A Stone Creek Collection, Volume 2

by Linda Lael Miller

  Olivia remembered the series, though she didn’t watch much television. Curiously, her viewing was mostly limited to the holidays—she always tried to catch It’s a Wonderful Life, The Bishop’s Wife and, of course, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

  “I think I’ve seen it once or twice,” she said, but she couldn’t place Tessa’s character.

  Sophie sagged a little as she opened Butterpie’s stall. “I think Dad’s going to ask Aunt Tessa to stay here and look after Starcross Ranch and Shiloh and the puppies after he leaves,” she said.

  “Oh,” Olivia said, deflated but keeping up a game face for Sophie’s sake.

  Butterpie looked fit, and she was eating again.

  “I’m still hoping he’ll change his mind and let me stay here,” Sophie confided quietly. “My education shouldn’t be interrupted—at least we agree on that much—so I get to go to Stone Creek Middle School, starting Monday, until they let out for Christmas vacation.”

  Olivia didn’t know what to say. She had opinions about boarding schools and adopting puppies he didn’t intend to raise, that was for sure, but sharing them with Sophie would be over the line. Satisfied that Butterpie was doing well, she let herself into Shiloh’s stall to stroke his long side.

  He nuzzled her affectionately.

  And her cell phone rang.

  Here it was. The sick-cow call Olivia had been expecting all day.

  But the number on the caller ID panel was Melissa’s private line at the law office. What was she doing working this late, and on a holiday weekend, too?

  “Mel? What’s up?”

  “It’s Ashley,” Melissa said quietly. “She just called me from some Podunk town in Tennessee. She caught the shuttle to the airport early this morning, evidently, and flew out of Phoenix without telling any of us.”

  “Tennessee?” Olivia echoed, momentarily confused. Or was she simply trying to deny what she already knew, deep down?

  “I guess Mom’s living there now,” Melissa said.

  Sophie stepped out of Butterpie’s stall just as Olivia stepped out of Shiloh’s, her face full of concern. They turned their backs on each other to work the latches, securing both horses for the night.

  “Oh, my God,” Olivia said.

  “She’s a wreck,” Melissa went on, sounding as numb as Olivia felt. “Ashley, I mean. Things turned out badly—so badly that Brad’s chartering a jet to go back there and pick up the pieces.”

  Sophie caught hold of Olivia’s arm, steered her to a bale of hay and urged her to sit down.

  She sat, gratefully. Standing up any longer would have been impossible, with her knees shaking the way they were.

  “Should I go get my dad?” Sophie asked.

  Olivia shook her head, then closed her eyes. “What happened, Mel? What did Ashley say on the phone?”

  “She just said she should have listened to you and Brad. She was crying so hard, I could hardly understand her. She told me where she was staying and I called Brad as soon as we hung up.”

  Ashley. The innocent one, the one who believed in happy endings. She’d just run up against an ugly reality, and Olivia was miles away, unable to help her. “I’m going to call Brad and tell him I want to go, too,” she said, about to hang up.

  “I tried that,” Melissa answered immediately. “He said he wanted to handle this alone. My guess is he’s already on his way to Flagstaff to board the jet.”

  Olivia fought back tears of frustration, fury and resignation. “When did Ashley call?” she asked, fighting for composure. Sophie was already plenty worried—the look on her face proved that—and it wouldn’t do to fall apart in front of a child.

  “About half an hour ago. I called Brad right away, and we were on the phone for a long time. As soon as we hung up, I called you.”

  “Thanks,” Olivia said woodenly.

  “Are you all right?” Melissa asked.

  “No,” Olivia replied. “Are you?”

  “No,” Melissa admitted. “And I won’t be until the twin-unit is back home in Stone Creek, where she belongs. I know you want to call Brad and beat your head against a brick wall trying to get him to let you go to Tennessee with him, so I’ll let you go.”

  “Go home,” Olivia told her kid sister. “It’s a holiday weekend and you shouldn’t be working.”

  Melissa’s chuckle sounded more like a sob. Olivia was terrified, so Melissa, what with the twin bond and all, had to be ready to dissolve. “Like you have any room to talk,” she said. “Can I come out to your place, Liv, and spend the night with you and Ginger?”

  “Meet you there,” Olivia said, following up with a goodbye. She speed-dialed Brad in the next moment.

  “No,” he said instead of the customary hello.

  “Where are you?”

  “Almost to Flagstaff. The jet’s waiting. When I know anything, I’ll call you.”

  Clearly, asking him to come back for her, or wait till she could get to the airport, would, as her sister had predicted, be a waste of breath. Besides, Melissa needed her, or she wouldn’t have asked to spend the night.

  “Okay,” Olivia said. A few moments later she shut her cell phone.

  Sophie stood watching her. “Did something bad happen?”

  Olivia stood. Her knees were back in working order, then. That was something. “It’s a family thing,” she said. “Nothing you need to worry about. I have to go home right away, though.”

  Sophie nodded sagely. “Shall I go get your doctor bag?” she asked. “I’ll explain to Dad and everything.”

  “Thanks,” Olivia said, heading for the Suburban.

  Sophie raced for the house, but it was Tanner who brought the medical kit out to her.

  “Anything I can do?” he asked, handing it through the open window of the Suburban.

  Olivia shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

  To her utter surprise, Tanner leaned in, cupped his hand at the back of her head and planted a gentle but electrifying kiss on her mouth. Then he stepped away, and she put the Suburban into gear and drove out.

  * * *

  Tanner stood in the cold, watching Olivia’s taillights disappear in the thickening snowfall.

  The shimmering colors on the Christmas tree in the front room seemed to mock him through the steam-fogged glass. Whatever Olivia’s problem was, he probably couldn’t make it right. It was a “family thing,” according to Sophie’s breathless report, and he wasn’t family.

  He shoved his hands into his hip pockets—he hadn’t bothered with a coat—and thought about, of all things, the puppies. There was no way he could ask Olivia to find them homes after he moved on. Tessa might or might not be willing to stay on at Stone Creek and look after Snidely and Whiplash.

  He’d dug himself a big hole, with Sophie and with Olivia, and getting out was going to take some doing. Fast-talking wouldn’t pack it.

  Inside the house, Sophie was making a bed for the puppies in a cardboard box fluffed up with an old blanket.

  “Did somebody die?” she asked when Tanner entered the living room.

  The question poleaxed him. Sophie had lost her mother when she was seven years old. Did every crisis prompt her to expect a funeral?

  “I don’t think so, honey,” he said gruffly. He should have hugged her, but he couldn’t move. He just stood there, like a fool, in the middle of the living room.

  Sophie looked at the Christmas tree. “Maybe we could finish decorating tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t feel much like it now.”

  “Me, either,” Tanner admitted. “Let’s take the puppies outside before you bed them down.”

  Sophie nodded, and they put on their coats and each took a puppy.

  The dogs squatted obediently in the thickening snow.

  “I like Olivia,” Sophie said.

  “I do, too,” Tanner replied. Maybe a little too much.

  “It was fun having her here to eat supper with us.”

  Tanner nodded, draped an arm around Sophie’s small shoulder
s. She felt so little, so insubstantial, inside her bulky nylon jacket.

  “I showed her my new saddle.”

  “It’s a nice piece of gear.”

  The puppies were finished. Tanner scooped one up, and Sophie collected the other. They plodded toward the house, with its half-decorated Christmas tree, peeling wallpaper and outdated plumbing fixtures.

  Flipping this house, Tanner thought ruefully, was going to be a job.

  Once Sophie and the dogs were settled upstairs, in the room she’d declared to be hers, Tanner unplugged the tree lights and wandered into the kitchen to log on at his laptop. He had some supply invoices to look over, fortunately, and that would keep his mind occupied. Keep him from worrying about what had happened in Olivia’s family to knock her off balance like that.

  He could call Brad and ask, of course, but he wasn’t going to do that. It would be an intrusion.

  So he poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee, drew up a chair at the table and opened his laptop.

  The invoices were there, all right. But they might as well have been written in Sanskrit, for all the sense he could make of them.

  After half an hour he gave up.

  It was too early to go to sleep, so he snapped on the one TV set in the house, a little portable in the living room, and flipped through channels until he found a weather report.

  Snow, snow and more snow.

  He sighed and changed channels again, settled on a holiday rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond. Here, at least, was a family even more dysfunctional than his own.

  In a perverse sort of way, it cheered him up.

  * * *

  Melissa arrived with an overnight case only twenty minutes after Olivia got home. Her blue eyes were red rimmed from crying.

  Of all the O’Ballivan siblings, Melissa was the least emotional. But she stood in Olivia’s kitchen, her shoulders stooped and dusted with snowflakes, and choked up when she tried to speak.

  Olivia immediately took her younger sister into her arms. “It’s okay,” she said. “Everything will work out, you’ll see.”

  Melissa nodded, sniffled and pulled away. “God,” she said, trying to make a joke, “this place is such a dive.”

  “It’ll do until I can move in above the new shelter,” Olivia said, pointing toward the nearby hall. “The guest room is ready. Put your stuff away and we’ll talk.”

  Melissa had spotted Charlie Brown, still standing in his nondescript pot in the center of the kitchen table. “You bought a Christmas tree?” she marveled.

  Olivia set her hands on her hips. “Why is that such a surprise to everybody?” she asked, realizing only when the words were out of her mouth that Ginger had offered the only other comment on the purchase.

  Melissa sighed and shook her head. Ginger escorted her to the spare room, and back. Melissa had shed her coat, and she was pushing up the sleeves of her white sweater as she reentered the kitchen.

  “Let’s get the poor thing decorated,” she said.

  “Good idea,” Olivia agreed.

  The tree was fairly heavy, between the root system and the pot, and Melissa helped her lug it into the living room.

  Olivia pushed an end table in front of the window, after moving a lamp, and Charlie was hoisted to eye level.

  “This is sort of—cheerful,” Melissa said, probably being kind, though whether she felt sorry for Olivia or the tree was anybody’s guess.

  Olivia pulled the bubble lights and ornaments from the hardware-store bags. “Maybe I should make popcorn or something.”

  “That,” Melissa teased after another sniffle, “would constitute cooking. And you promised you wouldn’t try that at home.”

  Olivia laughed. “I’m glad you’re here, Mel.”

  “Me, too,” Melissa said. “We should get together more often. We’re always working.”

  “You work more than I do,” Olivia told her good-naturedly. “You need to get a life, Melissa O’Ballivan.”

  “I have a life, thank you very much,” Melissa retorted, heading for Olivia’s CD player and putting on some Christmas music. “Anyway, if anybody’s going to preach to me about overdoing it at work and getting a life, it isn’t going to be you, Big Sister.”

  “Are you dating anybody?” Olivia asked, opening one of the cartons of bubble lights. When they were younger, Big John had hung lights exactly like them on the family tree every year. Then they’d become a fire hazard, and he’d thrown them out.

  “The last one ended badly,” Melissa confessed, busy opening the ornament boxes and putting hangers through the little loops. So busy that she wouldn’t meet Olivia’s gaze.

  “How so?”

  “He was married,” Melissa said. “Had me fooled, until the wife sent me a photo Christmas card showing them on a trip to the Grand Canyon last summer. Four kids and a dog.”

  “Yikes,” Olivia said, wanting to hug Melissa, or at least lay a hand on her shoulder, but holding back. Her sister seemed uncharacteristically brittle, as though she might fall apart if anyone touched her just then. “You really cared about him, huh?”

  “I cared,” Melissa said. “What else is new? If there’s a jerk within a hundred miles, I’ll find him, rope him in and hand him my heart.”

  “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?”

  Melissa shrugged offhandedly. “The one before that wanted to meet Brad and present him with a demo so he could make it big in showbiz.” She paused. “But at least he didn’t have children.”

  “Mel, it happens. Cut yourself a little slack.”

  “You didn’t see those kids. Freckles. Braces. They all looked so happy. And why not? How could they know their dad is a class-A, card-carrying schmuck?”

  Once again Olivia found herself at a loss for words. She concentrated on clipping the lights to Charlie Brown’s branches.

  “Par-ump-pah-pum…” Bing Crosby sang from the CD player.

  “I might as well tell you it’s the talk of the family,” Melissa said, picking up the conversational ball with cheerful determination, “that you skipped out of Thanksgiving to sneak off with Tanner Quinn.”

  Olivia stiffened. “I didn’t ‘sneak off’ with him,” she said.

  Not much, said her conscience.

  “Don’t be so defensive,” Melissa replied, widening her eyes. “He’s a hunk. I’d have left with him, too.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “It wasn’t what I think?” Melissa challenged, smiling now. “Of course it was. Are you in love with him?”

  Olivia opened her mouth, closed it again.

  Bing Crosby sang wistfully of orange groves and sunshine. He was dreaming of a white Christmas.

  He could have hers.

  “Are you?” Melissa pressed.

  “No,” Olivia said.

  “Too bad,” Melissa answered.

  Olivia looked at her watch, pretending she hadn’t heard that last remark. By now Brad was probably in the air, jetting toward Tennessee.

  Hold on, Ashley, she thought. Hold on.

  The call didn’t come until almost midnight, and when it did, both Melissa and Olivia, snacking on leathery egg rolls snatched from the freezer and thawed in the oven, dived for the kitchen phone.

  Olivia got there first. Home-court advantage.

  “She’s okay,” Brad said. “We’ll be back sometime tomorrow.”

  “Put her on,” Olivia replied anxiously.

  “I don’t think she’s up to that right now,” Brad answered.

  “Tell her Melissa’s here with me, and we’ll be waiting when she gets home.”

  Brad agreed, and the call ended.

  “She’s all right, then?” Melissa asked carefully.

  Olivia nodded, but she wasn’t entirely convinced it was the truth. The only thing to do now was get some sleep—Melissa needed a night’s rest, and so did she.

  In her room, with Ginger sharing the bed, Olivia stared up at the ceiling and worried. Across the hall, in the tiny spare room, Melis
sa was probably doing the same thing.

  * * *

  Tanner, watching from his bedroom window, saw the lights go out across the field, in Olivia’s house. He went to look in on Sophie and the puppies one more time, then showered, brushed his teeth, pulled on sweats and stretched out for the night.

  Sleep proved elusive, and when it came, it was shallow, a partial unconsciousness ripe for lucid dreams. And not necessarily good ones.

  He found himself in what looked like a hospital corridor, near the nurses’ desk, and when a tall, dark-haired woman came out of a room, wearing scrubs and carrying a chart, he thought it was Kat.

  She was back, then. The last dream hadn’t been a goodbye after all.

  He tried to speak to her, but it was no use. He was no more articulate than the droopy Christmas garlands and greeting cards taped haphazardly to the walls and trimming the desk.

  The general effect was forlorn, rather than festive.

  The woman in scrubs slapped the chart down on the counter and sighed.

  There were shadows under her eyes, and she was too thin. No wedding ring on her left hand, either.

  “Nurse?” she called.

  A heavy woman appeared from a back room. “Do you need something, Dr. Quinn?”

  Dr. Quinn, medicine woman. It was a joke he and Sophie shared when they talked about her career plans.

  Sophie. This was Sophie—some kind of ghost of Christmas future.

  Tanner tried hard to wake up, but it didn’t happen for him. During the effort, he missed whatever Sophie said in reply to the nurse’s question.

  “I thought you’d go home for Christmas this year,” the nurse said chattily. “I’d swear I saw your name on the vacation list.”

  Sophie studied the chart, a little frown forming between her eyebrows. “I swapped with Dr. Severn,” she answered distractedly. “He has a family.”

  Tanner felt his heart break. You have a family, Sophie, he cried silently.

  “Anyway, my dad’s overseas, building something,” Sophie went on. “We don’t make a big deal about Christmas.”

  Sophie, Tanner pleaded.

  But she didn’t hear him. She snapped the chart shut and marched off down the hospital corridor again, disappearing into a mist.