High Country Homecoming

by Roxanne Rustand

  “It’s just me—Dev. Can I bother you for a minute?”

  His deep voice sent a little shiver of awareness through her, despite her renewed resolution to mind her own business from now on. “If you’re bringing back food containers, just leave them on the porch,” she called out as she dragged the vegetable peeler along the surface of a potato.

  “If you’re busy, I can come back, but I think you’ll want to see this. I just got home from town and it’s...kind of a present.”

  A present? From Devlin? Not likely. She rinsed off her hands and went to the door, still drying them with a paper towel...and pulled to a halt in shock.

  Staring at her through the screen was a tall fluff ball of snowy-white, moth-eaten fur with a big red bow around its neck. Her heart melted. “Daisy?”

  Devlin had clearly stayed to one side to let Daisy make her own introductions, but now he stepped into view. “It’ll take a while for her coat to grow out, but the vet techs did a great job of cleaning her up, didn’t they? They even found a bow.”

  Speechless, Chloe eased out of the door to avoid bumping Daisy and gently cradled her head between her hands.

  She hadn’t seemed this big when Chloe had first found her outside the cabin, but then she’d been a miserable, cowering pooch covered with matted hair and dirt. Now Chloe realized that the dog’s head was level with her waist.

  “You are a very big girl, and so beautiful,” she murmured. She looked up at Devlin. “How long will it take for her to heal?”

  “Probably six to twelve weeks, but she needs to go back in two to make sure she’s healing correctly. She was so frantic with a neck cone that the vet decided she was better without it. We need to watch her to make sure she doesn’t chew on her cast.”

  Chloe studied the bright green hard cast on the dog’s leg. “Did the vet give you any other care instructions?”

  “She needs to be confined in a small space and just go for short walks on a leash, only when necessary. No going up or down stairs, no running or play.”

  “So my cabin should be perfect, then.”

  “Actually, the vet said a dog crate was best, but Daisy’s so big that I was thinking that she and I could spend a few nights in the tack room, just to get her acclimated.”

  “You’d sleep in the tack room?”

  “In case she needs to go out or gets too agitated by the confinement. We don’t really know what kind of life she’s had before becoming a stray—or even if she’s housebroken.”

  The offer touched Chloe’s heart. She reached up to brush a kiss against his cheek. “That’s so sweet of you.”

  Devlin seemed to wince a little at the “sweet.” He cleared his throat. “Just practical. I’m almost always in the barn throughout the day, so I can take her outside then, too. You won’t have to keep walking on a sore ankle.”

  “That’s really kind. Thank you.”

  He turned to leave with the dog at his side, but then stopped. “By the way, the guys at the gas station had a good used tire—same brand as yours—and wheel that fits on your SUV. They put it on and then drove the vehicle out here this morning.”

  She felt a prick of guilt. She’d been disappointed when he didn’t text a critique of the meal she’d sent home with him. Yet now she knew he’d been quietly busy on her behalf in more ways than one. “That was so kind of them—and you.”

  “Hope you don’t mind that I told them to go ahead. Your phone went to voice mail, so I sent you a text and didn’t hear back. They had some time first thing this morning, but otherwise they couldn’t have done it until late tomorrow or even Wednesday.”

  So, apparently her phone was either on Mute or dead. “What do I owe you?”

  “They put it on the ranch account.” He shrugged. “We can figure it out later. Oh—and thanks for the great food yesterday. I’ll drop off the containers later on.”

  “Any comments? Too much seasoning—or not enough?”

  He thought for a moment, and then a half smile deepened the long slash of a dimple on one side of his lean, tanned face. “If I could only have one menu for the rest of my life and that was it, I would die a happy man.”

  “So it was all okay? Really?”

  “Better than. The only problem is that I’ll never remember how to pronounce the fancy name of that entrée, and I have no idea how to spell it.”

  “Boeuf bourguignon,” she said, enunciating the name carefully. “I’ll text you the name. Honestly, to pronounce it, I had to look it up on YouTube, and even there I found several ways to say it. So as long as you aren’t in France and you come even close, people will probably know what you mean. Or just call it French beef stew.”

  Her heart warmed as she watched him carefully lift Daisy onto a pile of blankets in the back of his four-wheeler, touch the brim of his Stetson in farewell and then drive down the path toward the barns. The dog’s white flag of a tail wagged happily as they disappeared from sight.

  Dev’s menu critique certainly wasn’t the most in-depth and helpful she’d ever received, and it was probably laced with more charm than truth.

  Yet he’d not only taken care of the ruined wheel on her SUV, but gotten Daisy at the vet clinic, which was an incredibly thoughtful surprise. On top of that, he even planned to babysit the dog in the tack room, where the only place for him to sleep was a sofa far shorter than his six-plus feet.

  She’d always thought of Dev as a reckless charmer; a wounded, self-destructive rebel who had crossed swords with his father at every opportunity, no matter the cost. A boy whose pain she’d felt clear to the depths of her bones—and who had surely needed her nurturing heart whether he knew it or not.

  But whether it was due to maturity or the military, he’d become a different man over the years. Maybe he’d learned to mask his emotional scars. Maybe he’d simply buried them deep so he could finally forget. But either way she needed to stop underestimating the man he had become. And she also needed to guard her heart. It would be all too easy to fall deeply, irrevocably in love with a man like him—and maybe she already had. But she’d already learned her lesson on that score.

  Loving someone had always just led to heartbreak, and she just couldn’t take that risk again.

  * * *

  Figuring the injured dog would be uncomfortable and restless during the night despite her prescription pain pills, Devlin collected a thick stack of soft winter horse blankets and piled them in a corner of the tack room for a soft bed.

  “Here you go, Daisy,” he snapped his fingers and pointed to the makeshift bed, and the dog obediently hobbled over, awkwardly turned around a half dozen times and lay down. “Good girl.”

  Daisy watched him with pure devotion in her large, liquid black eyes, her white plume of a tail thumping out a fervent thank-you against the blankets.

  From beyond the closed tack-room door, Devlin could hear the sounds of the horses stirring in their stalls. The faint, distant bawling of the cattle as the herd moved away from the hay bunks and headed back out to the pasture. The call of a distant owl. Comforting sounds that could lull a man to sleep, without the interruption of gunfire or explosions.

  Eyeing the club chairs and small sofa arranged around a cowhide in the center of the room—none of which would be useful as a bed for anyone past elementary school—he unrolled his sleeping bag and shook it out onto the cowhide on the floor. He settled down for the night. Not exactly the Ritz, though he’d had a lot worse. And with the miles he’d covered running on the trails north of the ranch, he ought to be tired enough to sleep.

  But the blessed oblivion of sleep didn’t come. Not until the wee hours, when he suddenly found himself facing off with the Dooley brothers again—only this time he was without a weapon of any kind, while they were both armed with an AK-47 out on the flat, arid high-desert expanses, with only knee-high sagebrush for cover.

  Chloe was beh
ind them, gagged and bound, unable to escape, her terrified gaze fixed on his as she silently begged for help.

  His peripheral vision caught the approach of even more Dooley brothers, only now they were all in uniform, carrying military weapons and closing in from every side.

  A deafening explosion to his right shook the ground. Threw bodies into the air. Shrapnel sliced through smoke raining death and destruction in every direction. The terrible screams went on and on, threatening to shatter his skull—

  A soft, warm presence enveloped him. Slowed his thundering heartbeat. Filled him with a sense of peace and calm as it protected him from the horrors surrounding him...

  He fought back the ragged cobweb edges of the nightmare and slowly opened his eyes to find Daisy pressed next to him, her massive white head on his chest. Her gentle, knowing eyes were fixed on his, as if she was trying to absorb his pain and offer comfort in the only way she knew how.

  For months he’d prayed for the end of the nightmares that had ripped him from sleep, night after night. He’d kept up those prayers until he’d finally realized that God had better things to do and just wasn’t going to listen. And no wonder. Devlin had failed as a brother, son and fiancé, and what he’d had to do as a soldier had haunted his thoughts for years.

  Surely he was beyond the possibility of forgiveness. And even if God was willing, Dev would never be able to forget, much less forgive himself.

  Yet now, with this raggedy white dog lying close beside him, he felt...released from the horror somehow. And somehow at greater peace. His eyes burned. He drew in a jagged breath, his heart feeling just a little less broken...if only for a little while.

  And then he felt himself sinking deeper, deeper into a dreamless, healing sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  If Daisy hadn’t actually been the elderly hermit’s service dog, then she possessed uncanny intuition and perception. Despite the hard, cold floor of the tack room and his thin sleeping bag, Devlin awoke more refreshed than he had in ages after a night with her comforting warmth pressed closely to his side.

  After taking Daisy outside, he fed her, went to the main house to take care of the twins’ puppy, then jogged up to the meadow for target practice and ran on the trails for a half hour. Already he could feel himself getting stronger, and he was doing better with the targets, slowly but surely. Afterward he stopped by his cabin for a quick shower and breakfast—the rest of the food Chloe had given him.

  When he came back outside, Daisy was standing at his door, her wagging tail a blur of excitement at seeing him again. As if it had been years, not just an hour or so.

  “How did you get up here so fast with that bum leg?” He ruffled the thick fur at her neck. “And how in the world did you escape?”

  She pulled her lips back in a wide doggy grin and wagged her tail even faster, her dark-eyed gaze riveted on his face.

  He’d closed the tack-room door behind him; he was sure of that. “Doctor’s orders—minimal exercise. Remember?”

  He let her come into the cabin, stepped outside and closed the door behind him—firmly—and started jogging down the hill to get the four-wheeler for Daisy’s trip back to the barn.

  He hadn’t gone a dozen yards before he heard her howling and frantically clawing at the door—which had to be worse for that fractured leg than a slow walk to the barn.

  With a sigh, he went back up to the cabin and let her outside. “You, my dear, are high-maintenance.”

  She pressed against the side of his leg as they slowly descended the hill. She abruptly halted, her attention riveted on the trail ahead.

  A moment later Chloe appeared at the junction of the trail and the path leading to her cabin, wearing a flour-dusted apron, with her hair pulled back into some sort of haphazard knot at her nape.

  She couldn’t have been dressed in a less flirtatious way, but for some strange reason she still looked so appealing that he wished he could walk right up to her and wrap his arms around her for a long embrace.

  “I thought I heard Daisy howl,” she said, eyeing the dog with obvious concern. “Isn’t she supposed to be sedentary?”

  “Tell her that. In fact maybe you can watch her while I get the four-wheeler. I thought she was locked in the tack room, but she escaped and followed me clear up to my cabin.”

  “Awww. She likes you,” Chloe murmured, with a twinkle in her eye. “That’s so cute.”

  “It’s separation anxiety, more like it.”

  “Poor thing. If she did belong to that old guy, the trauma of him dying and leaving her all alone probably makes her afraid we’ll disappear, too.”

  “Yeah. That must be it.” He didn’t want to bring up the other very plausible possibility—that the dog thought he was the one who needed attention and support, and was earnestly trying to do her job. “Well, she oughta like you well enough, so just keep her here for a few minutes, and I’ll be right back.”

  Chloe nodded and took a firm grip on Daisy’s collar with one hand and began stroking her, while crooning all sorts of singsong nonsense about her being a “wonderful dog” and a “big, beautiful girl.”

  He’d just rounded the first bend and stepped out of sight when Chloe yelled something that he couldn’t quite decipher.

  Pebbles started cascading down the slope from behind him.

  A second later he heard the heavy panting and disjointed three-beat steps of a big dog running on three legs, trying to catch up.

  He spun around just in time for Daisy to awkwardly barrel into him and knock him flat onto the trailside carpet of pine needles, under sixty-some pounds of wiggling dog, flailing paws and ecstatic slurps and kisses.

  “I wasn’t even gone five minutes, Daisy,” he managed when he finally managed to push her gently away from him. “This has got to stop.”

  When the dog spun around and stared up the trail, he looked over his shoulder and saw Chloe standing a few feet away, her hands on her hips and her mouth twitching. “Need any help?”

  “No. But once she regains all the weight she apparently lost, she’s going to be dangerous.”

  “She certainly does like you best,” Chloe said wistfully as she reached forward to offer him a hand up.

  Just the touch of her hand in his sent warmth zipping up his arm, just like always.

  “I’m really sorry she got away from me, but holding her back was like trying to stop a buffalo,” Chloe added. “I did try to warn you.”

  A warning he hadn’t heard.

  Chloe crossed her arms over her chest and regarded him with a troubled look. “I know you don’t want me to say it again. But it seems like you’ve just given up, and surely if you—”

  He dusted off his jeans. “Just drop it. Okay?”

  “No. Because there has to be something out there—now or maybe even in the future—that can help. A new device, a new surgery technique. A better hearing aid. A different clinic somewhere. Your life could be in danger someday because you didn’t hear a warning. And what if someone screamed for help? What then?”

  He gritted his teeth, wanting to ignore her. To ignore everything that made him feel damaged and less of the person he’d been. His identity as an effective warrior had literally gone up in smoke, and he doubted that he would ever find a way to accept it. “I was told. By experts. Hearing aids help somewhat for now, but eventually they probably won’t.”

  “Look—I’m only trying to help.” She hesitated for a split second, and then her hands moved swiftly. How will you communicate if and when your hearing fails? Please let me help you while I’m here. It’ll be easier to learn while you can hear the spoken words...

  He wanted to turn and walk away. But she was still watching him, quietly waiting, and he finally gave up. I...know some, he signed laboriously, thinking about each movement of his hands. Satisfied?

  Her eyes opened wide and a joyful smile lit up her
face. That’s fantastic! So now we can start practicing, and it will bring everything back for you—

  He held up a hand and shook his head. “Thanks, but no,” he said aloud. “It could be years before I need it. I may never need to sign at all.”

  “That isn’t what you just said. You said—”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work.”

  He was walking into the barn a few minutes later, when his cellphone vibrated. Anyone but Chloe, please. He grabbed it from his pocket, relief flooding through him when he read the caller ID. “Hey, Jess. How’s the trip?”

  There was a long, static-filled pause, and then Jess said something Devlin couldn’t hear. He turned up the conversation volume on his amplified phone to the highest level. “What?”

  “Mostly good. Abby visited some colleges and chose one. The visit with Lindsey was rocky—she didn’t pay much attention to the twins and seemed distracted and impatient. Her attention was mostly riveted on her cell phone.”

  Lindsey had visited the ranch once while Devlin and his brothers were growing up, and that news didn’t surprise him one bit. “How did the girls take it?”

  “Not too well. They were nervous about seeing her again—but I think they were also imagining it would be a big, happy reunion.”

  “Poor kids.”

  “The social worker had thought a visit would be a good idea, but it’ll be a long while before we try that again. Maybe not until they’re much older. So, how’s everything at home?”

  “Good enough.”

  “The girls keep asking about Poofy.”

  “He’s fine. Tell them that I let him outside every couple of hours during the day and we play fetch. You’re coming home tomorrow, right?”

  “Actually, no. Planned on it, but we heard about a promising stallion prospect near Sacramento, so we’re going to swing by and check him out. We should be back Thursday—or Friday at the latest.”

  Devlin closed his eyes. Great.