A Light at Winter’s End

by Julia London

  “Now, see,” Jesse said, pointing at him, “you’re acting like that because you know I’m right—well, look here. She just couldn’t keep away from that charm of yours, could she?”

  Wyatt looked up. Holly had come back outside without the baby. “Hi,” she called as she walked down the steps of the porch. “I forgot to tell you that the cows were coming in from over there, too.” She pointed down the fence line.

  Wyatt peered past the windmill and water tank. He could see a bit of barbed wire curling away from the pole. Damn it. He stalked forward to have a look, skirting around the tank. The wire had in fact been cut here, too. He pivoted around and walked back to the drive. “Anyone been out here lately?” he demanded, and noted, for the record, Jesse’s withering look.

  Holly looked surprised. “What do you mean? I’ve been here—”

  “Besides you.”

  “I think my friend is asking if anyone has come out to work around the fence,” Jesse explained politely.

  Holly shook her head, and that strand of golden hair drifted across her cheek and eye. “Just the Russells.”

  “The Russells,” Wyatt repeated, and looked at Jesse.

  “Melissa Russell was a friend of my mom’s,” Holly said, and brushed the strand of hair with the back of her hand away from her cheek. “She and her sons were here the same day you were here.”

  Jesse suddenly smiled at Wyatt, clearly delighted to hear he’d been here before.

  Wyatt ignored him. “I think we should go have a chat with the Russell boys,” he suggested.

  “Just as soon as we fix that hole,” Jesse agreed, still smirking a little.

  “What … you think they cut the fence?” Holly asked, her pretty green eyes widening with astonishment. Why did women have to do that? Why couldn’t they all be as jaded as Wyatt was? “Why would they do that?”

  “Well, now, we don’t know if they did,” Jesse said. “But it’s kind of hard for a fence to get busted out more than once a day, and definitely not in two places. And honestly, Miss Fisher … the Russell boys have a reputation around here.”

  She stared at Jesse. She blinked. And then her brows dipped. “Then you might want to look at the fence down the road a bit. When I was out with Mason this morning, I noticed another hole.”

  Wyatt gritted his teeth. He was going to kill those kids. Right after they fixed his fence and spit-shined his shoes. “We’ll get it fixed,” he said, and looked at Jesse. “Let’s go.” He turned back to his truck.

  “What Wyatt means to say is, thank you,” he heard Jesse say. “He hasn’t been quite himself since that horse kicked him in the head.”

  Wyatt rolled his eyes, pretended he didn’t hear, and got in the pickup. Milo hopped into the bed and Jesse appeared a few minutes later, tossing their tools in the bed with Milo. He climbed in the passenger side, perched his elbow on the seat back, and looked at Wyatt. “Wyatt, I’m going to tell you what no one else in town has the guts to tell you, except for maybe Linda Gail.”

  “Do you want a job?” Wyatt asked gruffly.

  The question startled Jesse. “What?”

  “A job. You know, where you get up and go somewhere and work for pay—and not on your back.”

  “I am not going to be offended by that,” Jesse said amicably. “What sort of job?”

  “Helping me,” Wyatt said. He backed the truck up to turn it around. He saw Holly Fisher walking back to the old house. She was talking to the baby on her hip.

  There it was again, that gooey feeling. Wyatt wondered why she was here with that baby. It seemed strange to him, out of place. She didn’t even know if she had propane.

  “I’m listening,” Jesse said.

  “This isn’t a one-man operation anymore. I could use some help. I’ll pay you twenty bucks an hour, but there is one condition: no talking. I mean it, Jesse. You can talk about work, but nothing else. I don’t want to be hearing your opinions on every goddamn topic under the sun. Can you do that?”

  Jesse laughed. “Of course I can. If you want, I won’t talk at all.”

  “I want,” Wyatt said.

  “What about football?” Jesse asked. “Can we talk about football?”

  Wyatt rolled his eyes. He might live to regret this, but Jesse was a good hand. He glanced in his side-view mirror and watched Holly walk up the steps and across the porch and disappear inside of that run-down house.

  Yep. Those were some nice legs and, as long as he was looking, a nice, curvy rump. Wyatt was reminded of what it felt like inside to really notice a woman. It was a sudden rush of blood, a bona fide thrill, and he could feel that physical itch deep inside. It felt kind of odd to him now, he thought, as Jesse began to prattle about the Cowboys’ chances this season. But his thrill felt a little off center. Wyatt used to be like Jesse, dating as many women as he could, enjoying female company like a healthy man ought to do. Then he’d met Macy, of course, and everything had changed. His life had changed. He’d changed. He’d fallen so hard for Macy that he’d never been that guy again. He’d quit running around and he was entirely devoted to his girl, who became his wife.

  Now, two years after having his whole world smashed with life’s giant wrecking ball, Wyatt was pretty sure he would never be that guy again. He sure as hell wouldn’t feel that way again. These days he felt nothing but … old. To have this little nudge of attraction was more bothersome than inspiring, but he figured it was nothing that a beer or two wouldn’t dull.

  As they turned down the ranch-to-market road toward the Russell spread, Jesse was chatting enough to power a windmill, clearly ignoring Wyatt’s rule. The sun was beginning to sink into the edge of the earth, and Wyatt thought of the Fisher house, which now had plenty of cow patties for that little boy to avoid. Maybe he’d go around tomorrow with some decent firewood and clean that up. That seemed a fair way to apologize for his cows grazing her grass.

  Even if he had done her a favor by getting that lawn mowed.

  Chapter Nine

  Mason was not sleeping through the night. Holly guessed it was because he’d been bounced out of his comfortable home to strange new surroundings, and she hoped he would settle soon. But in the meantime, it was making for some very long days. A sleep-deprived baby was an unhappy baby.

  Holly was exhausted, emotionally, mentally, and physically. She’d spent yesterday moving furniture around to make the house more accessible to an increasingly mobile Mason. Holly’s mother had been freakishly fond of knickknacks, and Mason was managing to get his hands on each and every one; she’d ended boxing them up and hauling them out to the barn.

  She’d tried to work on her music for a while, but Mason had found her sheet music again, and it was still scattered all over the front room. She was up twice with him overnight, and then was awakened at the crack of dawn by a flock of damn mockingbirds. Holly had never noticed birds chirping in Austin, but out here a full-blown chorus lived in the tree right outside her window.

  Mason was still sleeping. Oh, sure, he could sleep through that ruckus, but if she played a single chord, he awoke crying.

  Holly got up and made her way down to the kitchen. The flour was still sitting out on the counter from the batch of cookies she’d made a couple of days ago. She decided she would make some more. A small voice in the back of her head reminded her that her clothes were getting a little tight, but Holly didn’t care. There was something about a major personal crisis that demanded a few batches of big, fat chocolate chip anti-anxiety pills.

  She’d found the recipe in her mother’s red-checkered Betty Crocker cookbook, her mother’s kitchen bible. Stuffed in between the pages were recipes torn from magazines and written on old index cards. In those pages, Holly had found the family favorites: chili, meat loaf, chicken-fried steak, fried tomatoes, English pea salad. And then there were the sweets: banana pudding, coconut cream pie, cinnamon rolls, strawberry cake, and cherry pudding pie. All of them memories.

  Holly could still see her mother in the kitchen wi
th the cookbook, her flour-dusted finger running down the list of ingredients, her apron stretched across her belly. As Holly had never been much help in the kitchen, she felt strange being the one to wear the apron now, but she’d strapped it on like armor and started with the homemade chocolate chip cookies.

  It was odd how the life she’d known was disappearing a little more each day, and in its place was Mason. She was flustered by him, frustrated by him … but she also marveled at him, delighted in him, and realized the afternoon when she’d made her first batch of cookies and watched him pick up the pieces with his fingers and push them into his mouth, that she was falling in love with the little guy. Of course she loved him. Mason was her nephew and she’d loved him from the beginning. But she hadn’t loved him like this—not in the way that her every waking thought included him. Not in the way that made her want, above all else, to make him happy, to see him smile, to hear him laugh. She felt protective of him. Loren was way too self-centered to ever pay attention to Mason. And Hannah? Holly didn’t know what she thought of Hannah anymore. She recognized that with her increasing love for all things Mason, her fury with Hannah was slowly fading.

  Holly was worried about her sister. The more Holly was with Mason, the more impossible she believed it would be to leave him behind; it seemed to her that as Hannah did leave him behind, she must have been in really bad shape. What was it? What was it that had sent Hannah into rehab?

  Holly couldn’t think about that all the time. It brought her down, messed with her head, and made her music that much harder to create. And besides, she had more pressing issues, like a meeting with a lawyer this afternoon. She’d gotten the name from Melissa Russell. “If Jillian Harper doesn’t know about wills, she’ll know someone who does,” Melissa had said.

  So Holly had finally made the call she should have made months ago. And just as soon as she was through with her meeting, she’d head to the grocery story, because there was baking and cooking to be done. She made a grocery list. She needed diapers. When did kids learn how to use a toilet, anyway? Was she supposed to be doing something about that? She made a mental note to look that up.

  Groceries. Milk for Mason. Peanut butter for her. More flour, more chocolate chips. And ingredients for her mother’s red velvet cake—she’d been craving that. And her mother’s Mexican pie casserole. Holly looked at the list and frowned. Her days of shopping at Whole Foods for organic were temporarily suspended due to her location. She would need to find an Internet café in town to check her bank balance, because there was no Internet connection here on Mars. That was because her mother had not been a fan of computers. “People spend way too much time on them,” she’d said dismissively, but Holly knew she’d been intimidated by the concept of computers and the Internet. Her mother had not been the sort to own up to her fears—even the fear of dying. Peggy Fisher was always too concerned about how she appeared to the world, and a fear of dying would be perceived as weak. Holly had asked her one day if she was afraid. “Of what?” her mother had scoffed with a flick of her wrist. “Everyone has to die.”

  Yes, but most people didn’t know when that was going to happen.

  The grocery list made, the cookies baked, Holly dressed and got Mason up. She fed him baby oatmeal, which he did not like. When she’d managed to stuff as many spoonfuls down him as she thought she could get, she put him in the living room and picked up her guitar. Mason was in the living room with the train set Holly had found in the nursery, so she got out a blank sheet of staff paper and started playing around with a melody and lyrics that had been in her head for a while.

  You’ll remember me the way I used to be

  And you’ll wonder if we could have made it work.

  You’ll remember me the way I used to be

  Only now it won’t have to hurt.

  She’d just found the rhythm she was wanting when the sound of the piano startled her. Mason was standing with one foot on top of the other—one shoe missing again—and his hands on the keys, banging and laughing. He was a little round ball of drooling happiness. Holly smiled and put down her guitar. She wondered, as she stood up to fetch him, if Hannah thought about him. Did she wonder if he was okay? If he was eating? If he was walking or talking? Holly thought of all the other abandoned babies out there, all of them as cute as Mason. It was gut wrenching to think about, and for the umpteenth time Holly was glad she’d been home the day Hannah had lost her mind.

  Mason banged again, then put his mouth on the keys.

  “Okay, no eating the piano. Aunt Holly doesn’t like touching slobber when she’s working,” she said lightly. “Anyway, I’ve got something for you right here,” she added, and fetched one of seven washcloths that were in the freezer. Hopalong Cassidy had been right about that—frozen washcloths worked brilliantly for teething.

  Hopalong Cassidy was a handsome muse for such a cold fish, she thought idly. She had a mental image of him standing at the bottom of her porch steps, his black hair pulled back into a little ponytail—which, much to her surprise, she’d found incredibly sexy on a Texas cowboy—and his vivid blue eyes locked on her, the shadow of a dark beard on his tanned face. He was a big man, tall and lean and muscular. He looked like he could lift the cows he was so mad at and toss them over the fence.

  The first time Holly had met him, she’d been wary of him: he’d hardly said two words and had looked at her like he couldn’t quite figure out who or what she was. She remembered that his jeans were so worn that they looked as smooth and fit as well as a leather glove. He could have stepped out of a Marlboro ad.

  The second time she’d met him, she’d wondered who or what had planted a stick so firmly up his butt that he could hardly even speak. He’d kept staring at her, his gaze flicking over her, then looking away. Then back again. Thankfully, he’d had Jesse along to do his talking.

  Jesse … Now, there was an attractive man, the type of man who would have Ossana doing backflips. But Jesse was too cute. Holly knew Jesse; she’d known dozens of Jesses. She’d danced with them, drunk with them, and dated more Jesses in her life than was reasonable, even for someone as perpetually single as she was. They were always drop-dead gorgeous, always charming, and always bad for you in the end.

  Holly pulled Mason away from the piano and put him on the floor and handed him the frozen washcloth. Mason bit down on it but then tossed it aside and pulled himself up on the coffee table. “Da,” he said. “Da da da da.” He let go of the table and stood on his own two feet, his hands out.

  Holly laughed. Mason had been doing this for a couple of days now, pulling himself up and standing all by himself. And he was so proud of himself! He grinned, and Holly squatted down, holding out her arms to him. “Come on, Mase,” she said. “Come on, come over to Aunt Holly.”

  Mason wobbled. Almost casually, he put one foot in front of the other and stepped away from the coffee table. He stood there a moment, looking almost alarmed by what he’d done.

  “You can do it!” she gleefully encouraged him. “Look at you, you’re doing it! You’re a big boy, Mason!”

  He teetered for a moment, wavering between planting himself on the worn carpet or walking, and suddenly took several steps toward Holly before falling on his rump.

  “Mason!” Holly cried with delight. She grabbed him up and fell onto her back, holding him above her. “Mason, you walked! You walked, you walked! I am so proud of you!” She gathered him to her in a big bear hug. Mason giggled and tucked up under her arm as she rolled around the floor with him.

  Holly sat up and put Mason on his feet, letting him hold on to the tips of her fingers before slowly pulling one hand away. She hopped up and was backing up, pulling that last finger away from him, when someone knocked at the door. The sound of it knocked Mason off his game; he fell onto his rump. “Bubby dee,” he said.

  “Bubby dee is right,” Holly said, and leaned around to look out the window. Speaking of the Marlboro Man, there he was on the porch, his weight on one hip, his arms folded ac
ross his chest as if he didn’t want to be on her porch at all, and his dog standing by his side. “Why?” Holly muttered, and walked to the door. She opened it and stared through the screen. “Hello, Wyatt. Are the cows out again?”

  “No. I’m sorry to bother you, and I won’t keep you. But I brought you some firewood.”

  “Firewood?” Holly didn’t know what to think about that. “You brought me firewood?” Curious, she opened the screen door a little to see him better. He’d been working, obviously. A sheen of perspiration covered his skin.

  His dog instantly stuck his muzzle into the crack, sniffing in the direction of Mason. “Milo, sit,” Wyatt said sternly, and the dog sat. But his tail was wagging furiously, and he was grinning at Mason. “You don’t have any,” he said, his gaze still on the dog.

  “Pardon?”

  “Firewood,” he said, and lifted his gaze to hers.

  His eyes really were an unusual color of blue. Cobalt blue, she thought. His eyes the color of a blue jay’s breast, his smile as warm as a soft caress …

  “You said you didn’t have any, and that green wood might have smoked you out of your house. I’ve got plenty, and we were heading over here anyway, so I stacked it by the shed. It’s probably enough to get you through winter.”

  He’d brought her enough wood for winter? Someone had been stacking firewood outside and she hadn’t known it? That didn’t exactly make her feel warm and fuzzy; it made her feel entirely too vulnerable. First cows, now this.

  “Wow,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was around. I didn’t hear anything. I wonder what else I haven’t heard out here.”

  “Hard not to hear things out here,” he said. “Sound carries.” He pulled the tail of his shirt from the waist of his jeans and used it to wipe his face. Holly saw his abdomen, lean, with a row of tight muscles.

  Wyatt paused to give her a look.

  Holly realized she was staring. Whoa. “That’s right neighborly,” she said in an exaggerated Texas accent. “But you didn’t need to go to any trouble.” Mason suddenly stuck his head through her legs, and Milo began to whimper, wanting at him. Holly picked the boy up.