His frown eased into a smile. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”
She didn’t know if it was intentional or not, but there was something formal in his old-fashioned courtesy and it troubled her, making her worry that it might be a mistake to go through with everything she’d come here to talk to him about.
But there was one other safe, impersonal subject, so she bought herself some time by launching into it. “I thought you’d like to know about Burt, too.”
“I sure would,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, one ankle over the other, and leaning back against the counter’s edge much the way he had that morning after Burt’s call to her.
And like then, Paige couldn’t help feeling that it was a small way of keeping his distance from her. Something else she found disheartening.
Still, she forged on. “Burt confessed everything—to Julie and the state police. It seems that several years ago he was in an accident while on the job as sheriff here. He was helping some folks during a flood, lost his footing, fell and had one hip nearly crushed it was injured so badly. Julie and I were still in the city so neither of us knew much about it. I guess he was in misery for a long time, and when he was finally well again, he’d become addicted to the pain medication. Apparently, the addiction lasted for a couple of years until he finally beat it. But for some reason, a few months ago, he started using again.”
“Drugs?” John said, shaking his head. “I didn’t think there was much of that around a small town like this. Did you notice that he was acting differently?”
“No. Nobody did. Except Julie, but she thought he was cheating on her.”
Paige paused. She was still having trouble digesting all she’d learned this afternoon about a man she’d thought she knew so well. A lifelong friend.
“Anyway,” she went on, “a small-town sheriff doesn’t make enough money to keep an expensive drug habit going and the more he used, the more he needed. Or wanted. I’m not really sure how those things work. But to get the money, he started burglarizing people’s houses.”
“And then he’d sell what he stole for more money to buy drugs.”
“Seems so.”
“Terrible,” John muttered, shaking his head.
“Julie said he wasn’t even sorry about it. He told her the town owed him. Said it was because of helping folks here that he’d started using drugs in the first place, so he had a right to steal from them to support his habit.”
“Drugs don’t leave a person thinking too straight. But what about you and Robbie? Was he doing all that stuff around your place, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“The night we came home from Topeka—the night I hit you with the baseball bat?—Robbie and I had come across him on the back road. He’d pulled in behind a black Trans Am. He was doing something in the trunk of the other car. He said he’d just changed a tire, so we didn’t think anything about it. Apparently, the woman in the Trans Am was the dealer he bought the drugs from, and Robbie and I were witness to more than we realized. The drugs must have warped his mind because he decided to try scaring me into moving out of Pine Ridge before it occurred to me that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.”
John nodded. “So where did I fit in?”
“You were just a convenient scapegoat. He hadn’t planned it from the start, but when it hit him that you’d come into town right about the time he’d started the burglaries…well, he thought he was going to be able to kick the drugs again, but he needed to be able to pin the burglaries and the vandalism here on somebody, and you got to be that somebody.”
“Did he mean to hurt Robbie?”
Paige swallowed hard, finding it difficult to even think about that. “Yes, he did. Nothing else seemed to be convincing me to move, and when he heard you’d been arrested for murder before…”
It took her a moment to control all the feelings this part of the story set off in her before she could go on.
“He intended to leave Robbie and some of the things from the burglaries in your barn. I guess he was in the process of doing that when you caught him.”
“So he must have thought Robbie was dead.”
Again she swallowed back bile at just the thought. “I think Robbie almost was dead,” she said very, very quietly. “I think he would have been, if not for you.”
“I’m just glad he’s okay,” John said in a voice that left no doubt he meant it. She sensed that thinking about Robbie’s being hurt and on the verge of death was no easier for him than it was for her.
Silence fell for a moment as Paige wondered if she could finish what she’d come here for. It wasn’t easy. Especially since she wasn’t sure if she’d gone too far this morning. Maybe this polite, neighborly catch-up would be all she could ever have with him now because of it.
Her stomach was in knots and there was a lump in her throat that made it difficult to talk at all.
Then, into the silence, John said, “I had a little good news a few minutes ago.”
He went on to tell her about the phone call. She pretended she hadn’t overheard it, hoping that by the time he’d told her the whole story she’d have found a way to say the rest of her piece. It seemed like a good sign that he was offering the information, that he was being so candid with her. It helped in a small way to give her the nerve to go on.
But first another silence ensued as Paige studied the floor, not knowing how to begin, feeling John’s eyes on her the whole time.
After several moments, she raised her gaze to him and forced herself to say, “So. You really do have the power to heal with the touch of your hands.”
His eyebrows arched in a kind of confirmation. “Did you think I was lying?”
“I didn’t know what to think. You have to admit that’s a pretty strange thing to tell a person.”
He inclined his head as if to say, Strange or not, that’s the way it is.
“Are you going to try keeping it a secret still? Now that you know it hasn’t gone bad and Dwight was probably right about what was happening before being just a result of exhaustion?”
John didn’t answer her question immediately. Instead, she had the impression that he was struggling with just what he would do in the future.
Then he said, “It doesn’t seem as if I should not use the power, does it? I suppose the people who say it’s a gift aren’t too far wrong. And not to use it to help folks…”
But when his voice trailed off, she knew he was remembering the way things had gotten out of hand and caused the exhaustion in the first place. Clearly he wasn’t anxious to have that start again.
“Maybe you could do the healing but set some rules,” she suggested. “Only see people during certain hours or days of the week, the way doctors do. And in a place separate from your home so you can get away, have some peace and quiet, rest.”
He seemed to think about that and then he chuckled slightly. “Put out a shingle?”
Paige shrugged. “Whatever it takes to allow you to use the gift but still have some privacy.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” he conceded, laughing again at the notion. “I do like bein’ able to help folks.”
Things between them seemed to have eased somehow. Warmed up even. Only just as Paige was going to venture into the last, rocky terrain, it was John who did it.
“What about us?” he asked. “Has any of what’s gone on today made a difference on that front?”
Just the fact that he considered there to be an “us” helped her.
“That’s part of why I came here tonight,” she admitted. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking—waiting for tests to be done in a hospital leaves a lot of time for that.”
“Thinking’s good.”
“I’ve known Burt for as long as I can remember. I grew up with him. If there was any man in the world that I thought I knew, it was him.” She paused, shook her head, still having trouble grasping what he’d done. “It’s made me realize that anyone can hide things
about themselves, that no one can be sure they really know anybody else.”
“I suppose that’s where trust comes in, doesn’t it?” John interjected.
“Trust and instincts.”
He nodded. And waited for her to go on, watching her with those penetrating green eyes.
“This morning…well, I was afraid that your not telling me the whole story about your powers meant that not only could there be other events in your life, other things about you, that you weren’t letting me in on, but that your not being up front with me was an indication of a character flaw, the kind of flaw my ex-husband had. Maybe only one of many, the way it was with him.”
She glanced over at John to gauge the impact of her words, to see if she’d insulted him. He was only watching her, listening intently.
Paige met his eyes with hers and went on. “But sitting in the hospital today, trying to come to grips with what Burt did, what he was…Well, it occurred to me that trust and instinct have to play a big part. Just because you’ve known someone for years, lived in the same small town with them, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you know them the way you think you do. And when I looked at the kind of man you are, the way you’ve treated Robbie…and me, I can’t find fault in any of it. I can’t find so much as a hint that you don’t have a pretty sterling character.”
He grinned slightly, wryly. “So I’m the perfect man?”
His joke made her smile. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“I’ve been doing some thinkin’, too,” he said then.
He crossed to her, pulling another kitchen chair out from under the table, setting it right in front of her and sitting down on it close enough to have to spread his legs so that there was one of his strong, bole-like thighs on either side of hers.
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and letting his hands dangle. “I’ve been thinkin’ that I can’t take lightly that something brought me to Pine Ridge, to you and Robbie. Call it fate or destiny or divine intervention. Call it whatever you want, but I don’t believe everything that happened to get me here was without reason. Or that what’s happened between us has happened as fast as it has without one, too. Even if you are a doubting Thomas.”
The wry tone was in his voice again as he added that last comment, but still Paige felt the need to respond to it. “I’m not a doubting Thomas anymore. Not about your powers. Not that you’re a good man.”
“But not perfect.” He was teasing again, easing the tension.
“Maybe you can work on it,” she said with another smile.
He grinned that intoxicating one-sided grin. “We’re good together, Paige. Good for each other. So here’s what I have to say to you. You had enough faith in me to trust me with your son’s life. Why don’t you trust me with your heart now, too?”
“What would you do with it if I did?”
He took both her hands in his and cradled them gently. “I’d hold it as carefully as I’d hold a newborn baby and cherish it just the same. And I’d show it a good time in the process,” he added with a note of playfulness in his voice. Then he sobered again. “I meant it when I said I love you. And there isn’t anything about me or my past that I’m not willing to tell you. If you’ll just give me a lifetime to do it in.”
“A lifetime?”
“I want to marry you. I want to be a daddy to that boy of yours. And a daddy to a bunch more. And I want to string out all those things you don’t know about me, tell ‘em a little at a time, so you never get bored.”
That made her smile yet again. “Somehow I can’t imagine ever being bored by you.”
“Does that mean you’ll take a chance on me?”
She looked at that wonderful face of his, felt the tingling that came with each touch of his hands, and somehow all her doubts fled. This really was a good man. A man of substance, of depth, of strong character. She’d had much too close a view of two other men who weren’t good, and holding John up in comparison made her see the real thing when it was presented to her. It made her see that not only was he special in the gift he had of healing, but in the kind of person he was. A person she could trust with her son, her heart, her life.
“Take a chance on you, huh?” she repeated.
“Just one—marry me. And I promise you, you won’t be sorry.”
She’d be sorry if she didn’t marry him. “Is this just a scheme to get hold of my water rights?” she teased, her eyes filling with happy tears at the same time.
“Okay, I confess. I figured I wasn’t going to get them any other way, so I’d have to marry into them,” he joked back. He stood then and pulled her up with him so he could wrap his arms around her and hold her close. “And for payment,” he went on, “I offer you every last one of the rest of my days.”
“And a quick fix for most anything that ails me?”
“Goes without sayin’.”
“You may be the first man to actually experience the pain of childbirth,” she warned.
“I don’t know if we need to go that far,” he said with a laugh that ended in a kiss so sweet and tender Paige had to fight off tears once again. “I love you,” he whispered into her hair a long moment later.
“I love you, too.”
“Think Robbie will be okay with me as his dad?”
“I think if he had to choose between you and me right now, I’d be afraid he’d leave me behind altogether,” she joked once more. “There isn’t anything that will thrill him more.”
“How about his momma?”
“There isn’t anything that will thrill me more, either.”
“Nothin’?” he asked with another helping of that playful tone to his voice as he lightly bit her earlobe.
“Well, maybe you could work on that, too.”
John kissed her again. A deeper, more passionate kiss this time, one that Paige welcomed, matched, reveled in.
She’d been right early this morning when she’d awakened in his arms and thought that he’d healed her heart, her spirit. And she suddenly couldn’t imagine living without him.
She knew she was doing the right thing in marrying him, in linking her life and that of her son’s with his. No matter how much there still was that she didn’t know about him.
Because what she did know was enough. She knew that she loved him. That he loved her. That he loved Robbie.
She knew that more than the magic of his touch, there was a magic that had brought them together, a magic that would hold them together for the rest of time.
Blessings turning to curses, he’d said.
Maybe so.
And then turning back to blessings of a whole different kind.
eISBN 978-14592-7509-6
RED-HOT RANCHMAN
Copyright © 1996 by Victoria Pade.
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