Country Bride

by Debbie Macomber

  Oh, this was bad. Really, really bad. Not only did she have to once more confront a life’s calling she thought she’d left behind, but working with Taryn was bound to put her into repeated contact with Brodie.

  A few days ago, she had thought that wouldn’t matter. She had assumed that nothing could induce her to soften toward a man she disliked so instinctively. She was beginning to have the very uneasy feeling she might have been a smidge optimistic in that blind confidence in her ability to resist the man.

  * * *

  What was it about Evie Blanchard that seeped under his skin like water wearing away at shale?

  Fifteen minutes later, Brodie watched her drive through the gates and back toward town in her sporty little Honda SUV and wondered how one small, slender woman could leave him feeling as if he’d just tangled with a badger in a bad mood.

  Every time he was with her, he felt itchy and off balance and he didn’t like it. A big part of it was this inconvenient attraction. Intellectually, he knew damn well he shouldn’t be so drawn to her. It made no sense at all, especially when they approached the world from completely different stratospheres when it came to, oh, just about everything. Politics, philosophy, business. Probably because of the attention deficit disorder he still battled, he craved order in his life, neat and organized structure to help him cope with the chaos that was his mind sometimes.

  In contrast, Evie’s personality was like the beads and bangles she tended to favor—colorful, splashy, unique.

  He knew his reaction to her was purely physical. Something about that lithe body, her delicate, sun-kissed features, all that sumptuous, silky honey-blond hair just reached into his gut and twisted hard.

  Having her here in his house for the next few weeks would be an exercise in self-restraint, especially when his unruly mind drifted into all kinds of unwelcome areas, like wondering just what she would do if he gave in to temptation and tasted that mobile, fascinating mouth of hers.

  If he tried it, he didn’t doubt she would probably shut him down faster than that pissed-off badger would go for his throat if he ventured into its personal space.

  He couldn’t afford to antagonize her any more than he seemed to do just by simply breathing. The woman knew her stuff. His mother was right. He hadn’t even seen her work with Taryn yet but he sensed knowledge and competence in the cool appraisal she’d given the renovations to the house.

  He was impressed, despite his instinctive objections, by her firm assurance that she planned to begin working immediately with Taryn. How could he help but respect her willingness to jump right in, especially when she was still quite obviously reluctant to take on Taryn’s therapy.

  Absolute authority, Evie had demanded he give her. He shook his head, watching as her little SUV headed down the hill. That wasn’t going to be an easy thing to surrender but he understood the wisdom of it. In every one of his endeavors, someone needed to be the boss. Sometimes he refused to relinquish that role but most of the time he had seen the wisdom and efficiency in handing it off to someone else he trusted. Like it or not, this was going to have to be one of those times. If he second-guessed every decision, she might bolt before the two weeks were up.

  Already, he could tell he wasn’t going to be satisfied with her agreement to only help Taryn transition to a home program. He wanted her here permanently. She was the best choice to help Taryn; he knew it in that same gut that responded so physically to Evie as a beautiful woman—which meant he would have to do everything in his power to convince her to stay beyond that initial two weeks.

  What choice did he have? She was absolutely right. He intended to do every freaking thing possible to make sure his daughter had the best chance at a normal life, no matter what the cost.

  Four

  Home.

  She was almost home.

  Taryn looked out the window of the van. Town. Trees. Mountains.

  Home.

  She was glad. So glad.

  She shifted, back aching from the wheelchair.

  “We’re almost there, baby.” Her dad spoke from the front seat.

  “Only a few more miles.” Grandma smiled. She looked pretty. Tired.

  No more hospital. Her friends. Her room.

  Normal.

  She heard the word just right in her head but she when she tried to talk, she could only make a stupid sound. “Noorrmmm.”

  Grandma smiled again. “You’re going to be surprised. Your dad’s been so busy fixing things up for you. You’ve got a beautiful new room downstairs with a roll-in shower in the bathroom and your own private workout space.”

  She frowned. “No. Up.” She thought of posters on the wall, her pillow couch, purple walls. Her room.

  Her dad turned, frowning. “We don’t have an elevator yet and you’re a ways from tackling the stairs, kiddo. This will be better.”

  She wanted her room. Window seat, canopy bed, everything. She wanted to argue but the words caught. “No. Up.”

  “Wait until you see your new room, Taryn.” Dad’s smile was fake, too big. “We painted the trim your favorite color and it has a really nice view. I think you’re going to love it.”

  She shook her head. She wouldn’t.

  This wasn’t right. She was going home but it wasn’t the same. Out the window, she saw trees, flowers, mountains.

  Home.

  Everything else was normal. Not her. Not anymore. Never again.

  She was broken.

  * * *

  In the rearview mirror, Brodie watched his daughter’s chin tremble and he thought she would cry. He’d been afraid of this. She wanted her regular room, her regular life. That she couldn’t have those things right now would be one more stark reality-check for a girl who had endured far too many already.

  He kept his gaze on the road as he drove the wheelchair-accessible van he’d purchased for an ungodly amount from a dealership in Loveland just a few days earlier, but he allowed himself occasional glances at Taryn in her wheelchair—secured by latches to the lowered floor behind the driver and passenger seats—until finally the distress in her features eased a little.

  She was still pretty, his baby girl. Her facial features might seem a little more slack than before the accident and she would always have faint traces of scars but most of them were beneath her hairline.

  Her hair was short since they’d had to shave it during her various procedures, but it was dark and impishly curly, and her eyes were still the same blue of the sky just before a twilight thunderstorm. He wondered if others would see the courage and strength inside her or if they would only register the wheelchair, the scars, the halting, mangled words.

  “Oh, it will be nice to be home,” Katherine said from the seat beside him.

  She gazed out the window as if she’d been away for years and he was grateful all over again for his mother’s sacrifices for him and his daughter. After the accident, Katherine had basically given up her own life and moved to Denver to stay at Taryn’s bedside around the clock. He had spent as much time at the hospital as he could and had turned many of his business responsibilities over to his associates at Thorne and Company. He had eventually set up a mobile office at the apartment they had rented near the hospital and had scrambled the best he could to keep everything running smoothly.

  “Look at that,” Katherine suddenly exclaimed.

  He followed the direction she was pointing and saw a six-foot-long poster driven with stakes into a grassy parking strip near Miners’ Park. “Welcome Home, Taryn,” he read. A little farther, splashed in washable paint in the window of a fast-food restaurant, was the same message.

  On the marquee at the grocery store that usually broadcast the latest sale on chicken legs or a good buy on broccoli was another one. “We love you, Taryn.”

  And as they headed through to
wn, he saw another message in big letters on the street, “Taryn Rocks!”

  The kids at the high school had probably done it, since it was similar to the kind of messages displayed during the Paint the Town event of Homecoming Week.

  He was grateful for the sentiment, even as a petty little part of him thought with some bitterness that the message might have been a little more effective if a few of them could have been bothered to visit her on a regular basis in the hospital.

  That wasn’t completely fair, he knew. The first few weeks after she’d come out of a coma, Taryn had been inundated with visitors. Too many, really. The cheerleading squad, of which she was still technically a part, the captains of the football team, the student body officers.

  Eventually those visits had dwindled to basically nothing, until the last time anybody from Hope’s Crossing High School stopped in to see her had been about a month ago.

  He supposed he couldn’t really blame the kids. It was obvious Taryn wasn’t the same social bug she had been. She couldn’t carry on a conversation yet, not really, and while many teenagers he knew didn’t particularly need anybody else to participate when they jabbered on about basically nothing, it would have been a little awkward.

  This gesture, small though it might have been, was something. He could focus on that, he thought as his mother pointed out all the signs to Taryn, who smiled slightly at each one.

  Though he could have easily circumvented driving through the main business district of downtown to reach their home in the foothills, he could tell the outpouring of support had touched Katherine. This was a small thing he could give his mother to thank her for all her help these last weeks. A few more moments of driving wouldn’t hurt.

  More Welcome Home signs hung on several of the storefronts downtown, including the bead store, the café and even Maura Parker’s bookstore.

  “We should have put something up at the sporting-goods store and the restaurants,” he said. “I didn’t think about it. I’m glad someone else in town did.”

  “We’ve had a few other things on our minds.”

  “True enough.” He smiled, grateful all over again for her steady strength these last few months. He would have foundered on the rocks and sunk without her.

  He had always loved his mother but that natural emotion had sometimes been tempered over the years by a low, vague simmer of anger he hadn’t really acknowledged. Why would someone as kind and giving as his mother ever stay with a man like his father, a hard, uncompromising man with no sense of humor about life and little patience for a son with learning deficits and a gnat-short attention span?

  That frustration seemed far away and unimportant now when he considered all Katherine had done for Taryn since the accident. He supposed an adult child never really understood or appreciated the best qualities of a parent until they had walked a difficult road together.

  She was growing older. It was a sobering reality made more clear in the harsh afternoon sunlight when he saw new lines around her mouth, a few gray streaks she usually ruthlessly subdued with artful hair color.

  “You ought to think about taking a trip somewhere in the next few months,” he said suddenly. “A cruise or a trip back to Provence or something. Lord knows you deserve it and we can certainly hobble along without you for a month or so.”

  “Maybe next spring, when things settle down a little.”

  Spring seemed a long way off to him right now. The aspens were already turning a pale gold around the edges and in only a few months Hope’s Crossing would be covered in snow and the skiers would return like the swallows at Capistrano.

  “Ice.” Taryn suddenly spoke up.

  Considering what he’d just been thinking about, he wondered if she had somehow read his mind.

  “It’s August, sweetheart,” he answered. “No ice around, at least for a few more months.” The idea of coping with the wheelchair ramp around town in the snow was daunting but maybe by then they wouldn’t need this van.

  “Ice!” she said more urgently, looking out the van window with more animation than he’d seen since they had left the care center. He sent a quick, helpless look to his mother, who shrugged, obviously as baffled as he was.

  An instant later, they passed a little stand shaped like a Swiss chalet, planted in a small graveled parking lot on the outskirts of downtown. A few people sat under umbrella-topped tables holding foam cups and, as he caught them out of the corner of his gaze, a light switched on.

  “Oh! Ice! Shave ice!” he exclaimed.

  Taryn gave her tiny, lopsided smile and nodded and he felt as if he’d just skied a black-diamond run on pure, fresh powder.

  Though he was impatient to get her home and begin the next phase of this crazy journey they’d traveled since April, Taryn had asked him for something. She had actually communicated a need and, more importantly, he’d understood it. It seemed like a red-letter moment that ought to be celebrated—despite the fact that she wouldn’t be able to hold the cup by herself or feed herself the treat.

  “You want a shave ice, you’ve got it, sweetheart.”

  He turned the van around and by some miracle, he found a fortuitous parking space a moment later, sandwiched between a flashy red convertible with rental plates and a minivan with a luggage bag bungeed to the roof. The summer tourists were still out in force, apparently. He’d missed most of the onslaught while relocated in Denver.

  “What flavor?”

  Her brow furrowed as she considered her options and then she gave that smile that was a lopsided shadow of her former mischievous grin. “Blue.”

  He had to guess that meant raspberry. That had been a favorite flavor of hers before the accident and he was heartened at this evidence that, while so many things had changed about his daughter, he could still find traces inside of all the things that made her Taryn.

  He opened his car door. “Mom? Do you want one?”

  Katherine looked elegantly amused. “I think I’ll pass today. But thank you.”

  The afternoon was warm but mountain-pleasant compared to the heat wave they’d left down in Denver. Hope’s Crossing consistently enjoyed temperatures about ten degrees cooler than the metro area, one reason tourists even from the city enjoyed coming to town, to visit the unique shops and eat in the town’s many restaurants.

  He recognized the teenager working at the shave-ice stand as one of Taryn’s friends from elementary school, Hannah Kirk. Before he had moved up to the Aspen Ridge area, the girl and her family had been neighbors.

  “Hi, Hannah.”

  She set down the washcloth she had been using to wipe down the counter, probably sticky from an afternoon of serving up syrupy treats. “Hi, Mr. Thorne,” she said. “How’s Taryn? I heard she might be coming home today.”

  “She is. Right now, in fact. She’s in the van over there. We were just driving past on our way home and she asked for a shave ice.”

  Hannah beamed. “She asked for a shave ice? That’s great. I heard she couldn’t talk,” she faltered, the excitement on her slightly round features fading to embarrassment, as if she was afraid she’d just said something rude. “Sorry. I mean...”

  “She can talk. It’s still a little tough to understand her sometimes so she just doesn’t say much. Only the important things. I guess she really wanted a shave ice.”

  “I can sure help you with that. What size?”

  “Let’s go with a medium. She wanted blue raspberry. I’ll take a peach coconut, medium.”

  He knew it was straight sugar but he figured every once in a while a guy was entitled to enjoy something lousy for him. Why that made him suddenly think of Evie Blanchard, he didn’t want to guess.

  While he waited for Hannah to run the ice in the grinder—a process that seemed to take roughly the equivalent time to carve a masterpiece out of marble—he stood beside the
faux chalet, looking at Main Street. The town looked warm and comfortable in the afternoon sunlight, full of parents pushing strollers, an elderly couple walking arm in arm, a couple of joggers with their white iPod earbud tethers dangling.

  He loved Hope’s Crossing. When he was a kid, he couldn’t leave fast enough and thought it was a town full of provincial people with small minds and smaller dreams. But this was the place he’d come to after his marriage had fallen apart, when he had been a lost and immature twenty-four-year-old kid suddenly saddled with a three-year-old girl he didn’t know what the hell to do with.

  If his father hadn’t just died, he wasn’t sure he would have come home, even as desperate as he’d been for his mother’s help with Taryn. Raymond Thorne’s massive heart attack at that particular juncture of Brodie’s life was probably the bastard’s single act of kindness toward him.

  He was mulling that cheerful thought when a teenage boy with streaked blond hair rode up on a high-dollar mountain bike wearing board shorts and a black T-shirt with a vulgar picture on the front.

  “Hey, Hannah-banana. Give me a medium watermelon.”

  Raw fury curled through Brodie. He could taste it in the back of his throat, sharp and acrid. He hated this kid with every microcell of his heart and it took all the discipline he’d learned in his ski-jumping days to keep from grabbing the kid and shoving his face into that freezer full of ice beside the stand.

  He stepped around the side of the fake little chalet and had the tiny satisfaction of seeing the kid’s features go a little pale under his summer tan.

  “Nice bike,” he said to Charlie Beaumont, the son of a bitch who had ruined Taryn’s life.

  The kid looked as if he would rather be anywhere else on earth, as if he were tempted to climb back onto his bike and race away. Hot color washed up to replace his paleness and he didn’t meet Brodie’s gaze.

  “Mr. Thorne,” he muttered.

  Brodie could think of a hundred things he would like to say to this kid, whose position of wealth and privilege apparently led him to think he could destroy lives around him with impunity from his choices.