to warm.

  “So, hey, while we’re all gathered, I have some news,” Luca said.

  Hallie stuck her dish in the microwave and prayed to the wedding gods that he would not reveal some new detail about his wedding next spring. We’re releasing biosustainable balloons!

  “Ella and I have successfully integrated some prairie chickens near the spring behind her house.” He followed his announcement with a proud smile, and looked from one family member to the next.

  “Some what?” Nick asked when Luca’s gaze settled on him.

  “Prairie chickens,” Luca said, still beaming. “They’re all but extinct, you know. But we’ve got a flock of them thriving at Blue Dove.”

  Blue Dove was the name Luca had given his conservation and ecological restoration project, named after some Indian petroglyphs they’d found on a cave wall near the spring. Luca had worked tirelessly to secure funding for the project, and last month, they’d started clearing invasive, nonnative plant species from the two thousand acres that would make up his natural-state paradise.

  “That is good news,” his mother said. “Now I know what to serve for Thanksgiving.”

  “You’re hilarious, Mom,” Luca said.

  “Speaking of Thanksgiving, it’s in a couple of weeks,” Hallie’s mother continued. “Chet and his family are coming,” she said, referring to her brother. “That means your cousins. Hallie, honey? Will you be able pull yourself together before I plan a big day?”

  The microwave dinged. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hallie asked.

  “Just that you’ve been moping around, and I’d like to know you won’t be mopey Thanksgiving Day while we have guests.”

  Hallie glared at her mother, uncertain if that beating in her chest was indignation or rage. Did her mother really think a light switch drove her grief?

  “I’m just asking,” her mother said.

  “Mother, I swear—”

  “Leave the poor girl alone, Delia,” her grandmother interrupted, and tossed aside her magazine. “Worry about my cemetery Christmas trees.”

  “Hallie,” Nick said. “You know what you should do? Get out of the house. See a movie, go shopping. But stop wandering around here with nothing to do but think.”

  Hallie yanked open the door of the microwave. “I’m so glad everyone feels free to tell me what I need to do. No one ever tells you what to do, Nick.”

  “I’m just saying,” Nick said. “Don’t you want to get out of the house?” he asked, and shot a meaningful look in the direction of their mother and grandmother.

  “Yes, she does,” her mother piped in. “Because if she doesn’t get out of the house, she can help me chop down some unauthorized Christmas trees.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Delia!” Hallie’s grandmother said with much exasperation. “If you don’t want them up there, I’ll help you move them.”

  “By ‘help,’ do you mean instruct me from your chair?”

  “Well, why would I change the way we’ve learned to coexist after all these years? But I’ll bring the wine coolers. Speaking of wine coolers,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going to Walmart.” Grandma walked out of the kitchen.

  Hallie was fuming. It only had been a little over a month since she had walked in on Chris’s ass riding high in the air. She was furious that her family thought they had the right to impose an arbitrary time limit on mourning the end of her engagement and the plan she’d made for the rest of her life. It was all “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” around here, and never “you deserve all the cake.” Not one of them seemed to realize that it wasn’t just the gross humiliation of it all, but that everything she’d thought she’d be doing from now to eternity had flittered away, too. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with herself. It wasn’t like she had a job. She’d never even really had a job. Not a real job, like a career.

  Hallie sliced off some quiche and slapped it onto a plate, then slid onto a barstool next to Nick. “Are you on my side?” she murmured.

  “Always,” he said. “But this is not the place to host the meltdowns, if you know what I’m saying.”

  She knew what he was saying, but where was she supposed to go? She’d sold her condo in Houston in anticipation of being married. She had no other place to go. She had nothing to fall back on. She had no real skills other than asking rich friends to donate money to worthy causes.

  “Wanna come see the wild chickens?” Luca asked, sliding his arm around her shoulders.

  “No,” Hallie said firmly.

  “I’ll bite,” Nick said. “Let’s go have a look.”

  “Fantastic,” Luca said, and looked like a kid who’d just gotten what he wanted for Christmas. He stood up, took his plate around to the sink. “You’re going to love this, Nick.”

  “Don’t oversell it,” Nick said with a grin, and slid his plate across to Luca as he stood. Hallie’s brothers walked out of the kitchen together and left Hallie alone with her mother.

  She didn’t dare look in her mother’s direction, because if she made eye contact, there’d be a conversation. She would rather gouge her eyes out than have another conversation. Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

  She looked.

  She couldn’t help herself—the silence was more than she could bear, and in a moment of weakness, Hallie shot her mother a sidelong glance.

  Her mother was clearly waiting for her moment to pounce and said immediately, “Did you think I’d disappear if you didn’t acknowledge me?”

  Hallie groaned. She could kick herself. “Mom? Can we please not do this again today?” she asked sincerely. “You’ve made it very clear how you feel.”

  Her mother rose gracefully from her chair and walked to the sink. She turned on the faucet and ran water over Nick and Luca’s plates. She turned the water off, braced her hands against the edge of the countertop, and leaned slightly forward, studying Hallie. “How I feel is that my daughter is disintegrating before my eyes. Two days ago, I found you in that chair eating half of a blueberry pie. The day before that, I finally convinced you to take off the sweats you’d worn for a week. I put them in the burn pile.”

  “What? I love those sweats!”

  “I’m particularly grateful you decided to bless us all with a bath after last night—”

  Hallie threw up a hand before her mother could say more. “Look, I know you care, I do, but I’ve been through a really ro
ugh patch, and it’s not like I want to be depressed, you know? I can’t help it. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “Oh, I understand better than you can know,” her mother said.

  Hallie laughed bitterly. “No, you don’t.”

  “You don’t think so? You know your father’s history.”

  “Mother,” Hallie said firmly, and put down her fork. She didn’t want to hear again about her father’s infidelity. Seeing Chris’s was bad enough. She didn’t want to be coaxed into hating her dad, too. “Please don’t review all the marital woes you had with Dad, okay? It’s hard enough to deal with him being gone, much less knowing every horrible thing he ever did. Anyway, Chris isn’t Dad.”

  Her mother winced, as if she found that remark painful. “Except that he is, Hallie, he’s exactly like your father was, and if there is anyone who understands, it’s me. That’s what I am trying to tell you. And I know that the best remedy for a shattered heart, the best revenge for a shattered heart, is to live well. Do you think Christopher is happy right now? I can promise you he’s not. I can promise you he is kicking himself.”

  Hallie snorted. He was probably fucking Dani right now, and probably all of Houston knew it. Hallie had discovered that Dani was a very vocal lover. She’d never heard such cries of ecstasy.

  “And you know what is going to make him even more unhappy? If he knows that you have moved on, and are living your best life. He would cut his wrists.”

  “Mom!”

  “But the problem is, you’re not living your best life. You’re letting that man eat away at you. You’ve taken up drinking—”

  “It was one night—”

  “And you’re crying to whoever will listen to your sad tale—”

  “I am not! I don’t see anyone, because I don’t dare go to town and face all the hideous expressions of pity!” Hallie shot back. “I am entitled to be depressed! I have earned this right. Has it occurred to you that maybe what is wrong with me is bigger than Chris? That maybe I am so depressed because everything I touch turns to shit?” She was very angry now, and shoved her plate across the kitchen bar and stood up, intending to storm from the room as she had done so often in the last few weeks, even though the storming never brought her any satisfaction. Nothing did.

  “You were engaged to a man who treated you horribly, and you’re in shock, honey. That’s all this is.”

  “Oh, really?” Hallie asked with a snideness she generally could not summon. Her mother drove her crazy, and had for thirty years—but Hallie loved her mother. It was just that in the last few weeks, her mother had become so unbearable, always looking in on her, always trying to offer some pithy bit of advice. “You know what’s really hard? To take advice from you, a woman who sits by her husband’s grave for hours on end. You’re not living so well, either, are you, Mom?”

  Her mother’s mouth twitched. She looked almost hurt by that remark, and Hallie almost apologized for it. “I’ll clean that up later,” she muttered, gesturing to her plate, and turned to walk out of the kitchen.

  “My God, you are determined to be miserable, aren’t you?” her mother said sharply. “You’ve always been so happy, Hallie. The happiest of all my children, finding joy in the world wherever you went!”

  “Nope. Not true!” Hallie shot back.

  “And now you look for misery!”

  She looked for misery? Was that true? Hallie had to pause to think about it—it seemed to her that misery was the one seeking her. When was the last time she’d felt truly happy?

  “I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean that,” her mother said quickly. “Look, if you won’t talk to me, will you at least find someone you can talk to?” her mother asked, her voice softer and plaintive.

  Hallie didn’t answer. She was never going to talk about it, not to her mother, not to anyone. She didn’t need to talk about it because she’d obsessed over it for weeks and she’d come to the conclusion that what had happened with Christopher Davenport was just another chapter in the story of her life. Every time she put her mind to something—ballet, college, marrying well, being a society wife, whatever—it never ended like she thought it would. It never worked out. She didn’t know what it was about her that turned everything into such an unmitigated disaster, but here she was, thirty years old, and she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, she was living at home, and she had no earthly idea what was supposed to come next. What direction she was supposed to go? Who was she supposed to be? How did she get out of this cycle of always falling back on her family or a man instead of making her own way? She had never lived truly on her own. There was the summer she’d gone to Dallas and interned at a charitable foundation. But she’d stayed with her cousin in the Preston Hollow neighborhood, which had included maid service and a family chef, and the work at the foundation had been hard with very little thanks, and in the end, the foundation couldn’t afford to keep her on full-time. So she’d come home. Again.

  Hallie went back to her room, closed the door behind her, and looked around.

  It did smell in there.

  Hallie pushed Rafe’s gloves and the book aside, and lay down on her bed. This is ridiculous. Get a grip.

  But grip what, exactly?

  Hallie picked up her phone. She did feel a little like talking to someone. Not to family—they were too close to her, and wanted too desperately for her to get over her hurt. She called Charlotte. Charlotte was the office manager at the Saddlebush Land and Cattle Company, the primary Prince holding. Hallie and Charlotte were friends. But the call to Charlotte rolled to voice mail.

  Hallie put the phone down and shifted, and when she did, her fingers brushed against Rafe’s gloves.

  Rafe. Now there was a good listener. He’d listened to her whine about any number of things through the years.

  She sat up and found her shoes. When she had them on, she picked up his gloves and the book and went outside. There was a slight chill in the air, and in the north, she could see the gray hue on the horizon, the slow creep of clouds toward the ranch.

  She started walking. Past the brick patio strung with small white lights, edged by a bar on one end, a dining area on the other. Past the zero-edge pool, and the rose garden and the maze her father installed when she was seven. Past the garage, the paddock, the stables.

  She went out an iron gate and into a pasture, walked a quarter of a mile, and skirted around the hangar and the edge of the airstrip Nick used for his plane. She took that path down to the river, then up again, walking through cactus and cedar and wild lantana.

  She knew this path so well she could traverse it blindfolded.

  Roughly a mile from her house, she ended up in front of the Fontana house.

  How long had it been since she was here? A very long time. Years, maybe. She couldn’t remember any longer why she and Nick and Luca had stopped walking down here on summer days. Probably had to do with being teenagers with friends and interests that took them away from the ranch. Or the fact that Mrs. Fontana was sick a lot of the time.

  She owed Rafe a big thank-you for saving her last night. Who knew? Maybe the two of them could hang out. They hadn’t done that in a while, not since she’d been engaged to the lagoon creature from Houston.

  Maybe they could talk about books. Or life. Maybe both. She needed to get out of her own head for at least a little while.

  She walked up to the door and knocked. The moment she did, her pulse ratcheted up, and she began to second-guess what the hell she was doing. Why would Rafe want to hang out with her? Like he needed her woebegone life messing with his.

  The door suddenly swung open, and two little girls with big brown eyes stared up at her. A woman with short, dark curly hair stood behind them. She was pretty and a few years younger than Hallie.

  Hallie suddenly smiled. “Hola, Angie,” she said with a salute. “I haven’t seen you in ages! How are you?”<
br />
  Angie, Rafe’s little sister, stared at Hallie as if she couldn’t quite place her.

  “Oh. Don’t you remember me? I’m—”

  “Hallie?” Angie said with great surprise. She stepped halfway out the door and looked down the drive, as if she thought more people were coming. “Is something wrong?”

  “No! I just . . . it’s just me. I was hoping to catch Rafe at home. Is he here?”

  Before Angie could answer, Mrs. Fontana crowded into the open door. “Hallie!” she said, smiling, and spread her arms wide. She was thinner than the last time Hallie had seen her, and her skin had a sallow tint to it. Her hair was much grayer, too. “Come in, come in! Girls, move out of the way and let Miss Hallie inside.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” Hallie said, and stepped into Mrs. Fontana’s thin embrace. But she gave Hallie a surprisingly tight squeeze. “Is Rafe here?” she asked when Mrs. Fontana let her go.

  “Yes, he’s here,” Mrs. Fontana said, and put her arm around Hallie’s shoulders, pulling her inside. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Hallie. It’s so good to see you. Come in.”

  Chapter Four

  The afternoon had started off like so many other Sunday afternoons at the Fontana residence. Rafe’s dad was watching football. His mother was making a stew for dinner. Angie had brought her three young children, all under the age of six—Isabella, Abigail, and the toddler, Silas.

  Rafe, who had been studying, was on the floor with the kids, wrestling a wildly laughing Silas, and taking turns lifting the girls up on his feet. He loved the kids, and when he was around them, their pure view of the world made him want his own kids in a way that sank talons into his core.