Undeniable Read online

  UNDENIABLE

  UNDENIABLE

  ALISON KENT

  HEAT | NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2012 by Alison Kent.

  Excerpt from Unbreakable copyright © 2012 by Alison Kent.

  Cover photograph by Claudio Marinesco.

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender.

  Text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  HEAT and the HEAT design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Heat trade paperback edition / October 2012

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kent, Alison.

  Undeniable / Alison Kent.—Heat trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61181-4

  1. Ranching—Texas—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. 3. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.E5155U53 2012

  813’.54—dc23

  2011051848

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  To Walt.

  I love you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Let me use this space for a few thank-yous.

  To my agent, Laura Bradford, for believing in the Dalton Gang. To my editor, Wendy McCurdy, for loving Arwen and Dax. To fellow authors and good, good friends HelenKay Dimon and Loreth Anne White for the daily sanity checks, and to Anne Calhoun for saying the most beautiful words ever after reaching the end of the book. To May Khaw for reading early pages and asking for more. To my husband, Walt, for being willing to eat soup for dinner, and to my daughter, Megan, for loving a clean house.

  I have taken some liberties with the timing of activities on a cow-calf operation in this part of the country, but only because doing so best served the story.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Unbreakable

  About the Author

  ONE

  “DID YOU HEAR who’s back in town?”

  “Which who? Dax, Boone, or Casper?”

  “Dax is the only one I care about.”

  “Good, because I’ve got my eye on the other two.”

  “Boone first? Casper second?”

  “I’m thinking both. Maybe at the same time.”

  An unapologetic eavesdropper, Arwen Poole rolled her eyes at the bawdy speculation of her all-female crew. She’d heard the rumors, too. Everyone in Crow Hill had. The town was small, a south central Texas ranching community with a gossip mill strong enough to power the whole of the county’s windmills.

  The Dalton Gang—Dax Campbell, Boone Mitchell, and Casper Jayne—had come home to claim the ranch left to them by Tess and Dave Dalton, the elderly couple who’d died within weeks of each other after a marriage that lasted a lifetime.

  The three boys had spent summers, holidays, and weekends working the ranch, grudgingly at first, none loving the order to do so handed down by his parents to Boone, and to Casper and Dax by association. The Mitchells attended Crow Hill Baptist Church with the Daltons and knew the retired couple needed the help. Knew, too, their son and his friends needed the structure.

  Where Boone went, Dax and Casper followed, and it wasn’t long before the Daltons came to depend on the three to keep the place solvent. They also came to trust them when few others in Crow Hill did.

  Because while the Dalton Gang gave their employers their best, they gave the rest of the population their fast-driving, hard-drinking worst, going through the daughters of the locals like fire through drought-ravaged grasslands.

  Arwen had gone to school with the hell-raising trio, but as an observer, a fly on the wall. She hadn’t run in their circles. She hadn’t run in any circles at all—though she had spent more time than the three boys combined in what had been Crow Hill’s only bar in the day. Of course she’d been sober, so they had her there.

  The problem with Arwen’s employees staking their claims to the three men now was availability. Dax wasn’t, and wouldn’t be until Arwen had her way with him. He knew nothing of her plans, but they’d been brewing since she’d first gotten wind of his return.

  He’d been the only member of the Dalton Gang she’d had a crush on, and he’d looked right through her. He hadn’t been alone in that, but she would always wonder about what might’ve been. She knew herself, so she knew she had to get him out of her system. One more piece of her past tossed out for good.

  With the news of his return spreading, however, it looked like she was going to have to put her plan into motion sooner than she’d thought.

  And stepping into the kitchen of her Hellcat Saloon, the lunch hour in full swing—grease popping on the grill, metal tongs clattering against big white platters, ice cream whirring in the milkshake machine—she found a way to make it happen.

  “Amy, is the order for Lasko’s ready to go?”

  Wisps of black hair escaping her hairnet, Amy peered into the brown paper bag printed with the saloon’s clawing cat logo and counted the burgers inside. “Yep. A half dozen baskets, and all stil
l hot enough to burn the tar off the roof. Give me ten seconds to lose the cafeteria lunch lady look and I’ll hit the road.”

  “The road, and the Dalton Gang while you’re at it?” This from Stacy, the afternoon bartender. She swung a bag of pretzels at Amy’s head on her way from the supply room through the kitchen. “One of the three is usually there at lunch.”

  “No need,” Arwen said, crossing her fingers Dax would be the one at the feed store today. From the pegboard beside the kitchen door, she snagged the keys to the saloon’s delivery truck. “I’ll make the run.”

  The activity in the bustling kitchen slammed to a stop. Amy froze, her hairnet in one hand. Black curls tumbled to her shoulders, the only part of her that moved.

  Callie, one of the saloon’s Kittens, famous for their bar-top dance routines, two-stepped to the side to avoid Amy and keep from dropping a crate of clean beer mugs. They rattled loudly, a gunshot in the quiet of the room that smelled of grilled onions and beef.

  Luck Summerlin, the fourth member of Arwen’s waitstaff on lunch duty, finally spoke. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”

  The company pickup was a big, bad, four-on-the-floor extended cab dualie. Since Arwen’s cottage sat on the block behind the saloon, she walked back and forth to work, and since she spent most afternoons in her office, and most evenings hustling to make nice with the customers bellied up to the bar, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been behind the wheel. It was very possible Luck had never seen her drive.

  But, yeah. She knew exactly what to do. She palmed the keys in one hand, hefted up the lunch delivery in her other arm. Then she headed out of the kitchen with a wink, saying, “It’s a stiff rod with a knob on top. I think I can handle it.”

  WHATEVER ELSE MIGHT have changed in Crow Hill during his absence, Dax Campbell knew he could count on Lasko Ranch Supply for more than his need for feed. Landowners, ranch hands, old-timers, and those aiming to fuel the gossip mill gathered in the parking lot before breakfast to shoot the shit of the day, or at lunch to share the food that flowed as freely as the news.

  Like all communities of folks making their living off the land, Crow Hill knew about getting the word out. Trucks passed on a country road and occupants traded the latest. A driver dropping hay bales at one ranch carried stories from the last. Drifters looking for work brought with them the grim truth of what they’d learned at the place they’d tried before.

  Dax wasn’t after the grim truth or stories or the latest. His reason for hanging out at the feed store was all about getting laid. It had been way too long since he’d taken the time, even had the time for that particular pleasure. And being out of touch all these years meant scoping out the lay of the land.

  Word of the inheritance he’d be sharing with Boone Mitchell and Casper Jayne had reached him in a bar outside of Bozeman. He’d been drunk, he’d been cold, and for the first time in years, he’d been homesick. Not for the place he hadn’t seen since the summer after high school, but for his boys.

  Learning of the passing of Tess and Dave Dalton on top of that ache had almost done him in. He’d loved the Daltons, considered them family. They’d been there when his mother had taken up the causes of less privileged children instead of seeing to her own. They’d encouraged him to live his life his way when his father insisted he follow the path of all Campbell men.

  Dax had wanted to cowboy—not go to college, and definitely not to law school to add Esquire to the end of his name. Tess got that. Dave got that. Casper and Boone got it, too. They’d sent him packing with promises to keep in touch. He hadn’t, and had nothing but his vagabond life to blame.

  But that night in Montana, finding out he’d lost the Daltons had him missing his boys with an unimaginable hurt. Every good memory of his teenage years was connected to Boone and Casper. The summers they’d spent working the Dalton ranch were the best times of his life.

  In fact, outside of honoring the Daltons’ wish that he help keep the place they’d poured their hearts and souls into from being sucked up by Crow Hill’s First National Bank, the only thing that would’ve brought him back to Texas was raising some Dalton Gang hell. But he needed a woman—or two or three—to do it up right.

  “Campbell! Was wondering if you were planning on showing your beat-up old face around here. Not that I couldn’t have gone the rest of my life without seeing it.”

  Dax let the screen door slam behind him before he turned toward Bubba Taylor, who was just as gap-toothed and curly headed as he’d been in high school, though now carrying a gut that appeared over the years to have never met a beer it didn’t like. “Now, Bubs. I don’t think my face is any more beat-up than your wife’s.”

  A chorus of sharp snickers and a couple of guffaws punctuated Dax’s words. Bubba, proud of getting in the first shot, seemed at a loss for another, which pretty much reflected the IQ Dax remembered him displaying most of the time.

  Josh Lasko, another classmate who, word had it, had taken over running the store from his dad, made his way out from the register, his boots clomping on the worn plank floor. He offered Dax his hand for a hearty shake. “Good to see you, Dax. Damn good, but c’mon. Cut Bubba some slack. It’s a wonder he’s got a wife at all when you look at the face God gave him.”

  Dax pretended to consider the ugly mug of the man in question, asking Josh, “You sure it was God?”

  That loosened Bubba’s tongue. “Hey now. What’s with all the ganging up on Bubba here?” Hands out, he looked to his posse for help. Getting nothing but murmurs and shrugs, he dug for a comeback, snickering. “I ain’t the one who screwed myself out of a hilltop mansion and into a ranch so rundown it ain’t worth a salt lick.”

  Dax had done plenty of screwing, true, and the fallout hadn’t done a damn thing to help his situation at home. But neither his history with women nor that with his folks had squat to do with his partnership in the Dalton place. “That’s the difference between you and me, Bubs. I know the value of a salt lick. You want to insult my property, you’ll have to do better than that.”

  “It wasn’t your property I was aiming for,” Bubba tossed back, turning to his cronies with a smirk at having gotten in the last laugh.

  Dax let him have it. The hours he was working these days, catching up with friends he might want to see already took time he didn’t have. Wasting it on the likes of Bubba Taylor wasn’t a luxury he cared to indulge in.

  “Gentlemen.” He nudged his hat brim up a notch, gave Bubba his back, and walked to the register with Josh. “Wondered how long the woodwork could hold them back.”

  Josh gave a single shake of his head. “Might’ve been a bit longer if you’d picked up any manners out wherever the hell you’ve been.”

  It had been five years since he’d last counted the places he’d worked. Before that… He didn’t even want to think about the miles he’d driven, the horses he’d rode to ground, the cattle he’d herded. “I’ve been everywhere, man. I’ve been everywhere.”

  The corner of Josh’s smile dimpled. “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”

  Dax shrugged. He was who he was. “I left in a hurry. Didn’t have time to head back to the hilltop mansion for etiquette lessons.”

  The other man leaned forward on both elbows, his head low as he spoke for Dax’s ears alone. “Bubba and his bunch? You gotta expect some of that, leaving like you did, then coming back to take over a property a lot of folks could’ve been putting to good use. Rain’s been in short supply. Makes grass hard to come by. Too many animals being sold at a loss because of it.”

  Nothing Dax didn’t know or hadn’t seen employers face over the years. Ranching ran in the blood of a lot of families, but that didn’t keep hearts from breaking when troubles bit deep. “I came back for Tess and Dave. And for my boys. Not because I had some grand dream of ranching in Crow Hill.”

  “And not because of your family?”

  He’d been back a week, Boone and Casper a couple weeks longer. He hadn’t seen his
folks or his sister yet; he hadn’t seen much of anything but the back end of cows and the bottom of bank accounts, but the inevitable was on its way. “Found an attorney in Dallas to take care of my third of the partnership papers. His legal advice didn’t cost me an arm and a leg and a soul.”

  “I hear that,” Josh said, giving Dax cause to wonder if his old man billed clients a price similar to what he’d demanded from his only son.

  But Josh didn’t give him time to ask. “So what brings you to town today? That lawyer of yours get you up to speed on your payables? ’Cuz I was thinking of taking a ’round-the-world cruise, and if you pony up, I can do it.”

  At least Josh’s reminder of the state of Tess and Dave’s affairs didn’t grate in the way of so many others. Josh’s grandfather had wrangled cattle on the King Ranch with Dave Dalton, years before the two made their way to south central Texas. That had Josh counting the Daltons as family, too, the Dalton Gang an extension.

  But it didn’t mean Dax and the boys weren’t still on the hook for the debt. They did, however, have a secret weapon in Boone’s sister, a loan officer at the First National Bank. “With the budget Faith’s got us on, you should be able to afford the drive to the port in Galveston real soon. Maybe even the gas to get back.”

  Josh straightened, laughing, but the sound was cut off by a loud round of catcalls rising from the corner. Dax looked over his shoulder in time to see Bubba and his bubbas nearly topple the barrel holding their card game as they jockeyed for position at the window.

  Elbows gouged and shoved. Bootheels landed on boot toes. Hats were jerked from heads to clear lines of sight. Reminded Dax of a bunch of bawling calves jammed into a chute. “Looks like someone needs to put a lock on the beer cooler.”

  “Nope,” Josh said. “Looks like lunch.” He circled the counter and headed for his own window, this one tucked on the far side of an old wardrobe now stocked with square cans of unguent and dark brown bottles of antiseptics and thick leather gloves.

  Curious, Dax followed, leaning a raised arm along the window casing and squinting into the glare of the sun. The view that finally came into focus looked like way more than lunch to Dax. The woman bent across the front seat of the pickup, dragging a big, brown, grease-spotted grocery bag into her arms, had the most gorgeous ass Dax had seen in weeks. Course, the only asses he’d seen during those weeks belonged to the calves he’d been working, but still.