Unexpected Family (18 page)

She turned back just in time to catch Walter glaring at the boy.

“What?” Ben asked. “There are a lot of reins here.”

“Actually,” she said, plunking herself down in front of the piles of leather, across from Ben. “I was wondering if I could look at the pieces you’re getting rid of.”

“The garbage?” Walter asked.

“You know what they say—one man’s garbage is another woman’s jackpot.”

“Suit yourself.” Walter used his cane to push a small pile of beat-up leather straps at her. She dug into it with gusto, sorting pieces she could salvage and pieces that were too far gone.

“So,” she said, needing to occupy her brain as well as her hands if only to fill the empty space Jeremiah used to fill. “What are we talking about?”

Ben and Walter shared a look. Apparently there wasn’t a whole lot of talking going on yet.

“Do you have any stories about my mom?” Ben blurted.

“Do I?” Lucy cried, taking her own cloth from the pile to clean the ruined leather. Distressed leather was cool but distressed leather that smelled like horse—not so cool. “Your mom used to babysit Mia and me when we were kids.” She launched into the story about their epic and elaborate games of hide-and-seek in the barn.

“And then…” she cried, lost in the memories, “when we’d hear Walter coming in, we’d—”

She stopped, suddenly embarrassed. They’d been little shits to Walter when Mom and Dad weren’t around.

“What?” Ben asked, wide-eyed, the leather forgotten in his lap.

“Nothing—” She winced.

“Go ahead,” Walter said, not looking up from his oil and cloth and the strip of leather he was working on. “Tell him.”

“We’d hide Walter’s things. His glasses, his hat. We’d bury them in the hay. We’d move his horse between stables. We were…we were mean.”

“Mom?” Ben asked, shocked and delighted at the same time. “Mean?”

“It wasn’t ever her idea,” Lucy said. “It was always Mia and me.”

An apology rose to her lips but she swallowed it down. Those little pranks had been righteous retribution for what Walter had let Vicki do to Jack when they were all kids. Lucy and Mia had hidden his things and felt like Robin Hood, righting wrongs.

“Do you think I didn’t know?” Walter asked.

Lucy blinked. “Did you… I mean, you never said anything. Or stopped us.”

“I could hear you giggling while I dug through hay for my hat. I knew what you were doing.” He looked up and Lucy saw intense blue eyes, less runny and more startling these days. More piercing. “And why.”

Lucy broke eye contact first, discomfited by the vulnerability in his eyes. Yesterday, Mia had said that Walter had paid for all his crimes and Lucy had dismissed the notion.

But maybe she was wrong.

* * *

W
HEN
J
EREMIAH
SAW
Dr. Gilman that week, he felt compelled to confess why he’d canceled last Saturday’s appointment.

“Would you like to reschedule our meetings to a different day?” she asked.

“No. Saturday’s fine.”

“But if you’re going to be dating…?” She trailed off suggestively, nothing but hope and approval in her face. Jeremiah couldn’t meet her eyes so he stared at his hands, ran his thumb over a cut on his palm.

“I’m not dating—”

“Do you want to talk about this?”

“No.”

“Jeremiah—”

“No. I don’t.”

It was bad enough seeing Lucy when he came to pick up Ben, sitting cross-legged at Walter’s feet beside Ben, a pile of reins between them.

He’d thought it was a one-off. There simply was no way Lucy was going to hang out with Walter and Ben every day. But yesterday, when he’d driven up, she was there laughing at something Walter had said. Her throat, pale pink and elegant, had been tipped back, her hair a dark spill over her blue shirt.

Ben and Walter were staring at her like she was the sun and they’d just come out of a cave. He’d known exactly how they felt. And he’d wondered if she was doing it on purpose. Some kind of ploy to get him to reconsider their breakup. A way to get under his skin.

“How is Ben doing?” Dr. Gilman asked.

Jeremiah didn’t know how to answer that. There were no more tantrums. The running away had stopped, too. Yesterday his teacher had said that Ben was starting to take part in class discussions. Raising his hand even.

Which was all great, but there was this obsessive collecting of stories and pictures. He was like an emotional hoarder. It couldn’t be healthy.

“He cries at night,” Jeremiah said. “I can hear him through his door.”

“Makes sense,” Dr. Gilman said. “He’s grieving.”

“Yeah, but how long does this last?”

Dr. Gilman put down her notebook and stared at him. The intent in her gaze felt like a razor against his skin. Sensing danger, his balls curled up into his belly.

“Have you grieved?” Dr. Gilman asked.

“For my sister? Yeah. Of course.” Cried like a baby through her funeral. Boxed up her clothes and sobbed. Had to call Cynthia to help him.

“No. Have you grieved for your old life? For the rodeo? For the life you lived before you took over caring for the boys?”

His stomach dropped and his brain felt too light. His skin painfully tight. Panicked, suddenly shaking with adrenaline, he glanced up at the clock.

“Time’s up, Dr. Gilman.”

“Jeremiah—?”

He didn’t stop. Didn’t listen. He grabbed his hat from the stand by the door and slipped out the door. But his stomach stayed in his leaden legs and his skin itched like it wanted to come off.

* * *

A
NOTHER
WEEK
WENT
BY
and Lucy found herself, gathering more steam every day, pulling herself from the black hole the past year had buried her in. And every morning she woke up expecting this to be the day she would leave. To head, if not back to Los Angeles, then into some new direction on some new adventure.

But instead her eyes opened and she saw the familiar bedspread, the familiar sun falling through her window. The sound of her mother and sister talking in the kitchen. It all gave her that heady sense of home that she’d been missing for five years.

This,
her heart seemed to say,
is exactly where I want to be. Here.

It wasn’t to say the situation was perfect. She needed her own space, an apartment, maybe in town. And she’d cut off her own arm for some sushi and a proper latte. But she had peace and quiet, privacy to work, wide-open spaces to walk. When her head got tired of designing—a heretofore unheard of balance in her life that was unexpectedly and deliciously satisfying—she had honest ranch work to do.

And for about ten minutes twice a week, she had Jeremiah.

Every morning, after deciding she wasn’t ready to leave, she tested what remained of her feelings for Jeremiah. Like lifting the lid off a rain bucket, she checked the levels and to her great pain and chagrin, the levels stayed the same. The infatuation wasn’t ending. These feelings were not fleeting. Twice a week, her heart stopped at the sight of his truck in the driveway.

And every day—at least twenty times per day—when her mind was the most still, when she was in the garden or tearing apart her jewelry only to rebuild it with leather and metal from scraps of tack, she hoped Jeremiah was okay. If she couldn’t be with him, she wanted the sacrifice to be worth something. If he was better off without her, so be it.

Thursday morning, she awoke and felt sick of herself.

The longer she lay there, the more it felt as if her chest was collapsing under the pressure of her yearning. Her longing to see him. Talk to him.
Maybe today he’d stay long enough to talk,
she thought, and then hated herself.

Honestly, this is not you. Do not let that man turn you into this. Get out of bed.

That seemed a bit extreme so she compromised by pawing around her bedside table for her cell phone.

Within ten minutes she’d called her real estate agent and told her to put the condo on the market in earnest. And sell it, sooner rather than later.

“What about your stuff? I put what was here in storage—”

“I’ll come and get it in a few days.”

Hanging up the phone on Los Angeles and her ties there felt liberating. As if she’d finally managed to get rid of the stony weight she’d been pretending wasn’t killing her back. She could go and pick up their stuff and then she’d put that city in her rearview mirror for good.

Amber,
she thought suddenly.
And garnets. Oh, my gosh, in a bridal tiara.

Sitting up, she grabbed the notebook she’d been keeping by her bed and found a blank page. She found one of the ten charcoal pencils she kept close by and frantically started to sketch. With delicate points of amber and garnet, it would be as if golden red rain had been caught in the bride’s hair.

Wow,
she thought when she was done.
Expensive. One of a kind.
Meredith Van Loan came to mind again and she grabbed the phone.
It would be easy to call her. Just press the button.

You need pieces to show her,
she told herself.
You
can’t just call her and say, “Hey, I’ve got some sketches that I think you’d like.”

Nope. It wasn’t time. She closed the phone, got out of bed and pulled on some clothes. She had a couple hundred dollars from the ill-fated taxi business. Perhaps it was time to see what she could scrounge together in terms of materials and tools.

Perhaps it was time to scrounge together a second chance.

* * *

J
EREMIAH
WASN
’
T
SLEEPING
WELL
. He wasn’t eating well, either. He wasn’t actually doing anything well.

Lucy was a thorn under his skin. He’d narrowed their contact down to twenty minutes a week and somehow those twenty minutes had become painfully paramount in his life.

Bullshit,
he thought, wishing that denying it made it less true. With his stomach in knots, he drove over Friday afternoon to pick up Ben.

Ignore her,
he told himself.
Just ignore her.

But she made herself impossible to ignore, sitting right there when he drove up. She wore tight jeans and a silky shirt that had no business being so close to a barn. And what was she doing with Ben and Walter, anyway? If she was trying to torture him, she was succeeding.

He slammed the door behind him, probably too hard, if the looks on everyone’s startled faces were anything to measure by. As he stomped up to them, his evil mood grew blacker. Lucy must have picked up on his viciousness because she stood and headed into the barn.

Walter stood, too, looking like a man who had no need of a nine-year-old nurse.

“Ben,” Walter said. “Help me inside, would you?”

“Ah, sure,” Ben said as he stretched the reins he’d been working on into the grass to dry. He stood, taking Walter’s elbow. “I’ll…I’ll be right back,” he said to Jeremiah.

“Fine,” Jeremiah snapped, and then got ahold of himself. “Sorry, Ben, yes, go on. I’ll wait here.”

It was foolish, crazy even, but it suddenly felt as if the entire universe was conspiring to throw him into Lucy’s orbit. And he was no good at resisting. Terrible at it.

Ben and Walter crossed the rutted parking area and Jeremiah resisted his base instinct for exactly ten seconds before spinning on his heel and stomping into the barn. He found her in the cool shadows of the tack room, her back to him; she stood at the sink, rinsing out rags. Torn in pieces by his instincts and demons he could only stand there for a second before finally barking, “What are you trying to do?”

Water sprayed the wall and she whirled, furious. “Good God, Jeremiah, why are you sneaking up on me?”

He glared at her and despite his better sense stepped farther into the room. “Why are you hanging out with Ben and Walter?”

She turned off the faucet and faced him. Water splats had turned her white shirt transparent in places and it clung to her, revealing the lace at the edge of her bra, the pink skin of her stomach, the shadow just under her collarbone.

Lust did not improve his mood.

“Did… Is Ben upset about it?” she asked.

“No. I am.”

She blinked. “Why?”

“I—”
I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be reminded of you. I’m tired of having you in my head.
“I just think it’s suspicious,” he said. “You don’t spend any time with Ben when we’re sleeping together and then, when we’re not, you’re suddenly sitting beside him at Walter’s feet two days a week.”

“Wait a minute…you think it’s about you?” The gentle way she said it proved what an idiot he was, but he was committed to this path.

Her eyes narrowed before she wiped her hand off on her thighs and started to walk past him.

Let her go,
he told himself, his hands.
Nothing good will come of touching her.
But when she was just past him, he turned and grabbed her elbow.

Her palm connected with his cheek and his whole head snapped back under the force of her blow. There was a breath—a moment for reason to prevail, for sense to guide his actions—but instead he grabbed her shoulders, yanking her against him and his lips smashed against hers.

She fought and he tried not to like it. He tried to let her go, but the best he could do was lift his lips from hers and press his forehead to the top of her head, his hands still holding her in an iron grip.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I miss you. I can’t… I see you and I miss you and I can’t remember why it’s a bad idea to kiss you or touch you. I’m sorry. I am—”

She leaned away from him; her eyes, wise and knowing and feminine, searched his and saw all his cracks and weaknesses.

“You’re a mess,” she whispered, and all he could do was try to laugh, but it came out sounding like a groan. Her arms lifted and he let her go, because he wasn’t the kind of guy to kiss a girl against her will, or…well, he didn’t used to be.

But then her arms wrapped around his neck and she was kissing him again and it was sweet. It was warm and tender. Caring. It wasn’t a kiss between strangers acting on their casual attraction. It was the kiss of friends, acting on their feelings.