Once Evie was out of his house and his mind, he probably wouldn’t need the relentless distraction of laps.
If they weren’t swimming, they could have gone for a walk. Evie liked being outside. He wouldn’t exactly call her a nature girl but she definitely thrived on sunshine and fresh air. He could understand that. Being outside helped him think more clearly, probably because of the ADD.
Forgetting these contracts seemed an entirely too familiar habit, one he had worked hard as an adult to overcome. School had been a nightmare for him of missed homework and forgotten assignments, notes from teachers, frustration all the way around. His father had despised that weakness in his son and couldn’t understand why Brodie couldn’t just put his mind to it and succeed.
He’d tried. The only saving grace for him had been sports. When he was swimming or skiing or running, all the connections in his brain seemed to click along just fine.
Now that he was an adult, he’d managed to come up with techniques to block out the chaos in his head but sometimes when he pushed himself too hard or worked outside his comfort zone, he could still stumble. These contracts were a perfect example. He should have remembered them. The meeting was his main priority for the day and he’d known he needed the contracts. He had even set them on the corner of his desk, after vetting them the night before, in plain view so he wouldn’t forget them.
By now, he should have known his own weaknesses well enough to have had the foresight to slide the contracts into his laptop case when he’d finished with them. Since he hadn’t, here he was, burdened with the complication of having to run home for them.
He located them quickly and stuck them under his arm, then decided to run into the kitchen for a slice of the banana bread Mrs. O. had made earlier. Though it had filled the house with the delicious nutty scent, he’d left in too much of a rush to enjoy it then.
The window was open above the sink in the kitchen and he heard a muffled bark from outside, saw a shadow of movement. Ah. There they were. He should have known. The backyard, with its sweeping views of Hope’s Crossing, had become a favored spot for Evie and Taryn.
He had twenty minutes before his rescheduled meeting, which left him just the right amount of time to say a polite hello and then leave before he could cross any more boundaries with Evie, he decided.
The morning was cool but pleasant as he opened the door leading to the deck. He closed it behind him with a snick, then turned back around. “Good morning,” he started to say, but the words and everything else inside him seemed to stutter to a grinding halt and he only got out the first consonant.
For a full thirty seconds, he could do nothing but stare, shock paralyzing his thoughts, and then fury washed over him, fierce and hot.
“What the hell is this?”
Evie whirled around at his voice and he saw guilt and panic bloom in her blue eyes. Her mouth opened slightly but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned her attention quickly back to Taryn until the girl, standing unassisted, threw a ball for Jacques.
The dog caught the ball easily but even he seemed to sense something wrong. He padded toward Taryn and planted his haunches in front of her.
On some peripheral level, Brodie was aware of the others. Evie. Taryn. The dog. But the bulk of his attention was focused on one person, the young man standing on Taryn’s other side, whose features had gone as white as Woodrose Mountain in January.
Brodie was vaguely aware he was crumpling the contracts but he couldn’t seem to make his fists unclench. Charlie Beaumont looked as if he’d like nothing more than to take a step backward, out of his reach, but he stayed frozen in place.
“Get away from my daughter, you little son of a bitch.”
“If he moves, she might fall.” Evie’s voice was calm, which somehow seemed to infuriate him even more. He threw the contracts down on the deck table, wedging them under the centerpiece vase filled with flowers from the garden, to keep the papers from fluttering away in the breeze.
Charlie Beaumont. The kid who had decided it would be a barrel of laughs to drive drunk with a bunch of teenagers in his car, rob a bunch of businesses, including several of Brodie’s own, and destroy dozens of lives.
If not for him, Taryn would be starting school again this week. She would be going to cheerleader camp and texting her friends nonstop and beginning to think about college applications.
Instead, here she was having to relearn even the most basic functions—while Charlie Beaumont stood by, probably to mock and laugh at her.
It was taking every ounce of his self-control to keep from stalking forward, scooping Taryn up and carrying her far, far away from this punk who had hurt his baby girl.
He turned his rage on Evie, the obvious accomplice in the whole thing. She stood there looking perfectly calm, perfectly serene, while he wanted to yell and curse and break something. Preferably something attached to Charlie Beaumont.
“This is completely messed up. What the hell is he doing here?”
“Right now we’re working on multitasking. Taryn is throwing the ball to Jacques while balancing at the same time, which works multiple gross-motor skills as well as focus and concentration. Charlie is spotting if she needs help.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
She sighed, looking slightly apprehensive. Good. She should be.
“If you’re going to yell at me, let’s get Taryn to the deck. She can’t stand this long.”
Much to his astonishment, Taryn turned with Evie and Charlie’s help and made her painstaking way to the steps. Charlie grabbed her walker when Evie asked him to and carried it over to Taryn, who used it without help to make her way up the four wide, low steps leading to the terraced deck. How long had she been tackling stairs? he wondered. He’d had no idea she had progressed so far.
Pride warred with his anger and confusion as he watched Charlie smoothly take the walker from her and grab her elbow to lower her to one of the teak chairs, as if he’d done it dozens of times.
When Taryn was settled with the dog at her feet, Charlie shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts. Brodie had to give the kid credit for looking him in the eyes, though he looked scared to death.
“I’ll go,” he said quietly.
“Good idea.” He knew he sounded like an ass but he was so furious he didn’t trust himself to be around Charlie Beaumont right now. “On second thought, you can stay until somebody tells me what’s going on and why I shouldn’t have you arrested right now for trespassing.”
“Dad, stop.” Taryn gave him a disgusted, eye-rolling look that was so painfully familiar from the time before her accident that he almost had to stare. “Chill. It’s f-fine.”
“Not with me.”
“Charlie...is my f-friend. Therapy is...f-fun...with him.”
“How long has he been coming here?”
Evie looked as if she didn’t want to answer but she finally sighed. “Over a week. Since the day after we went to String Fever that first time. He’s been coming just about every morning for an hour or two, then Hannah Kirk comes for another hour or two. I should have told you. I just...knew this is how you’d react.”
“How am I supposed to react when somebody I trusted with my daughter’s life betrays me in my own home?” He thought of the soft tenderness of their kiss, of the growing feelings he had been doing his best to ignore.
He was not a man who trusted easily. Growing up with a father who treated him like a failure had left him wary and prickly. Marrying a wild, immature woman and then having to stand by and watch his child suffer because of it hadn’t helped alleviate his unwillingness to let someone else into his life.
But he had trusted Evie, more than any woman except his mother. How could she have brought Charlie into his house, into his daughter’s life, knowing Brodie’s animosity toward the kid
who had destroyed everything?
“I should have told you. That was certainly wrong and I’m sorry. But everything I did was for Taryn’s sake.”
He opened his mouth to argue but closed it again. He had no desire to leave Charlie alone with his daughter out here but he also didn’t want to fight this out in front of a couple of teenagers and a very curious-looking dog—not when this duplicity seemed so very personal.
“Ms. Blanchard. May I have a word with you inside?”
At his icy tone, her eyes turned cool as well, a far cry from the soft warmth in them when he’d kissed her. Even then, she had been keeping this from him, he realized with disgust.
“Of course. You can still throw the ball to Jacques from the chair,” she instructed Taryn. “Try an underhand throw with your left arm. Like you’re lobbing a softball pitch. That’s it. Good.”
She led the way back into the kitchen, which now seemed stuffy and close compared to the cool mountain air outside.
“All this time. You’ve been letting him into my house for nearly two weeks!”
“He’s helping her. You should see her, Brodie. When Charlie is here, her motivation is enhanced a hundredfold. He can help her master things in half an hour that it takes me days of pushing to even persuade her to try.”
“You had to have known I would never permit it. You had no right to allow him here.”
“Wrong. You gave me the right!”
He had seen her annoyed before but not angry. Now she was glaring at him and hot color climbed her cheekbones. He refused to notice how lovely she looked. “I didn’t want to do any of this, remember?” she went on. “But you promised me I had full authority to do whatever necessary to help Taryn.”
“Is that the reason you pushed so hard to get me to promise you that? Were you planning this from the very beginning?”
“Of course not,” she said. “I never even talked to Charlie until a week after I started working with her.”
“This isn’t what I meant by full authority.”
“Next time you should clarify, then. You give me full authority to try anything—except the one thing that seems to be working!”
He glared. How was he supposed to argue this point without sounding, again, like the world’s biggest ass. “You should have told me.”
“Yes. Absolutely. You had every right to know. I should have mentioned it the first time Charlie came to the house. I’ll be completely honest with you, Brodie. Keeping it from you was sheer cowardice on my part. That is the one thing in all of this that I feel like I owe you an apology about. But I could see, even that first day, that Charlie was making all the difference in Taryn’s motivation and I was afraid you wouldn’t allow him to come anymore. I justified it by telling myself you would be more interested in outcomes than the methodology used to achieve those outcomes. It was wrong and I’m sorry.”
Damn it. He didn’t want her to go belly-up here. He just wanted the kid gone from his house.
“I can’t even look at him without wanting to pound something.”
“I know.” With sympathy-drenched eyes, she rested her fingers on his arm in that physical way she had of communicating. The heat of her and the brush of skin against skin comforted him in ways he couldn’t have explained, and he could feel some of his anger trickle away. How did she manage that so easily? She only had to touch him and his brain turned to pudding. He found it more than a little bewildering.
“I completely understand your anger toward him, Brodie, and I don’t blame you for it. But like it or not, the day he came to the bead store, it was as if he flipped some kind of switch in Taryn. I can’t argue with the results. You’ve said it yourself—look at how far she’s come, especially this past week.”
“Because of you and your hard work.”
To his regret, she slid her fingers away as she shook her head. “I would love to take all the credit, but it’s not me. Oh, I was making slow, steady progress but she fought me every step of the way. When Charlie is here, she works three times as hard. With Hannah, it’s maybe twice as hard—Charlie seems to have the magic touch—but either of them can still cajole her into doing more than I can alone.”
More than anything, he wanted to go back to those few moments before he’d walked into the house, when he had been in blissful ignorance that all this was going on behind his back. He didn’t want to deal with it. If Evie was right and Charlie was helping Taryn, how could he bar the kid from his house?
Through the kitchen window, he could see them on the deck. Taryn was laughing at something Charlie said and she looked carefree and lighthearted. As she laughed, she must have drooled a little—something she didn’t completely have under control yet—because Charlie picked up a cloth from the back of the chair and dabbed at the corner of her mouth in such a matter-of-fact way that he doubted Taryn even registered it.
His chest felt tight, fragile, as if a breeze might shatter something deep inside.
“What about Beaumont? Why is he doing this?” Brodie’s voice sounded strangled and he cleared his throat, thinking of all the dreams he’d once had for his daughter and how that kid out there had destroyed them all in one night.
Evie didn’t respond at first. She was silent for so long, he finally had to shift his attention from the scene out the window to her.
“I don’t know, if you want the truth,” she finally answered. “I think he enjoys it, actually. At first I think he came out of guilt and...” She paused. “Okay, you won’t like this either but Charlie has said something about his father encouraging the visits in the hopes it might reflect well on him during his judicial proceedings.”
His anger, which had begun to cool, hit boiling point all over again. “That sleazy bastard. And you went along with this, knowing Mayor Beaumont would like Charlie to wriggle out of these charges with less than a slap on the wrist?”
“I was looking at what was best for Taryn. You can throw any motivation at me that you want but she remains my primary concern.”
“If Charlie uses this to help him walk on the charges against him, I am going to hold you personally responsible.”
“That’s fair.”
“Fair? Do you know how much I hate that word? Nothing has been fair in our world for four damn months! Including that the one person I trusted would go behind my back like this.”
“So fire me. If you think what I’ve done is so outrageously egregious, I’ll quit right now. You’ve only got a few more days before the new aide is supposed to start anyway. I’m sure you can hobble along without me.”
He raked a hand through his hair. “How can I fire you? Look at her. She’s a different person than she was two weeks ago.”
“Then trust me, Brodie,” she pleaded. “Trust me that I would never do anything to hurt Taryn. I’m trying to help her here. I knew you wouldn’t like Charlie helping with therapy but I was willing to do it because it was working for Taryn. I thought that was worth the risk of you being angry.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Evie hadn’t wanted to help them at all because of her past pain yet she’d spent more than two weeks here, day after endless day, exercising extreme patience and calm. All for Taryn. She hadn’t acted maliciously by having the kid here. Brodie accepted that.
Right after the accident, those terrible, bleak days when doctors couldn’t say whether she would even survive her extensive injuries, Brodie had vowed to God that if He would spare Taryn, he would do anything within his power to give her the best chance at a normal life. But damn it. This wasn’t what he’d meant at all.
“I hate this.”
“I know.” She touched his arm again. Just as before, he could feel the tension and frustration inside him begin to ease as if she’d rubbed the tight muscles in his shoulders instead of merely brushing her fingers against the skin between wrist and elbow.
He froze, not sure what to do. He never had been much of a hugger, probably because his father had discouraged such obvious shows of affection. Not that his disapproval had stopped Katherine. He might have received stiff and hard disapproval from his father but Katherine had compensated with her steady love.
Evie’s simple, unexpected embrace sent comfort and calm seeping through him. Though he found it as dangerous as it was enticing, he couldn’t seem to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and holding her close.
They stood that way for a long time, not speaking and neither seeming eager to break this fragile, tensile connection between them.
She was the first to slide away and he thought he saw the shadow of something tender and soft in her gaze before she lowered her lashes and wrapped her fingers together. “If you absolutely can’t bear the thought of Charlie being here, I’ll go out there right now and tell him to leave and not come back. I can guarantee Taryn won’t be happy about it, but this is your home and you’re her father. You get the final say.”
He was tempted. So tempted. Taryn would get over it. He was almost sure of it. The new therapist was starting the following week and maybe that would provide enough distraction that Taryn wouldn’t even remember that Charlie wasn’t here.
And maybe his mother would get a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on her forehead.
“He can keep coming but I don’t want to see him. Make sure he’s only here when I’m not.”
Her smile was more breathtaking than the sunrise breaking over the mountains after weeks of gray muck. He had the grim realization that he would be willing to do just about anything if only she would smile at him like that.
“You’re a good father, Brodie. Taryn is lucky to have you in her corner.”
He wasn’t so sure about that right now. Letting Charlie Beaumont even within a mile of her seemed like a huge mistake.
Country Bride Page 33
