She shook her head. “I fell in love with the man underneath all that. And right now I need him in the worst way. Don’t shut me out, Jake. I can’t do this by myself, and neither can you. When Jake the outlaw rode out of my life once after we first met, I just wanted to die.”
He saw the love in her eyes, thought about all she’d been through, being the wife of Jake Harkner. He set the gun aside and walked up to her, pulling her into his arms.
“Well, he’s here for now.”
Randy rested her head against his chest and wept. “I didn’t even take the medicine Brian brought over to help me sleep. I hoped you’d come here and just hold me, and I wanted to be awake for it.”
Jake kissed her hair. “I’m sorry I’ve left you out. I just…” He squeezed her tighter. “God, Randy, I thought I’d lost him! I feel like I failed him, Randy. All those years we rode together back in Oklahoma I never once failed him. When I saw him go down…” He began to stumble. “It should have been me! It should have been me!” He rambled between Spanish and English.
“Jake, I can’t hold you up.”
They literally helped each other to a bed. Jake felt himself nearly collapsing. He pulled her onto the bed and crushed her close. “I shouldn’t have left you alone in this.” He ran a hand into her hair and kissed the top of her head. “Que Dios te acompane, mi amor. Yo te amo.”
“And I love you, Jake. It’s going to be all right now. I know it is. Tell me that when this is all over we’ll go back to that line shack, Jake, just you and me.”
“We’ll go back.” He clung to her then…and wept.
“He’ll be all right,” Randy soothed. “He’s in God’s hands.”
“¡Mi hijo! ¡Le falle!”
Randy recognized the words my son and fail. “You did not fail him, Jake. No one knew. No one knew. You did what you could.”
“¡Mi hijo, favor perdóname!”
“There is nothing to forgive. Lloyd will never blame you for this.” Randy held him tightly as his tears soaked her neck and the pillow beneath her. He needed this. The Jake who’d refused all feelings could not deny that they were there. All she could think of was the horror it must have been for him as a tortured little boy with no one to hold him. Her own tears mingled with his as they both wept until they fell into an exhausted sleep.
Twenty-two
Randy finished pinning up her hair. “Button me up,” she asked Jake.
Jake walked up behind her, wearing his own clothes now, a white shirt and denim pants. He’d just pulled on his boots after his daily ritual of shaving and scrubbing his teeth with baking soda—things he’d neglected while sitting at Lloyd’s bedside for nearly four days.
Randy watched him in the mirror. “I see some remnants of an outlaw, Jake, and I feel it in the way you are jerking at those buttons.”
He frowned. “They’re going to try to arrest me, Randy. You understand that, don’t you?”
She closed her eyes. “Maybe they won’t.”
“They will. And I’m still not leaving here—not until Lloyd is standing and walking. And there is one other thing we haven’t talked about.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“We have to. Brad Buckley is still out there somewhere, so if I get hauled away—”
“Don’t say that!” She stood up and turned to wrap her arms around his middle. “Jake, I just want to go home to the J&L.”
“Believe me, there is nothing I want more.”
Someone tapped on the door then. “Jake? Mrs. Harkner? It’s me—Pepper. Cole is with me.”
Randy pulled away, wiping at her eyes. “Just a minute!” she called out. She turned around so Jake could finish buttoning her dress.
“Jake, I told them they should get the grandsons and Ben when they go home, and bring them back here.”
Jake finished her buttons and walked over to pick up his gun belt. “I don’t want my grandsons involved in this.” He buckled the gun belt.
Randy hurriedly straightened the still-unmade bed. “Stephen has a right to see Lloyd, Jake, and having him here might help Lloyd heal faster. And Ben will be worried sick once he finds out what’s happened. He gets so scared when he thinks he might lose you. He and Little Jake will both want to see you’re okay. I want them here, whether you like it or not.”
Jake scowled. “Well, those precious little granddaughters should be left at the ranch.”
“I agree.”
“Anybody out there in the hallway?” Jake called to Pepper as he approached the door.