Chapter Four
Dallas
Dallas hadn’t yetgotten used to the sheer size of the Endeavour’s main house. It boasted three wings—one for each of its owners—and a central meeting area with three large leather sofa recliners and an eighty-five inch, flat-screen TV used mostly for football and hockey matches. The meeting area fronted a huge office from which Ryan ran the ranch business. Dallas kept his office at the hospital, and Dan had one at the sheriff’s department in Grand, but Ryan liked to hang close to home.
Ryan’s wing of the house lay to the immediate left of the front door and that enormous central space. Dan’s was on the right. Dallas’s door faced the main door from the far side of the room, in a shallow alcove to the right of Ryan’s office.
Right now, the house seemed entirely too small.
His family had driven up from Sweetheart for the weekend, and although they understood he was a doctor and his hours could be unpredictable, no way would they believe he had back-to-back emergencies when he was supposed to be off.
Strategically, it might work out for the best. Hannah likely expected Dallas to show up at the nursing home while she was there. When he didn’t, she’d have to consider the possibility that he really was more interested in helping Marsh than in picking up where he’d left off with her, and in the short term, he actually was. He didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the pleasure the old man would get from her company.
By the time Dallas showered and dressed, Ryan had settled in next to the griddle in the outdoor kitchen and was pouring mimosas for the moms. Judging by the color, the champagne content significantly outweighed any juice. Freda McKillop, Dan’s mother, already had a healthy pink glow to her cheeks and Dallas’s mother, Bea, was on her second glass at least. He got the impression the moms had been talking about him because of the way they went quiet as soon as he appeared.
He dropped a kiss on Freda’s cheek, then wrapped his arms around his own mother and drew her in for a bear hug, lifting her off her feet. Bea was a slight woman in her late forties with eyes the same color as his. He loved her to pieces.
“Put me down, Dallie!” she complained, trying to talk and breathe and not give in to the giggles, all with the same amount of success.
He did so, but not before she received a solid kiss on the cheek from him, too.
“Seriously, Dad? Beer for breakfast?” he said, turning to his father, whose middle-aged spread tested the integrity of the lawn chair next to Ryan’s.
Ed Tucker appeared unconcerned over his wife’s protests at being mauled by their eldest son, or of Dallas’s opinions regarding his breakfast beverage of choice. He raised his half-empty glass to eye level and calmly pondered its thick, cocoa-brown contents. “The brochure says it has oatmeal in it. Don’t worry, though—I’ll get my calcium from the Irish cream in my coffee.”
Ed and Bea Tucker’s approach to life involved not sweating the little things. Dallas had made a surprise appearance in their lives when they were teenagers, prompting his mother to tell people they’d grown up together. His younger brothers wouldn’t factor into their lifestyle for another eleven years. Then, the boys began arriving like clockwork, three years in a row. By the time the third joined the family, the senior Tuckers earned a decent double income. When Dallas received his unexpected windfall inheritance and tried to share it with them, they’d told him no thanks.
“All I ask is that you look after your money,” his dad advised him. “It’ll change you if you aren’t careful with it. You can help your brothers pay for school—that’s up to you. But we’re so proud that you haven’t given up your career, and they’re going to learn to work for their living, too.”
They’d spent the night in the bunkhouses, along with Dan’s oldest nieces and nephews, and Dallas suspected they’d emerge closer to lunch. Dan wasn’t up yet either, although his two older sisters had a crowd of younger kids seated at two picnic tables and appeared to be force-feeding them pancakes.
Dallas dragged an empty chair away from the firepit and set it down next to his dad. A short while later, Dan joined them. He looked pretty content. They’d talked in the garage for a bit last night, and since things had gone well with Jazz, Dallas didn’t feel at all bad about abandoning him to the reporter.
He ate two platefuls of pancakes and joined his dad for a beer, then played a game of tag with Dan and his two twin sets of nieces and nephews—two four-year-old boys and two six-year-old girls—because their mother told them they weren’t allowed to play videogames in the bunkhouse until the older kids were awake.
He managed not to think too hard about Hannah, her date, and whether or not she’d follow through on her visit with Marsh—right up until the moms placed him and Ryan on cleanup duty after Dan took the kids to see the horses.
“So,” Ryan said. They were alone in Dallas’s kitchen, stowing dishes into the dishwasher and scrubbing pans. Dallas’s parents hadn’t been kidding when they said they expected their sons to work, and those expectations shifted over to Ryan, who appeared to love being bossed around by Freda and Bea. “Want to talk about her?”
“Her who?” Dallas asked, playing dumb. He’d made the mistake of telling Ryan about Hannah late one night when he’d been tired and bummed out. Luckily, he hadn’t mentioned her name.
“Whoever had you creeping in after midnight last night.”
He scraped a plate of half-eaten pancakes into the kitchen compost container with extra care and attention. “Oh, that. The nursing home called.”
“Nice try. The home has competent nurses onsite twenty-four seven. They don’t need you after hours. Besides, most of the residents have do-not-resuscitate orders in place.”
“I sat with Marsh. He wanted company.”
“Until one o’clock in the morning?”
Dallas switched tactics from telling evasive half-truths to a full-on, frontal offense. “I could ask you the same question. You got home around the same time I did.” He knew because he’d found him sitting in his car in the garage, talking to Dan.
Ryan closed the dishwasher door on the first round of dirty plates, carefully pushing a few buttons to select the right cycle as if he knew what he was doing. “You could ask me the same question, sure. Our answers are going to be different. I took the AMG for a drive to Greybull. I checked out their museum on aerial firefighting while I was there. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered aerial firefighting refers to fighting fires, not other airplanes.”
“All by yourself?”
“Do you have a problem with that? Do I need to produce an eye witness?”