Willow in Bloom Read online

  Thinking about it.

  Wanting to do it…

  Maybe that fall from the horse had knocked more screws loose than anyone had realized.

  He wished his brother were there to talk it out with him. But not only was Brick not there, Tyler hadn’t been able to get hold of him since he’d started trying early this morning.

  But he knew even without talking to his brother that Brick would be glad to hear he was attracted to someone else. To someone in the here and now. Someone who was more than a memory he couldn’t grasp.

  Tyler knew his brother thought that trying to find his mystery woman was foolhardy. And he also knew that Brick was worried about the pull Tyler felt to someone he’d spent only one night with. Someone who hadn’t left him so much as a phone number or an address where he could reach her again.

  But Brick didn’t understand the attraction Tyler felt. The pull he couldn’t explain.

  The draw, the pull that should have been keeping him from wanting to kiss Willow Colton and wasn’t.

  So what was he doing? Tyler asked himself. Juggling women? Because that wasn’t something he’d ever done.

  He knew guys—particularly guys on the rodeo circuit—who did that. Who never turned down a willing woman in any town they were in at any given time.

  But that wasn’t Tyler. Or Brick, for that matter. It was too complicated. Too dangerous. Too sleazy.

  Yet here Tyler was, intent on finding one woman, but spending time with an entirely different woman. Wasn’t that sleazy?

  But what was the alternative?

  Either give up the quest for the mystery woman or give up seeing Willow.

  Tyler shook his head. He couldn’t give up his quest for the mystery woman. He had too many hopes that finding her would mean getting back his memory, too.

  But he also couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing Willow.

  Which put him right back where he’d started: was he being fair to her?

  He thought seriously about that. Very seriously, because he wanted to do right by her.

  But the more he considered exactly what he was doing with Willow, the more he decided it wasn’t altogether unfair to her. It wasn’t as if they’d embarked on a grand romance or a serious involvement. They were just getting to know each other. And there was nothing fair or unfair about that. It wasn’t as if he’d asked her for a commitment of some kind. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t be seeing other guys. And he wasn’t seeing other women.

  He was just looking for one.

  Okay, no matter what kind of spin he put on it, it wasn’t a really stellar thing to be doing.

  But he had to do it.

  Because at this point, he couldn’t make himself give up either seeing Willow or keeping an eye out for the mystery woman.

  But maybe what he could do, he decided, was be careful. And considerate of Willow’s feelings.

  He could work damn hard to make sure that things between them didn’t go too far, while he tried to figure out who the mystery woman was.

  But until he did, maybe he could just go with the flow.

  He knew that would be what Brick would say. Brick would tell him to enjoy Willow, and if, in the process, he found the mystery woman, then just deal with that development when it happened.

  If it happened.

  And if it didn’t happen?

  Then maybe he wasn’t meant to find the mystery woman again.

  Coming to that conclusion on his own surprised Tyler, because it was the first time he’d seriously thought he might be okay with the possibility.

  Which Brick would consider a step forward.

  And maybe that was something.

  Because it occurred to Tyler that while he still wanted to find the mystery woman, while he still hoped finding her would fill that gap in his memory, it didn’t seem like the be-all and end-all the way it had before meeting Willow.

  And that felt good. It felt freeing.

  He just had to be extra cautious and not let that freedom go to his head.

  Because what he wasn’t free to do was hurt Willow.

  Under any circumstances.

  Willow knew it was irrational, but somehow she felt that as long as her grandmother’s bedroom stayed intact and undisturbed, it was almost as if Gloria wasn’t gone.

  So in the weeks since her death, Willow had not so much as opened the door.

  But now she had no choice. She’d promised Bram she would finally go through their grandmother’s things, and that was what she had to do.

  It wasn’t easy.

  Especially after a particularly bad morning of nausea.

  Or maybe the nausea had been worse this morning because of the stress of knowing what she had to do today, what she’d begged off work in the store to do today.

  Either way, as Willow stood at the entrance to her grandmother’s bedroom, her stomach clenched. She could feel the tension in the back of her neck, and she suffered a fresh wave of shame, as if going into Gloria’s former sanctuary would reveal to her grandmother what she’d done in Tulsa and the results of that rash act.

  But Willow was resigned to the fact that she had to do it, so she took hold of the doorknob and went in.

  The room was small and spare, and Willow was greeted with Gloria’s scent—vanilla and lilacs.

  That made it seem as if her grandmother was somehow with her, and suddenly not coming into this room, feeling ashamed of herself for the baby she was carrying, all seemed silly. As silly as it would have been not to confide in her grandmother if Gloria were still alive. Because in this room Willow felt the same kind of unconditional love, the same kind of warmth and acceptance she’d always had from her grandmother.

  “Hi, Gloria,” she said out loud, hearing the relief in her own voice. “I have to go through your stuff,” she said then, as if her grandmother really were there and needed to be warned. “Those weird things that started happening just before your first stroke are still going on, and we need to figure out why. So Bram wants me to see if you left any clues in here.”

  It was odd, but having said that, Willow actually felt as if she had permission to do what she’d come for, and so she began.

  The room held only a single bed, a night table, a few bookshelves and a dresser, plus an easy chair with a floor lamp behind it, where Gloria had liked to sit and read.

  The dresser seemed like a good place to start, so that was where Willow went.

  There was a gallery of framed family photographs on top of the bureau. Pictures of Gloria as a young woman with her twin sons—Trevor, who was Willow’s father, and Willow’s uncle Thomas.

  There were also pictures of Willow’s parents, of Uncle Thomas and Aunt Alice, of Willow and her brothers, and of all six of Thomas and Alice’s kids, too. Plus there were photographs of Gloria’s own parents—together when her mother was alive, and more recent ones of George alone.

  It was a nice array, and even though Willow had seen them all more times than she could count, she still spent a few minutes looking at them before she started her search through the dresser drawers.

  When nothing of any particular interest showed up there she moved on to the closet. Then the nightstand. Then the bookshelves. She looked under the bed and under the chair, and essentially left no stone unturned.

  But two and a half hours later she didn’t know anything more than she had initially.

  She hated to call Bram and tell him that there was nothing among their grandmother’s things that would explain why a stranger suddenly had an interest in them or why that stranger might have set fire to the town hall and broken into the newspaper office. But that seemed like what she’d come to.

  Except that for no reason she understood, she felt as if she shouldn’t rush into it. That she shouldn’t give up yet, in spite of having searched the entire room.

  She knew what her great-grandfather would say about it. He would say that Gloria herself was whispering to Willow’s subconscious, telling her to keep going.
r />   Willow just didn’t know what else to do.

  “So Gloria, if there’s something in here we should know about, where is it?” she said aloud, thinking that her great-grandfather would be pleased that she believed in the spirit of her grandmother enough to talk to her.

  And that was when Willow remembered something out of the blue.

  She remembered her grandmother making a joke once or twice about hiding her fortune under her mattress.

  Of course, no one had taken it seriously. They all knew Gloria didn’t have a fortune.

  But recalling her words, Willow began to wonder if maybe hiding things under the mattress had not been a joke, after all.

  It probably had, she thought as she stood at the foot of the bed. But there was no harm in removing the quilt Gloria had made by hand. Or the blankets and sheets. No harm in turning the mattress just in case.

  And that was where Willow found it—a lockbox tucked into a portion of the box springs that looked as if it had been cut away for just that purpose.

  Willow hadn’t come across any unaccounted-for keys, so she brought the box with her to the kitchen, where she used a hammer and screwdriver to break the lock.

  And when she had, she found papers inside: a long letter and several documents.

  A very important, very informative letter and very interesting documents.

  Important enough, informative enough, interesting enough for Willow to make that call to her brother in a hurry.

  Willow paced as Bram sat at her kitchen table and read what she’d found under Gloria’s mattress forty-five minutes earlier. Each time she passed by him she tried to gauge his reaction, and she could tell he was as shocked as she had been.

  “So it wasn’t the way Gloria always claimed it was,” Bram said when he finally finished the long letter and laid it on the table beside the documents, which included Gloria’s marriage license and a deed to a property in Washington, D.C.

  The letter was written to Gloria’s sons. But it hadn’t been in an envelope, and when Willow had unfolded the sheets, she’d realized at first glance that what her grandmother had written to her late father and her uncle was important enough to be read immediately. Even if it wasn’t originally intended for her or for Bram.

  “Gloria got married in Reno during that time she was there, hoping to break away from Black Arrow and her Comanche heritage,” Willow said, as if her brother needed it explained. “But the Teddy Colton she married didn’t die there shortly after the wedding and before anyone could meet him—the way she told everyone he had. They got married and had one night together, and then Gloria discovered the invitation to his wedding to another woman, and she left him sleeping in the hotel room. She thought he would come after her, tell her he loved her, and that of course he would break it off with the other woman. But instead he didn’t come after her at all. He went ahead and married the other woman as planned.”

  “Which makes him a bigamist.”

  “And broke Gloria’s heart. So she came back to Black Arrow. But it wasn’t until she was home again that she realized she was pregnant,” Willow continued.

  “And when she did realize she was pregnant she hired a private investigator to find Teddy Colton to tell him?” Bram muttered.

  “Right.” Willow confirmed it as if she were the expert, when in fact they were merely rehashing what had been in the letter they’d both read. “By then Teddy Colton had gone through with the second marriage, to this Kay person, and he didn’t want anyone to know about Gloria or the pregnancy—which would have come out if he’d divorced Gloria and had to re-marry Kay.”

  “So instead he paid Gloria off.”

  “By setting up a trust fund and signing over to her the deed to a piece of property in Washington, D.C. In Georgetown, specifically.”

  “And the crux of it,” Bram said, as if he were just seeing it for himself, “is that Dad and Uncle Thomas—”

  “And all of us kids—”

  “Are the legitimate heirs of Teddy Colton, while any kids or grandkids he had with Kay—”

  “Might have thought they were the heirs, but aren’t, because Teddy Colton’s Reno wedding to Gloria was never dissolved. So his subsequent marriage to Kay wasn’t legal or valid, and any kids or grandkids coming out of that union—”

  “Are illegitimate,” Bram concluded. “Wow.”

  “Wow is right,” Willow agreed.

  “Plus there’s an inheritance,” Bram said, as if the wheels of his brain were turning smoothly again after the shock of what he’d read in the letter. “And coincidentally, there’s someone in town nosing around asking questions about us.”

  “Maybe part of the interest in us involves this deed,” Willow suggested.

  “I think it’s possible,” Bram agreed. Then, as if he’d just realized Willow was still pacing, he said, “Would you sit down? You’re making me dizzy.”

  Willow did as he’d suggested, taking the chair across from him. “So what do you think is going on, Bram?”

  “I’d say we’ve found proof of what Rand Colton was here looking for last month. That we are connected to this other branch of the Coltons. That we’re the legitimate heirs of Teddy Colton. And that we seem to have inherited some sort of trust fund and some property in Georgetown.”

  “I meant does all this have anything to do with the fire and newspaper office break-in and this other supposed guy asking about us around town?”

  “Maybe,” her brother said noncommittally. “One thing is for sure, though—this could change some lives. Maybe lives of people who don’t want them changed. Or it could take something away from someone who doesn’t want to lose it. Until we know exactly what’s going on, I’m thinking that it would be a good idea for all of us to be a little extra careful.”

  “And to put these documents and the letter somewhere safe,” Willow added.

  “After we show it to Uncle Thomas. Plus we’d better let all the grandchildren know, too, so they can be on guard in case there’s any move made against any of us.”

  “Do you really think we’re in danger?” Willow asked worriedly.

  Bram shrugged. “I don’t know, Will. I don’t know what the D.C. property is worth or how much whoever wants it wants it—if that’s what’s going on here. I don’t know what these other Coltons might be worried about losing to us, either. I do know that I’m taking the letter and the documents right now, showing it to Uncle Thomas and then locking it away at the bank so it’s not here, putting you in possible jeopardy.”

  For once Willow was happy with the protective tendencies of one of her brothers. “You won’t get any argument from me,” she declared. “So, are you going to contact Rand Colton and see what he has to say about this?”

  “He left me a few numbers where he could be reached. But I think first we’d better just let the immediate family know what’s going on and find out who this guy is who’s asking questions about us now. And if he had anything to do with the break-in and the fire.”

  “Do you have any other leads?”

  “Not about anyone else who looks suspicious. But I have heard that there’s someone staying in a trailer outside of town, and I’m about to check that out.”

  Bram gathered up the deed and the pages of Gloria’s letter to her sons, obviously preparing to leave.

  As he did, Willow said, “Do you think this is what Gloria meant just before she died when she told you to find the truth?”

  “Could be. But she wrote the letter so long ago—right after Dad and Uncle Thomas were born, it looks like—that it’s hard to know if there was something else she wanted uncovered. Something that’s happened since then.”

  “I think this is it,” Willow said. “I think when she realized Teddy Colton wasn’t going to be a part of her life, or Dad’s or Uncle Thomas’s, she decided to keep all that a secret—to avoid the shame and humiliation. But she must have written the letter so that someday her sons would know what really went on. So they would know their complete her
itage.”

  “It’s possible. But imagine making up that story about her husband dying.”

  Willow had no problem imagining it. She knew exactly what it was like to get caught up in a moment the way the young Gloria had. To give in to an overwhelming spark of passion with a handsome, charming man who could sweep a woman off her feet.

  And Willow also knew what it was to feel horrified by what she’d done when it was over. To worry about what kind of response she was going to meet from her family, her friends, her whole community when they learned she was going to be a single mother…

  “Will? Are you okay? You’re really pale all of a sudden.”

  Willow yanked herself back to the present and came up with a quick excuse. “I was busy going through things and I forgot to have lunch.”

  “Well, eat something now. I’d better get over to Uncle Thomas with this stuff so he can take a look at it before I have it locked up for safekeeping. Thanks for doing this.”

  “I’m just glad I found something. I didn’t think I was going to.”

  Bram reminded her to keep her doors locked, said goodbye and left.

  Willow stayed sitting at her kitchen table, still struck by the similarities between the path her grandmother’s life had taken and the path hers had.

  “So you really would understand,” she whispered, feeling somehow comforted by the knowledge that she wasn’t the only one who had gotten carried away by an overpowering attraction to a man and done something she would never have otherwise. Something she was embarrassed by. Something she’d paid dearly for.

  But her grandmother had survived and ended up with two wonderful sons and eleven grandchildren who loved her.

  “So maybe it will all work out for me, too,” Willow said.

  And in her hopes for that she remembered she had a date tonight with the overpoweringly attractive man who had gotten her into all this in the first place, and she still needed to shower, shampoo her hair and get dressed.

  Which she headed to her own bedroom to do, feeling just a little less shame than she had before.

  And hoping fervently that what she’d done in Tulsa in June didn’t reverberate through generations the way her grandmother’s night of passion seemed to have.