Heartbreak, Tennessee (24 page)

Amber grinned, giving
Mac a poke in the ribs as her friends laughed.

Just then the sun
crested the courthouse behind them, sending splashes of golden light down onto
the scene below. Down on Walnut Street, cars and pickup trucks were starting to
line up along the curb, and groups of people were getting out and making their
way to the courthouse lawn. A few had found their seats in the rows and rows of
folding chairs. An old man tipped his hat to Amber, and a young mother waved as
she bent to hush a squalling baby in a stroller.

“And to this town,”
Amber added softly. “I’ll dedicate myself to Heartbreak. To my home.”

The End

***

Did you enjoy Heartbreak, Tennessee?

Check out more books by Ruby Laska now!

Mine
'til Monday

A
Man for the Summer

Mountain
Song

Along
for the Ride

…or keep reading to sample the first chapter of
Mountain Song!

About Ruby Laska

Ruby Laska grew up in a small midwestern
town, where her passions included state fairs, Vince Gill, and the local
library. A recent West Coast transplant, she lives and works in Emeryville,
California. When not writing, Ruby loves to explore San Francisco’s
neighborhoods, stopping in at every shoe store and searching for the perfect
cup of joe.

Please enjoy this
excerpt from…

Mountain
Song

By Ruby Laska

CHAPTER ONE

“You’re too thin,”
Claudia Canfield’s grandmother pronounced, eyes narrowed, from her nest of
starched white linens. “Don’t you ever eat?”

Claudia sighed,
massaging a temple that had been throbbing ever since her plane left the ground
that morning.

“Bea, I’ve been here
all of three minutes. I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you.
How we’re going to get you put back together as quick as we can, and get you
home where you belong.”

“Fine with me. I never
have been able to tolerate hospitals. Full of deadly germs, you never
know—”

Bea stopped mid
sentence as her face flushed with color. Alarmed, Claudia squeezed the cool
small hand she was holding and bent closer.

“Bea? Bea, are you all
right?”

A very slight nod of
the head was all the response she got; Bea’s gaze drifted somewhere over her
shoulder. Claudia pressed her thumb into the pulse points of Bea’s wrist and
was rewarded with a regular beat.

“Um, I have a bit of a
surprise for you,” Bea murmured, inclining her head in the direction of the
door.

Claudia swiveled in
the hospital-issue plastic chair.

And nearly toppled out
of it.

Filling the frame of
the cramped room’s door, Andy Woods stood dressed in green-blue scrubs,
clutching a clipboard to his chest as if it were a shield. She recognized him
immediately, but the reaction that followed was anything but clear. Panic was
the dominant note, panic edged with surprise and wariness.

But even in that complicated
tangle, her brain registered one more item: what a compelling looking man Andy
still was. Five years had done little to change him. A trace of gray tinged his
unruly jet-black hair, and the furrows between his brows and at the corners of
his mouth were deeper than ever. But his forearms were still powerful, his
rigid stance hinting at the caged, raw energy packed into his frame. And his
flint-gray eyes were guarded, inscrutable, as always.

For a moment, surprise
briefly segued into a scowl before Andy arranged his features in a neutral
expression. Clearly he wasn’t one bit happier to be in the same room with
Claudia than she was.

“Andy?” Claudia
managed, her throat suddenly dry. She blinked her eyes hard several times.
Maybe he was an illusion, a blip in the synapses of her exhausted brain. After
all, she had been up half the night, then skipped breakfast before the
four-hour flight, the mix-up at the rental car counter, and a long drive
through the mountains.

Though if she were
going to go around conjuring up people from her past, Andy Woods would rank
somewhere at the bottom of her list. It wasn’t for nothing that she’d pushed
his memory deep down inside, down into a remote corner of her soul that she was
determined to keep buried forever.

And she just might
have succeeded—had been doing pretty well in fact, damn it—until he
showed up in Bea’s hospital room. Terrible sense of timing fate had, Claudia
reflected, not for the first time in her life.

Fate...or Bea. Claudia
wouldn’t put it past her tenacious grandmother to have schemed the whole
meeting. Although a hip and wrist fracture seemed like drastic measures to get
her in the same room with Andy. They meant a whole mess of trouble for a
seventy-eight-year-old woman—especially one who had nursed a hatred for
hospitals for most of those seventy-eight years.

Chalk one up for the
old Canfield stubborn streak.

“Hello, Claudia. I
guess I might have figured Bea was up to something. I...expected your father,”
Andy said, his voice heavily weighted with resignation. He made an awkward
motion with his hand, extending it as though he meant to take hers in a formal
shake, then letting it drop. “You’re looking well, Claudia.”
 

Andy spoke her name in
the same tone he might have employed to say “taxes” or “root canal”. Not at all
he way she remembered him saying it, once upon a time.

“Dad couldn’t get away
for a couple of days. I mean, since Bea’s already patched up, for the most
part. But you’ll forgive me,” she managed, forcing her chin up a notch and
slipping into the cool tone she’d found worked so well with some of her more
difficult colleagues. “It’s been such a long day. It’s good to see you
too...we’ll have to catch up on things sometime.”

Another awkward
silence. Claudia shot a glance at Bea, who lay propped up in her angled bed,
wearing a trace of a grin.

Like the Cheshire cat.

“Did...has Bea
mentioned that she’s been under my care?” Andy’s casual gesture across the room
included the white-haired figure who’d been silently watching their exchange
from the hospital bed.

“No. As a matter of
fact, until a few minutes ago I didn’t even know you were back in Lake Tahoe.”
And if Bea hadn’t taken a spill yesterday, Claudia might never have found out.

Grandmother Bea.
Claudia glared at her beloved grandmother, whose sudden silence seemed a little
too convenient. In the minutes since Claudia had arrived at the hospital, the
old lady had kept up her end of the conversation quite well, barely letting
Claudia get a word in. She’d complained about the hospital, the nurses, about
being stuck in a bed when the mountains were coming into the height of the
spring bloom.

But she hadn’t said a
thing about Andy.

“All right, Bea, what
do you have to say for yourself?” Andy said reproachfully.

The old woman managed
a faint shrug. “Oh, dear, Andrew, did I neglect to tell you about Claudia’s
visit? I’m afraid we elderly are given to these lapses.”

“You’re as sharp as a
tack, Bea,” Andy growled, “and you and I both know that you only ‘forget’
things when it suits your purpose.”

“Speaking of
forgetting to tell people things,” Claudia interrupted pointedly. “I should
think—”

“Oh, now, let’s not
waste time arguing about who told who what and focus on what’s important. Isn’t
it wonderful that the two of you are being reunited!” Bea lifted her tiny
wrinkled hands from the covers and pressed them together in a gesture of
childlike glee. “How long has it been, you two? Four years? Five?”

“Nobody’s being
reunited,” Claudia snapped. “I’m here to help you get on your feet again, and
that’s it. I just have a couple of days to spare and I plan to spend every
minute of them with you, like it or not, so I won’t have time for old
acquaintances.”

Claudia regretted her
word choice immediately. As dismayed as she was to see him again, she could
hardly get away with calling Andy an acquaintance. She needed to pull herself
together or risk letting him see how upset she was. “I’m sorry,” she amended,
forcing a steady gaze on Andy. “What I meant was, as much as I would
like—”

“I’m swamped, myself,”
Andy interrupted, his expression hard and unreadable. “I’ve been here for hours
and my day is just beginning.”

“Oh, Andy, you work
entirely too hard,” Bea said. “You always have. Always with your nose in a
book, always staying up until all hours of the night.”

“Med school isn’t
exactly a walk in the park,” Andy said. “They don’t give out diplomas for good
intentions.”

“Yes, well, was it
really necessary for you to be first in your class? Andrew, my dear, when will
you learn that you don’t need to be the very best at everything? Sometimes good
enough is good enough.”

“If I was just ‘good
enough’, Bea, odds are I wouldn’t have known about that new procedure you and I
were discussing earlier.”

Chastened, Bea eased
back into the soft pillow and frowned.

“Well, I know that.
And I do appreciate your skill. I trust you—unlike the rest of these
butchers around here. I wouldn’t let any of them near me.”

“Yes, yes, you’ve
shared your contempt of my colleagues,” Andy said, a ghost of a grin appearing
at the corners of his mouth. “They’re all scared of you, Bea.”

Watching the spirited
exchange between them, Claudia felt a twinge of jealousy. She had no idea that
they’d remained close.

Actually, she had no
idea that Andy had come back to live in Lake Tahoe. Never in five years of letters,
calls, and visits back East had Bea ever even mentioned Andy.

Well, of course, there
was the small fact that Claudia had forbidden her to.
I never want to hear his name again
, she’d said, and for once Bea
had done as she was told.

“Bea,” she muttered
under her breath, “you are a piece of work, you know that?”

Turning to Andy, she
made sure her features were neatly arranged in her best all-business
expression. “Andy, I’ve been up since before dawn, and I’m exhausted, so I’ll
be going soon. I hope it’s not too much of an imposition for me to ask you to
come back a little later? I’d like to talk privately with Bea.”

From the bed came a
coughing fit as Bea drew in too much breath at once, then managed to lift
herself up a little. “Now, now, Claudia,” she said in her most wheedling tone,
“I’m suddenly exhausted. This has all been too much for me. Andrew, I know you
can save all your poking and prodding until later, dear. Give an old lady a
break. Now since I’m going to have a little rest, why don’t you two go off
somewhere and have a cup of coffee?”

Andy rubbed his
forehead as though his own head were suddenly splitting. “Bea, I’m in the
middle of rounds. I know this will be difficult for you to believe, but I have
other patients, too. And as much as I enjoy your company, my number one concern
here is helping sick people get better, not my social life.”

“And I’m not letting
you off so easily,” Claudia added. “I’ve spoken to you twice since your fall.
How is it that you forgot to tell me about—about this?” She gestured
vaguely in Andy’s direction, feeling suddenly foolish.

“But sweetheart, you
knew Andrew was in medical school. For goodness sakes, he spent every minute he
wasn’t with you studying.”

“Oh, come off the
innocent act,” Claudia retorted, her face flooding with color at her
grandmother’s casual reference to their love affair. “You know what I meant. I
think you might have thought to mention that he was your personal physician.”

“My dear Claudia,” Bea
said, summoning a look ablaze with fire to her still-beautiful features, and
training the full power of her blue-eyed gaze upon her granddaughter. “You of
all people should know that I keep the confidences with which my loved ones
entrust me.”

Under her
grandmother’s scrutiny, Claudia felt her indignation wither. Bea’s pointed
reminder was a low blow, perhaps, but it was true nonetheless: she was the one
person in the world Claudia would trust with her deepest secret.

And had, for that
matter.

“Of course, Bea,” she
murmured, feeling the color seep into her face. She darted a glance at Andy,
and found him looking at her openly, though his eyes revealed nothing.

She meant to look
away. Andy was a stranger to her now; it wouldn’t do to stare. And yet
curiosity won out over propriety, curiosity and the remnants of an old
familiarity, a time when his face was hers to read whenever she wished.