A Stranger in the Family (Book 1, Bardville, Wyoming Trilogy)

by Patricia McLinn

  Boone gave a slight grunt as the nail came free. Cambria couldn’t tell if it was from effort or satisfaction. She held out a hand and he dropped the battered nail into it.

  “All right, all right.” She looked up, then quickly away from his grin. “What do you mean, they lost sight of the balance?”

  He set the hammer on the bench beside her, then sat on the other side of it.

  “The problem is, too many people, when they’re designing, get too focused on one thing—the inside or the outside—and they lose track of the other.” His gaze fastened on the cabin, and Cambria had the idea he didn’t see the same woeful sight she did. “You have to look at both at the same time. You can’t sacrifice one for the other.”

  “How do you do that? Keep both in mind?”

  “By remembering people. The people who’re going to live in it and all the people who’ll look at it—inside and out. You can’t forget either. It’s like blowing up a balloon—if you don’t put enough inside, it’s going to be flat. If you put too much, it’ll pop.”

  “How’d you get started designing, Boone?”

  “A job I worked in high school was an addition on this artist’s house near a town called Blowing Rock. She said she’d like to have a skylight, but the contractor said it couldn’t be done. I got to thinking, and I figured a way. I was having a hard time putting it in words for the contractor and owner. Finally she shoved a pad and pencil in my hand. I don’t think I’d drawn since crayon stick figures, but the design just came out, like there was a direct link to the image in my head. I’d never known that could happen—having an image in your head turn into reality like that.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “From then on, Miss Knoblauch helped me with the basics of drawing in exchange for odd jobs. She brags her studio’s the first Bodie Smith original.

  “I worked on my own, a couple high school classes helped, then I picked up a lot in the army. By the time I got out, I started building houses. We figured ways to give people good, solid homes, but cut costs by using logs and keeping some things standard. Designing came from listening to what folks wanted and working it in without sending them to the poorhouse.”

  Gray eyes glittering, Boone Dorsey Smith was the most excited and at the same time the most relaxed Cambria had seen him.

  “It must be wonderful to have a vision in your head, put it on paper, then see it brought to three-dimensional life.”

  The balloon of his enthusiasm popped as soon as she spoke, and she didn’t know why. “Yeah. But that’s only a small part of running a business like mine.”

  “You like the designing best, though, don’t you?”

  “It’s not that simple. Everything has to be overseen. There’s hiring, ordering materials, shipping, making sure workmanship stays top quality, keeping on schedule. And there’s the matter of supplies. You can’t use up logs and think there’ll be trees forever. You’ve got an obligation to replant. And let me tell you, reforestation, with all the government rules and regulations, can get damn complicated.”

  She waved that away with one hand.

  “But the part you like best, the reason you got into this, is designing, right?” She couldn’t have said why she pushed him, except she had the feeling he wanted to avoid it. “The matching of people with the homes they’ll love.”

  “You could say that, but—”

  “Then it is simple. You simply make the time for designing. Let someone else do the rest of it.”

  “I’m responsible. It’s my name on that product, nobody else’s.”

  “None of that’s as important as doing what you love. So make time. That’s what you should be doing here instead of trying to reclaim this cabin. You should be designing—”

  “I can’t.”

  The pain in those two words stopped Cambria cold. “You just need time—”

  “No. Time won’t help. I don’t have it anymore—whatever it is.” His bitterness brought a dull ache to her throat. “That vision, that ability to blend all the needs and wants into a building, it’s gone. I could sit over a piece of paper from here to next week, and nothing would come. Nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried. I haven’t designed anything for more than a year.”

  Boone’s mouth twisted. “I was so busy for so long, trying to get the business off the ground, working night and day, then right back into night again, that I don’t even know exactly when I lost it.”

  Cambria considered being tactful and gentle—for about a second and a half. That wasn’t what Boone needed. He needed a good shaking.

  “If you stopped trying to do everything yourself, stopped trying to personally see to every nail and screw, maybe your ability to design would have a chance to resurface.”

  “I don’t know wha—”

  “Oh, give me a break—you don’t know what I’m talking about? You’re not going to start that again, are you? Trying to deny you oversee every dust ball in every broom closet in your business? We already went through that, even before I knew who you were and what those articles said about you. Besides, you as much as admitted it—and said your friend Cully agrees with me.”

  One side of his mouth lifted.

  She watched it suspiciously. “What are you grinning about?”

  “Just thinking that ‘overseeing every dust ball’ sounds a lot like you and Weston Ranch Guest Quarters.”

  “Maybe,” she acknowledged. “But it’s not keeping me from doing something I love.”

  “It’s a tough habit to break. Especially...” His half smile faded. In his eyes Cambria caught glimpses of memories through the gray mists of the past.

  “Especially what, Boone?”

  “The day we came home from burying Daddy, Gran took me out on the porch. She held me by the shoulders of Daddy’s old suit because I didn’t have one of my own, and she said I’d better grow broad enough shoulders to fill out that suit, and do it right quick, because I was the man of the family now.”

  Cambria put her hand lightly over his, a gesture of compassion for a grieving boy loaded with such a burden. Boone caught her fingertips with his thumb, turning the touch into a clasp.

  “I tried. God knows, I tried. With Mom working, mostly at the mill, but picking up whatever she could—cleaning houses, working at the dry cleaners, or one summer picking tobacco down near Greensboro—I looked after Gran and Kenzie. That’s all I could do, how I could do my part.”

  Cambria tried to imagine the boy he’d been, a boy told he must become the “man” of his family. The youngster who’d put aside his childhood to care for an elderly grandmother and younger sister.

  No wonder the man tried to do everything. The boy had had to.

  “At first, Gran did the cooking, but she got real forgetful, and with that old stove, it wasn’t safe. So Kenzie and I made do. Ate a lot of sliced egg sandwiches doing my homework and helping Kenzie with hers.” The ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. Cambria looked at his face, saw the emotion there, and understood that Boone hadn’t taken charge only because he’d had to, to help his family survive. He’d taken charge because that’s how he’d been taught to show love. By doing things for people.

  “Even when Mom was home, she was tired all the time... I pretty much was in charge at home. Until I got old enough to go to work, that’s how I could help her, help all of them.”

  And Cambria wondered if she saw more. Had he become so accustomed to being valued for what he did for people that he didn’t consider that he could be loved for what he was?

  She turned her hand in his, connecting palm to palm. “You had to take charge then, I understand that.”

  He raised one eyebrow and looked at her askance. “Subtlety, Cambria? It doesn’t suit you. I think I prefer your usual straightforward, unvarnished lectures.”

  “All right.” She raised her chin, torn between an urge to grin and a serious desire to make him understand her point. “You had to take charge then, but you don’t have to anymore. Not all the time.
Sometimes taking charge isn’t the best way.”

  “It is if I want to keep Bodie Smith Enterprises running,” he said wryly.

  “Oh, yeah? How would you know? Have you tried it any other way? Have you given your employees a chance to show what they can do? No. You’ve carried everything on your shoulders, trying to do it all. You’ve spent so much time doing for Bodie Smith Enterprises that you’ve totally lost sight of what you are—a designer. That’s what got you into that business in the first place.”

  He opened his mouth, but she held off any rebuttal by raising her free hand and hurrying on. “Look what your way has gotten you, Boone. You come all the way to Wyoming for rest and relaxation, and instead you burn up the phone lines, terrorize small-town Wyoming librarians and run the post office ragged. And it’s not only business. Your sister became estranged from you because—”

  Horrified, she stopped.

  Too late. Letting her mouth run had pushed her to the end of the plank. The water below was dark and cold.

  “Boone... I...”

  “Kenzie became estranged from me because she said I tried to run her life,” he said in a low, tight voice.

  “I’m sorry, Boone. I didn’t mean...”

  “Hey,” he said with a smile that made her feel worse than harsh words would have. “I invited the lecture, so I can’t complain. And I have a suspicion—”

  “Boone.”

  “That Kenzie would agree with you. The bigger question is...” Her eyes followed the motion as he raised their joined hands, then met his gaze as he drew her hands to his mouth and touched his lips to first one knuckle, then another. “How can I do anything about it?”

  * * * *

  Impatiently hitching the edge of her turquoise blouse back onto her shoulder, Cambria rapped the truck steering wheel in time to the old Randy Travis song on the radio. It was better than pounding on it the way she’d felt like doing the past few miles.

  “Did I hear right?” Boone demanded so abruptly she jerked slightly. “Did that singer just say he’d still love his girl if all her hair fell out?”

  Cambria bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning in relief. It was his first comment since they’d left the co-op, and it had considerably more good humor in it than his previous one.

  Boone had been irked when she’d insisted on going into town with him, and more than that when she’d trailed him to the co-op where he’d given Norman a list of lumber. When Cambria had insisted the lumber go on the ranch’s account instead of coming out of his pocket, he’d gotten downright belligerent.

  Clearly, the man was entirely too accustomed to getting his own way. After the quick one he’d pulled with the piers —she’d called the construction company and been told there was no charge because they’d tried a new material—she was keeping a close eye on Boone. The Westons didn’t need charity, and wouldn’t take it. Even if she had to hog-tie Mr. Boone Dorsey “Bodie” Smith. Or outmaneuver him.

  It was a good thing Norman had taped closed the bags of nails Boone had requested, or he might have started chewing them.

  Well, maybe she’d contributed to his poor mood by telling him, first, that she didn’t think much of grown men who always had to get their own way and, second, that just because he’d let his underlings at Bodie Smith Enterprises carry on without him for all of forty-eight hours, he couldn’t start bossing her around.

  What she hadn’t said was that she intended to give him a few lessons in seeing that he didn’t have to be doing for other people to earn affection. She knew—and it was time he realized—the affection Pete, Irene and Ted had for him had nothing to do with his rebuilding the cabin. As for herself... she didn’t enter into the situation.

  He’d snarled something unintelligible. That was the last thing he’d said to her after he and Norman had loaded the truck and they’d started back to the ranch. Until now.

  “That’s what he said,” she confirmed. “Surely they have country music where you come from. In fact it seems to me Randy Travis is a North Carolina boy.”

  “Is he? I don’t know. I haven’t had much time—”

  “To listen to music,” she finished with him, shaking her head.

  The tight line of his mouth eased. The fact that his improved mood seemed to lift a weight off her shoulders was easily explained—nobody liked having someone glowering from two feet away. Besides, she’d gotten used to an easier exchange between them, almost camaraderie the past couple of days.

  “All right, all right. I will ignore all my corporate responsibilities and spend all my time listening to music, learning line dances and watching movies. Anything to make you happy.”

  That last sentence had Cambria’s hands suddenly feeling slick on the steering wheel, and made this seem like a real good time to twist around and look over her opposite shoulder for traffic before the left turn into the ranch road.

  “We’re going back?” Boone asked. “I thought Irene wanted us to check out some meadow for that party.”

  She’d nearly forgotten. In her determination not to let Boone leave the ranch by himself, she’d barely heard Irene’s request.

  “I don’t feel like going right now.”

  “Oh, yeah? Irene asks you to do something, you say sure, then change your mind? Sounds to me suspiciously like a case of a grown woman who always wants to get her way.”

  Having already made the turn, she applied the brakes hard. Boone braced his arm against the dashboard to stop his momentum, but that didn’t dim the glint of his grin.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll go. Right now.” She put the truck in reverse and spurted back out onto the deserted highway. “Even though I happen to know there should be fresh banana-cherry nut bread coming out of Irene’s oven right about now.”

  He laughed out loud. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Cambria—you don’t do anything halfhearted, not even playing dirty.”

  Ignoring her instinctive quick-drawn breath at his first phrase, she turned a mock innocent stare at him. “Playing dirty? Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “Don’t try a fake Southern drawl on this boy, Cambria. I cut my eye teeth on steel magnolias. Now, tell me about this party. Who’s coming?”

  “Sometimes it seems like everybody in the county. Let’s see...of people you’ve met, Jessa’ll be there, and Wanda Rupert, Kent Kepper, the Ellistons from the cafe, June Reamer, along with her mother, the Mooneys, the Pooles, Pete’s baseball team, including Coach Lambert. And, the hot gossip is, Sheriff Milano’s bringing Rita.”

  “Sounds like quite a blowout.”

  “We’re so busy during the summer that it’s hard to get together with our friends, so a few years ago Irene came up with this idea. Every year, the weekend before we open, we invite all our friends over for a cookout. It’s also when some folks bring their horses for our guests to use during the summer. A lot of us’ll ride from the house to this meadow just short of Bulwark Canyon. Irene’ll bring the four-wheel around with food supplies, so she wants me to check the road and meadow. Sometimes they flood and we need to find someplace else.”

  Not this year.

  The uphill road, an unsubtle climb after the more gradual ascent of the highway, provided a rock-strewn torture test for any suspension system, but it was dry. The high meadow was lush in new grass and fragile wildflowers. They walked to the edge of the creek, which rushed self-importantly over rocks that would stick through its ribs come high summer.

  Cambria breathed in the air, spiced with a touch of the mountain noticeably nearer here than at the main ranch.

  “This is what we saw from up top, isn’t it? So this is your land, too?” Boone shielded his eyes with one hand and slowly surveyed the view. Both his tone and the faint lift of his lips told her he liked what he saw.

  No reason that should please her. But it did.

  “Yeah. Some of the canyon, too. It’s not much use for ranching, but Ted couldn’t resist when it came up for sale several years ago. That�
��s part of why they started the bed-and-breakfast operation, to pay that off.”

  He turned in the direction she’d pointed.

  “Can we get back there?”

  She hesitated. What did she have to feel vulnerable about showing someone a hunk of land? It was silly. “Yeah. The road’s pretty bad, but it goes most of the way.”

  “Then maybe I should drive.”

  He made a stab for the keys. She eluded him.

  “No way. You’d probably put us in the creek.”

  “Hey, I grew up driving mountain roads.”

  While they one-upped each other with tales of harrowing mountain drives, she guided the truck slowly over an increasingly rough track as the scenery shifted rapidly from open meadow to the closing, craggy walls of a canyon cut by eons of water and wear.

  “This is as far as the truck goes,” she announced. “We can walk up a little more. There’s a place to sit, if you want.”

  He wanted.

  She snagged an old blanket from the back of the truck and led the way, stepping from stone to stone that climbed next to the creek like an ancient, jumbled staircase. He remained directly behind her, sometimes choosing a slightly different path, but keeping up.

  “This is it, unless you’re part mountain goat.” Leaving the blanket folded as a narrow strip so it provided more padding, she laid it on a slab of rock that nestled among its more vertical brethren. They sat side by side, not touching.

  To their left, the creek tumbled down through a corridor of multicolored rock with a slice of lush meadow visible at its end. To their right, water came rushing at them from the narrow cleft of earth, with fantastically tenacious trees clinging to the sides to grow like gargoyles straining to touch the blue ribbon of sky far above.

  “It’s a beautiful spot. I can see why you came back from Washington—” He broke off, then slowly turned to her. “No, I can’t,” he said as if in discovery.

  She frowned. “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t see why you came here. I can imagine, maybe, but I don’t know, and you never talk about it. I know a few folks who left city life for the mountains in North Carolina, and they can’t tell you often enough the differences—how long a commute they had, how often they got mugged, how brutal the office politics’ back-stabbing was, but you don’t do that. Neither does Jessa.”