Loe raamatut: «Dreamless»

CHAPTER ONE

CASSIE MCCLEAN had just about had her craw full of Mr. Jake Coffey.

She removed her soiled leather work gloves finger by finger with vicious precision, squinting out over the Ten Mile Flats and watching that hated man’s pickup jolt up the narrow gravel road that shot straight toward her like a mile-long arrow.

That road, that ridiculous…cow path of a road, was the most recent spear Jake Coffey had chucked into their escalating series of skirmishes. In the spring, it had been the watershed. In the dry weeks of August, the grading dust. With him, it was always something.

Her plans would be unfolding perfectly by now were it not for Jake Coffey.

Ten Mile Flats lay below her in a gentle sea of green winter wheat, a marked contrast to the high, darkly wooded ridge that she had christened The Heights. With its brick and wrought-iron gates, its curving concrete streets and newly installed underground utilities, The Heights was as sophisticated as the Flats were rustic. And that’s exactly what Cassie had envisioned.

She had counted on the fact that Ten Mile Flats would never change. Out there, horse-farming operations with miles of white fencing and pristine barns had been producing their champions since the turn of the century. And as long as the horse farms were there, those bottomlands would spread forth like a hazy patchwork quilt, meeting the curve of the South Canadian River, creating an unobstructed, timeless view, complete with breathtaking Oklahoma sunsets. The future homeowners of The Heights were willing to pay a fortune for that view. Yes, everything was perfect. Everything except Jake Coffey.

She bit her lip and whacked her gloves against her palm. That man.

She had jumped through hoop after hoop to appease the landowners out on the Flats. Many of them had come to consider Cassie’s exclusive, luxury housing addition as a welcome cushion between their peaceful farms and the urban sprawl creeping westward from the city of Jordan. All of them had come to accept, grudgingly, that The Heights was a quality development of classic homes.

All but Jake Coffey. Owner of the nearest, the largest, the most productive of those horse farms.

What was that man going to complain about now?

At the base of the hill, where the pricey lots were pocked with massive red rock formations that veered into a narrow creek, the noise of rock crushers cracked the morning calm, answering Cassie’s question.

Of course. Undoubtedly he’d gripe about the rock crushers and the track hoe hammer and the bulldozers making so much noise as they cleared the lower lots.

Well, wait till the dynamite started!

The noise was certainly going to be the next thorny issue with her nearest neighbor, Cassie was sure. She wondered if he was going to overreact, as he had over the road access. A temporary restraining order, for heaven’s sakes! Forcing Cassie’s grading equipment, her delivery vehicles, and now her concrete trucks, to drive all the way around on Troctor Avenue. Five long miles out of the way, each way, when his road through his dadblame antiquated horse farm was an easy shortcut from Highway 86.

The elderly sisters who’d previously owned Cassie’s land had held an easement to use the road through Cottonwood Ranch—mostly to haul feed to their wild goats in their rattletrap Toyota pickup. When Cassie bought the land, she made sure she got the easement in the deal. She thought everything was fine and that she could pass through Cottonwood Ranch until the interstate loop under construction to the north was completed.

But Jake Coffey had claimed that the easement allowed for light traffic only and that Cassie had “so changed the use of the easement that it had become an excessive burden on the road.” Or, rather, his lawyer had claimed that. And now, the man was seeking a permanent injunction. Permanent.

Well, with that nasty maneuver, Louis Jackson Coffey had turned their peevish little telephone feud into all-out legal war. Cassie had contacted a lawyer and filed a counteraction of her own.

And right now it looked like the whole thing was about to get up close and personal.

Fine. C. J. McClean was more than ready to take on Louis Jackson Coffey.

When the crushers ceased their pounding for a moment, she slapped the gloves against the leg of her overalls and turned to holler up at the foreman from Precision Stone. “Darrell! This limestone looks perfect. Let’s get that chimney rocked up today.”

Darrell Brown, husky, middle-aged, hardworking and brutally honest, gave her a salute from high up on the twelve-pitch roof. “Yes, ma’am!”

Darrell’s crew and a couple of the framing carpenters were hammering away, nailing toe boards and protective wood planks over shingles still slick with morning frost. “Just so long as you’re happy with the quality, Ms. McClean,” he called over the noise. “I don’t want to be knocking no low-grade limestone off of this monster.”

He jerked a thumb at the chimney towering behind him. The thing peaked a full seventy feet in the air—tall enough to clear all three stories of the eleven-thousand-square-foot house and the tops of the massive black oaks sheltering it.

Down the hill, the rock crushers started up again, cutting off further conversation.

Darrell shrugged and Cassie smiled, waving him off. She surveyed the woods rising up behind the house, remembering the design challenges those huge trees had presented. The timber on this hill had cost her in more ways than one, but on the outskirts of Jordan, Oklahoma, a forested crest like this was dear.

Every home builder from here to Oklahoma City had tried to get his hands on this land, and Cassie, using extreme patience and her aunt Rosemarie’s social goodwill, had finally secured it for a fair price from the eccentric Sullivan sisters. In the deal, she’d promised that any tree over thirty feet tall would be preserved—a promise that had put her architectural skills to a real test. But C. J. McClean was always true to her word. Always.

In the end, she would make a killing off this exclusive housing development, but it was the quality and integrity of the homes, not the profit, that mattered to Cassie. The lasting beauty. Ever since she was a little girl, the one thing that had always made her spirits soar was the sight of a well-built, well-designed home positioned on a beautifully landscaped lot.

Pride rose in her chest as she backed up, giving the frame of the most recent house she’d designed a quick once-over. Board by board, stone by stone, her dream houses were becoming a reality. All custom-designed, all over ten thousand square feet, these majestic homes would grace this crest for generations to come. And her name, her good name, C. J. McClean, would stand solidly behind them. It was a hell of a dream—one she’d carried in her heart ever since the day her father had gone to prison. And now it was a thrill to see that dream materialize right before her eyes.

Darrell Brown would start the stonework on the Detloff family’s chimney today. The Becker place was already partially framed. At the highest and most westward cul-de-sac, country-and-western singer Brett Taylor’s enormous concrete slab would be poured by week’s end.

Barring rain, of course. Cassie frowned at the sky where soggy clouds threatened to band together and make trouble. It was already November and soon chilling rains would delay work on everything from concrete to brick masonry. At least she had this first house weathered in, which meant she could keep the indoor subcontractors busy through the winter.

She sighed. There was never any shortage of things to worry about in the building business. She sure didn’t need the likes of Jake Coffey adding to her stress.

She cut an angry gaze back to the red double-cab pickup as it raised a plume of dust, fishtailing round the development marquee.

While Jake Coffey’s truck pell-melled up the hill, Cassie marched to her own white one, the one with the Dream Builders logo stenciled on the door—a tasteful aubergine logo that she had designed herself.

Cassie McClean lived a life entirely of her own design. She enjoyed riding around town with the radio blasting so loudly on her favorite oldies station that even with the truck windows rolled up, the guys on the second-story roof could hear the pulse of the music. Everybody in the building business knew who she was. Big blond ponytail. Bouncy energetic stride. Too young. Too successful. Boss McClean’s only daughter.

She liked it that way…except for the Boss McClean part, that is. She shook off that thought.

She ripped open the truck’s door and snatched up her cell phone. When the noise at the bottom of the hill ceased again, she punched the speed dial for her lawyer’s office. She was determined to face this Coffey bully well armed.

“How’s our little countersuit shaping up?” She paced back to the curb and spied glints of red winking in and out of the bare trees as Coffey was forced to slow down on the steep, winding streets. Even the streets in The Heights were designed to contribute to the atmosphere of privacy, serenity, peace.

She nodded as she listened. When Mr. Jake Coffey parked that truck, he was, by George, in for quite a roaring earful.

“Excellent,” she said, after her lawyer had told her everything she wanted to hear. “Fax the letter.” She punched off and stepped up onto the curb.

The red pickup braked with a screech right in the middle of the cul-de-sac. A large, long-legged man in a cowboy hat and sunglasses muscled his frame out, slammed the door and strode toward her.

From the top of his dusty black Stetson to the tip of his scuffed brown boots, the man exuded virile masculinity. His bearing, his movements and what she could see of his face, his jaw, his mouth—all of it—looked handsome, sexy.

Cassie just hated that.

She deteriorated into a complete klutz around good-looking, sexy men. As C. J. McClean, she could hold her own with the rough-cut good old boys in the construction business any day. But around any eligible, attractive male she reverted to little Cassie, the awkward tomboy raised by her strange maiden aunt.

Jake Coffey was single, or so she’d been told. But why did he have to be so danged appealing?

He stopped on the pavement a yard short of her person, regarding her from behind reflective sunglasses. “Ms. McClean?” He did not remove his shades.

She kept her place up on the curb, which gave her only a slight boost against his massive build.

“Yes?” She was determined to keep this carefully civil. Deliberately cool. But she did not remove her sunglasses, either. Civil was one thing, but she refused to make this confrontation easy for him.

“I’m Jake Coffey. Owner of Cottonwood Ranch.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the spread at the bottom of the hill. “We’ve talked on the phone.”

She glanced at the logo on the pocket of his jacket—the same one was on his pickup—an unimaginative black silhouette of a horse’s head with Cottonwood Ranch in a semicircle of script wrapped below it. “I know who you are, Mr. Coffey.” She did not extend her hand.

They hadn’t “talked” on the phone the last time. They’d shouted. Well, she had shouted. He always kept his voice infuriatingly low while refusing to budge about anything. Lately, it had been this restraining order. “What brings you up to my turf?”

Cassie was glad she was wearing sunglasses because she almost rolled her eyes at her own baiting tone. Here we go, she thought, the klutzy tomboy is already acting defensive. Why couldn’t she ever just act normal?

He didn’t respond to her taunt. “Seems you and I have another problem this morning, ma’am.”

“We have a problem? I don’t have a problem.” Cassie spread a palm on the bib of her overalls. “My work is proceeding on schedule.”

He hooked his fingers in his back pockets and planted his booted feet wide, with his torso settled low on his hips and his pelvis thrust forward, like a man who sat atop a horse a lot, which she supposed he did. Under his worn denim jacket, tucked into a dusty pair of Levi’s, he wore a faded black T-shirt that stretched over a well-developed chest.

“Ma’am,” he repeated, looking over his shoulder in the direction from which the noise had started late yesterday, “we have a problem.” His soft voice belied his firm stance. He looked back at her.

His skin was weathered, tan, and he had a black five o’clock shadow though it was only eight in the morning. His full lips were chapped-looking and slightly pouty, turned down, as if he might spit out something vile at any moment.

A most unpleasant man. Most threatening.

Cassie cocked a knee and took a dainty swipe at her thigh as if his dustiness had somehow contaminated her overalls. “Okay. Exactly what is it now, Mr. Coffey?”

His head had ticked in the direction of her gesture, as if it distracted him. He clamped his lips tight and looked back up at her face. “I’ve been up most of the night with my horses.” His voice was tired, unemotional. “That rock crusher down there sent my broodmares crawling up the stable walls yesterday. Kept ’em skittish all night. Another day of this and I might lose a couple of my winter foals. If I do, I am holding you legally responsible.”

She’d listened to him on the phone often enough. His voice was always low, controlled like this. But in person, it carried a resonance that rolled from deep in his chest. She hadn’t felt that during their terse phone conversations. And underneath it all, she clearly sensed his rising ire.

She let one eyebrow arch high enough that it cleared the frame of her sunglasses. “I doubt you can do tha—” Unfortunately, the crusher drowned out her last word, underscoring the man’s argument.

I don’t, he mouthed as he made an emphatic jab at his chest.

“How can you—” Cassie shouted as the crusher took another vibrating bite out of the hill—boom, boom, ka-boom! Unfortunately, the noise halted before she finished on a high note “—possibly hold me responsible?” The men up on the roof turned their heads toward her shouting. More quietly she continued, “I am in no way liable for what happens to your horses.”

“You don’t have to make all that noise. You could have that rock chipped out by hand.”

Was this man insane? She yanked off her sunglasses so she could give him the benefit of her most incredulous stare.

“Mr. Coffey—” now it was she who kept her voice lethally low “—removing a ledge of imbedded red rock that size with little pickaxes—” she pinched a thumb and finger together in front of his face “—would take weeks, perhaps months, and we’ve got to have those lots cleared soon so we can pour concrete before the first fall freeze. If the noise disturbs you, I suggest you move your horses to a quieter location.”

She started to turn away, but he stepped around her, jerking off his sunglasses and matching her flabbergasted expression with an incredulous one of his own.

“Move twenty-two mares? Do you have any idea what that would cost? And where would I take them? Texas? That noise ricochets over the whole of the Flats. You can hear it all the way to the river! Cottonwood Ranch was down there a long time before you started building these fancy houses. You can just shut down those machines until after my mares foal—”

“Absolutely not. Do you know what that machinery cost? I can only rent it for a limited time, and while I’m paying for it, I’m using it every minute of the day.” Cassie had not reached her level of success by wasting money.

He planted his fists at his belt. They were into it now. “Not where there’s a noise ordinance.”

“For your information—” The accursed booming started up again, seeming to support Jake Coffey’s grievances all the more, and Cassie hated the fact that she had to raise her voice again. “I have obtained a noise variance.”

“Well, there you have it—” Coffey said sarcastically.

When she cupped a hand to her ear, he leaned closer, bringing the aroma of horses, smoky wood and fine leather forward with him. He smirked while keeping that maddening voice level.

“I reckon when my horses read that variance, they’ll calm right down.”

Cassie felt her blood pressure spike. Nothing irked her more than being mocked by a man. The Scottish temper that she had inherited from Boss McClean boiled right to the surface. “They can eat the variance, for all I care.” She narrowed her eyes as she stared into his infuriatingly calm ones. “Those crushers stay.”

Heads jerked around on the roof above.

She clamped her lips and gritted her teeth, hating herself for flaring up in the same way her father always had.

Jake Coffey’s color heightened and the line of his mouth tightened, but his voice remained calm, in spite of the deafening noise booming from the base of the ridge. “I thought maybe I could come up here and deal with you, man to ma—neighbor to neighbor. But I can see plain dealings won’t work with you. Never mind, then. I’ll be back with the sheriff in one hour.” He turned toward his truck.

She slapped the gloves against her thigh, wishing she could whack his hat off with them.

“The sheriff can keep me off your road, but that is all!” she shouted, even though, now, the crushers were silent. “And that’ll end soon enough when we put a stop to your blamed injunction. By the way, I’ve added the crushers to the countersuit I’m bringing to court—” her voice went spiraling up to a shriek “—and the dynamite!”

Coffey froze with his hand on the door of his pickup. His head swiveled toward her. For the first time he shouted back at her. “Dynamite?”

“My attorney’s faxing your attorney a letter right now.” Cassie waltzed toward him. “We’re going to get this damn road business squared away, once and for all, and we may as well settle up on the noise deal, too, because it looks like some blasting’s gonna be called for.” She tended to fall into her father’s tough speech patterns when she felt threatened. Normally, Cassie tried never to think about Boss McClean during the course of her workday. But this morning she’d thought of him twice already. Not a good sign.

Her aunt Rosemarie always said that Cassie’s father was not a bad man. Only weak. And Cassie had to admit, his legacy to her, good and bad, had certainly amounted to a lot more than blunt language and hot temper. From him, and from her grandfather, she had learned the nuts and bolts of the building business, had absorbed it into her very cells. But her grandfather had shown her the rewards for doing things right, while her father had shown her the penalty for doing things wrong.

“Dynamite?” Jake Coffey repeated, and his dry lips looked paler.

But the haughty answer Cassie might have tossed back died in her throat, because even as the booming vibrated through the woods again, they both heard a horrified scream above it, followed by frantic shouting from the men up on the roof.

Cassie whirled to see Tom Harris, the youngest of the stonemasons, skidding down a valley of the roof like a puppet whose strings had snapped. The young man’s face looked shocked, disoriented, as he tumbled sideways with such force that he knocked toe boards loose on his way down. The other men scrambled along the shingles grabbing for him, but he slipped from their hands and went flying over the edge, hitting a high scaffolding before bouncing down thirty feet onto a jagged pile of limestone below.

Cassie emitted a choked cry, then raced to the fallen man. She threw herself to her knees on the mound of rocks, tossed aside her sunglasses and shouted, “Tom! Tom!”

The young man, an apprentice barely out of his teens, lay perfectly still, white-faced, with eyes closed. But he was still breathing. Blood pooled onto the limestone from the back of his head. Cassie jerked off her flannel shirt and pressed it against the gash.

“He grabbed ahold of a live wire up there!” Darrell Brown shouted as he crabbed his way down the scaffolding toward the ladder braced against it. Other men were crawling down behind him like ants off a mound.

From inside the structure, the banging of hammers, the whining of saws and the loud rumbling of a rock radio station all ceased. The framing carpenters rushed out and gathered around with the stonemasons.

High up on the house, a new man—a loner named Whitlow—stood and pointed with a long piece of board at a thick white wire. Up there, Cassie knew, the dangling wire was the power to the decorative lighting that would eventually illuminate the massive chimney.

“That one shouldn’t be hot!” she argued senselessly.

“This thing’s hot, all right,” the carpenter called back. He casually flipped it with the stick, and sparks flew.

The man’s fearlessness with the arching wire snapped a red flag in Cassie’s mind, but she was too distracted by Tom’s condition to puzzle its meaning.

Why the hell was that wire hot? It wasn’t like her electrician to make a mistake and switch the temporary with the main power.

“Somebody go kill that damn power,” she ordered.

A gangly young man hollered, “Yes, ma’am!” and sprinted away.

“Somebody go down to the site trailer and get the big first-aid kit.”

Again Cassie’s order was obeyed with a “Yes, ma’am!”

Jake Coffey had dropped to one knee on the other side of Tom and was pressing two fingers against the victim’s neck. “His pulse is okay,” he said quietly.

Cassie fumbled around in the bib of her overalls, pulled out her cell phone and punched 9-1-1. Electric shock was a worry, but she was more concerned about the effects of the fall. She told the dispatcher the problem quickly, while Darrell scurried over the stones toward them.

“No,” Cassie shouted into the phone. “There’s a shortcut, a private gravel road—” she looked pointedly at Jake Coffey “—through Cottonwood Ranch.” Jake nodded. His dark brown eyes were alert, concerned. His mouth looked grim.

“How far is the turnoff from Highway 86?” She searched Jake’s face imploringly while the dispatcher held.

“Let me.” He took the cell phone from her. “It’s two-tenths of a mile. Hard to see. I’ll phone someone at the ranch and tell them to park one of our red trucks out there and flag the paramedics.”

He handed Cassie the phone. “They want us to stay on the line.”

She nodded, pressed the phone to her ear and looked down at Tom.

“Think he broke his neck?” she heard Darrell calling to Jake Coffey, who was sprinting toward his pickup.

“We’d better not move him, just in case,” Jake called back. Cassie looked up and saw him pull out his cell phone. She turned her full attention back to Tom.

The men stood in a circle of stunned silence, watching as Jake, Darrell and Cassie covered Tom with emergency blankets, then padded the man’s limbs against the sharp rocks as best as they could. They bandaged his burned hand, and then there was nothing to do but wait on the ambulance.

In the distance the rock crushers resumed their methodical work, the operators oblivious of the tragedy up on the hill. The sound filled Cassie with a mixture of guilt and nausea. She wanted the noise—that aggressive sound of progress—to stop. She knew there was no rational reason for work all over the development to halt. Still, her ambitious concerns of only moments ago seemed utterly callow now.

Please let him be okay, she prayed as she studied Tom’s unconscious face. “Hold on,” she told him gently. “Help is on the way.”

She kept up this litany of silent prayer and verbal reassurance while they waited for the medics.

Time stretched taut, and she glanced up once to find Jake Coffey, wearing his sunglasses again, obviously studying her. When he caught her glance, he removed the shades, poked them into his breast pocket and squatted down on his haunches next to her.

As their eyes met in mutual concern, her fear mysteriously seemed to abate and a strange lightness overcame her.

“Is there anything else I can do?” Jake said quietly.

His face, the face she’d viewed as an angry opponent’s only moments before, was the face of a compassionate ally now. She looked away because she felt the sting of tears and she didn’t want to cry in front of the men…or in front of Jake Coffey. She shook her head and turned to stroke Tom’s unburned hand.

Jake stood up again. “Fellas.” He addressed the men gathered around. “We’d better move all these pickups out of the way.” The circle of Levi’s and boots disappeared from Cassie’s view, and then she heard engines roaring to life. She only glanced up from Tom’s face one other time, to see the vehicles pulling away from the cul-de-sac. At the same time, she caught sight of men jogging down the hill from the other building sites.

None of them could do anything to help Tom, she knew, but she felt a wave of gratitude for the caliber of the subcontractors and workmen she employed. These men were the finest of craftsmen, and they knew the meaning of teamwork and cooperation. They were always on schedule, always fair, always professional and honest, and not one of them would let a man lay fallen without rushing to his side.

She heard the sirens then. “Here comes help, Tom,” she reassured the young man and squeezed his hand.

ONCE TOM WAS STRAPPED into a neck brace and safely loaded into the ambulance, Cassie turned to find the men still grouped around the cul-de-sac. An air of helpless frustration was setting in.

“Let’s get back to work!” Darrell Brown bellowed at the assembly. He waved a beefy paw, and slowly, as if unfreezing from a carved tableau, the men responded.

“Ms. McClean, I’m so sorry this happened.” A deep voice spoke quietly from behind Cassie. She turned. She hadn’t noticed Jake Coffey still standing there.

She tilted her face up to him and tried to speak, but could only give her head a forlorn shake. He studied her, and his eyes were sad. They were also very kind, as if the earlier animosity between them had never existed.

He sighed. “What a terrible thing to happen.”

“I can’t believe it,” Cassie admitted, and looked away.

Their sudden bonding over the accident came as a surprise to Cassie. And those few seconds of eye contact also brought another completely unexpected sensation. A thrill of attraction pulsed through her middle as she realized again that Jake Coffey was undeniably good-looking.

Cassie, who spent her days solely in the company of men, was seldom genuinely attracted to one. She often wondered if living in the world of construction had left her abnormally inured to male magnetism. But her honesty—her most valued trait—prevented her from feigning attraction when there simply was none. Even so, she secretly worried about herself: at age twenty-seven, she remained stubbornly alone.