"That's nice," Erin said. Now it's time for you to go to sleep. Good night." She bent and kissed Sophie, then went to the door and shut off the light.
"Mama?"
Erin turned back. "What?"
"Do you ever think you might get married again?"
"What? No!" Where had that come from? She went straight back to the bed and looked down at her daughter. "Why?"
Sophie wriggled in the bed. "Just wondered." She hesitated. Erin waited, knowing Sophie, knowing there would be more. "I was lookin' at Uncle Taggart tonight," her daughter said finally. "An' at Gus an' Noah an' Cash an' Mace an' Shane an' Jed." She plucked at the quilt, then shrugged silently.
"And?"
Another shrug. "I was thinkin' about havin' a father again."
"You're missing your papa?" Of course she was. Gabriel wasn't the only one sensitive to losing their father.
"I always miss him," Sophie said simply. "Every day. But I know he's not coming back. I mean a new father."
"Oh." Erin swallowed. Oh, dear. "Uncle Taggart does a lot of the stuff for you that fathers do."
"I know. But it isn't the same. It's better to have two parents."
"You've given this a lot of thought, have you?" Erin tried to smile and make things lighter than they were.
But Sophie nodded gravely. "Some. Me an' Becky talked about it. She only had Uncle Taggart until she got herself a mother."
"Do not," Erin warned, "consider matchmaking."
Sophie shook her head. "Matchmaking?"
"Finding me a husband."
Sophie yawned. "Already did."
"What?" Erin stared at her daughter, mouth open.
"Mr. Malone."
"Deke?"
Sophie nodded. "It makes sense. Zack doesn't have a mother, and we don't have a father. You an' Mr. Malone used to know each other. He said so. That's better than Becky having to find Felicity for her dad."
Erin blinked at the workings of the ten-year-old mind.
"So, what do you think?" Sophie said seriously, as if she expected her mother to run right out and reserve the church. "Do you think it would work?"
"No," Erin said firmly. "I do not."
* * *
Chapter 4
« ^ »
Deke hated openings. He attended them because Gaby, his agent, would have had his hide if he didn't.
"Act like a grown-up," she always said. "Put on a tie. Smile. Say thank you. Drink club soda. And if you're going to wear boots, be sure they don't hurt."
So two or three times a year, whenever she hung a show for him, he put on a tie, drank ice water, said thank you, smiled till his jaw ached and forced himself to talk about his work. He was always cordial and polite and always desperately glad when it was over, because mostly it bored him silly. He liked taking the photos. He didn't care who came to look at them.
Except tonight.
Tonight virtually everybody who mattered in his life was going to be at Dustin's. His sisters and their husbands, his nephews and niece. His mother.
Not his father, of course. Deke had finally—last night, at long last—said goodbye to any lingering pipe dreams he'd had about a reconciliation with the old man. It wasn't going to happen, he told himself, so get over it.
And he would. He vowed he would.
So the old man didn't matter. But everyone else did. Besides his family, practically everyone else he knew in the valley seemed to plan on coming, too. A part of Deke wished he'd never asked Gaby to include him in the show. It was one thing to have a bunch of strangers who didn't matter look at his work and pass judgment. It was another thing entirely, he discovered, to care about what people thought.
He felt sick. What if they thought his work was crap?
What if she thought it was crap? She. Erin.
Being judged by everyone else made him edgy. It made him chew on his thumbnail and crack his knuckles. It made him fumble as he knotted his tie. But it didn't make him sick to his stomach.
The thought of being judged and found wanting by Erin made him ill.
Last night he'd been thrilled to learn she was coming to the opening. He'd been that eager to see her again. And showing off his work had seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, it was through his first photos at Dusty's that she'd found him. She'd liked those, hadn't she?
But then she'd been sixteen, a girl—young and untutored. Now she was a professional. She was a woman. She had standards.
Deke just hoped he measured up.
And, oddly, not just on the photo front. Of course he wanted her approval there. But all day long, every time he'd thought about her—which was a lot—he hadn't been thinking of her as a photographer, or even as his old friend. He'd been aware of her as a woman. She'd looked wonderful. More than wonderful. Gorgeous.
Deke had never thought of Erin as gorgeous.
Of course she'd always been pretty, with that long, shiny dark hair and those big green eyes. If he'd thought of her looks at all he'd thought in terms of words like wholesome, genuine. Nice. She hadn't ever been the sort of girl he'd had impure thoughts about.
He wouldn't have dared.
Hell, it would have been more than his life was worth to put moves on Will Jones's daughter!
Besides, Erin had been his friend.
And that had been way better than a girlfriend.
Deke had had more than enough girlfriends back then. Tina, Gina, Sally, Susie, Holly, Lisa, Kelly, Lori, Deb. He ticked them off in his mind, groping for their names and finally giving up, sure there were more, but unable to remember them all.
What he did remember was that they'd all simpered and giggled and that their main claim to fame had been their eagerness to put their hands all over him and, even better, to let him put his hands all over them.
It had been damn enjoyable as far as it went. But even as a lusty teenager Deke had known there was more to life. Somehow he'd realized that he couldn't count on a future in which he spent twenty hours a day with some girl in the back seat of his dad's old Chevy.
And none of those girls had had much to offer beyond that. What they'd wanted him to offer them was a lifetime commitment and lots of money. And they'd wanted him to give up his silly notion of making a career out of taking pictures. To a woman, they were on his father's side about that.
"What's wrong with the grocery store?" Tina had asked. "It's a steady income, isn't it? Your dad does okay." It didn't matter to her that Deke didn't want to do it.
"If you took pictures, you'd have to go places, wouldn't you?" Lisa had made a photographer's career sound like a terrible thing. She couldn't figure out why anyone would want to go anywhere.
Holly had said simply, "Taking pictures for a living? That's dumb."
Sally at least had liked the idea. "You can take pictures of me naked," she'd suggested, then, giggling, had run her hand down his chest to his belt buckle and beyond. "And I could take pictures of you," she'd added with a smile.
"They don't understand me at all," Deke had complained to Erin.
Erin had understood him completely. Erin had listened to him for hours. She'd sympathized, supported, teased, and when he'd needed it, had told him off.
When he told her what Sally had said, she'd rolled her eyes. "So become a monk. Stop dating. Become celibate."
He grinned now, thinking about that. As if! But Erin had always had a way of cutting through the crap, of knowing what mattered.
He hoped when she saw his work tonight she wasn't disappointed. He hoped that when it came to deciding what mattered, she'd think he did.
"You ready yet?" Milly called through the bathroom door.
Deke took an extra swipe at his hair with the comb and straightened his tie one last time. Then he took a deep breath. "Ready." He opened the door. Zack toddled over and put up his arms. Deke picked him up. "Who's baby-sitting?"
"Susannah Tanner," Milly said. She came out of the kitchen with C.J. in her arms. "Her folks are dropping her off on their way to
the gallery. You can go now. Cash and I'll come when she gets here. My, don't you clean up good?" She looked Deke up and down and whistled in amazement. "Is that a tie? I didn't know you owned a tie."
"The better to strangle you with, my dear," Deke said with a grin. He gave Zack a kiss and handed him to Milly. "Behave," he told his son. He started toward the door, all the butterflies in his stomach swarming madly.
"It'll be fine," Milly said to his back.
He hoped she was right.
Dustin's, the gallery where the show was being held, was a far cry from Gaby's Sol Y Sombra fine arts gallery in Santa Fe.
For one thing, it had only been Dustin's for the past year and a half. Before that, for at least thirty years, it had been Dusty's Art and Bait Shop—the art being photos of the biggest fish and elk and deer that local hunters bagged, the bait being what kept Dusty in business, along with the bit of taxidermy he did on the side.
But in recent years Livingston had undergone a bout of gentrification, and Dusty, Deke discovered, had attempted to keep up with the times. There were quite a few businesses in town that had. And there were new ones Deke hadn't seen before, like the Page and Leaf, a bookstore-cum-coffee-and-tea shop that would have looked right at home in Santa Fe, and a trendy, upscale restaurant called Sage's, the likes of which never would have survived in the Livingston Deke had grown up in.
There were still remnants of the old days, though. The pizza place he remembered as a boy was still where it had always been. And as he got out of his truck he was pleased to see that The Barrel, a rough-and-tumble cowboy bar, looked just as rough and tough and down-at-the-heels as ever.
Dusty's didn't. The old metal sign had been replaced by one made out of carved wood. And the decor no longer consisted of plaster walls covered with hunting and fishing shots, half a dozen stuffed ten-point bucks, one rather moth-eaten bear and Dusty's infamous busty-naked-women calendar on the back of the closet door.
In its new incarnation, Dustin's large front room sported high-tech track spotlights on recently finished wood-paneled walls, which were hung with collages made from fishing lures, arrowheads and driftwood, and amongst them were exquisite, tastefully framed photos of Montana wildlife—young antelope, deer, bear, beaver, otter and others—courtesy of Charlie Seeks Elk. Ferns hung in darkened corners, and a small waterfall trickled in an environmentally correct water-saving way over artfully arranged imported rocks.
Deke's own photos were hung in a room now called the Sundown Annex, which, if he remembered right, was where Dusty had done his taxidermy all those years ago.
Some things hadn't changed, though.
Dusty, for example, was still wearing his trademark red and black buffalo plaid shirt dressed up for the occasion by red suspenders and a red bow tie. He spotted Deke as he came in the door and hurried over. He was in his midseventies now, but what he'd lost in the quickness of his step and the hair on his head, he hadn't lost in enthusiasm or in the breadth of his welcoming gap-toothed grin.
"Deke, boy! By golly, look at you, all growed up!" He grabbed Deke in a bear hug that came near to cracking his ribs.
Feeling better at the enthusiastic reception, Deke hugged the old man back. "Hey, Dusty. Great to see you! Thanks for sayin' you'd show my stuff."
"Anytime! Reckoned you'da come back before now," the older man scolded. "Shoulda. Always got a place for you here. Told that agent of yours I put up your first show." He chuckled and snapped his suspenders. "Don't think she believed me."
Deke grinned because in fact Gaby hadn't. She'd called him after her first conversation with Dusty, reporting doubtfully, "I'm afraid this Dusty is a bit of a character. He claims to have 'discovered' you. Says he hung your first show."
Deke had explained about the elk hunt pictures and Gaby had been delighted. "Ah, well, that explains it then. No wonder he feels proprietary."
Now Dusty took Deke by the arm. "Come an' see how we cleaned the place up. Wantcha to meet my new partners." He drew Deke toward the refreshment table set up along one wall between the two rooms.
Marjorie and Hal Goodnight, the new partners, were a bit younger than Dusty and considerably more conventionally dressed. They shook hands and offered him a glass of wine and the usual platitudes. Deke would have liked the wine to settle his nerves, but opted for ice water instead. He practiced smiling. More people were coming in. He spotted Brenna and Jed McCall just inside the door.
"Better check on Charlie. See if he needs anything," Hal said, and drifted away.
Marjorie went on speaking knowledgeably about Deke's photos and even making comments on a couple of his books, and Deke forced himself to pay attention, but his gaze kept wandering toward the door. He wondered when Erin would come.
"Have you met Charlie Seeks Elk?" Marjorie asked eventually, nodding toward the front of the gallery where several people were gathered around a series of photos. Charlie's blue-black hair glinted in the lights.
Deke nodded. "Met him in Santa Fe a few years back. It's pretty amazing to change focus the way he has."
When Deke had met him, Charlie Seeks Elk had been a photojournalist with an international reputation. He'd spent the early years of his career shooting gritty urban America, and then had moved on to war zones in various parts of the world. His articles and books had shown life at its most desperate and hopeless. They had been calls to action, to compassion, to concern.
Then three years ago Charlie had been shot. He'd been wounded critically. Gaby said he'd coded—had been clinically dead. Somehow, though, he'd battled his way back to life.
When he'd left the hospital, he'd come to Montana to recuperate, to regain his health and his focus—and to find Cait Blasingame. Since then his work had taken an entirely different slant. His latest book, Morning Has Broken, focused on children—human and animal. It drew connections. It spoke of hope.
Now Deke moved to study Charlie's photos, determined to take his mind off worrying about when Erin would show up—and what she'd think when she did. Charlie was every bit as good at this as he had been at his earlier work. He still had an eye for a story—it was only the story that was different.
Three years ago Deke's work—his silent canyons, vast empty skies and stark barren landscapes—would have seemed grand and inspiring compared to Charlie's harsh gritty, tightly focused images.
Now their roles were reversed. Charlie's new work was more accessible and less lonely and remote than his.
"Oh, there you are, Deke!" Gaye Jones came bustling up and threw her arms around him. "Don't you look nice." She touched his tie. No one who used to know him, apparently, believed he owned a tie. "What a wonderful turnout. And your work—it's stunning. We've been bragging about knowing you. Come meet our friends."
Deke turned to see Will approaching with a small mob of people trailing in his wake. He did a double take. "What'd you do, bring half of Bozeman?"
Will clapped him on the back. "Had to prove to these folks that I knew you. They didn't believe you used to work for me."
Deke laughed. "Didn't you tell them you taught me everything I know? It's true," he told Will and Gaye's friends. And then, with Will asking leading questions, he found his stride and began to talk about the photos behind him.
It got easier after that. A steady stream of people kept coming. Brenna McCall, an accomplished artist in her own right, said all the right things and made him feel even more at ease. Then Taggart and Felicity appeared, along with Becky and a tall, lanky boy with thick rust-colored hair who turned out to be Tuck McCall.
The Nicholses showed up. So did the Holts, along with Jace and Celie Tucker and Artie Gilliam.
Artie, who had already been an old man when Deke left, had to be on the far side of ninety now. He was moving slowly but he studied each picture intently before moving on. When he reached Deke, he held out his hand. "Don't get around like I used to," he said, shaking Deke's hand. "Can't barely get up and down the steps these days. So seein' these is like takin' a trip again." He smiled
and gripped Deke's hand even harder. "Thanks."
"You're welcome. Thank you." Before he could say more than that, Deke found himself overrun by his sisters, their husbands and Jake.
"Wonderful," Milly said.
"Stunning," Dori agreed.
"Wow," Cash said, while Riley just stood and nodded his head.
"Hi, Uncle Deke. These are cool." Jake was bouncing up and down on his toes. "I wasn't sure I wanted to come on account of it might be boring. But Charlie's got some amazing pictures of bears. An' I like these horses in the canyon." He tipped his head toward a panoramic photo of a herd of running mustangs that Deke had taken from the top of a mesa. "It's like bein' there. Lots better'n in books."
"High praise," Riley said in case Deke didn't realize it.
Deke did. He grinned, bounced a little in his own boots, butterflies settling.
And then, through the crowd, he saw Erin.
She was halfway down the long gallery talking to Charlie, nodding at one of his photos. And Charlie was nodding, too, then pointing something out, then laughing at whatever Erin said.
Deke, watching, couldn't get over how elegant she looked. The wholesome country girl he remembered had turned into a cultured cosmopolitan woman. She wore a sleeveless black dress of the less-is-more variety, very short, very stark, very very sexy.
If it was hard to think of her as the girl he'd known, it was equally hard to think of her as the mother of three young children. In her elegant dress, with her feet in heels and her hair piled high on her head, she looked like the epitome of Parisian sophistication. She dimpled now, smiling at something Charlie was saying. Then she put her hand on Charlie's sleeve, took her farewell and headed straight for him.
Deke swallowed, then took a quick gulp from the glass of water he was holding and watched her approach. He felt as if he was caught in her sights. There was no way on earth he could look away.
She was smiling by the time she got to him, looking cool and classy. "Deke," she said, and leaned forward, giving him air kisses and the brush of her cheek against his in quintessential European fashion.
The Cowboy's Christmas Miracle Page 6
