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Think! Think!
There was a big pottery bowl on a table near the door in the front hall. She’d laughed at how people had dropped their keys in it.
“How do you ever find the right ones?” she’d said, and Luca had grinned and said sometimes it was the luck of the draw.
“Cheyenne,” Luca shouted, “cara, where are you?”
She dug into the bowl. Luck was with her tonight. Luca had put the keys to the rental car on a keychain hung with a silver L, and it was that silver L around which her fingers closed.
“Cheyenne,” Luca said, from almost right behind her, and she flung open the front door and raced to the car.
Sobbing, she got inside, stabbed the key into the ignition lock and stepped on the gas.
The last thing she saw in the side mirror was her Luca, running down the driveway after her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Luca stood half a mile down the long driveway, panting, bent over with his hands on his knees.
He’d run as fast and hard as he could, but no way could he catch up to a car, especially one doing at least seventy miles an hour.
Now, even its taillights had vanished into the darkness.
What the hell had happened?
One minute, Cheyenne had been snuggled up to him, smiling and laughing. Then she’d gone into the house and—
And now, she was gone.
He heard a vehicle pull up behind him. He swung around, held his hand up against the glare of headlights.
“Luca!”
The lights dimmed, doors opened, and Matteo and Travis stepped down from the cab of a pickup truck.
“What’s going on?” Matteo asked.
“Cheyenne,” Luca gasped. “She’s gone.”
Travis ran his hand through his hair. “Gone where?”
Luca shook his head.
“Jesus. What happened?”
“I don’t know. She took off.” He dragged in another lungful of air. “Something must have gone wrong in the house. With Bianca and Alessandra.”
Matteo shook his head. “I don’t think so. When they came back, they were both smiling. In fact, Alessandra told me what a wonderful woman Cheyenne was, and Bianca said the same—What are you doing?”
“I’m going after her,” Luca said as he slid behind the wheel of the truck.
“We’ll get everybody out looking,” Travis called, but Luca had already floored the gas pedal and the pickup was racing down the driveway.
* * *
He had only been to El Sueño once before, but he knew the roads well enough to know that a left at the end of the mile long driveway would take you further down a narrow country road. A right would eventually take you to the main road.
Which way would Cheyenne go?
Luca thought fast and took the right.
The pickup was responsive, its engine surprisingly powerful, but she’d had a head start. Not even a winking taillight was visible in the darkness ahead.
A few more minutes and he’d have to make another decision. Assuming he’d chosen correctly and she’d headed for the main road and the highway, which way had she gone from there? Dallas lay in one direction. Nothing much of any size lay in the other…
Nothing except Sweetwater Ranch.
The main road was just ahead.
Where would she have gone? Luca took a breath, damn near stood on the brakes, and made the turn that would take him to Sweetwater.
All he could do was hope he had made the right decision.
The pickup ate up the miles.
He was driving faster than was reasonable, but nothing was reasonable tonight.
Why had she run away? She’d been happy. They’d been happy. What had changed?
His headlights cut a swathe through the night. Something ran across the road. He swerved and missed it. The turnoff for Sweetwater had to be coming up soon and he tried to remember something, anything that might serve to let him know that he was coming up on it—
There! A tall tree, long-ago split by lightning. The brakes juddered and protested as Luca skidded into the turn and onto a narrow gravel road.
Long minutes later, Sweetwater Ranch rose on the horizon.
No lights.
Nothing.
Just the dilapidated house rearing up in his headlights and, beyond it, the one functional building.
The barn.
And outside it, the rental car, the driver’s door hanging open.
He drove over the grass towards it, hit the brakes, stopped the engine. The headlights blasted a path through the darkness, but he’d need light inside the barn. He leaned over, yanked open the glove compartment. Back home, at his ranch in Tuscany, he insisted on a flashlight in the glove compartment of every vehicle on the place. He could only hope that Jake kept the same standard at El Sueño
And…yes! Luca’s fingers closed around the flashlight. He turned it on, shut off the truck’s lights, and stepped out into the night.
Silence, except for the tick, tick, tick of the cooling engine, surrounded him.
“Cheyenne?”
Nothing.
He called her name again. This time, a lone katydid answered.
Luca started through the high grass, playing the beam of the flashlight over the dark barn. The door was closed.
“Cheyenne,” he said again, as he pushed it open.
More darkness… What was that?
Something moved in the far corner. An animal? An owl?
“Cheyenne,” he said, “dolcezza, per favore, you have to be here. You have to be…”
Something moved again…
No. Not ‘something.’ It was she. Cheyenne. She was crying. Sobbing. His heart
thudded. Was she ill? Hurt?
He cast the flashlight’s beam on her and rushed forward. “Cara. Sweetheart—”
She shook her head, spun away from him. “Go away!”
The anguish in her voice stopped him. Years before, when he was a boy hiking the cliffs in Sicily, he’d found an injured osprey. He’d wanted to save the bird, but his desperate attempts had only driven it closer and closer to the edge. In the end, the osprey had fallen. Luca had never forgotten the terrible sight, nor had he forgiven himself for making a bad situation worse.
He stopped a couple of feet away.
“Are you injured?” he said softly.
She shook her head.
“Are you ill?”
Another shake of her head.
“Will you turn around so we can see each other?”
“There’s nothing to see.”
“There is you, cara,” he said. “You are always what I wish to see.”
“Luca. Did you mean what you said? About—about caring for me?”
“About caring for you?” He gave a sad little laugh. “I love you, Cheyenne. With all my heart.”
“If you do… If you really do, then—then please, go back to El Sueño.”
“And leave you here, alone?” His voice roughened. “Do you take me for a crazy man?”
“I know you mean well, but—”
“What?”
“But everything became clear tonight. I—I don’t want what you want out of life.”
“And what is it you think I want?”
“The things your brothers and sisters have. Some of them, anyway. Marriage. Children.” Her voice broke. “A house in the country, a dog, a cat—”
“And?”
“And—and I realized that I—I don’t.”
He wanted to go to her. Grab her. Demand to know what in hell she was talking about. Instead, he did the hardest thing imaginable. He stood still and said, “What do you want, then?”
She drew a ragged breath. This was going to be the tough part. Convincing him that she was telling the truth, but she was good at convincing people of things, that the soap she was selling was the reason her skin was soft, that the shampoo she hawked was why her hair was so lustrous. That was her talent, convincing people that she was someone she wasn’t.
